I won’t link to it, because I think it’s a crappy article, but the WoW.com holy paladin writer, Chase Christian, is claiming that Divinity affects the healing done by a paladin’s Judgement of Light. My first thought was “that’s BS” followed quickly by “… right?”.
I just spent 95g, respeccing my prot spec to holy and then back to prot to examine this situation.
At first, I thought I could try it out with the same holy gear and just switch from holy to prot and judge light on a training dummy and see what happened.
What happened made no sense whatsoever. One of the specs I was in got 3.4% more healing from JoL. That didn’t make any sense to me, so I went and respecced. I mean, I should be getting 10% more, not something weird like 3.4%, right?
With identical 54/17/0 builds, except getting Divine Strength instead of Divinity, I ended up with:
Divinity: 454 per JoL
No Divinity: 412 per JoL
What does that mean? That means that Divinity is granting me 5% extra healing because the judgement is mine and it’s granting me 5% extra healing because I’m receiving the healing. I have 20,564 health unbuffed, so 2% of that health is about 412. Another 10% of that 412 is about 454.
So that works and means that Mr. Christian’s claim that paladins with Divinity ought to judge light exclusively makes sense, right?
Wrong.
My brother’s hunter has 21,404 health unbuffed.
I had the hunter shoot up a training dummy in IF and I judged light in the spec without Divinity in it.
My brother was getting 428 health back. That’s 2% of his health. That seems to work fine.
With Divinity, my JoL should, then, heal my brother’s hunter for an additional 21.40 (5% extra), or about 450 health per proc.
And still, my brother’s hunter was getting 428 health back per proc.
It appears to me that Divinity and Judgement of Light give the JUDGING paladin 10% extra healing, but it honestly doesn’t affect anyone else, except possibly other paladins with Divinity.
I know! I know! It doesn’t make sense! Why would you be awarded the 10% bonus with Divinity and not have that extra 5% affect others? Before you ask, no, it’s not my glyphs. While I had my prot glyphs in on the secondary non-Divinity spec, none of my glyphs affect my JoL or extra healing in any way. I wasn’t using Glyph of Seal of Light or anything.
But no matter what I did, 428 was what my brother’s procs of JoL were hitting for. So I must conclude that my initial “that’s BS!” call stands. Of course, if anyone out there has screenshots or a combat log parse to show otherwise, I’m happy to revise my assessment. :)
If there’s another paladin in my raid group, by the way, I almost always judge wisdom. Why? Because warriors, rogues and death knights have no use for mana and ret pallies, hunters and enhancement shammies have little need for the regen and the healers generally will not benefit from it, as they’re not attacking the boss. That means that if I don’t refresh my judgement three times a minute, it’s not a big deal. It means that only elemental shammies, mages, warlocks, moonkins and shadow priests will really be adversely affected if I can’t find a global to judge. Whereas any other kind of paladin, a retribution or protection paladin, will be judging on cooldown, which is WAY more than I am, which leads to WAY more uptime on their judgement.
The judgement that should, IMHO, have priority, is Light, because EVERYONE attacking the boss has a health bar and could potentially benefit from it.
So basically, Kurn, you’re saying that you fail at judging.
:P I’m saying that, as a healer, keeping our judgement up is not going to be our first priority and sometimes it’ll fall off. Sorry, but if my tank is taking 30k melee attacks, it’s not always easy to find a place to judge often enough to keep up Judgements of the Pure, much less my judgement debuff.
As an added note, I’m finding that the best time to judge on Sindragosa is when I get Instability and again when I want to drop my 4-5 stacks of it.
Huh, this makes me really wonder. Maybe I’ll take a peek at it myself for experimentation! I actually Judge on cooldown for mana regen. :) I also Judge Light, as we tend to run 4-5 paladins per raid. LOL
LOL. See, I read the aforementioned-but-not-linked article, thought exactly the same as you, but couldn’t be bothered trying to prove it one way or the other :D
Thanks Kurn :)
I am wondering if your brother wasn’t getting the bonus because he was “sort-of” getting the healing from his attacks on the dummy with the judgment, not you directly healing him? So you were getting healed because of the 2nd part of the divinity talent “increases healing on you by 5%” whereas it wouldn’t affect him cause he wasn’t healed by you, but by the target. Makes sense?
My guess is that it is a bug. I did a quick test, and expected the CL to read as:
“OTHER gains x from OTHER’S Judgement of Light”
However, it is indeed:
“OTHER gains x from PALADIN’S Judgement of Light”
This means that he SHOULD be right, and it should grant 5% more healing done to others via it.
My bet is that it is actually counting as healing done by the attacker instead of healing done by the paladin, however is being reported reversed.
Codi – I like to judge for regen as well. I think I was in Ulduar when I realized that judging with Seal of Wisdom was proccing mana regen and I was OMG SO EXCITED. haha! :)
Saunder – this is my downfall. I sit there and go “well, how can I figure this crap out?” :)
mpengle – The combat log entry said “[hunter] gains 0 Health from Madrana’s Judgement of Light (428 Overhealed)”. Either way, though, whether it views him or me as the healer, Divinity is not having any effect on the heals from Judgement of Light. That I can see, anyways.
thansal – He SHOULD be right. But he’s wrong. And he’s putting out false information. Just because HIS paladin is gaining the 10% from Divinity doesn’t mean that anyone else is gaining a blasted thing. Parses and recount do measure JoL as being part of the paladin’s healing, so the combat log entry is “properly” attributing the healing to the paladin. So the issue lies in granting the bonus from the healing paladin to the heal that people proc on their own.
I think that maybe all this got “fixed” when they normalized all judgements. For a long while there, JoL scaled a ton better with AP than with spellpower, so rets were the best choice for light. Now, it basically doesn’t matter and there appears to be no way to improve JoL. Which, honestly, is how it should be. Trying to manage 2 holy paladins, 1 prot paladin and 1 ret paladin to all use the appropriate judgements based on uptime and strength of the judgement was a nightmare that I dealt with in Ulduar when I was on Bronzebeard.