Kurn's 4.1 Thoughts

This is going to be short and sweet.

– 20s CD on Word of Glory does not apply to holy paladins, since as soon as we spec holy, the CD is removed.

– Aura Mastery no longer works on Crusader Aura. Didn’t they try to do this several patches in a row, now?

– Illuminated Healing shields now last 15 seconds, up from 8, and our mastery is now 1.5% per mastery, up from 1.25%. Hot tip: In pretty much all dungeon and normal raid situations, our mastery still sucks. There’s a possibility that it doesn’t suck quite so much in heroic raids, but so far, haste is still better than crit, which is probably just slightly above mastery, if only for the Infusion of Light procs, once you can comfortably keep Conviction up.

Yeah, that’s about it. I guess we should be grateful we didn’t get nerfed out the wazoo, but it certainly does make for a boring patch.

ETA: Ooh, Rebecca at MMO Melting Pot linked to me, so, in brief:

4pc bonus: Not sure if it’ll be worth it to lose all the haste and such and pick up so much mastery for 540 Spirit whenever you use Holy Shock. I’m picking up the set pieces but don’t know that I’ll ever actually use them.

10% less cost to Divine Light/Flash of Light: Squidularity mentioned this in the comments below. Divine Light now costs 7026 mana and Flash of Light now costs 6323. This was apparently a hotfix?

(Want to learn more about 4.1 in general? Go listen to the latest episode of Blessing of Frost, a World of Warcraft podcast hosted by myself and my good buddy Majik.)

8 Replies to “Kurn's 4.1 Thoughts”

  1. No thoughts on the new 4T11 bonus set (between +300 and +500 spirit depending on holy shock usage) ? :)

    And I think that mastery is now better than crit once we can keep conviction up, from a math. point of view.

  2. “…which is probably just slightly above mastery, if only for the Infusion of Light procs, once you can comfortably keep Conviction up.”

    I’m pretty sure you mean “just slightly above mastery until you can comfortably keep up Conviction.” In other words: Crit is valuable until you have good Conviction up time (near 100%) and then Mastery is prefered. Even then… meh.

  3. Not in the patch notes, but both Divine Light and Flash of Light mana cost were reduced by ~10% last night.

  4. Don’t feel bad about it being a “boring” patch for holy paladins – it’s like that almost every patch for shadow priests. :-P We got a buff to our aoe damage (yay, Mind Sear, how I love you again) and an indirect nerf to our overall damage (the nerf to DI’s target), but I didn’t notice a lot of difference last night. Eh, better than being “nerfed out the wazoo” like you said.

    The interesting stuff about the patch, to me, wasn’t the class-specific stuff. Our bubble of guild xp per boss kill (via tabards) was awesome. The change to non-missing interrupts, the “no hunting for corpses”, more battle rezzes, targets and focus targets displaying on the minimap – all nice changes. :-)

  5. klakette – Actually, no, no thoughts on that. I haven’t done any math or real research about it, but my original stance is that we lose too much by going for the four-piece. That said, I have 2/5 pieces and will get another two (gloves and helm, probably) just in case math shows 4pc is very strong with the change. Certainly the change rewards you spectacularly for using Holy Shock on CD.

    Joe Ego – Eh. I still think crit outweighs mastery because of Infusion of Light. This isn’t math-based, this is a personal preference, but there have been times when an IoL-hasted DL has saved my tank’s ass. It’s very lacklustre, but that’s how bad I think mastery is, even after the buff.

    Squidularity – Seriously? Very nice, thanks!

    Dahrla – I think the tabards just do guild rep, no? But the XP in raids without the cap is AWESOME. Level 25 before next week for sure. I do like all the little changes, too. :)

  6. “- 4pc bonus: Not sure if it’ll be worth it to lose all the haste and such and pick up so much mastery for 540 Spirit whenever you use Holy Shock. I’m picking up the set pieces but don’t know that I’ll ever actually use them.”

    You mean you’re not hording your EP anymore?!

    Also, of note, @Dahrla, priest bubbles only last 15 seconds now which makes me sad, though not surprised as they recently started to clear your PW: S and whatnot at the beginning of an arena. So no pre bubbling and whatnot. It calls for more wise bubbling…

  7. One thing I noticed post patch… there seems to be no delay in getting the Holy Power from Tower of Radiance now. I used to either have to wait (or cast another spell) after healing a beaconed tank for the third charge of holy power… now it seems to be there immediately (although I’m not based in the US so my latency is never below 250).

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