Another day, another batch of 4.2 news, courtesy of MMO-Champion.
* Denounce has been redesigned. It still reduces the mana cost of Exorcism. However, it no longer has a chance on Holy Shock of making Exorcism free and instant. Instead, it has a 50/100% chance to prevent the Exorcism target from causing critical effects for the next 6 seconds. This effect can be dispelled.
* Holy Shock mana cost has been decreased to 7% of base mana, down from 8%.
* Speed of Light now reduces the cooldown of Holy Radiance by 40 sec, up from 30 sec.
First up, Denounce. A talent that doesn’t have a lot of use in PVE, but I still pick it up for Chimaeron P2 and for soloing purposes. This now makes it firmly a PVP talent, as I see it.
Next, Holy Shock. Flash of Light, Holy Light and Divine Light are all going UP in cost, but Holy Shock goes down a percent. Given the 2pc T12 set bonus for holy paladins, this is pretty sweet. Having a 40% chance for your Holy Shock to cost 234 mana instead of 1640 is a very nice bonus. I think, anyways.
And finally, Speed of Light’s change means that we can use Holy Radiance every 20 seconds. I don’t think anyone’s mana pool could sustain such use, but hey. It’ll be nice that it’s basically always up.
So far: increased mana cost on our three casted spells, slight decrease in mana cost on Holy Shock, Denounce being changed for PVP and the ability to use Holy Radiance every 20 seconds.
Druids got a new mastery. I wonder if we’ll get one eventually. I don’t even need it now, but it sure would be nice to have a new one for 4.3 or 4.4 or something during this expansion. I don’t want to go a whole expansion hating our mastery.
Not only aren’t we getting a new mastery this patch, but I believe I read on the latest patch notes that it’s being nerfed. I believe we get less percentage per point out of it?… fairly odd given the fact they greatly increased crit through the crit healing change. If mastery was nigh worthless before, I don’t know why we’d aim for it more given these changes.
I’m happy to see a reduced CD on Holy Radiance. There have been multiple times where it was needed and it was on CD. It’s a small buff to our AoE capabilities.
The mana increases are disappointing. Blizzard stated that the reasoning was because Holy Paladins would Beacon 1 tank and spam Divine Light on the other, thus they would never cast Holy Light and never go oom. I don’t know who they are talking about, but if I do that I go oom very quickly. Divine Light is usually my top heal, but Holy Light is usually followed closely behind. I feel that this will only hurt fresh-85 Paladins just trying to get through dungeons more than anyone else. High-content Paladins will find another way to exploit mana efficiency. Especially with the 2-piece bonus change. Paladins are going to become very efficient in high content T12 even with these changes. It really is the noob 85 Paladins who are the real victims of this change.