Substantial Holy Paladin Changes in 4.3 (PTR)

Kurn / / 4.3, healing, paladins

MMO-Champion’s datamining has revealed a number of forthcoming changes to holy paladins on the public test realm for 4.3.

Let’s just jump right into the raw changes and then I’ll talk about what they potentially mean.

  • Divine Plea: You gain 12% of your total mana over 9 sec, but the amount healed by your healing spells is reduced by 50% and grants a charge of Holy Power. . 50%.
  • Holy Radiance: 40 yd range | 3 sec cast 1 min cooldown | Instant | Imbues a friendly target with radiant energy, healing that target and Heals all party or raid members friendly targets within 10 20 yards for 50 up to 61 and another 683 every 1 sec for 3 sec sec, with effectiveness diminishing on targets farther than 8 yards away and grants a charge of Holy Power. . for each additional player target beyond 6. Lasts 10 sec.
  • Infusion of Light: Your Holy Shock critical hits reduce the cast time of your next Flash of Light, Holy Light, Divine Light or Holy Radiance Divine Light by 0.75 sec.
  • Infusion of Light: Your Holy Shock critical hits reduce the cast time of your next Flashof Light, Holy Light, Divine Light or Holy Radiance Divine Light by 1.5 sec.
  • Judgements of the Pure: Your Judgement increases your casting and melee haste and mana regeneration from Spirit while in combat. haste.
  • Judgements of the Pure: Your Judgement increases your casting and melee haste and mana regeneration from Spirit while in combat. haste.
  • Judgements of the Pure: Your Judgement increases your casting and melee haste and mana regeneration from Spirit while in combat. haste.
  • Seal of Insight: Unleashing this Seal’s energy will deal [1 + 25% of SPH + 16% of AP] Holy damage to an enemy. enemy and restore 15% of the Paladin’s base mana.
  • Clarity of Purpose: Reduces the casting time of your Holy Light, Divine Light and Holy Radiance Divine Light spells by 0.15 sec.
  • Clarity of Purpose: Reduces the casting time of your Holy Light, Divine Light and Holy Radiance Divine Light spells by 0.3 sec.
  • Clarity of Purpose: Reduces the casting time of your Holy Light, Divine Light and Holy Radiance Divine Light spells by 0.5 sec.
  • Infusion of Light: Increases the critical effect chance of your Holy Shock by 5%. In addition, your Holy Shock critical effects reduce the cast time of your next Flash of Light, Holy Light, Divine Light or Holy Radiance Divine Light by 0.75 sec.
  • Infusion of Light: Increases the critical effect chance of your Holy Shock by 10%. In addition, your Holy Shock critical effects reduce the cast time of your next Flash of Light, Holy Light, Divine Light or Holy Radiance Divine Light by 1.5 sec.
  • Judgements of the Pure: Your Judgement increases your casting and melee haste by 3% for 1 min and your mana regeneration from Spirit while in combat by 10%. min.
  • Judgements of the Pure: Your Judgement increases your casting and melee haste by 6% for 1 min and your mana regeneration from Spirit while in combat by 20%. min.
  • Judgements of the Pure: Your Judgement increases your casting and melee haste by 9% for 1 min and your mana regeneration from Spirit while in combat by 30%. min.
  • Light of Dawn: Consumes all Holy Power to send a wave of healing energy before you, healing up to 6 5 of the most injured targets in your party or raid within a 30 yard frontal cone for 605 to 674 per charge of Holy Power.
  • Paragon of Virtue: Reduces the cooldown of Divine Protection by 30 20 sec, Hand of Sacrifice by 30 sec and Avenging Wrath by 60 sec.
  • Paragon of Virtue: Reduces the cooldown of Divine Protection by 15 10 sec, Hand of Sacrifice by 15 sec and Avenging Wrath by 30 sec.
  • Speed of Light: Grants 1% spell haste. haste and reduces the cooldown of Holy Radiance by 13 sec. In addition, Casting Holy Radiance or Divine Protection increases your movement speed by 20% for 4 sec.
  • Speed of Light: Grants 2% spell haste. haste and reduces the cooldown of Holy Radiance by 26 sec. In addition, Casting Holy Radiance or Divine Protection increases your movement speed by 40% for 4 sec.
  • Speed of Light: Grants 3% spell haste. haste and reduces the cooldown of Holy Radiance by 40 sec. In addition, Casting Holy Radiance or Divine Protection increases your movement speed by 60% for 4 sec.
  • Tower of Radiance: Healing the target of your Beacon of Light with Flash of Light or Divine Light has a 33% chance to generate a charge of Holy Power. In addition, casting Holy Radiance will always generate one charge of Holy Power.
  • Tower of Radiance: Healing the target of your Beacon of Light with Flash of Light or Divine Light has a 66% chance to generate a charge of Holy Power. In addition, casting Holy Radiance will always generate one charge of Holy Power.
  • Tower of Radiance: Healing the target of your Beacon of Light with Flash of Light or Divine Light has a 100% chance to generate a charge of Holy Power. In addition, casting Holy Radiance will always generate one charge of Holy Power.

Whew. Okay, let’s take these one at a time. Bear in mind that Ghostcrawler has also posted some thoughts about various changes. Plus, the first set of patch notes is up.

– Divine Plea: Same as always, but now also grants you one charge of Holy Power. Great, excellent. Anything that adds Holy Power is pretty good.

– Holy Radiance: 40 yd range | 3 sec cast | Imbues a friendly target with radiant energy, healing that target and all party or raid members within 10 yards for 50 to 61 and another 683 every 1 sec for 3 sec and grants a charge of Holy Power. This is different. We will now have a cast time for Holy Radiance and it will be a targettable spell. You will drop the Holy Radiance effect on top of someone and THEY will heal themselves and all party/raid members within 10 yards, etc, etc. Note that this is a much smaller radius than we’re used to (10 vs. 20 yards) and it’s been confirmed that there is no cooldown. There is still the cast time, however, and I would presume that the mana cost has not decreased. As well, note that it only heals for a total of 3 seconds. So it looks as though you get an initial heal on the target/allies within 10 yards and then 3 ticks (without haste included) of the new Holy Radiance spell. Oh and look, a charge of Holy Power.

Finally, Ghostcrawler has let us know that Holy Radiance will now benefit from Illuminated Healing, our much-maligned mastery. I guess we’ll see how that goes. Certainly it’s a buff to our mastery if another of our spells is going to benefit from it, but I don’t see the overall healing done by Holy Radiance, even in its new form, to be anywhere close to the mitigation from, say, Divine Aegis from a discipline priest’s Prayer of Healing.

– Clarity of Purpose and Infusion of Light: Both of these talents remain the same except they affect the cast time of Holy Radiance now, as well as Flash of Light, Holy Light and Divine Light.

– Seal of Insight: The key point here is that judging with Seal of Insight up no longer grants you 15% of your base mana! Goodbye, judging on cooldown.

– Judgements of the Pure: You’re now going to get more mana regeneration from keeping Judgements of the Pure up. At 3/3 JotP, you’re getting 30% extra regen from Spirit while in combat. This will keep us judging once a minute and makes up for the fact that we will no longer gain mana from judging. Ghostcrawler said we’d want to judge every 30 seconds, though the JotP duration has not (yet) changed. I guess we’ll want to watch for that to potentially drop to a 30s duration. At any rate, we were always getting a set rate of 3513 mana back per judgement (not including the cost of judging) and nothing we ever did could change that. This change tells us that more mana regen is available by stacking spirit. Interesting…

– Light of Dawn: As Ghostcrawler said, this is moving to a baseline of 6 targets, up from 5. The associated Glyph of Light of Dawn will be changed to lower the number of targets but increase the output. The glyph changes this to 4 targets with a 25% boost in throughput.

– Paragon of Virtue: Just a slight change to 15s and 30s off of Divine Protection’s cooldown as opposed to 10s and 20s.

– Speed of Light: Still grants us 1/2/3% of spell haste, but casting Holy Radiance will NO LONGER give us a speed boost. Well, now the Paragon of Virtue change makes sense. Ghostcrawler says it’s a nerf compared to 4.2 (and it is, since we now only have one sprint) but, to be fair, if there’s no cooldown on Holy Radiance, it would hardly make sense to constantly have a 60% speed boost.

– Tower of Radiance: I would say that they are attempting to pigeon-hole us into taking Tower of Radiance. I actually like the talent, but I know there are several builds out there that don’t drop 3 points here. Now, though, it’s worth taking even if you never directly heal your beacon, because it ensures (at least one point, anyhow) that you will always gain one charge of Holy Power anytime you cast Holy Radiance.

So. What do you fine folks think of the changes?

16 Replies to “Substantial Holy Paladin Changes in 4.3 (PTR)”

  1. Goodbye, my beloved sprint. I hardly knew ye.

    I have mixed feelings. I liked being able to hit HR and forget about it, but it really wasn’t that powerful much of the time, especially for tens content. If we’re now going to be able to target a person and obtain a splash heal from that – well. I don’t know how much more useful that’s going to be, especially on a fight where ranged are spread out. I may have to try to coach the range to hang out together when there’s no detriment to doing so. It will be okay for healing a clump of melee. Especially with mastery also affecting it – maybe it will be better than I think! I’ll have to see it in action to really know.

    (Goodbye, second sprint. /tear)

  2. Sounds mostly good for PVE, and some PVP nerfs. Loosing speed boost of of HR is going to hurt pvp a lot, but the decrease in Divine Protection cd, will help everywhere.

    Really like the targetable HR though, that’s nice. Target tank, HR, target melee next to tank, HR, target other melee, HR. Boom… thats a LOT of healing.

  3. I echo the same sentiments as others- good bye, holy sprint :( I always though this was rather a fun thing to have, to be able to get to where you needed to be quickly when you get Speed of Light from HR. Making HR targetable is also interesting… me thinks it’s like the Efflorescence from Swiftmending a target with Restoration Druids. I like it!

    I’m all for less judging as well, this was always a mild annoyance to me having to judge every time it came off CD. Perhaps I can relax a bit more now that judging isn’t mandatory to get mana back. Overall, the changes aren’t looking too shabby.

  4. Glyphed Light of Dawn will now be feasible in dungeons. We should have been using Divine Protection as our sprint all along, since it’s much cheaper than Holy Radiance.

  5. @Sarlalian:
    and after having cast those three HR, LoD the melee with the 3 HP you got!

    That is to say, I like that we now have something approaching an aoe rotation. I will miss the move-speed increase with HR, but I can live with that.

    The judgment changes do not fill me with glee, exactly–I’m used to judging on CD–but it is nice that spirit will be the main factor in mana gains.

    As a 10-man healer, I imagine I’ll be glyphing LoD for most fights.

  6. I’m wondering about the “holy power on holy radiance” thing – HR spell description says paladin will get a charge of HP and tower of radiance says s/he will “always get” a HP charge. (Maybe it makes sense to native speakers but not to me.)

    @Benjy, DP had 40s cooldown while HR only had 20s so there might have been some situations when it was needed.

  7. The Judgement change is a good one because now mana gains will scale with gear rather than base mana (which doesn’t change unless you level).

    I don’t like losing the Radiance sprint, but the new cast time makes it impractical anyway.

    The Light of Dawn change is very interesting, particularly the default to 6 players. I appreciate the changes to the LoD and CoH glyphs.

    The Radiance change makes me a little sad, but hopefully the output and cost of the new spell look good. The Illuminated Healing effect on Radiance will be really helpful on sustained AoE damage or relatively close pulses. Mechanics like Nef Crackles will get hardly any help from absorb shields.

    I wonder how effective the new Radiance will be. If strong, you’ll see a lot more Paladins raid healing and more raid teams functioning well with more Paladins. If comparable to our current output then there’s a good chance Radiance will be cast less often as Paladins continue to focus on spending their GCDs on tank healing.

  8. I’m not sure about the holy radiance change – 10 yards isn’t large and you have no control on where that person moves to after you cast it (although I guess the 3 second duration helps that). I found having it on me was pretty useful as I could position myself hit it and then carry on healing – on fights like Beth’tilac on 10 man holy radiance would come out as 2nd in my healing done as I could pop it on cooldown in-between keeping the tanks up, with the cast time that’s now not possible. – this change also just makes it less paladin like to me and more like, as has been said, a Druid efflorescence.

    The change to judging sounds ok (although I’m fairly used to it now) – 30% extra mana based on our spirit is certainly nice.

    As someone who raids 10 man the LoD glyph certainly seems like a good one to have.

  9. I’ve been gone from the game for a few months now.. I think since 2 two weeks before firelands launched. So I know my experience in recent times is lacking, but not all that much has changed. But it looks like it will.

    Curious though, HR in its description says you get a holy power charge every time you use the ability, and then the description of ToR claims to give a holy power charge each time HR is used. Does this mean, that with ToR, using HR will give 2 HP charges? I mean, this kinda makes sense, (1)HR to (2)HS to (3)LoD to (4)go to 1 if you still require AoE healing. I mean, it would really lend allow the player to enter an “AoE mode”. Whether or not it’s truly effective remains to be seen.

    The LoD change makes sense for 5 mans, but I’m not sure whether or not 10s would be a good use. I suppose it is if your raid has to split up into smaller groups, but I don’t know if it’d be anymore useful for a boss like Chimaeron.

    SoI change sucks, but it also good. It’s good, because now you don’t have to judge as often and lends itself to better scaling. Getting 30% spirit increase is better than a flat return amount. It should allow for better scaling. It only sucks, in so much that it no longer returns mana on judgement. I’m curious to see how the balance will work out with some melee paladins and this new judgement change, seeing as melee attacks still return 4% mana. Could certain playstyles be truly OP?

    I’m intrigued to see how these changes work out. Maybe I’ll reopt for another tour of duty when 4.3 comes out.

  11. Incoming paladin raid healers. HR, HR, HR, LoD, HR, HR, HR, LoD.

    Holy Radiance is now Circle of Healing. Except no cooldown, and it provides the healing over three seconds instead of in one lump sum.

    Stacking spirit and becoming a raid healer is actually a very sound idea for paladins, in my mind. With the changes that they’ve announced it very much looks to be extremely heavy raid damage come 4.3. I guess I can’t complain, I always did enjoy the Blood Queen in ICC. lol @ renew/COH spam.

  12. I am kind of upset about this. We already had a radical overhaul for this expansion – one that an embarrassingly high number of players haven’t yet adapted to (and that already makes me want to punch every FoL-healing holy pally in the face). I like how we work at the moment – I feel like our class is powerful at tank healing, good enough but not the best at group healing, and that our lack of mobility while casting is offset by things like Speed of Light, Holy Shock and Word of Glory. All things considered, we have a niche, we do it well, we don’t do other things as well as the other healers. We are balanced. And I really liked the self-positioning aspect of Holy Radiance.

    A mid-expansion major change like this seems a little cruel and unnecessary. It makes me sad actually – I feel like we are being punished because the top guilds were healing everything with pallies and druids.

  13. I like the change but will have to experiment on the PTR. I still don’t feel that the HR change will make us great raid healers. I got a feeling it will be a spell that I will throw on tank, thus a mini HoT on tank and melee around him while bombing him with HL/DL, HS, WoG/LoD. In Wrath we had a mini HoT with Sacred Shield. I get my SoL off of DP, so losing it off of HR is no biggie. Wow, no mana from Judging, this will take some getting used to; old habits are hard to break but atleast this will free up a gcd for a healing spell.

  14. One thing no one has mentioned is what ret and prot will do with HR now – granted it was never a priority for them, but on fights where the raid is stacked up they occasionally use it (flame scythe) – as a 3 second cast targeted spell it will now never be used by them.

    Anyone tried it on the PTR yet? – I think if it is intended to make us more able to raid heal they will need to reduce the mana cost as well.

  15. Hmm well I’m not so happy about the fact that Spirit regen is going to be based upon how much spirit you have on your gear. I dunno, why is it that Blizz always decides to kill off my particular way of playing?
    For a while on my Warlock, I was playing a Drain Life spec. It was fun, and a change from spamming Shadow Bolt as my filler spell (which I had been doing since vanilla, yawn). Then Blizz decides they don’t want people using Life Drain instead of Shadow Bolt, so they nerfed it.
    Now, I’m playing a Crit/Haste/Mastery build, and reforging Spirit, or simply using gear with no Spirit on it. I like it, and it also has meant I’m able to take gear the other healers don’t want, which in 10 mans is really nice. So, along come Blizz, and decide that no, once again I am not allowed to deviate from the norm, and I have to go back to Spirit/Haste in 4.3 again.
    Big meh.

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