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The Light and How to Swing It: Major AoE healing changes in the Mists beta
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered, like why paladins are so awesome. Blizzard has been deploying beta patches at a record pace, which has a lot of stale info being bandied about as fact. The official Mists of Pandaria talent calculator is wildly out of date, and much of the commentary made over the past week is now superannuated. The developers haven't been shying away from making major class changes in these early days of the beta, and so everything is still up in the air. What we do know for sure is that there's work being done to modify our holy AoE arsenals specifically. First, Holy Radiance still generates holy power points for us. The holy power generation mechanic was moved from Tower of Radiance and placed directly onto Holy Radiance itself. Other than that, every other piece of our holy toolkit has been updated, and for the better.
The Light and How to Swing It: The AOE heal we deserve
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered, like why paladins are so awesome. From launch until Cataclysm, holy paladins survived on just a handful of heals. We traded healing complexity for unique utility, gaining Aura Mastery instead of Wild Growth or using Hand of Freedom instead of Prayer of Mending. Holy paladin healing was so simple for so many years, as we tended to gravitate toward a single spell like Flash of Light or Holy Light in each expansion. While any other healing class could have complained that their class had become stagnant, holy paladins had literally been playing the same game of whack-a-mole for years. Cataclysm's massive retooling of paladins and introduction of the three-heal model helped breathe new life into playing holy. Holy power gave us a unique mechanic to manage and gave us additional choices to make when healing. The three-heal model ensures that we're forced to choose between throughput and efficiency, and now we're challenged with managing our mana as well as our healing. Even though these changes drastically shifted the way we play our paladins, we were still relying on the same single-target heals we had always been. Healing Hands, now known as Holy Radiance, was the spell designed to upset the status quo.
The Light and How to Swing It: Patch 4.2's effect on holy PVP
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered, like why paladins are so awesome. I have a feeling that the developers have a hard time balancing healers for PVP combat. How should healers be killed in PVP? Should we run out of mana eventually, or is a bursty switch the only answer? Can the focused efforts of a single DPSer be enough to topple us, or should it take two players to finish us off? Trying to balance all of these elements for four different classes with five different healing trees is a challenge by any measure. Every organized PVP encounter revolves around the healers involved, especially in the golden bracket of 3v3. Prior to patch 4.2, teams loved seeing a holy paladin across the arena from them, as holy paladins weren't exactly amazing at 3v3 matches in the first few months of Cataclysm. We have a few key weaknesses, notably our lack of any long-term crowd control like Hex and our lone school of magic, holy, which leaves us defenseless when interrupted. We weren't completely ineffective in arenas before patch 4.2, but we also weren't breaking any records or winning any #1 Healer trophies.
The Light and How to Swing It: Patch 4.2 shakes up our heals
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered, like why paladins are so awesome. I wasn't very happy with the first round of notes for patch 4.2, as they contained several holy paladin nerfs. I had originally thought that Blizzard's developers were just trying to keep holy paladin mana in line, but it looks like they actually had a few other changes up their collective sleeves. We've learned about several new mechanics that shift the balance of power between our healing spells and even offset much of the expected loss of power. Our new set bonuses help us recover some of that lost mana and also boost the effectiveness of our expensive heals. While Blizzard states that class power is not designed around set bonuses, our potency is still affected by them. In addition, some key talent adjustments have the potential to completely change the roles of our heals, including letting Flash of Light be instant-cast (with a proc) and significantly bolstering the effectiveness of Holy Light when used in a Beacon of Light environment (which is always). These are the type of exciting patch notes that I can get behind, as they are aimed at adding diversity to our relatively stale lineup of direct heals.
The Light and How to Swing It: Holy paladins are all about throughput
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered, like how to pull off an awesome dive heal, as pictured above. Blizzard has tried to give holy paladins so many interesting tools. We saw our first absorption effect in our level 80 ability, Sacred Shield. Its potency was limited due to the proc mechanics involved, and once it was limited to a single target, it became just another buff we kept active. The dev team tried giving us not one but two different HoTs. The first was via the old Glyph of Flash of Light, which took our weakest heal and cut its up-front healing in half in exchange for a weak HoT. It simply didn't make sense. The second HoT we received came from the interaction between Infusion of Light and Sacred Shield, which would put a HoT on our SS target when we used FoL on him. While more powerful than the last iteration, it was still far too weak to make any difference, and its limitation of a single target really made it untenable. Our ability to prevent damage via absorption effects or proactively heal damage via HoTs was basically nil, and holy paladins relied on massive throughput to solve every healing dilemma. It looks like that model hasn't changed today.
The Light and How to Swing It: Holy Shock mechanics
Every Sunday, Chase Christian of The Light and How to Swing It invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. This week, we discuss my least favorite healing spell, Holy Shock; though I might be changing my mind about that. I have been going over my guild's World of Logs parses for heroic Sindragosa recently, trying to find any holes in our strategy or areas that we can improve upon. While browsing the statistics, I examined the balance of healing spells I had employed. Our wipes were fairly typical fights by any account, with a 50/50 mix of healing from Holy Lights and Flash of Lights, and the rest of my healing coming from Beacon of Light and Judgement of Light. I noticed that Holy Shock was all the way at the bottom of my healing done chart, below even the Infusion of Light FoL HoT and the Glyph of Holy Light splashes. I'll admit it now, I have never really been a fan of Holy Shock. My very first character was a paladin that I tried leveling as holy, to take advantage of that seemingly awesome ranged attack, since that was the core weakness of paladins at the time. The concept of healers and tanks had never occurred to me, since I had never played a collaborative RPG before. Once I picked up HS from the talent tree, I found out that it was just a terrible spell that happened to cost 31 talent points. Disappointed, I put my paladin on the bench for several months. After realizing how little I was utilizing it in Icecrown Citadel, I decided to give Holy Shock one last chance to redeem itself in my mind.
[UPDATED] Patch 3.1 PTR build 9658 Paladin changes
So the new PTR build dropped, and it doesn't look very pretty for Holy Paladins. Before we get into the grim side of things, it looks like Aura Mastery has been made baseline. Does this mean a new talent will be popping up in the Holy tree? That seems likely, but don't bet on it yet. Now on to the bad stuff...HolySacred Shield - Cannot be on more than one target at any one time.Ouch. So much for raid damage mitigation. Back to single target healing, the lot of you!Infusion of Light - No longer has a chance to reduce the casting time of Holy Light, but increases the the critical chance of your next Holy Light by 10/20% instead. Moved to Tier 10.Double ouch. This seems to be a PvP nerf to me, and others are crying out the same on the forums. Without addressing it directly, Ghostcrawler states that "several of those changes were made for PvE reasons". He was, of course, referring to Sacred Shield, considering that one of Blizzard's concerns was the increasing number of mitigation abilities going into Ulduar. Losing half-a-second Holy Lights will be severely palpable to Holy Paladins in Arenas. [UPDATE: With Aura Mastery's old effect made baseline, the new activated ability talent is all kinds of awesome - Now makes anyone affected by Concentration Aura to be immune to Interrupt and Silence mechanics and increases the effectiveness of all other auras by 100%. Lasts 10 sec. 2 min cooldown. This is a fantastic ability that compensates a little for the other nerfs. Because it is a party or raid-wide buff, this is extremely powerful -- imagine the improved versions of Retribution Aura and Devotion Aura working at 200%. This makes Paladin synergy simply too good. The 2 minute cooldown is about right for PvP, although a 12 second duration might have been more appropriate. It's an excellent talent on paper, I can't wait to see in practice.
[UPDATED] Paladin changes in patch 3.0.3
Yeah, yeah, I know. You're sick of reading about Paladins. Don't shoot the messenger, I'm just here bearing some news and a couple of opinions. You can always skip down to the the next post, anyway. For those Paladin lovers (and even loathers), Patch 3.0.3 brings about some pretty interesting changes to the class. We got a lot more changes than other classes, but then again we've been getting a lot of attention lately, haven't we?First, the bad news. We knew most of the nerfs since they showed up in the Beta a while back. Well, most of those nerfs made it live to Patch 3.0.3, so let's get this over with quickly so we can move on to the good news. Yes, there's actually good news for Paladins this patch. Seals all get nerfed to varying degrees, the general idea being that they no longer deal as much damage either as a Seal or as a Judgement. Don't ask me for the math, you can check out Boubouille's detailed notes on MMO Champion for the details. All Seals have been nerfed, period. Ouch.[UPDATE: Thanks to Turkeyspit who reminded me about the change to Judgement of Light, which now awesomely affects spells and not just melee attacks. I told you this was a good Patch for us.]
Patch 3.0.2 primer for Holy Paladins
This was supposed to go up before the servers did, but as you probably already know, Patch 3.0.2 wasn't quite what we all expected. Now that servers are starting to go back up online, I can better write up this handy guide for the brave new world. Let's try to get as much of this right as possible. If you were as excited as I am -- and you should be -- you probably logged on as soon as your Realm went up, picked out all those cool talents you've been drooling over these past months, and went off reveling in your newfound power.Good for you. Even though Patch 3.0.2 had a few hiccups, most of the important class changes made it through. I had to delete a lot of my macros and change a few. For one thing, Judgement and a Seal can no longer be cast within the same macro. This is because Seals aren't consumed by Judgements anymore, so they now share the same GCD. If you have macros for your Blessings of Freedom, Protection, and Sacrifice, you should edit them to cast Hands instead of Blessings. Lots of little things. I'll probably talk about that in The Light and How to Swing It. For now, we'll take a look at the talent trees and how we'll settle into the 3.0.2 world.
Holy and Protection buffs incoming for Paladins
Ghostcrawler just recently posted some good news for both Protection and Holy Paladins. Some of them are simply a matter of convenience, but all of the changes posted were nice little buffs.First, Righteous Defense now has an 8 second cooldown. It's 15 seconds on live realms, and was 10 seconds previously in the beta. I'm very, very glad this change was made, though it's an example of the 'slippery slope' of homogenizing classes/tanks. Paladins were the only class with a ranged taunt, but now all of the tanks have one. Righteous Defense still taunts multiple mobs, but all of the other tanks had/have AOE taunts as well. Righteous Defense mostly lost what made it beautiful compared to the other taunts, so it really needed this buff to not look terrible. I'm glad they did it.
Don't panic: Paladin changes in Beta build 9014
I know I'm a bit late posting this, but it took me a while to calm down enough. Alright, some of you might have already read this and most of you might have crouched into a fetal position when you heard of the change to Divine Plea. In it's first appearance, Divine Plea was a phenomenal, channeled return of 50% total mana over 6 seconds. Of course, that was simply too powerful and was subsequently "tuned" in further builds. That tuning has resulted in gutting the ability, with the latest version granting a buff that regenerates 25% of total mana over 15 seconds but reduces healing by 100%.A moment of silence, please.It reduces healing by 100%. This means that it makes the one spec that needs it absolutely useless for 15 seconds. I seriously have no idea anymore where Blizzard is going with this. Ghostcrawler issued a quick revision, however, stating that the healing penalty will only be 20%. That's good news, but it's scary that such a massive nerf was even applied to what is a key spell for Holy Paladins considering that their only source of mana regeneration is a crit-based gamble.
The Light and How to Swing It: The shocking truth in Beta
Ok. So Paladins rock in Beta. There are a whole slew of abilities and talents that make life a whole lot easier and a lot more fun. One popular request on the comments has been to test drive the new Wrath Shockadin, with improvements like a 6 second Holy Shock and ranged judgements from Enlightened Judgements, it really does seem like the spec has finally come into its own. Of course, what looks good on paper doesn't necessarily translate into actual gameplay. With the reshuffle of talents and the consolidation of spell and melee crit, what used to be a fringe off-spec with a loyal following might actually turn into the spec of choice... for healing Paladins. Before anything, though, let's make one thing clear -- this is Beta, so everything we'll be taking a look at today might (and is likely to) change by the time Wrath of the Lich King is live.
Wrath Beta patch notes: Paladin part III - the Holy tree
Finally. We get to the most exciting -- albeit also most likely to change -- part of our Paladin abilities analysis. The new Wrath of the Lich King talents! Readers who have been keeping watch on the expansion's Alpha and all the rumors and leaks know only too well that Paladins have had nothing significant throughout the entire Alpha stage. That all changed with the sudden release of the Beta yesterday, however, and a flood of overwhelming Paladin information came streaming in. You can read the list of changes in my first post, and a general review of baseline abilities and existing talents in my follow-up post. Paladin talents have been greatly reworked, with some talents jumping from one tree to another, and other talents scrapped completely. The general vibe from the new talent trees is that Blizzard, after so long, has finally given the class some much needed love. I don't think I've gotten this excited about the class -- or heck, about the game -- in a long time. We'll take a look at each tree, the new talents, and what they could mean for Paladins in Wrath after the break.
