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The Light and How to Swing It: Fresh patch 4.0.6 PTR notes for holy paladins
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, or with any screenshots of huge LoH crits. When Wrath was released, there were just over a dozen bosses available to fight immediately. Most of them were found in Naxxramas, which fell to the superguilds so quickly that not all of them were even level 80 yet. A few achievements like A Poke in the Eye and the first "hard mode" of Sartharion with three drakes were all that the talented raiders had to keep them company during the first few months of Northrend. By the time that Ulduar was released, nearly everyone was clamoring for new content. Cataclysm's launch hasn't shared the same fate. With heroic raids now the de facto form of progression and miles of new non-raiding content to explore, the content available at release has definitely lasted far longer. Even the most difficult bosses are still not on farm for the big guilds. Blizzard's developers have used this opportunity to start working on the first major patch after Cataclysm's release, which is of course includes plenty of holy paladin changes to keep us on our toes.
The Light and How to Swing It: A little less hybrid
With the Light as his strength, Gregg Reece of The Light and How to Swing It faces down the demons of the Burning Legion, the undead of the Scourge, and helps with the puppet shows at the Argent Ren Faire up in Icecrown. Ghostcrawler has been doing a lot of talking pertaining to paladins and Blizzard's vision of them for the future. A lot of this has been spawned by some of the changes the developers have been toying around with on the public test realms. In the current build of the PTR, Lay on Hands causes Forbearance on its target which has prompted quite an uproar from the playerbase. This cuts a leg out from our two major defensive cooldowns making us choose either health or invulnerability during a fight. Holy paladins are getting some text tacked onto Sanctified Light which will allow them to reduce the chance it will cause Forbearance on others by 33/66/100% to allow it to still be useful when healing in groups. As this is the PTR, we don't really know how much of this will end up on the live realms. The developers have been toying around with several different ideas and at the moment we're not sure which one or ones they'll end up going with.
[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.
Paladins to receive some Blizzard love
Reader VyseV1 took some time off from lurking on the official forums to point us in the direction of a post where Ghostcrawler responds to some Paladin concerns... with love. Alright, I'm exaggerating, but at this point, after the class has been dealt some severe nerfs, his responses are more than encouraging. In particular, he mentions that the eventual plan is to put Divine Shield and Avenging Wrath on the same 30 second cooldown, indicating that the Forbearance hotfix was a mere band-aid.Ghostcrawler also mentions that Divine Shield's attack speed penalty -- a remnant of the days when Paladins largely got majority of damage from auto-attacks -- will be revised to a reduction in total damage done. This means that Sacred Duty will likely be reworked to accommodate this change. One of the more interesting points that he brought up applies to all mana-based classes but is great news for Retribution Paladins who have paltry mana pools: Blizzard will be changing mana drain effects to take away a percentage of total mana instead of a flat number.
The Light and How to Swing It: Uncle
Uncle.I cry uncle.Please, Blizzard, no more. I've been extremely understanding of the nerfs done to the Paladin class as a whole, intended to reduce the so-called "dominance" of Retribution in PvP. I've always said Blizzard was doing the right thing and was on the right track towards balancing the class. I celebrated the fact that Paladins were actively tuned and assessed -- it was a refreshing change of pace. When nerfs were done to the class, I supported it because I valued game balance.But now this. I'm tired. I'm broken. This latest nerf -- intended for Retribution but affects the entire class -- has brought me to my knees. Blizzard has found a way to undermine Faith, and I no longer feel the comfort and safety of my Divine Shield of naiveté. In fact, right now I feel quite vulnerable with Forbearance, and the weight is quite heavy upon my shoulders. Right now, I just feel really disillusioned, disappointed, and lost.
The Light and How to Swing It: Paladin 3.0
It's pretty exciting, isn't it? Patch 3.0 is coming, well, "soon™" according to Blizzard. Considering that our favorite class hasn't gotten a second pass, it might be a bit premature to talk about Paladin changes when the pre-Wrath patch finally hits. That said, it looks like more than a few new talents will make it at least into the PTRs more or less intact. Hopefully and changes we'll see during our second pass will be tweaks to numbers and some mechanics refinements but hopefully no major changes.Assuming that most of the changes push through, we should expect a completely different Paladin in the coming months. Even without taking the new talents into account, there are baseline changes that should make gameplay technically different. The most significant change, of course, is in the way Judgements work. This is the one change that will take some getting used to. First of all, there are now three Judgements and they activate the GCD. This means no more macros for Seals and Judgements, which is actually fine because of two things: first, Judgements no longer consume Seals; second, Seals now last for a micromanagement-light two minutes.
Where is Blizzard going with Paladin changes?
"Like I promised, the paladin changes were more sweeping than most changes. As such, it's going to take us some time to go through a second pass on the abilities and get everything polished up enough to evaluate the shiny, new paladin." - Ghostcrawler, on the Paladin forumsThe Paladin changes we've seen so far have been pretty massive. There's been a reworking of our Seal and Judgement system, a shuffling of our talents, and the addition of interesting baseline spells like Divine Plea, a much needed mana recovery mechanic. The important thing to remember, though, is that this is Beta -- meaning a lot of things can still change from now until Wrath of the Lich King goes live. And as Ghostcrawler indicated, a lot of things will change.In fact, some spells we might love now could change or be scrapped. The Art of War, a talent I raved about and was wreaking havoc in the Beta, was fundamentally changed. From a pure DPS talent usable by raiding Paladins, it has become a utility spell more geared towards PvP. Some old spells such as the poor man's Divine Shield, Divine Protection, was reworked to actually be more usable. While we won't go through all the changes one by one -- there are a lot and I expect more in the future -- we can examine some key changes and try to figure out what Blizzard wants to do with the class.
