holy-paladin-mana
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The Light and How to Swing It: Healing by the numbers
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. Every raid encounter is designed to challenge the players attempting it. Tanks can be faced with controlling several mobs at once, while DPSers often have enrage timers to race against. Blizzard's developers have a few different tricks for putting healers to the test. The first and most obvious danger that healers face is the rate of incoming damage, which we have to counter with spells that are appropriately powerful. We are also often tasked with reacting quickly to stimuli, like instantly dispelling or bringing a raid group's life back to full before another incoming attack lands. With the release of Cataclysm, the developers specifically focused on a mechanic that had been sidelined for quite some time -- mana management. Our spells' mana costs have been tweaked and mana regeneration capabilities have been altered to ensure that we focus on choosing the right spells. We used to be able to spam Holy Light carelessly in Wrath, but now we can't sustain nonstop Divine Lights for more than a minute or two without emptying our mana bar completely. Learning to live with a limited mana supply is paramount to being a successful holy paladin in Cataclysm.
The Light and How to Swing It: Don't trust your mana bar
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. Since patch 4.1 went live, I have been noticing some irregularities with my mana bar. I don't check it too often, as I'm usually focused on my raid's health instead. As expected, I watch my mana the most when it's running low. It seemed as if I was both gaining and spending more mana than usual, and so I started doing some research. A few threads on the WoW official forums revealed that there were others seeing the same sort of issues and that Seal of Insight and Judgement were the main suspects. The initial reports that I found indicated that holy paladins were actually being robbed of mana after using Judgement. We normally gain mana after Judging, due to its interaction with Seal of Insight. The issue was that when casting a spell after Judging, we'd somehow lose the mana that we had just gained. Judgement actually costs us some mana, though typically we recoup the cost from the mana it grants. If we're not seeing a return from Judgement with SoI active, then we should actually stop Judging on cooldown. Luckily for us, that's not the whole story of what's happening.
The Light and How to Swing It: Best practices 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, like what to look for in your World of Logs parses. Holy paladins are doing all right. While patch 4.1's notes may have retribution and protection up in arms about the new cooldown on Word of Glory, holy paladins are exempt via Walk in the Light. We're actually not seeing any changes in the upcoming patch -- at least, none that have been announced yet. The lack of updates shouldn't come as a surprise to a healing class that's been performing relatively well. Minor balances to our mana and effectiveness have been used to keep us in line with the other healers, but we're otherwise stable. Patch 4.1 will buff our recently discussed set bonus, but that doesn't help improve the gear today. Just because Blizzard doesn't have any buffs planned doesn't mean that we can't work on improving our performance naturally. There is truly no WoW player who can perform perfectly at every moment, but the closer we get to that ideal, the stronger healers we become. As healers, we should constantly be developing our skills and refining our gameplay. There's nothing worse than feeling like the weak link on the chain, and so keeping ourselves at top healing efficiency is crucial to being successful in whatever environment you're healing in.
The Light and How to Swing It: The latest casualty in the mana war
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 examine the changes in the latest beta patch. If you read my post last week, then you're familiar with the pretty serious nerfs to our mana regeneration that came with the previous build of the Cataclysm beta. Apparently Blizzard was only halfway done, and they released build 12942 on Thursday with even more cuts to our already-weak mana regeneration situation. Our last powerful tool to restore mana, Seal of Insight (the old Seal of Wisdom) was changed to only restore 4% of our base mana, instead of 4% of our maximum mana. While I was already upset from reading that my vision of a melee-centric holy paladin was coming apart, I then saw that Holy Shock's base healing was also nerfed by 30%. While Holy Shock was definitely powerful, it wasn't a spammable heal and you still needed to use the other heals in your toolbox to keep everyone alive. We had already lost Sacred Shield and the Infusion of Light HoT, and our proactive healing is now purely based on our mastery bonus. We need strong reactive healing to counter our lack of HoTs, and so nerfing Holy Shock just didn't make sense.
The Light and How to Swing It: Why is the mana gone?
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 the future of mana regeneration for holy paladins. When you play WoW on a beta server, you accept that there's going to be a lot of bugs. There's the stacking modifier that doesn't actually stop stacking, and you're left with retribution and protection paladins swinging for 5-digits with every attack. I'll admit that I felt a bit guilty when I one-shot someone with a thirty-thousand damage Avenger's Shield. There's also the programmer who accidentally misplaced the decimal in another spell, letting Crusader Aura grant us 600% mounted movement speed. Even with some of these glaring issues present, it's our job to ignore the urge to exploit and to continue working on testing balance and content. Well, it's our job to only gank a few people at the teleport NPCs and to then get moving to test balancing. Well, maybe more than a few. Well, maybe all of them. Anyway, Blizzard unveiled its most comprehensive patch to the beta last week. It contained a ton of changes to paladins, and specifically there were a lot of holy paladin talent changes. While some of these edits are positive, like the new Denounce and Exorcism changes which FINALLY give us a spammable ranged attack, others are fairly grim. I'm talking about the complete removal of Illumination and the ruination of Divine Plea. They're both toast.
