6.1.11

Divine Plea Buffed From the Brink of Irrelevancy? (PTR)

Patch 4.0.6 is heading to the Play Test Realm according to MMO-Champion.  This is not a content patch, so no new raids or anything, but is a bug fix and update patch. 

For Holy Paladins, there is not much in the way of changes coming.  As with Ghostcrawler’s post last week, it looks like Holy Paladins are in a good spot right now. 

One small but significant change is coming down the pipeline, however: Divine Plea is getting buffed.

Divine Plea now lasts for 9 seconds, down from 15. It grants 4% mana per tick, instead of 2%, for a total of 12% mana, up from 10%.

In addition: Glyph of Divine Plea now adds 6% mana, for a total of 18% over 9 seconds.  Up from 5%.

This is a nice, small buff to a good ability that will make it substantially more useful. Couple this with the new glyph and we have a real winner here.

The biggest problem with Divine Plea the way it is now is the 50% healing reduction while it is active. This buff gives us more mana returned in a shorter period of time, thereby reducing the impact of this limitation. The extra 8% 3% mana is just Awesomesauce flavoured icing on the cake.

In this healing environment there is seldom a time when 9 seconds of reduced healing will spell the death of a tank. And within the space of that time, there are many other things that a Paladin can do that aren’t heals and won’t be affected by the debuff. For instance, depending on Haste you would have 6 or 7 global cooldowns during that time so you could cast:

Judgement, (1.5s GCD)
Holy Shock, (1.5s GCD
drink Mana Potion, (1.5s GCD)
Cleanse, (1.5s GCD)
Hand of Salvation, (1.5s GCD)
Judgement, (1.5s GCD)
Holy Shock, (1.5s GCD) and then resume healing normally.

In this particular example, the Holy Shocks are used less for the amount of healing they would do, but rather to build Holy Power for an immediate Light of Dawn or Word of Glory when Divine Plea is finished. Of course, there are any number of different utility spells you can throw into that 9 seconds: Hand of Freedom, Hand of Protection, more Cleanses, Aura Mastery, etc. Even spamming Holy Light with its extremely low mana cost would be an option.

All in all, I’m very pleased with this tweak. I think it will go a long way to making it worth hitting the Divine Plea button again. I hope that it survives the PTR.

On the nerf side, our Blessings are getting a bit of a mana cost increase:

The mana costs of Blessing of Might and Blessing of Kings have been increased by approximately 217%, making them roughly equal to the cost of Mark of the Wild.

Since Blessings are normally cast outside of combat, this is mearly a “Meh”. I don’t suspect that this will change anybody's playstyle, except I may be slightly more reluctant to rebuff in the middle of combat for a Battle Rez.


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