Holy Paladins in 4.2 - What You Need to Know

The release of Patch 4.2 brings with it the first major new content of Cataclysm: A new raiding tier taking place in a gigantic zone, a new quest hub and dailies with excellent gear rewards, a Legendary Staff for the Mages and Warlocks to fight to the death over, and a new, epic questline advancing the story of Thrall and the Earthen Ring. Not to mention getting a chance to kill Ragnaros once and for all and an opportunity to finally shove all that goddamn dirt that we gathered right in Fandral Staghelm's snarly face. Good times.

But with this patch, as always, come a lot of changes, balances and tweaks to the classes. Holy Paladin's are getting off pretty easy this time around; avoiding drastic changes but getting some quality of life changes, a couple of buffs and of course, getting the mana cost of our direct heals nerfed yet again.

I have put together a list of all the changes in this patch that are relevant to Paladins of the Holy persuasion, along with my comments. Full Patch Notes are here: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/2993743

GENERAL HEALING CHANGES

• All healing critical strikes now heal for 2 times a normal heal (+100%), up from 1.5 times a normal heal (+50%).

A straightforward buff to all healers throughput, and an attempt to make Critical Strike rating a desirable secondary stat for healing. I'm still not completely sold on the viability of Crit as a stat for Holy Paladin healing, but I'm not going to say no to any extra 50% buff that Blizzard is willing to give me. Since Blizzard is doing everything they can do to force us away from Divine Light and to the smaller, more efficient Holy Light, this is a very welcome increase to our healing that will help make up for the fact that we'll be less able to spam our biggest heal.

I am, however, looking forward to seeing those big, juicy Divine Light crits.


FROM THE "HOLY CRAP IT'S ABOUT TIME" FILE

• All class abilities which place a buff on friendly targets no longer generate any threat. This goes for raid-wide buffs like Mark of the Wild and Power Word: Fortitude, as well as triggered effects such as Blessed Resilience or Fingers of Frost, and single-target buffs like Dark Intent and Hysteria. The exception is buffs which directly cause healing or damage, such as Thorns or Renew. Abilities such as these still generate normal threat.

This is a really small change, but it's one of those blindingly obvious, "why wasn't it like this in the first place" changes. It happened rarely, but every now and then I would refresh Beacon of Light or a Blessing just as the boss is being pulled and get aggro. I'm not really sure why a boss would think that Beacon of Light is a threat and want to rearrange my face, but it's been known to occur. This is just a quality of life change, really, but it will make your tank's life just that much easier and may prevent you from getting your head pounded into the ground on occasion.

CHANGES TO HOLY PALADINS

• Divine Light mana cost has been increased to 35% of base mana, up from 30%.
• Flash of Light mana cost has been increased to 31% of base mana, up from 27%.
• Holy Light mana cost has been increased to 12% of base mana, up from 10%.

Okay, ouch, this hurts. In a recent article on the official WoW blog, Ghostcrawler said "We concluded PvE Holy paladins were ending fights with too much mana relative to other healers, so we raised the mana cost of their single-target heals" and this change steps in to correct this. 

If I was to look at our mana situation objectively and not as a completely partisan class zealot, I would tend to agree and I think that these changes are reasonable. Looking at other healers, Paladin's have it enormously easier when it comes to mana. Often during raids I'll hear a healer call out for an Innervate or a Hymn of Hope while I'm sitting pretty with 80% mana having done about the same amount of healing. So while the zealot in me is storming through the house knocking holes in the drywall, I can appreciate that this is designed to bring Paladins to the same level as the rest of the healers and I think I'm okay with that.

 The Divine Light increase stings though... a 17% increase is a big jump.

Delicious, but
unhelpful
while healing.

• Holy Shock mana cost has been decreased to 7% of base mana, down from 8%. 

A small buff to make up for the last one. I don't think that making Holy Shock cheaper is going to have any effect on my Mana as the cost now is unnoticeable and I'm already casting it on cooldown as much as I can anyway. So, thank you, Blizzard, for doing the equivalent of tossing a Gummi Bear to a starving man.

Still, a Buff is a Buff.

• Beacon of Light can no longer be dispelled. In addition, it now transfers 100% of the heal from Holy Light, but still 50% of the heal from other spells.

Beacon of Light can no longer be dispelled, which I assume is going to be great for PVP. I've never run into this as a problem, so I will refrain from commenting further.

However, the transfer of 100% of Holy Light to the Beacon target is a fabulous change that I am very happy to see. 

I'm not sure how everyone else does it, but when I'm healing and responsible to keep a tank up, I still rely on my Beacon of Light to do a lot of the heavy lifting for me. At 50% transfer, Holy Light was next to useless when trying to keep a tank up through the Beacon, forcing a lot of Divine Light casts on Raid members that, strictly speaking, could likely have been kept up with a Holy Light. With Blizzard doing whatever they can to get us away from spam casting Divine Light, this will allow us to cast our ultra-efficient Holy Light more often and have it be effective in more situations.

• Illuminated Healing (Mastery) has been adjusted slightly so that if a paladin refreshes an existing copy of his or her own Illuminated Healing on a target, the new absorption amount will be added into the old absorption amount and the duration will be reset. The total absorption created can never exceed 1/3 of the casting paladin's health.

I posted in depth about this change in my previous article: Illuminated Healing in 4.2: New! Improved! 100% More Shiny!.

I think that the buff to our Mastery coupled with the improvement to Critical Heals and the change to Holy Light will go a long way to make a Crit and Mastery gearing strategy viable for Tank healing in Raids, and I'm very intrigued to check the numbers out. I think some more research is needed on this one before it can be fully understood. As of now, however, I am going to stick with my previous Haste-heavy build.

• Infusion of Light can now lower the cast time of Flash of Light by 0.75/1.5 seconds, in addition to Holy Light and Divine Light. In addition, the old Denounce spell overlay effect has been transferred to Infusion of Light since Denounce is no longer a proc.

Nobody uses Flash of Light. It doesn't heal enough to compete with Divine Light, it's too expensive to compete with Holy Light and isn't fast enough to make it worth casting over either of them. 

If only it was instant I might actually use it.

What's that? Infusion of Light now reduces the cast time by 1.5 seconds? Ahh. I see. Right. Carry on then.

• Speed of Light now increases movement speed when Holy Radiance or Divine Protection are cast. In addition, this talent now reduces the cooldown of Holy Radiance by 13/26/40 seconds, up from 10/20/30.

This buff is nice, but not, I think, in the way Blizzard intended. I think that they view this as allowing us to use Holy Radiance more often, and therefore being more effective at AOE healing, which is true. However, I have rarely found that Holy Radiance is on cooldown when I need it, and I'm not sure how it being available 10 seconds earlier will change things dramatically. But it may allow us to move a Talent Point from this and put it elsewhere and still have virtually the same cooldown as before.

Actually, the thing that I am excited about with this change is having the Speed of Light movement increase be activated by both Holy Radiance and Divine Protection. It makes a lot of sense, actually, because when I need to quickly move out the fire Divine Protection's damage reduction is also likely to come in handy, not to mention save me the mana cost of Holy Radiance (which ain't cheap).

• Walk in the Light now improves Word of Glory healing by 30%, in addition to its current effects.

Sweet Merciful Neptulon! An actual, no-bullshit BUFF! In Ghostcrawler's words: "We buffed Word of Glory for three reasons: We felt Holy Power was mattering less to Holy paladins than it did at Cataclysm launch. We wanted to provide more uninterruptible healing in PvP. We knew Light of Dawn was trumping Word of Glory in almost all cases in 25-player raids". Excellent.

As a 10-man raider, I use Word of Glory a lot, and this buff makes it's use in 10-mans a complete no-brainer, as well as making it a viable option in 25-man content. Consider this slavering class zealot pleased. I almost regret the car bomb I put under Ghostcrawler's minivan for the mana nerfs. Almost.

BUFF TO PURE AWESOME

• Players are once again free to dance in combat (without causing graphic errors). Other animations, such as attacks, will take precedence over dancing. The dance animation will be suppressed until the higher priority animation is complete. Fun has been unnerfed.

Can there be anything better than dancing while healing a boss encounter? I don't think so. Trash mobs will flee from the shear magnitude of my dance machismo, and Bosses will cower from my epic arabesques and drop their epic loot as I do a plate armour version of The Hustle. So You Think You Can Dance will have nothing compared to my Holy Warrior hoe-downs.


HOLY PALADIN GEAR LIST FOR 4.2

I will defer to the experts on this one: Kurn put together a great list of Holy Paladin Firelands gear. She and I generally agree on gearing and stat weights (by that, of course, I mean that I read her stuff and say, "Yeah, that makes a lot more sense than what I was thinking"), and I'll probably be using her guide myself, so I see no point in duplicating it here. Go visit her!

   

Call to Arms, A Rebuttal

Blizzard announced yesterday a new tweak to the Looking for Dungeon system to help alleviate the long dungeon queue times that are experienced by many.

The idea is simple enough: Incentivise the least represented role to encourage players of that role to queue up for dungeons more often by offering perks and a chance for rare in-game items.

From Blizzard's post:

"Call to Arms is meant to lower wait times by offering additional rewards for queuing as the currently least represented role. To be eligible for the additional rewards you must solo queue for a random level-85 Heroic in the role that is currently being Called to Arms, and complete the dungeon by killing the final boss. Every time you hit these requirements (there is no daily limit) you'll receive a goodie bag that will contain some gold, a chance at a rare gem, a chance at a flask/elixir (determined by spec), a good chance of receiving a non-combat pet (including cross faction pets), and a very rare chance at receiving a mount. The pets offered come from a wide variety of sources, and include companions like the Razzashi Hatchling, Cockatiel, and Tiny Sporebat, but the mounts are those specifically only available through dungeons (not raids), like the Reins of the Raven Lord from Sethekk Halls, Swift White Hawkstrider from Magister's Terrace, and Deathcharger's Reins from Stratholme."

This is aimed primarily at Tanks, since 99% of the time they are the least represented role and the queue time bottleneck, but occasionally healers will benefit from this as well.  The benefit to Damage Dealing players is, if this system works as intended, drastically reduced queue times and a better, less frustrating experience with the Dungeon Finder.

I'm not going to go into the details of this new idea as I think it's been covered really well by others. Psynister has a great post up that dissects the advantages and potential problems with this new system extremely well, and from a DPSers perspective.

However, I do want to offer my own opinion on some of the issues that have been raised.

First off, this is a great first step into alleviating the Dungeon Queue problem, but it's not a long-term solution. If the fundamental problem with the LFD system is the lack of tanks, then the solution must be to encourage people to roll and play tanks. Having this added perk is nice, but it does nothing to change how the role plays or to encourage more people to do it.

Secondly, since the Damage Dealers are the ones suffering for the long delays, it makes sense to reward them as well. I suggest a scaling buff tied to the Queue time so that for each 15 minutes spent waiting in the queue, that person would receive a 5% buff to all rewards generated up to a maximum of 20%. Experience, gold and Justice/Valor points received would all be boosted.  Perhaps anyone with the maximum 20% buff would also get a chance at the rare drops that are now being dangled in front of the tanks. Adding this incentive would hopefully increase the patience of DPSers because they would be acknowledged and rewarded for enduring a wait time longer than the other roles.

Of course, doing this means that the only role getting screwed over would be the healers.  C'est la vie.

Lastly, one of the largest concerns that I've heard, especially from healers, is that this change is going to encourage more Plate DPS to try their hand at Tanking in gear that is unsuitable for the role, which means we are about to be innundated with a whole wave of LOLTanks in DPS gear that are completely unprepared for what actually needs to be done as a tank, but will get the extra rewards as the rest of the group stuggles to carry him through the dungeon.

This is certainly a possibility, and I'm sure there will be instances of it, but I don't think it will be any worse that it is now - DPSers are already queuing as Tanks for the instant queue.  Preventing that is what the Votekick function is for.


ENCOURAGING THE BADS, BUT ALSO SOME GOODERS

However, what if this change encourages a Death Knight or a Paladin DPS to try tanking for the first time and he likes it?  That's Blizzard's hope and the only way that the Queue situation can be improved long term.

It has never been easier than it is now to try a role that you've never done before. With Dual Specs being so cheap as to be inconsequential, and between the Auction House, Justice and Valor points and quest rewards and dungeon drops it's possible now to gear up for a different role without ever having to run a dungeon as that spec.  This is a mixed blessing, obviously, since at some point our fledgling Tank is going to have to bite the bullet, enter the queue and actually tank a dungeon. But there is no excuse for ever tanking without the proper tools and gear.


THE PRESSURE ON A NEW TANK

I have done some tanking in my time. I have a level 80 warrior that went through the Lich King expansion as Protection - even tanking some raids. I enjoy tanking, but the pressure that is put on a tank, particularly a new one, is pretty extreme. A new tank is expected to know which mobs need to die first, where to position them and when to interrupt them. They are expected to know where to go and what to do.

A new tank, especially one that is just dipping his foot into the role as a secondary spec, isn't necessarily going to have all the tools that he needs for the job. He's not going to be as quick to pick up stray adds; he may not even have a threat meter installed or know that he should, for that matter. He's likely going to make mistakes that will wipe the group.

And odds are he's going to get told off, insulted, belittled, called a bad, kicked from the group or simply ignored as a "noob".  It's happened to me before, and is frustrating as hell. Simply put, learning how to tank is not fun.


IT'S UP TO US

There is only one sure-fire, long term solution to the tank shortage: Tanking needs to be more fun. Blizzard can do their part, but certainly some of the reason that many tanks will only run with a guild group, or have given up Tanking altogether is because of how Tanks are treated by the other players.

It's up to us to solve the long-term Tank shortage by making life just a little bit more pleasant for them. Offer to help or coach a new tank that looks like he's struggling. Offer up a "Great tanking" kudo more often. Pay attention to the DPS order and CC targets. Or even do something simple like ask the tank what he wants from his raid markers, or offer to put them up for him - especially if the tank is a new one.


PROVING THE POINT

It's been a long time since I tanked - not since Wrath. But to prove that this change might just make things a little better after all, I am going to pick up my shield again and bash some heads with it.

I have three different characters that can start tanking right away:  Thosif, my Paladin is dual-specced Protection and I have been collecting gear for a while now (as of this moment he has a weird collection of tanking and DPSing gear, which means I'm going to have to spend some money to fill in the holes); Krupel, my Warrior who is level 80 and hasn't been into the Cataclysm zones yet; and my level 33 Paladin on Azuremyst, who is levelling as Protection but has yet to step into a dungeon.

If I, a dedicated Battle Medic, am tempted to give Tanking another try because of this, perhaps I'm not alone and this change will make a difference. Even if it doesn't, it's a step in the right direction. And if absolutely nothing else, it just proves that Blizzard does get it - they do understand what the players are going through and what the problems are, and that they're working on it - whether the community agrees with their choices or not.


TOO LONG, DIDN'T READ

To sum up:  Looking for Dungeon: Call to Arms is a good idea, but only time will tell if it's enough.

More Paladin Changes on the Patch 4.0.6 PTR - Patch Notes

Courtesy WOW Insider, new patch notes have been released today for the 4.0.6 PTR and there are some very interesting changes coming for Paladins.  Of course, it’s best not to get too excited over these changes just yet, as these changes may not make it out of the Play Test Realm.

Forbearance:  The duration has been lowered to 1 minute, down from 2.

Forbearance, of course, is the debuff that Paladins are given when using one of our major cooldowns (Divine Shield, Lay on Hands and Hand of Protection), preventing the paladin from chaining together very powerful spells for a certain period of time, currently 2 minutes.  The reduction of this effect to 1 minute is a lovely “Quality of Life” improvement for paladins, allowing us a great deal more flexibility as to when we can use our major cooldowns.  The 1 minute limitation still prevents us from casting the wonderfully overpowered Divine Shield/Lay on Hands combo (every PVP paladin’s dream, I’m sure), but doesn’t restrict us unduly from casting our cooldowns when needed. 

This is a very nice change that I would love to see make it onto the live servers, especially because…

Lay on Hands now causes Forbearance on the target.  It used to only cause it when cast on the paladin.  This was an old design from when Divine Protection caused Forbearance and the paladin didn’t want to prevent a tank from using their defensive cooldown.

From the perspective of a group with a single paladin healer, this is no big deal.  I only have two Forbearance causing cooldowns that can be cast on other players, and they typically would go to different targets anyway.  Where this will affect things is in a raid with more than one holy paladin.  I suspect that this is to prevent raids from gimping boss fights by allowing the tank to ignore a mechanic and take a huge amount of damage, knowing that there are two 100K heals available at a moments notice to pull him through.  Chaining two Lay on Hands back to back on a tank could allow the tank to survive an insane amount of damage, possibly completely neutering certain boss mechanics.  This could lead to a situation where the optimal way to do an encounter would require that there be two paladins healing the raid, which is the exact situation that Blizzard is trying to avoid.  The reduction in duration to Forbearance, however, should still allow two paladins to heal together in a raid effectively without being unbalanced or prone to “Unforeseen Creativity” from the perspective of the developers.

This change is too bad, but understandable from a balance perspective.  Let’s let inflating gear levels neuter the bosses, like always.

Lay on Hands cannot be a critical effect and will not be affected by most abilities which modify healing (such as Beacon of Light).

D’oh!  This one hurts.  One of the most beautiful and elegant things that a holy paladin could do was to cast Lay on Hands on a DPS, have it crit and then have half of that healing to go the Beacon of Light target.  Seeing that many large, green numbers show up on my scrolling battle text gave me a severe case of the giggles most times.

Again, from a balance perspective, I can understand this one.  But I don’t like it.  I don’t like it at all.

Rebuke can now be trained by all paladins at level 54.  Exisiting characters will need to visit their trainer, even if they had talented Rebuke before.

This change has been out for a while and has got some people very, very excited.  It’s absolutely fantastic for Protection Paladins since they’ve desperately needed a real interrupt ever since… well, forever.  It also allows a Holy Paladin to add even more utility to their arsenal.  My only question is where the hell am I supposed to put yet another button on my action bar?

The interesting thing about this change is that if a Holy Paladin wants or needs to be using Rebuke, they are going to need to heal within melee range of the boss.  This is interesting since it would also give us access to Crusader Strike to generate Holy Power.  Given the very short radius of Holy Radiance, the melee nature of CS and Rebuke, I’m wondering if that is exactly where Blizzard wants Paladins to do their healing. 

Protector of the Innocent heals for 30% less.

And the nerfs just keep on coming.  With Protector of the Innocent healing for the amount that it does right now, I am almost completely able to ignore my own health bar and focus on the group.  I doubt that this is an intentional design; hence we get this reduction in PotI’s healing.  No big deal, really.  Frankly, I think the biggest result of this change will be a large decrease in my Overhealing Done numbers.

I think these changes, added to the ones that we have seen previously add up to a lot of not much. The reduction in Forbearance is nice but not game-changing, as is the change to Divine Plea and it’s associated Glyph that we heard about last week. I think Paladin’s are in a good place right now, and the minimal changes that Blizzard has proposed really amount to not much more than a simple fine-tuning.

Ghostcrawler on Healing

A few days ago on the Official WOW blog, Ghostcrawler posted a kind of “State-of-the-Union” style post detailing how Blizzard is feeling about where things are so far and things that could potentially be addressed in the first patch.  There is a lot of great information in this post, and it shows a snapshot of how Blizzard views the game balance thus far.

With regards to healing, there is one paragraph in particular that is caught my attention:

Healing in PvE is working out pretty much as intended. There are some Heroic dungeon bosses that are probably tougher than the required item level average permits. In general, you might have a tough time upon zoning into a Heroic dungeon with a bunch of strangers as soon as Dungeon Finder permits, especially if your group isn’t willing to communicate and work together. We want Heroics to be challenging -- if you want to zerg the content, stick to normal dungeons.

I only read this today but, interestingly enough, it was posted on the 27th, the same day I wrote my First Lessons from Heroics post about communication; meaning that Ghostcrawler is obviously reading my blog. Hi Greg, welcome to Dwarven Battle Medic.

The basic point here is that heroics are not going to get any easier, at least not when you’re working with a random group of total strangers… and that is how Blizzard wants it. 

As frustrating as my experiences with Heroics has been (there has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth, lemme tell you), I’m glad they are not going to be nerfing heroics.  Heroic Dungeons are supposed to be hard and good teamwork and communication should be needed to successfully complete one.  During Wrath I found heroics quite dull; not because of the content or the mechanics or the fact that I had done them several dozen times each, but simply because everybody ran them with a deadly silent efficiency.  No communication meant that you might as well have been running the dungeon with four NPCs.

I would have liked to have seen this post mention a buff to Holy Light that makes it heal for a kajillion HP, but you take what you can get.  It’s actually interesting that there is nothing in here about Holy Paladins at all.  It seems that they are working as intended.

Priests look like their in for a nice little buff, however:

For Holy priests, we’re increasing Chakra’s duration and changing Surge of Light so it can now benefit from Flash Heal and Greater Heal and can crit.

A little link love needs to go out to Tarinae over at A Healadin's Tear for writing about this in a far more timely manner than I managed to.