PvP continues to ruin PvE, re: Paladin change

#0 - March 6, 2009, 8:40 p.m.

Holy

* Sacred Shield now cannot be on more than one target at any one time.
* 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.

Protection

* Hand of Sacrifice now lasts 12 sec or until the caster has transfered 100% of their maximum health.
* Targets affected by Divine Shield, Hand of Protection or Divine Protection can no longer be affected by any of these spell for 2 minutes. (Down from 3 minutes)
* Divine Sacrifice *New Talent* (Tier 3) - 30% of all damage taken by party or raid members within 30 yards is redirected to the Paladin (up to a maximum of 150% of the Paladin's health). Instant, 2 min cooldown.

The sacred shield and infusion changes just make PvE less interesting. It's already a horribly boring spec to play.

If you want examples, I stack all the low hp targets on 10 man malygos with sacred shield to put a buffer. Infusion of Light, again PvP, but crit is just pure overheal in PvE. Meanwhile the haste can actually save people.

Edit: Clarifying the example, before anyone takes any damage, I'll put sacred shield on targets with low max hitpoints. It's easy to keep these rolling during movement, or in between arcane barrages.

Ghostcrawler

#9 - March 6, 2009, 9:26 p.m.

Several of those changes were made for PvE reasons.

Ghostcrawler

#68 - March 6, 2009, 10:27 p.m.

Sacred Shield was possibly only a problem in PvP on the larger teams (or for rage generation, but we fixed that separately).

It was really a PvE problem because the damage prevention was really starting to add up in Ulduar. We know this was supposed to be one of the answers for how paladins can "group heal." However, you shouldn't need to do a ton of group healing in raids, and in PvP or heroic dungeons, you should still have enough tools to manage: fast heals, the HL glyph, Beacon, etc.

The topic of whether Holy paladin healing is too simplistic is a good conversation to have, though probably beyond the scope of this thread. Some players like a play style where they don't have many different spells to weave together so we try to offer ways to play like that. What I mean is that there are players who like the Holy healing style as it is. We think we can improve it, as we think we can improve most aspects of the game, but we want to be careful to do so without ruining what it is they enjoy (or what makes the class distinct).