A misconception that must be cleared:

Q u o t e:
Illumination nerf exists in 3.2 to force Paladins into Mp5 plate gear.

You know, the kind they've been ignoring for months now.

The regen nerf won't feel too bad if you guys actually start wearing the Mp5. It's there for a reason. You may not like it but it's either complying with Blizz and wearing it, or not wearing it and going oom in less than a minute.

This isn't quite accurate. We buffed MP5 because it just did not provide enough mana per stat point. You are often going to end up with MP5 on your gear almost no matter what you do because you aren't often choosing directly between Int, spellpower, crit or MP5.

The nerf to Illumination was almost entirely because of the buff to Beacon of Light. Beacon can now provide massively more healing in some situations. If paladins still had the mana return they do currently, they would be the best healer in the game by a pretty wide margin. It is difficult to argue that point. Now you can argue that you prefer the current model (HL on the tank and nearly unlimited mana) better. But it's hard to argue the new Beacon would be balanced without other changes.

I'm going to throw out some made-up numbers. These are not from actual stats, but are hopefully typical of say a 25-player, 10-min hard fight (something like XT). Feel free to disagree but they shouldn't be off by orders of magnitude.

A Holy paladin's mana regen might look like this:

Illumination 70,000
Divine Plea 50,000
Replenishment 36,000
Other sources of mana 30,000
Mana from gear 10,000
Overhealing 60%

A Holy priest's mana regen might look like this:

Replenishment 30,000 (remember, the paladin has more mana)
Other sources of mana 40,000
Mana from gear 25,000
Overhealng 30%

See the problem? We're not talking about mana regen that is slightly off from other classes.

This situation is acceptable (somewhat) in current content because you can only do so much with such high levels of regen since you generally have to target one heal at a time. We could pretty much just make paladin spells free and the outcome wouldn't change that much. That's an exaggeration, but you get the point: paladins are generally GCD limited much more than they are mana limited. I'm not sure anyone is that mana limited in current content (though slightly more so on the hard modes), but whatever it is, paladins feel it the least.

Now we change Beacon so that the overhealing counts. Paladin healing is going to go up, probably by a lot. We can argue how much it's going to go up or how of that will be effective healing. But it will go up a lot, especially considering the glyph of HL will get more use. Considering how much higher paladin regen is than other healers, it has a long way to fall before it would even be at parity.

Remember, we are also nerfing Penance, Prayer of Healing and Lifebloom. The latter won't be felt as much in PvE, but also realize we are talking about 3.2 changes here and the current druid set bonuses (which might be slightly overpowered) won't be around.

Q u o t e:
That Priest forgot to spec Holy Concentration.

Oh and he never got Surge of Light (Mana Free Instant Heals) so the mana saved from those don't count.

Then give the preist and extra 10K or 30K or 50K if you want. It doesn't change the outcome that much.

Q u o t e:
what are their effective healing numbers like?

It's irrelevant for purposes of mana return unless you are looking at talents that return X on a heal or something.

Q u o t e:
I'm not quite sure why you think the glyph of HL wasn't already being put to use before these changes.

Typically you are healing the tank who is usually not clustered with a lot of melee. If you HL a rogue, then you are probably getting more out of it. With this change you can heal say rogues a lot and still get all of that healing on the tank.

Before: Unless the rogue is pretty injured, the tank gets nothing. Better off just targeting the tank.
Now: Go ahead and heal the rogue, because the tank will still get the beacon effect every time.

Q u o t e:
Btw, they only stated they are trying to be able to add more than 1 beacon to a single target. There is no confirmation this will be in with these changes.

Here is your confirmation. That change is in.

Q u o t e:
Current
Your Holy Light grants 10% of its heal amount to up to 5 friendly targets within 8 yards of the initial target.

New
When your Holy Light critically hits, 60% of any overhealing is granted to up to 5 friendly targets within 12 yards of the initial target.

It’s an interesting idea, but I worry it wouldn’t be smart enough in the other direction. You see a lot of raid damage and want to heal the raid – but the guy you target just took a ton of damage, so instead of getting that overhealing you were depending on to heal the group, you just hit one target instead. At least in its current form, the HL glyph will always heal the group no matter how much damage the actual target has taken.

Q u o t e:
That's my guess too. I'm 100% sure it doesn't stack. What worries me more is whether Flash of Light resets the HoT. If it does it's kind of like the opposite of Grace. You should never Flash the tank except every 13 seconds. The whole mechanic is so weird.

It stacks with other paladins. You can’t built a stack with it. You will reset the HoT if you keep spamming it. The goal is to get paladins to use both HL and FoL. FoL currently isn’t getting enough use, so we added this extra bonus for it to work with SS. When you SS someone you may want to Flash them too. We aren’t trying to turn paladins into only spamming FoL. Sometimes you won’t want to stomp on your own hot. Sometimes you will (like when you are about to have to run and can’t heal again for a sec).

Q u o t e:
Old beacon: Beacon tank, sometimes heal raid if they're actually taking damage.
New beacon: If you're supposed to be healing the tank, Beacon the raid, heal the raid like you're healing the tank. Play whack-a-mole with one hammer and try to hit two targets. Somewhat harder to do if you're trying to be fully effective and efficient about it.

This is a pretty good summary, and also why I find the response that we are dumbing down paladin healing to be a little surprising. Note that you can still just heal the tank if you are more comfortable with that (or if the fight isn’t particularly dangerous or if you are so worried about the tank dying that you don’t want to be distracted). We are making it more efficient to do something else, but we aren’t preventing the current gameplay.

Q u o t e:
Odes, Ghostcrawler, and all the other healers with little actual Uld25 hard-mode experience all sound the same to me, really. I'm sure this change would be perfectly fine and in fact overpowered in a world of easymode content.

The strategy of trying to insult people when you disagree with their argument also perplexes me.Several posts after this one were basically just attacking me and other players. This is not a good way to get intelligent players to read and consider the issues. They might get to page 14 or so (maybe) and then conclude “Oh, it’s just personal attacks from here on out.” That’s a good way to kill a thread. :(

Q u o t e:
________________________________________
Q u o t e:
GC, you can bring ancedotal evidence but however we can not?
________________________________________


I thought we established this particular cardinal rule of talking with GC when he gave Shamans anecdotal evidence on our CH usage in Ulduar.

Look, we’re not haggling over the price of a used car here. The designers make the changes we think are right for the game. If you disagree with the changes, you are welcome to provide feedback. Sometimes when players seem to have trouble understanding our design direction I might throw out some numbers of the kind of thing we are seeing. Players typically attack those numbers, which does almost nothing to further their cause, because those are the numbers we see and are balancing around. Those are the numbers we feel are correct. It is different when players come up with their own numbers because then you are campaigning for us to change something. The obligation is on your end to convince us to make a change. The obligation is not on our end to ask permission for us to change the numbers in the game (though we will ask for feedback).

Now in this case, I was clear that I was making up typical numbers and said it’s fine to point out where you think those numbers are off. A few players challenged them, but most seemed to conclude they were probably in the ballpark and changed their tactics to saying that paladins need that level of mana regen in order to heal. We don’t think a design where healer regen is so different between classes (to the point where it might even be irrelevant in some situations) is good for the game.

Q u o t e:
Why does GC always have made up numbers? Why doesn't he want to share real numbers with us?

Because there are no real numbers. There is no such thing as “average paladin regen.” It depends enormously depending on raid comp, gear, encounter and player skill. Yet if you are only looking at the numbers of that particular situation, you have no idea how that compares to every other data point. Do you only count the best players? Do you only count the hard modes? These data sets are too complicated to generate a simple mean, so in this case I was just providing the kind of numbers you might see. If you think they are wrong, feel free to speak up. But I think they are in the ballpark.

Q u o t e:
The made-up numbers are because the actual numbers are based on a lot of variables, but are in the same ballpark.

Yes.

Q u o t e:
If GC is going to present made up numbers, even claiming they are made up, then after presenting them, try to use them as proof that the nerf was needed, he might as well just use the Chewbacca defense since it at least would more plausible.

We don’t have to justify our decisions at all, and often don’t. Given that, when we try to explain why we are making a particular change, it might behoove you to consider things from our point of view instead of always concluding “Their numbers are just wrong.” This is why we provide numbers so rarely – because the community as a whole stops looking at the broader design issue (which is of far more interest to us) and wants to quibble about whether the numbers are accurate. We aren’t looking for feedback on our numbers. We are looking for feedback based on the design changes we might make as a result of those numbers.

In this case those problems included that many paladins where casting HL on the MT forever and doing almost nothing else. We wanted to make paladin healing a little more dynamic. We wanted you to change targets and consider who you were healing. To do this we think we needed to nerf mana regen to avoid paladins from becoming enormously more powerful.

Q u o t e:
When 99% of the paladin community is saying the same thing, you cannot be asking yourself anymore who is right or wrong. And we are talking about paladins from top guilds on their servers like Samgee (gratz on legendary).

When 99% of the paladin community says something, we will listen. When a few dozen forum posters who might not have a problem with paladins being the best healer in the game have an axe to grind then you have to understand if we take it with a grain of salt.

Q u o t e:
It doesn't matter if it was GC, or any other blue or even you or me. It would be giving anyone too much credit in this situation to assume that they have real numbers, when all they've offered are ones that they described as made up. Sure, it's possible that there are real numbers, but we haven't been shown any.

Again, it doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t change anything if you believe the numbers or not. They are reasonably accurate numbers. My point was that paladin regen was much higher than that of other healers, perhaps even double or triple. That works okay in a world when paladins can’t be counted on to heal more than one target at a time. The Beacon change lets you much more reliably (though of course not at 100%) heal two targets at a time.

Q u o t e:
It just looks like a mana regen nerf with a terrible BoL bandaid fit over top to try to balance it out from the tone of your posts. Why are we talking about regeneration if this is supposedly a modification to our HPS issues?

Because the Beacon change is a very big buff. It will improve your HPS. You calling it “a terrible BoL bandaid” suggests you’re not understanding it somehow. That isn’t intended to be an insult, so I hope you don’t take it that way. I just can’t figure out the disconnect here. Currently, you waste a lot of potential Beacon heals. With this change you won’t miss them, to the extent that you don’t even have to target the MT anymore. Sometimes you will get twice as much healing out of your Holy Light because of Beacon. That seems worth a 25% loss in regen (if in fact it’s even that high).

Q u o t e:
Beacon the MT. Heal the raid with FoL/HL/HS, healing the tank via Beacon. I expect Paladin regen to be able to support a mix of FoL/HL as needed to keep up the tank. If the current Illumination nerf is too much on the PTR, I expect Blizz to change it.

Yep. I hope it is obvious that we’re not going to sit by if raids start benching Holy paladins. That isn’t happening now – it isn’t even happening with shamans despite many recent threads about how terrible shamans think they are. If we thought there was any danger of paladins being underpowered with this change, we wouldn’t go forward with it, and if the PTR suggests our predictions are off, we have plenty of time to change it. We based that number on looking at the amount of mana regen compared to the amount healed of all 5 healers in a variety of situations. Come 3.2 though a lot of players are going to be focused predominantly on the new content, so what happens in those fights will feel a lot more relevant than Patchwerk or XT.

Q u o t e:
If that's the case, that won't be enough to heal current hard mode fights. If they change content so it's more viable, or if gear changes enough to allow us to regen enough to make HL spam viable, i'm fine with the changes. If the changes were to go through tomorrow, paladins would not have the regen to heal the tank in hard mode fights and we would be useless to the raid.

We’re not very sympathetic to arguments that hard mode will be too hard. They are supposed to be hard. We are sympathetic to situations where one healer might get replaced with another healer, but we don’t think these changes will lead to that.

Q u o t e:
What I don't like about the beacon change is the backwardsness of the main tank healer being punished for healing his main target... the tank.

I understand if you enjoyed the way paladins work right now. I really do. I also hope all of the players asking for new, smart AE heals realize that too. There was however much feedback from paladins (and not just in these forums) that targeting the MT nearly all of the time and using Holy Light nearly all of the time was boring. It might have been effective, but it was boring. We asked ourselves how we could let paladins contribute more to healing other people without losing their niche as a great main tank healer. The new Beacon does that – you can target lots of different people without worrying that you are neglecting the tank. But you do have to choose those targets a little carefully if you want to keep your HPS high.

Q u o t e:
I'm confused. Do the devs think most paladins use Divine Plea every cooldown?
On an 11 min fight I usually only use it enough to get back 10000. 50% penatly to healing is enough to get people killed and tell me that I shouldn't be using it every cooldown.

The use of Divine Plea is really variable. Some paladins are so scared of the lowered healing that they will never use it. Bad paladins use it too much. Good paladins never use it. Great paladins know when they can get away with using it. But it absolutely gets used, even on the hardest of hard modes.

Q u o t e:
The concern, GC, is that the Illumination change causes us to be unable to heal ONE target at a time reliably: the tank. I would much rather be able to heal the tank for the entire fight, than raid-members-whose-health-will-be-sniped-by-hots anyway, plus the tank, for half a fight.

No, you will not be able to spam Holy Light for 5 minutes on one target without stopping. We don’t think that design is good for the game. We are willing to balance the new content around that change if need be.

Q u o t e:
I keep coming back here expecting GC to address the fact that Paladins have already been using this 'new' beacon method very effectively during high raid damage situations, and yet were not considered overpowered before.

You could use it to a very limited extent if you knew that the heal would not be overhealing. That is a bit of a risky strategy though when you’re talking about the tank, so probably you just healed the tank and let Beacon heal someone else (usually one other player, unless you were really good at constantly changing your Beacon). You will be able to use it a lot more often after this change, in addition to having a longer range on Beacon and being able to stack it with other paladins.