Sick of being designed around gimmicks

None of the changes you mention were because of PvP balance.

Many Holy paladins (on these boards even) said they were weary of only using HL spam on the tank and were willing to trade their virtually unlimited mana for the ability to contribute to raid healing in other ways. As I tried to explain in the article we posted earlier, the SS change encourages more FoL use. The Beacon change encourages you to heal targets other than the tank, while still contributing to tank healing. The Beacon change (through the HL glyph) and the SS change give paladins a little more versatility in raid healing and healing on the run. The Beacon change with a nerf to mana regen would have made paladins the strongest healer in the game by almost any estimation. We figured the regen nerf was tolerable since it never even comes into play on many fights, and you still have Divine Plea.

We think healer homogenization is a very dangerous risk. We're not going to give every healer an AE heal or a hot or a shield just so they all have the same tools. We already have 5 viable healing specs for PvE, and many raids were inviting all 5. That's better than we've ever done in the history of WoW. That's not to say there weren't some problems though, which this patch hopes to address.

Q u o t e:
Out of curiousity, is the new FoL/SS HoT replacing the current +crit to FoL granted by SS? Or is it in addition? And does the size of the hot increase on crits? Or is it based on the non-crit spell size?

The crit is on the Sacred Shield tooltip and the hot is on FoL itself, so they should both work. I didn't actually try it just now, but based on the way the spells appear to work if you crit, you crit, and the hot would be larger.

Flash of Light now says "Heals a friendly target for X. If the target has the Sacred Shield effect, they heal an additional 100% over 12 sec."

Q u o t e:
Exactly. Pallys still really only have 1 mobile heal and that's holy shock. 2 if holy shock crits but that's going to be unreliable now that we won't value crit as much.

If you don’t count the FoL hot as a heal then yes you only have one. I guess if you didn’t count the Holy Shock heal as a heal, you’d have none. Many of these responses are similar. “I don’t count the hot from FoL as healing. I don’t count the ability to overheal and still make Beacon work as healing. I don’t count the HL AE as healing.” Well, okay....

The Beacon change is a significant buff. It’s clear from the tone of many of these responses that I’m not going to be able to convince you of that, since many of you are stuck in the mode of “You didn’t give us exactly what we asked for.” We addressed a problem we perceived with the spec. That’s what we do. Our job first and foremost is to make the game fun, not please the community. Those two are related but they are not the same exact thing.

Q u o t e:
So you are putting pallies in a predicament......... Cast FoL, don't run out of mana, but don't do enough hps to keep up a tank. Or spam HL (only hps viable healing spell) and go oom very quickly.

When you are deciding between high throughput or high efficiency you have a choice and the better paladins can make better choices on when to use either one. When you have one spell that is the only choice no matter what the circumstances, well that is no choice at all. We think this is a major problem with the Holy paladin spec. Many players complained about that. We’re not asking you to all agree on every change before we make them, but you also have to understand that this was something several players were asking for. We discussed our options and came up with a solution that we think makes the healing style more dynamic and interesting without fundamentally changing it.

Q u o t e:
Please don't say the FoL hot is enough to help keep up a tank through 30k+ thorim hardmode hits, and other hardmodes. There is more over healing in about 5-10 seconds on the MT then that hot even puts out.

Your job isn’t to keep up a tank alone through Thorim hardmode hits. Your role is not to have such good hots that the druids and priests can skip on theirs. But now when you do need to move, you have one more way to provide healing.

Q u o t e:
Priests and Shaman can quite easily run themselves OOM, and will be even easier to run OOM after the patch, and yet they weren't replaced. I hate to break it to you, but mana management is supposed to be a part of playing a healer. You're not going to be booted from raids because you have to manage your's, just like the rest of the healing speccs. At least not if you're able to do so successfully.

What Odes said. We allowed Holy paladin regen to be very high for a long time because we thought there was an okay trade-off for being so limited in scope. We expanded the scope now. Paladins will be able to contribute a lot more (almost double in ideal cases) to non-tank healing. I understand some of you are saying you did run OOM. It’s hard for us to balance around the experience of every single player. In the end we have to try and follow trends and what we are seeing in the data. Paladin mana pools were large, which exacerbated percent mana restores, and Illumination allowed HL to never be a choice and by contrast every other heal to feel paltry by decision. If down-ranking existed in the game right now, you would never need to do it.

Q u o t e:
QUESTION: does the hot only trigger when the absorb shield is UP, or at any time during the 30 (60) seconds the SS buff is on?

The latter.

Q u o t e:
Does this mean if the target has YOUR sacred shield or ANY sacred shield?

The latter.

Q u o t e:
Except Flash of light even with the HoT Simply can not keep a tank alive.

Neither can Renew or Rejuv.

Okay, now I have to shift into lame housekeeping mode. :(

Q u o t e:
If Blizzard will just come right out and say it that they don't want holy paladins to heal, then I will unsubscribe right now. Don't waste any more of my time, GC.

Q u o t e:
Ghostcrawler - I'm sorry, but you have no idea how to satisfy Holy Paladins. It has become apparent. Even other healers are pissed. Your ignorance of our weaknesses coupled with your double standards (since every other healer can do what we do better than we can do what they do) is slowly driving this class towards the cliff.

This is not useful feedback. This is not the kind of comment I can take to my team and say “Here is a problem we should discuss about paladins.” This is not the kind of thing other players who come to the official forums are interested in reading. If this is your contribution to the forums we ask that you read and not post. Apologies if that sounds harsh. I don’t want to call your feelings invalid, but this is not the way to express them.

Q u o t e:
Does it have to be MY sacred shield to get a hot or any paladin's sacred shield?

Sacred Shield is Sacred Shield as far as this mechanic is concerned. The Flash of Light spell doesn’t know who cast it.

Q u o t e:
Don't the changes really hurt paladin healing leveling?
FoL is going to require SS which paladins don't get until 80.

You can cast Flash of Light without SS. We didn’t change the core mechanic of Flash.

Q u o t e:
That being said, I (and I'm sure most other holy paladins) would like to know if our class and spec will continue to be molded according this "homoginaztion is dangerous-but only for paladins" ideology.

I think this is your perception because you are a paladin. We’ve been through this same sort of thing with druids, priests and now shamans, and all since LK launched. All three of those classes would tell you that they don’t feel like they can heal a MT anywhere nearly as well as a paladin. They don’t have heals as big as HL, and what they have they don’t like to cast (HT, HW and GH). Disc priests are probably the closest, but they are still not healing as much as they are preventing. We just don’t think giving the paladin a big AE heal or a hot is the answer here. I think those seem like the answer to some players because when you feel like your raid spot is threatened you look at who is threatening you and figure if you had their abilities, then everything would be fine. That design works but it's lazy design and makes it less interesting to play the various classes or even group with them.

Q u o t e:
Replenishment is awful at the moment, and will continue to be if left active in its current form, if not removed entirely. Mp5 needs to not only be completely reworked, but have different applications for different classes if your goal is to suppress homogenization.

Replenishment went from 0.25 to 0.20. I can’t imagine that pushes it from overpowered (which many players claimed) to awful.

Q u o t e:
A 25% increase of mp5 on existing gear won't stop the necessity to stack a certain amount while sacrificing another necessary stat to do it. Forcing the Holy Paladin to become gear dependent will not have good results, as was already proven in previous content.

The mp5 change was less about encouraging paladins to stack it, because int and crit are still quite useful, and more about them not being so upset when mp5 showed up on gear. It just wasn’t competitive as a stat. We aren’t trying to turn it into your best stat. There’s a big difference.

Q u o t e:
At the present time I am using Bacon as will be intended to work in 3.2 and it does 2-5% of my effective healing at the end of the night, based on what bosses I am fighting. The "double" bacon means double the 2-5% which will become roughly 4-10% of my effective healing.

I suspect your Bacon is low because it currently doesn’t count overhealing. You HL the tank and when that overheals, the Bacon doesn’t heal anyone. With the change, you can make sure that every player you target is going to benefit (unless every HL is getting sniped, which I sort of doubt) and the tank will *always* benefit too (assuming they are damaged, but if you are healing when nobody is damaged then I’m not sure what you’re really doing). That is a big change to its effective healing.

Q u o t e:
Something tells me that these changes weren't based around making our experience as holy paladins more fun.

They were. I have no reason to lie to you. If we were going to nerf you, I would just come out and say “You are too good. We are going to nerf you.” We did that to Penance, PoH and LB outright. Those were not to make the classes more fun. They were nerfs. The Illumination nerf was to prevent the Beacon change from making paladins the best healer, by far, in the game.

Q u o t e:
Ghostcrawler, dear... I am not even sure how to help you understand this. We do not have a choice! You guys yourselves designed encounters in such a way that we are absolutely required to have extremely high throughput AND logevity at the same time. We don't avoid Flash of Light in raids because we are stubborn, ignorant or just plain stupid.We do it because you guys have forced us to.

But that is just saying that the content is so difficult that you won’t be able to heal it with these changes. The content is supposed to be difficult, assuming you are talking about hard modes. If you are talking about normal Ulduar or Naxx or 5-player dungeons, then we don’t think the regen nerf is going to really slow you down much. If you are really struggling with that content, then I would advise you to research what strategies other paladins are using on that content.

Q u o t e:
The feedback on this trade-off between illumination and raid healing is probably 95% negative. Why don't you take that back to the designers. We flat out hate this change and regret giving you the idea that we wanted anything else but to be the best (at something) single-target healers in the game.

That is your feedback. You can’t speak for every paladin, or even every raiding paladin. Players always respond negatively to a major nerf, even if it comes packaged with a host of other buffs. This is a very typical reaction. Druids were certain they would never be able to raid again after the 3.1 Lifebloom changes. Druids are fine.

Q u o t e:
I'm really confused when you look at this set of changes and calling the beacon change a significant buff is very strange. Essentially speaking you seem to want to address the "HL spam fest" that is holy paladin healing, yet this does nothing to actually change that?

You will want to actually target injured people in the raid instead of always just healing the tank. (And if you have the HL glyph and find a group of players to heal, so much the better.) You will also have to be more mindful of when a Flash, Holy Shock or Sacred Shield might be more appropriate than Holy Light, because using a Holy Light to heal a few thousand health risks putting you out of mana. Pretend you are downranking.