Holy Paladin Build 13033 Feedback

#0 - Sept. 24, 2010, 7:29 a.m.

Changes:

Enlightened Judgements now also Increases the range of your Judgement by 5/10 yards.

Divinity is gone, moved to Protection

Protector of the Innocent is now a Tier 1 Holy Talent and has been revamped - Casting a targeted heal on any target, including yourself, also heals you for 1240.83 to 1427.62. (Multi ranks, but currently all with the same value)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Feedback:

Judgement has now become a very serious problem for Holy Paladins as of this build.

We now have three separate talents that are all equally mandatory in order to make a Tier 1 talent functional.

* Enlightened Judgments
* Spiritual Focus
* Improved Judgments

All of them are quality of life talents. All of them should be baseline.

In ‘Wrath of the Lich King’ casting ‘Judgment’ felt just as important to a Holy Paladin as it dose for the other two specs, we got a unique haste buff, and ‘Judgment of Light’ healed the raid. But now that ‘Judgements of the Pure’ is available to all three of the paladin specs, and ‘Judgment of Light’ removed, I feel like I am using a ‘Retribution’ ability to keep up a mandatory haste buff.

There is nothing that makes using ‘Judgement’ uniquely enjoyable for Holy anymore.

The thing that has me most disappointed about the ‘Judgment’ and ‘Seal’ changes is the removal of choice. I like choosing between ‘Seal of Light’ for extra healing, or ‘Seal of Wisdom’ for mana cost reduction, or choosing which ‘Judgment’ I should use, wether it be for PVE, PVP or Soloing.

‘Judgments’ and ‘Seals’ are such a unique Paladin mechanic; it is such a shame that Holy Paladins don’t have any real use out of them anymore.

It feels like you are trying to force the current ‘Retribution’ ‘Judgement’ and ‘Seal’ mechanic into a healing environment, and its not working, as others have pointed out we MUST spend multiple talent points just to keep up ‘Judgments of the Pure’.

What I think is really needed is a re-evaluation of how ‘Judgments’ and ‘Seals’ work from a HEALING point of view. A unique healing only ‘Seal’, and perhaps a ‘Judgment’ that can be used on friendly players to grant some buff or heal.

If at the end of the day this feels like to much work to implement then perhaps we should accept the fact that Holy is never ment to use 'Seals' and 'Judgments'. And perhaps the ‘Judgments of the Pure’ talent should be changed to allow ‘Word of Glory’ to grant us the haste buff instead, so we don’t feel forced to spec into multiple talents to make this one talent work.

Ghostcrawler

#69 - Sept. 24, 2010, 7 p.m.

Q u o t e:
Tooltips said hit rating, so I am assuming it affects both melee and spell hit.

It does. I would personally still consider it quite optional. Get it if you like to do a little damage in PvE, PvP or while soloing. I still don't buy that you need it to make sure your Judgements always hit.

Q u o t e:
Warrior tanks received a flat 35% boost to their total threat generation (Defensive stance bonus went from 145% to 200% of normal threat output), and Thunderclap's base damage has been increased by 50%.

Bears received some slight buffs to their damage output, and a longer range interupt.

Paladins received a quality of life improvement that causes them to no longer lose Holy Shield when using Holy Power to heal themselves.

It's a bit extreme to turn around and say they're not attempting to balance the tanks.

I realize this is a healing forum, but related to paladins, we discovered that Sanctuary's damage reduction wasn't working at all. So there is 10% more survivability for tankadins right there. (This is also the reason we numbers tuning nearly last. No use buffing someone only to discover a bug was causing inflated damage taken.)

Q u o t e:
Either way, time is short, and Holy is still a long, long ways off from being a functional spec able to fulfill any role (or even, in many cases it seems, just make it through a Heroic without a Shadow Priest providing a constant stream of AoE heals).

Holy is awesome. I healed a dungeon run yesterday with it. Your mileage may vary, but I had a lot of fun stacking Holy Power through shocks and Tower and using Daybreak intelligently. Holy Radiance is fun in five player runs too. I got close to running OOM on two bosses (without using Plea or pots), but they died before it actually happened and I'm sure we could have played more efficiently.

Ghostcrawler

#88 - Sept. 24, 2010, 8:36 p.m.

Q u o t e:
GC, I know, I know, it was a five man, but- Did you find good uses and times for Light of Dawn? Would you change it after the experience? Would you have liked to have it more? Could you have used it less and been happy?

I used it. It did not heal as much as Holy Radiance. (I did not have the glyph.) If the dps were not moving around as much or I was more skilled when positioning I'm sure I could have gotten more use out of it. It will also do more the more targets there are. We did recently make it also heal the paladin no matter what, since you can't be inside the cone otherwise. We'll consider other ways to make it scale better between 5 and raid-size groups.

Q u o t e:
In Cataclysm, a hit talent is a huge quality of life issue, because if we miss two judges in a row while keeping JotP active, we would lose 20 seconds of 9% spellhaste and 2k mana. Our only option to counteract this is to judge more often (every 30s or so) and waste thousands of mana at the end of a fight to maintain an essential heal buff.

Unless you miss 10 Judgements or so in a row, you're not going to bleed yourself dry by judging and missing. We like Judgement being useful but not a critical mechanic for Holy. We are more sympathetic with having to spend 9 talent points to make that mechanic completely work.

Q u o t e:
However, with the current talent calculator, there aren't really many other good choices that aren't entirely PvP oriented, which basically forces us to take the new Hit from Spirit talent in any decent Holy paladin build.

I don't think we'd be doing you any favors adding more mandatory talents to the tree.

Ghostcrawler

#181 - Sept. 25, 2010, 7:20 p.m.

Guardian of Ancient Kings should be off the GCD (for everyone).

We think we are liable to consolidate some of the Judgement related talents for Holy. We're unlikely to make Judging even more of a big deal for Holy though.

We're going to try to get the 10 points Holy spends in other trees to be a little less cookie-cutterish. Options include making Divinity or Rule of Law not healing related.

We'll keep an eye on Holy's damage for purposes of leveling, etc. I do believe some of that feedback though comes from creatures just being really powerful now. You're not seeing Holy being weak at leveling. You're seeing everyone having to work more than they are used to. This is a situation we're closely monitoring. We don't want questing to be trivial and boring, but we don't want it to be brutally punishing either.

Q u o t e:
I'm still worried about the lack of interactivity. Daybreak and Word of Glory are talents that you react to in an incredibly simple way now. Healing without wasting Holy Power isn't a high benchmark.

Changing Daybreak has taken out a rewarding and fun spell combination that made the class a lot more interesting and dynamic to play.

It has a lot more going on than it does on Live. No, you aren't overly punished for mismanaging Holy Power, but healers need to have a lot of flexibility. Sometimes you don't want to cast Holy Shock or Word of Glory on the tank because you need to do something more dramatic. In addition to the mechanics you mentioned, there are buffs such as Conviction and Judgements of the Pure to watch out for, as well as several cooldowns: Divine Favor, Avenging Wrath and Guardian.

Daybreak still requires you to watch the proc, or you're going to fail to cast Holy Shock twice in a row. It's just less sensitive to latency and makes you less likely to have to resort to cancel macros now.

Q u o t e:
I think the LoD CD is fine. But I thought GC said that it would have the most throughput of any healing spell in the game. From accounts I read so far, it seems like it does very little healing compared with the mana cost and CD.

It is target sensitive. If you heal one person, it's not going to do impressive numbers. In situations where it hits 10 people, it will perform really well. You will need to look out for situations where it will be the most optimal. Part of why it can heal so much is it is far from being a smart heal.

Q u o t e:
What people want is this:
Light of Dawn
No Cooldown, Requires Holy Power
Heals players for 1000/2000/3000, consuming all holy power in the cast.

The reason we didn't do that is because the times you need AE heals are usually because several folks took damage all at once. That is why so many AE heals are instant. Even those with a cast time aren't as long as something that requires 3 Holy Power. Nor do we want you to have to neglect Word of Glory on fights with periodic AE damage. To have a long ramp up - high throughput AE heal be useful, there would have to be a lot of encounters like Loatheb or something where the damage is fairly constant but folks aren't often in immediate danger of dying.

I could see (someday) giving paladins a heal that hit 3-5 targets but otherwise worked exactly like Word of Glory. But since we gave paladins 4 new heals already, as well as reasons to use both Flash and Holy Light, let's see if we can get the current model feeling good first. I think we're close.