Dual specs! Vanity fishing bobbers! Creepy spontaneous cooking fire creation! Patch 3.1 is very exciting, indeed!
Classes and specs are changing significantly. I’m looking forward to hopping over to a delicious 3.x-era protection spec at a moment’s notice.
But my primary role in our raids is as a paladin healer. How will that be changing? Let’s take a look now that the 3.1 patch notes have been pushed to clients. Like all right-thinking people, I’ll be ignoring PvP.
• Haste Rating: shamans, paladins, druids, and death knights now receive 30% more melee haste from Haste Rating.
Interesting. This is the first time I noticed this in the patch notes. Seal of Wisdom can be a fantastic source of mana regen when fights allow us to hug the boss’ hit box. SoW’s proc-per-minute is rumoured to scale with haste. Will this help us get the most out of its PPM limit? Hmm.
• Mana Regeneration: The amount of mana regeneration derived from intellect and spirit has been reduced by 40%; however, talents that allow for mana regeneration while in combat have been increased. As a result, in-combat regeneration for classes with those talents will stay the same, while out-of-combat regeneration will be lower.
I still hear guildies wondering how the spirit nerf will hit paladins, so I’ll re-iterate this point. We healadins are almost never outside the five second rule. We get our mana regeneration in fights from Illumination and Divine Plea primarily, with situational abilities like Replenishment and Seal of Wisdom bringing up the rear. We already had our mana regeneration addressed before 3.1 when Divine Plea’s healing penalty was increased.
• Auras will now persist through death and affect a 40 yard radius.
• Blessing of Kings is now trainable at level 20. Removed from talent trees.
\o/
• Hand of Sacrifice: The damage transferred by this ability is now capped by the paladin’s health.
I’m having trouble getting too worked up about this. It’s a reduction of a novelty ability rather than one of our fundamental mechanics. Sure, it makes fights that are just on the edge of possible — like juggling cooldowns in Sarth 3D — that much harder. But it’s not like we always have HoSac on cooldown, now do we?
• Sacred Shield: This effect cannot be cast on more than one friendly target at a time.
Honestly, this is the change that I’m going to notice the most. I liked the dynamic nature of throwing Sacred Shield around the raid. I’ll admit that it was a bit much to use it to mitigate raid-wide damage in fights like Lotheb or during Malygos’ vortex and deep breaths.
• Spiritual Attunement: Removed from trainers. It is now available deep in the Protection tree for 2 ranks at 5/10%.
It’s tempting to worry about losing this source of mana regen. Do the numbers support that worry? I don’t think so. In my sampling of fights it only approached 10% of our mana regen when we were taking heavy raid-wide damage. In normal fights it was down in the < 5% noise — alongside [Soul of the Dead], [Insightful Earthsiege Diamond], and all the mp5 on our gear. We’ll have to be mindful of regen, as always, but it’s not the end of the world.
▪ Infusion of Light: Now increases the critical chance of your next Holy Light by 10/20% instead of reducing cast time. Moved to tier-10.
Dang. It was nice to be able to chain cast fast Holy Lights when things got messy in a fight. This makes us slightly less agile. It pushes us towards having to be predictive casters. It makes us care a little more about haste in our gear, I’d also argue.
▪ New Talent: Divinity: Increases healing done by and to you by 1/2/3/4/5% (tier-1).
Well, poo. We used to have enough points left over after taking our core talents to be able to get into Pursuit of Justice. Now we can’t really claim with a straight face that there’s nothing more important for us to spend those points on. Complaining about a raw healing throughput buff because we can’t justify running slightly faster anymore? Yeah, you read that right.
▪ Glyph of Holy Light: Can no longer critically strike and has had its range updated.
I’ll sure miss seeing those nice big crits fly around melee, I tell you what! Though how much of the crits pushed up into overhealing? It’ll be interesting to compare parses to see if the range increase ends up being more valuable.
▪ Beacon of Light: This spell no longer duplicates the heal on yourself if your target is currently immune to being healed due to being on a vehicle. It will simply not duplicate the heal. In addition, Divine Plea will only penalize the original heal instead of applying the penalty a second time on the duplicated heal.
Zing. Beacon of Light can generate a lot of healing if we’re given the proper assignments. We’ll probably be keeping Divine Plea on cooldown in Ulduar, so this is great.
I think that covers the highlights. Having not yet logged in to 3.1, I can say that I’m happy with the changes. Let’s see if this rosy outlook survives our first few wipes in Ulduar-25!
Interesting stuff…I’m very interested in how easily you’re going to be able to take advantage of seal of wisdom on uld bosses, considering how hard they’re gonna be hitting. Is there a way to weave heals between auto-attacks the way hunters used to weave aimed (and then steady) between auto-shots?
All the numbers I’ve gotten for SoW regen have been without worrying about making room for the auto-attack swings. I just heal as usual and let them hit when they can. It might be fun to investigate it specifically with a target dummy..