Zabery

It’s been a little over a week since patch 3.2 went live. I’ve had a chance to heal most of Ulduar with the holy paladin changes. So, in a word, what’s my impression the changes so far?

Awesome.

I think it’s fair to say that paladin healing received a huge buff in 3.2, when put in the right hands. There’s now quite a lot of healing throughput available to the holy paladin who can make the most of our available tools.

Beacon finally frees us from focusing on a single target.

Imagine we’re assigned to the main tank and the raid is taking a decent amount of damage. Examples in Ulduar are legion: Ignis scorching the tank while the raid eats flame jets, XT’s tantrums, Kologarn tanks waiting for taunts during oblivion, Hodir’s frozen blows, Mimiron’s plasma blast while some raiders eat napalm blast, and on and on it goes.

Before 3.2 only effective healing flowed to our Beacon of Light. It was awfully risky to let our beacon keep our tank up while helping heal the raid. If our awesome raid healers beat our pokey Holy Light to a raid target then our assigned tank would get a tiny amount of the holy light’s potential. We want to shower our tanks with giant holy lights, not 2k beacon left-overs. So we had to put on our blinders and spam our tank.

In 3.2 the full amount of a heal flows to the beacon, regardless of how much it healed our target. We can now contribute significant bursty raid healing while our tank receives the same healing stream that they did before 3.2. This can also add healing from the [Glyph of Holy Light] if our target is in a pack. Previously our tank might have been on the other side of a giant hit box from our raiders, rendering our glyph useless.

I can’t over emphasize how significant this change is. It’s a huge buff to our healing throughput when the raid is taking significant damage — exactly the situation in which our healing throughput matters the most.

Beacon’s range is now 60 yards.

Yeah, as if buffing beacon’s throughput weren’t enough it can now transfer heals from as far as 60 yards away. Did your beaconed dummy tank just run out range of your 40 yard heals? No problem! At the very worst you can always heal yourself and magically extend the range of every single one of your heals to 60 yards, a 50% buff.

That’s just a cute fringe benefit, though.  The intent is to stop us from having to worry about healing DPS at max range, on the other side of the boss from the tank, who ends up being too far for the heal to make it to the beaconed tank.

The Flash of Light HoT rewards competence.

Flash of Light now leaves a HoT on the target if it was protected by any paladin’s Sacred Shield when the heal lands. A casting paladin, of any spec, can have HoTs up on multiple targets. Each paladin can only have one HoT up on a given target, however. A paladin’s HoT on a target will reset each time the paladin lands a new FoL on that target. So you won’t get any HoT ticks if you chain FoL a shielded target.

Combine this with beacon transferring the entire heal and you have an opportunity to shine. Beacon and shield your assignment. Only cast FoL on your assignment to renew the HoT, otherwise always cast heals on other targets and let the beacon transfer the heal.

I hacked GridStatusHots to show the duration of my FoL HoTs so that I could easily keep them up and ticking. During the boss fights in a typical 25 person Ulduar farming night it came to 4.4% of my overall healing. In comparison, the glyph of holy light came to 9.7%. That’s not bad for something that’s so easy to keep up.

The FoL HoT also creates a hilarious mini-game to play during mind-numbing trash. See if any healers notice the paladin rolling HoTs around the raid by chain casting SS and FoL. Extra points for having a UI that shows you other paladin’s shields that you can use to skip a SS.

Divine Sacrifice doesn’t seem to have been fixed.

I’m still seeing parses that show a single cast of Divine Sacrifice lasting the full duration and transferring much more than my health, while bubbled.

I can’t imagine dropping the 52/17/2 Holy/Protection build as long as this remains such an incredibly powerful tool.

The mana regeneration nerf isn’t so bad.

I haven’t found myself in serious mana trouble even though our mana regeneration took a serious hit.  To try and quantify the situation, let’s take a look at the Kologarn fight where we can’t really get into melee and feed off of Seal of Wisdom procs.  Here’s the regeneration as reported by WoL parses before and after the patch, expressed as MP5:

Illumination took it in the teeth and Replenishment didn’t do much better.   I swapped out my previous [Ember Skyflare Diamond] for the trusty old [Insightful Earthsiege Diamond] since Divine Intellect was nerfed, making ember’s 2% intellect less appealing.

I didn’t include MP5 from gear because I don’t really have it recorded before the patch.  If you factor in the buff it received and Blessing of Wisdom then you start to see that the change in total regen isn’t anything like illumination’s “50% nerf” that people focus on. Overall our regen probably dropped by, what, on the order of 15%? That seems much more manageable.

I think this brings us back to the overall theme of 3.2 — if you play well, you’ll do fine.

Stop spamming, start playing.

Yes, we can no longer mash holy light while watching TV in a raid.  Excellent holy paladins were not doing that in the first place.

Holy paladins should move their beacon and shield around, precast, mix flash of light and holy light, use hands when appropriate, keep their judgement up, melee for seal procs, maybe throw around some aura mastery, and weave in DP and DI — all depending on the conditions of the raid.

If you’ve always been doing that then you’ll excel in 3.2.  If you haven’t, now’s the time to learn.  You’ll love it.

Tags: holy paladin 3.2 awesome sauce

This entry was posted on Friday, August 14th, 2009 at 11:30 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.