Patch 3.3 is finally here! Hooray! Let’s see what the 3.3.0 patch notes have in store for holy paladins.
(This has been edited a bit since it was first posted. I was willfully misreading the patch notes in the hope that our FoL would always leave HoTs on the target — no such luck.)
- Divine Guardian: This talent no longer increases the amount of damage transferred to the paladin from Divine Sacrifice. Instead it causes all raid and party members to take 10/20% reduced damage while Divine Sacrifice is active. In addition, the duration has been changed to 6 seconds, however the effect does not terminate when Divine Sacrifice is removed before its full duration.
- Divine Sacrifice: Redesigned. The effect of Divine Sacrifice is now party-only and the maximum damage which can be transferred is now limited to 40% of the paladin’s health multiplied by the number of party members. In addition, the bug which allowed Divine Sacrifice to sometimes persist despite reaching its maximum damage has been fixed. Divine Sacrifice will now cancel as soon as its maximum damage value is exceeded in all cases. Finally, damage which reduces the paladin’s health below 20% now cancels the effect early.
Yikes! That’s a mouthful. There’s four major changes.
- Shorter duration. DS is now six seconds instead of 10. Darn.
- Only redirects from your party. DS now redirects damage only from your party, not the entire raid. Boo. But maybe it doesn’t have a range limit now, which would be nice.
- Actually caps redirected damage. Supposedly it now will actually stop redirecting damage. This is awesome. It stops us from having to chain it with Divine Shield to protect ourselves from 100k incoming damage.
- Raid-wide damage reduction for the full 6s, always. Even if the redirection stops, the raid still takes less damage for the full duration. This is fantastic.
On balance, I’m awfully excited by these changes. Decoupling DS from having to bubble, and so also from anything that triggers Forbearance, should give us more flexibility in when we can use our long cooldowns.
- Hand of Sacrifice: Damage transferred via this ability can now be prevented by damage absorption effects.
I haven’t seen a lot of chatter about this, but I’m excited about it too. It used to be awfully risky to try to heal through damage from HoS which was redirected from a tank. Using Divine Protection to mitigate that incoming damage might give us another tool we can feel safe using.
Notice that Blizzard also accidentally put in a duplicate entry for the HoS bugfix under Blessing of Sacrifice, which hasn’t existed since the great renaming of blessings to hands. It’s almost like naming spells by putting seven words in a bag and picking them at random can be kind of confusing! Those of us who are still cranky about the naming of Hand of Reckoning (which has nothing to do with the fistfull of “Hand of” spells (formerly blessings), nor Reckoning; nevermind [Reckoning]) can hopefully be forgiven grinning a little.
- Flash of Light: This spell no longer causes a heal-over-time effect unless the player has the Infusion of Light talent.
- Infusion of Light: This talent now causes the paladin’s Flash of Light spells to heal the target for 50/100% of the Flash of Light healing amount over 12 seconds.
It’s not entirely clear from reading the patch notes, but the HoT still only appears if the target has Sacred Shield. Previously any paladin’s FoL could leave a HoT on shielded targets, but now only holy paladins can do it. There’s no change for PvE healing, but it makes soloing as ret slightly more irritating.
- Divine Intervention: This ability now also removes Exhaustion or Sated from a target if the recipient is out of combat when the effect ends. In addition, the cooldown on this ability has been reduced from 20 minutes to 10 minutes. Cannot be used in Arenas.
The thinking paladin hasn’t been speeding up wipe recovery with DI because the target would be left with (exhaustion|sated) and could not benefit from (heroism|bloodlust) on the next pull. Now we can. It would have been great to have this back when we were chain pulling Algalon. On the downside, there went another bag slot.
- Lay on Hands: This ability will place Forbearance on the paladin if used on his or herself. It will not place Forbearance on others.
Paladins now have to put casting Lay on Hands on ourselves in the bucket of mutually exclusive cooldowns: Divine Protection, Divine Shield, and Avenging Wrath. Keep it in mind if you use LoH to top yourself off after being resurrected. I try to reserve LoH for reducing damage on a tank so this doesn’t feel like a big deal.
I think that’s it. Let’s go heal some stuff! Dibs on the [Battered Hilt]!
Tags: 3.3, holy paladin, patch notes
The patch notes are incorrect. We still can only put our HoT on someone with Sacred Shield. Only now a paladin can only do it if they have the Infusion of Light talent. So, this is just a nerf to prot and ret and no change to Holy.
Yeah, I was pretty disappointed to find that out in those five minutes after the servers came back up. I’ll edit the post..
nice, so you are saying with the Divine Intervention change Celli will no longer yell at me when I use it in a raid if i decide to come back??? hmmm…. incentive!
So i know this post is a bit early for gear from 3.3, but I have been reevaluating my meta slot when coupled with the 264 gear and intellect. Since Holy Pallies are getting to a point of having 38k+ mana raid buffed, and a ton of intellect, wouldn’t it be prudent to start thining about the value of the gems that scale with gear? For instance there are 2 meta gems that have percentages (2%) to mana and intellect. I tried the 2% mana for a bit and that also has crit value instead of intellect, but the 25 Sp and 2% mana at this point actually out wieghs the 21 intellect and mana restore now imo because I am getting more intellect overall and more crit value, which in turn provides more mana back on the crits. I ran some tests and will be post WoLog posts to show differences on mana back, but it looks like at this point I am getting about 30-50 mana back per minute over the old insightful earthsiege (not much, I know). Also, my mana pool is also about 300 mana larger at this point. Seems to me having our meta scale with our gear is more valuable now then constants that we used in Naxx. These differences should grow as we go from 245-258 gear to the 264 and higher. Your thoughts on this?
I think it would! It’s clever to observe that the additional heroic tiers weren’t around when they designed the metas.
When I’ve done the math in the past it’s seemed to me that the cost of falling back to two red gems to activate the ember meta was quite a lot when compared to 2% of our Int.
If you already had red gems to activate some spell power socket bonuses, yeah, the ember might be compelling. But the question is why you have those red gems to begin with. If you drop them for brilliant gems you lose a small percentage of spell power (presumably), and gain a larger percentage of Int.
So yeah, maybe it’d be fun to really demonstrate this in a post :).
You are right, the cost of putting two red gems in is quite a lot in past gear, but sticking 2 orange gems that are SP and Int means you are only losing one full intel gem and gaining 1 full red sp gem. The cost of one intel gem to take advantage of the rest of our intel and get an extra 2 percent may be worth it at this point. You would be losing 41 intel between the meta and the 2 oranges not being yellows, but with my 1791 intel alone, I would be getting almost 36 intel back from the 2%. Granted that means less overall, but that does not include raid buffs.
The real question is not whether it is worth it, but at what point? If I were sitting on 10k of intel, I would be stupid not to take 2% on top of it, but I am not that leet, maybe at lvl 85 in some ridiculious gear that will be out then.
My real thoughts are, where is the break even point? Should we wait longer or get one once we are in 245 and ICC gear? How much intel makes going for the extra 2% worth it instead of the mana proc and 21 intel off the old stand by meta?
[...] Vivalabambam posted a comment in the 3.3 gear post which asked when it might make sense to consider using the [Ember Skyflare Diamond] instead of the [Insightful Earthsiege Diamond]. [...]
[...] If you’re a paladin looking to talk holy, then you might want to strike up a conversation with Zabery. She (I think!) doesn’t post often, but when she does brings up topics the rest of us don’t really stop to think about, such as appreciating Seal of Wisdom beyond the glyph bonus or the in-depth implications of the 3.3 Paladin changes. [...]