I’ve been avoiding posting about Cataclysm so far because it’s still so early in the process that it’s likely to change quite a bit. I generally don’t want to sink a bunch of analysis into such a moving target. My motto has been that once it’s on the PTR then we can start to really dive in to changes that might actually hit the live realms.
But today Blizzard released a build that included the initial drafts of the 31-point talent trees. It’s fascinating stuff, so interesting in fact that it’s convinced me to break my rule. Let’s take a look at what the holy tree might look like in Cataclysm, complements of mmo-champ’s talent calculator.
If you’ve been living in a cave and missed it, we’re talking about Blizzard’s intention to slim down the current talent trees for Cataclysm. The idea is to fold the bland mandatory talents into the core of the class (trained abilities, spell base values and coefficients, mastery bonuses), throw away some truly clumsy stuff, and leave interesting choices as talents. You can read the original blue post announcing 31-point talent trees from July 13th.
To set the stage, here’s my incredibly detailed rendering of the difference between the current holy tree on potential cata holy tree:
It was just too crazy with arrows showing where things moved..
Let’s start with the talents that vanished all together.
- Divine Intellect (stat balance)
- Improved Blessing of Wisdom (we get one raid wide blessing instead)
- Blessed Hands (pvp arms race reset)
- Pure of Heart (pvp arms race reset)
- Divine Favor (goofy to the point of being useless)
- Light’s Grace (core mechanic)
- Holy Shock (now granted as first points spent in holy)
- Holy Guidance (stat balance)
This all seems reasonable to me.
We can definitely do without divine favor. If you’ve spent any time with combat log parses recently you’ve probably noticed that most holy pallies don’t bother to cast it.
I guess we can now walk through the talents in each tier of the new tree. Some of the talents don’t appear to be updated in Wowhead’s database yet. I’ve tried to mark them as having old tooltips.
Tier 1
Sanctified Light -> Sanctified Light
(holy light and shock crit +6% -> judge and shock crit +15%)
Not much here. The choice of buffing judgment might seem strange at first, but wait a few tiers. We’re going to care a lot more about judgement damage as holy.
Spiritual Focus -> Spiritual Focus
A simple addition of our new heal to pushback protection, not much to see here either.
Divinty trades spots with Seals of the Pure, which then ends up in the prot tree. This makes sense in the Cataclysm model where you can’t spend talents in other trees until you spend 31 points in your first tree. This gives people leveling holy access to divinity much earlier.
Tier 2
Healing Light -> Healing Light
Again, the simple addition of divine light.
No change. It’s still a huge DR cooldown available pretty early in the tree.
Judgements of the Pure -> Judgements of the Pure (old tooltip)
(25% seal and judge damage, 15% haste -> 9% haste)
That’s a decent amount of haste to lose, it’ll be interesting to see if we feel the difference with the new raid buffs and healing gear itemization. The other big change is that it flew up the tree, giving early holy pallies faster casts. I’m willing to write off the loss of the judgement damage as noise during rebalancing.
Unyielding Faith -> Unyielding Faith (old tooltip)
(-30% fear and disorient duration -> -50% cast time after fear or disorient)
Now that’s interesting, but I’m not a huge fan of PvP so I don’t have a strong feel for the implications. It certainly feels in line with the general rhetoric to slow down crazy bursty arena matches.
Tier 3
Illumination -> Illumination (old tooltip)
(30% mana back on HL/FoL/shock crit -> 30% back on all “abilities”)
Instead of scaling the percentage chance to get 30% back up with 5 points, we scale the mana returned up to 30% with 3 points. That’s a fine cleanup. It’s also nice that it presumably now procs on all our heals, it’d be interesting to see if it also procs on damaging abilities. That might make some attacks even more potent regen tools if part of their cast can be refunded in addition to their current SoW procs.
Our new slow, large, heal.
Beacon of Light -> Beacon of Light
Beacon flies up the tree! Today it’s available at level 60, in Cata it becomes available at level 20. This will be a great help to early paladins who are trying to heal groups.
The real news, though, is that only holy light and holy shock are transferred to the beacon. Today everything transfers to the beacon. One could say that we chose the size of our heals by what our beacon target needs, but we can help out the raid by landing that heal just about anywhere. With the new beacon we might have to return to our beaconed target if the appropriate heal they need doesn’t transfer. We’ll be duplicating our healing out in the raid less often.
This’ll be awfully interesting to see. It’ll chance our triage flexibility, for sure.
[Inspired Judgement] (not in wowhead yet?)
Are you sitting down? “Your Judgement spell also heals your Beacon of Light target for 100% of the damage caused.” That’s just crazy talk.
Today we rely on judgements for haste, at the very least. Most of us also judge reasonably often for SoW regen. But every time we do that we’re creating a gap in the healing stream. On some fights (enraged shambling horrors, juggling multiple saurfang marks) that gap can be pretty risky. Making judgements also heal cleverly mitigates that risk.
It’ll be awfully interesting to see how much damage and healing judgements can end up doing. All the other talents that mention Judgement just got a lot more interesting.
Tier 4
Infusion of Light -> Infusion of Light
There went the FoL HoT. I haven’t noticed if it’s surfaced somewhere else. I rather like it ticking away, I have to admit, so I hope it’s not gone for good.
No change. Maybe PvP rebalancing will make this more interesting, but it seems like a long shot.
Enlightened Judgements -> Enlightened Judgements
(judgement range +30 yd, +4% hit -> judgement range +30 yd, +100% spirit as hit rating)
Remember those judgements that now heal our beacon? Yeah, I don’t want them to miss either. The change from a flat hit percentage to scaling hit rating with spirit is an interesting choice. It’s hard to get a feel for what that implies without seeing how all the stats balance out.
Tier 5
I’m a little surprised that this hasn’t changed, given that it feels like a participant in the PvP arms race. Maybe it still will.
Also unchanged. While we’re here, can I vote for a return to a longer duration? Thanks.
Sacred Cleansing -> Sacred Cleansing (old tooltip)
(30% chance on cleanse to increase resistance -> cleanse also dispels magic)
A previously unreliable PvP talent (”chance of having a chance of..”) is reborn as our corner of the great dispelling redesign in Cataclysm.
Tier 6
Purifying Power -> Purifying Power (old tooltip)
(confusing pile of mana cost and cooldown reduction -> judge debuff caster on cleanse)
“When you Cleanse a harmful effect, you have a 100% chance to strike the caster of the harmful effect with your Judgement ability.”
OK, that’s just awesome. Presumably the judgement will then heal our beacon. Will it work on bosses? Will the judgement proc seals? How will line of sight work? Can we use this to cheese the range of Judgement of Justice? Man, now I want to fool around on the beta.
Holy Power -> [Selfless Healer]
(5% holy spell crit -> 6% healing spell crit on others)
It’s a subtle tweak, but it seems reasonable to suggest that selfless healer is taking the place of holy power in the tree.
I have to admit that this, along with quite a lot of the other healing effect and crit buff talents, feels exactly like the kind of boring required talents that we are trying to get away from. It seems like these math talents should be hiding behind coefficients and gear. If we don’t want other specs to have access to them then hide them behind the tree’s mastery bonuses?
Tier 7
Divine Illumination -> Divine Illumination
(50% mana cost reduction for 15s -> 30% “spell and attack” crit for 15s)
That’s an interesting take on the current DI. Instead of just flat out reducing mana it takes a round-about path through Illumination to provide a weaker equivalent. With larger health pools that increased crit might actually amount to something. It’ll become relatively less powerful as we gear up and our crit increases, and it could theoretically push us into the crit cap. Though hopefully we won’t see anything like the inflated gear levels of Wrath for that to be possible. Maybe it’s just me, but this doesn’t feel quite as consequential as the final tier in a lot of the other trees. Though I’ll admit that it’s in line with the clicky cooldowns given in quite a few trees.
Full speed ahead!
I’ll close by sharing that I love where this is going. Maybe it’s the techy in me, but I feel a lot of sympathy for trimming the trees down to the bare essentials. KISS, “perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”, and all that.
Finally, what might a cata holy pve spec look like? Something like 35/3/3 sure looks like fun.