Zabery

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.

1. Shorter duration. DS is now six seconds instead of 10. Darn.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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]!