[Holy] Patch 5.4 PTR - Changes Discussion

[Krekko]

Lets keep this discussion about the Paladin class, and not about the Monk class. If you feel the need to discuss changes, both past and current to the monk class, the Monk Class forum can be found here.

Thanks for keeping it on topic!

[mcbubble]

Please Reglitch, you can't compare this with the monk nerfs a while back. Your class is in very good shape and has been since those nerfs due to class re-balancing.
They have yet to see HOW we're getting re-balanced. The first mastery nerf/T14 nerf, and now this just puts us in a pretty bad spot.

[Virsta1]

Reglitch is just upset he gets carried by a paladin to every kill : / But to get back on topic, I am wondering what our compensation is going to be with these EF nerfs. My guess is going to be something with Light of Dawn. If they buff LoD though we are just going to use sacred shield, LoD spam which is just going to be another niche and that is what they want to get away from so we shall see. Time will only tell.

[Xs]

The actual loss of EF hot´s not apply IH anymore doesn´t equal 17% Overall healing as someone wrote above. thats to high; it s rather ~10, but would have to check logs properly again too.
Just the fact that EF has been majorly nerfed doesn´t mean in the end that we are going to be stuck with the current SH and the 5.4 SS; there will be further changes. A sheer throughput incrase isn´t going to do it alone obviously.

So because you don't think its a 17% decrease that means it can't be a 17% decrease?

The fact of the matter is, in our current state we might not be the best healers, but we bring a lot of utility to the raid in the form of Effective Health, and by proxy that means we heal snipe and get higher up the meters than we actually should, but if we don't get compensated in a fairly decent way right now, we'll have nothing left to bring, at least in the previous incantation with the 30% initial nerf, we could still be brought like the old Resto Shamans where brought mostly for Purification and their utility cooldowns through Mana Tide and Spirit Link. Without EF > IH I don't see much reason to bring us, Sacred Shield even in its current live state is a fairly awful raid ability as its just reducing tank damage.

[Kyuuseishu]

The actual loss of EF hot´s not apply IH anymore doesn´t equal 17% Overall healing as someone wrote above. thats to high; it s rather ~10, but would have to check logs properly again too.
Just the fact that EF has been majorly nerfed doesn´t mean in the end that we are going to be stuck with the current SH and the 5.4 SS; there will be further changes. A sheer throughput incrase isn´t going to do it alone obviously.

Considering the number Aladya came up with is used from doing calculation's on their own personal logs, yes it may be a bit skewed but its roughly in that area

[Pasture]

The DS HR/LoD spam though was a lot worse then ef blanketing, you didn't even need a raid frame to do it, it was that mindless.

Well you still needed a raid frame. You needed to rotate who you cast HR on to ensure the hot from HR stacked. Not saying it required skill but it did require a frame. Regardless the problem then was more to do with fights rather than our own mechanics. Most the fights were stack and AoE heal fights which was something we had the perfect tools for once mana allowed.

---------- Post added 2013-06-21 at 10:04 PM ----------

Why do the devs have such a boner for HoT healing right now?

Because the hot classes were complaining they haven't had their chance to shine yet. GC specifically said there would be more hot friendly fights because every class needs their chance to shine. It depends on the fight mechanic. If they are fights where we can stack then we'll be fine. If we need to spread then we won't, but then that's the situation where we should be weak anyway. The problem is we aren't particularly strong in the area which should be our strength, which is burst healing and stacked AoE.

[Deleted]

It highly depends how they compensate for EF not applying mastery/IH anymore. The Initial heal reduction will be reverted as stated in the blue post.
You could i.e. increase the hot healing Output and make LoD stronger and get SS work with crit and mastery and or even Bacon (5.2, if or not combined with the 5.4 effect is a different Story) and make maybe SH work with HS for Holy (every 18 secs at the max a free/instant heal for 60% more isn t going to be a dealbreaker, just ask a shaman about Unleash element, only increased healing and no instant etc, but it just doesnt make it the ueber Talent)and then you have a choice already again.
The actual loss of EF hot´s not apply IH anymore doesn´t equal 17% Overall healing as someone wrote above. thats to high; it s rather ~10, but would have to check logs properly again too.
Just the fact that EF has been majorly nerfed doesn´t mean in the end that we are going to be stuck with the current SH and the 5.4 SS; there will be further changes. A sheer throughput incrase isn´t going to do it alone obviously.

The number is based on 5.3 farm and on my gear, obviously someone on progress/with lesser gear checking logs(with different classes) would see a lesser nerf,mayhaps.

Do however consider that 5.4 will have MORE mastery on gear(due to higher ilvl), that mastery will still be our best stat and that Priests,Monks and Druids are all having their outputs increased(as of this time @ PTR). I don't think rounding it up at ~17% nerf to healing is that far off.heh.

Also,take the silly buff to cds in 25 man for example. Even if mastery was left untouched in 5.3, our healing would still have fallen because of output cds taking care of all the damage.Shaman healing would of dropped even lower then currently without any patch notes to shaman because we would of sniped more from them .Healing isn't like dps where if you buff an ability that does 20% of dmg by 50% you buff the class by 10%.

As an added bonus, consider the refreshing part of the mastery ticks benefit of EF. Right now, EF constantly refreshes leftover mastery something that it won't do in 5.4

[Lucyrotten]

I honestly think that the biggest hit we're ultimately taking from this design change is that our IH shields will drop so much faster that more will end up being wasted. I'm not sure how to sim/quantify that but my not-very-scientific gut tells me that this is real problem.

[Kyaza]

Mastery is our best stat and the current Eternal Flame refreshes our shields. With Blizzard wanting to take away EF's ability to proc IH, they are basically forcing us to heal with a limited toolbox.

The blue post suggests that we should feel free to use Sacred Shield, Selfless Healer, or Eternal Flame because they want us to be versatile healers. But the problem is that they don't seem to understand what they are really doing to our healing.

Selfless Healer requires us to judge on cooldown to proc large heals. It sounds nice in theory, but the truth is that it requires us to judge essentially on cooldown, which wastes globals that might be needed for heavy healing. Which will then turn into this buff falling off or us being forced to use the proc too early because as soon as we use a heal that it affects, we lose that buff. It's just plain awkward.

Sacred Shield has been weaker than Eternal Flame for some time now. One super strong shield vs. the multiple shields generated by Eternal Flame blanketing (current 5.3 talents). EF is the obvious winner. And SS is nowhere near as strong as the PW:S generated by disc priests. It isn't competitive.

Those two aren't really changing much, from what I understand, but they are taking Eternal Flame (the only viable raiding talent at this point) and making it almost useless.

Except, oh wait. It's still going to be better than Sacred Shield or Selfless Healer.

If they don't want us to be hot-blankets, then they need to do something about the other two talents to make them worth taking.

Also, if we are supposed to have an absorb mastery, then all of our talents should reflect that. At least SH and SS do that much. Taking IH away from the hot of EF is like saying "Oh you're absorb based healers but your most useful spell won't get the benefit of those absorbs." Completely ridiculous.

[Deleted]

If we ain't gets compensated i'l might just unsub. I can say for sure that this chance is gigantic and does not belong in a patch. I'l enjoy the the next couple of month clearing ToT herioc and then i'l leave my casual raiding group. Our output right now is okey don't understand these nerfs.

[Deleted]

If we ain't gets compensated i'l might just unsub. I can say for sure that this chance is gigantic and does not belong in a patch. I'l enjoy the the next couple of month clearing ToT herioc and then i'l leave my casual raiding group. Our output right now is okey don't understand these nerfs.

The problem is when you go to LFR and when u have a healer with some hc gear that totaly dominates the meters ppl start QQ that holy paladins are op when its just because its a LFR enviorment and if u have a healer that is actualy doing its job and has a bit more healing he will overpower the other badly geared or slacker healeres..

Im raiding with a shamy and a druid healer set.. And we work perfectly toghether.. I migth be a bit ahead of the shamy and the druid in the metters(but not by a large margin) but they are way more essencial to the raid team for their cd's.. This nerf is completly unecessary with the nerfs we had to the mastery our IH got a lot more controled.. If they feel they need to nerf the IH component of the HoT in EF do it but dont remove it completly or keeping the shields on ppl will be a nigthmare..

This seriously anoys me.. They see us heal with EF since day one in MoP they let it role till now.. And now at the last tier(at least they say its gonna be the last raid tier) they go around and say "Yeah EF needs to be completly changed.. Lets forget you've been using it since the start of mop.. Oh you feel it will be a problem to your play style? Handel it.."

[nightfalls]

The problem is when you go to LFR and when u have a healer with some hc gear that totaly dominates the meters ppl start QQ that holy paladins are op when its just because its a LFR enviorment and if u have a healer that is actualy doing its job and has a bit more healing he will overpower the other badly geared or slacker healeres..

Right, at this point any healer (including shamans) who's geared and actually aware will easily overpower your average LFR healer.

---------- Post added 2013-06-22 at 12:22 AM ----------

I honestly think that the biggest hit we're ultimately taking from this design change is that our IH shields will drop so much faster that more will end up being wasted. I'm not sure how to sim/quantify that but my not-very-scientific gut tells me that this is real problem.

Pretty much at this moment, I'm looking at going back to the 18k million spirit build, and compensating via yet more(?!) HR spam.

Not much else I can think of that would work given how EF's being gutted.

[Deleted]

Oke my conclusions:

1. There is no dev that actually plays a holy paladin.
2. They have no clue what to do with the holy paladin.
3. Whoever complains the loudest wins.
4. GC wants proper feedback but all he uses is fucking twitter. Players have to harass him on it to get a blue post in a forum thread.

They just drop a nerf on EF base healing like it's no big deal. And after holy paladins complain they "instantly" revert it like it's a bad idea. Why was it even nerfed to begin with if you play a paladin you know it's a bad idea. You do not need PTR testing for this.

They move SS to prot paladins and then come to the conclusion it's to over-powered. They replace SS with something that's so bad that it's not worth the time it took to add it to the patch notes. Oke perhaps on really specific boss mechanics it could have been worth something but nobody is going to use it on every fight the

They still believe SH is for a paladin who likes to judge...
There is no point in using judgement as a holy paladin. It doesn't heal or generate holy power. It does shit for damage.
We are based around generating holy power to use with a finisher WoG/EF and LoD. We are limited in holy power generation by Holy Shock CD and cast time of HR/DL(beacon target). For simplicity i'm ignoring CS because we are still classed as a ranged class for boss mechanics.
So lets add selfless healer.
Cast 3 judgements with a 6s base cooldown to get 1 free instant cast DL which heals for 60% more. If we place Divine light at a 100k(easy math) heal we get a 160k instant free heal.
To get that 160k heal you need to cast 3 judgements and that will cost you 3x GCD and 9k mana. Or you just cast 1 more DL and heal for 100k which is more healing at the cost of 12k mana. To make it worse macro in your beacon(glyphed) swaps and you get 1 holy power for every 2 DL casts which means more healing.
Pretty much every holy paladin it was going to be this bad when reading the patch notes.


The following might be a little off-topic. But the devs seem to hate the EF spam combined with mastery. And yes it's really overpowered. But just taking it out without anything else in our toolkit will hurt us more then it "helps" the game. So more of a state of the healer game situation.

The way i currently see raiding and more specific healing in a raid has nothing to do with single target heals. The reason we have 5-6 healers in a 25man is to heal the entire raid when they take damage. We don't need 5 healers for the tanks or even random damage spikes. Every healer has the Flash / Greater / Spam heal trio of spells basicly.
Combine that with the fact there are only a couple of ways we take damage these days.

Constant tank damage and boss tank specific abilities that causes a tank swap.
Raid wide constant damage(Primordius Ventral Sacs).
Raid wide Burst damage more then the player healthpool (Megaera Rampage) Or some smaller burst damage for 50% or 75% of the health but predictable on a timer.

Random target boss abilities that require you to spread out. These are mostly on ranged classes only these days.
Debuffs that require Soaking(static shock) and thus aoe healing.
Debuffs that require 10s spam heals or reduction with personal and external cooldowns and healing
Debuffs that are a DoT either dispells or cooldowns/healing.

Lets go over some of our toolkit options now.

SS: So we use SS on Tank like a second Beacon Because that is the target who takes the steady damage.

SH: well can't for the life of me figure out where i'm going to use a 160k Divine heal when the tank already has a beacon and earth shield and gets hit by other smart heals. Guess we could use it on this big boss hits that take a good chunk of hp from the tanks every 10-30 seconds that seems to be super popular among the devs now. Oh and it takes 3 judgments and only lasts 15 seconds! Why do discs get to do their normal rotation and get a free flash heal and we get this "complicated" stuff. Guess we can save that 1 poor soul who takes a big random hit.

DL/HL/FL/WoG: I guess those spells work for all of the damage type/sources listed above. EXCEPT when you start combining them and you need to heal multiple targets in say 5 seconds. Combined with our mastery we could make shields but it's significantly harder with only 15 seconds from IH. Besides every other healer can do similar heals. Little Exception WoG and saving holy power so you can 3point WoG - shock - 3 point WoG i guess. So we can save 2 poor souls this time!

HR: Stacked up 10 yard only but at least it generates holy power which converts into LoD or more instant casts.
LoD: Yay 30 yards but limited by targets and you need to generate 3 HoPo first. So no chain casting.

So that leaves us to our favorite EF.
It's perfect for any debuff/DoT related damage on single targets or a low amount of targets. Combined with our mastery it's perfect for building up a shield for that raid wide damage. It's also great for healing that aoe damage where you have to spread out for and still want to heal a lot of people at the same time. Yes you can't hit 5 people at the same time but the hot will still be rolling and building a shield if it heals to full.

meh already ranted to long.

[Medario]

This seriously anoys me.. They see us heal with EF since day one in MoP they let it role till now.. And now at the last tier(at least they say its gonna be the last raid tier) they go around and say "Yeah EF needs to be completly changed.. Lets forget you've been using it since the start of mop.. Oh you feel it will be a problem to your play style? Handel it.."

To be fair about one Thing: I do like the fact they re adjusting stuff mid xpack and not only at the start of the xpack. Doesn t Change anything about the fact I dislike the Change. Druids get their 87 spell chamnged, all T90 talents changed. Years ago blizz wouldn t have touched stuff till the xpack was over, now they do and I like that. What I am saying is, to make it more obvious: if Ef stayed untouched and SH and SS and SancWrath would get fully reworked that is appreciated as well. So yea, I dislike the nerf, but do approve the faster reaction of blizz a lot.
PS: EF has been buffed a lot just Prior to release of MoP, because they considerd it not powerful enough, but they have regreted the buff since, which has been stated by GC even before patch 5.1 if I am not mistaken.

[Fashionstarz]

I honestly think that the biggest hit we're ultimately taking from this design change is that our IH shields will drop so much faster that more will end up being wasted. I'm not sure how to sim/quantify that but my not-very-scientific gut tells me that this is real problem.

I really don't see us losing that many shields on heroic, damage is usually high enough to break all of them before they expire.

[Lucyrotten]

I really don't see us losing that many shields on heroic, damage is usually high enough to break all of them before they expire.

I hope you're right. I more hope that they revert this change too and rebalance another way.

[Deleted]

To be fair about one Thing: I do like the fact they re adjusting stuff mid xpack and not only at the start of the xpack. Doesn t Change anything about the fact I dislike the Change. Druids get their 87 spell chamnged, all T90 talents changed. Years ago blizz wouldn t have touched stuff till the xpack was over, now they do and I like that. What I am saying is, to make it more obvious: if Ef stayed untouched and SH and SS and SancWrath would get fully reworked that is appreciated as well. So yea, I dislike the nerf, but do approve the faster reaction of blizz a lot.
PS: EF has been buffed a lot just Prior to release of MoP, because they considerd it not powerful enough, but they have regreted the buff since, which has been stated by GC even before patch 5.1 if I am not mistaken.

If i could i wouldnt cover the raid with EF covering the raid with HoT's was never our style.. I luved the healing style we had on cata, fast and big heals.. But blizz seemed to want every class with some HoT's mechanics.. And its kinda like the lock kiljaden thing.. You make us dependent on a spell since the start of a expansion and at the end of the expansion you decide to tackle it? This should be done in the next expansion.. Not now..

SS shields will never work in a expansion were we are constantly showered with heavy AoE figths, and were our AoE heals arent that strong(we normaly keep shield stacking to counter some of this aoe bits).. And SH in its current form is to much of a waste of time and mana for a single big heal..

[Tonic]

Trusting devs would be a better choice than rerolling monk/druid. Stick to your class like its a marriage, I'm sure they will compansate it as pacer or aladya said.
If they don't change the typical paladin (EFstyle). it would be good opportunity to find a new gaming style.
judging and shit just like the old bc and wotlk times.

[Pasture]

I'm surprised they lowered the cooldown of GotAK for ret but not holy. You could quite easily put it on a 3min cooldown for Holy without it being too strong.

On a none healing related note, any thoughts on the glyph change to proc an instant Denounce. Strictly PvP or do they intend to somehow integrate it into PvE. I'd love to see it do something.

[Deleted]

Bring back Judgement of the Light. Then maybe I'll take the shitty SH