Blizz on the holy nerf

[t3hj0j0]

We increased paladin mana costs because they were too efficient at healing. In raid encounters, for instance, paladins were sitting at 40% of their mana while the other healers were flat out of mana. Paladins were casting Divine Light as their main heal because they didn’t need the efficiency of Holy Light. You personally may not have been in that situation, but when looking at the overall picture, as well as running plenty of tests, this was our conclusion overall. It is entirely possible this will hurt Holy paladins in PvP, where mana can be harder to come by. It is our hope that the recent Speed of Light change as well as another change or two coming will help offset that.

We did not make these mana cost changes because of the change to critical heals or because of any upcoming set bonuses (which are still being designed, by the way). We made the changes only because paladins were too efficient compared to druids, priests and shaman.

As a postscript, we see a lot of paladins advocating a strategy of Beacon the tank, heal the off-tank with Divine Light, and never ever do anything else... and if you ever heal the Beacon target, you fail. That’s just not a realistic goal. Stuff is going to happen that is unpredictable, or else you’d probably win every fight. You should make the most of Beacon, absolutely. It’s a great tool. But you shouldn’t consider anything that doesn’t maximize Beacon to be a class design or personal performance failure. Sometimes you’re going to want to heal the Beacon target directly. It happens.

I see some good things in this... with the possibility of the set bonus being changed, and new changes to help PvP... but quite a few things bothered me.

1)

As a postscript, we see a lot of paladins advocating a strategy of Beacon the tank, heal the off-tank with Divine Light, and never ever do anything else... and if you ever heal the Beacon target, you fail.

What a bad, and really obnoxious generalization. Only bad holys ignore the beacon target. If they are in trouble, chunk a heal. Nor is DL the only heal we should cast (but it IS the best in many many cases).

2)

But you shouldn’t consider anything that doesn’t maximize Beacon to be a class design or personal performance failure.

But... it IS a class design failure. Holy is balanced (in a raid and pvp setting) around beacon. Beacon allows us to put our attention on another target while keeping the beacon target alive in most cases. This gives us a sort of multi-target/shield mechanic. If we can't rely on it to keep them up with little attention... why have it? If we have to constantly heal the beacon target to keep them or our mana up... that's bad design. If we have to heal in a way that is below our maximum potential... that is bad design.

[archangelz]

"It is entirely possible this will hurt Holy paladins in PvP, where mana can be harder to come by. It is our hope that the recent Speed of Light change as well as another change or two coming will help offset that."
A speed increase every 40 seconds is going to help with the mana increase. What..?

[lil pink pwny]

My guild has only progressed through the first few(Ie: easy) hardmodes, but I dont see this infinite mana situation blizz is talking about. In normal modes, when I was ilvl 359 and completely outgearing the encounters? Sure. But the other healing classes can do the same(and with more throughput in 25 mans to boot). In hardmodes, or situations where the instance is on the upper end of your gear level, where mana actually matters, I dont see paladins spamming HIGH OUTPUT heals and maintaining full mana.

Last time I checked, even with best in slot gear, DL consumes more mana than you can regen, and chain casting DL indefinitely results in going oom within 1-2 minutes. It's not our fault they made holy light too weak to provide reliable healing for tanks in hardmode encounters. We have no choice but to use as many divine lights as we can. GG blizz learn to stop corning pally heals into two abilities and then going back and claiming we're too good or relying on the wrong ability.

What parses are they looking at? World of logs shows druids and priests dominating every single fight, normal and hardmode except for shamans on chimaeron. Sinestra 25 is the only fight where pally heals dominate which doesnt count for the purposes of this balancing issue.

[Archadin]

Blizz doesn't realize that pallies mana regen was one of the things that made them semi competetive, both of our interupts are melee range when no other healers are, except for a priest but they interupt potentionally more players. In 2's I try my best to interupt other team's healers/casters but it's near impossible because either I get cc'd or they flat out can root/hex me instantly and run away. Trying to interupt a druid is pointless Hot's are too powerful, priests have their OP bubble, and shaman's are probably the only class besides another paladin that is semi easy at interupting. So I guess I'm even expected to blow HoJ and rebuke on dps now because I doubt I'll be able to keep pillar hugging and last 2-3 min with constant pressure on me. Blizzard is a joke and yes they will be losing more than 600k members. Because quite frankly I don't think they know what the fuck to do anymore. I'm also sick of Blood DK's out healing me in arena. Like wtf are they smoking over there in Cali.

[drazzil]

My guild has only progressed through the first few(Ie: easy) hardmodes, but I dont see this infinite mana situation blizz is talking about. In normal modes, when I was ilvl 359 and completely outgearing the encounters? Sure. But the other healing classes can do the same(and with more throughput in 25 mans to boot). In hardmodes, or situations where the instance is on the upper end of your gear level, where mana actually matters, I dont see paladins spamming HIGH OUTPUT heals and maintaining full mana.

While what you say is true, there is no doubt that generally the healer that always has more mana than the others in the raid will be the pally. And hard modes are designed to be exactly that - hard.

However, i do feel this change might hurt 10man quite a bit more than anticipated, because im pretty sure very many has balanced their healing crew around 1 pally, and in most fights in 10-man there will be no room for other classes to step up their healing. Thus this will severly increase the difficulty of the encounters for these healing-crews overall. - On top of this the nerf to mana-tide will furthermore skew the difficulty between 10 and 25-man, since a 10-man team will only have one MT to drop, and many fights will be near impossible without it.

[Deleted]

Paladins chain cast divine light because there's essentially nothing else to cast when doing the harder heroic modes. Holy light heals for too little and you have no spammable aoe heal. I honestly hope blizzard understands this...

[givemefive]

Paladins chain cast divine light because there's essentially nothing else to cast when doing the harder heroic modes. Holy light heals for too little and you have no spammable aoe heal. I honestly hope blizzard understands this...

Holy light doesn't do enough healing to keep up a tank through normal melee swings. This nerf in mana means they need to buff holy light to be useful.

Check out my 10m hard mode logs. Holy Light is my go to heal followed by divine light, what ends up happening is I have to chain cast divine light over and over again because people are on the verge of death. That means twice as many divine lights as holy lights.

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/pxlbaygwzfivdk5c/

Recently are new healing strat has been Beacon MT, Shaman's 1st priority is MT 2nd raid and I heal OT 1st priority raid 2nd priority with disc priest full time on raid

I also agree that this means a harder nerf to 10mans than 25. While you can put 2 paladins on the 'tanks' in 25man raids my job in 10man is to keep up the tanks and heal the most injured raid members.

Hell my 25man guild put 2 paladins on the tanks in heroic chimaeron even though the damage is the same as 10m heroic. I solo heal it in 10man

[Merin]

I don't cast the efficient heal on any of my three healers. It's just too weak.

[Deleted]

I kinda agree with blizz on this one.

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...ozona/advanced

I were on Atremedes Hc 10 man last night and i can see from the log that i did 46 DL and at no point i in mana problems, both our shammy and holy priest needed an innervate and potion of concentration while i just poped DL on 2 air phase and AT and judge on CD.

But as you can see i got 3 spirit procs, 2 trinkets and heartsong. I'll say that helps out alot with mana.

[Deleted]

Picked a random fight where I always feel like I'm going oom from last weeks clear of the 13/13 hardmodes - I chose Cho'gal. I calculated how much mana I would need in order to heal the same amount (disregarding the holy radiance buff). My results where I would need ~90k more mana or ~80% of my total mana pool.

This is my mana gains from that fight:
Seal of Insight 138896 mana
Innervate 60904 mana (lol)
Replenishment 52960 mana
Divine Plea 41546 mana
Blind Spot 29040 mana
Arcane Torrent 27696 mana
Glyph of Divinity 23080 mana

Don't really see how it is possible regain more mana in that fight besides a pot and some excessive meleeing.

I finished 3rd on healing done with a druid + priest above me, and a shaman and paladin below me (5 healers).

[Consata]

Sinestra 25 is the only fight where pally heals dominate which doesnt count for the purposes of this balancing issue.

The only reason paladins are so good on Sinestra is because we can beacon 1 target and spam the other and keep them both topped. This said, in P2 i can heal for up to 500k each DL because of Calen, which is why paladins are topping healing meters on that fight.

[announced]

blizz should get their heads outta their asses and look at WOL. only the most super gear'd pallys tend to not oom. with 5 cds for mana umm. how is anyone gonna oom then. HL heals for way too little.

[Zecora]

Won't this hurt fresh Holy pala's just entering heroic instances, giving them a hard time until they are basically overgeared? Not to mention Holy in PVP...

It's REALLY high time Blizzard stop balancing around end-game raiding in a way that hurt everyone who doesn't play at that level.

[Moeller]

I have just hit lvl 84, and I can see how this becomes a problem, blizzard is really ruining the healing for newly dinged holy paladins, as mentioned, balancing thing around end game ruins it for others, aka newly dinged paladins, people who tend to pvp a lot (I think it is a problem here) and I have a bit of mana issues already when healing normals, not so bad that I will go below 50 %, but I am still trying to save mana for neccesarities =/

[Deleted]

I have just hit lvl 84, and I can see how this becomes a problem, blizzard is really ruining the healing for newly dinged holy paladins, as mentioned, balancing thing around end game ruins it for others, aka newly dinged paladins, people who tend to pvp a lot (I think it is a problem here) and I have a bit of mana issues already when healing normals, not so bad that I will go below 50 %, but I am still trying to save mana for neccesarities =/

People have forgotten to CC, this might be a reason to actually do it again

[Faemn]

I don't raid as Holy, but I like healing to heal a Heroic or two once in a while, and even if my gear is pretty good, as of now DL already costs to much, and it is basically our only good spell we can cast.

It bothers me that we paladins have a total of like 6 healing spells. (Flash of Light, Holy Light, Divine Light, Light of Dawn, Word of Glory, Holy Radiance) I might be missing something though, and other healers have like a billion situational tools and different heals that are good enough to actually consider using. We need moar spells IMHO.

[Renowned]

1) He's not saying all paladins "advocate a strategy of Beacon the tank, heal the off-tank with Divine Light, and never ever do anything else... and if you ever heal the Beacon target, you fail", just that they're seeing a lot of paladins doing it. He's not generalising at all.

2) Whether or not the numbers are balanced perfectly for this to work is a different discussion, the intent of Beacon is to allow you to still heal the tank while actively healing a second target. Ultimately it functions similarly to a druid's Lifebloom (and Rejuvenate), a priest's Renew and/or Power Word: Shield, and a shaman's Earth Shield (and perhaps combined with Riptide and Earthliving Weapon) in that you can hard cast a heal on a second target and still have something going on the tank. It's not intended to be put on the tank so you can completely forget about him.

If you don't think Beacon works, that's fine. Just realise that Blizzard is more likely to change the numbers than the intent of the ability if they decide that Beacon (or any ability for that matter) is underperforming.

[Deleted]

As a postscript, we see a lot of paladins advocating a strategy of Beacon the tank, heal the off-tank with Divine Light, and never ever do anything else... and if you ever heal the Beacon target, you fail. That’s just not a realistic goal. Stuff is going to happen that is unpredictable, or else you’d probably win every fight. You should make the most of Beacon, absolutely. It’s a great tool. But you shouldn’t consider anything that doesn’t maximize Beacon to be a class design or personal performance failure. Sometimes you’re going to want to heal the Beacon target directly. It happens.

Yea, cause we like wasting talent points for the sake of not maximizing our healing.

[MisterSheep]

How can people complain about Holy nerf... Holy was overpowered for both PvE and PvP. Please, stop complaining paladins

[Tullkas]

How can people complain about Holy nerf... Holy was overpowered for both PvE and PvP. Please, stop complaining paladins

That PvP part is either ironic or all you do in pvp is few BGs per week for fun.