1. #1

    The Matter of Eternal Flame

    At present, the "Eternal Flame" ability is a talent in the level 45 "healing" tier for the paladin class in the MoP Beta, it is a holy power-based 30 second HoT with a single target restriction. It won't be a surprise to you that I'm bringing up this talent because I have problems with it, since I'm certain it's quite rare for people to open a discussion on this particular subject simply to offer praise.

    As a talent, Holy and Prot players might consider this talent, but primarily for mathematical reasons over anything else. Questions start to come to mind when considering it, questions like "How is it affected by haste, and do the ticks crit?" or "How often [am I]/[is my target] in a damaged state for this to not be wasted on overhealing?", and it's not really a mechanically compelling ability; it's a HoT, that's about it.

    One of the problems is that this talent can easily become your only choice if it's broken down to simply do better numbers. Heck, it'd be unambiguously mandatory for holy if it weren't for the target limit (Thank the light for that).

    But the real kicker here is that I simply cannot see Retribution using this talent, ever. Not in pvp, definitely not in raiding. Retribution paladins already have to maintain a holy-power based buff through inquisition, and at least that increases your damage, Eternal Flame does no such thing.

    Worse yet, the other choices are simply better. Sacred shield, while not absorbing as much as Eternal Flame heals, only costs mana, and it also buffs your FoL crit chance by quite an amount. Even in the middle of nowhere getting bared down on by another melee class, with the new Devotion Aura it isn't far-fetched to have a ret paladin spam flash of light in a pinch to get themselves back up, so that crit means a lot. Selfless Healer is entirely passive and even if you never use it on anyone other than yourself it's still fairly useful in a pinch.

    And if a ret paladin needs to burn holy power to heal their self there's still WoG, there's even a glyph for it which (Albeit only slightly) mitigates the damage loss, for which Eternal Flame has no such thing.

    So really, I just don't see the appeal of this talent, unless of course I'm missing something here.

  2. #2
    The problem is its one target restriction. I would choose sacred shield more so then eternal flame because it will be of more use on one target then the HoT would. If it was limited to say, 2 players max, then it might be a different story but for right now i wouldnt choose that for raiding or pvp. The HoT does crit, im not sure if its affected by haste or not yet, however Sacred Shield seems like its a better fit.

    Maybe they will change the way eternal flame works (hopefully for the better). I personally would like to see it affect more then one target.

    http://www.twitch.tv/hammerpairs 7/7 Mythic EN / 3/3 Mythic ToV / 10/10 Mythic NH / 9/9 Mythic ToS
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBmNLMo4vcI some old school CM fun
    "Your lights will go out. The darkness will envelop you. And you will fear the shadows that move within it."

  3. #3
    Quote Originally Posted by Theholypally View Post
    The problem is its one target restriction. I would choose sacred shield more so then eternal flame because it will be of more use on one target then the HoT would. If it was limited to say, 2 players max, then it might be a different story but for right now i wouldnt choose that for raiding or pvp. The HoT does crit, im not sure if its affected by haste or not yet, however Sacred Shield seems like its a better fit.

    Maybe they will change the way eternal flame works (hopefully for the better). I personally would like to see it affect more then one target.
    The target restriction doesn't really make it any more of a compelling choice for ret. Ret would rather spend their precious holy power doing their job instead of pretending to do someone else's.

    Worse yet, the talent becomes mandatory for holy once you start raising the target cap. At the extreme end of the spectrum, no target restriction, holy paladins immediately change into a sort of resto druid, and all we'd do is play HoT maintenance on the raid to pad the meters.

  4. #4
    Quote Originally Posted by Diatenium View Post
    The target restriction doesn't really make it any more of a compelling choice for ret. Ret would rather spend their precious holy power doing their job instead of pretending to do someone else's.

    Worse yet, the talent becomes mandatory for holy once you start raising the target cap. At the extreme end of the spectrum, no target restriction, holy paladins immediately change into a sort of resto druid, and all we'd do is play HoT maintenance on the raid to pad the meters.
    Im holy not ret, which is why i said what i said

    http://www.twitch.tv/hammerpairs 7/7 Mythic EN / 3/3 Mythic ToV / 10/10 Mythic NH / 9/9 Mythic ToS
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBmNLMo4vcI some old school CM fun
    "Your lights will go out. The darkness will envelop you. And you will fear the shadows that move within it."

  5. #5
    I don't understand why you are saying if they increase the target cap holy paladins will HAVE to take it. Yes, it will be a hot like rejuv, except that you need HOLY POWER to use it. Meaning you can't spam it. Increasing the target cap would be useless unless you are spamming HR or DL and FoL on your beacon, which then makes it a waste of mana just to keep it on 2+ targets when LoD would be a better choice for burst aoe healing.

    My huge problem is the fact that if you are on a fight where there is a lot of tank swapping, changing eternal flame targets becomes a waste of holy power. (I'm not sure about MoP fights) but comparing it do current content there are a lot of fights where the tank damage is minimal or there is a lot of tank swapping.

    I understand that changing your talents is as easy and glyphs in mists of pandaria so eternal flame can be good on constant, heavy tank damage fights, but even t hen the ability to refresh/change sacred shield targets when needed, without any buildup puts sacred shield well ahead of eternal flame for me.

  6. #6
    Quote Originally Posted by Roasalie View Post
    I don't understand why you are saying if they increase the target cap holy paladins will HAVE to take it. Yes, it will be a hot like rejuv, except that you need HOLY POWER to use it. Meaning you can't spam it. Increasing the target cap would be useless unless you are spamming HR or DL and FoL on your beacon, which then makes it a waste of mana just to keep it on 2+ targets when LoD would be a better choice for burst aoe healing.
    Generating enough holy power from the get-go isn't difficult. You can, for example, pre-hot everyone up before the encounter. Or, if you need to Hot up a lot of people in a pinch, you can pick holy avenger to generate a lot of holy power quickly. We also don't know the exact PPM of Divine Purpose for holy paladins either, which could make generating enough holy power not that difficult.

    Keep in mind, the math right now shows that Eternal Flame does more HPS at 3 holy power than sacred shield, and can you imagine how big a deal it'd become if you had 10 sacred shields up at the same time. We also don't know how it's affected when you try to replace the buff with a weaker version of EF; Does a 1 HP EF just reset the duration of the original EF? If so, maintaining these buffs (Which I remind you last a pretty decent 30 seconds) would be rather easy.

  7. #7
    Quote Originally Posted by Diatenium View Post
    The target restriction doesn't really make it any more of a compelling choice for ret. Ret would rather spend their precious holy power doing their job instead of pretending to do someone else's.
    All talents in this tier require ret to spend a global to heal. And while yes, they'd rather spend their HP on dps, they generate it so fast in MoP it will be less of a problem. Realistically this tier will be more of a desperation tier. Rets don't want to be healing, but if they do they'll probably take Selfless Healer as it's a better desperation heal. Likewise, when it comes to just having a free global, selfless healer is probably a better reactive heal to use on someone.

    Worse yet, the talent becomes mandatory for holy once you start raising the target cap. At the extreme end of the spectrum, no target restriction, holy paladins immediately change into a sort of resto druid, and all we'd do is play HoT maintenance on the raid to pad the meters.
    The capacity for Holy Paladins to roll Eternal Flame is limited by how fast they can generate HP, which is horribly slow, and this will be particularly true at the start of the expansion when we can afford fewer Divine Lights on the tanks and few Holy Radiance casts. We're not suddenly going to become druids.

    ---------- Post added 2012-06-25 at 09:06 PM ----------

    Quote Originally Posted by Diatenium View Post
    Generating enough holy power from the get-go isn't difficult. You can, for example, pre-hot everyone up before the encounter. Or, if you need to Hot up a lot of people in a pinch, you can pick holy avenger to generate a lot of holy power quickly. We also don't know the exact PPM of Divine Purpose for holy paladins either, which could make generating enough holy power not that difficult.
    You couldn't pre-hot everyone. It takes about 5 seconds to generate 3 HP by spamming on a beacon or using Holy Radiance. The max you could hope to hot at once would be about 5 players in the raid, with the first falling off straight after pull and you starting the fight on 50% mana. Not feasible.

  8. #8
    Quote Originally Posted by Pasture View Post
    All talents in this tier require ret to spend a global to heal. And while yes, they'd rather spend their HP on dps, they generate it so fast in MoP it will be less of a problem. Realistically this tier will be more of a desperation tier. Rets don't want to be healing, but if they do they'll probably take Selfless Healer as it's a better desperation heal. Likewise, when it comes to just having a free global, selfless healer is probably a better reactive heal to use on someone.


    The capacity for Holy Paladins to roll Eternal Flame is limited by how fast they can generate HP, which is horribly slow, and this will be particularly true at the start of the expansion when we can afford fewer Divine Lights on the tanks and few Holy Radiance casts. We're not suddenly going to become druids.

    ---------- Post added 2012-06-25 at 09:06 PM ----------


    You couldn't pre-hot everyone. It takes about 5 seconds to generate 3 HP by spamming on a beacon or using Holy Radiance. The max you could hope to hot at once would be about 5 players in the raid, with the first falling off straight after pull and you starting the fight on 50% mana. Not feasible.
    I think we're venturing too far into the realm of conjecture, here, so let's start doing some napkin math to get a clearer view of how this might work out.

    Alright, we'll say we want to HoT up a lot of people quickly, so we'll take Holy Avenger. Now, to generate holy power, we'll bounce between holy shock and holy radiance, we'll also assume zero haste and no infusions for clean math. We can generate a Eternal Flame at time intervals 1.5 (Assumed opening with holy shock), 5.5, 8.5, 12.5, and 15.5 (Using our last holy shock at the 14 second mark). So, unless I screwed up, we're looking at five generated in the duration of the effect.

    Assuming we use that rotation to either maintain full power EFs with weaker ones, or just maintain a bunch of weaker EFs if you can't simply reset the large HoTs with smaller ones, we're looking at a max of 9 up at any time before their duration starts to run dry. Again, zero haste and infusion procs.

    EDIT: This math is pretty fast and loose, so don't be afraid to make sure I didn't make a mistake.
    EDIT 2: Mis-counted the number of hits I got, re-adjusted the numbers accordingly.
    Last edited by Diatenium; 2012-06-25 at 08:33 PM.

  9. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by Diatenium View Post
    I think we're venturing too far into the realm of conjecture, here, so let's start doing some napkin math to get a clearer view of how this might work out.

    Alright, we'll say we want to HoT up a lot of people quickly, so we'll take Holy Avenger. Now, to generate holy power, we'll bounce between holy shock and holy radiance, we'll also assume zero haste and no infusions for clean math. We can generate a Eternal Flame at time intervals 1.5 (Assumed opening with holy shock), 5.5, 8.5, 12.5, and 15.5 (Using our last holy shock at the 14 second mark). So, unless I screwed up, we're looking at five generated in the duration of the effect.

    Assuming we use that rotation to either maintain full power EFs with weaker ones, or just maintain a bunch of weaker EFs if you can't simply reset the large HoTs with smaller ones, we're looking at a max of 9 up at any time before their duration starts to run dry. Again, zero haste and infusion procs.

    EDIT: This math is pretty fast and loose, so don't be afraid to make sure I didn't make a mistake.
    EDIT 2: Mis-counted the number of hits I got, re-adjusted the numbers accordingly.
    Now you are not just saying that eternal flame would be mandatory if you could keep it on multiple targets but you would also need holy avenger?

    It seems like you are basing your entire spec/playstyle off of eternal flame and making it out to be better than it really is.

  10. #10
    Quote Originally Posted by Roasalie View Post
    Now you are not just saying that eternal flame would be mandatory if you could keep it on multiple targets but you would also need holy avenger?

    It seems like you are basing your entire spec/playstyle off of eternal flame and making it out to be better than it really is.
    Even if we go the angle of maintaining this rotation and disregard whether or not we have Holy Avenger, keeping only single-holy power EFs on 10 players (Assuming we can squeeze in a tenth with enough haste/infusion procs or an external proc like from Blessed Life), that's still over 500% the potential healing of sacred shield. This is why it has the single-target restriction, and tuning it around having it up on multiple players renders it so weak for single-target healing that Ret and prot paladins have even less reason to pick it up than they already did.

  11. #11
    Quote Originally Posted by Diatenium View Post
    I think we're venturing too far into the realm of conjecture, here, so let's start doing some napkin math to get a clearer view of how this might work out.

    Alright, we'll say we want to HoT up a lot of people quickly, so we'll take Holy Avenger. Now, to generate holy power, we'll bounce between holy shock and holy radiance, we'll also assume zero haste and no infusions for clean math. We can generate a Eternal Flame at time intervals 1.5 (Assumed opening with holy shock), 5.5, 8.5, 12.5, and 15.5 (Using our last holy shock at the 14 second mark). So, unless I screwed up, we're looking at five generated in the duration of the effect.

    Assuming we use that rotation to either maintain full power EFs with weaker ones, or just maintain a bunch of weaker EFs if you can't simply reset the large HoTs with smaller ones, we're looking at a max of 9 up at any time before their duration starts to run dry. Again, zero haste and infusion procs.

    EDIT: This math is pretty fast and loose, so don't be afraid to make sure I didn't make a mistake.
    EDIT 2: Mis-counted the number of hits I got, re-adjusted the numbers accordingly.

    So you would use your two minute cd just to prehot people and not have it available for that long into the fight? :P That seems like a gigantic waste.

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