Current state of Atonement on PTR

[Deleted]

Hey there,
so, does anyone know how Atonement currently works on the PTR?
First they said they'd increase the range to 100y but now the patchnotes only say this:

Atonement will now account for the target enemy's combat reach when calculating proper range, enabling it to be used on large creatures such as Ragnaros and Ala'kir.

Does this still mean the range itself has increased so I can consider healing the raid that way or does this change only affect large creatures like the description would make you think?

[Papalenin]

I think it means that it now calculates the distance the heal can travel based on the hitbox instead of the center point of the creature. So now it can travel 18 yards + radius of creature hitbox, instead of just 18 yards from the very center of the creature.

[Deleted]

That's what I thought as well but the tooltip was changed at some point to "heal a party member within 100y of the enemy", so it would be nice if some on PTR could try it.
I live in EU and they somehow messed up the character copy here...

[Kelesti]

That's what I thought as well but the tooltip was changed at some point to "heal a party member within 100y of the enemy", so it would be nice if some on PTR could try it.
I live in EU and they somehow messed up the character copy here...

No it wasn't. That's called taking datamining at face-value. It's a major no-no in the community.

The blue post that came out at the same time said specifically that it was only being done to accomodate large boss sizes, so that we don't have this problem of not actually getting any use out of it, whether it's optimal or not.

[Deleted]

But obviously they thought of increasing the range to 100y at first, why else would they bother changing it?
I wish they'd just add this as a hotfix. Could really use it for Ragnaros sometimes.

[Zelven]

But obviously they thought of increasing the range to 100y at first, why else would they bother changing it?
I wish they'd just add this as a hotfix. Could really use it for Ragnaros sometimes.

It's called a placeholder value. Reading a datamined change and thinking it's 100% going to happen fact is rather amateurish when concerning patches. Much like the big mess with paladins and holy radiance. So many thought Holy Radiance was going to be producing 1 holy power baseline. But, that was a datamined change and wasn't the case at all. This is the same deal.
Tossing "100yd" in there doesn't mean necessarily that it'll be a 100yd range at release. It's more to set a limitation on a boss like Al'akir, phase 3, as a max distance counting the center of the hit box and the 15 yard distance from the edge of the hit box for applicable raid members. IE, if the center of the boss is 85 yards away, it will still heal those within 15 yards of the edge of the hit box. If it's more than that from the center of the hit box, then likely the range will be cut down. Might also be the case for Rag - his center point seems to be pretty far back.
Not once did they ever say it was going to be 100 yards, however.

[Kelesti]

But obviously they thought of increasing the range to 100y at first, why else would they bother changing it?
I wish they'd just add this as a hotfix. Could really use it for Ragnaros sometimes.

As Zelven said, they never once actually said 100 yards, nor did the PTR tooltip show this. Bibi's datamining found an unwritten change to the spel, a placeholder.

What Blizzard actually said was that it will actually work on a fight like Al Akir or Ragnaros, so boss art doesn't get in the way. Anytime something is written in green, it's not from Blizzard. It's from us, and should be taken with a grain of salt until confirmed by a blue post.