[Holy] Patch 5.4 PTR - Changes Discussion Pt. 2

[Sellinz]

Got half a pull in then they pulled the plug. Great 25m testing session everyone!

10HC was about 45 mins as well, but the fight is pretty easy so it didn't really matter

[Dubalicious]

Holy Shock's mana cost has been reduced by 50%.

Only change in today's patch notes.

[Rayocell]

Holy Shock's mana cost has been reduced by 50%.

Only change in today's patch notes.

Wait, so they made Judgement cost 12% base mana for 7200 mana, up from 3000. Now Holy Shock costs 4800, down from 9600.

Is SH back to where it was before with mana efficiency as a result? What the hell is Blizz thinking? I'm really confused with this change... (not that I'm complaining, but HS's mana cost wasn't really a problem, I think).

[Deleted]

Wait, so they made Judgement cost 12% base mana for 7200 mana, up from 3000. Now Holy Shock costs 4800, down from 9600.

Is SH back to where it was before with mana efficiency as a result? What the hell is Blizz thinking? I'm really confused with this change... (not that I'm complaining, but HS's mana cost wasn't really a problem, I think).

While you are mostly correct, you cannot say that SH is back to being awesome because both EF and SS will be a lot more mana efficient too. Asuming you use HS every 6 seconds (this is very likely when it scales with haste) you will need 4000 less mp5 which is pretty much equal to 4000 spirit.

I also find it strange that they would reduce the mana cost of HS, I dont think we have seen a single person in this thread, nor the "part 1" thread mentioning the mana cost of HS. Sure this change will put us more in line with certian classes but im more of the opinion that they needs to be nerfed to avoid highly inflated hps numbers. Reducing the mana cost of HS does not fix the viability of our talents which I think is a much bigger issue (and is what blizzard seemed to want to focus on for 5.4).

Another issue is guardian, yes they improved it but they removed the double single target healing thus making it garbage in pvp and in general for any 2-5 man groups. This issue becomes very apparent in proving grounds where other certian healer cooldowns will top off the group in a matter of seconds. Guardian also suffer from range issues, I have seen it do less than 1 million healing but I have also seen it do 8 million healing. The low healing was not because the raid was topped off no it was because everyone was spread and you litterally can not heal people with guardian when they are spread. Guardian is a 5 min cooldown and should be an awesome raid cooldown.

[Rayocell]

While you are mostly correct, you cannot say that SH is back to being awesome because both EF and SS will be a lot more mana efficient too. Asuming you use HS every 6 seconds (this is very likely when it scales with haste) you will need 4000 less mp5 which is pretty much equal to 4000 spirit.

Very good point...I didn't see it that way.

We haven't seen the numbers tuning yet, but I doubt they'll touch Guardian at this point

[Dubalicious]

I also find it strange that they would reduce the mana cost of HS, I dont think we have seen a single person in this thread, nor the "part 1" thread mentioning the mana cost of HS.

Not HS directly, but there has been previous mention of expensive spell costs causing us to stack spirit relatively higher than most other healers. Nerfing the mana cost of a spell we use on CD somewhat addresses that. I also think it makes haste a bit more attractive, but I don't think it changes anything significantly overall.

[nightfalls]

Not HS directly, but there has been previous mention of expensive spell costs causing us to stack spirit relatively higher than most other healers. Nerfing the mana cost of a spell we use on CD somewhat addresses that. I also think it makes haste a bit more attractive, but I don't think it changes anything significantly overall.

The change seems largely targeted at proving grounds, you really feel the pain there, and HS is a much larger percentage of your mana expenditure than in raids.

Of course, it also will still serve as a HPM increase in raid (as you mentioned, we spend quite a bit less mana post-change (4,000 MP5 which as Pacer said would probably translate to about 4,000 spirit, since you need to gain a little less than 4,000 static MP5 from spirit alone due to other sources) less.

[Lucyrotten]

So... I did some math. Take it for what's it's worth. In a 7 minute fight it's possible to cast 70 Holy Shocks for a total mana cost of 672,000 mana. A 50% reduction to that is 336,000 mana. On our Ra-den kill this week (which happened to be 7 minutes) I got 330,210 mana back from Seal of Insight, Divine Plea, Cloudburst and Potion of Focus combined.

The mana cost reduction seemed good but I wasn't real sure exactly how good it was. Those numbers are pretty far from insignificant.

Before anyone says it, yes I know we won't be getting SoI mana in 5.4 but Divine Plea will contribute more than on live. It still doesn't invalidate the fact that the mana reduction is a good thing and should help us to not be so spirit dependent going forward.

[Deleted]

Before anyone says it, yes I know we won't be getting SoI mana in 5.4 but Divine Plea will contribute more than on live. It still doesn't invalidate the fact that the mana reduction is a good thing and should help us to not be so spirit dependent going forward.

None is denying that its a good buff. Its just that Holy Shock was already an insanely mana efficient ability.
The issue is simply the mechanics of previous expansion drafted directly in the current expansion without consideration for changes. There is no reason other then borderline bad development that Holy Radiance and Divine Light have a mana cost of 21.6k . Sure Holy Radiance in 4.3 deserved a massive mana cost because it healed for massive amounts and Divine Light was sustainable via int regen and Shard of Woe.

- - - Updated - - -

How was 25m testing today?

http://ptr.wowhead.com/spell=73920 good ability.

From a Paladin perspective,lets be honest did anyone use SS or SH? LoD isn't working out in 25 man because since it hits 6/25 people for too little and it misses the refresh part of 10 man LoD+ the importance of the tier 3 talent is just too high. Even in 10 man where SS is at its strongest there were 2-3 bosses to use it on max. We'll probably soon hear again how they're not happy with how every paladin is going for EF, completely oblivious to the fact that its a side effect of our baseline heals being bad and LoD not being an option for 25 man.

[Euphonious]

I actually did use SS on one of our Protector pulls (we wiped it at like 2%) and I did almost the exact same amount of healing with SS as I did with EF. I was pretty on par with the priests but shamans and druids just crushed me and I eventually would just go oom. 100% Efflo with no mana cost and it can be moved at anytime.. are you kidding me?! Anyways the biggest issue I had was no mana by the end so with the HS change maybe it'll help with that.

[Deleted]

does anyone have logs/meters from the 10 and 25 testing?

It was very laggy and nothing changed since last time, our scaling for 25 still needs to be fixed or other classes need to be toned down.

Did the 25 man raid lag like crazy for anyone else? For me it was insanely low FPS and didn't have time to find the addon causing it in the short testing time. Either way nothing changed our problems on 25 man are more evident than ever. Did more than fine against one of our druids in 10 man even with efflorescence healing the small adds but in 25 tests both our druids were much higher.

As for the HS change dunno why people are complaining that is exactly what we needed. I mean sure they could of just reduced the cost of HR instead of HS to allow us to spam it more during high burst periods but the result is more or less the same. One of our main problems has been that we need to run with much more spirit than other healers and after the HS change we can drop 7k spirit to have close to the same static mana regen or 6k spirit if you include Divine Plea.

[Deleted]

It was very laggy and nothing changed since last time, our scaling for 25 still needs to be fixed or other classes need to be toned down.

Did the 25 man raid lag like crazy for anyone else? For me it was insanely low FPS and didn't have time to find the addon causing it in the short testing time. Either way nothing changed our problems on 25 man are more evident than ever. Did more than fine against one of our druids in 10 man even with efflorescence healing the small adds but in 25 tests both our druids were much higher.

25 man always lags :P, even more then ever with all the heals on pets,cloaks, etc.

As for the HS change dunno why people are complaining that is exactly what we needed. I mean sure they could of just reduced the cost of HR instead of HS to allow us to spam it more during high burst periods but the result is more or less the same. One of our main problems has been that we need to run with much more spirit than other healers and after the HS change we can drop 7k spirit to have close to the same static mana regen or 6k spirit if you include Divine Plea.

Because Holy Shock's cost mana cost was already very low. The result is not more or less the same, to match the output of the other healers(bar shamans which are just broken and druids which are just too high) we need to do 2xHR 1xHS and 3HP Finishers over and over. The 2x 21.6k mana cost remained the same, which will still require a high amount of Spirit to support, significantly higher then the other healers. Sure the entire mana cost does lower but not enough to go 11k spirit instead of 17k.

[Deleted]

Yeah but i mean if they changed the mana cost of HR it would not be reduced by 4.8k, they would of probably reduced it by 2.4k.

[nightfalls]

From a Paladin perspective,lets be honest did anyone use SS or SH? LoD isn't working out in 25 man because since it hits 6/25 people for too little and it misses the refresh part of 10 man LoD+ the importance of the tier 3 talent is just too high. Even in 10 man where SS is at its strongest there were 2-3 bosses to use it on max. We'll probably soon hear again how they're not happy with how every paladin is going for EF, completely oblivious to the fact that its a side effect of our baseline heals being bad and LoD not being an option for 25 man.

SS just doesn't feel viable in 25m with the target limit, mechanics that hit 2 players to allow for it in 10m (2 players + tank) typically hit 5 players or something in 25m; feels that EF will then take top.

Also one thing I happened to notice, trivial as it is, your Beacon heals a lot less with SS/SH than with EF due to LoD's 15% transfer.

[Deleted]

Yeah but i mean if they changed the mana cost of HR it would not be reduced by 4.8k, they would of probably reduced it by 2.4k.

And maybe it would be reduced by 9.6k(ok not rly) . Its all guesses. What matters is HR's mana cost should have been reduced not HS's.

[Lucyrotten]

Pure speculation... but decreasing the mana cost of HS effects all hpallies equally because no matter 10/25/arena/rbg/bg everyone is using it on CD where HR is used in differing amounts based on the content and context.

[PosPosPos]

None is denying that its a good buff. Its just that Holy Shock was already an insanely mana efficient ability.
The issue is simply the mechanics of previous expansion drafted directly in the current expansion without consideration for changes. There is no reason other then borderline bad development that Holy Radiance and Divine Light have a mana cost of 21.6k . Sure Holy Radiance in 4.3 deserved a massive mana cost because it healed for massive amounts and Divine Light was sustainable via int regen and Shard of Woe.

On the bright side, GC said classes which rely more on spirit (namely Holy Paladins) should not be outhealed by classes which don't.

"Ghostcrawler: The less Spirit users should not be able to just stack throughout stats and then outheal the more Spirit users."

So if we push for stronger throughput buffs for HPally rather than more mana efficient heals, we might be able to get somewhere with him.

Or we might simply see other spirit-ignoring classes get their throughput nerfed if we did, who knows.

For me, I am perfectly fine with pally regen, and us stacking more spirit than others, but it should still be able to do competitive HPS, which isn't quite there yet with the current incarnation of our 75 talents.

[Freia]

Do you mean 45 talents? Our 75 talents are fine minus Sanctified Wrath really.

[PosPosPos]

Do you mean 45 talents? Our 75 talents are fine minus Sanctified Wrath really.

Yeap, bad typo on my part. HA/DP are perfectly fine.

Assuming we don't have baseline spell buffs (especially for HRadiance), EF needs a bit more overheal protection. SS should honestly be reworked; a shield-over-time doesn't work as well as a heal-over-time, and SH seems to be a PvP-centric talent so I don't really care about it at this point.

[nightfalls]

So if we push for stronger throughput buffs for HPally rather than more mana efficient heals, we might be able to get somewhere with him.

We probably should be, seems our secondary stats are still relatively mediocre (except Mastery) so dropping Spirit only has so many returns anyway. On the bright side we might be seeing a mastery buff? Who knows?

SH I can't see competing that well with SS/EF just because as you mentioned it's extremely good for PvP and that will keep its raid use limited. Which I'm fine with, having some talents more relegated to ret or PvP roles, so long as our actual raid talents are competitive with other healers.

[edit] Updated OP. Not sure if it's live on 17299, but it's the latest build released so far.