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

[Pasture]

GC is answering tweets atm. Descend on twitter en masse to query Guardian.

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It was a non-trivial source of lag, which isn't acceptable. We lowered the CD to 3 min to help compensate.

So it's just another 3 min cooldown now. Better than the live version I suppose.

[monikasun88]

Well it does interact with other heals rather than single target heals, but 30% is too low if its just an additive amount to the healing we are doing esp since you can achieve the same effect with other CD's.

Live and current PTR are both bad.

Ah that was the part of it I was forgetting. Makes a little more sense now...also just saw in his tweet that the CD was lowered to 3 minutes.

[Deleted]

So it's just another 3 min cooldown now. Better than the live version I suppose.

Not really? The live version is still significantly better in stacked situations.

According to description, GotAK 5.4 does 30% more healing as Light of The Ancient Kings. Remember also this does not benefit from mastery, cloak, beacon so its a lot weaker then a 30% buff to healing.
GotAK Live does 10% of a single target heal to everyone in 10 yards range, no DR applying, encounters like Ra-den, Megaera etc will get a lot more use of GotAK live then 5.4
GOtAK Live is an extraordinary cd on encounters where you need to heal npcs like the Valithria in ICC, Calen in BoT and Tsulong in ToES
GotAK Live can be made a 30 secs 10/20/30/40/50% haste cd while GoTAK 5.4 is 10% strict for 15 seconds.

The only thing that GotAK 5.4 has for itself is that its a 3min cd, so its easier to line it up with damage and other cds. I would greatly prefer live GotAK over the 5.4 joke they're creating.

[xiloclipse]

I'm not going to whine about a minor nerf like this when shammans got a 30% Rain nerf. Considering paladins are already beating/keeping up with shamans in 10mans no complaints from me!

Are you on drugs or just looking at Mal? Maybe your shaman isn't very good, or doesn't have a cloak, idk.

You do realize that this ability is completely out of control, and that the compensation for reverting the target cap was a huge buff in 10m where the target cap wasn't an issue. Nervmind cloak synergy, and even outside of rain they've been doing well.

Hopefully the tool tip for GoAK is wrong or is fixed. If the CD is as it reads, it is just CD bloat even at 3 min. I'd rather have a baseline buff to mastery,
or better an effective CD.

[Pasture]

Not really? The live version is still significantly better in stacked situations.

Well the new version has the benefit of allowing you to actually cast AoE heals when stacked, benefiting from mastery and generating HP. The old version forces you to cast DL / HS when you want to be casting HR. With the 5 min cooldown old Guardian sometimes felt too difficult to know the perfect time to use it. 3 min cooldown feels less onerous for poor usage.

I can understand them dropping the splash because of lag. That said, I don't understand nerfing the duplicate heal down from 100%. That should remain to ensure it still works properly on single target heals.

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Hopefully the tool tip for GoAK is wrong

GC has been tweeting about it. It sounds like it is intended. That said he talks about combating input lag, which nerfing the duplicate heal from 100% to 30% has nothing to do with.....

[Deleted]

Well the new version has the benefit of allowing you to actually cast AoE heals when stacked, benefiting from mastery and generating HP. The old version forces you to cast DL / HS when you want to be casting HR.

Actually the perfect use of the live is

Have 2 Holy Power
Use GoTAK
Use HS
Use EF
HR * many
Refresh Haste buff via EF once every 7 seconds
continue until the 30 seconds expire

Mana is what denies this from working perfectly, as Holy Radiance costs 21.6k mana and you cannot HS as it would proc the Guardian. There is no point where you'd want to cast DL/HS :P

[Peachpies]

You can't directly compare spells across classes, and you are being particularly fallacious in trying to compare GoAK to Tranq/DH/Revival/HTT. Those are the raid cooldowns for their respective specs; GoAK is not and never was designed to be the Paladin raid cooldown. If you really need to compare Tranq/DH/Revival/HTT, you need to compare them to Devo Aura - that is the Paladin raid cooldown. GoAK is a personal throughput cooldown, more along the lines of Power Infusion/Ascendance/Primal Elementalist/TFT, etc. It's completely ridiculous to expect it to be as strong as primary raid cooldowns.

over course you can, it is an extremely simple thing to compare the mana cost, cast time(s), healing done, how it heals (smart heal vs. everyone) and come up with a completely logical comparision between various cooldowns raid or otherwise. But what it will boil down to is that Holy paladin cooldowns are just bad.

[dragconus]

You mean like you are doing in the Shaman forums? Do us all a favor, Tib, and spare us.

If GotAK needs to be more in line with the cooldowns you mentioned then it needs a cooldown closer to those mentioned cooldowns as well as buffs to be in line with those cooldowns.

It's not just that ..if it was stronger then other classes that's because we sank WAY more mana into it. It's not a cast and forget kind of spell where it onlt cost us x amount of base mana.

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Paladin: We suck so bad in 25 man raids . We have almost zero in our toolkit to help us out on this . We need something in that results to some better HPS.

Blizz: Here's a nerf to one of the spells you actually did have . Have a nice day!

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Well the new version has the benefit of allowing you to actually cast AoE heals when stacked, benefiting from mastery and generating HP. The old version forces you to cast DL / HS when you want to be casting HR. With the 5 min cooldown old Guardian sometimes felt too difficult to know the perfect time to use it. 3 min cooldown feels less onerous for poor usage.

I can understand them dropping the splash because of lag. That said, I don't understand nerfing the duplicate heal down from 100%. That should remain to ensure it still works properly on single target heals.

You've never cast an HR with 50% haste buff before have you

[Corrupt]

Maybe they could buff DA now for holy paladins with this nerf to GoAK..

[Jackielope]

Maybe they could buff DA now for holy paladins with this nerf to GoAK..

Devotion Aura isn't exactly having problems being a good CD. Why would it get buffed when it doesn't need it?

[nightfalls]

Devotion Aura isn't exactly having problems being a good CD. Why would it get buffed when it doesn't need it?

Because we "aren't allowed" to compare GoAK to scaled HTT/Tranq/Revival/Hymn so we're "supposed" to compare DA to it instead, and DA does far less effective damage prevention than the healing that the other cooldowns do.

DA is good if it saves a person from getting one-shot by mechanics but as pointed out by Aladya in another thread Blizzard seems unwilling to put mechanics that will actually one-shot your players in the game (read: Animus nerf).

As another major limitation that people forget, HTT, Tranq, Revival, and Hymn mitigate physical AoE damage as well. They, too, have a 40 yard (or higher) range, and some even come with additional effects that are more useful than silence prevention which is even hardcoded not to work (Animus) in PvE.

[Jackielope]

Because we "aren't allowed" to compare GoAK to scaled HTT/Tranq/Revival/Hymn so we're "supposed" to compare DA to it instead, and DA does far less effective damage prevention than the healing that the other cooldowns do.

DA is good if it saves a person from getting one-shot by mechanics but as pointed out by Aladya in another thread Blizzard seems unwilling to put mechanics that will actually one-shot your players in the game (read: Animus nerf).

As another major limitation that people forget, HTT, Tranq, Revival, and Hymn mitigate physical AoE damage as well. They, too, have a 40 yard (or higher) range, and some even come with additional effects that are more useful than silence prevention which is even hardcoded not to work (Animus) in PvE.

Shows how much I've kept up with it. Thanks for clearing it up for me.

I wish I could remember which CD we used for XT's tantrums back in Ulduar since it did mitigate physical damage.

Bit of a shame they're reluctant to put in those 1-shot mechanics. Wasn't it possible to make them so obvious that you had to be blind (or worse since I expect the blind player I heard of a few years ago could probably work with it) to get killed by it if you had any kind of idea what you were doing? Okay, don't put it in LFR since people there are often clueless, but otherwise leave that stuff in because it's an idiot check.

[Deleted]

Bit of a shame they're reluctant to put in those 1-shot mechanics.

It would mean for progress class stacking would be needed to survive those mechanics which is against their design policy.

And bad design anyway.

[nightfalls]

It would mean for progress class stacking would be needed to survive those mechanics which is against their design policy. And bad design anyway.

Right, agreed that DA is fine as a CD (though I still am in the camp that believes it should mitigate physical also) with its %. GoAK was just hit and miss but Tagzz is right, if you used it in a full stack with little to no overheal it would do a lot more than 2m in 25m.

Mine would do a lot more if my computer was able to actually handle mutliple shaman AoE effects, DPS AoE on add spawns, desecrated weapon, and repeated AoE heal spam with GoAK. On PTR servers no less.

[Jackielope]

It would mean for progress class stacking would be needed to survive those mechanics which is against their design policy.

And bad design anyway.

Depends on the ability, though I suppose an ability that the players wouldn't care to try and work through wouldn't be meaningful enough to really warrant being a 1-shot in the first place.

[mofobagins]

I have been following this thread since in the beginning and I have a couple of questions I am hoping to be answered. I dont not believe they have been asked before but i do apologize if they have.

1) How are holy pallies looking in 25man? I know shamans and druids are op right now, but are we far behind priests and monks too? I know 25 heroic hasnt been tested yet so we cant know the real damage of the nerfs yet, but im just curious to know what it is looking like.

2) From what people have posted, it looks like EF will be the way to go for 25man. Just want to double check this is true? If so, now that EF doesnt stack mastery, is it better to stack EFs on the raid or just make sure both tanks and yourself have 3hp EFs and then spam what you can on everyone else?

3) Overall, with the change to DP, change to SoI, lower mana cost of HS, and change to Sanctity of Battle reducing the cd on HS, are we in a better spot for mana and regen then on live? I believe the current PTR build is a little farther ahead than live now but I just want to check.

Thank you.

[Deleted]

Pre-mop we had Aura Mastery which could be used with Devotion Aura for phys damage, .

Yea no.
Aura Mastery- Devotion gave ~2% phys dmg reduction which was so bad it was never really worth it.

Back in Wrath of the Lich King we had a talent in the protection tree(that could be taken by all paladin specs) called Divine Guardian that reduced raid dmg by 30% within 30 yards for the duration of bubble.

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I have been following this thread since in the beginning and I have a couple of questions I am hoping to be answered. I dont not believe they have been asked before but i do apologize if they have.

1) How are holy pallies looking in 25man? I know shamans and druids are op right now, but are we far behind priests and monks too? I know 25 heroic hasnt been tested yet so we cant know the real damage of the nerfs yet, but im just curious to know what it is looking like.

2) From what people have posted, it looks like EF will be the way to go for 25man. Just want to double check this is true? If so, now that EF doesnt stack mastery, is it better to stack EFs on the raid or just make sure both tanks and yourself have 3hp EFs and then spam what you can on everyone else?

3) Overall, with the change to DP, change to SoI, lower mana cost of HS, and change to Sanctity of Battle reducing the cd on HS, are we in a better spot for mana and regen then on live? I believe the current PTR build is a little farther ahead than live now but I just want to check.

Thank you.

1)Horrible. The only fights we were remotely fine on were low damage fights that we had IH for. Compared to Shaman,Druids and Monks were are miles behind. Priests(mostly holy as discs have other purposes) are in the same boat as us, very poor compared to the other 3 healing specs

2)Only EF is 25 man viable @ decent progression. The other 2 talents force you into using LoD which doesn't work in 25 man. Sacred Shield only works in 10 man on encounters that have exactly 3 people taking damage(for example Nazgrim) and SH relies on LoD refreshing IH(which it does in 10 but not in 25)

3)We are in a better spot for regen then on live after the HS change, no doubt about that. We're still the worst healer in terms of mana regen, but we are significantly better then live especially on encounters you cannot melee on.

[Jackielope]

Yea no.
Aura Mastery- Devotion gave ~2% phys dmg reduction which was so bad it was never really worth it.

Back in Wrath of the Lich King we had a talent in the protection tree(that could be taken by all paladin specs) called Divine Guardian that reduced raid dmg by 30% within 30 yards for the duration of bubble.

Now that the numbers and abilities are back in my head, I recall that AM doubled the effect of Devo aura, which meant it was only an extra 6% (or was it 10%?) armor which didn't work against AoE stuff. DG and its boost were the raid CD. I also remember when holy's crit got nerfed (because the Illumination talent gave us back mana on crits) going into Ret was no longer worthwhile for maximum throughput since going into Prot gave an extra 6% healing when Devo Aura was up. Had some people remark "why would I go into prot if I'm not going to be tanking?" I wonder if those are the same people who now don't think haste is a good stat for prot.

[Jackielope]

Lowering the mana cost of HS by 50% takes it from 16% (9600 mana) to 8% (4800 mana). If you were previously casting HS every 7 seconds, what was once 82000ish mana every minute (or ~6857 mana every 5 seconds) becomes ~41000 mana every minute, or ~3428 mana per 5. The difference of course is that ~3428 mana per 5, which equates to roughly 6000 spirit if my math is correct.

Assuming most holy players still stack mastery and ignore haste, the change to SoB will leave most only having at the lowest a 5.5 second CD on HS (about 9% haste or about 3800 haste rating), so assuming an HS every 6 seconds for an entire fight means the expenditure would be 4000 mana per 5 for a difference of ~2857 Mp5 from before, or effectively about 5000 spirit.

Yeah, it's quite a boost, but it's still not like how mana was in Wrath or late Cata.

[dragconus]

Lowering the mana cost of HS by 50% takes it from 16% (9600 mana) to 8% (4800 mana). If you were previously casting HS every 7 seconds, what was once 82000ish mana every minute (or ~6857 mana every 5 seconds) becomes ~41000 mana every minute, or ~3428 mana per 5. The difference of course is that ~3428 mana per 5, which equates to roughly 6000 spirit if my math is correct.

Assuming most holy players still stack mastery and ignore haste, the change to SoB will leave most only having at the lowest a 5.5 second CD on HS (about 9% haste or about 3800 haste rating), so assuming an HS every 6 seconds for an entire fight means the expenditure would be 4000 mana per 5 for a difference of ~2857 Mp5 from before, or effectively about 5000 spirit.

Yeah, it's quite a boost, but it's still not like how mana was in Wrath or late Cata.

Guess every once in awhile we got to take our turn...but our overall build is gonna hurt us next expac if something doesn't change, and I don't see a complete overhaul coming any time soon.

I got a feeling that if EF is the only viable talent in 25's then our stats will prob be better toward a good mix of stats ..Mastery being main of coarse but I believe haste isn't going to be far behind and prob going to need more then just 9% since EF doesn't stack the mastery shield anyway.

Has anyone asked the healing boost be removed from SoI and put into our mastery yet? I'm tired of being the only healer that can't scale better healing through mastery . Even disc has both shield and healing boost. A static 5 % that never changes while everyone else can get more is frustrating .