Let's Talk about HolyFollow

I think some of the High end Holy talents outweigh that Ret one. I mean a 20 yard range on judgements and Judgements giving you 10% haste? Seems pretty damn good.

With a 47/24 build here, a Holy Paladin can get all of the necessary talents in holy. Here is what they lose:

6% spell haste on judgements
Beacon of light


Here is what they can gain:
Free Renews on crit heals
The Retribution Aura buff for DPSers (w/Improved for the tank, on top of the spell power we will already have, this can be a great threat increase for any tank)

Link Here:
47/0/24

First, why have a healing bonus half way down the Ret tree? So that Healadins don't get BoK, Imp RF, or Guardian's Favor anymore? I REALLY hope this changes.

Beacon of Light? Complete junk. Not itemized for Paladin healing at all. I misread this talent. It is actually pretty awesome, and will help out significantly. As long as it gets good healing coefficient, it can be awesome when dealing with AoE. I'd rather get a better single target healing talent, but you can't have everything.

Infusion of Light? Also pretty bad. So my 2 sec auto-crit Holy Light is now a mana wasting 1.5 sec non autocrit Holy Light + auto-crit Holy Shock. Benefits? VERY limited. If we used Holy Shock more often, then this might be more viable. But really, the only time one would use this is:

Divine Favor
Holy Shock
1.5s CD
Instant Holy Light

I'd rather cast:

Divine Favor
Holy Light

It costs a lot less mana, heals for more, and is only 0.5 seconds longer to cast.

If you are randomly casting Holy Shock and hoping for a crit so that you can cast Holy Light 1.5 seconds later, then you will be oom.

Now, if the talent would give you an auto crit/auto cast Holy Light.....then we can talk :)

Enlightened Judgements - increasing Judgement range to 20 yds. hmmmm. Not sure what to make of this yet. I think it can actually be quite useful to judge Light on mob. But you have to keep refreshing it unless you have a Ret Pally refreshing it. Also, paired with Judgement of the Pure (judgement increases spell haste), this could be good.

Sacrerd Cleansing - I do like this one. Cleanse is a PITA becuase I'd rather be casting heals. Anything to help out is good in my book. Also, when it says resistance to magic by 30%. Is that all magic, or only magic debuffs? This could be OP... :)

Prot Talents: Divine Guardian? How often will a tank be bubbled? Did they change the bubble mechanic? I can see this for PvP, but pretty useless in PvE.



Edited, Jul 18th 2008 1:51pm by YJMark

Honestly, I only used Imp RF for the damage reduction (i.e. more survivability). The threat increase was not much since our heals generate such little threat anyway.

Still, I may have sounded like a pessimist, but I am REALLY excited to try these new talents out. I'm sure I'm missing something completely since Blizz is putting a lot of effort into our class.

We don't use Holy Shock as a heal now because we really can't. The changes, however, may well make it useful. As of now, I'm leaning towards the Sheath of Light spec. I'll miss Kings and the reduced cooldown on BoP. To be honest, however, the rearrangement of talents in the Protection tree doesn't thrill me as much for a Holy as they do now. The Ret tree looks like it has some really interesting synergy with Holy.

Beacon of Light is nice, but with a 10-yard radius, it really requires the party/raid to bunch up. Maybe the new dungeons/raids will require this more, but there's only a few fights I've experienced so far where you really want your party to group up. Nice I suppose if you take 4 melee fighters into an instance!

Rather than run off right to Northrend, I suspect my first action when Wrath hits the streets will be to do a bunch SSO dailies and see how the new stuff works in practice (unless, of course, my guild starts hitting me up to start instancing -- it's going to be strange trying to keep pace again). I expect there will be a lot of gold spent speccing and respeccing and respeccing until we figure out how things will work best for us.

just to be a pain... 0.3*0.6 does not equal 0.20.... close, but its 0.18. 18% increase in healing efficiency still isn't bad. assuming further crits don't cancel out your initial HoT this would be nice. if my next crit overwrites my last HoT then the efficiency of this goes down drastically. assuming 30% crit my next HL crit should be on average 8.33 seconds later if i'm spamming HL. if that HoT overwrites the last one i only got just over half my HoT.... so closer to 9-10% increase in effeciency. if i'm in charge of healing one person (ie tank) which pallies often are. this isn't bad still. a free HoT is a free HoT. however, BoL may not crit, but the HoT from that in 10 man raids (large part of WotLK) will hit the 2 tanks and any rogues, dps warriors, ret pallies, feral dps druids, enh shamans, pets, and any other melee that my sad brain is forgetting about. on bosses with larger bases it may just be on the tanks or the dps if being behind the boss means being farther than 10yards. either way, many raid groups/fights have 2-4 melee nearby. while not everyone in range will be getting hit constantly, it can ease the strain on aoe fights. on non-aoe fights this will be less useful of course. but this aoe HoT with 10% spell haste may be more useful in some situations than a HoT that only half finishes.

if SoL works to affect healing spellpower and the HoTs stack, then i'd have to say 18% more efficiency for my heals would be wonderful and worth skipping the 10% faster heals and BoL from the holy tree. if they don't stack and the spellpower doesn't affect healing (both of which i've heard were currently true) then 9-10% increased efficiency probably won't be worth it compared to 10% faster heals and an aoe HoT.

has anyone heard it SoL is going to be fixed to affect healing spellpower and to stack HoTs?

and capjack, my understanding is they're moving away from Rets gearing for spelldamage. CS no longer benefits from spelldamage. divine storm probably won't. unless they change it though SoC, JoC, SoB/M, JoB/M, Hammer of Wrath, Consecration, Ret Aura, Exocism, Holy Wrath (and maybe some others i'm forgetting) all benefit from spelldamage. with the exception of SoC/JoC all of these can be used by any pally. even if SoC/JoC was changed to benefit only from AP, the rest of these would still benefit from spellpower or you'd be gimping prot/holy's ability to deal damage and quest or tank. SoL allows a ret to gear for APand still have all these abilities that used to not scale with our gear scale now. its an awesome talent for allowing every damaging ability scale rather than become obsolete.