Healing in 3.2Follow

I read Bodhi's thread about the new deal with 3.2. Last night in Nax25 and Nax10 i was 3rd and 2nd on heals respectively with some people more geared than I (don't laugh at the druid gear, it was better than quest greens!) Also, my neck is showing up as a dps caster piece from OS 10 when I replaced it with an actual healing neck in Nax last night.

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Shattered+Hand&n=Cainmarxanon

So what were the changes made to Beacon? It seems the same to me. Last night we didn't really have any healing assignments, so I just kept beacon and SS on the tank and spam FoL'd on raid, and during things like Patch i just kept SS on one tank and beacon on the other and did FoL with the occasional HS if there was a spike.

-Should I be putting SS and beacon on the same target? I don't know if my FoLs on other targets proc the 12 second HoT on the Beacon even if they have SS.

-Something weird is going on with my heals, because sometimes I crit flash for 2800, and sometimes 4800. My holy lights only heal about 9k crit, but during Razuv while our tanks were sucking at taunting, I was popping AW and my Winged Talisman and critting 16-18k if I remember correctly. (This isn't due to the fact that a crit heal on a beacon target can crit twice.)

-Has anyone else noticed Infusion of Light not proccing all the time? It only happened 50% or so of my crit HS.

-My holy shocks have also been critting 2800 and 4800.

-I will have to test this, but it seemed like all of my heals were crit heals when compared to 3.1. I went an entire boss fight where every heal crit if I remember correctly.

-Did holy pallies receive a nerf, a buff, or just a change in utility? It is too early in the patch for me to know because I was healing with different healers than usual, but it seemed like my heals went up and my mana conservation went up even though all my heals are doing way less.

-On a different note, why the heck does all the 3.2 plate dps gear have arpen? Even the t9 chest for ret pallies has arpen, and I thought that crit/haste/str are much better stats.

Edited, Aug 7th 2009 3:24pm by morgorg

- As the other poster said, Beacon now transmits overheal. Previously, it was dangerous to use Beacon to raid heal while responsible for the tank because if you got sniped or if the raid was taking trivial damage, only the effective heal got copied. Now you can watch the tank, but queue up the appropriate the appropriate heal for her on a different target instead, and count on the tank getting the full effect regardless of how much the raid target gets. This means that you never have to actually directly heal the tank unless it is an emergency where the tank is in danger of being one-shot and you can't risk the lag inherent in the Beacon copy.

- Beacon heals don't trigger the FLoT. Only a FL targeted at someone with SS. Doesn't have to be yours, and unlike the SS crit effect, it doesn't have to be proccing at the time.

- Variation in crits probably due to random effects - sometimes having +healing multipliers (e.g. Divinity) and sometimes not, or sometimes having +SP buffs/debuffs (e.g. Mortal Strike and like effects) and sometimes not.

- Another possibility is that your scrolling combat text was hosed with the patch. A friend of mine mentioned that on patch day, Parrot was reporting that all his incoming heals crit on him.

- Overall, it's probably just a change. Regen got nerfed, but even we will admit it needed to be. Beacon got buffed to the point where it will probably be tuned back at some point. If you consider the FLoT as a buff to SS, rather than to FoL, the mitigation becomes quite nice. To make full use of how things are now, we'll probably have to change our style, but it's good to have a shakeup from time to time.

- As for ArPen, Blizzard explicitly stated that they don't want to put optimal gear out there. They want gearing to be a choice between viable alternatives. Not to mention that DPS plate is shared, and there are, I believe, warrior specs that like ArPen much more than Retadins do. Same with haste.

Thanks ElMuneco.

Yeah, it turned out my MSBT was just reporting everything helpful I did as a crit. I was kinda dumb not to notice... thanks for the great response!