So, beta build 9014 landed on us overnight, and the paladin forums exploded in a storm of weeping – and pretty justified, too, I feel. Heck, people were upset enough that the main forum thread about it grew 16 pages overnight.
The two key changes were:
- Infusion of Light no longer gives instant Holy Lights. Instead, it reduces cast time by 1 second.
- Divine Plea is now confirmed to return 25% of mana, last 15 seconds, and reduce healing by 100% while active.
Infusion of Light is still nerfed – which is very disappointing, because it was the only talent that really felt fun – but Ghostcrawler has just posted that Divine Plea will be changed to a 20% healing debuff, instead of 100%, but DP will now be dispellable to compensate for it which seems like a pretty good tradeoff to me.
Somehow I managed to get the first response on the thread, but as I posted further down, I think it’s a pretty smart change.
Until now, the premiere healing spec for paladins post-3.0 has been a Holy/Ret hybrid build, 37/0/34, which goes deep enough in Holy to get Infusion of Light and deep enough in Ret to get Judgements of the Wise. This is largely because anything deeper in Holy is fairly average – the 51-point talent, Beacon of Light, is situationally groovy but not a must-have (it’s hideously expensive, and doesn’t proc off overheal), and everything between Infusion of Light and Beacon of Light ranges from ho-hum (Divine Illumination) to downright awful (Sacred Cleansing).
Making Divine Plea suddenly pretty awesome for healadins is a very smart choice. It means we’ll be regenning a decent chunk of mana in PvE every minute. Which means we don’t feel compelled to take JotW any more, because we won’t have mana woes that necessitate it. Which means we’re more likely to go deeper in Holy to take Beacon of Light (or Bacon of Light, as Ghostcrawler calls it) because JotW doesn’t look so ridiculously awesome next to it any more.
I was really looking forward to instant Holy Lights, especially for PvP. Dunno whether it was considered OP and other classes called for it to be nerfed, but it makes spamming Holy Shock off every cooldown less appealing now :(
The Divine Plea change (yet again) to 25% sure is nice. To be honest, I wouldn’t have minded a 100% healing penalty if it had a 10 second duration, but 15 seconds is far too long, especially when you are chain pulling in an instance or raid.
Thanks for the news. I was really disappointed by the 100% healing debuff on Divine Plea. Very good news that it can now be a regular addition to our normal healing routine on long boss fights.
I was actually wondering how many people saw GC’s Bacon of Light gaffe. Good to hear though, as I thought the 100% healing reduction was incredibly stiff.
Honestly, I didn’t really care about the Divine Plea, but I’m still very disappointed in what happened to Infusion of Light. That looked to be the big spec-defining talent for the later 10 points of Holy. Now, for that 1 second reduction…it doesn’t really seem worth it to put points into deep Holy now.
@Treylah – I don’t think it’s a gaffe; she’s called it Bacon a number of times in the past. :)
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@Revaan – I agree. I was really looking forward to the fun of IoL; now it’s just another Light’s Grace procced a different way. Ho-hum. I’m hoping they reimplement it but make it an instant FoL, not HL – that’d be okay.
The state of the class is still horribly broken. With more than 80 days of /played on my main paladin healer, I take it personally.
One thing that you didn’t mention was the change to Judgements of the Wise, this has been ‘nerfed’ to now give 33% of BASE mana making it better for ret and worse for everyone else (and prob not worth the 33 ret points needed).
You know that the picture of the Pally looks like its giving us the finger? Don’t know if that was intentional, but its perfect :)
The nerf to Infusion of Light is dissapointing because of how long they took to do it. Why change it so late in the beta when it existed from the start? It was kinda OP, but it was awesome and fun.
I’m just soooo glad that Divine Plea is changed, and to be even better than before. I couldn’t care about it being dispellable as I prefer PvE, and when I play PvP I play more casually and in BG.
@Korath – Yeah, I didn’t mention it as it’s a Ret changed – but it does affect us, indeed.
That said, I think it’s still worth the points – most people are going to be putting 18+ points into Ret anyway for the 8% crit, and even 33% of base mana is going to be 974 mana returned at 70 (though you can’t get IoL/JotW until 78) and 1450 mana returned at 80. Nothing to sneeze at, for the cost of a Judgement’s mana and a GCD.
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However, with the new DP I don’t expect mana to be a huge issue any more – still requiring management, sure, but not totally starving – so JotW looks a lot less attractive by comparison.
@Siha – You are quite correct I didn’t think about the +8% crit. I suppose there actually isn’t any reason to go deeper than 5 points into Prot (kings) anymore so those extra points have to go somewhere :)
Meh I only have a Tankadin & Retadin (healer is a resto shammy) so overall the changes to divine plea are all good :D
I called it Bacon of Light First I swear! Its been my away message since Beacon was announced. ;]
In a way I’m glad I don’t have access to the Beta, you all have gotten to mess around with awesome spells like Infusion, and when they get nerfed you feel like you lost something. Where as I will probably be super stoked by what ever I get in Live. Thanks for going through the emotional rollercoaster for us!
After reading a lot of forum posts today I feel pretty sad for my holy pally. It just shows the state the holy tree is at when you see people discussing to go 28/0/43, 28/43/0 or 15/43/13. And tbh, if no major changes to deep holy are incoming I see myself either speccing 28/0/43 or 28/43 for either an offensive healer with quite some utility or a defensive caster with huge crits (the sta->sd and +30% crit heals are nice).
It has the nice side effect that leveling is a lot faster and you can heal/dps/tank with a gear swap.
Most hilarious thing I have seen is the suggestion to go 20/0/51 and go for hunter mail with int, ap and crit on it for a true hibrid.