Now it's all about protection paladins, or mostly, and Lay on Hands suddenly becoming too op to live. You can find the changes in the last patch on the PTR on Mmo-champion.
To sum-up here they are :
- Sacred Shield can now only occur every 30 sec. (Up from 6 sec)
- Lay on Hands can no longer be cast on yourself.
- Infusion of Light now also reduces the cooldown on the effect of Sacred Shield by 12/24 sec.
- Aura Mastery now lasts 6 sec. (Down from 10 sec)
- Infusion of Light: This talent now also reduces the cooldown on the effect of Sacred Shield by 12/24 seconds.
It's clear that PvE protection paladins are the most affected by the Sacred Shield & Lay on Hands nerf. Holy Paladins regen via Glyph of Divinity will also be affected when they were casting Lay on Hands on themselves.
And now all paladins can't self heal themselves in arena/bgs via Lay on Hands.
As Rhidach is saying on his blog, I can't eat this change is not mostly arena/pvp related. And it severaly screws-up protection paladins ... and all levelling paladins btw.
It's been several years since we started saying PvE & PvP abilities should just be made different (as it's already the case for potions/food/etc...) so that PvP changes aren't that hard to balance if you take PvE into account (and vice-versa). But no, this is probably too much work ... sigh. Well done Blizzard.
edit :
In this post Ghostcrawler announces they reverted the Lay on Hands change ... but he's not promising anything about them not changing it again. Stay tuned for more paladin nerfing news.
And yes it's qquing but such changes are so deep towards the PvE balance that they can't just go silently. We're learning to play a class, we're fighting for spots in raids, esp as paladins were not good at all during the end of BC, either for tanking or healing or even not that good at dpsing. So we won't let our efforts go to waste without a fight, that's all.
I'm a holy paladin and when they nerfed our crit mana regen in favour of what I thought was shit mp5 regen, I was up in arms. Eventually Blizz balanced it out, sort of. My mana's still manageable - not the same but good enough. In light of this holy paladins were given other things, like DiSac and a renewed beacon.
ReplyDeleteI'm prot everyday for all my dailies and the heroic daily usually. I'm really bothered by how such a thought was proposed and actually posted out public. Lay on hands is such an iconic paladin move. I don't know, I agree with wishing that Blizzard was a little bit more conservative with their class changes.
But really, looking at the trend of changes so far so good.
Hi here, welcome to the blog and thanks for the comment.
ReplyDeleteMy own thoughts are divided on that whole paladin change topic.
I've adapted to the changes of 3.2 for Holy, and I like it better now because the new BoL really makes us shine even on the healing meter, and allows us for a more relaxed raid healing without being too stressed of leaving our tank to die. Mana regen is more a problem than before, probably because I was still nax25 geared, I'm playing a little more lately and finally moved to gear upgrade mindset which helps.
In the end 3.2 wasn't the end of the world, and 3.3 probably won't. My problem is the way they are handling all these nerfs to iconic abilities such as Illumination and now Lay on Hands (I won't say Sacred Shield is iconic because it's really new but it was really good in arenas).
Seriously, Illumination is not worth a 5pts talent now for a 30% mana return. We don't have a choice to regen mana so we have to keep it ... but it sucks hard now.
They obviously have a problem with the old hybrid design of the paladin trees & class in a whole. And they don't want to change it drastically before Cataclysm (let's hope they will for that expansion). So they "patch-up" the class with successions of nerfs & changes & buffs. I don't want one of our trees brought back to lolret as it was before ...
And this quote from GC kind of frightens me:
This is just “don’t nerf me, bro” talk. We have been so gentle with paladin nerfs because we’ve been so concerned with returning to lolret, that paladins as a class are still very powerful in end-game LK in both PvE and PvP. Yes, it’s not fun to be nerfed. We get that. There is very little evidence we have over-nerfed paladins at any time in the past couple of years. There is plenty of evidence that we haven’t nerfed them enough.
I don't like the way they are handling changes for paladins, I guess it won't change before the next expansion, and I really really hope we'll see a whole class revamp then. We need it, they need it, let's pray the Light :p