Where did my Insight go ?

During the Lich King era mana regeneration became more and more a non issue for healers. And even since the 4.0 patch heal spam and overhealing still reign supreme in raids. The healer metagem of choice still sticks to Insightful Earthsiege Diamond though, I would dare to say more by habit and having used it for now two years.
An interesting point to not though is that there is no upgrade to this meta gem in Cataclysm. The insightful gem disappears from the scope entirely. There is a reason for that, and it is very simple. With the increase of healing spell cost from 80 to 85 and the amount of raid damage of most Cataclysm raid fights, an upgraded Insightful gem would be very very overpowered compared to the other meta for healers.
We do not have final studies at lvl 85 for metagems, because the value of each stat (int/crit/haste/...) has not yet been set for every healer class. But some people have already given it a first look and it seems even at lvl 85 the old Insightful Earthsiege Diamond could still be the best healer metagem. I find it a little silly to use an outdated metagem and usually blizzard corrects the values when something like that happens. But ask to shield using tanks, they would tell you they used a BC enchant for their shield during all the LK period.

So don't sell/drop your Insight yet, you could still use them in Cataclysm.

Nothing that great nowadays ...

but I must concede I'm still quite happy of it.


It is the first time I'm able to finish the content of an extension before the next one. A big thanks to all the members of my guild, Skyre Hordalis on Dalaran EU. You all deserve a big big hug for all the nights together in the frozen halls of Icecrown Citadel.

Light of Dawn with more flashy flashy light ?

Two new builds hit the beta servers this week, I'm not going to detail everything but I want to notify you a change for one of the new spells we got with 4.0.1.
For detailed infos you can look at the build 13241 on MMO Champion.

Light of Dawn now uses Holy Power instead of Mana. Now heals up to 5 targets. No longer has a cooldown - Consumes all Holy Power to send a wave of healing energy before you, healing up to 5 of the most injured targets in your party or raid within a 30 yard frontal cone for 1008.96 to 1124.15 per charge of Holy Power.

What does that changes do? Both a buff and a nerf.
No more cooldown is a buff, even if dependent on Holy Power, getting 3 stacks of HP is usually much faster than waiting 30s.
It can now only heal 5 targets, whatever the positioning of your raid. This is clearly intended as a 25-Man raid healing nerf, you will never get more than 5 people in your "aoe cone" in a 10-Man. Blizzard is nerfing most aoe healing recently, especially the paladins which seemed to do too much of their raid healing via aoes (that's a change ...) no surprise LoD finally got the shaft too.

All in all I think that it's an interesting change, at least for 10-Man raiders which will not suffer from the nerf.
Now ... Light of Dawn is a crappy situational heal as it is right now on live. Will it be strong enough with a 3 Holy Power stack to justify its use is to be verified once these changes are live.

Up to now, most paladins are just playing with their "disco ball" and getting silly giggles on vent for using it, it's pimp, it's flashy, it's also near from useless in 10-Man where you will rarely heal even only 3 people with it (but for Festergut perhaps, if you're a lucky healer and sticking to the melee range, usually not the case of a paladin in hard mode).
We'll see what it will be.

Word of Glory and Holy Power stacking

Busy weekend, Halloween and all, not much sleep, not much wow time, but I found enough to do a Word of Glory testing regarding Holy Power.

The Question:

It has been said on very serious sources (like elitist jerks) that Word of Glory healing power is exponential regarding the number of stack of Holy Power you have, hence asking us to only use it with 3 stacks if you don't want to lose serious hps.
So I did two batches of tests, one with a nooby lvl 13 Holy Paladin created for the occasion, and one with my lvl 80 ilevel 264 main. Each character used WoG 5 times with each 1, 2 and 3 HP stack, and I compared the results between each other, and between character to see the influence of the spellpower coefficient part of WoG.

The Result:

WoG healing of mostly linear in the number of HP stack. Which means that a one HP stack WoG is roughly 1/3 of the healing of a 3 HP stack WoG. It seems that with more than 3K spellpower stacking is slightly more interesting, but at low level you really see WoG being linear in the number of HP stacks.

The Conclusion:

So you can use WoG with 1 or 2 Holy Power, the healing is not exponential. Though remember using WoG is a use of a global cooldown too, so a slight loss of hps in the end. But considering it is not exponential, you should not refrain from using it in emergencies when moving, even if not at full Holy Power.