Feedback about Holy at 80, and beyond.

I won't hide it, Holy right now is crap. Perhaps I'm a bit strong with this word, but that's what I feel when I look at a recount after a raiding night. Sure most of the time we're doing fine, but I'm raiding with 2 very good druids and they're doing like 85% of the healing (call me a bad healer if you want, I know what I'm doing).

Before 4.0.1 I was confident in my healing, even when I wasn't pushing the numbers. I knew that I could do it and that if it was needed I could jump into power healing mode and start keeping all our 10-Man raid up for one minute or two just spamming Holy Light like crazy with my Beacon on our tank. None would die as long as I got enough mana, and I was playing conservatively. That saved us on Lich King, and I was proud of that.

Now I'm crap on numbers, but the sad part is that I'm not better than other healers on the mana side, unless I'm just using ToR, which seriously can't keep a tank/raid up by itself. If I need to start spamming Divine Light ... well things start to go wrong. My DL cost more than a holy priest Greater Heal and heals for seriously less at equal spellpower. We don't have any raid healing tool at 80, no more Sacred Shield & hot, no more judgement healing. Light of Dawn is cute but crap and way too situational.

That can sound like whining, and it probably is. But I'm dead serious on it, I can't support my raid anymore, or at least not enough to justify a healer spot on hard modes.

What about the future for Holy Paladins?

So I'm considering going ret until Cataclsym, at least I can perhaps do enough dps to be useful. But what about the future of pally healing?
Some perhaps remember how prot paladins were during most of TBC, and how holy paladins were during half of it, after being op at start. The answer for me is simple, balance is hard to achieve and when a class get shafted it often last for several months. Be it bad design, or a producer choice to balance the number of players on that specific class, it's not a fun spot to be in.
And I don't want to be playing a useless class/spec when we rush for 85 and raiding during Cataclysm, I don't have the time needed to rush two characters, so I need to pick-up the right healing class before Cataclysm goes live.

To answer that question I looked into how holy paladins are doing during the first raids that started this weekend on the Beta test realms. You can find very good videos on MMO Champion, I'm going to advise you two of them, that are being casted by holy paladins. You can watch them on Youtube following these links:
Paragon vs Halfus Wyrmbreaker
Paragon vs Chimaeron
I also read the elitist jerks holy paladin forum (always a good source of up-to-date information).

The answer is: Holy Paladins are doing great at lvl 85. Most 25-Man raids seem to be using something like 5-6 healers, 2 of them being Holy Paladins which are most of the time topping the meters. So what? Let's rejoice?

Not so fast my friends. If you look at the recount, and the timing of the heals, the holy paladins are using a pure ToR rotation with Light of Down and Holy Radiance inserted during raid damage periods. These raid damage timings are big, often requiring the healers to top the whole raid from 5% to 100% in about 30s. and if you look at the recounts, the paladins are far behind until these huge raid damage happen. So why are they topping the meters, because of Holy Radiance, our new raid healing spell that we won't get before Cataclysm.

Yes it seems HR is too strong, but what would they be without it, because they are clearly only helping on the raid/tank with a ToR rotation beside using HR and that is not pulling the numbers.
Now let us read the last comment of Blizzard after these first raid tests:

Yes, we buffed the 5 paladin direct heals (FoL, HL, DL, HS, WoG). This is a change for both level 80 and 85. We are going to tone down Holy Radiance as I described in the other thread. It can be powerful without being 75% of paladin healing.

You can read the two blue posts about the state of Holy Paladins (look for the 18/10 post) and the hotfix deployed thanks to Boubouille blue tracker.

So the devs decided to nerf Holy Radiance, which will bring the paladins probably way lower than what you can see on the two raids I invited you to watch. The questions for me are: will the buffs to our direct heals be enough to keep us competitive at 85, and give us back a healer spot at 80 in any serious raid encounter?

I'll keep looking at raid reports/logs/videos of the beta and try to analyze the buffs comparing them to the "old number" that you can find on Ophelie's blog (thx Ophelie ^^).
I'm kind of sad to say it, but I'm seriously considering switching class for the launch of Cataclysm if Holy Paladins can't be effective healers, at least at 85.

Cataclysm expected for December 7th!

There is another build on the beta test servers, Cataclysm Beta - Build 13117. This one doesn't change much for Holy Paladins.
I was kind of sad to see the global nerf to resto druids, I hope it is a balance change and indicates they were a bit too high, as they have already been strongly nerfed by the change of most of their core talents as our mana regen has been savagely put "To The Ground Baby" ...
Retribution paladins also see the increase of Two-Handed Weapon Specialization from 10% to 20%. It is good for them, but indicates that they were probably very low on the dps charts, I'll probably go ret for questing, I hope it won't be too bad ^^

But the new build is not the big news of today. Cataclysm will hit live on the 7th of December according to MMO Champion and some clever datacrossing. Thx Boubouille, you're as always, on the top of news.

More Cataclysm Beta and news

Heyla here, not posted for some time, holidays and raiding have more or less taken all my time (and did you say Starcraft 2, noooo, sure not ^^).

On the front of Paladin updates in the beta I would advise you to follow the news on Righteous Defense by Rhidach. A lot of changes happened for paladins in the last builds, and nothing is final yet (far from it). The developers decided to introduce a new mechanic for us, called Holy Power, that will stack with some abilities (up to 3) and will allow us to empower some existing abilities or use new ones. I am partly excited by this news, some change to our usual pretty lame gameplay can be fun, but I'm really not in line with some of the current builds for that, we'll see how it goes. Go visit Rhidach site for details :)

Raid news, my guild has finally downed the Lich King in 10 man first time without me (my computer having been dead for 2 weeks) and the second time with me. Nothing great now I would agree but raiding attendance during the holidays is always scarce and it is nice to have been able to keep at it and finally reach our goal: which was going into heroic ICC. The 3 first bosses are already down in heroic, we're currently working on Saurfang heroic who's a bad ass :)

I must say that heroic really has revived my interest for ICC, the normal modes until the Lich Kings were really becoming lazy farming. Heroic bosses are much much more interesting, at least for some of them. They are less forgiving to blunders, which is kind of what I like in raids.

Oh and if you are one of the few to not have played Starcraft 2 already ... it's great :P
The campaign is the best solo play for a rts game I've ever played (and I've played a lot of them). I liked the strategy aspect of the last Dawn of War campaign, but Starcraft 2 really get you into the "story" of the campaign, and even if the mission choices are kind of irrelevant, it's still nice to chose the order in which you play them.
I've not started multiplayer yet, or I won't have any time left for raiding :)

On these few words, see you, have fun, and I'll try to finish my healing through ICC articles now that I've got enough experience on the fights.

New Cataclysm Beta, New Paladin Goodness

A new build of the Cataclysm beta has hit the test realms and Boubouille at MMO Champion has given us the updates on all abilities and talent trees.
You can find all the update for paladins with abilities and talent trees on this page.

Main change for Holy Paladins is the healing spells we will have at our disposal:

• Holy Light ( lvl5)

Heals a friendly target for 3880.99 to 4324.07.
6% of base mana, 40 yd range, 3 sec cast

• Flash of Light (lvl16)

Heals a friendly target for 4830.14 to 5419.5.
27% of base mana, 40 yd range, 1.5 sec cast

• Divine Light (holy talent tier 3)

Heals a friendly target for 7761.99 to 8648.14.
30% of base mana, 40 yd range, 2.5 sec cast

• Holy Shock (lvl 40)

Blasts the target with Holy energy, causing 1399.45 to 1516.07 Holy damage to an enemy, or 3938.43 to 4266.63 healing to an ally.
8% of base mana, 20/40 yd range, Instant cast, 6 sec cooldown


So Holy Paladins are now on the same model as priests, we have a medium relatively slow and mana efficient heal (Holy Light), a fast but very costly heal (Flash of Light) and a slow costly but big heal (Divine Light). We still keep our instant heal that will be the same size as a Holy Light for nearly the same price (that makes it very very valuable mana wise especially with Holy Mending that adds a 15% hot on the target of Holy Shock at lvl 80+).

These are the major changes to our gameplay that I see. Even if the holy talent tree has changed a lot the core talents are still here and the gameplay should be relatively unchanged.
As for the fears we had about BoL, it is now only duplicating Holy Light and Holy Shock ... as I see them as our two spam heals I don't think it'll be too bad.

See you later for more comments on cataclysm holy when more news come out.