The recent beta build moves Sheathe of Light down to Tier 9 in the Ret tree, requiring 40 points in the Retribution tree to get it.

Now there's a change I hope doesn't stick. It'd be so nice to have more than one spec option - but apparently Blizzard disagrees.

Edit: and here's another nerf for you: "Holy Guidance (Tier 8 ) now increases spell power by 4/8/12/16/20% of your intellect. (Previously was 7/14/21/28/35%)".

http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?topic=15605.0

Ooh, hello, more nerfs!

"Divine Plea changed so that you gain 25% of your total mana over 10 sec, but the amount healed by your spells is reduced by 50%."

So, it's no longer channelled, but it only gives us half the previous benefit. I assume the healing debuff is while the spell is active - which means you're not going to bother healing during that anyway, as it'd be a waste of mana.

Here's one that will make our tanky brethren unhappy:

"Improved Holy Shield removed from the talent tree. Holy Shield (Tier 7) now has 8 charges, but no longer causes additional threat."

And another: "Improved Retribution Aura moved from Tier 4 to Tier 6." - which will make it a lot harder for Tankadins to get it.

Ah, and one more kick for good measure: all Seal/Judgement direct damage has been reduced.

BoK has been improved though, it's now a Tier 1 Prot talent, so everyone can spec for it fairly easily if they want. And "Benediction (Tier 1) changed to reduce the mana cost of all instant cast spells by 2/4/6/8/10%" which will be nice for Holy Shock and Beacon of Light.

If this was our "second pass", I wish they'd left us alone after the first one.

I'm not really sure the Sheath of Light vs. Beacon of Light would have been much of a choice, especially after the Holy Guidance nerf. Many Paladins already considered the higher tiers of Holy to be fairly weak and unappealing compared to the lower tiers of Retribution, and in light of the change to Holy Guidance, I think Sheath of Light builds would have become the standard.

I'm having a very difficult time understanding Blizzard's statements of how talents are given budgets, similar to items. I mean, let's compare Sheath of Light to Holy Guidance, shall we?

Holy Guidance (Tier 8 Holy) — 5 points
Increases your Spell Power by 4/8/12/16/20% of your Intellect.

Sheath of Light (Tier 9 Retribution) — 3 points
Increases your Spell Power by an amount equal to 10/20/30% of your Attack Power and your critical healing spells heal the target for 20% of the healed amount over 12 seconds.

• Sheath of Light is one tier higher in Retribution than Holy Guidance is in Holy.
  
• Sheath of Light costs 2 fewer talent points than Holy Guidance.
• Sheath of Light effectively converts 60% of your Strength to Spell Power whereas Holy Guidance has 1/3 that effect and is based on your Intellect.
• Since Sheath of Light works on Attack Power, and not Strength directly, the amount of Spell Power gained is actually greater than 60% of your total Strength.
• Sheath of Light has the additional HoT portion, whereas Holy Guidance has nothing extra.

I wanted to see how absurd the comparison was, so I decided to test it in the beta. In healing gear, my stats were the following:

Talent Spec: Untalented | Holy | Retribution

Health: 8797 | 8797 | 8797
Mana: 9708 | 10743 | 9708

Strength: 126 | 126 | 144
Agility: 77 | 77 | 77
Stamina: 530 | 530 | 530
Intellect: 469 | 538 | 469
Spirit: 93 | 93 | 93
Armor: 14443 | 14443 | 14443

Attack Power: 442 | 442 | 478
Melee Haste (not displayed on character sheet): 0% | 0% | 3%
DPS: 72.9 | ? | 81.7
Crit Chance (Melee): 15.08% | 15.08% | 22.08%

Spell Power: 894 | 1001 (1082 healing)* | 1037
Spell Haste (not displayed on character sheet): 0% | 0% | 3%
Crit Chance (Holy Spell): 20.52% | 26.38% (32.38% HL/HS) | 27.52%

*: This discrepancy is caused by Holy Guidance increasing "Bonus Damage" stat by 20% of my total Intellect and my "Bonus Healing" stat by 35% of my total Intellect. I am going to assume the tooltip is correct and that the 35% of Intellect -> healing is an unintentional bug, so as to better fuel my outrage.

None of the above include any proc-based effects. Just basic stats displayed on the character sheet (except for Haste, which isn't displayed because my rating still equals 0).

What is lost going from Holy -> Retribution in healing gear?

1035 mana
69 Intellect
4.86% Spell Crit Chance on Holy Light

What is gained by going from Holy -> Retribution in healing gear?

18 Strength
36 Attack Power
3% Haste (both Melee Haste and Spell Haste)
7% Crit Chance (Melee)
1.14% Crit Chance on all spells except Holy Light
36 Spell Power

That's right. I gain Spell Power, in my Healing gear, by switching to Retribution. Does anyone else think that that is totally and completely wrong?

On a more positive, less ranting note...



The cooldown's also been lowered to 1 minute. So it may give you less mana and gimp your healing, but you can have it active 17% of the time!

Which means 1/6th of the time, our healing is gimped.

Excuse me for not jumping for joy.

One of the disappointments of the move of Sheath is, as stated by Siha, that it tends to push us in the direction of fewer viable builds. It seemed initially that there would be room for Beacon Pallies and Sheath Pallies, but not anymore.

My first reaction to the Holy Guidance nerf was 'Holy S***!' I thought about it a little more, and came to a reasonable conclusion -- given the changes from +healing/+spell damage to just plain +spell power, it made some sense. As I understand it, +spell power roughly splits the difference between the two stats on our current gear. So the more I thought about this change, the more I thought it made sense in Blizzard's grand plan. Just so long as other classes with similar talents see the same kind of reduction!

However, I'm not a numbers guy. Sure, I like to look them a bit, but I certainly can't play around with them the way some guys do, and I don't have a beta key, so I can't test them at all. Seeing Gryph's numbers makes me cringe. I don't want to be like 90% of the paladins who do nothing but cry on the O-boards, but those numbers -- I don't like what I'm seeing.

Our numbers were actually higher than the other classes with similar talents to Holy Guidance. However, most classes have a 2-3 point investment in their version of spiritual focus, so I always figured it evened out.

I am hoping that they moved sheath just to force holy builds to actual test deep holy because so many people were skipping the deep talents for low ret talents. I've been playing with the new talent trees and it's rather depressing. I'm not seeing a whole lot of hybridization options for holy and it's frustrating.

51/5/15 seems to be the most viable (you could try for a DG spec in prot but there's a bunch of wasted mitigation talents to take to get there). I was really hoping that I would have some choices in this expansion, hell, last time I respecced I took Blessed Life just to see if it even worked cause I was pvp'ing, and just wanted something different than 41/20/0.

I am hoping we see some decent changes in deep holy in the next build, because right now it's just terribad, imo. There's no synergy with the top part of the tree, except in Beacon. And with such little flexibility in spec, there's not a lot of synergy with other paladins either.

Holy's poor synergy with other talents is fairly sad. There's Benediction, Conviction, and, well — if you're a Beacon of Light fanboy, I guess you know where you'll be dumping your points.

Holy Paladins will never have the spec flexibility and amount of choices that Holy / Disc priests have, for example. Or, even Restoration / Balance, at this point.

Two viable specs would have been nice, however.

It's also laughable that their idea of changing Blessing of Kings completely boils down to duplicating Nature's Wrath. Which, by the way, was finally condensed and added as a core talent. Why? Because it sucked. For every paladin who specs 5/5 Kings, there will be another inexperienced paladin responding to a king's request with a 3/5 BoK.

It's a terrible implementation, it's unintuitive, and does little to address the fact that Blessing of Kings should have been a core skill a long time ago.

Nuts... just nuts. I really don't see how Divine Plea will be of much use anymore. It's like putting Mortal Strike on your entire raid as soon as you cast it. It almost seems to be more useful as a grinding spell then a end tier raiding/party talent.

The reduction in Holy Guidance, almost seems to have been implemented to combat Sheath of Light/Holy Guidance combos, but then they forgot that they did it and moved Sheath of Light on down the tree therefore nerfing us even further.

I'm guessing that they'll expect the reduced cast times, and reduced mana costs, and increased crit chances to make up for the lack of SpellPower compared to a Ret build.

Okay, I have just done some thinking, and I'm REALLY EXCITED. I'm just writing a blog post about it now, but I'm going to babble at you guys first.

GLYPHS

Non-Scribes will get three Major Glyph slots and three Minors. The top contenders for your Major slots so far are:

Glyph of Flash of Light: Your Flash of Light heals for 50% less initially, but also heals for 200% of its inital effect over 15 sec.
Glyph of Holy Light: Your Holy Light grants 10% of its heal amount to up to 5 friendly targets within 5 yds of the initial target.
Glyph of Lay on Hands: Your Lay on Hands also grants you as much mana as it grants your target. (Note that max rank of Lay on Hands restores 1950 mana.)
Glyph of Seal of Light: While Seal of Light is active, the effect of your healing spells is increased by 5%.
Glyph of Seal of Wisdom: While Seal of Wisdom is active, the cost of your healing spells is reduced by 5%.

My first thought on looking at the FoL glyph was "wow, that's a really dangerous gimp to your healing", but no, wait.

Reducing the upfront output and turning it into a Regrowth-a-like will significantly punish healadins who mindlessly spam Flash of Light every GCD, since you'd be constantly overwriting the HoT portion before it had a chance to tick its full duration.

However:

- Install the FoL, HL and one of the Seal glyphs.
- Put Beacon of Light on your main healing target.
- Use occasional FoLs (no more than 1 per 15 sec) on the tank.
- Use Holy Shocks on the tank as needed to keep health up; a decent crit rate should see plenty of HL instacast procs from Infusion of Light.
- Use FoL on all your other party members, who will get a halfsize upfront heal and a ticking HoT - ALL of which will transfer to your MT.

Which means your tank is going to be getting basically 4 free FoLs ticking on him every 15 seconds, as well as whatever direct healing you give him.

Assuming you throw 5x FoLs every 15 seconds, ie 1 per party member, that's going to give your Beacon of Light recipient the equivalent of 7.5 FoLs (2.5 from the upfront portion of the FoL effect, and a further 5 from the HoT portion). (This is assuming BoL gets tweaked so that it doesn't duplicate healing given directly to the BoL target.) It'll cost you 5 GCDs, ie 7.5 seconds... so effectively, you're cutting your FoLs down to 1 second each, which is a massive increase in HPS. The cost is in making your FoL less useful upfront.

This value drops away sharply if your party isn't taking damage, since overheal sadly doesn't pass through BoL. Blizz seems to adore splash damage, though, and you can bet your bottom dollar that they'll throw in plenty of it if they think all healers are now capable of dealing with it.

Also, all this is assuming that our mana stands up to this kind of battering; we'll need gearing to support it.

Still: the entire scenario has a hell of a lot of potential. If this holds up, we're not going to be two-button healers any more.

(Still disgruntled about what they did to Divine Plea, though. )

You do have a good point. And that somewhat makes me excited as well... but I can only imagine how much those glyphs are going to be running on the AH. Initially, it could be painful with the changes, but with further gear upgrades, and glyphs added, then ya, it could make for some very interesting instance runs (Much unlike me falling asleep during a Mana Tombs run while healing it at 70... and still no wipe happening).

I'm still interested in seeing how the final builds will be laid out, and if the Sheath of Light was purposely moved for testing purposes, or if it's going to stay where it is.

I didn't realize that the Holy Light glyph was only a 5 yard PBAE. That's terrible, on a level that's stunning.

That said, your post does shed some light as to what Blizzard's reasoning behind Beacon may be.

Sheath of Light is irritating, but I wasnt too fond of it to begin with as a holy paladin. But i do agree about having more than one spec option.

Holy guidance I was expecting. The change from +healing to +spell power did that in my view. As for total change, gimps what was known as a shockadin, but probably wont effect healing much.

A change to BoK was needed, but this is just awful.

Holy looks awful right now, the last 3 tiers of talents are blah at best. And I am a fan of Beacon, but getting there wastes alot of talents. Looking at other classes/specs alot of them have really nice talents at that point in thier trees.

I'm just trying to figure out what all this means for us PvP healing paladins...

With things changing about every other day, I honestly have no idea what the implications are going to be. I'm just glad you beta testers are out there doing your thing because lord knows I'm about as confused as you can be at the moment. From what I gather it looks as if we'll finally be able to heal multiple targets and not be so gimped by CC, especially taking into consideration the Glyphs that Siha mentioned above. Them moving sheath of light up a few tiers definitely rained on my parade but I won't claim the sky is falling just yet.

What are y'all's thoughts on Pally PvP viability as the beta stands now?

I think PvP-wise, it'd still be smart to go as far down the Holy tree as to pick up the Infusion of Light, so that you can use Insta-Holy Shocks to get Insta-Holy Lights. This would be awesome in PvP. Then you could either go for survivability with some of the Protection talents, or play around with some damage and (I'm unsure if it's possible, don't have a talent tree in front of me) but go as far as Sheath of Light for that extra boost to your Spellpower.

More in the Ret tree would mean less pole humping, and more face smashing with your mace/sword.

I am wondering if the change in Benediction will apply to the instant cast holy light from the Infusion of Light. It would be nice.

I tested this, currently it does not.

The new Divine Plea is amazing for grinding at least, that much I'll say. I have yet to test it out in an instance/PvP but it seems pretty good right now, even with the 50% hit to healing. It is affected by haste as well (bug?) which is pretty cool though.

Holy is strange at the moment. Devs are saying Bol is "almost too good" it also has a known probable bug that wil nerf it even more when fixed. We do have alternatives to 51 holy. 38/0/33 is a strong Build. It can even be argued that in a return to the old bad mc days you gain utility with 20/0/51 and lose nothing substantial healing wise.

We presumably got our 2nd look with these latest nerfs and while they are talking about 1 or 2 new talents for ret/prot and nerfing bol is this it for holy?

Divine plea is a Holy spell deliberately nerfed for holy... But a Glyph to remove the - healing would be nice.

These changes depressed me all day. With Sheath of Light where it was, healing paladins had at least 3 good talent builds that really customized how they played the game and what their specialty was in terms of healing. There was 51/20/0 - getting Improved Devotion Aura and Divine Guardian. You boost healing on the raid, and reduce damage done to allies when you bubble. There was also 51/0/20, for a crit and judgment (Benediction didn't help instants before this last patch)-focused paladin. Then there was 48/0/23 for a Sheath of Light build, which further emphasized holy crits and turned the paladin into the epitome of tank healing, at the cost of utility and raid healing, but for a lot of people a worthwhile sacrifice. I'd personally argue that 50/21/0 would be good too, but that's only if you don't have enough protection paladins to have Blessing of Sanctuary in the raid every night, and your raid is willing to give up Beacon of Light (which I remain convinced will be nerfed hard once it's tested in a raid environment). This really did hurt the possibilities for paladin healing, and I'm not sure it was needed.

Oh, and by the way, new spells or abilities gained from talent trees should always only have 1 possible point associated with them. If Blizzard wants to provide further "improvements" to them, have trainable ranks that you can learn after picking up the talent. Blessing of Kings is so popular that almost any endgame Holy paladin needed to have it, and the only real benefit to this new incarnation is that now they only have to spend 5 points instead of 11 in protection to get it.