Holy Paladins Fall By Wayside Again in Cataclysm

Healing Hands, the new aoe healing spell for holy paladins in Cataclysm, sucks in its current rendition. Combine that with the planned nerf to Beacon, holy paladins are going to be underpowered, AGAIN.

Thanks Blizz. I know you hate paladins for real now.

Reasons Why Healing Hands SUCK

1. Short range - described like a healing totem and conjecture has been the range is real short. On top of that, it depends on where the casting paladin is standing so our movement/placement is key. Yet, we are one of the least mobile healing classes! WTH, Blizz?!
   
2. Short duration, long CD - It lasts 6 seconds with 15 second CD. So how effective can paladins really be as raid healers then? Sure we have DSac too but so do ret/prot! Why would raid leaders feel compelled to bring holy paladins to the raid?? HL + glyph is better in this regard since there is no CD associated with it.
   
3. Not spec dependent - Correct me if I am wrong but aren't all the paladin specs receiving this? It should scale best as holy but why are prot/ret allowed to aoe heal too? Ret also has Divine Storm so now they have TWO aoe heals. This seems a bit overpowered for PVP purposes as well.
4. Self only - Healing hands basically makes the casting paladin a "beacon of light" (hehe) so fights that means the raid must all spread out, too bad sucker! Also, unless the entire raid stays in 1 spot, our "aoe" healing spell will never be able to hit the entire raid yet the traditional raid healing classes are getting spells that hit the entire raid!

PVE Projections for Holy Paladins in 3.2

Blizzard seems to have made it their policy in WotLK to design fights around stressing healers to the limits of their abilities. As such, mana regeneration is a vital standard to tweak. Mana regen for healers was deemed too high by Blizzard and spirit based regen was famously nerfed.

Now in 3.2, Replenishment will be nerfed. On top of that, holy paladins in specific will be targeted as Illumination and Divine Intellect is nerfed. Holy paladins are therefore facing a 3 pronged attack to their mana regen mechanics.

Currently, holy paladins favor stats like intellect, crit, haste and spell power. Mp5 is a stat that is mostly ignored for reasons I have detailed in previous posts explaining how mana regen works for a holy paladin.

So with the nerfs to Replenishment and our talent buffing our own intellect along with "buffs" to itemization allocation of mp5 on gear, will things change much for holy paladins?

This is my own opinion formed through my experience on the PTR, my current healing experience and my knowledge of my class. So feel free to disagree with me (respectfully if you so please).

PTR 3.2 - More adventures on the PTR

So I can see that my adventures on the PTR got quite a lot of attention and thank you all for commenting. =)

Now, it was my objective to really put myself in healing intense situations when I next logged on the PTR. It was then I discovered something about the PTR servers. Pugging is damn hard even with a much larger pool of puggers with higher gear level (via premades like mine). It doesn't stop people from dying to stupid stuff like void zones or flame walls. -.- It was one of the most difficult Sartharion 1D fights I ever had to heal through.

As you can see, I got more used to the changes but the entire raid took a crap ton of damage. I also think some of the healers weren't that good as some of them consistently ate flame walls. It seemed some of the puggers had no clue about the new T9 gear that they could buy so some of them were handicapped in comparison to me. (Note: I didn't bother censoring as I usually do because this is the PTR, not like it is live servers. If you were one of these puggers and want me to censor, I will gladly do so)

I'm just glad that I restructured my gear and I was almost full T9 or I wouldn't have been able to support my healing done. In general, I felt that haste was much more important than crit so I balanced my gear appropriately (I wasn't even close to 676 soft haste cap). In my opinion, paladins will have to settle for lower crit so they have more haste, spell power and mp5 as well as continuing to gem for maximum intellect. Mana regen is even more important than ever as spell power is easily gotten from the new gear.

PTR 3.2 - Initial Impression for Holy Paladins

I've never been on the PTR before but with the severe mana regen nerfs incoming to holy paladins, I knew that I wanted to experience for myself how bad the nerfs really were before passing judgement.

I wasn't able to copy over my main in time but a premade paladin character was successfully copied over. The paladin got a lot of sweet gear for all 3 specs for PVE with full sets of T8.5 and complete Deadly gear for PVP, pretty nice hook ups.

I wasn't completely happy with how the holy set for the premade paladin turned out but I got to see the Mimiron 25 trinket, score! With that said, the enchants for all the gear was pretty funny such as PVP res enchants for shoulders/head for PVE gear and really weird enchants for the tank set.

The Dilemma of Holy Paladins

So some of you may be wondering what crawled into my pants and died from my previous post.

Well, basically Ghostcrawler got this bright idea that paladins should want mp5 and actively try to stack it as their mana regen. In short, he wants to mess around with the foundations of what makes a holy paladin tick JUST so we won't bitch and complain about the poorly itemized gear (mp5 heavy) in Ulduar (the T8 bonus is still shat, no matter what, compared to T7).

Why am I so mad that Ghostcrawler is mucking around with paladins? There are a couple reasons.

One has to do with the spells that paladins must use to heal and that we are the ONLY healer class STUCK as single target healers. Another reason is to do with the large contrast between our 2 main spells in terms of effectiveness (HPS) and efficiency (mana cost). Another important reason is how our mana regen works despite the claims of Ghostcrawler to the contrary. Lastly, mp5 is an archaic stat that has lousy lousy scaling but is being foisted on us. I will elaborate further on each of these points and then you'll know why I think Ghostcrawler is a f*cking ignoramus.

WARNING LONG WORDY POST AHEAD!

I. How Paladins Heal

Paladins only have ONE way of healing, single target direct heals. We have no AOE heals, no HOTs or smart heals. Anytime we land a heal is usually a result of a conscious decision on our parts to target and cast a spell.

We have 3 spells in our arsenal, which are Flash of Light (FoL), Holy Shock (HS) and Holy Light (HL). HS is on a 6 second CD (or 5 if you glyph for it) and is instant cast but is very mana inefficient as well as unreliable since it is on a CD. That leaves FoL and HL.

Paladin changes for 3.1

Warning! Long entry ahead!

According to wowhead and numerous other sites, Paladins will have many changes. The ones affecting holy paladins are (my comments in red):

Skills:

• Sacred Shield: This effect cannot be cast on more than one friendly target at a time. (NO!!! Not my sacred shield!!! I love love love sacred shield!! I am one unhappy holy paladin -.-)
  
• Forbearance reduced to 2 min duration. (No real difference, just means I can use Hand spells on other people more often. I tend to only use DS on myself. )
• Warriors can now remove Divine Shield on paladins!!! (They are really bent on nerfing PVP for paladins -.- I guess holy paladins are now the new red headed stepchild of Blizzard instead of ret)
  
• Exorcism can now be used on all targets, but is now a guaranteed critical strike vs Undead and Demon type mobs. (This will make questing much faster)
• Hand of Sacrifice: The damage transferred by this ability is now capped by the Paladin’s health. (I guess this is to prevent people from taking advantage of this so that content won't be too easy, especially in combination with the next change)
• Auras will now persist through death and affect a 40 yard radius. (Since aura mastery got changed, about time they made our auras baseline 40 yards!)