I think everyone would like to know if (this goes for 2 other heal classes aswell) the graphics on the heal spells itself could have another look taken at, Flash of Light and Holy Light are identical, same goes for Healing Wave and Lesser healing wave, Regrowth and Healing Touch, spells like Holy Shock dont even do anything, you wouldnt be able to see if it landed without the green Combat Text.
It's like fireball and frostbolt having the same animation, it just feels very cheap and belongs more in the days of Molten Core rather then in the super awesome Ulduar.


-Secondly there has been some changes announced to both holy and ret, when will these happen? Mainly the big change GC has been talking about to change illumination and int will require a almost complete regear, regem and enchant overhaul, not to mention eating runed orbs from crafted mail stuffs (atm im holding back) and other items we will nab away from others, (IE, should i take Hard Vezax's crit mace over our imba elesham, or Hard Hodir's mp5 over our other healers,as knowing our luck we wont see much drop).
The ret change i'm personally hoping to bleed over to the prot and holy side aswell to make the entire class less dull and more interesting to play with.


-Why on earth are the librams from Arena different then we can get from Ulduar, i don't enjoy the arena and don't want to play it anymore, why are we forced todo so?


-What kind of new heals is being looked at, everyone is dying to know! I've been thinking about a new heal or a way to change paladins alot, but it's hard to fit one in without making it the a clone of another heal so one way other the other it will be like that. But we need something regardless, especially if we wont be able to spam HL as much anymore we will lean towards stacking SP and neglect any other regen stat and spam FoL, again not because we want to, but because we have to. There are no others options and we need something new to ever make it work. Personally, im not looking forward to going back to the SWP paladin.


-The other thing im worried about is the 2p t8 bonus, its very counter productive (after all you get a nice instant FoL after it) to its own effect wich is relative to the damage quite weak already.
Is this being looked into? Wouldn't a living seed like effect be better, or "Your holy shock heals for 25% more when target is below 50%" ? Is its really healing enough for such a setbonus in relation to the damage inc and other bonusses?


-Last.....when, Pegasus? ;-]

Well, I'm a holy paladin and I don't hate my class at all. I have thoroughly enjoyed playing holy for well over two years now in PvE, having changed from playing a resto shaman since vanilla wow.
I do have a few questions about our abilities, and I promise none of these are 'please give us hots and aoe heals'

You have already stated that intellect and crit stacking, while holy light spamming is not very fun, and I appreciate that you have picked up on this, as it has led to a very lazy playstyle, which is far from fun.
Would you consider changing our crit benefits, for instance, lowering illumination mana return, and giving us a talent similar to a Priest's 'Holy Concentration'? (but hopefully working with mp5 rather than spirit)

Are there any plans to make us a little bit more mobile during fights, without just giving us instant hots or instant aoe spells? Maybe working Hand of Freedom into healing, so that we can heal easier on the move while we have hand of freedom up on ourselves, or something like this?

To move away from this holy light spamming, I would really like to see glyph of holy light removed, and its benefits given to glyph of holy shock. This would stop the spamming as holy shock is on a 6sec cooldown, maybe even increase the range of the aoe heal, or make its aoe a smart heal?

I also really like the use of Hand of Sacrifice and Divine Sacrifice since WotLK has launched. My only gripe is that in those fights where it is absolutely neccesary, like Sartharion, Mimiron, Vezax, etc, we have to time it with our bubble. I think that this constricts us, mainly because we're screwed if we've had to use our bubble already earlier in the fight. what I'm asking is, if there are any plans to put a little more imagination into these talents so that we don't HAVE to bubble and use them on those fights?

Aura mastery is quite an intriguing mechanic, and currently only has a useful home in PVP. Obviously there are times in raid content where it is useful, but its never absolutely necessary.
Do you have any plans to add more content in PvE where having aura mastery in our builds is helpful, or maybe changing it slightly to give us a reason to use it?

I have really enjoyed using Beacon of Light since the release of WotLK. Its a clever mechanic, and very useful at certain times. Would you ever consider drastically lowering the amount of mana it costs to cast it, and at the same time drastically lowering its duration? I understand that this could possibly make it overpowered, so maybe not a good idea. However, it would be great to see BoL be something a little more usefull that just a situational tool.

At the moment, talents like Holy guidance, holy power and sanctified light are very basic and quite out dated. They are talents that are purely aimed at increasing our base stats. Have you ever considered adding something a bit more exciting to these talents? I don't think that there is anything wrong with these talents at all, but they have remained the same for so long (obviously because they work, when something aint broke, dont fix it, comes to mind), but since we can ask questions, I was wondering whether it had ever come up in your 'buzz sessions' to change these slightly to make them a little bit more 'sexy'?

Our Blessed life talent is something that has always confused me. It automatically seems like a PvP talent, but over the years, I only remember a few builds which have ever taken it, and they haven't exactly been great pvp builds. Recently, I've seen a few protection heavy holy builds using this talent in pve, but its always been a grey talent in my holy builds. any plans on turning this into something more useful? Or putting it deep into prot or ret trees where it would be more useful and giving us something else?

A final question about librams. In WotLK I have used the same libram since two days after I reached level 80. There still aren't any others better than the libram of renewal for a holy paladin. I've picked up the deadly gladiators libram also, just in case I need to use it at any point.
I remember having the same issue in TBC. Through TBC, I think I only upgraded my libram once after reaching level 70, where as I changed my helm at least 5 or 6 times, my gloves at least 5 or 6 times, my bracers at least 5 or 6 times, I think you see where I'm going with this.

I think thats about it, thanks for reading :)

Hello blizzard :)

Question :

1. When are you going to make our librams visible?

2. We are able summon a charger as our ground mount, will we ever be able to summon a paladin unique flying mount, gold plated gryphon or archangel wings for example?

3. Can we have melee strikes animation for hammer if righteousness(360 twist, that human model has on certain melee abilities) and other similar spells like avengers shield, that require melee weapon or a shield to cast?

4. Robe type plate armor is very cool and suits paladin since he is a holy knight/warrior priest, do you plan on holding to this style direction for all our future armor set designs?

First of all Paladin is a fun class to play, I like the Idea of a holy knight weilding its powers of the light to heal his allies in battle. That's why I play holy in PvP but the truth is I feel useless in PvP battles My heals take long to cast and therefore are easely countered with tons of abilities wielded by other players

---

Q u o t e:
Aura mastery is quite an intriguing mechanic, and currently only has a useful home in PVP.

---

This is wrong, true it helps for 10 secs if you pop it right, dont get feared, death gripped, stunned, charged, etc (tons of other spells and talents can still get you on this point). what we need is some changes that makes us counter this, we dont have something to protect us during CC spells, except for divine shield with 5 min CD and if there's a shaman or priest in the fight you can forget your bubble -Poof- dispel!

also counterspell gee >_<, ever seen you entire hotbar go in CD because you only got one school of magic!

what we need is for example something similar as warriors and hunters have, the abilities when they don't feel pity, remorse and fear can't be stopped unless killed thingie, so that we have the abilitie to counter a storm of interrupt and silence effects (and their are alot of those) when healing In PvP because at this point we are a joke! a priest and DRUID (ever tried to counterspell a healer who only works with instant casts? and IF they ever got silenced or stunned their HoT's keep going) do the job they got more survavibilitie in PvP then an armoured paladin

Maybe it would also be nice to expand illumination for holy shock on enemies too so we can save some manna in battles since it's our only spell worth throwing at an enemy, we are a melee class but that feeling disapears completly when you are holy.

well work on that And I be happy = )

also srry for tha bad english! salut!

Dear blues.

I have several questions regarding Holy PvE.

First I want to say that I truly love Aura Mastery, thank you so much for this new talent. It is good in PvP and truly amazing in PvE. The ability to time 260 resistance to the raid is strong and I consider it to be fun, especially for fights like Ignis and possibly tons of future fights. This talent has so much potential.

I like the new Hand Of Sacrifice as well. I can give a tank a a mini-shieldwall twice a fight (depending if i can freely cast Bubble/HoP on myself), which I enjoy timing. I enjoy being part of a cd rotation on the tank as well on fights where this paladin/priest ability truly helps.

---

Q u o t e:
I meant "too good" in the sense of healing per second and longevity. You can spam very fast Holy Lights virtually forever, or at least much longer than the typical boss encounter lasts. The big negatives for a Holy paladin right now are having insanely high overhealing (but who cares since mana is cheap?) and having a narrow niche of single target (usually tank) healing. Improve the efficiency (not mana efficiency but replace the overhealing with actual healing) or let paladins heal multiple targets at once and I think it would be hard to argue that any of the other classes could compete.

---

For me personally, the biggest change to the Paladin class was the removal of down ranking. I know that it was too strong and that it was used in ways you did not like it. It however allowed paladins to choose their ranks to eliminate tons of overhealing. Paladins could change their healing output to the output required for a fight and change it when strong boss abilities were used. I loved having more buttons (linked to healing spells) to press in raids.

Our 2 tank-heal abilities that are currently present seem so far apart in mana cost and healing output. FoL does not cut it most of the time so I geared to spam Holy Light for minutes (29k mana pool raidbuffed, combined with 52% Holy Light crit allows me to skip Divine Plea use on every cooldown). My question is this: Would Blizzard see different spells that work as Holy Light with lower mana cost/healing output as a viable option to reduce overhealing. I was thinking of a concept like heal and greater heal (both priest spells were used in Vanilla, the mechanics of these spells were truly similar), where 'Weaker Holy Light' heals for 70% of the normal Holy Light with 65% the mana cost to give an example.

---

Q u o t e:
Making Flash of Light useful again to "fix" MP5
To be clear, we think that's a problem. When the toolbox isn't large, it's important that every tool does something. The solution is just a little tricky. Nerfing HL won't go over well, but buffing FoL just risks making paladins overpowered. To fix this, which we might do, we have to tweak carefully. (Source)

Mana regeneration and MP5
We nerfed a lot of regen mechanics in between T7 and T8. Players were worried about regen being too low so we made sure the stats were there. It appears that players aren't having mana problems on the normal encounters but are having to be more careful on the hard modes. So we need to get some more hard mode data. (Source)

Changing game mechanics to make MP5 more wanted
I'm convinced the best option for Blizzard to make MP5 matter would be to:

* Change Replenishment to restore mana every second based on your MP5. 1% of your casting MP5 returned per second.
* Change Illumination to restore mana on crits based on your MP5. 35% of your casting MP5 returned per HL crit, 20% per FoL/Shock crit.


Yes. Changes like that would make MP5 more meaningful without removing potentially fun mechanics like Illumination or DP. (Source)

---

This post scared me. It would mean that us Paladins would have to itemize completely different with such a change, gear they might not have due to min maxing their characters.

Personally, if I could not spam Holy Light anymore, I would consider a respec to protection for a FoL spec. The hps is surprisingly similar to HL spam just by using FoL. 12k FoL crits every second seem strong (have not tried it in a raid yes, could even be 14k crits). Would it be a problem if a deep protection spec could put out these high hps numbers by just using your weakest healing spell? And would it be considered a problem if deep protection became a commonly used healing spec?

The spec of choice would be 23/48/0 (http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?paladin=503501520000130300000000005032013522310232030330000000000000000000000000000000&glyph=000000000000&version=9947). I personally would stack SP/haste/crit for it, I might even use some pvp items. Glyph Of Flash Of Light would be an obvious glyph for more reliable healing output. The haste comes from the items with spellcrit and some raidbuffs. You can time much stronger Holy Lights after special boss abilities. You mainly will sacrifice Beacon / panic heals with Holy Shock (it is an inefficient spell mana/hps) and Judgement of the Pure, which you could always take in a standard 51/2/18 spec with your duel spec for the fights where these are required.

Sorry for this sorry excuse of theorycraft (if needed I can do some testing/regemming to give correct numbers), but I would like to know if gearing up for this spec would be worth the effort. It would not surprise me if after gearing for this, it would be fixed in the next patch.

My personal beef is with retribution, so i'll spill my guts over that.


Damage system

1. - PvP

I'll begin with pvp. Since the beginning of the expansion people have been constantly whining about retribution paladins and their 'insane' burst damage in player vs player combat. This is most likely down to the fact that people expect to be super powerful and flatten every class they come across despite, A) not having any pvp gear and B) a clue as how to play their own class. We've been annoyingly dubbed, 'facerollers' due to the way retribution paladins deal damage. The constant cycle of pressing cooldown after cooldown, is both tedious and requires all the skill of a rasin. Our burst damage is both, the best and one of the worst parts of the class in PvP. Being able to do alot of damage to try and kill our opponent, but then at the end of a rotation, waiting for abilities to come off cooldown, with that chance that SoC/SoTm might proc and do that extra bit of damage.

2. - PvE

The same 'facerolling' appears in PvE too, seal based damage is not at all fun, its just a matter of chance. We don't possess and constant damage abilities to use apart from auto-attack and thats pointless. Would like to mention that from 70-80, no trainable retribution abilities were introduced, anything remotely useful and I say that lightly has all been through talents. Crusader strike for example, should be a baseline ability which you can train during 1-60, there is nothing special about it at all.
Divine storm is also very weak.


Items

Tier 7/7.5 : - 4 Parts of my Tier 7.5 have haste on it, which in my eyes is a stat not even worth giving a second thought to. Lack of expertise, is another thing which seem's to be like gold dust.
The 4 peice bonus isn't much better either,

'Reduces the cooldown of your judgement of light, judgement of wisdom and judgement of justice by 1 second.'

Compared to the mage tier 7, 4 pieces: Your offensive spells gain an additional 5% increased critical strike bonus damage.


PvP issues


I really do feel that we lack alot in PvP, some will disagree with me. We definately lack offensive abilities. Warriors have charge and intercept to get to the enemy, death knights have death grip, rogues stealth their way in and us paladins instead run in at a increased 15% speed. Giving us pursuit of justice is basically putting a carrot on a stick, but full well knowing that we'll never get to eat that carrot.
I spend most of my time getting kited around by frost mages with their insane amount of evasion spells, when I do get close, their ice barrier just eats my damage and they blink away again spamming ice lance. I've explained about our burst damage, the one sort of bright spot in the cesspool.

People tend to whine about our bubble, but they just don't realize that its the only thing that keeps us in the game just that tiny bit longer. Which thanks to 3.1 is now breakable by 2 classes.

Self-healing is an issue I feel as the mana cost on holy like floats around 1.3k mana per cast, with retribution paladins having a small mana pool, its only good for 1 or 2 heals, which tend to get severely mitigated by both wound poison and mortal strike. Death knight self'-healing in this case seems vastly superior.

Slow effects and healing reducing abilities are things that have been overlooked greatly by the developers. Judgment of justice is still pointless as I found in a recent PvP session and once again, an attempt at trying to kill a discipline priest failed, due to being out healed and then having my mana drained while I slowly died.

I really do wonder why ret paladins even use mana, same go's for enhancement shamans in a way.

---

Q u o t e:
players dont have any holy resistance buffs

---

How often do you see people running around with:
- Arcane resistance?
- Nature resistance?
- Shadow resistance?
- Fire resistance?
- Frost resistance?

Yeah, some classes have a tool to get some resistance to 1 of those types. No one has it for arcane damage though. Please go complain about how arcane mages en balance druids are ruling Arena because no one has arcane resistance.

Questions:

1) When will our aura's that are persisting through death, persist through death?

2) When will you start nerfing other classes for the same reasons as you are nerfing paladins?
Paladins can do to much burst with just hitting some attacks, so they will get changed. While at the same time for example mages, shamans and warlocks can easily take 10-15k health away within seconds, from range.

Paladins are doing to good at low level brackets, so lets nerf them there. Vindication and HoW makes you feel you are at 60% health. Do you know that MS and execute make me feel like I am at 30% health when fighting a warrior / rogue / hunter?

3) When are you going to give paladins more tools for PvP?
At the moment we have burst, a stun and a 1 minute cooldown sap with reduced duration. You are now taking away the burst. That turns paladins into the biggest dot. Predictable damage with no interrupts, no slows, no gap closers and no debuffs. We just run at you and then start our rotation. If that isn't burst, nothing will happen.

You might as well give paladin 1 debuff which ticks for 2-3k per second when the paladin is in melee range of his target.

[quote]Ah, it's here!

My question is mainly if there are any solid plans to make Ret less faceroll-ish. Ghostcrawler mentioned something along the lines a while ago, and I don't think I'm the only one who's interested to see if anything will change.
/quote
Imo paladins arent faceroll at all , in arena atleast , in battlegrounds and duals and normal stuff like that they are. But in arenast it's like you have to support your partner so much, and it's like u have to chose between u making a good burst or supporting ur partner + It's a bit hard getting any1 with only 3 spells of attack and no healing reduction. You basically cannot take a resto druid if he just stays in treeform and puts 1-2 hots on him. And bliz\zard keeps nerfing paladins , so soon it would be inpossible in any condition to take any1.If retri was so faceroll-ish every retri wud have 2k+ rating >.<

My question is regarding Ret Pvp and the 5% marge between then and pures , not QQ as my wish would be for each class to be balanced.

When taking the fact that paladins have a merre 5% less dps than pures ( tho they have MStrike ) and viewing that rets have heals, Bubble etc... do you not think the margin is to little considering that they have as much if not more options to stay alive than pures who go against someone with around the same dps as them with more survivability?

you do know that if a ret was to heal it would take up most of his mana. bubble it reduces his DPS by 50 precent so again if he did that his DPS will be lower and you just have to try and stay out of range for 12 secs.

I am tired of seeing ret has plate bubble and heals. Yes they have plate means nothing to magic classes also warriors DK have plate and they can DPS so it means nothing

bubble i will give you that but it does reduce there dps by 50% so it like a slef nerf to a dps spec.

Heals what can they heal really if they cast 2 holy lights they are gone they might get away with FOL but you should dish out more DPS than what that can heal. Heck a holy pally FOL can only heal 4k non crit 5-6k crit. So ill assume a rets will be much lower

Serious Question...really:

With the change to Vindication is there a possibility of revisiting this Talent and its points requirement in a future patch?

For 2 talent points to only reduce Spirit, Agility and Strength it is weak.

A 186 days played paladin has to say something about retribution.

1. Will seal of command be useful or competitive in pve or pvp ? Obviously in pve seal of martyr/blood is better and in pvp many retribution paladins just don’t spend a point to get seal of command.

2. Retribution paladins have the easiest (easy to perform) burst but its not the best burst . Since blizzard wants to reduce that frontload burst can paladins get a tool to balance this loss?

3. Is there a plan to give to paladins a short cooldown spell interrupt? ( its really stupid to see a mind control spell and not be able to do something to avoid it , yes 1 min hoj and rep can be in cooldown , seal of justice doesn’t help either (yes I tried it many times)).

4. Would it be too much to ask for a gap closer after a cc lands on us ? ( fear can put as away from our target for too much time , ex. fear --> paladin runs towards one direction --> lock / priest runs towards the other direction --> paladin gets in range most of the times too late to save their partner or at a time where diminishing returns wear off and this starts again. Considering there is only one cc to be landed).

5. Will paladins be given the tools to kill a healer ? ( yea ms is too common these days , can we have something that put a debuff so healing spells are costing more mana or a debuff that doesn’t allow mana regeneration for example?)

Before "noone is supposed to kill a healer 1v1", yea noone is but when you have a healer backing you up it should take the same time , not the double.

6. At tbc, warriors were outhealing and outdamaging me in arenas at all the battles at any possible scenario which lasted more than 1 min, don’t bring these days back.

7. Give divine shield a 15min cd and give us the tools needed to play without being called names for once. (either cause we are useless or do better than others) , bring balance to arena or remove 2v2 bracket.

Thank you for your time reading these.

---

Q u o t e:
Serious Question...really:

With the change to Vindication is there a possibility of revisiting this Talent and its points requirement in a future patch?

For 2 talent points to only reduce Spirit, Agility and Strength it is weak.

---

Hey, there's totally a good idea there! Perhaps fold the effect into improved judgement, and make it reduce attack power on PvE encounters (Like demo shout) so it would be a good reason for prot paladins to spec 2/2 for it :) Thats not a question directly, but it seems like a good idea. <3

I can not say anything about pvp as I do not like it at all as a holy paladin so only talking about PvE

This one is already going on and I am with it that the only way a good holy paladin is a apparently a paladin who is only focussing on +intellect. Pls give us more mp5 and make intellect less so other stats like haste and crit are more usable. Now even with the amoubnt of overhealing a spell is doing +spellpower is a waste also and should be in my eyes adressed that all stats contribute more or less to a good healinggear.
Librams as a holy paladin are allmost non excisting, the only decend ones are increase spellpoer on HL or degrease mana per cast on HL.
Last thing I can think up at this moment that atleast was not mentioned in the post I saw in this forum is our 51 talentpoint Beacon of Light. Let me start its a very nice idea but pls give it eaher a decend time that its up (and sry the glyph is for most people not an option) or make it a little less mana. In hectic fights I sometimes loose the Beacon on my Target.
About groupheals, its nice to have one but I dont think its realy that needed. I did choose my paladin because it was the lacking of this making it harder in a lot of fights

Any plan to give a real, non glyphed AoE healing spell to holy paladins?

The whole beacon of light thing fits perfectly in the paladin concept, so maybe you would consider making this last talent in holy tree an AoE healing spell instead? similar to Circle of Healing.

I don't mind reducing the holy light's heal value if we had more healing spells to juggle between