Healing Changes 4.3

[Theotherone]

So after GC does his blog about Changes and how they don't really enjoy disrupting the community with too much change or unnecessary change, the class changes for 4.3 have come out - so it raises the question, did they disrupt, in this case, Pally healing too much or are these welcome changes? I'm up in the air, I liked Holy Radiance for the speed boost and for the instant cast - frankly, if I want to raid heal, I'll go my shammy or repsec my priest to Holy. What I'm hoping this does not do, is make me have to "relearn" or "remaster" a new Pally healing style - we just went through that in WoLK into Cata.

"We changed Seal of Insight to no longer return 15% base mana and then changed Judgment of the Pure to provide mana regeneration so that Holy paladins would not need to Judge every eight seconds. With these changes, they will want to Judge every 30 seconds, which seems more reasonable. Judging every eight seconds is hard to ask someone who is also targeting players a lot to heal them.

We made several changes to Holy Radiance to make it a cast time spell. We felt like Holy paladins couldn’t go into a group healing mode because Holy Radiance had a long cooldown and in the absence of a cast time, didn’t compete with any other spell. With this change (and the Light of Dawn change below), paladins can opt for an AE healing “rotation” (insofar as healers can ever have a rotation) of using Holy Radiance -> Light of Dawn instead of Holy Light et al. -> Word of Glory.

Several Holy talents changed to support the change to Holy Radiance, such as allowing it to benefit from Illuminated Healing, Clarity of Purpose, and Infusion of Light. It didn’t make sense for Speed of Light to be triggered by a cast-time spell, so we caused the Paragon of Virtue talent to lower the cooldown on Divine Protection, so that Holy wouldn’t lose quite so much functionality of Speed of Light. Speed of Light has definitely been nerfed compared to 4.2, but we feel it’s an acceptable change given the entire package.

We reversed the glyph for Light of Dawn. Instead of providing an additional target to Light of Dawn, the glyph now reduces the number of targets but increases the throughput. Light of Dawn was not a very useful spell in 10-player raids or similar small groups, like Arena teams. This glyph should allow paladins to tailor Light of Dawn for their group size".

[Soan]

No I don't think they've disrupted pally healing too much at all. All that's going to happen is we'll get to judge less and cast radiance more if we needed.

The LoD glyph change is pretty interesting too, with any luck it'll certainly do what they're hoping and make LoD more useful for 10 mans and maybe even 5 mans.

[Theotherone]

LoD will be interesting; as I've geared up it's actually been useful in certain situations - stacking on Staghelm comes to mind; but in a spread out fight it's basically useless.

[skankalicous]

I've come to really enjoy my paladin healer over the last six months. The most challenging thing about it has been mana conservation which I've just about got down to a science, Between Arcane Torrent, Divine Plea and Judgement it really hasn't been to much of a concern. My personal opinion is that the constant Judging was a skill check that furthered the gap between GREAT players and good players. A great player could run themselves OoM in a very tense battle while keeping everyone up and then be back to 80% mana in 6 to 8 seconds when there is a lul in action. Which even in fights like Rag there is a beather point when he submerges and adds come out. So it's my opinion that they are once again trying to take away the power players advantage and make the class easier to master by the lesser players.

Again, just my opinion.

[Theotherone]

As silly as it sounds, I liked Judging; it was a tool in the toolbox to use and part of my healing rhythm. I think what annoys me most about these types of changes, is it breaks the rhythm you develop with the toon. You get to the point where you know when you need to judge, when you need to cast a certain heal, when that heal will hit and for how much; it starts the intuition learning curve all over again.

It's hard to explain, but it changes playing from just reacting instinctively to having to think and react until it's all re-learned. Could just be me, but it is annoying.

[Megacode]

I feel the same. I to had a rhythm with my heals and judgements while at the same time moving out of the bad stuff. I would have been happy with just buffing Holy Radience heals while keeping the same mechanics which includes SoL.