From a first look at the paladin spells from 70-80 as displayed on MMO Champion, I was struck by the jump in mana costs for the new two ranks for both Flash of Light and Holy Light.
Using a quick spreadsheet to compare and calculate evolution in healing per mana (HPM) for the new ranks, this is what I came up with:
As you can see, there is a sharp drop in mana efficiency, in particular for the former one-trick pony casters using FoL for their bread and butter healing. The ranks are, of course, FoL 5 to 9 and HL 9 to 13, respectively.
The graph appears to be spelling the end of the healadin as the game’s mana efficiency caster (though in all fairness I haven’t looked at what happens with the other healers so far), but this is, actually, not the whole picture.
If we work under the assumption that the MMO-Champion numbers are correct AND final (which might be something of a stretch, see below), we will start having to take the paladin’s third heal into account. Indeed, in Wrath, Holy Shock moves from a lackluster and highly inefficient heal on a 15 seconds cooldown to something much more useable running on a 6 seconds cooldown instead - a tool which could very well become a standart element in any healadin’s spell rotation, moreso since with the appropriate talents, a crit Holy Shock will accordingly make the next Holy Light spell instant. Or, to put it differently, if a paladin suddenly needs to step up his heals in an emergency, within one single GCD he can drop a crit HS followed by a max rank Holy Light for almost 7.5k raw healing done - before even factoring in spellpower.
Here’s the graph with Holy Shock included. While it looks very good for the new and improved Shock, there’s one big caveat which makes the whole thing look a bit, well, fishy to me. The last three ranks (HS 5 to 7) are all listed with 650 mana cost.
Which seems odd, to say the least.
Nonetheless, healadins were lacking any serious Oh Crap! tools in their arsenal in TBC. The transformation of Holy Shock, with the added talent to make a crit HS followed up with an instant HL as described above, when properly geared, may very well top off any tank who just moved from normal operations into the realm of “incoming wipe risk”.
Most definitely something worth watching out for.
EDIT: the graphs should now look less like something my 3-year old daughter made in a hurry
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7 Responses to “Wrath Paladins: Significant Changes in Healing Techniques Ahead?”
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[...] Wrath Paladins: Significant Changes in Healing Techniques Ahead? | Altitis Interesting post comparing the base efficiency of paladin spells, with pretty graphs. Upshot is that both HL and FoL’s base efficiency decreases, but Holy Shock’s efficiency increases to fall in-between the two other spells. Of course, this is before taking SP into account, but it it might point to Shock becoming a staple part of the healing rotation. [...]
Maybe it’s my browser (Firefox 3), but I think your large charts are breaking your page layout pretty badly. You might take a glance at it.
Passing by,
~Rhoelyn
[...]To follow up on my previous post, via the EJ thread linking to it, someone wrote about his experiences group healing in the Wrath beta on the o-bards: [...]
Thanks Rhoelyn, something did indeed go horribly wrong with those two charts. Hope it’s a bit better now.
No offense, but it’s pretty retarded to compare mana efficiency without taking into account gear. The reason FoL base heal doesn’t go up is because it scales so well with gear. It’s difficult to say whether HS will have any use in regular healing rotations, it may depend on whether the coefficient for its healing portion has also been increased and what the downranking formula has been changed to for the TBC ranks of FoL when used in WotLK.
Two more things: it’s almost certain that FoL and HL base heal are balanced so that with an ‘average’ amount of healing, they will have similar mana efficiencies when you first reach lvl 80. But since FoL scales better, it will still be the ’sustained healing’ spell to use once gear increases. Second, the only way to get RELIABLE burst healing from HS would either to be to use it in a combo (HL + HS), or to pop DF so you can be sure it crits to give you an instant HL. But that cooldown is probably more useful on HL anyway, since HL is only a 2 sec cast which is just 0.5 sec slower than when it’d go off with the DF/HS + HL combo, *and* you have the free GCD to immediately drop another HL. The HPS of 3.0 seconds of HL casting is probably more than, or at the very least equal to from the same 3.0 sec spent burning cooldowns on HS, especially if that 3.0 sec of HL casting includes DF on one of them. Very rarely will the small amount of burst from HS save someone, with the GCD downtime that any instant causes, when a pre-casted 2.0 sec HL won’t.
No offense, but when this was written the spellpower coefficients weren’t known yet, which made it a bit hard to consider how spells would be scaling with gear and take that into account.
To dismiss HS out of hand (when beta testers regularly report using it as part of their healing rotations now) smacks of TBC-based theorycrafting bias, no offense of course.
Blizzard pretty much changed paladin healing when introducing TBC (to the one-trick FoL pony show we know), and they at least claim to bring back more tools and variety to the scene.
The spell costs have changed a couple of times since this post was written, so updating it again is now premature. Suffice to say, it is quite probable that there will be a paradigm shift for the healadin in Wrath. We’ll need to wait a bit longer till the beta nears completion to know just how much. I suspect, though (but that’s purely personal opinion), that FoL-bots won’t be as efficient as they are now. By design.