Comments on: Wrath Paladins: Significant Changes in Healing Techniques Ahead?

By: Gwaendar

Gwaendar — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 08:53:27 +0000

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.

By: Taemojitsu

Taemojitsu — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 17:45:29 +0000

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.

By: Taemojitsu

Taemojitsu — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 17:37:34 +0000

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.

By: Gwaendar

Gwaendar — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 23:33:53 +0000

Thanks Rhoelyn, something did indeed go horribly wrong with those two charts. Hope it’s a bit better now.

By: Early Healadin Reports: Holy Shock Becomes Viable | Altitis

Early Healadin Reports: Holy Shock Becomes Viable | Altitis — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 23:32:58 +0000

[...]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: [...]

By: Rhoelyn

Rhoelyn — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 22:37:26 +0000

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

By: [Paladin] WotLK talent trees/abilities discussion - Page 21 - Elitist Jerks

[Paladin] WotLK talent trees/abilities discussion - Page 21 - Elitist Jerks — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 16:01:24 +0000

[...] 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. [...]