Streamlining Blessings

Over at Eye for an Eye, Josh notes that Blessings are still much more complicated to maintain than other buffs. To achieve maximum effectiveness, it requires a lot of planning, and even mods like Pally Power. He asks if there is a better way to handle blessings.

The problem with Blessings is that each class-spec has a different priority order for Blessings. Retribution paladins want Might, while Holy paladins want Wisdom. So class-based buffing only works if you have enough paladins to cast every Blessing. And if you have enough paladins to cast every Blessing, you could just as easily buff entire groups instead of classes.

Blessings would be easier to handle if the blessings were deliberately unbalanced. I.e. Blessing One is more powerful than Blessing Two which is more powerful than Blessing Three. Then assigning Blessings in an optimum fashion would be trivial. The first paladin casts Blessing One on the raid. The second paladin casts Blessing Two, etc. In all honesty, balancing the Blessings against each other--while appealing to our sense of symmetry--just makes life harder in raiding.

My suggestion for streamlining Blessings would be to combine Might and Wisdom into a single Blessing: Blessing of Faith. For the most part, Might and Wisdom are mutually exclusive. The priests being able to hit mobs harder with their staves doesn't really matter. The only classes that would benefit are Retribution and Protection paladins, Enhancement shamans, and Hunters. Even then, Wisdom is generally low priority for those classes.

Blessing of Faith would make it much easier to cover entire classes. You hit the Druids with Faith, and the Ferals rejoice over the Attack Power, while the Trees and Boomkins revel in MP5. No need to hand out individual Blessings. As well, Faith comes very close to being the best Blessing overall. The first paladin hands out Faith, the second hands out Kings, and the third hands out Sanctuary.

Next I would clean up the talent trees as follows:

1. Combine Improved Blessing of Might and Improved Blessing of Wisdom into Improved Blessing of Faith (improves Blessing of Faith by 10/20%) in the Holy tree in the same spot as current Imp Wisdom.

2. Make Blessing of Kings baseline at 6%. Add Improved Blessing of Kings (improves Kings by additional 2/4%) to the Retribution tree in the same spot as current Imp Might.

3. Add some other random Tier 1 Protection talent that Holy might like to dip into.

So essentially we have three blessings: Faith, Kings, and Sanctuary. Each tree specializes in one, so you can count on a Holy Paladin to have Imp Faith and a Ret Paladin to have Imp Kings.

Then streamline a bit further by having Greater Blessings buff the group instead of the class. That should make raid buffing on par with all the other classes.

There's still a little awkwardness around the fact that tanks probably have a different priority than the rest of the raid. But I think this system would be better than the current system, while not being too different.