Here's how I would solve the paladin endurance healing problem, without altering Illumination:
1. Replace Sanctified Light, Holy Power, and Divine Illumination with new talents not aimed at saving mana. High level holy talents should encourage the paladin to spend mana, not save it.
Heh, since the priests seem to dislike their 41-pt Holy talent, Circle of Healing, let's swap it with Divine Illumination. That would give healing paladins a significant tool to help them act as main healers in 5-mans. Maybe even reduce its power, drop it down to 31 pts, and move a pumped up Holy Shock to 41 pts.
This change right here removes -11% cost from Holy Light, and -5% cost from Flash of Light, as well as the extra mana savings every couple of minutes from Divine Illumination.
2. For all the +heal gear with +spell crit, replace +spell crit with the equivalent mana/5s. Tthe vast majority of gear like this is paladin set gear, so it shouldn't have very much impact on the other healing classes.
These two changes should be more than enough to keep Illumination in check. Basically, they just reverse the decisions made in patch 1.9, and return paladin healing to the older, more balanced state.
I don’t see the point in keeping Illumination as a talent if you can’t get +spell crit gear to complement it. It is only overpowered when over geared so maybe tweak the + spell crit values for some more stam or +heal however if you remove the +spell crit from our gear not only do you remove our only unique mechanism on our healing itemisation effectively dressing us in highly armoured cloth gear.
ReplyDeleteI like the idea of changing our top end mana efficient talents to more costly (undoubtedly) defensive moves but I think if you leave Illumination as is then the itemisation has to remain for it to be useful. As it stands now we’re going to need twice the crit gear we had to make the talent worthwhile.
If Illumination is to remain at 50% of its former glory I’d like to see the point cost lowered from 5 to 3 points and rather than chance to occur have the % mana retuned increase per point eg: 15/30/50% mana retuned on spell crit.
Stefion
[Barthilas]
Well, you would still be able to find a fair amount of spell crit. Gems, neckpieces, rings, trinkets, etc.
ReplyDeleteJust remove it from our armor and talents, which is putting it over the top, as it were.
The thing is that Illumination needs to be a balancing act. Other classes get talents that straight out reduce the cost of specific spells by a static percentage.
We get a talent that starts out being slightly worse than most cost-reducers, but if you put enough effort into it, it can become better than the others.
The problem is that right now, it is trivial for a paladin to make Illumination "better" than the cost-reducers that other classes have.
I agree itemisation is broken as raid buffed and only really clearing Kara I'm at a holy spell crit percentage of 25.38 and of course 31.38 on Holy Light. However the problem with cloaks, rings and trinket +spell crit gear is its actually designed for caster dps and while in a 5 man I don’t have to many reservations for rolling on it I think in a raid environment as a healer I shouldn’t have first dibs (particularly considering how dps sensitive some encounters are becoming). Another downside is it cripples your healing to some extent as you are taking +dmg/heal over raw +heal.
ReplyDeletePersonally I like my plate to have +crit/+heal and my trinkets/necks/rings etc to have the +Mp5 / +Heal that I’m missing on my plate items. The reason I think this works is that the other healers can’t wear the plate yet we all share the cloaks/trinket/ring/neck etc slots.
We are definitely in need of fine tuning I would just rather they look at lowering our overall potential spell crit gear than abandoning the mechanic entirely as it distinguishes us from priest/druid itemisation which is handy since we are the only casters that wear plate.
As you blogged it is really a creative was of lowering our spell costs but is it really twice as powerful as intended? Effecting an additional 8 points spent further in the tree. I guess the added value of a spell crit over the mana regeneration factor is you get a larger heal so maybe this is the factor they didn't consider in the original design.
The problem with trying to reduce our spell crit gear is that we can wear anything. If they took it off plate, you could just wear cloth, might not be as durable, but still better off then a priest. To nurf our crit they'd have to nurf everyones.
ReplyDeletenavis, the thing is that there really isn't any +heal/+spell crit pieces outside of paladin armor. Do a search on thottbot or something. I think I came across 2 non-plate pieces that had those two stats.
ReplyDeleteSo while we could wear mage +crit pieces, we'd be giving up a fair bit of +heal to do so.
There is at least a trade-off there for paladin healers.