Saturday, February 07, 2009

Divine Plea Idea

The details of the upcoming Divine Plea nerf:
Since paladins rely less on Spirit as a mana-regeneration stat, we have to address them in other ways. We don’t want to change Illumination or Replenishment. However, we are going to increase the healing penalty on Divine Plea from 20% to 50%. Divine Plea was originally intended to help Protection and Retribution paladins stay full on mana. It should be a decision for Holy paladins, not something that is automatically used every cooldown.

I am fine with Divine Plea being nerfed. It isn't necessary for current content if you bring a full complement of 7-8 healers. You have to mix in more FoLs and Sacred Shields, but I think once paladins get accustomed to life without Divine Plea, they'll realize it was just a crutch.

That being said, I don't think this nerf is strong enough to stop paladins from using Divine Plea every cooldown. We use Divine Plea to chain Holy Lights, which has absurd amounts of overheal. Something on the order of 60-70% overheal is common. Even a 50% reduction is not going to be much of a barrier to Holy Light.

However, it's very easy to go too far, and flip Divine Plea into the "never use" category. For example, if it reduced the effectiveness of your heals by 100%, Holy would never use it, as it would be far too dangerous. Fifteen seconds of no heals is an eternity.

What I would suggest for Divine Plea is:

Divine Plea
You gain 25% of your total mana over 15 sec. Casting a healing spell will end this effect.

(Where healing spells include Holy Light, Flash of Light, Holy Shock, Lay on Hands, but not Sacred Shield, Seal or Judgment of Light, or Divine Storm.)

This doesn't interfere with Protection or Retribution. For Holy, Divine Plea becomes a skill move. A good Holy paladin can time the ability right to maximize regen for specific fights. If you are just spamming, you can't use it. However, if you use Divine Plea, and it turns out you misjudged, you can resume healing at full strength without seriously hurting your raid. It's less dangerous, and thus paladins will be more likely to experiment with it.

I think this "robustness of failure" is important for a healer. I don't want to wipe just because I made a mistake with Divine Plea.

As well, I think the class designers can play with this variant of Divine Plea a bit more. It's not as binary as the current version. For example, consider:

Glyph of Divine Shock
Major Glyph
Casting Holy Shock no longer ends your Divine Plea.

Usable? Maybe. At the very least it is more interesting, and Divine Plea is no longer an automatic decision, but rather an ability that you want to time for maximum effectiveness.

Edit: Added Divine Storm to the list of non-healing spells to address a concern in the comments.

23 comments:

  1. You can do this already. Just add a /cancelaura command to your main heal macros.

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  2. Just make any heal you'd hit as an 'oh shit!' heal a macro beginning with /cancelaura divine plea

    It's what I did playing my pally as holy on beta with the 50% penalty for Holy Shock, Lay on Hands and I toyed w/ doing it for Flash of Light.

    Holy Light through divine plea, as you noted, is just fine.

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  3. Yes, you can mimic this with /cancelaura, but that requires macros. This would be built-in, and more importantly you can't power Holy Light through the penalty.

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  4. Aren't paladins supposed to be the outlast class? so why do they get nerfed every time they are outlasting other a little to well??

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  5. Can't you just right-click the aura?

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  6. Austin, if you can find time to right click the aura, surrounded by 18-25 other raidbuffs, when your healing output is SO IMPORTANT that you need to shuck the divine plea penalty to get it off, without accidentally clicking off some other, more useful, more desirable aura, and get your heal off in time...

    well, I bow to you.

    The rest of us mere mortals should make macros.

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  7. Hmm. I kinda agree with Blizzard (and you) that it needs a nerf. In BC there where much more tactics in healing as a pally. I started my raiding in Northrend as prot but switched back to holy recently and it's silly. The Holy Light bombing feels careless, but it doesn't matter since I can keep it up for a very long time.
    In BC Holy Light (top rank) was the thing you went for when you needed it. Now it's more like "Well, i really, really do not need it now, lets do some FoL..."

    Blablabla. Anyway, tnx for a great blog. And please Blizzard, hire him as Pally Class Designer! ;)

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  8. Sure divine plea seems over powered now because it lets a holy paladin use holy light like a mad man. What is going to happen later in Uldar and Icecrown when boss encounters get punishing AOE and lots of position dancing and the tank is getting his butt whooped? I tell you what is going to happen. Its going to be a repeat of BT and Sunwell,holy paladins won't be competitive healers and will only likely to be brought if the raid doesn't have prot or ret paladins to bring blessings.

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  9. "And please Blizzard, hire him as Pally Class Designer! ;)"

    Wait wut

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  10. DP is the paladin Fear: It's overpowered, but nerf it carefully because it's all we have. We need our versions of death coil and soul link, maybe a passive regen (mana/5 from int like elemental shamans). This would make DP a decision rather than something to spam, because it wouldn't need to be spammed.

    It's a rather silly situation: Blizzard doesn't want us to spam DP, but we have no other regen, so what else are we supposed to do?

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  11. I dont see how this solution is functionally different from having a 100% penalty and a cancelaura macro.

    I did like the solution that someone on wowinsider posted. Basically you remove the penalty from DP but increase its cooldown. Then you give ret and prot deep talents that reduce or remove the cooldown. Basically you can insure that Holy gets 1-2 DPs a fight and Prot and Ret get as many as they need to chain.

    The only thing that this mana regen nerf will do is force raids to stack more healers just like the bad old days. Which in turn further compresses small guilds that already have a healer shortage. Nerfing mana regen is a disaster for small guilds.

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  12. healer mana seems to be the go to thing to "fix" to make raid content more of a "challenge". this is all moot really with dual specs. your casters change specs and clothes depending on how heal intensive the boss will be.

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  13. I respecced my Paladin holy and he is 69 now, i healed nexus and UK which was wierd not doing it on my preist but very enjoyable.

    I would love another aoe for my paladin if truth be told.

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  14. "Divine Plea
    You gain 25% of your total mana over 15 sec. Casting a healing spell will end this effect."

    Doesn't affect Ret? Think about it again. Divine Storm heals for a percentage of damage done...

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  15. "Doesn't affect Ret? Think about it again. Divine Storm heals for a percentage of damage done..."

    Could just as quickly be worded as "Casting Holy Light, Holy Shock, or Flash of Light"

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  16. Hmm. Not a bad suggestion-but I'm not terribly upset by what Blizzard has planned, anyway. I'm already not using it every cooldown. I think a bit of careful use of Avenging Wrath to negate the healing loss could go a long way (which is something I already do, anyway).

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  17. If they do change the penalty to 50%, then they better increase the duration of becon of light because as it is now it can be quite a mana drain sometimes. I've had times when I've accidentally cast it on myself, then had to recast it on the tank...that is nearly 2k mana instantly gone.

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  18. I don't think your idea would work. In effect it is a reduce healing by 100% for the period of time. Yes, it can be canceled at any time but in order to get the mana you have to get 15 seconds of not healing.
    With a 25 man, you might be able to have another healer cover for you for that time - but a 10 man no way. For example, 15 seconds of no healing on say Patchwork?

    At the same point Blizzard's method of reducing healing done isn't a good fix. Due to the standard overheal going on with Holy Light - It's either reduction heals to uselessness or it's fairly irrelevant given sufficient spellpower. In either situation healing reduction hurts the lower end holy pally (which needs the mana more) rather then the ones with sufficient gear to ignore it.

    Even at 50% reduction, I still plan to use it every cooldown (except in the most extreme of situations)

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  19. While I think this idea is neat in a meta sense, they're adjusting DP to do what they designed it to do.

    Rather than adjust a spell that was intended to help Prot and Ret be interesting for Holy, they just nerfed it for Holy. It's sensible from a design standpoint to avoid some unintended consequence (and the current change likely requires VERY little code modification -just a coefficient).

    I also think that anyone looking to maximize its usefulness will be WoW savvy enough to write or at least find an already written macro to do what you recommend.

    That isn't to say that the holy shock glyph idea isn't a good one though.

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  20. I'm a holy paladin and Divine Plea is OP. I would like to see a longer CD. It is a useful spell to bring your mana up. The other suggestion of "You gain 25% of your total mana over 15 sec. Casting a healing spell will end this effect." Is also a reasonable nerf.

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  21. Did our first one-night clear of Naxx last night, complete with the 3.0.9 stealth nerf to Divine Plea. Wasn't too big a deal. Just had to use it a little more strategically, coupled with Avenging Wrath, for example.

    And I like the tips for /cancelaura

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  22. I went into a hero with my pala with a not really good group so I had to heal alot and the tank dies every time i tryed to use D P in a boss fight becouse it was not possible to heal enough to keep him alive. I healed with holy light and god a good gaer

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  23. Your suggestion for making Divine Plea cancelled on heals (or as other commenters are saying have it be 100% reduction on heals and use a macro) is a fine way to go.

    You make an excellent point that those type of 'judgement call' moments are what sets the skilled players apart.

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