Patch 3.3 is almost upon us. Here's a look at the changes for paladins.
Divine Intervention
Divine Intervention: This ability now also removes Exhaustion or Sated from a target if the recipient is out of combat when the effect ends. In addition, the cooldown on this ability has been reduced from 20 minutes to 10 minutes. Cannot be used in Arenas.
With the decreased cooldown and removal of Exhaustion, this ability can now be used without fear. Good for wipe recovery and reducing repair bills.
Flash of Light
Flash of Light: This spell no longer causes a heal-over-time effect unless the player has the Infusion of Light talent.
Infusion of Light: This talent now causes the paladin's Flash of Light spells to heal the target for 50/100% of the Flash of Light healing amount over 12 seconds [if Sacred Shield is on the target].
Though the patch notes (so far) haven't explicitly stated it, this refers to the FoL+Sacred Shield HoT. You will still need Sacred Shield to be on the target. Pretty much nothing changes for Holy paladins, but Ret and Prot paladins lose that HoT. A PvP change more than anything.
Lay on Hands
Lay on Hands: This ability will place Forbearance on the paladin if used on his or herself. It will not place Forbearance on others.
A slight nerf to Protection paladins in PvE, and to all paladins in PvP. Blizzard is trying to cut down on the number of "extra lives" a paladin can use in a row.
Aura Mastery
Aura Mastery: This effect of this talent has been reduced in duration to 6 seconds.
A PvP nerf. The main effect this will have in PvE is that it will make timing this ability more unforgiving. Usually you use AM during a boss special attack. 10 seconds did give some margin for error, so you might hit AM a couple of seconds too soon and still cover the duration of the attack.
Repentance
Repentance: This crowd control effect will no longer break early from the damage done by Righteous Vengeance.
Small boost to make Repentance more usable on a target you've already attacked.
Divine Sacrifice
Divine Guardian: This talent no longer increases the amount of damage transferred to the paladin from Divine Sacrifice. Instead it causes all raid and party members to take 10/20% reduced damage while Divine Sacrifice is active. In addition, the duration has been changed to 6 seconds, however the effect does not terminate when Divine Sacrifice is removed before its full duration.
Divine Sacrifice: Redesigned. The effect of Divine Sacrifice is now party-only and the maximum damage which can be transferred is now limited to 40% of the paladin's health multiplied by the number of party members. In addition, the bug which allowed Divine Sacrifice to sometimes persist despite reaching its maximum damage has been fixed. Divine Sacrifice will now cancel as soon as its maximum damage value is exceeded in all cases. Finally, damage which reduces the paladin's health below 20% now cancels the effect early.
Okay, DS is now party-only, so it becomes much less valuable than it used to be. However, hopefully the new design allows the paladin to survive using DS without the bubble. If that is so, you get to use DS much more frequently.
The raid damage reduction gets moved to the next tier and cut in half to -20% for 6 seconds. As with Aura Mastery, the timing becomes less forgiving. However, you will get to use it without the bubble (hopefully). A less powerful effect usable more often.
I suspect that most Holy paladins will still take DS+DG, and may even end up using it more. However, I think most Ret paladins will drop the talent, and use the points in Retribution, probably making Vindication standard.
Conclusions
On the whole, not a lot has changed for paladins. Minor nerfs to a couple of situational abilities, but Divine Intervention becomes usable again. Divine Sacrifice becomes weaker, but might be usable more often. It really depends on how likely a paladin using Divine Sacrifice is to gib herself. Personally, I hope that DS and the bubble become fully de-linked. The bubble can go back to being an individual emergency defense, rather than being saved for Divine Sacrifice all the time.
Hey man, as someone who plays a lot of PvP I'm really welcoming these changes.
ReplyDeleteAs an enhance shaman with full furious/part relentless gear I feel these changes bring dps pallies back into the "killable" bracket for me again, especially in battlegrounds.
While some pallies might argue being hard to kill isn't a big deal if they're not putting out uber dps, its very handy being able to last long enough until the "cavalry" arrives (or run that flag an extra 20 yards).
Good to hear that it won't hurt PvE paladins much either!
I have been *extremely* happy with how my Holydin plays throughout Wrath, and am relieved that we haven't been significantly nerfed. The change to DSac/Guardian will take a bit of getting used to, but the danger of self insta-gibbing is greatly reduced, which is good. I know some people are complaining about breaking the bubble effect, but it had to be done. I was looking at a WoL report for one of the top guilds on my server, and it reported Divine Sacrifice completely nullifying 108000 (I kid you not) damage in one 10 second application on Heroic Lord Jaraxxus. That's just overpowered, and needed to be fixed.
ReplyDeleteOddly neither my holy build or my prot build take divine sac and guard, I opted for the Critadin build going into the ret tree for my holy spec, and as the MT for my raid, there really hasn't been a call for me to use divine sac, as it would likely have killed me.
ReplyDeleteFinally I think the LOH change is ok, though I'm not sure how effective it will be for PVP since you can still bubble then LOH just not the other way around
hey i just posted how to do the lich king raid succesfully sense it was realesed in patch just got three pieces to shadow mourne and so on.
ReplyDeleteSince the release of the patch yesterday I found it necessary too go straight into the Arena to make sure the healadin still stands up. However, massive surprise (as id read nothing about it) almost every caster class removed the beacon of light buff. in several fights, a priest, shaman and mage all removed this buff. Has anyone heard / read anything about this?? Im hoping its just a bug that can be aired as without the beacon, healadins (with few instant casts or heal over times) will be pretty poor as main healers in any arena environment.
ReplyDeleteAlso if it has been confirmed that our beloved beacon can now be removed with ease, any suggestions on how to combat this, may be a case of stacking haste as an initial thought???
i havent been seeing that with my priest due to the fact i dont use my priest with pvp, mostly death night in arena.
ReplyDeletei find the lay on hands change annoying.
ReplyDeletei was doing HoL via random dungeon finder with some guild members and pug'd healer. everyone went down except me and Loken was at very low health so i used LoH and i would have killed the boss had divine shield kicked in. instead i died and the boss had 12k health.
not a huge nerf as you said, you could say its a good change since other tanks dont have the ability to do this... but it still is annoying seeing as it didnt really hurt anything much in pve but i got nerfed anyway because of pvp. in fact the group was just as annoyed as i was because we had to make the long run thru HoL
i wish they would just separate the two so i didnt have to pay for imbalances that don't affect me.
I think making the Pala more killable is a good way to make PvP more enjoyable. "Palas don't deal much damage, so it's okay to be invincible"... wait what? Since when is it fun to attack a Pala for minutes without response?
ReplyDeleteAnyway.. hurray for Divine Intervention!