Holy paladin nerfs (12942)

We wanted going to melee to benefit from Seal of Insight to be an option you might consider on some fights. With the previous numbers, you would be stupid to play any other way, which was not our intent.

We were seeing too many paladins use nothing but Holy Shock -> Word of Glory and be effective at doing so. The intent was to give paladins more healing spells to use in Cataclysm, and this mechanic was dominating too much. It will still be quite effective.

The other concerns seem to be about mana and throughput number changes. It's too early to worry about those yet. It will be some time before we feel like the numbers are stable enough. We'll make sure paladins have about the same mana regen as the other healers.

Q u o t e:
Hopefully they just make the 70% baseline for everyone with no pushback with earth shield or concentration aura type spells. Spell pushback is one of those things that can really drive you crazy in both PvP and PvE. :(

We did. We just changed the base pushback resistance so that we didn't have to duplicate the same passive bonus in every tree.

Q u o t e:
Simple, the Devs think Ret first, as in it has to be balanced for Ret. The impact of those decisions on Holy are never given consideration as they either believe holy didn't need that level of power or that they can come tweak something else to compensate for any percieved loss to Holy power/functionality.

This is the kind of QQ likely to get you banned.

Q u o t e:
So instead of decent changes to eternal glory or moving it out of reach of holy you decided to give a massive nerf to our class defining level 10 special ability!

Perhaps you missed all of the Holy paladins posting about how overpowered the Eternal Glory talent was for Holy.

Q u o t e:

The ret change that hurt you (Exorcism), in the long run should be to your benefit, as it means that Blizzard can now tune the SP co-efficient solely with Holy's damage output in mind, so your Exorcism damage will no longer be dependant on how much damage it should do for Ret. Now, whether it will be tuned to be useful for holy, that is a whole other question.

Exactly. We can tune the spellpower and attack power coefficients independently. Exorcism should be a good button if you have Denounce. You're not going to do high damage if you're interested in skipping the talents that buff that damage.

Q u o t e:

It's the same line of garbage we hear from people about how Paladins "only" use Holy Light on live. Yeah, it's the main heal, and yeah, we use it a lot, but saying that's all we use is just exaggeration that hurts attempts to balance rather than helps.

Yeah, I used Holy Shock on beta a lot.

Yeah, I used WoG on beta a lot.

Is it all I used? No way.

This is a very common line of argument we see from players, especially healers. It runs something like "I use all my heals. I seem to be a pretty good healer. Therefore only using a few heals makes you a bad healer." It should make you a bad healer (if our numbers are appropriate) but often it does not. Often those 1-2 spells can take you 90% of the way there and the additional heals used my more savvy players only adds 10% or so optimization on top of that. You might have been a better paladin for using all of your toolbox, but the fact is that even very mediocre paladins could heal just fine using only those two buttons. That's not what we are going for. If you're used to using a variety of spells, then this change won't affect you much.

Also, you might try not dismissing points with which you disagree (or perhaps don't understand) as "garbage."

Q u o t e:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzBH4jbWzgg

This video illustrates how bad holy paladins are right now. (Well, and warrior/paladin tanks... and I suppose this is a jab at all healers at 85, too).

He had to use Dark Simulacron to use Seal of Light and Frost Armor, but I'm fairly confident healers could be replaced by a few shadow priests and a healing tide totem with current balance, if you use a druid or dk tank. (People watching my stream are probably familiar with my Vampiric Embrace rants).

Eloderung, I used to appreciate the posts you made, but crossing over to ranting mode is more likely to get your points dismissed as just another angry player with an axe to grind.

If you read a lot of posts, you'd see that we are nerfing non-healer healing quite a bit in order to make what the healer is doing count for more. There are also videos of DKs running around who have used to Dark Simulacrum to get Shadowform and a Felguard. That shouldn't be used as a basis for comparison to how weak or not weak healers are.

One of the reasons we start the beta population so small is to try and keep control over the strange perceptions players can sometimes get of seeing the game in a state where a lot of things are in a broken or half-implemented state. The most valuable posters are those who can see past this "noise" instead of dwelling on it. If any of you want a better chance at having your feedback considered by the developers, you should try to do just that. After reading through this particular thread today, I don't have high hopes that it is going to improve much from the new "woe is me" trajectory that it's on.

Q u o t e:

yeah, dismiss it as noise, not garbage. silly.

I'm not sure if you're just trying to be silly or playing gotcha, but you're talking apples and oranges here.

I used the "noise" to talk about numbers not being finalized yet. The player that advocates doing nothing but spamming Flash of Light, because that seems to work for them, is discounting our stated goal of that not being the way we want healing to work. (Now if we fail on that goal and you find something that works better than what we intended, go for it, but it's too early to make that determination yet.)

The poster was using "same old garbage" or something like that because he was annoyed at being nerfed. Presumably he'd rather us buff all the numbers up to the level of the highest one, no matter how ridiculous that made the final numbers. We describe this as "Oh no, I changed from one arbitrary number to another arbitrary number!" It's a nerf if you feel your character on live heal for less after a patch than you did before the patch. If we accidentally put an extra zero in a healing number and players decry that as a massive nerf, it's hard for us to take that seriously.

Q u o t e:

I think Elodrung & I are both at a point where we're frustrated because of how much we're struggling with the current beta content and how hard things have been on us in that environment. I've personally had to stop blog posting about resto druids because I'm so terrified that my posting will just cause hundreds of resto druids to reroll before Cata even hits the Live servers.

Then you've probably reached the limits of being able to offer us useful feedback on the beta environment. If it's frustrating for you, then stop playing. Using the forums for the digital equivalent of kicking the dog when you had a rough day at the office isn't benefiting us or other players.

Now if you have concrete feedback, by all means offer it. If you've offered all the feedback you've got and you still haven't seen any change because of it, then chances are we disagree with you or, just as likely, we haven't gotten around to making any changes yet.

If Resto druids reroll because the only thing they enjoyed about playing a druid was being overpowered, then so be it. If they reroll because they like healing when it's easy but not when they have to think, well, then they're collateral damage to some extent, but they'll *still* be able to heal normal dungeons just fine. If they reroll because they're convinced we're going to let Resto druids remain weak while the other 4 healers are powerful, then they're just being silly. We had all 5 healers participate in every LK dungeon and raid and the new combat mechanics and talent trees are only going to make it easier to balance for Cataclysm.