Lvl85 H. Paladin Numbers/Abilities Thread

#0 - Sept. 3, 2010, 5:03 p.m.

Heal mana cost numbers, average heal values, and so on for the curious.

Before I get into the numbers, Guardian of Ancient Kings!
http://i67.photobucket.com/albums/h314/kaikulu/guard3.jpg
http://i67.photobucket.com/albums/h314/kaikulu/guard4.jpg
http://i67.photobucket.com/albums/h314/kaikulu/guardret.jpg (ret version, carries a large sword instead of a prayer book)
http://i67.photobucket.com/albums/h314/kaikulu/guardprot.jpg (prot version, carried a shield when not channeling)

As holy, melees for ~1k, is aggressive (hunts down critters in Stormwind even), and lasts 30 seconds or until five heals are used. Functions just like the tooltip states.

Anyways, here are the numbers:

My gear
Twilight Highlands and Uldum are not itemized yet. I have three Deepholm greens and two Cata heirlooms, with ICC25 heroic gear in every other slot. 5% plate specialization bonus is currently broken in favor of numerous more powerful non-plate healing items. My gear has all been reforged to drop haste or crit in favor of spirit when possible, and mastery when spirit is not available. ICC25 H gear is still full of spellpower gems.

Basic Stats
Health: 74k
Mana: 58k (~25k base)
Spirit/regen: 1100, 2065 mp5 while out of combat, 1032 while in combat.
Spellpower: 3848. This is lower than my current live value due to the lack of leveling gear present and talent changes.
Mastery: +10% healing converted to shields (416 mastery rating, 2.16 mastery)

Heal mana costs, and average unbuffed heal value without Conviction on self, with Divinity/Insight glyph
Divine Light: 7k mana, ~14k healing
Holy Light: 1.4k mana, ~7k healing
Flash of Light: 6k mana, ~9k healing
Holy Radiance: 9.4k mana, 1164/tick healing
Light of Dawn: 4.9k mana, 3.4k healing without Holy Power
Holy Shock: 1.9k mana, ~8.8k healing
Beacon: 1.4k mana

My Holy Light on live currently hits harder than my Divine Light at 85 with a few buffs.

These are numbers out of context, though. What is your impression of content since the cap was raised?

Unfortunately, the in-game dungeon finder tool forbids me from running any dungeon past Vortex Pinnacle (lvl83 dungeons) due to my gear being 20 ilvls below that which is required. Vortex Pinnacle itself, a new dungeon, hard-freezes whenever most players mouse over or target any mob, so it is currently untestable for many players.

I only have two references upon which to contextualize the lvl85 numbers: Twilight Highlands levelling and the new Ring of Blood. Level 85 mobs in Twilight Highlands tend to hit very hard - taking me down to about half hp in ret per mob to <5%, depending on the cooldowns I had available, while fighting mobs solo. The hardest hitting non-elite mobs I found dual wielded and could crit for 9.5k on their autoattacks, with spells hitting in the 7k-15k range. Several non-elite quests were not soloable, and one even required a group of seven before we were capable of downing the quest. There are many unavoidable groups of two social mobs in Twilight Highlands. Mob hp was typically in the 80k range, though there are a number of 115-130k hp non-elite mobs with the same damage as normal mobs.

Holy paladin grinding is downright evil. Do not even think of attempting it parring changes going to live. Exorcism hits for 2.1k unbuffed. 2-4 non-elite mobs (depending on the mob) are capable of doing more damage than Divine Light spam. Also mana issues - you don't really melee for mana back since Exorcism is so much more damage than other alternatives available (crusader strike).

The new Ring of Blood was interesting. The bosses were pretty simple and involved tank damage over and over again. A combination of Divine Light, WoG, and Holy Shock with few interruptions could handle the tank damage, but it drained mana very quickly - despite the bosses having the same hp as lvl80 bosses, mana could easily drop down to 25% when Holy Light was unusable. Word of Glory is extremely nice for tank healing and mana longevity, especially when combined with Tower of Radiance, given the extreme mana-starvation conditions present in Cataclysm.

Three second tank deaths are still in the game. I'm going to go with a broken ability on that specific boss (Earl of Evisceration) but his damage output wasn't actually that much worse than any other boss except when performing his flurry attack. For that Ring of Blood boss we had to do a rotation between tank cooldowns, healing cooldowns, and Heroism to down the boss (well, get him down as low as possible, the server crashed the one attempt he did not bug after he picked up the carriage).

Fun screenshot: the Earl of Evisceration on the attempt he did not bug out for! The damage output caught everyone by surprise, but it's ridiculous regardless. http://i67.photobucket.com/albums/h314/kaikulu/earlofevis.jpg

I'll be able to provide more meaningful updates once I find a non-dungeon finder group for the lvl85 dungeons. And as usual, everything in beta changes wildly every other patch, so take my words with the usual grain of salt.

Ghostcrawler

#66 - Sept. 5, 2010, 4:31 a.m.

Q u o t e:
Twilight Highlands and Uldum are not itemized yet.

Unfortunately, this is the most salient point in the original post. :( Everything from mana cost to tank damage are designed around having the correct gear. Doing an 85 zone in 83 gear is much, much harder than doing a 75 zone in 73 gear. Why? Because with only 5 levels, we made the level to level jump in item stats really high. That also means mobs also jump up a lot in power from level 73 to 75.

Almost every "Wow, things are hard" thread I have read on this and other forums are a direct result of not having Uldum and Twilight gear yet. We thought long and hard about whether it was a good idea to bump the level cap without that gear in place. In the end, we thought it was worth getting feedback on the quest design and some of the encounter design. But encounter balance is enormously dependent on having the right gear. Just keep that in mind. Things will feel better when you have ugrades available.

Q u o t e:

That wasn't my point. My point is is that the whole "mana management" game they are adding is going to matter in raids, not 5-mans unless you/group are very undergeared.

Right. Another way to think of it is Heal, Holy Light and Healing Wave are essentially your heal autoattacks. They won't do anything too impressive, but you can essentially do them forever.

The Guardian of Ancient Kings shouldn't take damage or die.

Q u o t e:
At the moment I doubt that a full set of 85 blues will change my opinions on how the healing is - mana will be better, but throughput will still seem way too low compared to damage output in many situations. The upgrades tanks and dps receive (especially in the sta department) will probably change things slightly, but I'll have to wait and see on that. Cataclysm content is not really more difficult than other content, but it doesn't seem like you can outgear it as quickly and the content is FAR less forgiving.

Throughput won't go up enormously, but it will go up. Regen will go up. Most importantly, tank health and total dps will go up a lot. You won't be able to top anyone off in a GCD, but nobody will die so quickly that you'll need to. In all of our dungeon tests, tanks don't die in 2 or 3 hits unless they are doing something very wrong in the encounter.

Q u o t e:
It looks to me Mastery(for many, if not all) is THE stat on gear.

It should generally be competitive with haste, crit and Spirit. Stacking one stat to the extent of all others, while appealing from a "what should I do?" perspective is not advisable.

Q u o t e:
Yes, according to GC our mastery and the priest mastery should roll.

The paladin mastery should definitely replace a lower shield with a larger one. We're a bit hesitant to just let you continually stack the shield up to its max size. That feels more annoying if anything because then paladins would feel compelled to spam heals on a tank before the pull so they could start with a max strength shield and then drink to restore the mana investment.

Q u o t e:
Don't get me wrong...until the last build I was stoked by all the changes. It's the loss of Illumination and the gutting of DP without losing the MS effect which depresses me. I know we've gained a lot but the loss of Illumination, Divine Illumination, Divine Intellect and the gutting of DP takes away so much of what I felt made the Tree what it was.

I can't imagine anyone chose Holy paladin because they loved Illumination and Divine Plea as concepts. I can see liking those abilities when they gave you near infinite mana. For some healers, we understand that never having to worry about mana was fun, but we feel like overall, healing will be more fun if there is more skill and less spamming the same button involved.

Q u o t e:
Mana regen for a ret spec in holy gear would be obscene, something on the order of 6k+ mp5 from judgements of the wise alone. Add in providing your own replenishment and the added utility of ret (an interrupt and real cc) and a healing ret spec may actually be possible. There are pretty obvious things you lose--and they may be too much to lose--but the regen might make it possible to spam the larger cost spells. Kinda boring, but there it is.

I think the loss of Meditation would be hard to live without. You might be able to keep a steady inflow of mana with Judging, but your mana pool would be small enough that you'd need to do so often and none of the heals would heal for particularly large amounts (except WoG).

Q u o t e:
A Holy Paladin currently is unable to outheal the passive healing of Warriors, Rogues, BM Hunters, Warlocks and Feral Druids.

I don't think this is true. Did you mean out-damage? I'm still not sure that is true, and even if it was, we don't think a healer should be able to put out very high dps while still being able to keep themselves alive. Healers should have enough damage in a PvP environment to be able to help their team. We don't balance around duels.

Ghostcrawler

#132 - Sept. 6, 2010, 7:46 a.m.

Q u o t e:
I really don't like the guardian of the ancient kings model...at all. It's a human model with skinned with luminous holy light like appearance....

Would it kill blizzard to have a unique model for him or at least a grander entrance? I can dig that avenging wrath wings is just there for display but the gota wings just being decoration is just plain lazy imo.

Take a look at it again. It's a unique model done by one of our most senior artists. It was inspired by the Resurrection spell of the Warcraft III paladin, which was vaguely human looking. This one is a new model though.

Ghostcrawler

#133 - Sept. 6, 2010, 7:48 a.m.

Q u o t e:
Okay, but you realize that Holy Paladins are meleeing with a spell caster weapon, right?

I wouldn't melee, unless you're trying to proc your Seal or something. Exorcism and Holy Shock do reasonable dps, and we don't think healers need to do dps that is higher than "reasonable."

If you're soloing in PvE and mobs are up on top of you, then go ahead and Crusader Strike if you want, but that's probably going to be about as effective as you'd imagine it would be.

Ghostcrawler

#134 - Sept. 6, 2010, 7:54 a.m.

Q u o t e:
Does that mean those stats will be buffed up to the level that they are comparable to Mastery for holy paladins, or that Mastery will be nerfed down to the level of crit and haste? Right now crit and haste are pretty miserable. Spirit is alright but still leagues below Mastery in my opinion with how my class is playing at 85, even considering the length of the 5-man encounters to what'll come in raids later.

We haven't made much of an effort to tune those yet, since players are just starting to get to be level 85. Since you describe mastery as clearly superior to the other secondary stats, my hunch is that that one is the outlier. That suggests we should nerf it really soon, or paladins are going to fall in love with those shields and then be really bummed when they are properly balanced. But I'm just speculating based on your feedback.

Ghostcrawler

#136 - Sept. 6, 2010, 7:58 a.m.

Q u o t e:
If the MS is still on Divine Plea it needs to go. There is absolutely no reason to have it on there anymore, that or everyone else should suffer through the same thing.

We like the healing penalty on Divine Plea. It's what makes the ability more interesting than just something you should hit on cooldown. At the point which you're just supposed to hit Divine Plea whenever you're low on mana with no thoughts to the contrary, then why have the ability at all? Why not just have a free mana boost that kicks in when it's low? The point of the penalty is that you need to think about the right time to use it. Look at a fight like Putricide -- good paladins figured out exactly when they could afford to Divine Plea.

Ghostcrawler

#137 - Sept. 6, 2010, 8:01 p.m.

Q u o t e:
2) Why would your mana pool be small? I said holy gear in a ret spec. And why would the heals be small? In a raid environment, the ret spec could have as much as 2000 more sp than a similarly geared holy paladin because of Sheath of Light and various buffs to AP. This alone would show how little scaling of healing spells the holy tree provides.

We'll look into it and make sure it's not viable. We've certainly had cases in the past where the conversion factors that let Ret not be terrible at healing look really attractive to someone actually wearing healing gear.

Ghostcrawler

#138 - Sept. 6, 2010, 8:05 p.m.

Q u o t e:
Wait a minute, I thought the whole reason downranking was removed was to lo LOWER the skill required to play the game as a healer now you want to inject skill back in to the game? Hate to beat a dead horse but it seems like this huge healing change is just a fix for making the mistake of removing downranking.

The problem with downranking that we hated, and the reason we killed it, wasn't because players were being clever by using cheaper heals when they needed a smaller heal. That's good gameplay and the kind of thing the new model should reward. The part of downranking that was broken, was that the coefficients matter so much more than the base points that you could maintain mana forever by casting a heal that was only slightly less effective. That wasn't gaming the numbers. That was breaking them.

Ghostcrawler

#179 - Sept. 7, 2010, 12:36 a.m.

Q u o t e:
You know what's going to happen, right? We won't be making spur-of-the-moment decisions about using it. We'll learn the encounters, plan the moment to use it for each encounter, and then do exactly that without thinking twice. The actual decision will be made in advance, long before we use the ability, and as such it is not an interesting decision.

To be fair though, you're essentially saying "Once I master the mechanic, it's harder for me to screw up," which is pretty much true of any mechanic and virtually a tautology.

Q u o t e:
Well, if that happened then that would still reward skill, as players prepared with that knowledge (either from reading guides online or experienced it first-hand) would have more mana and potentially perform better than than those paladins without that experience.

Right. It's a skill curve thing. If there is a right time to use something and a big penalty for doing something at the wrong time, then there is a bigger difference between good and less good players. If you can pretty much do something whenever, then there is less to learn about your class, less to perfect and ultimately less reward in investing in understanding the character.

Q u o t e:
I haven't gotten first-hand dungeon experience on many other characters or alts at the moment, but from the people I've been talking to and from watching the forums, it seems like a lot of classes and specs really love their mastery bonuses in comparison to other stats

Well, they are shiny and new and pretty much give you exactly what you want, so that response isn't too surprising. It's good that mastery is attractive and fun. We just don't want non-mastery gear to be viewed as junk the way some classes view some stats on Live. Incidentally, we looked at mastery for Holy paladins today and decided we were happy, for now, with the power it offers, so reforge away if you think that makes you more powerful. We might always tweak things in the future.

Q u o t e:
Maybe it'd be possible to kill two birds with one stone if Light of Dawn used Holy Power exclusively (with the strength being 100%/200%/300% by number of charges) and had no cooldown. That could make the Holy Power pretty interesting, with players opting for different healing methods to increase/decrease Holy Power generation to get Light of Dawn out more or less depending on the situation and to maximise Light of Dawn's use.

We thought about a similar implementation a lot, but just worried that would make Light of Dawn harder to use. With a long cooldown, you at least can save it until you think you need it. Sitting on 3 Holy Power (and being unable to use Word of Glory during that time) might be brutal.

Q u o t e:
First of all, then why have something like innervate at all with that reasoning? I'm low on mana, here is my free mana button with no penalty, time to use it. Where is the interesting game play there?

Innervate can be used on others for starters. Still, it's best not to try and compare different class abilities too closely. If paladins have mana problems either because base regen is too low or restoration abilities are too hard to use, then that's something worth fixing. But there are many ways to do that.

Q u o t e:
The big thing the devs have to remember here is that this is NOT WotLK. It's not Burning Crusade. It is Cataclysm. A 50% healing penalty on 10% mana regen every two minutes is completely unusable in Cataclysm. It's the same thing with crit and haste. Crit and haste are stats designed for BC and WotLK styles of healing from a healer standpoint. In classic, I did not want any crit on my gear, because going from 10% crit to 11% crit was not going to keep my tanks alive. In WotLK, crit was useful (relatively speaking) because 30-60% crit values were something I could rely on as a throughput option. On the same note, haste in the end of BC and all of WotLK was useful because mana wasn't an issue, so your mana pools could support haste. In Cataclysm? I aborr haste, because even with 15% haste I won't be much better of a healer due to Divine Light OOMing, and because Holy Light will still not be able to supplant Divine Light usage.

That's an interesting perspective. Typically LK paladins tell us that they like haste because it lets them get a heal out *right now* before a tank dies, but don't like crit because it often overheals. To use a tired cliche, it did feel a lot like Whack-a-mole because you needed to heal ASAP but how hard you healed someone wasn't nearly as important. FoL could often bring someone to full and a HL crit would be tons of overhealing. (I am talking only about the stats in how they affect healing per se, not extra effects like Illumination.) In Cataclysm you won't overheal as much (making the free healing from crits more useful) but you won't be in constant fear of the tank dying in one GCD (making haste less useful).

Q u o t e:

the problem is that you are expecting us to have the correct gear for those zones.. that drops in those zones from quests, or from dungeons. you don't get lvl 85 gear in deepholm. you don't enter twilight higlands or uldum at lvl 85. you don't enter twilight highlands, or uldum in lvl 85 gear. so why would you balance the mobs around lvl 85 gear?

It's not quite that extreme. The problem currently is that some players are tackling Uldum or Twilight Highlands in level 83 gear, or worse, their LK epics (just had to throw that in there :) ). You will probably want a good mix of level 84 and 85 gear before doing the level 85 dungeons, and certainly the heroics. Eloderung says that he or she now has a decent mix of dungeon gear so the quest gear issue should be skewing things less. There are still overtuned or undertuned bosses and abilities for us to contend with though.