Nobody Reads This

Gamer, Blogger, Student

James Reynolds

jamesr87[.at.]gmail.com

Endangered Species

So yesterday a friend finally kicked my back-side and convinced me to check up on the 3.2 patch notes, in response to me asking if there were substantial paladin changes he ominously replied “Ohhh yes”.

It has come to Blizzard’s attention that Paladins are over-performing on the mana effeciency front with many high end players completing Ulduar encounters with intact mana supplies. Blizzard has sought to resolve this by reducing our overall mana-pool with 5% off the top of of Divine Intellect and halving the mana return of Illumination (Down to 30% from 60% of Base spell cost).

As hard as two pretty nasty changes are to swallow they do not come without good reason. Paladins have always been the heinously effecient healing class but we paid for that in a relatively poor array of healing tools. We have no castable HOT’s and one insant cast heal which is on a 6 second cooldown. In return for this reduction in effeciency it was off set by providing us with a new take of Sacred Shield and an arguably fixed version of Beacon of Light.

Sacred shield will now apply a HOT for the total amount healed by the flash of light that procs it which means a sizable increase in healing done especially on those bosses where managing to even cast the heal is the hardest part, i’m looking at you Heigan the Unclean! The Beacon of Light buff now means it heals on potential healing done and for up to 60 yards in range, a very nice adjustment to an already powerful spell and arguably further encourages Raid Leaders to utilize us for Raid healing but at the same time further establishes us as the tank-healer of choice.

Whilst nobody likes the nerf-bat it becomes especially hard to swallow when Blizzard clearly does not realise where Paladins are actually underperforming. Any situational fight that contains either elements of movement or cast-time delays hampers us more than any other class. We are left casting 1 instant every 6 seconds, 1 sacred shield and if we are lucky a flash of light. During a Malygos throw the equates to as much as 20k healing split 10k over at most 4 targets but realistically 3 in a scenario where the whole raid takes as much as 20,000 a head.

Druids, Priests and to a much lesser extent Shaman are all better suited for difficult situations and yet Paladins remain as useless in the Malygos fight as ever before. Here’s to hoping that changes in the not to distant future but for now I’ll enjoy healing both tanks in the Razuvious fight and hitting 7.5k Hp/s.

Remember; never drink and heal,
JamesR.

Liadrin the Noble of Turalyon