Paladins and 1.9

[Kevin]

>>Have paladins healing capabilities been cut down so much in 1.9?

It's always been tricky for a Paladin to be a main healer in anything they aren't over-levelled for.  The way I was doing it was blessing of light, judging and sealing wisdom, and then casting Holy Light.  You can actually get a whole lot more healing out of your mana pool with the FoL, but let's face it ... FoL heals so little it might as well be a HoT.  That meant that you were limited to HL and that meant you were going to be running out of mana.  The judge/seal combo really did wonders with that, though.

With a 10s limit on renewing your judgement, though, that means you end up having to re-judge several times during a fight just to keep that up.  With a 2.0 attack weapon, you get 4 shots at renewing a judgement.  If you have to cast 2 heals during that time ... you get one.  A miss/dodge/parry and you have to lose mana and casting time to re-judge.  A move that was already skating on thin ice as it was teeters over the edge to just becoming dangerous to the party.

I may be wrong on this.  It still may be possible.  Unfortunately, I can't test this since the test server, right now, has a build on it that is not refreshing ANY of my judgements.

Oh, one other thing.  Vengeance is, as of right now, not boosting Seal of Command damage anymore.  That's about an 8% damage loss to the "critadin" crowd.  This may be a bug though, Blizz hasn't commented either way.

<edit - a healing paladin may be more viable with a faster weapon like a Flurry Axe to proc wisdom.&nbsp; Unfortunately, I can't afford Flurry for my Pally.&nbsp; In case you were wondering, there are all of 3 weapons in the entire game that are 1.5 speed for a pally.&nbsp; I predict the number of clerics running around with Hanzo swords is going to go up, post patch>
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That's why the lasting judgement talent in the Holy tree. A paladin main healer pre 1.9 still generally have to have have 20 points in Holy (I know it made it a lot easier for me when I was only healer in instances growing up). It's difficult but I didn't find it that much more difficult than I did with a druid becuase the druid either relied on a slow heal (3.5 second cast) to save mana or chewed it up in Regrowth. Though I did have the instant cast HoT. I also could not oh #$%& blessing of protection, though I could nature's swiftness. And as only healer as a druid if someone died more than once every 30 minutes it meant end of instance or fighting the repops (unless that person could stealth or we had a warlock).

Of course I had improved blessing of wisdom which I will miss a lot with just a 20 point Holy investment 6 mana/5 second adds up when you are looking the the pulls in a 5 man being 1.5 to 2 minutes or so each (3 to 5 mobs at 15-30 seconds per mob) and losing divine favor which was huge in 5 mans for a free heal and a crit heal to make the mana pool last longer and give you more time to heal other hurt people. I would generally judge light and run wisdom and of course the MT got blessing of light. I did pretty much only use Holy Light in healing the 5 man though. But I was not doing them while over leveled. I was 47 and turned 48 in Sunken Temple, I was 37 and turned 38 in Maraudon (and I wasn't 20 in holy then I was 8 Holy/21 retribution). I had rather varied groups that I healed too. Sometimes I had a couple of warriors sometimes I had a pally tanking, sometimes I had CC, sometimes I didn't.

As mentioned overall DPS has probably gone done even if you can control it a bit better with the new judgements but that ups your down time for more drinking. Overall aggro control appears to have gone down, even for prot spec, and you can't heal as well with a retribution or a protection build because of where the holy talents are now. So they are pigeon holing the paladins even more. At least the old trees all paladins could help their healing some if they wanted or mix damage with tanking. Now you pretty much have to try and specialize more it seems. So the stated mixing it up is wrong. I will say the trees make the builds a bit more distinct but they are all still relatively poor builds except for the two things you mentioned.

Now had they done what they did for druids where you could be a resto with good feral (like I am) or a feral with good resto, or a balance with good either or feral or balance it would have been different. And all 3 of those trees offer something different at the high end that gives you specialization that is helpful everywhere in the game. Holy shock doesn't really give you a healing edge. Innervate does and it helps the party more even if you put it on someone else. The paladin holy tree suffers many of the same problems as the priest one now. Mana tide for a shaman offers much more benefit as well (though the investment to get mana tide is generally too high because of other things you have to get up and how horrible the prereqs are).

Repentance has a very marginal effect on how well you can tank and survive because of the short duration and cooldown and it doesn't really help the party much either. Leader of the pack/Moonkin help you do your job and help the party more. Stormstrike or improved grace of air will do more the party and your tanking or survivabilty for the shaman in my book too.

Blessing of kings is generally not the first choice blessing though it does help the party and raid a lot (this is a bigger deal to me in the horde vs alliance debate than salvation ever was, 200-500 more HP for everyone as well as more mana) but if you are tanking in party pretty much everone is getting salvation so you can have better aggro control, if you are healing anyone expecting to take damage is getting light and mana users are generally going to get more benefit from wisdom, DPS classes will get might or salvation in most cases. Though kings has had it's uses in 5 mans where I'm the only paladin as well. So kings is closer to what the top tier talents a druid has. Elemental Mastery for the shaman will probably do more of a DPS boost though it isn't a big help to the party but since other deep shaman talents are.

Of course they may nerf the shaman in similar ways but right now of all the hybrids the paladin has become the most dependent on spec to perform one of their jobs well. So shaman should expect talent changes like the paladin got, that will pigeonhole them even more and probably nerf them too. I already felt the shaman was able to more fluidly change roles than a paladin was and that won't go away simply because they have always had more control of their DPS.

Now I still need to play the 1.9 paladin more than I have on test but as you mention the test build isnt' working the way it should be for some stuff anyway making that hard to do.

I'm not really happy with the changes.