Comparing Healers in Patch 3.2
Many people are asking which healer got hit the most by the nerf bat in Patch 3.2 and whether they still stack up to each other. There are complaints that Holy Paladins got hit the hardest, but a lot of the people making the complaints don’t play the other healing classes and may not even know how they were changed in this patch. In this post I’ll list the nerfs and buffs for each healer in Patch 3.2 and how they compare to each other.
Note that every healer’s mana regen will be affected by the 20% nerf to Replenishment.
Paladins
There’s no question that paladins received the most significant changes. We received some pretty large buffs to our raid healing in the form of a new Beacon as well as some pretty large nerfs to our mana regen.
Buffs
- Paladins now have a new HoT that can be applied to anyone with the Sacred Shield buff on them (one per paladin). It heals for the amount of Flash of Light over 12 seconds after FoL is cast on the target.
- Beacon of Light now has a 60 yard range (up from 40) and now works on overheals. This means all of a paladin’s heals are doubled onto the Beacon target every time, even if that target goes out of range, allowing a Holy Paladin to raid heal and tank heal simultaneously without risk of the tank missing any heals. This turns every Holy Paladin into a raid healer while simultaneously providing a good deal of tank support.
- Paladins (and Shamans) now get 25% more Mp5 on their gear (druids and priests rarely use Mp5 gear).
Nerfs
To temper the above Beacon change and prevent Healadin’s from practically solo healing 10-man Ulduar with Holy Light spam and the new Beacon, Paladin’s mana regen was nerfed quite a bit. Paladin’s will now have to use Flash of Light more often and stack more mana regen stats and less crit (similiar to the other healers).
- Illumination now only returns 30% of a heal’s mana cost instead of 60% when a heal crits.
- Divine Intellect now only increases our intellect by 10% instead of 15%.
Shamans
Resto Shamans made out the best in Patch 3.2 They received a number of buffs in Patch 3.2 and avoided the nerf bat almost completely. Like paladins, Shamans are now much stronger raid healers with a very slight nerf to their tank healing ability.
Buffs
- Chain Heal was buffed. Each link will jump farther (12.5 yards now) and the amount healed per jump is only reduced by 40% (down from 50%). This helps shamans AoE healing when people are a little more spread out.
- Healing Wave (the Holy Light-ish equivalent) was buffed with the buffs to the Healing Way talent. Not only does it increase healing by more (25% instead of 18%) the increase is now up 100% of the time.
- Glyph of Healing Wave was buffed to include overhealing, meaning Healing Wave is even better (if you have the glyph).
- Lesser Healing Wave (the Flash of Light-ish equivalent) was buffed with the change to the Tidal Waves talent. Tidal Waves no longer reduces the cast time of Lesser Healing Wave by 30%. Instead, it increases the Crit chance by 25% (meaning more Ancestral Awakening procs).
- Shaman mana regeneration was buffed with the buff to Improved Water Shield. The water shield regen now has an additional 30% chance to proc on Chain Heal and it no longer consumes an orb (the shield has 3 orbs), meaning shamans won’t have to use a GCD to refresh water shield as often.
- Shamans can now drop all 4 totems in one global cooldown. This will save Resto shamans a few global cooldowns if their totems run out, need to be moved, or if they weren’t laid down before the fight.
- All shamans now have approximately 7% more health (to match the other classes).
- Like Paladins, Shamans now have 25% more Mp5 on their gear.
Nerfs
- Nothing significant
Druids
Resto druids received some mana regen nerfs, especially in PvP.
Buffs
- The Empowered Touch talent was buffed to also increase Nourish by 20%. However, many resto druids skipped Empowered Touch in 3.1 since Healing Touch is rarely used (usually only once every 2 minutes with Nature’s Swiftness). So, they’ll need to give up something else in order to get this buff to both Nourish and Healing Touch.
Nerfs
- Innervate now restores half the mana but is available twice as often. This is a nerf for druid’s mana regen on fights that last less than 4-5 minutes. The fight will now need to last at least 3 minutes after the first Innervate to get the full Innervate effect, which means the druid needs to remember to use it as early as possible. This is a buff for fights that last for at least 6 minutes after the first Innervate since the extra mana will be available earlier for the remainder of the fight. However most fights don’t last that long.
- Improved Barkskin no longer provides complete dispell immunity, which means that Innervate can now be much more easily dispelled in arenas, hurting regen even more.
- The bloom on Lifebloom now heals for 20% less. This is mostly a PvP nerf since the bloom happens when it is dispelled. The bloom doesn’t happen often in PvE since the Lifebloom HoT is usually kept up the entire fight.
Priests
Priests received a significant nerf to raid heals.
Buffs
- The only buff is a change to Glyph of Power Word: Shield, allowing its heal to proc Divine Aegis. What this effectively means is that they’ll get a bigger shield if the heal crits (if they have the glyph).
Nerfs
- The spell power coefficient for Prayer of Healing, the primary raid heal for priests, was nerfed from 80.7% to 52.6%. This means a priest’s raid heals will be quite a bit smaller.
- The cooldown on Penance, a powerful heal used mostly by Discipline priests, has been increased from 10 seconds to 12 seconds. Priests could counteract the change by getting the Glyph of Penance if they don’t already have it, but of course, they’d have to give up another glyph first.
Summary
Without question, shamans made it out the best in this patch. Druids will feel the Replenishment nerf the most, as well as paladins and priests who don’t stack any Mp5. Priests had their healing nerfed while paladins had their regen nerfed (and their healing as a result, since we need to use smaller heals). So, druids, priests, and paladins all received significant nerfs. Our Beacon and Sacred shield buffs should help counteract some of our regen nerfs. Like paladins, druids will have to watch their mana more closely, especially in PvP.
You can assume from these changes that paladins, priests, and druids were overpowered in Patch 3.1, especially when compared to raid-healing shamans. Paladins should not have been able to solo heal a tank for the entire fight using one spell, priests could raid heal too well, and druids rarely had to hold back their heals to save mana while raid healing. With Patch 3.2 things should be brought more in line with Blizzard’s vision as well as bringing shamans back up to the raid healing level of the other classes.
I’m feeling good about the paladin changes so far. Last night I tested them out on Live with a full clear of 10-man Naxx. While it wasn’t even close to a true test like the Argent Tournament will be, I made sure to heal like I would in the new raid even though that level of healing wasn’t needed. I found it was hard to keep up the new HoT all the time (hopefully I can get an icon added for it on my Healbot bar), but I could see how having every heal get Beaconed onto the tank and having a 60 yard range really makes healing a lot easier. It almost seemed too easy, like Beacon had lost most of its complexity. Holy Light and even Beacon and Holy Shock burned through my mana a lot. I was almost tempted to take Holy light off my action bar. I definitely have to watch the Divine Plea cooldown more closely and use Holy Shock less. But it was also very powerful and I’m excited to try it out on some real content. Even if the mana nerfs are a little much, I’m at least looking forward to the challenge. =-D
I also had a go at healing some heroics yesterday after the patch launched. I can’t wait for a new healbot to be released, as unless I kept the tank targetted I had no idea when the HOT wore off, 12 seconds happens a lot faster than I thought it would! I agree with you it seems almost too easy… the only tricky part is keeping the HOT up, the rest of the healing almost requires no thought - although I’m sure my opinions of this will change during this weeks raid. The only time I noticed an issue with my mana was during “cleanse heavy” fights, but once again in a raid I won’t be the only one doing this, so I say big ups, the changes are great!
I’m left wondering now if the SS/FoL combo HoT stack with my Forethought Talisman?
I will admit that I am liking the heal changes. I also jumped on to my Ret Pally and tested the SS/FoL HoT, it wasn’t awesome but it was a fun little novelty.
I ran CC last night on 10s and it was tough on mana. You really have to pay attention to it constantly. Every time I focussed more on healing and less on mana management I’d be pretty much OOM straight away.
I didn’t find the hot to be nearly as good as I’d hoped. Honestly I don’t think until you get 4p T9 its going to crucial to keep it up 100%. Beacon is pretty ok (the Northrend Beasts encounter is friendly to it though) although it feels like the skill to it is gone now.
Judgments counting as melee attacks gives me around 1.3k mana almost on every judgment. I think that’s the next target of blizz nerf.
As for the flash hot, considering that tanks need to be toped off almost at all time the hot is usually ending up an overheal if you are using SS on the MT.
New beacon is good, i was already used to throw HL and FoL on the raid sometimes, now it makes it more safe if the heal lands on someone with full hp.
Since every heal gets Beaconed onto the tank, not only is it now safe to throw heals on the raid, you should actually never be directly healing the tank.
okay this is my first post here so i’d like to say thank you so much for this blog first. it helped me a lot on learnig how holy pallys mechanics work and to get the right gear for early raids, you’re awesome! please keep this blog going.
so …. since 3.2 went live i’ve been healing xt, ignis and razorscale 10 man (couldn’t do more because xt was bugged) naxx 25, 10 man normal coliseum and a lot of 5 man heroics. my experiences were really mixed so i want to share them with you by splitting them up.
-5 mans: awesome. period. mp5 works really well in 5 mans where you have to walk a lot and the damage is not high so you can just cast your shield, hot and beacon onto the tank and flash a grp member from time to time. here you can get out of the 5secrule pretty easy and let the hot+jol do a lot of healing. i hardly ever used hl so i my healing done was about 80% by fol+hots and beacon. i didn’t have to reg a single time and went out of almost every fight with at least 95% mana.
-25 man naxx: i had a pretty good grp on this run with dds ranging from 3k-5k dps so we downed the bosses pretty fast so i can’t tell what it would be like if the fights last a bit longer. i didn’t notice any changes on my hps compared to pre-3.2. i had to watch on my mana more closely and had use divine plea more often but overall it felt also really good, except on patchwerk where i went oom (even though using every manareg option i had) for the first time ever and watch my tank die which really sucked (it’s such a bad feeling to know that you can’t do anything just watch him die). i never experienced that before and i felt bad about that but luckily he died at about 4% of patchwerk so we managed to down him anyways. i also noticed that i used fol a whole lot more than pre-3.1 where my overall spell allocation looked like this: 30% fol, 30% hl and ~15% hs. on this run i had ~50% fol ~15% hl and ~10% hs. BUT obviously, healing done by beacon was increased a whole lot so it actually cut out hs on my top 3 sources of overall healing and got on 2nd place with ~20%. on all bosses i didn’t feel that i had time to get out of the 5sr so i’m not sure how much i profit from mp5. (forgot to check my manareg on recount, sorry)
-10 man uldu: razor was a piece of cake, finished the fight with about 75% mana because of save divine plea usage (when it’s on the ground) and managed to keep my tanks alive pretty easy with fol+hl when the breath comes or stacks of the debuff get too high. ignis was harder, i had to heavily rely on my healing mates (druid and holy priest) because i had to use divine plea on almost every time it was ready to use but that wasn’t a big deal because i supported the add tank healer a lot with beacon so he wasn’t too busy. we couldn’t down xt because there were insane numbers of adds spawning (felt like more than in the 25 man version) but i noticed that i could help a lot more than pre-3.2 on raid healing during the earthquake while keeping the mt topped. again, mana wasn’t an issue because of save divine plea usage. i didn’t notice any changes on hps and my heal spell allocation was pretty much the same as it was in naxx25. my experience about mp5 was also quite the same.
-10 man coliseum normal: ok, we tried yesterday the first boss in coliseum, no one knew how the boss mechanics worked so we just downed him once and whiped on the 2 worms. our main problem was to get the adds down quickly but what mattered more to me is that i was oom after the first boss was down and i couldn’t even use divine plea savely before the 2 worms spawned. so i don’t know, i had like ~4k hps (which is really good for me personally) i heavily used fol on raid and beacon healing on the current mt. i hardly ever used hl but i think i used hs too often and went oom because of that. i can’t tell you more but i’m a bit concerned about that because again, i had no time to stay out of the 5sr.
so these were my first excperiences healing in 3.2. my gear is not high-end but it’s pretty decent with a good amount of ulduar10/25 items and t7.5’s. my conclusions from these experiences are that i’m thinking about gemming for more sp so that fol+hot is more powerful. on the other hand i think int might be even more important because of heavy dependance on dp for manareg+going not oom too quickly. i might even gem a bit for mp5 but i’m really not sure about that, what do you think?
i consider myself as a “casual gamer”, i do quite a lot of raids but i’m not in a really good guild which does hard modes. i haven’t even seen yogg or vezax yet so i think pallys with better gear from late-uldu25 bosses or hard modes might have other experiences which i really would like to read. so i would be very interested about how you’re feeling about the changes and i would appreciate recommenatation what i might have to change about my current healing style/gear/gemming.
overall i think the changes blizz made are quite contradictory because blizz wanted to move pallys away from int gemming and hl spam. i think pallys will still have to rely heavily on a large mana pool and now the hl spam is replaced by fol spam so i can’t see a major difference in the general play-style for holy pallys, the one-cast-spam-style remains. (again, this is only my personal opinion, feel free to correct my, i’d appreciate it)
so in the end i’d like to say that it’s still a lot of fun for me to play my holy pala, i’m definetly not thinking about rerolling a shaman healer or another class….. and sorry for my bad english, i hope you get the major context of what i’m trying to say
cheers, Aenay
Thanks Aenay. One comment I have is that you shouldn’t be worrying about the 5 second rule. Your Mp5 works regardless of the 5 second rule and it continues working even while you’re casting. The 5 second rule is only for Spirit-based mana regen. You don’t regen any mana from your spirit unless you’ve stopped casting for 5 seconds. But since paladins don’t use spirit, the mana we gain from being outside of the 5 second rule is very small. Mp5 works regardless of what you’re doing.
Also, I do think the flash of light spam is more interesting, mainly because you are healing more targets more quickly. But you’re right, it is kind of similiar.
Neat insights here and I appreciate your take on things. One thing I have witnessed is what we think about is 100% what we become. We create our own reality.