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.

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

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.

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.

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.