Flash of Light, Lay on Hands, Sacred Shield Changes - Patch 3.3
A new PTR build - a slew of new paladin changes! This time there’s a change that will affect Holy Paladins quite a bit.
- Flash of Light: This spell no longer causes a heal-over-time effect unless the player has the Infusion of Light talent.
- Infustion of Light: This talent now causes the paladin’s Flash of Light spells to heal the target for 50/100% of the Flash of Light healing amount over 12 seconds.
- Sacred Shield: Reverted back to the live realm version.
Update: It seems that the Patch Notes aren’t really accurate. On the PTR, the FoL HoT still only works in conjuction with Sacred Shield but it only works if you have the Infusion of Light talent. So, this isn’t really a change at all for Holy Paladins, which makes a lot more sense and is in line with their other changes. A flat-out FoL HoT would definitely be overpowered. Still, here’s hoping we see it someday. =-D
Removing the HoT from Sacred Shield is Blizzard’s new nerf to Sacred Shield for Ret and Prot Paladins since they reverted their previous nerf. This is now amazing for Holy Paladins though. It flat-out doubles the efficiency of Flash of Light, as long as we aren’t just spamming it on one target. Considering I already splash Flash of Lights all over the raid, this change is absolutely OP. All I needed was another buff to pad my healing meters even more. I’m almost as excited about this change as I was about the Beacon change. I’ll have Flash HoTs running all over the raid! It’ll be sweet. I’m sure the reason Blizzard can justify it is because not many Healadins use Flash of Light very often but for those of us who do, this change is awesome! Btw, I’m assuming that Infusion of Light will still retain all of its current properties in addition to the above change.
- Lay on Hands: This ability now places Forbearance on the target and cannot be used on a target with Forbearance.
- Update: Sanctified Light: This talent now also has a 33/66/100% chance to prevent Lay on Hands from causing Forbearance when Lay on Hands is used on others.
This change means we probably shouldn’t be casting Lay on Hands on our Paladin tanks any longer, preventing them from using Divine Protection. We might not even want to use it on ourselves, since it will be locking us out of Divine Shield, although that’s usually not a huge deal. This is Blizzard’s new nerf to Lay on Hands. Instead of outright preventing us from using LoH on ourselves, Prot and Ret Pallies are now just locked out of our other immunity abilities for 2 minutes when we use it. Since Blizzard added a talent to the Holy tree to negate this effect, Holy Paladins aren’t affected by this change.
For those people who are crying about Lay on Hands being nerfed at all, Ghostcrawler has made a good point about how Lay on Hands is over powered. Powerful abilities on long cooldowns are still OP. Lay on Hands allows some Ret Pallies to instantly heal themselves for 25,000+ health and some Prot Pallies to instantly heal themselves for 50,000+, which is OP regardless of the long cooldown. For example, if they gave Prot Warriors the ability to do 50,000 damage instantly on a 90 minute cooldown, everyone would agree that it was OP. It would make them too powerful when the cooldown is up. Lay on Hands essentially does the same thing so it needed to be nerfed.
- Divine Intervention: Cooldown on this ability has been reduced from 20 minutes to 10 minutes. Cannot be used in Arenas.
I already use DI quite often, just to save a repair bill and to speed up a wipe when its called. Now it should be up almost every single wipe. Nice! I’ll have to start bringing more symbols with me.
Another nice change is that all meeting stones will be usable by all characters over level 15. Which means level 80s can get summoned to Scarlet Monastery, Dead Mines, or anywhere else. Yay!
I’m very excited about the Flash of Light change. I can’t wait to start pumping out even more heals throughout Icecrown Citadel!
Assuming that each flash of light I cast will trigger its own 100% HoT on that target.. and that I have a beacon up on the tank .. if each tic of the HoT on every raidmember gets mirrored over to the beacon target, then we are talking some utterly amazing healing.
Now, I’m not that great with numbers, so please correct the following where needed .. but lets assume for arguments sake that each Flash of Light heals for 4000, we have no crits, beacon up, and that I throw away 6 Flashes of Light on different party members.
That would result in 24000 raw direct flash of light heals, as well as another 24000 in HoTs, ticking at a rate of 2000 every second. This is at the very low end of what a pally would be able to dish out, it would not be a stretch to double it if you add crits and have a FoL cast time of below 1.2s.
With each automatic FoL HoT lasting 12s, we could get off 10 of those babies, covering an entire 10man raid group, each sending its HoT to the beacon target, easily resulting in a total of 4000/second tic on the tank.
^ above post was also assuming that the FoL HoT gets mirrored onto the beacon target, which after skimming the elitistjerks.com forum apparently isnt going to happen.
Question: Will the buff to FoL make Holy Shock obsolete in any situation that doesnt require a last second life saving insta cast?
@Nano: There’s a good chance the FoL HoT won’t carry over to the Beacon since, as you put it, it would be insanely OP and there would be no point for any other class of healer. =P
Ok so I haven’t played for over a year. Had a 70+ fire mage, got tired of him, then built a 70+ prot pally that re-specced holy. At the time, the only real option was single target healing the tank or off tank. Have things changed? Worth getting back into things? Thx.
Yeah, I’m confident the HoT won’t get transferred to the tank since it doesn’t currently.
Personally, I’ll still be using Holy Shock a lot. In fact, I’ll enjoy those instant cast Flash of Lights even more now.
Paladins are definitely about more than single-target healing now. At a minimimum we are two target healers. But a Holy Pally can also do a great deal of raid healing while also helping keep up the tank if we need to. I would definitely recommend getting back into things. =-D
There is a misunderstanding in the patch notes. The FoL HoT still requires Sacred Shield to be applied to the target for the HoT effect to be triggered. On the PTR, the SS-FoL HoT interaction is still the same as it has been since 3.2; you just need to be specced into Infusion of Light for the HoT to proc at all.
I highly, highly doubt a spammable FoL HoT is intended to be implemented either, because it would be ridiculously overpowered. You would then have paladins able to output 10k HPS on a tank as well as blanket like 10+ raid members with a HoT. I really don’t see that happening.
^ Been reading the same in other forums, which takes the wind out my 3.3 hype. Will Infusion of light keep its original talent and add the SS FoL HoT, or will the SS FoL HoT overwrite the current talent functionality?
If it’s the latter, giving “only” the SS FoL HoT, would it be worth taking at all?
Yeah, that’s not what the patch notes are saying, but it does make more sense that way. A flat-out HoT would be overpowered, IMO.
If DI can now be cast every 10 minutes, is it possible to have the reagents stack in groups larger than 5?
I much prefer these changes to the ones that were first announced.
As it has been said the change to the FoL hot / Sacred Shield combo has just been forgotten in the patch build notes, I can’t think about how OP Flash of Light would be with such an additional effect not limited to the one person having our Shield.
What surprises me is a comment from Blizzard I read about a week ago saying that, even with all the tools we have, a lot of paladins still mostly only use Holy Light as their main spell.
I tried to post my views about paladin healing in 3.2 here: http://atouchofarcane.blogspot.com/2009/09/raid-healing-for-holy-paladins-post-32.html, I would really appreciate to read what you think about the tools we have now as a whole.
Thank you for your continuous posts, they are always very detailed and informative.
Well, I sure would like the Flash of Light HoT to go on people without Sacred Shield. Now, this would make us pretty decent raid healers and would have us compete with the Druids. I’m not one of these Pallys who wants to be the best of every type of healer. I know that each has their specialty. But they could give us the Flash of Light HoT on anybody, regardless of the Sacred Shield, but have it that each Holy Pally can only have 4 people with the HoT on ‘em at any one time. If you cast a FoL HoT on the 5th person, they get the HoT and the first person loses theirs. This would improve our raid healing a bit, but still keep us that we’re always the tank healer.