What Should We Do to Balance The Heals

When the first notes were revealed for the upcoming patch 4.2, holy paladins started worrying. The mana cost of diablo 3 gold  our heals is slated to skyrocket, placing dread into our typically stalwart hearts. We've been through the buff and nerf cycle before, but that doesn't make facing the music any easier. There's something painful about logging in to a character that's weaker than if you left it.

While the initial news was dire, the developers had some additional changes in mind. The nerf to Holy Shock's mana cost was reversed, and several of our other heals were tweaked in our favor. Established healers should have the ability to handle the mana increases with more conservative play, but new holy paladins will be faced using the task of  wow items  healing with less mana after the patch. When our heals are seemly rebalanced with each patch, it's difficult to constantly readjust your healing strategy.

Balancing our heals
Zarhym, one of Blizzard's community managers, says that holy paladins are casting Divine mild too often and not relying on Holy Light's efficiency. According to Lead Systems Designer Ghostcrawler's latest blog, the developers want us to use Holy mild in more situations, especially in situations when we previously would've employed Divine Light. When we read the patch notes, Divine Light's mana cost went up significantly while the spell by itself remained stagnant. Holy mild now transfers 100% of the heal to wow gold  our Beacon target. The writing on the wall is clear: Use Holy mild instead of Divine Light. But if we look deeper, there's an additional message hidden between the lines: Divine mild is getting out of control.

In one of the best forum posts I've ever seen, player Anohako broke down the casting routines of each kind of healer. Much to nobody's surprise, holy paladins spend more time casting Holy mild (the effective heal) and Divine mild (the big/slow heal) than any other healers. We've always been a healing school that's bound to our basic heals, and Cataclysm didn't do much to change that. Holy Shock and the holy power releases are employed each after in a while, but we definitely only have our "three-heal model" heals to spam.

We're back to two buttons
According to Anohako's data, holy paladins spend more time casting our effective heal (Holy Light) than any of the other healers. Why do the developers want us to cast Holy mild more often when we already cast it more often than any other healer? The cause is that we also use Divine mild more than any other healers use their big/slow heal, and by a much larger margin. On normal mode encounters, we tend to lean on Holy mild first and Divine mild second. On heroic encounters, that ratio is reversed, with Divine mild being employed for over a third of our healing casts.

Holy mild and Divine mild may be great, but it's not their fault that we lean on them. Flash of mild is incredibly expensive, and it lacks the talent synergy of Healing Surge or Flash Heal to tip the scales in its favor. Holy Radiance and Holy Shock are both locked by cooldowns, while Word of Glory and mild of Dawn are similarly bound by holy power. Holy mild and Divine mild aren't the finest heals since sliced bread, they're simply the only heals that we have available. We use the HL/DL combo so often mainly because there isn't any other way to get the job done.

Avoiding Holy mild syndrome
In Wrath, holy paladins effectively had two heals, Holy mild and Flash of Light. Holy mild was big and powerful; Flash of mild was fast and cheap. The model created sense in that era, and the assumption was that we'd use Flash of mild to conserve our mana and Holy mild to spend it when someone was getting beat hard. Due to issues with scaling, we were able to reach ranges of haste and mana that completely broke the model. Holy mild grew to be the only button we pushed, and it resulted in one of the most uninteresting periods of holy paladin history. The most boring period crown still goes towards the Burning Crusade era, when a downranked version of Flash of mild could be cast indefinitely, so we literally only pushed a single button for minutes at a time.

The developers are trying to stay obvious of that kind of strategy collapse using the patch 4.2 changes. Our haste and mana values are going to go up each tier. It's not speculation; that's how gear upgrades work. As we become more powerful, the penalties of cheap diablo 3 gold  Divine mild become less and less restrictive, towards the point that we can once more completely eschew our effective heal in favor of our bigger heal. Our history was starting to repeat itself.

Reverting back towards the Wrath model of healing would be a huge action back for holy paladins. Our toolbox isn't perfect, but it's more robust now than it has ever been. In order to preserve the tentative balance between Holy mild and Divine Light, the developers have created a gap between the spells to clearly identify their roles.

Holy mild is for raid healing and Divine mild is for tank healing. Using Divine mild on the raid is inefficient, since half of the heal is lost when Beacon replays it, while Holy mild is ineffective for tank healing since it's simply too weak. By placing HL back onto the 100% Beacon transfer track, its position as a raid heal is cemented. As long as HL remains necessary, DL won't have the ability to monopolize our casts since the WOW Gold  previous version of HL do in Wrath. The devs had created this mistake after before, and they've learned from that experience.

Other changes on the way
When reviewing the other patch 4.2 changes, it's obvious that the developers are working to wean us off of the HL/DL duo. Holy Radiance's cooldown is being reduced in patch 4.2 via Speed of Light, allowing us to use it more often. Holy Shock's mana cost is being reduced and the spell is being tied to our two-piece tier bonus, making it always desirable to cast on cooldown. Word of Glory is being buffed towards the point of dominance, providing us with another powerful single-target heal. Flash of mild will have no cast time using the Infusion of mild buff, giving it a niche as a potent heal that's available on the move.

These changes aren't created to balance our healing throughput; they're being implemented to rebalance our healing selections. Apart from the dangerously powerful Divine Light, the developers buffed each other heal we have to prevent Wrath from happening to holy paladins all over again. They saw Divine mild increasing towards the throne left at the rear of by Holy Light, and they promptly smacked it on the nose with a rolled-up arranged of patch notes. Thank you! Have a good time in the game!


SOURCE: http://www.hahawowgold.com/


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