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Q u o t e:
-- Since paladins don't rely on any of those abilities for mana regeneration, we lowered the healing penalty of Divine Plea to -50%. We are also likely to make Spiritual Attunement provide less mana for non-tanking paladins. We are not touching Illumination for the moment. Nor are we lowering the effects of Replenishment (though as I have suggested, it would be our likely next target if we aren't happy with the results of these changes).

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Not to derail the thread or hammer you too hard on this, GC, but this highlights the one major gripe I've had with the paladin revamp this expansion. It really feels now like there are three mostly-seperate classes living in the paladin talent trees that happen to share certain inconvenient mechanics, rather than one hybrid class with multiple specializations. As a result, each of the three paladin classes feels as if it were being continually held down by the balancing requirements of the other two classes.

While I appreciate that there was a tremendous amount of work done on the paladin class as a whole this expansion, I'd like to ask if it is intended that there is so very little commonality between the three talent trees in terms of gearing, capabilities, and resource mechanics, or is this something you plan to work on in the future?

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Q u o t e:


I said the goal was to have regen about the same. In our tests all four healers run out of mana at about the same time if they aren't able to get out of the five-second rule, and if the paladins aren't gaining mana from being healed and using Divine Plea at every cooldown.

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WHoa whoa whoa Hold on a sec here

So on your test you have it so that in normal healing situations without raid wide damage Holy pallies while using Divine Plea run out of mana at the same time as the rest of the healers.

That sounds great and all except Divine plea has a huge healing nerf on it now. In the order of 50%.

So if a Holy Pally wants to keep up their heal amount they need to forgo Divine Plea. Subsequently they will run out of mana BEFORE everyone else.

If there is such a HUGE cost to using divine plea then it should not be used in the time calcs.

Now if you are saying equally geared of all the healers and pallies using divine plea and all running out at the same time net yields equal HPS or HPtotal. Then that is a different story.

But I highly doubt that is the case and Holy is now running out of mana faster and/or healing for less.

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Q u o t e:


Guess what? You're wrong.

Seriously, if you're so convinced that the devs hate our class, then explain:

-Priests being one of the two best(read- not gimp) healers in Sunwell, including being the best healer for KJ by a mile and a half due to the fight basically being specifically designed to make chain heal worthless
-Priests being grossly overpowered in PvE from 3.0 to the CoH nerf
-Shadow priests being similarly OP in early BC and still outright required for serious raid content up to the end of Sunwell, to pull them into this.
-Pallies, druids, and shaman being second-best in all relevant aspects to priests as healers throughout all of vanilla

Seriously, we haven't been perfect in all aspects of the game over the years, but to say that we've been significantly worse off on average compared to anybody else due to some VAST DEVELOPER CONSPIRACY requires very selective memory.

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We are good on loatheb now, you don't see me saying priests are alright because of that one encounter much like we are alright because we are sought after for KJ

We were good with COH spam, but could easily go out of mana. This is no longer the case they nerfed our AOE heals and increased a pally glyph to overtake us on fights like sapphiron.

We had a niche in raids with shadow, thats gone, you happy? replaced by ret pallies

The one good point u have is we were good in vanilla. But that was years ago.

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Q u o t e:


I have a question. You talk about priests, druids and paladins quite a bit. Unless I missed something, you have yet to talk about Shaman regen specifically.

While we share much of the same regen model as Paladins - I am curious as to why you talk about Priests and Druids (who share regen models), but not Shamans. While I agree with this change, and have no argument to it, it makes it a little antsy to see a distinct lack of mention of Shamans. Are we being left alone, or changed?

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As I understand it, shaman was the only healing class "in danger" of running OOM, so all other healers are having their mana regen looked at (except pallies, who still regen the same amount of mana through DP) and being "leveled" with shaman as far as regen so they all go OOM at the same time (GC even said this excluded DP, which was not touched in the mana retruned)

40% is huge IMO, but lets look at it differently. I used to play a priest, Redtalon of Burning Blade, and I stacked his spirit up to 1100 but he only had 800 intellect unbuffed. His mana regen while casting was just under 300, and NOT casting was over 900. Going from casting to not casting, that is a 300% increase in regen. I consider this a significant reason to stop casting.

Now for the new numbers, his regen while casting is the same, at ~300. But while not casting has dropped down to just under 550. That is only 150 more regen, a meger 50% more. So, the move from casting to not casting is only 150% more regen. Half the bonus from previously.

Now true, I have not seen the changes to talents such as Inner Fire, Holy Concentration and Improved Holy Concentration... but since the difference between casting and not casting has been cut in half (in my example)I see no reason to actively get outside the FSR unless you are OOM or in a transition phase or simply do not need to heal.

As far as I'm concerned this is not only another nail in the coffin of a healer I will never play again, but the epitaph upon his gravestone.

Could you guys please try to keep it constructive. Saying anything like

* You hate my class
* You never play my class
* You have no idea how my class works

Is really kind of silly when you think about it. They built them.

Provide an actionable example. Try to follow an example with start, middle, and finish.

* I'm concerned this regen change will negatively affect my PVP performance, which I feel is already suboptimal due to the factors of X and Y. Have you considered these factors with the regen change?

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Q u o t e:
-Pallies, druids, and shaman being second-best in all relevant aspects to priests as healers throughout all of vanilla

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Why complain about the past and not celebrate the present.

Paladins are basically 3 classes in one and druids are 4 classes in one. With some gear and a respec you are not trapped in the same narrow world that priests are. We can be healers, or we can be ranged DPS. You can be viable - actually some would argue the best - at tanking, melee dps and healing. Plus you are PvP viable. Dragging up the past like this takes away from your argument rather than adding to it.

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Q u o t e:

I am still not following the logic that Int now trumps Spirit by even more. It may have been a better stat already, but these changes shouldn't affect it that much unless you A) skip Meditation and Intensity, or B) relied a whole lot more on OOFSR regen than the average raid healer of reasonable skill.

I will break from our normal practice and go ahead and provide the numbers, just to make sure nobody is guessing about the details when doing their estimates:

-- The amount of base mana regen granted has been reduced 40%. We called this "Spirit" in the notes, since most players associate OOFSR regen with Spirit, but in reality Int factors into the equation as well and we only lowered the constant, not the relative contributions of Int or Spirit. In retrospect, this probably caused more confusion than it alleviated, but mana regeneration is a fairly technical concept.

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Umm... no

You are making a very basic theory crafting mistake. Honestly, it is such a simple calculation that I am surprised you haven't caught it already/

GC do the following:

1. Calculate how much effective mp5 is being added with +10 int to a priest with meditation 3/3, 1000int, 100spirit and 80% FSR time. So when int goes from 1000 tp 1010. Take replenishment into account.

2. Now do the same calculation but with 10 spirit instead of int.

3. Do the calculation with aforementioned changes.

Result: the amount of mp5 added by int changes very little, however, the amount added by spirit decreases when you go from 3.0 to 3.1.

Why is that? its because the biggest chunk of mp5 provided by int is through replenishment which isn't being changed in 3.1

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Q u o t e:

WHoa whoa whoa Hold on a sec here

So on your test you have it so that in normal healing situations without raid wide damage Holy pallies while using Divine Plea run out of mana at the same time as the rest of the healers.

That sounds great and all except Divine plea has a huge healing nerf on it now. In the order of 50%.

So if a Holy Pally wants to keep up their heal amount they need to forgo Divine Plea. Subsequently they will run out of mana BEFORE everyone else.

If there is such a HUGE cost to using divine plea then it should not be used in the time calcs.

Now if you are saying equally geared of all the healers and pallies using divine plea and all running out at the same time net yields equal HPS or HPtotal. Then that is a different story.

But I highly doubt that is the case and Holy is now running out of mana faster and/or healing for less.

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I think what he meant was pallies were going oom like the other classes were, if they aren't being healed or using DP every cooldown.

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Q u o t e:
So Priests are overpowered when they don't heal?

I'm sorry. SA is a tiny fraction of Pally's overall mana return. On a fight with tons of damage output to the pally (the RF add tank on Sarth with multiple drakes)

It is roughly 1/5 of what Illumination is.
It is 1/2 of what Replenishment is.
And it is equal to Divine plea.

SA however can scale to literally nothing depending on the fight. In patchwork it returns nothing.

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I'm looking at a Sapph parse where a pally is getting half as much from SA as from Illumination, and more than from Replenishment or DP. But that's the most extreme case, which kind of illustrates another issue with SA that you also bring up, that its return was rather spiky just like OO5SR regen- if the pally is taking lots of damage, he gets lots of mana back, if he doesn't get hit at all, he doesn't. So the nerf is similar to the 5SR one in that it's more about consistency than overall regen.

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Q u o t e:
However the OOFSR will affect a Priest in every fight in a very large way.

And if you think Priests are doing so much better than Pallys when it comes to mana... then... ya... I got nothing... I cannot imagine a way that Priests deserve such a massive nerf to mana without a Buff while Pallys get away with such a minor nerf

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Not going to speak for relative pally/priest regen as I honestly don't pay much attention to the blue bars next to the pink boxes, but still, I haven't had to pot or ask for an innervate and have barely had to fiend/HoH unless I died and got my ass sc%!#*d off the floor by a druid since I got rid of the last of my Sunwell gear, and I'm the biggest mana *!#*! in my guild.

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Q u o t e:

-- The effects of talents that provide mana regen while casting have been increased by 67%. This includes: Arcane Meditation, Improved Spirit Tap, Intensity, Mage Armor, Meditation, Pyromaniac, and Spirit Tap. For example, Intensity and Meditation are now 17/33/50% mana regen while casting (up from 10/20/30%). For most dps classes who never got much mana from OOFSR in the first place, the results should not be noticeable. Boomkin may be a possible exception because of Innervate, and we'll take a look at that.

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Thanks for the update and good to know you are keeping an eye on Balance mana regen, specifically with an eye on the Innervate nerf. I hope you will also take notice of the issue that we are forced into a very hard choice between mana regen and utility DPS talents for PvE and will consider condensing some required talents, specifically a talented cooldown reduction or boost to strength for Innervate. Another welcome change would be moving Intensity down from the third to the second tier of Restoration talents while making Master Shapeshifter no longer dependent on having Natural Shapeshifter. That change would allow us to spec into Intensity without having to make choices between essential DPS talents in our primary tree and mana regen talents that other DPS classes are not being forced to make.

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Q u o t e:


I thought I mentioned this at one point, but we were pretty happy with Resto shaman mana regen. They were our target and we wanted to bring priest and druid regen (by making non-casting regen lower) and paladin regen (through DP and SA) closer to that point.



Sorry, that was unclear. I meant some of the changes to lower burst damage so that defensive classes aren’t so uber in PvP.

To those players who feel like they already have trouble managing mana now, it's hard for me to evaluate each case to know what is going on. My only suggestion is you need to treat mana regeneration as a real mechanic and not just go for throughput in all of your gear and talent choices. We are going to get all of this on the PTR so that we and the community can run additional tests to make sure that all four healing classes feel valuable and effective. Ulduar is definitely going to shine a harsher light on PvE balance in all forms and we're just going to have to deal with problems (real or imagined) as they come up.

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I have been trying to skate a fine line on Hit rating and spirit for a while now on my pvp gear. I am still falling behind to healers to have to gear for neither of these stats. This is my problem.

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Q u o t e:
I thought I mentioned this at one point, but we were pretty happy with Resto shaman mana regen. They were our target and we wanted to bring priest and druid regen (by making non-casting regen lower) and paladin regen (through DP and SA) closer to that point.

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Thank you for the clarification.

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Q u o t e:
Why complain about the past and not celebrate the present.

Paladins are basically 3 classes in one and druids are 4 classes in one. With some gear and a respec you are not trapped in the same narrow world that priests are. We can be healers, or we can be ranged DPS. You can be viable - actually some would argue the best - at tanking, melee dps and healing. Plus you are PvP viable. Dragging up the past like this takes away from your argument rather than adding to it.

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Not when I'm arguing a point of his in regards to the past. He's arguing that priests have been neglected by developers for the past three years, I'm saying that if the devs have hated priests all these years then why have they had all these periods of being so powerful?

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Q u o t e:

WHoa whoa whoa Hold on a sec here

So on your test you have it so that in normal healing situations without raid wide damage Holy pallies while using Divine Plea run out of mana at the same time as the rest of the healers.

That sounds great and all except Divine plea has a huge healing nerf on it now. In the order of 50%.

So if a Holy Pally wants to keep up their heal amount they need to forgo Divine Plea. Subsequently they will run out of mana BEFORE everyone else.

If there is such a HUGE cost to using divine plea then it should not be used in the time calcs.

Now if you are saying equally geared of all the healers and pallies using divine plea and all running out at the same time net yields equal HPS or HPtotal. Then that is a different story.

But I highly doubt that is the case and Holy is now running out of mana faster and/or healing for less.

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Read what he wrote... He said while NOT USING Divine Plea... IE... You supposedly run out of mana at the same time as other classes when you DON'T USE IT.

Using it just gives you a massive leg up.

Maybe I am misunderstanding what you are trying to do here. Healing should not be so "spammy" yet, you take out the benefit of exploiting to 5sr, causing people to just constantly spam spells instead of deciding between casting a spell and gaining some oo5sr mana. I fail to see how taking choices away makes healing roles more interesting and challenging.

I foresee these changes doing two things:

1) They will force every raid to have someone with replenishment. As it is, my wife (holy priest) and I (resto druid) two heal naxx 10 every week with no replenishment and no shaman for totems, and thanks to the 5sr, we do not nave mana issues unless the raid is having a really bad night mentally. Nerfing 5sr regen too much will force us to bring a pug or one of our dps to spec into a tree that he normally wouldn't want to spec into. As it is, when we have someone with replenishment, its hard to drop below 90% mana even spamming heals constantly. In my estimation, replenishment is the ability, stacked with totems and the like, that has caused healers to have seemingly infinite mana.

2) The changes will force raids to stop more often to let healers regen mana. Its very nice as we run from one trash pull to the next to regen a few thousand mana. With random shades popping up and the occasional patrol adding to a pull, its often harder on us to heal trash than some of the bosses. If we have to stop and drink and hold up the rest of the raid while we drink, that is not going to make raids any more fun. Lets face it: trash is no fun. Dragging out how long it takes to clear trash will not make the game more challenging and interesting, it will only discourage more people from the PVE game. It would be nice at the very least to have mana regen the same as it is right now when you are out of combat or something. You would still be changing boss fights as you are wanting, yet not bog raids down with longer trash battles.

In the end though, we'll just have to wait and see what happens. My fears are that you are spending a lot of energy changing the fundamentals of a few classes when that time could be spent elsewhere.

I'll close with this: The feeling I get is that the original concern from the devs was that healing was becoming too easy, and so people were bored with it. Have you gotten any feedback from players thanking you for making these changes so far? I know that posts are always going to be skewed to the negative, but if not even a few of the more hardcore raiders have come forward thanking you for making these changes to make the game more of a challenge for them, are you sure your heart is in the right place?

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Q u o t e:
We are good on loatheb now, you don't see me saying priests are alright because of that one encounter much like we are alright because we are sought after for KJ

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Yeah, it'd be a faulty argument if it was one encounter but I'm talking an entire raiding tier of us being powerful that culminated in a fight where we were grossly overpowered.

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Q u o t e:
We were good with COH spam, but could easily go out of mana. This is no longer the case they nerfed our AOE heals and increased a pally glyph to overtake us on fights like sapphiron.

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If a pally is (ignoring JoL) outhealing a holy priest on Sapphiron, the problem is with the holy priest being outhealed, not holy priests or paladins in general.

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Q u o t e:
We had a niche in raids with shadow, thats gone, you happy? replaced by ret pallies

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Yes, ret pallies are so much better than shadow priests now, that's why we run with more shadow priests and (up until he got owned by RL and quit) as as many ret pallies (1) than we did in Sunwell.

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Q u o t e:
The one good point u have is we were good in vanilla. But that was years ago.

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You said they've been against us for the past 3 years at least. 3 years ago was still vanilla.

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Q u o t e:

-- The effects of talents that provide mana regen while casting have been increased by 67%. This includes: Arcane Meditation, Improved Spirit Tap, Intensity, Mage Armor, Meditation, Pyromaniac, and Spirit Tap. For example, Intensity and Meditation are now 17/33/50% mana regen while casting (up from 10/20/30%). For most dps classes who never got much mana from OOFSR in the first place, the results should not be noticeable. Boomkin may be a possible exception because of Innervate, and we'll take a look at that.

-- This should leave mana regeneration while casting (even the contribution of Spirit) relatively unchanged, but reduce mana regeneration while not casting by 40%. (If you don't understand our logic, I suggest you re-read the excellent post I quoted above.)

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This might be a little off-topic, but this pushes mage regen while casting from Arcane Meditation + Mage Armor to 100%, which leaves no space for the Glyph of Mage Armor to provide extra regen beyond that as it currently does. Can we get a hint as to what Glyph of Mage Armor will do in 3.1?

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Q u o t e:


Not when I'm arguing a point of his in regards to the past. He's arguing that priests have been neglected by developers for the past three years, I'm saying that if the devs have hated priests all these years then why have they had all these periods of being so powerful?

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Every class has its moment in the sun. When attempting to balance one class you unbalance another. I think its akin to trying to flatten a lumpy water bed. You push down somewhere and it bubbles up somewhere else. You can never get it flat ... you can dream about it but it will never happen.