So, I was pleasantly surprised to learn this morning that I’d be equipping my axes that much sooner. I’m not sure how much longer the season is going to run, but it seems like they’re still committed to giving two weeks notice so probably either two or three weeks more. I wonder if they’ll have another one-week grace period between seasons this time around?

I’ve still been playing a lot of games (just about at the thousand mark for my rogue’s 2s, even) but because I’m working slightly more traditional hours at the moment and a lot of my teammates are in different timezones, we’re mostly confined to playing weekends.

I’ve been trying deep holy on my paladin since Dowser has been fiending for a 5s team for a while now. 5s as a paladin is very turret, but holy has slightly more interesting spell-selection than prot at least. With the beacon buffs this patch the spec is going to be a lot better in small bracket too, and I’m looking forward to trying it out for 3s (still DK/Elem/Paladin) when we play this week.

It seems like the prot changes (or, more commonly, the lack thereof) and the new sacred shield HoT are going to firmly cement deep prot as the 2v2 healing spec of choice, though. Unless I’ve missed something, it only seems to be getting better.

On my warrior I’ve been struggling around in the 1600s with a friend’s even-more-undergeared druid alt. Playing in that bracket and not being able to beat awful keyboard turners because of the gear disparity and your partners’ inexperience is probably one of the most frustrating things I’ve ever encountered in this game. I’m hoping there will be an easy-to-obtain upgrade to the destroyer at some point, since it’s going to be fairly far behind the curve next season, and I’m not interested in raiding on this character at all.

My rogue’s 2s is rollercoastering around based on the percentage of druid/plate teams in the queue, but 3.2 contains some significant druid (purgable innervate) and dk (2 min IBF, dodgeable frost strikes) changes in addition to the shaman buffs so I’m hoping we can push that a bit higher. We had a great 3s session the other night playing disc/rogue/elem and pushed that team past 2500 for the first time, which was pretty cool, too. We’re running into issues keeping our priest alive against some compositions (she tends to crack under pressure a bit) but it’s something we can improve on and there wasn’t really anybody that could beat us consistently except a 2700+ wizard cleave. And really good rmp, which thankfully most of them aren’t.

I’ve been streaming some brackets on xfire but I have it set to friends only at the moment, so hit me up in game if you want the details.

After having had a few weeks to play some live games, though, I’m pretty satisfied with what turned out to be very even-handed changes to paladin healing. Paladins haven’t disappeared from SK, they still have a number of viable comps to run. Blizzard didn’t outright kill any of the specs, quite the opposite – as far as I know this is the first season that paladins have had a viable healing spec in every tree.

The old repentance spec of S5 has become 32/0/39. Since you can’t feasibly get Infusion of Light with any of the nice ret stuff, you push even deeper into ret to pick up Art of War and Fanatacism, which means you get an instant FoL on your judgement crits (instead of HS crits) and your judgements crit at a reasonable rate. Some people take Seal of Command for the guaranteed crit versus stunned targets, but I haven’t found it that useful.

You still get the ret utility you know and love – most importantly Divine Purpose and Repentance; but Sanctified Retribution is also a lot stronger without the specific aura requirement. Judgements of the Wise has actually been buffed and now returns a huge amount of mana (25% of base) every judge. Pursuit of Justice and Vindication are both still amazing.

The deep holy alternative has become 49/22/0. The protection talents they’ve changed up in 3.1 are amazing, with Divinity and Improved Devotion Aura increasing your healing substantially and Stoicism + Improved Righteous Fury increasing your survivability noticeably. Having a second Sac in the form of Divine Sacrifice is absolutely amazing, and makes a lot of double DPS or CC-heavy compositions a ton easier.

This also gives you the throughput talents in deep holy, such as Judgements of the Pure, Holy Guidance, Infusion, and Light’s Grace. Enlightened Judgements (increasing range to 40 yards) is also pretty useful now that Judgement is your only real way to keep people in combat or snipe totems. This spec feels a lot like the TBC paladin – you do have to drink, but it’s usually possible to set up opportunities to do so. 40 second HoJ is nice but doesn’t give you nearly as much CC potential as repentance does.

Which brings us to the dark horse of the collection, 20/51/0 deep protection. It sounds crazy until you actually look at the control possibilities and raw healing power of the available at the bottom of the tree. You get a 20 second HoJ (!) along with a 3 second silence and a daze on your Avenger’s Shield (30 second cooldown), which also increases your damage contribution. You get undispellable Divine Plea that refreshes on melee hits. You get a bunch of free stamina from talents like Sacred Duty (and some passive defenses like Ardent Defender) and then you convert that stamina into spellpower via Touched by the Light. You end up with a huge amount of spellpower, and although your crit is lower than the ret subspec when you do crit you’re looking at 8.5k flashes (10k+ on a warlock or mutilate rogue!).

The huge downside to the prot spec is, of course, the complete lack of any sort of instant healing. The new Aura Mastery helps here, and part of it is just adapting to the playstyle, but it’s a limitation and it makes the spec a lot weaker when you’re tanking a melee who can interrupt. Which, in a way, is also a lot like TBC!

I hear actual ret and prot paladins aren’t doing too badly, either.

Penance cooldown is going back up, maim is an actual stun (maybe?) and innervate is getting a pretty decent PvP buff. Most importantly from a rogue POV, they’re removing spammable blood boil!

I mentioned in my last post about paladin glyphs that using Glyph of Turn Evil was basically a metagame choice. Since then, I’ve seen maybe two death knights in arena, and not many more warlocks, so I think it’s time to retire it in favor of something more exciting.

So, as usual, it may be educational to see what everyone else is doing…

(Reckoning 2v2, top 200 teams)

Today I’m defining “holy paladins” as paladins who have holy shock and at least one point in unyielding faith which should hopefully narrow it down to PvP healing specs only. I’m not going to worry about deep prot healing specs, at least… not yet.

Here’s the same chart run against the infamous Bloodlust battlegroup:

Note that the top 200 teams actually goes right down to about 2k rating at the moment, so a lot of these people are probably not superstars.

(The deadly libram will also be a great throughput upgrade, I just wanted to replace all my blues first!)

So, as always, let’s go to the Armory and see what high-rated Paladins are doing. My sample this time around is Paladins from the top 200 2v2 teams on Reckoning, and I’ve only included people wearing pvp gear (medallion or human with >100 resil) at the time of the survey. I’ve also explicitly excluded meta gems since there isn’t really any contention there: int + manarestore all the way.

Here’s the initial results. I’m assuming the strength gems are from people caught in their ret gear (but still as holy spec), but I didn’t actually look them up. I’ve also excluded the quality of the gems, since it didn’t really seem important for my purposes. The data set consists of 75 characters between ~2750 and ~2140, with 784 total gems.

                                         Intellect => 149 | 20.93%
                                       Spell Power => 113 | 15.87%
                                 Resilience Rating =>  96 | 13.48%
                         Spell Power and Intellect =>  54 | 07.58%
                 Spell Power and Resilience Rating =>  51 | 07.16%
                           Spell Power and Stamina =>  49 | 06.88%
                     Resilience Rating and Stamina =>  44 | 06.18%
            Spell Power and Critical Strike Rating =>  41 | 05.76%
                             Intellect and Stamina =>  29 | 04.07%
                            Critical Strike Rating =>  19 | 02.67%
                                           Stamina =>  18 | 02.53%
              Spell Power and Mana every 5 seconds =>  18 | 02.53%
                Intellect and Mana every 5 seconds =>  10 | 01.40%
                                      Haste Rating =>   5 | 00.70%
                Critical Strike Rating and Stamina =>   5 | 00.70%
                      Spell Power and Haste Rating =>   3 | 00.42%
                                          Strength =>   2 | 00.28%
                              Strength and Stamina =>   2 | 00.28%
                                        Hit Rating =>   2 | 00.28%
             Haste Rating and Mana every 5 seconds =>   1 | 00.14%
               Strength and Critical Strike Rating =>   1 | 00.14%

We can do some basic categorization of the gems, too. I’ve divided them into throughput (spell power, crit, haste), longevity (intellect, mp5), utility (hit rating) and defense (stamina, resilience). I realise these categories aren’t entirely accurate because most paladin stats affect multiple areas (for example, via Illumination), but it’s a good starting point.

                                        throughput => 181 | 25.42%
                                         longevity => 159 | 22.33%
                                           defense => 158 | 22.19%
                                defense/throughput => 105 | 14.75%
                              longevity/throughput =>  73 | 10.25%
                                 defense/longevity =>  29 | 04.07%
                                             other =>   2 | 00.28%
                                           utility =>   2 | 00.28%
                                     defense/other =>   2 | 00.28%
                                  other/throughput =>   1 | 00.14%

Then maybe it’s useful to see totals for each category, if you count a “pure gem” as 2 points for its category and the hybrid gems for 1 point in each:

                                        throughput => 541 | 37.99%
                                           defense => 452 | 31.74%
                                         longevity => 420 | 29.49%
                                             other =>   7 | 00.49%
                                           utility =>   4 | 00.28%

From looking at that it seems most people are balancing their gemming across the three major categories, and browsing through the individual results seems to support that. Let’s see one last view over the data, since this is starting to get long.

This table contains a row for each paladin, with a column for each of the three major categories defined above – the cells show what proportion of that paladin’s total gems are used on that category. Hybrid gems are split across both categories as in the previous report, and strength/hit gems are ignored although they do still count in the totals.

          name throughput  longevity    defense
    Varluneyna       0.33       0.33       0.33
        Heimen       0.45       0.35       0.20
         Jeuce       0.38       0.50       0.13
        Haydee       0.39       0.11       0.50
    Unicornica       0.50       0.50       0.00
       Wcstyle       0.60       0.10       0.30
      Mchaggis       0.45       0.23       0.32
        Aiiden       0.44       0.38       0.19
        Braves       0.36       0.45       0.18
          Gina       0.50       0.22       0.28
        Dercas       0.43       0.43       0.14
     Mournhold       0.71       0.29       0.00
       Beldara       0.39       0.28       0.33
         Oryun       0.59       0.14       0.27
      Dimarius       0.56       0.44       0.00
      Tygrilol       0.50       0.17       0.33
       Sasorii       0.38       0.63       0.00
   Solidarityx       0.46       0.46       0.08
        Ieetoh       0.10       0.00       0.20
       Reepent       0.25       0.50       0.25
      Harumaru       0.55       0.45       0.00
      Magicpie       0.39       0.39       0.22
        Pummie       0.44       0.56       0.00
     Holynight       0.44       0.33       0.22
   Redemptionz       0.44       0.39       0.17
     Derreidos       0.41       0.59       0.00
     Femaleftw       0.44       0.28       0.28
     Diplomacy       0.50       0.50       0.00
           Qiu       0.65       0.15       0.20
        Gellin       0.45       0.55       0.00
        Stylec       0.25       0.50       0.25
         Aurog       0.35       0.45       0.20
         Kaara       0.40       0.20       0.40
      Mcjordie       0.50       0.35       0.15
        Arasof       0.50       0.06       0.44
  Bubbliciouss       0.61       0.28       0.11
   Eskimopally       0.50       0.25       0.25
         Zyrxy       0.38       0.50       0.12
   Lostprophet       0.56       0.17       0.28
       Valefor       0.40       0.35       0.25
     Sylvanisa       0.44       0.33       0.22
       Luncarn       0.30       0.70       0.00
     Feladence       0.50       0.50       0.00
    Smokealarm       0.39       0.33       0.28
         Ermad       0.28       0.72       0.00
   Appocalypse       0.50       0.11       0.39
        Macabe       0.38       0.63       0.00
        Fiaraa       0.50       0.35       0.15
         Trawn       0.56       0.19       0.25
   Moomoobeezy       0.38       0.38       0.25
        Oculis       0.19       0.56       0.25
   Espectrolol       0.50       0.30       0.20
      Romulisa       0.50       0.28       0.22
         Clint       0.38       0.42       0.21
       Kehrsyn       0.40       0.00       0.60
        Sayami       0.29       0.71       0.00
         Jdubz       0.31       0.38       0.31
    Shadgavena       0.55       0.14       0.32
         Serjj       0.65       0.25       0.10
      Judgmant       0.36       0.64       0.00
   Crispybacon       0.30       0.30       0.40
          Guli       0.31       0.44       0.25
  Annihilacion       0.64       0.36       0.00
       Clapton       0.44       0.44       0.11
         Zatin       0.44       0.56       0.00
        Tranze       0.38       0.63       0.00
      Brianlee       0.23       0.77       0.00
       Makitoo       0.45       0.55       0.00
          Fron       0.64       0.23       0.14
       Zenakuu       0.44       0.39       0.17
         Duner       0.36       0.64       0.00
          Evir       0.78       0.11       0.11
        Zorgat       1.00       0.00       0.00
       Svendor       0.63       0.38       0.00
          Mute       0.60       0.25       0.15

They’re sorted by rating, if you’re wondering.

There are still some ridiculous outliers in terms of damage (hi hunters) but it looks like Blizzard has identified the most egregious problems and 3.1 has further rebalancing. It seems like they’re actively moving towards a more balanced arena system and I’m pretty happy with the trajectory at the least.

The thing that troubles me the most about the current arena is the amount of matchups that are grossly in favor of one side or the other. There were always rough matchups, even at 70 – I played a lot of holy paladin/warrior in TBC and some comps like ualock/priest were basically impossible if at least one of the opposing players had either a keyboard or mouse installed.

That’s fine, and the nature of the classes mean some comps are always going to be tough – warlocks find rogues difficult, priests find hunters difficult, paladins find warlocks difficult… it’s not exactly rock-paper-scissors but there are advantages and disadvantages there. You can usually make some of it up by partner selection and just playing well.

Playing Holy Paladin/DK at the moment, it seems like the vast majority of our matchups fall into this category. I won’t pretend we have the worst of it by any means; it’s a strong comp, and a lot of the matchups fall in our favor – melee/paladin, melee/druid, dk/shaman (for example) are probably 90/10 to us with perfect play. Even difficult teams like disc/rogue or rogue/mage are probably 70/30 to us with no mistakes. But the flipside of that is ualock/healer, hunter/paladin, shaman/rogue are pretty much impossible no matter what we do.

I guess I’d prefer it if it didn’t feel quite so predestined.

First, the relevant glyph changes:

• Glyph of Exorcism – Increases damage done by Exorcism by 20%. (Old: Your Exorcism also interrupts spellcasting for 2 sec.)
• Glyph of Beacon of Light – Increases the duration of Beacon of Light by 30 sec.
• Glyph of Divine Plea – While Divine Plea is active, you take 3% reduced damage from all sources.
• Glyph of Holy Shock – Reduces the cooldown of Holy Shock by 1 sec.
• Glyph of Hand of Salvation – When you cast Hand of Salvation on yourself, it also reduces damage taken by 20%.

Well, they’re not as exciting as Pain Supression while stunned or Cloak becoming a shield wall, but I can certainly see that shock one getting some use. The exorcism glyph nerf was absolutely inevitable once you factor in the changes to the spell, but secretly I hoped that it would at least be something useful for holy.

The Death Knight Unholy tree has been shuffled around quite a bit and Gargoyle is now at the top – I have no idea whether it will change how people spec, but less gargoyles would make the Turn Evil glyph a lot less attractive.

Exorcism can now be used on all targets, but is now a guaranteed critical strike vs Undead and Demon type mobs.

This is a cool change. Bursting down felhunters is going to be a bit easier, and having an instant damage spell which doesn’t share a cooldown with your instant heal is going to be nice for gib opportunities. At the moment if you have a full HoJ duration to burn somebody you don’t really have enough spells to fill four globals.

It’s not going to hit nearly as hard as holy shock, but it’s cheaper (8% vs 18%) and has a 30y range instead of 20y.

Judgement of Light now procs off spells as well. (Previously only “attacks” would trigger this)

Bonus. I actually find there’s a lot of situations in 2s where light is the only useful thing I can judge, so extra procs via Icy Touch (or whatever) are welcome.

Purifying Power (Tier 6) now reduces the cooldown of your Exorcism and Holy Wrath spells by 17/33%. (Previously increased the critical strike chance of those spells by 10/20%)

Taking this would change Exorcism from 15 seconds to 10 and Holy Wrath from 30 to 20. I’m not sure the spells get used enough to justify taking this talent. That’s okay though, I don’t really have the points to spend there anyway!

Pure of Heart (Tier 5) now reduces Curse, Poison, and Disease effects by 15/30%. (Previously was 25/50% but did not include poisons)

Probably a good change. It’s too strong against hex/tongues at the moment, and 7 seconds instead of 5 seems like a reasonable comprimise. My initial thought was that this would be fantastic versus Wyvern Sting but it turns out that’s actually getting reduced to 6 seconds in PvP so it’s not as big a deal as I imagined. Still, 4.2s Wyverns and 7 second rogue poisons are pretty nice.

And hey, the more globals I can force a hunter to spend applying Serpent Sting the less globals I’m getting LnL Explosive Shots to the face, right?

Blessed Hands has been moved from Tier 5 to Tier 4 and now reduces the mana cost of Hand of Freedom, Hand of Sacrifice and Hand of Salvation by 15/30% and cooldowns by 10/20%.

If you take this in conjunction with Guardian’s Favor you can get a 14 second freedom on a 20 second cooldown which is significantly more uptime than the baseline version. On the other hand, this talent used to grant dispel resistance, so this change might actually be an average uptime decrease. Nerf tranq shot?

While pretty minor, the HoSac and HoSalv (if you glyph it) cooldown reductions will be nice.

Improved Concentration Aura’s (Tier 4) reduced silence/interrupt effect now works while any aura is active.

This is really nice. A lot of games versus (for example) mage/rogue I’ll be forced to sit in conc aura even when nobody is on me just so my partner doesn’t die in an imp CS. With this change I can use frost and mitigate more damage, or ret for the Sanctified Retribution bonus!

Blessing of Kings is now a baseline ability. Trainable at level 20.

This one has been a long time coming, as Rohan will be quick to tell you. A lot of holy specs can’t really fit kings in (especially PvE ones) and it’s an irreplaceable and strong buff. I’m curious to see what they’ll replace the talent with since tier 1 prot looks kind of empty now. Since the alternative is Divine Strength, I’m hoping it’ll be something generic enough to appeal to holy.

EDIT: The replacement is “Divinity: Tier 1 protection talent, increases healing done by and to you by 1/2/3/4/5%.” Holy crap, that is sweet. Now how do I fit it into my build?

Divine Guardian (Tier 4) now has been changed to redirect damage “(up to a maximum of 150/300% of the Paladin’s health).” (Previously had no limit)

Rough, but probably necessary. HoSac + DG was a targetable shield wall, admittedly at the cost of your primary defensive cooldown.

Improved Hammer of Justice (Tier 4) is now a 2 point talent, reducing the cooldown of Hammer of Justice by 10/20 sec. (Previously had a 3rd rank that reduced cooldown by 30 secs)

Slight nerf, but more targeted at retribution paladins I think. Prot gets to keep their 30 second HoJ and holy just has to live with it. If things go live like this, I’m not sure anybody would be speccing holy/prot anyway.

Improved Retribution Aura has been removed from the game. Improved Retribution Aura’s effect has been merged into Sanctified Retribution (Tier 5).

There’s not really anything much else to spend points on in the ret tree, but I’ll take it.

Divine Purpose has been moved from Tier 5 to Tier 6.

This change breaks 49/0/22 completely, which is kind of sad. The talent is still not out of each of the 37/0/34 variations so I’ll be curious to see if they’re happy with those builds existing or whether they’ll make further changes. Making the top 20% of the holy tree actually interesting for PvP would be a good start!

The rogue changes are pretty minimal (and entirely PvE oriented) so I’ll wait a bit before I go into those. That said, let the record show that I am all for normalizing instant poison proc-rates so I can actually use my dual Anarchies!

Serious business right? Thankfully Ring of Valor has prepared me well for not standing in various fires!

I got a few nice PvE upgrades, but not the second t7 piece I was hoping for – I’m still trying to complete my two piece bonus for arenas. I almost have enough emblems to buy the gloves or chest, though, so that’s an option if Archavon isn’t feeling benevolent this reset.

Raid healing has quite a different atmosphere to raid DPS, I find. Although you have the constant stress of people dying if you fail to perform, you don’t have the same optimization problems that DPS classes have. On my rogue every boss is a competition, even if it’s just against my previous personal best. There’s always room for improvement.

On a healer, if nobody dies, you’ve pretty much done your job. I’m not convinced the healing meters (especially the overhealing ones, hi beacon) are especially relevant or useful. Once you have enough intellect to not go OOM, enough throughput to keep up with Hateful Strike – well, gear evaluation becomes a largely academic exercise.

The positioning factor and the somewhat dynamic triage aspects (or “whack a mole” if you prefer) of healing are pretty entertaining though. Maybe I just needed a change from 4s/4e CttC rotations?