I am under the genuine belief that Beacon should be altered to only act as a node for our mastery, and maybe a small amount of talent interaction, and the rest of our entire spec balanced around that change. Beacon is grotesquely bad game design in the modern world of warcraft.
Didn’t read the rest
Beacon is required so i kit can function in modern wow specially because they refuse to properly update our core kit to actually work.
Adding Beacon made sense when our entire kit was focused on single target healing, in a world where tank-healing was a legitimate role to fill in group content while still needing a way to
heal small content in some way.
What the flip is the point of replying if you don’t even read everything, incredibly lazy
I tend to agree that outside of providing Mastery spread, I think Beacons in raid are pretty useless.
I could see a world where they keep Beacons as a Mastery spread mechanic, leave in talents like Light’s Protection that provide a DR and even add other mechanics that could make them more interesting.
I would love for them to explore removing Virtue because I think it’s terrible. It costs far too much mana for a choice node that comes with tradeoffs. Faith is a 28% increase to healing and a mastery blanket all the time completely for free.
Virtue is a 100% (80% in M+) increase every 15 seconds for 8 seconds. This works out to be a 53% or 42% increase to healing over the course of a minute if you cast it on CD.
So, for the cost of 500k mana a minute you can increase your healing by 25% (from 28% → 53%) on average. That’s assuming you cast it on CD.
I admit this is overly simplifying it because realistically there are overhealing considerations and the trade you’re making is 52% stronger healing (28 → 80) during 8 second windows at the expense of 28% all the time.
If you need it to live AOE healing checks in M+ then you have to pay the price of worse mana, worse healing outside of Virtue and overall, a worse time. It’s so unfun imo. What’s more, your Hunter and Warlock friends will hate you because you’ll be complaining about standing closer for Virtue to hit them the whole time.
Worse, I think the choice between Faith and Virtue has balance implications. When deciding how much a CD like HoD can heal for they need to be aware that you could be running Virtue, and those really strong Holy Lights are either 28% or 100% stronger depending on Beacons.
I’d like to see them remove Virtue, move Faith up higher on the tree acknowledging that it’s a core driver of the spec and is taken in all scenarios. In raid it can remain a mastery spreading tool and provide minor cleave. Buff Commanding Light back to 10%, move it off the required path to Rising Sunlight or make it a choice node so it’s more of a decision if you want more Beacon healing or a new talent that provides general AoE healing.
What could be even better is redesign Commanding Light to be a capstone and make it something that increases the beacon transfer of ST healing spells with a choice node something more akin to spread aoe. Then the choice would be between single target healing into stronger beacon cleave or AoE. That’s a far more interesting choice than Virtue vs Faith imo.
Stopped reading there
See, in a vacuum i do like the idea of Virtue.
In the vacuum of our very binary design, casting Virtue to our single target spells into AOE ones does sound good and thematic. If our ability to heal 1 person and heal that one person through everything remained, I feel Virtue would be great.
But Blizzard does not want us to have that playstyle and they don’t want to lay off on nuking the entire party. So Virtue (and Beacon as a whole) is stuck in this awful middle ground where it cant be too good but if they make it too weak its barely worth even existing and we still dont have proper ways to heal a group.
I gatta admit, that’s actually flippin funny xD
They can make Beacon of Virtue “too good” it was way better in Shadowlands and many still didn’t use it. Blaming Virtue for their design decisions isn’t right. Virtue isn’t making Holy Paladin top the meters and never has, mostly it gives you great 5 target burst AOE heals and then the rest goes to overhealing.
The real factor holding HPal back is them trying to force casting and melee healing while trying to balance a variety of support talents around it.
I dont disagree that the constant pull between caster and melee is the real problem.
I just also think the existence of Beacon (in all its forms) isn’t helping matters because Blizzard very clearly does not know what they really want witb it.
Beacon is just an antiquated mechanic unfortunately. Our mastery would have to fundamentally change should it be removed, which I really wouldn’t mind personally. Maybe go back to the old % of healing done as a shield mastery?
At least with the beacon changes they are making, it’s a reduction in beacon overhealing each time.
Alternatively, I wish they would remove aura mastery and give its power to Tyr’s Deliverance instead.
There’s an easy solution to all of these. Virtue/Faith deals increased/decreased healing in 5 man vs Raid.
This way HPS in raid can be kept in check as a tuning knob for Hpal (the same way they are nerfing talents like healing beacon transfer and commanding light) while the class still feeling powerful in 5 man during heavy AOE burst events when talents like virtue are needed without sacrificing our spot healing power.
This alone has made holy shock and WoG useless time and time again every expansion and its an issue that needs a more long term solution asap. So far since DF, we have seen this issue in DF S1, again after the nerfs in DF S2 and in S3, and once again in TWW S1.
In my opinion. even though I understand the tuning issues around Virtue and Hpal outside of CD windows (though awakening and Wings are wayyy more of an issue imo), Virtue at least has a timing/ resource management skill attached to it, Faith is just overall an incredibly boring talent all around.
The spec has gone through TWO whole reworks in less than 4 seasons and its once again having the same core issues that in the beggining. It’s crazy.
It’s completely a non issue. Beacons are 10%-13% of healing in raid, they are not carrying the healing. They very quickly cap out in value and transition to what would be over-healing if it just didn’t stop transferring any heals. Most of the time you are not getting a full 10-20% amp on healing as your beacon will get filled up quick. They are not smart heals and do not transfer to targets that need healing. Spenders are 10%-15% of healing. Judgement and its interactions is carrying ~14% of healing, Holy Bulwark alone is another 10%, the new ring is between 7%-13% of healing, Avenging Crusader is another 10% these are largely effectively smart heals and don’t contribute to over-healing as much as Beacon would if it could. Which is to say nothing of the horde of 1%-3% healing contributions.
Spenders are weak not because of Beacons but because we have too many sources of non-spender healing.
Of course beacons are not single carrying healing in Raid. Of course there are multiple other healing sources. The point still stands. HPS in raid is what nerfed us this time around and kept us without buffs for the latter half of DF despite desperately needing buffs to spenders/holy shock.
But, if we want to keep HPS in raid in check and make our core kit matter again, A.K.A dont make Hpal feel terrible outside of wings windows/CDs, then the healing has to came from somewhere, be it Holy Bulwark, be it avenging crusader transfer, be it beacons, be it glimmer.
This is the reason why they removed glimmers in the first place to make room for hero specs passive healing sources, also why I asked H&A to be redesigned a while ago on this same forums, and why Tyr’s was nerfed into the ground for TWW. And why they are making the changes they are making, if they want to keep it close to a net neutral, well you see, they are nerfing beacons, but in the end this is not gonna solve the issues long term. They need to create better tuning knobs for the class, figure it out spender/building mechanics or just give up and separate healing from raid/m+ in the same way they did it to disc priest not long ago.
The same problem has arised 3 times in 4 seasons, maybe we to re think how the class is being designed and tuned in the first place?
If HPS is an issue in Raid and we want to have the ability to control health bars again, then we have to either take a little bit of healing from all the healing sources to make room for stronger spot heals, or just separated same healing sources effectiveness from each other in raid vs m+, be it beacons, Dawnlights, etc etc. Which is kind what they are doing… but now they have become just like Tyr’s, almost meaningless?
A mere 5-6% overall taken from our passive healing sources into our spenders/HS (although HS is getting some love finally), would go a long way, (And that’s without taking into account all the silly nodes they added in our class tree, but they are getting nerfed next season either way despite being like 1% of our overall each).
The ring literally doesn’t matter, any healer spec can use it.
Interestingly, after the latest round of PTR changes, the feedback I’ve seen so far about Holy Paladin has been…generally pretty positive (?).
The latest wowhead article (Clarius) was overall very positive, going so far as to say it’s close to having one of its best iterations ever. Petko’s latest tier ranking video has it just behind MW for overall healers on the PTR as well.
All this to say that I am hopeful that the spec is in a healthy spot going into season 2. I would love to start the season as my original healer main and get the chance to stick with it without feeling compelled to reroll fotm again. Also not to say the spec doesn’t have flaws or doesn’t need further iteration, because it certainly does.
I also have concerns about how strong MW appears to be on PTR. Right now it seems to be good at just about everything, and we all know what happens to specs that are too good…it also is being hard carried by how OP Crackling Jade Lightning and Jade Empowerment is (not to mention how it directly interacts with Master of Harmony, the shiny new hero talent).
They have been generally positive, specifically if you dislike AC LS and want it’s power toned down.
If you were a fan of it, the patch notes at the very least is a bit worrying and that’s the primary worry; nerf the AC build until it isn’t viable and buff the caster builds until they are.
Still too early to make that call yet I feel but that is the overall worry.
I get the concern/worry, but from what I’ve gathered the AC build isn’t nerfed into complete oblivion (at least not yet).
I do think more love needs to be given to Herald builds generally (especially in m+), but I am not convinced that buffs to casted spells/builds is necessarily the correctly direction to go, for either hero talent.
A sentiment that I have seen about AC LS on the forums and is a complaint that many prominent streamers (Ellesmere for example) have shared is that there is a complaint that the playstyle relies too much on smart heals to do the healing for the player. For AC LS, this is being listed as a detrimental thing.
However, when I look across the evolution of other healers in TWW S1 and those that rose to the top…I see a lot of healers that don’t need to fuss too much about who and what they’re healing. Mistweaver isn’t targeting specific players when they’re healing through blackout kick cleave, rising sun kick, or CJL. Totemic Resto shaman isn’t fussing about targeting players with chain heal, instead relying on their totems to auto-cast and target allies for them. And disc priests certainly aren’t fussing too much about it, when they can do their main healing rotation of Radiance, Mind Blast, Mindbender and Penance without moving their mouse over their party frames once. So forgive me for not necessarily buying into the whole argument that suddenly it’s a problem that AC LS playstyle exists.
Well that’s what happens when the devs add new talents every patch for the last few patches that help fill the gaps it their kit. I don’t know enough about their tuning but I wouldn’t be surprised if that spec is insulated from a repeat of the HPal aura nerf situation.
Their raid build is very different to their mythic+ build. Even if they do aura nerfs to the spec, their ability to meet healing checks in M+ could be left mostly unaffected.
The problem with Hpal is our build is literally the same -+ 1 or 2 talents and those talents aren’t build defining - they are Consecration procs, and SotR damage increases and maybe Virtue.
If Hpal is too powerful in raid? Aura nerf it and you effectively kill it in m+ with no room to move.
Yeah, I’m still not really sure why they don’t lean on the talent tree more to solve this though.
In DF, 50% of Holy Shock healing was tied up in Glimmer and so HS itself felt 50% nerfed.
In TWW prepatch they removed Glimmer, buffed HS by 20%, nerfed Beacons 25%15% and buffed WoG and LoD by 20-25%. Wait a minute, do these patch notes sound familiar?
- Word of Glory healing increased by 25%.
- Light of Dawn healing increased by 20%.
- Holy Shock healing increased by 20%.
- Beacon of Light now transfers 15% of healing done (was 25%).
source: TWW launch notes - https://worldofwarcraft.blizzard.com/en-us/news/24119590/the-war-within-pre-expansion-content-update-notes
This set of patch notes are hilariously similar.
IMO they need to delete talents like Power of the Silver Hand, Liberation and Merciful Auras. Add new points in our capstone section and introduce new choice nodes. MW have 18 nodes in their capstone section with 8 of them being choice nodes. We have 16 total and only 4 choice nodes by comparison (‘choice’ is being generous as 2 of them are Merciful Auras and Sanc Wrath).
Add nodes that would be great in smaller group content and others that would be good in raid. Then we’re less likely to see this situation where they are forced to nerf Beacons and it has a disproportionate effect on m+.
As an aside, can HPal get away from these talents that have 0 power? Martyr is at best 0 or negative HPS, 2 points just for LoD range, SotR damage, Consecration procs. It’s crazy.
One of the significant differences between mistweaver and hpal, is that
Mistweaver has A TON of modifiers.
Chi harmony, enveloping mists, the first portion of jadefire stomp, thunder focused tea buffer the next spell, vivify being boosted when consuming TfT or a random proc AND vitality.
They crazy part is, you don’t need to stack all of them to do decent healing. Now you obviously need to manage things correctly for large damage but the healing is still noticable in all scenarios.
With hpal, the only modifiers that are really under our control is the prism + infusion + holy light combination. Everything else is just bland. There is no control over boosting our output.
Everything is passive changes to our HPS breakdown and nothing provides variations in our decision make or rotation.
Mistweaver modifiers are impactful and under our control
Hpal modifiers are all passive, and don’t change the rotation under any conditions
I’ve always thought the same. We have people in the holy discord hating on AC LS, and Ellesmere, but AC LS isn’t that much different than both MW (loved spec by their users and people who tried it back in DF S3 on average) and disc priest.
I understand the concern behind it and it absolutely shouldnt be the only available playstyle to us, but think the complaints about its gameplay is blown out of proportion.
Other content creators that play all healers like Automaticjak and Madskillz dont even mention those issues since there are precedents in other healers even in the current season, and has been, for a while now.
Then they nerfed Holy Shock by about ~20%, WoG for about ~15% 1 week before of TWW releaseduring the last beta build if I remember properly (might be more or less, since it was tied with the removal of Strength of Conviction) and on top of that we got a 6% not long after during heroic raid first week (these numbers are probably off, because most/ some of them were not even properly documented in patch notes just in aura/spell changes).
We are almost back to square one, minus Holy Infusion is now gone too.
If anything, I would argue that the preeminent healers this season (Disc, MW and Resto sham) being able to automate a large portion of their overall healing in m+ is why they’ve been so much more successful than their peers.
The hullabaloo Ellesmere and discord brings up about LS AC I think is blown way out of proportion, IMO.
The cognitive load and pressure placed on healers has hit such a threshold in TWW S1 that I believe any respite (smart heals) is an overall boon for the role, not a hindrance. It gives the specs greater access to it more ability to utilize their utility toolkit, because they aren’t needing to focus so much time on direct healing.