At some point I was toying with the idea of LotM replacing Flash of Light when cast on a friendly. It was an instant cast alternative for melee focused players and would give it ties into HoPo gen, Infusions, and other talents on the tree.
It might not be a perfect alternative either but it addressed the button bloat and talent tree synergy issue.
2 talents. Untempered Dedication and Crusader’s Might.
Holy Shock does not fit the niche of LotM. LotM allows you to manage your own health as an additional resource while also allowing you to minimize your overhealing from Beacon.
There’s an innate problem with LotM that would be impossible to fix and/or address:
We also don’t need any more resource management added to the spec. We already manage more than every other spec in the game with mana, holy power, glimmer, blessing of seasons, and infusion of light procs.
Holy paladin is already having an identity crisis and streamlining it via holy shock is 100% the play. If only Blizzard would take it a step further and pick a direction (either making the spec cast or fully melee, not some weird in between), it would solve a lot of the problems the spec is having at this moment.
You will always press Holy Shock because of Infusion of Light and now Glimmer. LotM helps to fill in the gaps, and if added to Crusader’s Might, would help to reduce those gaps, which would be beneficial for players who may prefer not to engage in the melee aspect of HPal.
It doesn’t have to be limited to emergencies only. When you have additional sources of passive healing such as Glimmer, Golden Path, Judgment of Light, Merciful Auras, and Beacon if you choose to utilize it as such, you can take advantage of the low mana cost while allowing these passive sources to actually heal instead of just piling up your overhealing.
You can already do that with holy shock and by extension flash of light (with its 0 mana cost). There isn’t anything that the spell does that isn’t fulfilled by another ability in our toolkit.
You want an instant heal? You have holy shock and WoG.
You want a save mana? Flash of light with infusion.
Do you need to heal someone immediately or they die? Lay on hands.
Overhealing is a non-issue. It doesn’t matter. You will always choose the most effective ability in any given situation, overhealing or not. LotM is only ever in that spot when we literally have nothing available. And given how many interactions & modifiers every other spell in our toolkit has, along with the number of cooldowns we have available, there’s a reason LotM isn’t even a spell we take into consideration the vast majority of the time.
This is stupid. Gaming your health to minimize “overhealing” is everything wrong with healers trying to parse. You gain nothing from that sort of play other than trying to brag that you overheal less than the next healer.
When mana becomes an issue, yes it does.
I agree that it has remained on the outskirts of usage in part because it has received so little support in the talent tree, but I have also offered suggestions that could help resolve this.
The main reason it doesn’t see use though is because it is tuned so low and gimped even further behind having to ramp up 5 stacks of Untempered Dedication that the number GCDs spent building it up to what amounts to mediocrity at best just isn’t worth the effort. I have also offered suggestions on how to resolve this.
At this point, it’s safe to say that you and I simply will not agree when it comes to LotM. Unfortunately, Blizz seems to be siding with your stance. I very much hope to see them change their minds on this, but we’ll see.
I love the concept of Martyr, but it was not well implemented into our current gameplay or talent tree. I’m hopeful that the change to passively alter holy shock will make it usable, I’m definitely going to play with it.
I still wish we had more opportunity to lean full-on into a sort of martyr mini-build, as I think it thematically fits paladins well. Maybe a future patch will give us a new hero class/hero talent tree that is more based around self-sacrificial healing.
An issue with the new design for LotM is that if the whole group drops low because of an aoe damage hit, you will also be below 70% and so Divine Toll won’t trigger the LotM passive making those 5 Holy Shocks 20-35% weaker.
This will depend on the damage profiles of the expansion but that might make the new LotM a little dooky in some scenarios.
If you take the pair, you’ll get the passive healing while below 70% so while you lose the holy shock boost, you either, heal yourself first with something other than shock, or let the free healing allow you to safely pay attention to the others
Group AOE DMG might not be too unfortunate, although gaining a heal absorb before hand could be difficult
Do you mean the bit that says “while below 70% health, the light urgently heals you”?
That heal is 20% spell power every second, which is ~13% of HS on live or less than ~1/3 of a Tyr’s tick. On live that would mean 4700-4800 a second. ie nothing to write home about.
I missed is affectivness, what a bummer
Well, we can all sympathize with that. When one reads “the light will heal you urgently,” you would expect it to be… idk powerful. Instead, it’s chump change.
I wouldn’t mind going back to 9.1 LoTM gaming. It was literally like a LoH every time.
Since they are putting it as a passive to affect holy shock I’d rather just have holy shock deals X% of my hp in damage rather than this absorb stuff. At least that way there is an Interesting choice between becon on myself for ease of health management and mastery benefit for putting it on ranged players.
So is our consensus all the same? The feedback for hpal is, either remove beacon entirely, compensate for aoe healing and healing outside of CDS if doing so, or buff beacon to be 50% and to stop punishing us for over healing when all other healers aren’t punished for it. I’m just curious to see what everyone thinks. I like all the different thoughts and opinions about how the class is designed.
No, I think I read a lot of contention in this thread. Everyone always disagreeing with each other seems to be a trend.
If you asked me, I’d like a way to be able to reposition a beacon off the GCD. Right now, and likely in raid next expansion, Beacon of Virtue has better numbers.
That’s mostly due to how damage profiles are - on Smolderon for example I spike up to 800k hps and then fall back down to almost nothing until the next damage event. So I can’t really afford to use Beacon of Faith/Light - the healing per action of actually casting it is distributed over large increments of time, but we need healing right now and no healing later. If we had a spell like Divine Favor or Hand of Divinity we could just press, and then the next 2 beacons were off-GCD I think that would go a long way. Or even how monk’s vivify just has a ticking timer - just every 15 seconds get an off-GCD beacon.
The feedback has been fairly consistent in most places other than some outliers here and there: beacon is iconic in the spec but we’re glad power is being distributed elsewhere outside of beacon.
I think what people fail to realize is that we’re not being punished. Beacon was nerfed but every other healing GCD was buffed to compensate for it. The changes are a net buff to overall healing, with our direct heals becoming more powerful while passive healing is less.
Personally, i think the direction of LOTM on the alpha is a very interesting change and would love to play it. Hope it makes it to live.
This is a very solid compromise between live LotM and the redesign in TWW. I think this does a great job of retaining the concept and mechanics of LotM while freeing up the keybind and allowing them to lean more heavily into Holy Shock.
I’m not liking Blizzard’s proposed heal prevention mechanic at all. As I mentioned before, it feels more like being abandoned by the Light instead of self-sacrifice.
It also seems very unintuitive. Is it going to require an add-on to track just how deep you’ve dug your own grave before you’re able to heal yourself again? Will they hit us with the Brewmaster Stagger tracker?
This is just one of the reasons why I believe the sacrifice mechanic is better. It provides clear and understood stimuli for us to react to. You see exactly how much health you lost and know right away what you need to do to gain it back.
With Blizzard’s heal prevention mechanic, I imagine the group getting bombed with damage, having to blow Hand of Divinity to pull myself above the threshold and then hitting Divine Toll. The good news is that each of those Holy Shocks would be pretty strong, but I would also have to contend with the fact that I just racked up quite the deficit in being able to actually heal myself again.
Then I would have to deal with the question of how will I know how much I need to lean into dumping heals on myself before I’m in the clear? Will a Flash of Light cover it? Should I burn my second instant Holy Light? Should I try to wait out the duration if there is one?
I know this conversation has moved on since the original Beacon nerfs topic in the TWW, however, this might be a terrible idea but I wonder if they could have toyed with the idea of reducing which spells transfer to beacon. ie nerf the broadness rather than the transfer amount.
Hpal use to have big ST heals. Beacons were a way of making their big ST heals cleave or do AOE in the case of Virtue.
Hpal have moved very far from that now with a majority of our healing coming from small passive effects like Glimmer and Tyr’s etc.
Two things: