Regarding the upcoming patch (2.10), as a holy paladin I must say I am not so happy. The changes that affects a holy paladin are:
- Illumination: This talent now only gives 60% of the mana cost of the critical heal. It also now returns the correct amount of mana when used with ranks 4 and 5 of Holy Shock.
- Improved Concentration Aura (Protection Talent) no longer increases resistance to Interrupt/Silence mechanics, but instead reduces the duration of Interrupt/Silence mechanics by 10/20/30%.
- Spiritual Attunement: Mana is no longer healed if the paladin is at full health.
It seems that are many disccussions over the net reagarding the way paladins and priests heal and it seems the paladins were taking more and more the place of a priest (holy priest) in raids or pvp mostly because of the mana regen from crits (Illumination talent that gives all the mana back if the heal is a crit) and from the healing (and Vampiric Touch) of a shadow priest (Spiritual Attunement - passive talent that gives 12% of mana from any heal).
So it was logical that the next patch will nerf these things.
When our talent review came at 1.9 about a year ago our class was basically redesigned completely: our healing aggro increased, Holy was changed from being support heal/semi-burst DPS/support in to a more defined pure healing tree and they took our talent Illumination (which is considered to be a concentrated class coolness ability which separates us from the other healers) and based our healing around that; hence the reitemization of giving us gear that focused more on spell crit and mp5.
Also, being able to heal longer than other healers is most definitely intended. We're the most basic healer in the game. We've got two spells. That is it. Nothing more. One that is mana efficient, one that is time efficient. We have no tricks beyond Lay on Hands or Holy Shock. A class like us, which has an extremely limited amount of healing tools which are all reactive only have the outlasting factor in our favor.
I really do not agree with Blizzard nerfing Paladin healing. If we lose our outlastingness, then we have nothing left. The only reason people consider us to be powerful today, rather than before, is that fights in the Burning Crusade are much longer. That work to our advantage, and we happened to scale better than the other classes. We're the exact same Paladin as pre-TBC. We've gained nothing.
The focus on Illumination is extremely unfairly attributed and singled out. I'm not saying Illumination is not a good talent, without a doubt it is, but spell crit is mainly favorable towards Holy Light (hence our talent Sanctified Light). It is our heal which favors speed over efficiency. Anyone who plays the Pally knows that tossing those Holy Lights certainly doesn't make you last very long.
Anyways, the best thing Blizzard should do is to buff the priests not to nerf us. So nerfing Illumination instead of buffing raiding Priests is like Blizzard saying "We really don't know what to do for holy priests, so we're just going to make Paladins a less desirable option." I guess Holy Paladins will have to just rely on the diversity of their heals now like other healers, right? Use their HoTs, big instant heals, group heals, and preemptive mitigation spells to be useful.
I have a hard time imagining the status of our healing if we're nerfed.
PS: the good part of this patch is that they buffed the protection (tanking) paladins.
