I initially expected to get a lot done Tuesday night, but boy was I ever wrong! With the release of patch 4.0.1, we saw the introduction of the new Cataclysm skill & talent system. Upon logging in, not only did I need to respec Magincia's healing tree, purchase overpriced glyphs on the auction house, re-gem to re-activate the meta gem (all my yellows turned red), and sort out which add-ons were working and which were not, I also had a host of new healing spells to learn. It took me a few hours of work, but I finally got up and running then braved a heroic or two with guildies. The healing experience was definitely very different from what I was used to.
In Wrath, holy paladins had three heals to contend with: the quick and efficient Flash of Light (FoL), the slow but powerful Holy Light (HL), and the instant but expensive Holy Shock (HS). When leveling or when incoming damage was low, FoL was your primary heal. As you got better gear and stacked int, mana pools grew to 30k+ and you could much more comfortably cast HL. Combined with Divine Plea (DP) invoked every two minutes, you could cast HL an entire fight and almost never ran out of mana. HS was reserved only for situations where you on the move. See the problem? The scales were tipped too far in favor of what became known as the "Holy Light spam". Enter a raid, cast one heal repeatedly, and win!
Holy paladins are, by design, healers that can pump out large single-target heals. This makes them excellent tank healers. So spamming HL continuously seems like the most natural thing to do given the resources to do it. The game designers tried granting us several incentives to rely on our other heals - HS crits that granted HL crits or instant FoLs; T10 bonuses that granted HL haste if you used HS on cooldown; and a libram that did something similar with a stacking spellpower buff. None of these were enough to separate the paladin from his or her HL addiction because, when you came down to it, we stacked int and ONLY int. It granted us mana, crit, spell power, and mp5 and therefore had OP crit heals and the mana to support them and there was really no compelling reason to do anything differently.
Enter Cataclysm. We now have seven healing spells instead of three. The three original heals only vaguely resemble their former counterparts. We now have an additional resource aside from mana called holy power. And we now get all our mana regen from spirit instead of int and mp5. Spellpower is mostly gone on items, we get most of it now from int which we mostly did before anyway (though I still see the SP stat hanging around on enchants and gem bonuses). DP has been nerfed from a 25% total mana regen down to only 10%. Beacon of Light (BoL) only heals your beacon target for 50% of your heal. And a good deal of our talents support much more of an interaction between heals rather than buffing individual heals. Now, none of this really makes the holy paladin less dependent on int - it's still our primary throughput stat, generating mana, crit, and spellpower. But I think we've now increased our dependency on other stats as well - haste, spirit, mastery, and crit (independent of int) - making the "which stat to stack" question not as easy to answer and therefore more of an interesting choice than it was before.
First let's look at our spells from Wrath and how they've changed. HL and FoL have now "inverted" upon themselves. Their speeds have remained the same but their cost and power have changed. HL went from a slow-expensive heal to a slow-efficient heal, making it our new default go-to heal. FoL went from a quick-efficient heal to a quick-expensive heal with a bit more power, making it more of a niche heal for emergencies previously reserved only for HS. And last, HS has changed the least; it's still an instant heal though it is less expensive than before. But it now also grants you a charge of holy power which is very important. (we'll look at that shortly)
We have two new direct healing spells. One is Divine Light (DL) - a slow-expensive heal that resembles the old HL in form and function. The other is Word of Glory (WoG), a mana-free heal that consumes holy power. We also get two new AoE heals. Light of the Dawn (LotD) heals for a 30-yard cone in front of the caster - I'm not quite sure how to fit this one into regular combat yet. And Holy Radiance (HR) places an AoE/HoT in a targeted area, but unfortunately it's unavailable until level 83.
One of the most significant new changes is the holy power resource bar. At first pass, holy power seems to be a perk system put in place to encourage paladins to do in Cataclysm what they would very seldom (or in some cases never) do in Wrath: use Holy Shock or heal your beacon target (if you have Tower of Radiance). Both of these actions generate holy power, which grants you a stacking mana-free heal. I have to admit, it's tough to keep an eye on it but I've been slowly getting used to it.
All of these together are the incentives paladins really need to stop the HL spam and start to rely on our other healing spells as well.
In closing, I will definitely miss the Wrath pally healing model. I had healing down to a science and always knew the right heal for the job. Learning to heal ICC with the Cata model will definitely take some trial and error. But I look forward to thinking a bit harder while healing, rather than just clicking on the guy with the lowest health.
Oh, and one more thing... let's all bid a fond farewell to Sacred Shield, which is now no longer. There goes one of our few damage mitigation spells and also the source of our only HoT combined with FoL. Now we have to wait until level 83 for HR (unless you get Glyph of Long Word, which looks meh IMHO).
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