I fear for LoH’s safety
We may have dodged the bullet last week, but there’s no denying that Lay on Hands is clearly in Blizz’s crosshairs. Hell, Pallies in general are. Damocles’ nerfbat is dangling precipitously above our heads.
Ghostcrawler recently asserted in a thread on the forums that “for most of the other hybrids, picking a role in a fight is much more of a commitment.” And approvingly quoted a poster who said that Paladins differ from other hybrids in that our healing capabilities are much more baseline.
Fair enough, but this peek into GC’s thought process bodes ill for our future situation. It appears that the developers intend to differentiate Paladins a lot more based on what spec they are. That is,
if you are up against a Holy paladin, you should know that one of your greatest challenges should be dealing with their capacity to heal. If you are up against a Prot paladin, you should be concerned with their capacity to take hits. If you are up against a Ret paladin, you should be concerned with how much damage they should deal. You should not, generally, be nearly as concerend [sic] about the Prot’s ability to self-heal or the Ret’s ability to tank you.
What does this mean for us? For starters: LoH doesn’t have a very bright future ahead of it. Because it is such a massive heal, it’ll probably be dumped deep into the Holy tree, much like Spiritual Attunement was back in 3.1. Our spellpower might be further nerfed so our off-healing capabilities can’t even begin to compare with Holy’s, and our damage dealing will surely be dealt a body blow for a nice double whammy of neutering Prot pvp and pve tps in one fell swoop.
Concerning my first assumption, to drop another quote bomb, GC went on to explain that they don’t consider the long cooldown on the ability (or the inability for it to be used in Arena is a balancing factor). Rather,
We don’t think “Sure I can heal myself for 25,000+ health as a dps spec or 50,000+ health as a tank, but not very often,” is balanced. Abilities can be unbalanced even if overall a character is not.
Gulp. Notice he specifically invalidated LoH for Ret and Prot in that example? Nice knowing you, old friend. Tell the Holy Tree we said hi.
The future of Paladins is probably this: Holy will have access to impressive self-heals (including LoH) but have little damage output, Prot will be a damage sponge but unable to kill anything or heal itself (basically, just slowly die in pvp), and Ret will be a paper tiger (good luck getting them to reverse the burst nerfs once you guys are mortal).
Normally, I wouldn’t mind this “recalibration” of the specs, but like most balancing matters, Blizzard will fail at the follow through. They have a bad habit of nerfing or buffing X to make up for Y, and then when they finally remove Y as a balancing factor, they don’t put X back to where it used to be. When Prot doesn’t have a third “cooldown” anymore, once LoH is gone, what is going to be the balancing factor to remove disparities?
Side question: does Blizzard even consider LoH a tanking cooldown? Admittedly, the reason I keep putting the word “cooldown” in scare quotes is because the classification is scurrilous at best, considering LoH is used more as a panicky free-heal and usually contributes to overhealing more than anything concrete. Still, the question is, do they factor its existence into the equation at all for us?
It’d be nice to get an answer on that.
To return to my previous point, another example: Blizz decided Ret was too bursty, which rubbed up against their survivability, and made it so their damage ramped up (expecting that they were going to live that much longer, so a ramp-up was justifiable). If Ret’s survivability craters, are they going to shift back to a bursty dps model? Of course not.
If I seem overly pessimistic, it’s because I am (pessimism is a bad habit of mine). Blizzard has a knack for going overboard, and I can just see them “recalibrating” our class and badly handicapping us as a result.
Armory Feed
It could be worse. They could be promising a switch from mana to energy…err focus. See how it’s different? It’s focus!
Blizzard will always cater to the wining sniveling pvp crowd and nerf PVE into oblivion because of that. And don’t let them fool you by saying that this being unusable in Arena means anything. This is yet another in a long line of PVP related nerfs that’s going to make PVE that much more difficult and less fun. Honestly if they’re going to do anything, make a change to bubble over LOH. One’s about survival, the others about “ROFL Watch me faceroll you, you silly Hunter! (And 5 of your friends who can’t touch me.)” I mean really, only two abilities in the game can even touch bubble and LoH is op?
Eh – LOH is great, once every 15 minutes. I use it in BGs (WSG especially) when flag running, but I only get to use it maybe once a BG. With the plethora of MS debuffs running around, I rarely get popped back to full.
From a tanking standpoint – I know it’s saved our skins a few times on Anub – with me getting a LOH from our retadin and using my own. And I’ve certainly used it to solo content I shouldn’t have.
I agree though – taking away such a spell in 3.3 seems wrong. I expect a full revamp in Cataclysm though.
You can have my LoH – just don’t take my free life.
“The future of Paladins is probably this: Holy will have access to impressive self-heals (including LoH) but have little damage output, Prot will be a damage sponge but unable to kill anything or heal itself (basically, just slowly die in pvp), and Ret will be a paper tiger (good luck getting them to reverse the burst nerfs once you guys are mortal).”
Hmm. That… pretty much sums up my experience as a Pally in TBC, which is why I leveled a druid to 80 before my pally. I realized about 6 months into WOTLK that those assumptions weren’t true anymore and happily made my pally my main focus. BAck to the drawing board.
If you’re correct, I anticipate the line of pallies jumping off a cliff akin to that of a line of lemmings.
I’ve got one of each of the four tank classes at level 80, ready to go and you know what? I think this may be it. If we go into T10 gimped as prot paladins I’m switching mains to a pure dps class. I can’t take the yo-yo-ing anymore.
Well as a non Paladin, but as a Hybrid I can safely say that I LOVE it when our Prot Pally is a surefire gonna and he pops Lay on Hands … in a raid.
In a battleground I don’t really notice any difference between Paladins. I sure couldn’t tell you what spec they are, but I tend to assume they’re all the “Awesome PVPness” one – you know, the one that kills you.
But I have to say, of any class, the Paladin is the one that you *think* you are close to killing, only to have his health bar jump up. Again.
That said, I don’t treat Druids much differently based on what spec they are. How can you tell what spec they are anyway? The good ones are all forms at once.
“Damocles’ nerfbat is dangling precipitously above our heads.”
Maybe it’s because I roll as Holy, but that just doesn’t sound very threatening.
I don’t see them shuffling tanks around too much before Cataclysm because everyone has to tank the same bosses. I don’t know why they think LoH is such a big deal. It has a long timer, can’t be used in Arena, etc. The most important aspect of the spell, and one I don’t think they should change, is the instant cast. Ret has Art of War to do an instant FoL, but Prot cannot use a cast time unless fighting the easiest trash mobs.
Off healing as Prot during an emergency and still in Prot gear is an absolute joke. Flash of Light is 1k to 1.5k. Holy Light is 4k to 5k. Mana lasts all of a dozen casts if you’re lucky.
@suicidalzebra
3 November 2009 at 7:29 pm #
This just in:
Lay On Hands now causes Forbearance and can’t be cast of players with Forbearance. That means that LoH being cast on you prevents you from casting Divine Protection for 2 mins.
Great work numbnuts!
*Sigh* Fail on the devs part.
wasn’t GC going to stop posting, I find him an unproffesional blizzard employee who likes the whining he causes, then whines when it happens. I don’t know if its just my perception, since I’ve played a paladin since launch, but its seems he wants to remake us a joke, since he loves laughing at our expense. LoH only threatens pvp rogues and dot locks. The addition of forbearance is clunky. Its not been an issue for nearly 5 years, why not wait to Cataclysm, or are the new raid bosses so piss poor, they don’t want prot pali to “faceroll” all their hard work
Elle, over at Altadin, found a healer survey that covered a consise spectrum of ideas, from personal gear philosophy, to class balance. At the end of the post, she challenged someone to come up with a equivilent survey for tanking. I put one together. You were one of the first bloggers I read who got me interested in maximizing performance through spec and gear choices, and as such, I’d love to get your take on it.
http://childrenofwrath.blogspot.com/2009/11/how-do-you-tank.html
@Rhidach
4 November 2009 at 8:54 am #
I will definitely do that today, TRM. Great idea!
@suicidalzebra
4 November 2009 at 12:49 pm #
*Watches Prot/Ret gain popularity in Arena*
*Anticipates Ardent Defender being linked to Forbearance*
*cries*
@Rhidach
4 November 2009 at 3:04 pm #
That would be the straw that broke the camel’s back.