"Anyone complaining about Beacon of Light hasn't played Holy in a raid. Period."

I'll have to disagree here, to an extent. I'm not someone who 'complains' about Beacon of Light, because quite frankly in concept it's fantastic, and in certain situations it can live up to it's full potential (5 mans).

The problem is, the more healers you get in a raid, the worse it gets - and for a 51 point talent this shouldn't be the case. Basically, the idea behind the Beacon was being able to heal two targets (the priority target, usually a tank, +1 person in 40 yds). However, as you get more healers there is a much higher potential for heal sniping - especially when you take into account Chain Heal, Wild Growth/rolling HoTs and CoH. For some fights where there are large amounts of AoE damage coming in (for example, Saph) there's less sniping, but if you're the only dedicated MT healer then even then you often can't take too big a risk.

In 5 mans it's perfect as it's a very rare occasion where you get heal sniped (for example, a dpser healing themselves). In 10 mans it's a little worse, but fairly managable. In a 25 man with 5-8 healers it can be very painful.

Of course, I'm only assuming that I know what Blizzard's intention with the spell was, but I feel I'm somewhat accurate in my analysis. If they did put it in there to heal the tank target +1, then the solution to it getting worse as group size increases is simple. They need to make overheal affect the Beacon, *but* to keep the spell balanced, reduce the transferred healing amount to around 60-80%. Doing this would mean a paladin could heal raid member X knowing that the tank is still going to get healed, unlike now where they could try to heal raid member X and pray that they don't get sniped.

Reply