The Light and How to Swing It: Patch 4.2 lets our mastery stack
by Chase Christian 
Jun 12th 2011 at 6:00PM
Intellect is the best holy paladin stat. There's no need to discuss it, as everyone agrees that intellect is king. Since all of our gear has intellect on it already, most of our stat choices revolve around our secondary stats. Haste and spirit are currently the two stats that most holy paladins prefer, with critical strike rating and mastery rating taking up the rear. Blizzard has already tried making our mastery bonus more attractive a few times in Cataclysm, but with little success.
In patch 4.2, the developers have made several changes to our mechanics that make the healing secondary stats much more powerful. Our critical heals will be healing for 200% of their original value in the next patch. Critical strike rating will be more valuable in a double-crit world, but haste will likely still be champion. On a more interesting note, our Illuminated Healing mastery bubbles are stacking on the patch 4.2 PTR. Each heal adds more absorption, up to a maximum of 33% of our total health.
Details of mastery stacking
Other than their new stacking effect, our bubble mechanics haven't changed at all. Each eligible heal we cast refreshes the bubble duration, and only our direct heals can proc the bubbles at all. The maximum bubble size is based off of our total health, which means their total size should scale as we are raid buffed and acquire new gear. I'm personally sitting on about 120k life without any buffs, meaning my master bubbles can grow to 40k total absorption. That's over 10 times stronger than my individual mastery bubbles, considering my low mastery rating.
When talking about the effect of this change, it's important to note that it's not as simple as a straight buff to mastery. If the tank that we're healing is taking damage quickly, especially when tanking multiple mobs, then there's no real change. Mastery's stacking effect is only valuable if the bubble actually gets a chance to build up, which isn't always the case. The stacking effect will be very valuable on fights where the tank takes damage in slower intervals, as we'll have time to cast multiple heals on the tank before the next swing arrives. I'm looking specifically at fights like Chimaeron, where we're tasked with filling a tank's empty health pool in just a few seconds. Each heal builds the bubble a little bigger, giving the tank a much bigger effective health pool once he starts getting beat on.
It's not a cure-all
A large number of holy paladins in the community have been advocating for stacking mastery bubbles since its introduction. While I agree that allowing our mastery bonus to stack is a step in the right direction, it also doesn't fix all of the problems with our mastery as a whole. Haste has been our go-to stat for one major reason: It affects Holy Radiance and Beacon of Light. These two abilities make up a large part of our total healing done, and having them ignore mastery only weakens its value.
Holy Radiance, while only just introduced in Cataclysm, has quickly become one of our signature spells. There's no AOE challenge that we can't conquer with Holy Radiance. Without it, we really don't have any AOE healing options outside of the lackluster Light of Dawn. Haste affects Holy Radiance in a very powerful way, giving it extra ticks that significantly boost its healing capacity. Haste also improves the HPS of all of our casted healing spells as well, making it the most potent secondary stat.
Beacon of Light has been our spec-defining ability since its introduction. While we've seen it rebalanced several times during its lifetime, it has always ended up being a core ability to the holy paladin style of play. Mastery bubbles don't appear on our Beacon of Light target when we heal someone else. Since our Beaconed target is most likely taking regular damage, bubbles would be incredibly effective if placed on them. With patch 4.2 allowing our Holy Lights to transfer 100% of their healing done to our Beacon target, we are going to be spending more time healing off-Beacon than ever before. The patch notes are bad news for mastery, which favors direct healing over all else.
Mastery is a tank healer's stat. If you're tasked to heal a tank who gets hit infrequently but for massive damage, then you really can't go wrong with mastery rating. I'm already imagining how much this could help with heroic Maloriak's Black Phases, where we have to squeeze a lot of healing onto the tank into a very tiny window. On a more typical raid encounter, the tank is likely getting hit between each one of our casts anyway. In heroic dungeons, tanks are usually handling multiple mobs, and so our mastery bubbles were almost completely effective anyway.
Holy Radiance's tentative balance
Until mastery affects Holy Radiance and/or Beacon of Light, it's simply always going to be considered a tertiary stat. A stat can't ignore two of our biggest sources of healing and expect to be competitive. Haste affects all of our spells, even including our non-heals via the GCD reduction. With reforging allowing us to customize our gear, we can basically pick our two favorite stats and aim to maximize them both. In order to break up the haste/spirit lockdown, mastery and crit are going to have to see a significant change. Stacking mastery bubbles is a step in the right direction, but it doesn't yet tip the scales.
The Light and How to Swing It: Holy helps holy paladins become the powerful healers we're destined to be. Learn the ropes in Cataclysm 101 for holy paladins, study the new balance between intellect and spirit and learn how to level your new Sunwalker. Tanking is a job, DPS is a craft -- but healing is truly an art.
Filed under: Paladin, (Paladin) The Light and How to Swing It
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
jessieveller Jun 12th 2011 6:14PM
I think the best way to effectively see mastery effect holy radiance would be to do something like:
Holy radiance places a non-stacking illuminated healing bubble on each target for 6 sec
or
Holy radiance places a stacking illuminated healing bubble on 5 low health targets.
or
Holy radiance refreshes the duration of all active illuminated healing bubbles on all targets.
Something, anything to do with holy radiance, and I can see it being strong.
jessieveller Jun 12th 2011 6:18PM
Or have mastery have something to do with our mana.
For every 50 mastery rating the paladin has a 2% chance to restore 1% of their total mana when the illuminated healing bubble is absorbed.
jessieveller Jun 12th 2011 6:19PM
They need not just think about how to make mastery better, but how to make it outweigh spirit and haste.
Diatenium Jun 12th 2011 7:24PM
The imperative for improving out mastery is not to make it necessarily better than spirit or haste but to reduce the penalty for having mastery on your gear; you'll always have sub-optimal secondary stats, but making the difference in quality as minimal as possible is the ideal situation.
The mechanic of mastery is fine, all holy paladins will tell you is that it's inability to work off all of our heals--unlike crit or haste--is what holds it back. Honestly, having mastery work off holy radiance would be extremely impressive in things like second-phase heroic al'akir.
Uukla the Mok Jun 27th 2011 4:21PM
Diatenium, I have to disagree with you on this matter. I think mastery is a complete waste of a secondary stat for Holy Paladins. Let me explain before people jump up and harp on me...
To effectively get the use out of any mastery you have to hit for a large amount. If you are a decently raid geared holy pally you should have about a 13% Illuminated Healing "Bubble". So lets look at an average Holy Light cast, say about 12k, that is a pretty fair number. That is about 1500 dmg absorption from IH. If HL crits we will say it hits for 20k, that would be 2600 for IH.
You say that what makes mastery sub par is it inability to work with all of our heals. I say mastery is sub par because it is ineffective with our "Primary" Heal. Even if it worked with BoL what they hell good does 2600 dmg absorbtion do for a tank who is taking 40k Hits every 3 to 5 seconds?
Unlike Mastery for most of the other healing Classes, Holy Paladin Mastery relies ENTIRELY on our other secondary stats. Without Haste the spells go off to slowly, without Crit the IH absorption is just not big enough. The problem is, Mastery takes up the space of both of these stats on our gear.
In my opinion, they don't need to alter mastery to work with our spells, they need to do a complete overhaul on what it does for us.
Sumadin Jun 12th 2011 6:34PM
I personally think blizzard is making a dangerous decision with the changes in 4.2
With this change and with the rest of the buffs to crit and beacon i think the overall result is a minor buff however what is dangerous is the individual changes.
Basicly we have greater HPS but if we keep spamming we cannot last as long.
This makes us better in at least 2 scenarios:
Halfus wyrmbreaker hc: Basicly any boss that that deals brutal punishment to the tanks for half the fight and then falls asleep. It will be easier for paladins to keep up tanks althrough they won't be able to do so for as long.
Alakir: The other scenario is bosses that may occationally decide to suddenly deal a huge hit to the tanks, at which point they need to go up FAST. As mentioned we will be better at this very thing.
What i fear is that we will be back at wrath where healer druids,shamans and priests only ever come to raid as raid healers and for buffs and blizzard have to balance heroic encounters on the assumption that the raid is using 2 paladins that swap beacons for tank healing.
A99barnsey Jun 12th 2011 11:23PM
Haste affects Holy Radiance, but it has caps. So it's a little more complicated than you imply.
Diatenium Jun 12th 2011 7:18PM
Asides from the minor hit to our mana efficiency, holy paladins have been receiving buff after consecutive buff, it's enough to make me smile, and this recent change to mastery is a nice icing on the cake.
For the most part, though, this doesn't change anything, all it means is that we aren't penalized in mitigative healing whenever pelting a raid member with a heal more than once before the initial illuminated healing is consumed, it's a very niche buff. As you said, our mastery needs to affect things like holy radiance before it can truly be taken seriously.
Though I'm actually surprised they buffed it at all. Here's the plain and simple: as much as we want our mastery to work we don't really need it to, holy paladins are doing fine in raiding in spite of such a poor secondary stat.
Now, no doubt you and I would like to see it resolved regardless, but it just isn't a pressing matter right now as far as blizzard is concerned; they buffed resto shaman's mastery to work off all heals, for example, because shamans were at the bottom for healing which just isn't the case for us. No class is perfect, but as long as that imperfection doesn't jeopardize eligibility in group content then it's not likely going to be resolved anytime soon.
Although we're all in agreement that something just -has- to be done about LoD, yes?
Diatenium Jun 12th 2011 7:35PM
Also, I see no--I repeat NO--healer plate belt of a 391 ilvl, only a regular one as a avengers of hyjal rep reward, tell me it ain't so! D:
silentk Jun 12th 2011 7:33PM
I welcome this change, though I doubt it will affect my itemization.
I hope that this does not make us "overpowered" again. I would like to avoid the nerf-bat if possible.
Though this does somewhat make up for the mana cost changes...
PJ Jun 12th 2011 7:45PM
I'll use their mastery crap if they pay me in gold (and make sure the damn recipe for the vial of the sands drops!)
adyuaa Jun 12th 2011 7:46PM
Would it be worth checking to make sure we don't want a stamina trinket to increase the maximum size of that bubble? Probably not, because most procs or uses would be tank relevant. But what if it was a stam-mastery trinket? Or even if the mastery was the constant stat and stamina the proc?
Chase Christian Jun 12th 2011 7:47PM
The stamina isn't worth it since we'll never get a "full" 40k bubble up, and our stamina only affects the maximum size of the bubble.
StClair Jun 12th 2011 10:09PM
There's a stubborn part of me that thinks our critical stat should be /Spirit/, not Int. Are we /mages/? No, we are /holy warriors!/ Priests in plate!
Zetsubou Jun 12th 2011 11:27PM
i wouldn't expect it to work off of holy radiance any time soon. even if it didn't add up to a lot, giving everyone within the effect a bubble is not what blizzard seems to want to do with paladins.
maybe if illuminated healing gave a different effect for hr and bol. like "targets affected by holy radiance receive extra healing for X when (insert desired spell/s here) are cast for Y seconds" or " critically healing the beacon-ed target causes illumination, (maybe a HoT or a small group heal) for x amount of the spells effect" that would even up crit's desirability.
just spit balling, but those sound useful and more blizzard friendly, because they have given paladins various incarnations of those before. definitely don't drop the bubble though, its just getting good. =D
James.birch2 Jun 13th 2011 9:01AM
Coming from a Dk tank, I foresee this change as a godsend and will obviously make pally healers our healer of choice due to the synergy of our 2 masteries, while our blood mastery bubble is eating away the incoming damage the pally can be building bubbles to make the next series of Inc damage absorbable just to allow us the build even more bubbles
EidlonImp Jun 13th 2011 12:05PM
Also speaking as a DK tank (one who's gearing a holydin) I have trouble understanding all the fuss about Holy's mastery. I've seen the theorycrafting, and I get why it's not a stat you want to stack, except possibly in very specific situations, but it doesn't seem all that terrible, especially next to crit.
Someone remind me, though, by what % does one point of mastery improve your bubble? If it's 1.25% or more, this still seems very handy, provided you're healing a Target who will be taking damage again in the next 8 seconds.
Which is where I fail to see the fail. In our raids the paladin is almost always assigned primarily to a tank. Now, our pally's good, so of course he tosses heals on DPS where he can, and Holy Radiance is awesome for group survivability and boosting his numbers, but at the end of Tue day his main concern is keeping me alive so Tue boss doesn't eat the raid. And bubbles just make this easier. Every point absorbed is that much less healing he has to do on me so he cam help others out. For me, it also helps extend Tue duration of bone shield (obviously, not nearly as well as a disc priest would), which is just gravy.
Making Bacon produce bubbles would be amazing, but I wonder if it wouldn't be too awesome. Paladins have very few decisions they need to make, compared to other healers (restoring druids make my head spin), with only 3 traditional heals, two insta-fast heals (which they usually use on cooldown, not much choice there) a couple AoE heals (which you use when there's AoE damage, one doesn't even cost mana, no big choice in whether or not to use these, then), a smattering of throughput cooldowns (choice here, but only occassionqlly) it seems like Bacon-bubbles would over-simplify things too much.
If your tank gets heals and bubbles whether you're healing him or the raid, why would you bother healing him?
jeppe0311 Jun 14th 2011 9:40AM
Mmmmhhhh Bacon bubbles.
davjhawa Jun 13th 2011 1:10PM
This is gonna so make holy paladins too OP for pvp!!!
Slaytanic Jun 13th 2011 1:59PM
So how is it determined which bubble gets "eaten" first? Say a DK has a good BS up (from an inc dmg proc), a healadin's mastery, and a disc priest bubble?