Patch 5.4 PTR's Level 45 Talents for Holy Paladins

The Changes:
Blizzard recently updated the Public Test Realm patch notes for World of Warcraft's 5.4 patch, which includes significant changes to the level 45 talent tier for Paladins. The relevant patch notes are as follows:

Talents

• Eternal Flame's initial healing has been reduced by 30%. 

• Sacred Shield (Old) has been renamed to Holy Shield and is no longer a talent. Holy Shield is a Protection Paladin ability learned at level 85. 

• Sacred Shield (New)
• Holy: When the Paladin or their Beacon of Light target falls below 30% health, that target gains a Sacred Shield absorbing damage equal to 30% of their maximum health. Sacred Shield can only occur once every 2 minutes. 

• Protection, Retribution: When the Paladin falls below 30% health, they gain a Sacred Shield absorbing damage equal to 30% of their maximum health. Sacred Shield can only occur once every 2 minutes. 

• Selfless Healer stacks now also work on Divine Light in addition to Flash of Light.
• Bastion of Glory will now apply Selfless Healer's bonus to healing to the casting Paladin as well as other targets and consume all stacks of Bastion of Glory in the process.

Holy

• Mastery: Illuminated Healing no longer activates from periodic healing effects.

Don't panic, though! Community Manager Rygarius clarified some of the changes and the intentions behind them in this forum post. I'm not going to go over everything, but here are the salient points:

• Selfless Healer was intended to be a viable option for Holy Paladins who happen to enjoy a playstyle that involves frequent usage of Judgment. Blizzard recognizes that not everybody enjoys this playstyle, so it's not meant to be an attractive talent for everybody.
• Eternal Flame was used far too frequently by Holy Paladins, so Blizzard is trying to figure out how to nerf it so Selfless Healer and Sacred Shield become viable choices. The 30% nerf to Eternal Flame's initial heal will probably be reverted, but the change to make it no longer stack Holy's Illuminated Healing mastery is here to stay.
• Sacred Shield's changes listed above are all pretty much going to be scrapped, because it buffs Protection too much and because the new Sacred Shield is unattractive for Holy and Retribution. Blizzard is looking for a way to make the currently existing talent more attractive to Holy and Retribution, but they haven't decided what exactly to do quite yet.

That means the level 45 talent changes for Holy Paladins at the moment amount to the much more easily manageable:

Talents

• Selfless Healer stacks now also work on Divine Light in addition to Flash of Light.

Holy

• Mastery: Illuminated Healing no longer activates from periodic healing effects.

My Thoughts:
I am actually somewhat intrigued by the Selfless Healer changes. At level 90 and with 26,000 spellpower (roughly normal tier 15-geared), a 3-stack of Selfless Healer grants you the approximate healing power of a Divine Light plus a Holy Light for the mana cost of a Holy Light and 4 nonconsecutive global cooldowns. The big question I have, though, is how does it interact with Infusion of Light procs? If the instant Divine Light consumes the proc, then it loses much of its appeal, but if it leaves the proc untouched (or better yet, allows the instant Divine Light to bypass triggering the global cooldown in exchange for consuming the proc), then it might be worthwhile to give this talent a second look.

However, Selfless Healer still has one fundamental flaw: Judgment just isn't really a Holy spell. Protection and Retribution both have effects that make it something worth casting relatively frequently, but Holy has no real reason to cast it except for this talent. Without some additional base effect for Holy, spending global cooldowns on Judgment will always be seen as a detriment, and I think Selfless Healer will remain unpopular.

As for Eternal Flame and Sacred Shield, the former's HoT ticks refreshing the Illuminated Healing mastery is a blatantly overpowered mechanic, and so many Holy Paladins choose this talent that I can see why Blizzard wants to tone it down, however the biggest reason why I chose Eternal Flame over Sacred Shield (even though I had tried Sacred Shield first and prefer it conceptually over Eternal Flame) is that Eternal Flame benefits from haste, critical strike, mastery, and transfers over Beacon of Light, whereas Sacred Shield only benefits from haste. Unless Blizzard allows Sacred Shield to benefit from Holy's strengths as well as Eternal Flame does, I'm not sure it will ever be as attractive.

Brief First Impressions of the Mists of Pandaria Beta

Note: WoWhead linking isn't really playing all that nicely with the beta data. The tooltips appear to be the live version of abilities, but clicking them will take you to the Mists of Pandaria equivalents, so be sure to click through to see the beta tooltips.

I finally managed to set aside some time to check out the Mists of Pandaria beta last night and answer some questions on PlusHeal, and here were some of my first impressions from running around Stormwind and messing around with target dummies:

• Holy Radiance no longer has a HoT portion. Additionally, it's splash healing has been reduced to 50% of the healing done to the primary target, but the splashes can crit independently (thus healing for the same amount as the primary target), and it all triggers our Illuminated Healing mastery. Yes, the Illuminated Healing shield is triggered on the splashed targets, too.

• Light of Dawn no longer has a facing requirement: it now heals the most injured targets in a full 360° circle (sphere?) around the Paladin rather than a frontal cone. This seems to make the Glyph of Light of Dawn a little less valuable, even in 10-man raids, though it may become more useful for Scenarios or Arenas. It still only extends 30 yards, though, which seems a bit inconvenient considering all of our other heals are 40 yards. Also, the animation looks a bit stupid, since the healing cone now erupts straight upwards from the top of our heads.

• Mana is normalized to 102,000 mana for a level 85 Holy Paladin, regardless of gear.

• Haste is less potent. The rating now converts to a smaller haste percentage than before, plus we no longer have the 9% haste from Judgments of the Pure or the potential haste rating from our relic slot, so heals feel somewhat sluggish. My normally 1.94 sec Holy Light was suddenly taking 2.19 sec to cast, which is enough to be noticeable.

• Crit rating is also converting into a smaller percentage, but as I didn't gear crit for PvE, I'm not sure how noticeable it is.

• Spirit converts very nicely at level 85, with 1 Spirit equaling 1 mana regenerated every 5 seconds while in combat (at least, according to the tooltips). I wonder if this is consistent throughout all levels, or if the ratios change like the various stats that use ratings.

• Crusader Strike is dirt cheap at 600 mana, and might be a decent way to build up Holy Power when in melee range. In comparison, Holy Shock costs 2800 mana. It does almost no damage, though, since Crusader Strike is based on weapon damage and Holy weapons sacrifice weapon damage for spell power. Also, Sanctity of Battle seems to apply to Holy, too, (though this might be the result of a character copy error) which means Crusader Strike is available fairly frequently - roughly one in every 3 GCDs with my gear.

• Holy Shock now has a spiffy new icon. So does Turn Evil.

• Denounce (formerly Holy Wrath, though closer in current implementation to Exorcism since it seems to no longer have an AoE component) is also really cheap at 1880 mana, and does about as much damage as Holy Shock. Also, it has a new graphic.

• Between Glyph of Denounce, Glyph of Holy Shock, and Glyph of Word of Glory, I'm cautiously optimistic that the Shockadin might make something of a comeback. Unfortunately, though, it's damage output doesn't seem very viable currently.

• I miss Daybreak. Not having any mechanic that allows back-to-back Holy Shock casts makes me sad.

• My action bars feel very empty. Very empty, indeed.

An Explanation of Haste

When haste was first introduced into World of Warcraft as an item stat, it seemed there was a great deal of confusion on how it actually worked. Even now that haste has become an extremely common stat that can be found on a significant portion of caster gear, it seems that there are still questions on how exactly each percentage point of haste affects spell casts and global cooldowns.

Well, nowadays there are a great many resources (such as WoWWiki's Casting speed page) available that explain how exactly haste rating and haste percentages modify spell casting speed and the global cooldown, as well as formulas that allow you to calculate how much haste you need to reach a target goal—such as reducing the 1.5 second default global cooldown to the 1 second minimum. Unfortunately, it seems that what many of these resources don't provide is an explanation of why haste behaves the way it does, and so the purpose of this post is to explain exactly that on a conceptual level.

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If we think about it, there are two ways to view the meaning of the word "haste". The first way is to interpret it something along the lines of "take less time to do a set task", and the second way is more akin to "do more in a set amount of time". Generally speaking, when we think of haste, we're likely to think about the first interpretation. For example, "Max hastily made his bed" most likely means that although it normally takes Max 3 minutes to make his bed, in this case he managed to make it in 2 minutes because he rushed. However, World of Warcraft uses the second interpretation instead of the first. An example of this interpretation would be "If I work with great haste, I should be able to paint 3 walls before dinner instead of 2."

So, you're probably thinking "Well, what's the difference? Taking less time to do something is basically the same thing as doing more things in a certain amount of time!" It turns out, there's a significant difference, mathematically speaking. Let's say Al and Bob are cutting carrots, and it takes both of them about 1 minute (60 seconds) to cut 10 carrots. After a while, Al and Bob get bored, and so Al decides to cut his carrots in 50% less time while Bob decides to cut 50% more carrots each minute. If there was no difference between the two, then Al and Bob should still be cutting carrots at the same rate, right? Well, Al begins cutting 10 carrots in 60 - 50% = 60 - 30 = 30 seconds, and Bob begins cutting 10 + 50% = 10 + 5 = 15 carrots in 60 seconds. After 1 minute, Al ends up having cut 20 carrots while Bob has only managed 15.


Now, how does this apply to World of Warcraft? Well, if you think about haste using the first interpretation—making each cast/global cooldown take less time—then the numbers are going to seem counterintuitive. Thinking about it this way would lead to the conclusion that you would only require 33% haste in order to reduce 1.5 seconds to 1 second, since

1.5 seconds - 33% = 1.5 seconds - 0.5 seconds = 1 second.

It would also lead to the conclusion that 100% haste would make all of your spell casts instant, since

1.5 seconds - 100% = 1.5 seconds - 1.5 seconds = 0 seconds.

Yet this is not how haste behaves in the game.


However, if you try thinking about it with the other interpretation—that it allows you to cast more spells in a set amount of time—it begins to make much more sense. The way I conceptualize it is that haste increases your casting rate. So, if you have 100% haste, then you can cast twice as many spells in the same amount of time it would take you to cast a single spell with no haste. If we use a 3-second spell as an example, then

1 spell per 3 seconds + 100% = 1 spell per 3 seconds + 1 spell per 3 seconds = 2 spells per 3 seconds.

So, if it doesn't take 33% haste to reduce a 1.5 second spell cast or the 1.5 second global cooldown to 1 second, then how much haste does it take? If you conceptualize it with the formula just above this, you can math it out:

1 spell per 1.5 seconds + ? = 1 spell per 1 second
1 spell per 1.5 seconds + ? = 1.5 spells per 1.5 seconds
? = 1.5 spells per 1.5 seconds - 1 spell per 1.5 seconds
? = 0.5 spells per 1.5 seconds

0.5 spells per 1.5 seconds is what % of 1 spell per 1.5 seconds?
(0.5 spells per 1.5 seconds) / (1 spell per 1.5 seconds) = 1/2 = 0.5 = 50%

So, you need 50% haste to reduce a 1.5 second spell cast or global cooldown to a 1 second cast or global cooldown.