Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Nerfing Illumination is not the answer

As some of you might realise, I play a holy pally. And recently on the forums blue have been bandying around a theory that now pallies have stopped QQing, there must be something wrong with them. *sigh*

Yes, there is something wrong with us, but it is not what you think.
You can see the blue posts in this thread here and here and here.

MP5 is not undervalued, int is overvalued (giving crit, manapool and SP).
But you know what? I seriously doubt this is as major as people are making it out to be. Remember all the hoo haa about 3.1 and nerfing regen? Yeah well, look how that panned out, storm in a tea cup.

Until they actually address the issue (that int as a stat for holy pallies is too powerful, not that MP5 is unattractive) they are going to stuff everything up.

There is a very easy way to solve the problem, remove a bunch of int from gear and reitemise it with MP5/crit/SP. There really is too much int kicking about, so much so that it is worth stacking at the moment.

Reitemising a certain amount of int has the effect of reducing the mana pool (making replenishment type effects more in line with everyone else), reducing crit and making MP5 much more viable for long term harder fights (where I can totally see not relying on RNG would be a benefit).

Personally, I have a good dose of MP5 on my gear (I use flask of mojo to cover off my shortfall cos frost wyrm is fail atm), and I do look for it, but there are plenty of OTHER items that render actual MP5 useless: insightful earthsiege diamond, the libram (worth a good 300MP5 or so when going hard on HL), the crit trinket that returns 900mana and procs ALL THE TIME... and those are just the ones I got my greasy little mitts on. Why would I look for MP5 when those 3 items and a flask cover off most of my issues? I mean really? T8 comes with much MP5, and I am not going to turn my nose up at that.

And now for the clincher - I present GENERAL VEZAX. WHY ON EARTH would I want MP5 for THAT fight? Really? Someone explain it to me cos I dont want it.

In short... Dont nerf illumination or DP, reitemise pally holy gear - it's not like it has got any other onflow effects other than holy pallies! go nuts! Set up the gear in a manner that makes MP5 as desirable as int - REMOVE INT from gear if you HAVE to do something. If my mana pool were in the low 20s like most other healers, I would be SCRAMBLING for MP5 on my gear. But it's not, it's around 30k. I am 10k ahead of any healer just to start with which is 10 holy lights, 50% of which are crits and cost 60% so effectively before I even hit where the other guys start, I am 14k mana ahead! That are some VERY rough numbers, but gets the idea across. Now had I started at 20k mana, I would be wanting my time to work for me a lot harder, and I would definately have a lot more MP5. I wouldn't have the wiggle room to not worry about a crit not happening for mana return, I need reliable calculable returns.

With a 30k mana pool, math says YES! use crit as your regen stat. 20k mana pool? Math says NOOOO use MP5 as your regen stat.

I have also seen suggestions of making spirit the across the board regen stat for everyone, and this has its advantages. But at this stage in the game, changing to spirit needs more game wide changes to implement (and thus much more chance of ballsing things up). I prefer the reitemisation idea as it has much less gamewide impact and "resolves" the issue.

Over 30k mana pools? over 50% crit raid buffed and ridiculous amounts of haste? Yeah, something is very wrong, and I see the amount of int available to use as being one of the main contributors.