Build [9014]; It's Over 9000!

Not many changes in last nights build, and they are not great tbh :/

Skills
Holy

* Divine Plea changed to : You gain 25% of your total mana over 15 sec (Old - 10 sec), but the amount healed by your spells is reduced by 100%. (Old - 50%) [Tooltip change. This one has been in since the last patch]


Talents
Holy

* Judgements of the Pure now lasts 1 minute. (Up from 30 seconds) [Probably needed to happen, but it doesn't make the talent much more interesting. It's a net gain, but not by much]
* Infusion of the Light now reduces the cast time of your next Holy Light spell by 0.5/1sec. (Down from 1.25/2.5 sec) [A very, very hefty nerf. Now this is a much less useful PvP skill as you can't cast Holy Lights whilst on the move, though presumably if you take this and Light's Grace you can reduce its casting speed to 1 sec. Still, if the aim was to encourage more people into Holy this wasn't a good start]


Retribution

* Judgement of the Wise has been changed to grant you 33% of your base mana instead of 20% of your maximum mana. [As inticipated, though 33% of base is a little low IMO.]

Protection
* Hammer of the Righteous now does damage equal to 4 times the weapon swing DPS (up from 3) [This is a buff, and probably puts physical tanking weapons higher than equivalent ilvl spell damage weapons in terms of threat. Pretty much necessary unless you wanted a whole load of caster QQ in Wrath.]

Glyphs (Full List)

* Glyph of Exorcism - Your Exorcism also interrupts spellcasting for 2 sec.[Still pretty much useless without the ability to target non-undead]
* Glyph of Flash of Light - Your Flash of Light heals for 50% less initially, but also heals for 140% (down from 200%) of its inital effect over 15 sec.
* Glyph of the Warhorse - Removed
* Glyph of the Wise - Reduces the mana cost of your Seal of Wisdom spell by 50%.[*yawn]

All in all, not a good set of changes.

Edit:

Some other changes which are as yet unconfirmed:

A second-hand account at BoKings states that Judgement of Wisdom's internal cooldown is now raid-wide. If this is correct it means that the JoW proc effect can now only trigger once for any member of the raid every 4 seconds, which reduces effective raid-wide mana returns by 90% assuming you have 10 offensive casters in your raid (a low-ball estimate). If similar is true for JoLight then Judgement debuffs are effectively worthless for PvE.

On the positive side of things, Sacred Shield appears to be getting a 75% Spell Damage Coeff on each activation, meaning that with 1500 SD a single shield will absorb 1625 (1500*0.75 + 500) damage. This is effectively really cheap pre-emptive healing, but may well play havoc with Tank power mechanics. For raid healing it's a cheap heal-over-time which requires continuous damage to be effective. This seems a little high and it's probably unlikely that this will get into the 3.0 release intact. Unfortunately it also doesn't appear to scale at all with Sheath of Light, which is a huge blow in its value to Ret Paladins (and means that Ret doesn't get any new spells for 71-80). I believe it's also still dispellable too, making it borderline for PvP.

The most significant news though remains the nerf to the Holy Tree. From my point of view it means that Holy Paladins are doing exactly what they were doing in TBC: spamming heals. Interesting mechanics have been removed, or gutted into insensibility. Many Paladins on EJ are stating that they would rather try a 28/0/43 Sheathbot build than current deep Holy, and I have to say that in its current state they probably wouldn't be wrong.

Deep Holy has gone from interesting but flawed to lacklustre. Paladin raid utility has been gutted. If one were to look at 2.4 vs the current 3.0 build I think you'd struggle to see how any spec other than Ret has come out ahead.

Thorgred at EJ has a good run-down of GC's commentary on Holy, and it shows just how deep the disconnect between theorycrafters and devs. goes.