Illumination

I'm hit quite hard by the illum nerf. I'm sitting on 29% holy crit raid buffed, which is 35% crit on holy light. I'm lucky I have prepared some mp5 gear. It was primarily for arena switching, but yeh it's going to be more useful soon.

To be honest, I'm not raging hard about the illum nerf. I enjoyed it, and expected a nerf. If you haven't seen my 44% holy light crit video, you can see it here. This video was made after 41 pt talents were added to the game. You would notice that Light's Grace is bugged; it wasn't being applied on the next heal if it was casted too fast. It has since been fixed though so by right, my HPS would have been significantly higher.

I read the Paladin forums quite extensively but not as much as I did in the past. If you didn't get the latest push update, illum now returns 60% mana instead of 50%. I mean does Blizzard really know what they're doing at all? They seem to be approaching drastic class changes in a comic-strip manner.

Anyhow, I saw some really good illum suggestions. I lost a direct link but someone suggested adding a percentile coefficient to your spell crit to determine how much mana you gain. The more crit you have, the less mana you get from crits. However, this would mean that Blizzard has to decide on a median amount of mana you gain from crits. This is fine, they can decide on any median they want but what the coefficient does is to normalize crit gear, while not making them obsolete.

I'm often asked how much crit converts into mp5. The answer is quite situational because it depends whether you are spam casting or just casting a few variant heals or burst casting then waiting. It is at expedience to do the calculations based on the former assumption.

x = mp5
x = (mana cost of spell * 0.01) / cast time of spell * 5
rank7 FOL => 180 * 0.01 / 1.5 * 5 = 6mp5
rank11 HL => 840 * 0.01 / 2 * 5 = 21mp5

Using the current illum push, these numbers are nerfed to 3.6 and 12.6 respectively. Not as good as before. But the arguement is very obvious, not every situation allows you to spamcast. Right now, I'm trying to get used to my mp5 gear. I'm still not a patron of +heal, im sitting on 1200 for raids, and I'm happy with it. There are however some items that are outright best for PVE. For example, Virtue Bearer's Vambraces and Talasite Owl.

I truly do not understand why some Paladins rejoice at the illum nerf anyway. It is a nerf, in any shape or form. No-one except the level designers and testers should be happy. The ability to PVE got nerfed, period.