Tier 12 Set Bonuses

The various news sites have a first look at Tier 12 set bonuses. (MMO-Champion, Wowhead)

Holy Paladin:

Paladin T12 Holy 2P Bonus: Casting Flash of Light, Holy Light, or Divine Light on your Beacon of Light target has a 40% chance to grant you 2% of your base mana.

Paladin T12 Holy 4P Bonus: Your Divine Light also heals a nearby injured target for 20% of the amount healed.

Obviously, we don’t know how these bonuses will work, yet, but there are a few things here that are interesting to note. Typically, Blizzard ties bonuses to spells they want us to use a lot. Witness our 2pc bonus (and any other healer’s T11 2pc bonus): it’s 5% crit on Holy Light/Heal/Healing Wave/periodic Lifebloom heals. (Never mind the fact that a lot of people go for offset pieces due to the lack of haste on tier, at least for paladins.)

Let’s talk about the 2pc bonus first.

a) You need to be casting Flash of Light or Holy Light or Divine Light. This effect does not trigger from Holy Shock, Word of Glory, Light of Dawn, Holy Radiance or, it appears, triggers from Beacon of Light.

b) You need to be casting those spells ON your Beacon target. This is in line with the Tower of Radiance talent that some paladins forego entirely and is, perhaps, Blizzard’s way of trying to encourage us to cast on our Beacon directly.

c) There’s a 40% chance to get back 2% of base mana. Do you know how much, or, rather, how little mana 2% is? Try 468 mana. So we have to cast a heal that’s about 7k (FoL) or 2k (HL) or nearly 8k mana (DL) in order to have a CHANCE to get 468 mana back. Not sure about you, but unless this changes, I’m just going to heal as I normally do and consider that mana to be icing on the cake.

It’s particularly insulting to us, given what the other healing classes are potentially getting. (And yes, I know, it’s datamined PTR info that’s subject to change.)

– Druids: Your periodic healing from Lifebloom has a 40% chance to restore 1% of your base mana each time it heals a target.

That’s a 40% chance to gain 186 mana each time Lifebloom TICKS. Lifebloom ticks (unhasted) once a second. Good resto druids, as I understand it, should ALWAYS have Lifebloom ticking on someone for Omen of Clarity procs, due to Malfurion’s Gift. In our first-ever heroic Chimaeron kill, my resto druid had 423 ticks or tick/crits of Lifebloom.  40% of that is 169. So, roughly, 169 chances to proc the bonus, assuming no internal cooldown.

– Priests: Your Flash Heal, Heal, and Greater Heal spells cause you to regenerate 2% of your base mana every 5 sec for 15 sec.

That is a 100% chance (no percent chance, no chance of failure) to regen 412 mana every 5 seconds for 15 seconds. So that’s 412 times 3 for a total of 1236 mana every time they use Flash Heal, Heal or Greater Heal.

– Shaman: Your periodic healing from Riptide has a 40% chance to restore 1% of your base mana each time it heals a target.

That’s a 40% chance to restore 234 mana on each Riptide tick. And you can have more than one Riptide going at once.

Clearly, the holy paladins have been screwed over here. The shaman and druids have the same chance as us to proc, but are restricted to one spell. However, that one spell (for both of them) ticks constantly if the class is being played well.

The priests have the same spell limitations as we do (short, expensive heal or the long, cheap heal, or the long, expensive heal) but don’t have the percent chance, nor are they limited by target the way we are, since our heals MUST be on the beaconed target.

d) The possibility of an internal cooldown exists. This isn’t unheard of. Eternal Glory‘s 30% chance to make Word of Glory not cost any Holy Power has a 15-second internal cooldown.

All said, I think the two-piece bonus COULD be great, but the mana returns are too low, we’re too limited in terms of our targets and, frankly, every other healer is going to get more procs off of their bonuses than we are, should it stay the way it is.

And now for the 4pc:

Raid-buffed, my average Divine Light hits for about 30k and crits for about 45k. So the 4pc bonus is going to allow me to hit my target for a bit more than that (given gear upgrades meaning more intellect), so let’s say about 38k and 52k for a DL hit and a DL crit in a raid with 4 pieces of T12.

20% of 38k is 7600 and 20% of 52k is 10400.

So my 4pc bonus will allow me to heal some random person near my target for 7600 or 10400 or some value in between?

– Will it be a smart heal or will it just heal anyone? A pet? Someone at full health?
– Define “nearby”

My concern here is that the radius will be small and that the heal will be random. If it is not random and if the radius is about the size of the old Glyph of Holy Light, this is a nice bonus. If it heals the player with the lowest health in its decently-sized ranged, I’ll be thrilled.

Sadly, my gut tells me it’s random, won’t care if the target is a pet or at full health already and will be pretty useless sometimes.

Having said that, no one knows how these bonuses are actually going to work. We’ll have to wait and see. I just really, REALLY hope these get some work done on them before 4.2 releases.

10 Replies to “Tier 12 Set Bonuses”

  1. First time I’ve posted here but the priest 2-set is good for priests put on tank healing but for holy priests who are usually on raid, it’s not great.

    Also, our 4 piece is a fiery lightwell in a fiery environment in fights with fire effects where we have no idea where it’ll be placed. I’m not counting on my raid’s dps being able to find it, let alone click it

  2. While our 2pc may not be ‘great’ compared to the other healers, our 4pc is clearly the better of the bunch; especially the priest one…. we all know how people love to click Lightwell.

    The Druid 4pc is the most interesting one there is. It’s my understanding that Druids don’t like to have it ‘bloom’ so as to not waste mana. I don’t play a Druid, but that’s just what I’ve heard. Now, if they’re in ToL spamming Blooms left and right…. I could see Blizz nerfing it hard, because that (combined with the 2pc set) would be an insane amount of mana returned.

    Overall, I think our set bonuses are pretty good: they aren’t OP looking to be nerfed (like Druids) and they aren’t odd; like that of the priests (no one will click their 4pc bonus.) I feel that both Shaman and Paladins toe the line well, between functional, but not crazy OP.

  3. In regards to the 4 piece, it DOES say in the notes that it targets a nearby injured player, so my guess is, at worst, it won’t be casting a useless heal onto a full HP member of the raid.

    As for the 2 piece, I can’t say I’m excited by it compared to the other healers 2 piece bonuses. If it was whenever we cast those three spells at all, it’d be pretty amazing (possibly OP) – but limiting those heals to just our Beacon target is too confining I feel. I run with Tower up, but the amount of times I directly heal the tank with DL or FoL JUST for beacon gains is nil. Any mana I get back from the 2 piece would indeed be just a bonus since I never make a conscious decision to heal the tank just for beacon stacking, let alone so I have a chance to get 400 mana back. I might as well save the heal and just attack my target for Seal procs!

  4. Does T12 Healadin gear at least have any Haste on it or are we screwed again on that front too?

  5. I think they should change the 2pc to be something like, you have a 40% chance to gain 2% mana when you heal a target through Beacon of Light. While it’s not a lot of mana like you said, at least you get the chance to proc it often. Any direct heals (plus an extra chance with PotI), and any time you judge. But it wouldn’t do anything for Holy Radiance, which is fine. Plus it gives us a ‘free’ regen component for our Holy Power dumps which don’t cost mana. This puts us in line with the other healers who get their 2pc bonus of ticks (don’t have to be actively casting).

  6. The set bonuses are interesting. As you said, the druid 4 pc would be OP while in Tree of Life, but sort of crappy the rest of the time. Even the 2-piece bonus seems a little OP – that’s a lot of mana.

    As a druid it would be really nice to see a set bonus that wasn’t lifebloom related at some point. All our other spells are getting ignored.

  7. Kiriel – The 2pc bonus for priests only requires one Flash Heal, Heal or Greater heal every 15 seconds. I would imagine that’s not terribly hard to keep up, even among COH/POH spam.

    The 4pc is definitely questionable, I’ll grant you that.

    Kalvelis – Our 4pc may or may not suck. I guess we’ll see how the bonus actually works first. :)

    I’m not sure how to react to the druid 4pc. It certainly seems a little odd given that most druids don’t let LB bloom (as far as I know) unless they’re on ToL, as you said, which, at that point, seems very OP.

    I still think the 2pc is extremely lacklustre, though. Again, we’ll have to see how much of an impact it makes and if there’s an ICD on it.

    Falrei – Ah, it says it targets a nearby injured *target*, not player. And if there’s no one nearby who’s injured, does it just not proc? What I’m looking for is clarification. Is this a smart heal? Will it heal the lowest-health nearby PLAYER? Or will it heal any injured target? We’ll have to wait ’till the gear’s available on the PTR to find out, I imagine.

    I agree with you on Seal/Judgement procs vs. the 2pc for mana gain specifically. My impression is that Blizzard is trying to encourage us to directly cast on our Beacon target AND have Tower of Radiance. I don’t know how effective that’s going to be, though.

    K. – The stats on our tier armor aren’t out yet. The offset pieces look more balanced in terms of their haste/crit/mastery so maybe our tier is also more balanced. Most of the offset pieces in T11 had a strong focus on haste where our T11 gear has, uh, none. So with a couple pieces of offset with haste and a couple more with mastery and a couple more with crit, we may have some good stats on the tier. But I’m not holding my breath! ;)

    Shathus – I think that would be a decent bonus as well, but as I said, I think Blizzard is trying to get us to hard-cast on the Beacon target and, therefore, give Tower of Radiance more value. Your suggestion would go against what I think they’re aiming for. :)

    Jasyla – I don’t understand why they’re focusing so much on Lifebloom either, to be honest. They’ve consistently nerfed LB since Burning Crusade and now they’re sticking bonuses to it everywhere you look? Geez, Blizz, make up your minds! :)

  8. Touche on pointing out target – I suppose that could also include pets as you have mentioned, or those trees running towards the boss I normally wouldn’t care about. I would like to assume though, based on the fact that shaman’s are getting an extra jump on their chain heal for their fourth, that we wouldn’t be getting a retarded tack on heal. Does that mean it’s a SMART heal? I’d like to think so, but I’m hoping at worst it’s somewhere between smart and totally useless bonus heal.

  9. The priest one isn’t as great as it seems if you are a Holy Priest who raid heals. It doesn’t proc off of PoH or CoH, our 2 bread and butter raid heals. I personally use Renew to spot heal people. Unless you are tank healing, the 2-piece bonus sucks for Holy Priests and the 4-piece is even worse. It’s already hard enough to get people to use Lightwell.

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