To make up for my stupidity in my last post. Here is a glimpse of wisdom. This concerns only the Beacon of Light and the Illumination Change,

Illumination now 30% mana return down from 60%, lets say that HL costs 1000 base mana I know it doesnt but for the sake of I dont want to pull out my desktop calculator lets say it is.

1. This means that a HL crit costs 700 mana instead of 400 mana as it was before.
2. That is a net loss of 300 mana per Crit with a single target Holy Light,

But this is more of an after thought when you think about the Beacon of Light awesomeness. 100% of the heal is transferred to the tank.

For the given situation assume your holy light is a 12k Crit an 8k base and it is the only heal you use and that your first Heal either does or Does not crit and your third cast never crits.

• Situation: Before Patch, You have Beacon of Light up on the tank who is missing 16k HP, you are missing 4k HP, you cast Holy Light on yourself (I dont know you hit the wrong button so you didnt cast FoL) you are now full HP but the tank is still missing 12k HP you cast again (and possibly again) to top off the tank

1. Lets say you did not crit at all, thats 3 casts, and 3000 mana, That hurts like hell right,
2. You crit on your first one and you do not crit on your second cast, that is 2400 mana, (400 for the first 1000 each for the second and third)
3. You crit on both the first and second heal removing the need for a third cast, that is 800 mana, Much better than any of the others,

• Situation: After Patch, Same HP situation you are down 4k tank is down 16k. You now only need a min/max of 2 casts of HL to top of both you and the tank.

1. again let us say that you do not crit at all, that is only two casts because now overheal counts on your beacon of light, (Tank heal 8k+8k), that is only 2000 mana, that is already much better
2. You crit on your first one but not the second, that is 1700 Mana, not as much of an improvement as in before the patch but still better,
3. You crit both times, it costs 1400 mana, MORE than before the patch.

Now let us assume each one of these happens twice, IE. You dont crit at all, you Crit on the first one and you Crit both times,

1. Adding up the Mana cost of before the patch comes to 12400 Mana,
2. Adding up the Mana cost of AFTER the patch comes to 10200 mana,

That is a net gain of 2200 Mana, assuming the situation I have given, Mind you it is a bit of a stretch.

The post patch situation is a lot more consistent in that there is not as much variable flying around. Considering my own effective crit when in a 25 man raid is about 50% Outcome 2 is going to occur more often, For new healers or rather new 80's this patch is going to help them a lot, the only people this has a small chance of hurting is the Best In Slot geared Ulduar Healers.

Frankly I would rather take the overhealing Beacon of Light over the 60% illumination any day! and hell if you dont see it my way, take our new HoT and laugh at the Druids, (Please dont)

Illumination 3.2 Nerf (Source)

If it matters, we changed Illumination first to correspond with the Beacon of Light changes. Then when we agreed on changing resilience (and it was a very long discussion) we knew we would have to look at healing, or at least the healing by prominent Arena specs. Resto and Disc almost certainly needed attention. We thought paladins might be okay since their mana regen had already been nerfed and Beacon isn't a huge factor in PvP.

I understand some paladins who don't like the change are trying to somehow trap us into admitting the Illumination nerf was for PvP. This strategy of questioning our motives always perplexes me, because we try to be up front about when we think something is too powerful -- we don't try to hide it. We would rather face player ire directly by stating something is getting nerfed because it was too good rather than try and sneak the nerfs in under questionable justification that smart players would see through anyway.

Illumination was nerfed for PvE reasons. Having made that nerf convinced us we didn't need additional PvP changes (for now anyway). We always consider what effect changes will have on PvP and PvE (and 5-player dungeons, soloing and the level-up experience as well).

Illumination nerfed to make MP5 gear look better (Source)

This isn't quite accurate. We buffed MP5 because it just did not provide enough mana per stat point. You are often going to end up with MP5 on your gear almost no matter what you do because you aren't often choosing directly between Int, spellpower, crit or MP5.

The nerf to Illumination was almost entirely because of the buff to Beacon of Light. Beacon can now provide massively more healing in some situations. If paladins still had the mana return they do currently, they would be the best healer in the game by a pretty wide margin. It is difficult to argue that point. Now you can argue that you prefer the current model (HL on the tank and nearly unlimited mana) better. But it's hard to argue the new Beacon would be balanced without other changes.

I'm going to throw out some made-up numbers. These are not from actual stats, but are hopefully typical of say a 25-player, 10-min hard fight (something like XT). Feel free to disagree but they shouldn't be off by orders of magnitude.

A Holy paladin's mana regen might look like this:

Illumination 70,000
Divine Plea 50,000
Replenishment 36,000
Other sources of mana 30,000
Mana from gear 10,000
Overhealing 60%

A Holy priest's mana regen might look like this:

Replenishment 30,000 (remember, the paladin has more mana)
Other sources of mana 40,000
Mana from gear 25,000
Overhealng 30%

See the problem? We're not talking about mana regen that is slightly off from other classes.

This situation is acceptable (somewhat) in current content because you can only do so much with such high levels of regen since you generally have to target one heal at a time. We could pretty much just make paladin spells free and the outcome wouldn't change that much. That's an exaggeration, but you get the point: paladins are generally GCD limited much more than they are mana limited. I'm not sure anyone is that mana limited in current content (though slightly more so on the hard modes), but whatever it is, paladins feel it the least.

Now we change Beacon so that the overhealing counts. Paladin healing is going to go up, probably by a lot. We can argue how much it's going to go up or how of that will be effective healing. But it will go up a lot, especially considering the glyph of HL will get more use. Considering how much higher paladin regen is than other healers, it has a long way to fall before it would even be at parity.

Remember, we are also nerfing Penance, Prayer of Healing and Lifebloom. The latter won't be felt as much in PvE, but also realize we are talking about 3.2 changes here and the current druid set bonuses (which might be slightly overpowered) won't be around.

Been waiting for this post all day.  Smiled ear to ear when I read the title. :)