There is no spell in Bandin's spellbook that he uses more than
Judgement. It gets constant use by all three of the paladin talent trees and is one of the most basic of abilities for the paladin class. Bandin spends most of his time as a healer as it is my favorite role, and the use of Judgement is paramount to successfully healing a dungeon or raid group.
As it stands now, Bandin uses Judgement on cooldown when healing a dungeon group, and it provides the following when used with
Seal of Insight active:
Unleashing this Seal's energy will deal 1988 Holy damage to an enemy and restore 15% of the Paladin's base mana.
This benefit from Seal of Insight basically makes Judgement on cooldown an active mana regeneration for all healing paladins. If you keep hitting that button every 8 seconds you get back 15% of your base mana every single time. For Bandin, that translates into 3513 mana for every application.
To put that into perspective, with the immediate return in mana Bandin receives from Judgement he can then apply
Holy Light to a target for 2810 mana, and have actually come out ahead. He can then immediately toss out
Holy Shock for an additional 1639 mana and only come out having expended only 939 mana total. Talk about efficient.
Keeping Judgement on cooldown has become 100% ingrained in everything I do when healing dungeons with Bandin. I do it without thinking, and I've reached a point where there is never a time that ability isn't on cooldown from the time my group first engages the first pack of trash, to the time the final boss is dead.
But, patch 4.3 is bringing about some changes in mana regeneration for Holy paladins. I think the reasoning behind the following change has a lot to do with how incredibly mana efficient Holy paladins are at this point in the expansion (Bandin is rarely below 90% in normal dungeons, 75% in heroics), and the developers needed to do something.
With the patch, Seal of Insight will be losing the mana return portion it currently has and return to simply dealing X damage with each application. Instead, what will happen is that the first tier talent
Judgements of the Pure will go from providing the following:
Your Judgement increases your casting and melee haste by 9% for 1 min.
to instead providing:
Your Judgement increases your casting and melee haste by 9% and increases mana regeneration from Spirit by 10/20/30% for 1 minute.
Now, I don't have the mathematical accumen to translate those percentages into great numbers across the board and do a ton of comparisons at different levels of gear and so forth, but given that Judgements of the Pure is the first talent any self-respecting Holy paladin fill out to all three available talent points upon unlocking their talent tree, it is safe to assume every Holy paladin in the game will be gaining the 30% Spirit benefit from Judgement.
So, before patch 4.3 if Bandin keeps Judgement on cooldown every 8 seconds for a full minute that means he will get 7 Judgements applied for a total of 24,591 mana returned. If we then subtract the mana cost of 7 Judgements, we have 24,591 – 8,197 = 16,394 net mana returned using the current format.
After patch 4.3 we switch to the new system. Bandin will need to apply Judgement 1 time every minute to keep the Judgements of the Pure buff active, which leaves 6 new global cooldowns for healing abilities each minute (which will be awesome). Currently Bandin sits at 2,856 mp5 (mana generated per 5 seconds) while in combat with his self-buffs of Seal of Insight and
Blessing of Might.
30% of 2,856 is 857, so Bandin really will have a combat regen of 3,713 mp5. That's a pretty significant amount of mp5 for anything Bandin is currently attempting to do. If you break it down further, that means that the new system for Judgement provides Bandin with 10,284 mana gained per minute.
The difference between the current system and the new system is a loss of 6,110 mana regenerated per minute for Bandin specifically. Clearly a nerf to his mana regeneration, but given his gear level and the fact that he doesn't raid, but rather runs 5-man dungeons, it shouldn't be a nerf that really affects his ability to heal groups effectively.
Of more concern for me at the moment is what I'm going to fill 6 more global cooldowns per minute with instead of standing around waiting to heal someone. That many globals is a significant amount of time in a healer's rotation, so that should be fun to experience.
Overall, I think the change is a good one. I'll appreciate not having to use Judgement so often even if getting out of the habit takes a little while. Was the change really necessary? I'd say not really as it doesn't change much, but then I'm not a Blizzard developer, so I don't know all of the more minute details behind such decisions. Generally, I think they were just looking for a way to give Holy paladins a slight mana regen nerf and this was the most straightforward way to accomplish it.
