Thursday, May 7, 2009

Will Judgement of Light proc BotAK?

That is the question.

The blues have done a really nice job of trying to clear up an area of much contention concerning the Legendary healing mace Val'anyr, Hammer of Ancient King.

I talked yesterday about how I thought Val'Anyr was a weapon that would be most effective in the hands of a Paladin because of the chance to proc off of Judgement of Light. After tossing the idea around multiple blogs and message boards some good points have arisen, but there has been no consensus. Lets take a look at what we know about the proc.

Lets start with the tooltip itself. "Your healing spells have a chance to cause Blessing of Ancient Kings for 15 seconds." Now, Judgement of Light is definitely a healing spell. If you look at your combat log or recount, that much is pretty clear. JoL heals can stack up to a sizeable chunk of overall healing at the end of the day. However, it is not a direct healing spell, and it is not cast on a player. That is an issue. Lets see if Bornakk can clear it up.

Bornakk says "The way this works is that when the proc happens (which is a 10% chance whenever a hot or direct spell heals, with a 45 sec internal cooldown) you gain a buff (the Blessing) on yourself." Since JoL is neither a Heal-over-Time or a direct spell heal, it seems as if JoL would not proc BotAK. Bummer.

Ghostcrawler has been good enough to shed some light on the issue as well. Here is what he has to say

"If it helps to explain it, the blessing is triggered by healing being done. If you cast a heal on a fully-healed target, you are doing no healing. The bubble itself is triggered by a heal spell being cast."

Aha! If the blessing is triggered by healing being done, JoL WILL proc it, but, since it is not a healing spell being cast, it will not lend itself to creating a shield.

While the language is no doubt a bit vague and inconclusive, I have no reason not to be excited that JoL could proc the blessing. Until we see otherwise, I will continue to hold out hope that it will, and believe in my heart that Val'anyr is most effective in the hands of a Paladin.

1 comment:

  1. Hiya GK,

    I've tried to compile and aswer to your posts, with my views on Val'anyr (http://atouchofarcane.blogspot.com/2009/05/is-valanyr-hammer-of-ancient-kings-good.html).

    I am not sure JoL will proc the blessing. And as Holy Paladins should not use JoL in raids when any other paladin (prot or ret) is present, I hope it won't encourage bad play style if it does.

    On another hand, JoL being our only (hot) beside some trinkets (Nax25 Heigan one, iirc) we would not activate the blessing as much as other classes. But I tried to show that, even without JoL, we would have it about 50% of the time, and as you calculated we can output huge heals during that time.

    Paladins being up to now the best healing class for single target and mana conservation, that means a heavy use of the blessing can be considered, what most other healing classes can't think about (they would go oom way too fast).
    This, I think, is the main reason for Val'anyr being designed for paladins in mind.

    ReplyDelete