Greetings, my name is Shaterhand. I've been playing the WOTLK expansion on this server since 2010, going back to the Molten days. After 10 years of playing holy paladin alongside this beautiful community, I've decided to share my experience in hopes that it will help anyone interested.
Table of contents
1. Gameplay
1.1 - Toolkit
1.2 - Playstyle
2. Talents & glyphs
2.1 - Talents
2.2 - Talent builds
2.3 - Glyphs
3. Stats & gems, gear & enchants
3.1 - Stats & Gems
3.2 - Gear & Enchants
3.3 - Consumables
4. Professions
5. Races
6. Addons & Macros
6.1 - Addons
6.2 - Macros
7. FAQ
1. Gameplay
1.1 – Toolkit
Spoiler:Show Holy paladins are simply the strongest healers out there in this expansion. They have a variety of very useful spells and externals, they can heal 2 targets to full hp at the same time because of beacon, their healing output is insane, it is pretty easy to play and is pretty much mandatory for every LoD/RS25hc raid. As an introduction, in this section we will go through the most important spells that a holy paladin has to offer, so you can have an idea of how it works:
Aura Mastery – Doubles the effect of your current active aura for 6 sec. For example, for fire aura, you will have 260 fire resistance for the next 6 sec, instead of 130. This affects the whole raid (assuming everyone is in range of your aura). Very strong CD.
Beacon of Light – This is basically a buff, that can be applied to another friendly target and any healing you do to another party/raid member, is also done to the target with beacon of light on him. In order words, you can heal 2 targets at the same time, for the same amount. This is one of the reasons why a holy paladin is considered the healer responsible for tanks, because it can keep both of them alive at the same time. Best healing spell in the game.
Divine Illumination – Your most powerful healing cd, with two T10 pieces. By default, this only reduces the cost of your spells by 50% for 15 sec, but with the 2-set bonus from T10 (http://wotlk.cavernoftime.com/item=51272), it also makes your healing spells 35% stronger. Unlike http://wotlk.cavernoftime.com/spell=31884, you can use it while you are affected by http://wotlk.cavernoftime.com/spell=63148 or anything else that causes forbearance.
Divine Plea – Refunds 25% of your total mana over 15 sec, but while it is active, your healing is reduced by 50%. This is your main source of gaining mana through the fight. You should use it on cd, especially on the long fights. With experience, you will learn when to use it properly and when to hold it for a bit before you use it. You can also use it with a healing cd, if needed. Works good with http://wotlk.cavernoftime.com/spell=31842.
Holy Light – This is our main healing ability. You should be casting this, 98% of time you spend in a fight. With http://wotlk.cavernoftime.com/item=41106, which is a must have, your holy light also does aoe healing, close to the target you’re healing. Try to pre-heal important abilities with holy light, such as, infest, soul reaper, green ozze explosion on PP, etc. The ideal cast time is between 1.2 – 1.3 sec. Anything lower than 1.2 is even better, but comes at the cost of intel gems.
Flash of Light – This is the low budget version of holy light and it doesn’t do any aoe healing. It costs far less mana tho, 291 compared to HL 1102. You should use FoL only when there are 1-2 targets taking dmg at a time, mostly when only the tank takes dmg and if it’s not high enough, that holy light would be necessary. (usually, around 10k steady damage, can be healed with FoL)
If you cast FoL on a target affected by http://wotlk.cavernoftime.com/spell=53601, because of the http://wotlk.cavernoftime.com/spell=53576 talent, you will apply a hot on the target, that heals for 100% the amount of FoL, over 12 sec.
Holy Shock – Instant cast spell, low heal. You should use this when someone is about to die, if he is like 2-3k health and there is incoming damage that would kill him. Can also be used simply to fill up someone to full hp or if you are moving and you cannot cast. If your holy shock crits, it will make your next FoL an instant cast, this is very useful if you need to move for a long period of time and you cannot cast, or if you need to quickly heal multiple targets to save them.
Holy Wrath – A 3 sec aoe stun for undead and demons. Commonly used at LK to stun the valkyrs.
Lay on Hands – Heals the target to full hp instantly. Used mostly on tanks, when you cannot cast holy light or when you are not going to heal them in time, but any target that would die without lay, is a good target to use it on.
Sacred Shield – A small absorb shield, which scales with the icc buff btw, and also scales with +75.00% of spell power . Should be kept 24/7, on the tank is taking the most dmg, usually the MT. Feel free to switch sacred shield to any target you need to apply the FoL hot on it, for example, on Sindragosa, you should look to apply the HoT, to as many people as possible, as soon as the tombs are assigned.
Seal of Wisdom – Gives your attacks a chance to restore 4% of your total mana and also reduces the cost of your spells by 5% if you use the http://wotlk.cavernoftime.com/item=41109. The chance to restore mana is pretty high, as most of your auto-attack will restore mana, so whenever you’re running low on mana, all you need to do, is to start hitting the boss and you will regain your mana in no time. (while you are casting, your character cannot melee auto-attack, you need to stop casting in order to start your auto-attacks) This is simply the best seal to use, as more mana = more healing.
Divine Protection – Major cd, reduces the dmg you take by 50%.
Divine Sacrifice – The best raid cd in the game. You use this mostly for the second part of it, which reduces the dmg taken by 20% for 6 sec, this affects the whole raid (http://wotlk.cavernoftime.com/spell=53530), and you cancel the party redirect dmg part, so you don’t die. Commonly used for abilities that deal heavy aoe dmg to the whole raid or if it the tank needs an cd to survive.
Divine Shield – A.k.a Bubble, makes you immune to all dmg for 12 sec. Should be used to survive mechanics that otherwise would kill you or if you need to move because of a mechanic and thus, you cannot stand still and heal, you can bubble so you can heal the raid.
Hand of Freedom – Remove any slow effect for 10 sec. Used at Halion, inside, to counter the slow after you get dispelled from http://wotlk.cavernoftime.com/spell=74792.
Hand of Protection – Makes the target immune to all physical attacks for 10 sec. This is mostly used at Professor Putricide, whenever the red ozze is not killed within the first assigned target, it will retarget and if the ozze reaches the new target, it will wipe your raid. So, in order to buy more time, after the ozze has chosen a new target, if you HoP him, the ozze will stop chasing that target and start retargeting again. This is extremely useful for when people are out of position and are too close to the ozze.
Hand of Sacrifice – Redirects 30% of the damage taken by the target, to you. Very useful for fights like LK and Halion, in which the dmg is heavily focused on the tanks. If you use Hand of Protection or Divine Protection while you sacrificed someone, it will complete negate the redirected dmg that you are supposed to get.
Hand of Salvation – Reduces the threat generated by the target by 2% every 1 sec, for 10 sec. Extremely useful for dps that have a lot of threat and that doesn’t stop from dpsing the boss.
Avenging Wrath – Increases your healing spells by 20% for 20 sec. This is your second-best healing cd, after Divine Illumination, because its just 20% and also you cannot use within 30 sec after using any other spell that causes forbearance on yourself.
Judgement of Light – Grants attacks made against the target, a chance to restore 2% of the attacker’s health. Basically, the whole raid will get healed, if you keep this debuff 24/7 on the target. Even though it last for 20 sec and its cd is 10, so in theory, you could only use it every 20 sec, to keep the debuff up, there is always a chance to miss, and thus, you can end up having a period of time without the debuff up, therefor, you should use it on cd. It also counts as melee attack and can restore 4% mana, because of Seal of Wisdom, another reason to use it as often as possible. Even though you should use it as often as possible, use it only during safe windows to do so. For more information on when to use judgement, please refer to the TIP from the "Playstyle" section.
1.2 – Playstyle
Spoiler:Show To play a holy paladin is not really rocket science, if you have been playing this game for a while, chances are that you already heard people saying things like “just beacon the tank and spam holy light”, which is true, to some extent, that’s what you’re going to do for the majority of the time, but if you want to be a good healer, you need to do much more than that. It’s the little things, that stack up and makes the difference between an average healer and a very good healer. In this section will try to explain the “rotation” or “gameplay”, if you may, of a holy paladin, how to heal properly, how to manage your mana, how to handle unfavorable situation, things to improve, etc:
Healing
- The beginning of the fight: first thing you want to do, before the fight even starts, is to Beacon of Light the main tank, or the tank that is going to take the most dmg, and Sacred Shield him. Also, it is ideal to pre-cast Holy Light so your tank gets healed asap, from the first hit that he will get from the boss and also to gain Light's Grace. The Next thing is to use judge on the boss, so you can get your haste buff Judgement of the Pure and by doing so, you will now have the lowest cast time on your holy light and in addition to that, you will apply the healing debuff Judgement, that will heal the whole raid when they attack the target. This is a standard rotation, that you need to do for almost any fight.
- Rest of the fight: Once you’ve done all of the above, keeping spamming Holy Light for the majority of the fight. Use Holy Shock when you need to heal a low amount of damage taken, when you cannot stand still to cast, or when someone is low hp and you need to heal them asap, because otherwise they would die from the next tick of damage. Same principles apply for FoL, if you crit with Holy Shock, you will get an instant FoL cast, very good to heal people up quickly or when you cannot stand still to cast. Even if you can cast without any issues, you can still sometimes spam FoL over holy light, if the damage taken is only on 1-2 persons and it’s a very low amount, so you can save some mana. Keep Beacon of Light & Sacred Shield up the whole time and same for the Judgement on the main target. It is ideal to keep the judgement uptime to 100% and if the fight involves multiple targets, you should always judge whatever target is currently the main focus for dps. Otherwise, holy light, holy light, holy light, holy light…. you get the point.
TIP: Regarding Judging on CD - Obviously, if there is a lot of damage going out, you shouldn't waste the GCD just because your judge came off CD, but first you want to stabilize the tank/raid and then use the judgement when you have a small safe window to do so. To make it easier to understand the whole process, I've attached the logical scheme below:
If you decided to use judge and your tank or someone else died as a result of it, or if you had to use an unplanned cd to avoid that, then it means that you haven't used judgement during a safe window. (it wasn't safe to use it during that time)
Mana management
- Managing your mana as healer is very important. If you run out of mana, most likely it will be a wipe, but the more mana you have, the more healing you can do. Therefore, your goal is to maximize the amount of mana gained/restored through-out the fight, so you can do the maximum amount of healing and if you still run out of mana, you at least did everything you could to avoid that.
- Your primary source of mana gained/restored is Divine Plea, second should be Illumination and Seal of Wisdom third. To maximize your mana gained, obviously you need to use everything that restores mana as soon as you can use it and without over-restoring, meaning that you shouldn’t use something that will restore more than 100% of your mana, as it will be a waste. So, personally, from the start of the fight, as soon as I drop to 90% mana, I use the meteorite trinket combined with arcane torrent, afterwards, I use the first Divine Plea around 80-85% mana (it depends how much you will be casting after you use it, so you don’t over-gain mana) and for the rest of the fight I use divine plea pretty much on cd, unless I will be over-gaining mana. If you have innervates available, and the other healers don’t need it or if you are solo healing, to also maximize the mana gained from innervates, you should ask for the first one around 75% ish mana, but only after you used Divine Plea already. Generally, in standard comps, you shouldn’t be needing innervates, if there is no unnecessary dmg taken and if the other healers are doing their job, as the other sources of mana should be enough, so that the innervates can go to other healers, that don’t really have a lot of ways to gain mana, such as shamans, so try to ask for innervates only when you are in a really bad spot with mana and you can’t stop healing to auto-attack, to regain mana. To make things easier, the usage list of mana resources looks like this:
At the start of the fight: meteorite + arcane torrent > Divine Plea > innervates, and afterwards use all of them on CD, but try no to over-gain mana.
- If you’re still running out of mana, don’t forget to use http://wotlk.cavernoftime.com/item=42545. Personally, I only use them when I drop below 25% mana, as I don’t like to waste them. For the Lich King fight, on HC, you can use multiple mana potions, because when you get out of frostmourne, the cd of your potion resets. (it starts counting down). As a last resort, if you used everything for mana, you can always stop healing and start auto-attack a target, until you make enough mana back from http://wotlk.cavernoftime.com/spell=20168.
Cooldown usage
Healing CD:
Hyperspeed – A small healing cd, that mostly reduces your casting time of holy light by 0.1 sec ish. This should be use pretty frequently, since it has only 1 min cd.
Glowing Twilight Scale – Small aoe cd, should be use when there is aoe dmg taken, to heal multiple people. It’s pretty good to combine it with Hyperspeed, and if needed, with another healing cd.
Divine Illumination – The best healing cd there is. 35% healing increased and 50% reduces cost of spells. This should be used first over wings, in most cases, because of the reduced mana cost part, as it results in more mana overall.
Avenging Wrath – Second best healing cd, should be used whenever D. Illumination is not available. Keep in mind that you cannot use any spell that would cause forbearance within 30 sec of using wings and vice versa.
Externals & Raid CD:
Hand of Sacrifice – Redirects 30% of the damage taken by the target, to you. Very useful for fights like LK and Halion, in which the dmg is heavily focused on the tanks. The soul reaper mechanic is a good example where this cd is very useful.
Divine Sacrifice – 20% dmg reduction for the whole raid. You should cancel the party part (check the macro section). Use it for mechanics that will deal heavy aoe damage. Can also be used as a cd for the tank If needed.
Aura Mastery – Doubles the effect of your current active aura for 6 sec. Same as DSAC, should be mostly used for aoe mechanics. Use it for an aura that offers resistance vs that type of dmg.
Lay on Hands – Heals the target to full hp instantly. Used mostly on tanks, when you cannot cast holy light or when you are not going to heal them in time. But any target that would die without lay, is a good target to use it on.
Things to improve
- Make sure you never drop Beacon of Light & Sacred Shield from the tank.
- Keeping JoL up the whole fight on the main target and judge almost on CD.
- Use your healing CDs, when needed, no to push HPS. You never know when something bad will happen and you’re going to need them.
- Use your defensive & external CDs smartly, don’t waste them by using too many at the same time. With experience, you will know when a cooldown is needed for a certain mechanic and when not.
- Perfecting your mana management. If you are able to heal long fights, that can last even 15 min, such as LK HC (mostly because you have low dps), with 1 innervate or no innervate at all, then you know you have mastered your mana pool. You should not rely on the auto-attack strategy to make your mana back. Why? Because you should be casting almost the whole time, believe me, on fights that are heavy on tank dmg, your tank can die in less than 2 sec from full HP; I’m not exaggerating. While you are casting, you don’t auto-attack, so that’s why you shouldn’t rely on auto-attacks for mana, only if you’re below 10% mana and it’s the only way. No to mention that on some fights, it’s very bad to stay in melee range, because of a mechanic. BQL for example.
- Saving low HP people with your instant cast spells. A good example, is when someone is getting combat ressed and there is a constant aoe dmg taken on the whole raid, you need to heal the ressed person instantly, otherwise they will die.
- A good healer is the one that can keep his friends alive, not someone who plays for HPS meter. Focus on saving people and keeping them alive.
2. Talents & glyphs
2.1 – Talents
Spoiler:Show There are not many options to choose from, meaning that the talents that are not mandatory, should be taken into account, depending on the situation. In the image below, you can see what talents you should prioritize according to the colors, and in order to understand the talent's importance and in what situations they are useful, I will explain each one of them, so that you can make your own decision when considering a certain talent:
Green (Rank 1) – These are the mandatory talents, you should maximize all talents marked with this color, except “Toughness” from protection, put only 4/5 points in it.
Blue (Rank 2) – These are talents that you can spend your remaining points and are completely up to your choice/situation.
Yellow (Rank 3) – You should only consider spending points in these after you decided that you don’t need/want any blue talents, because they are not really that useful. The retribution ones are only for the crit build.
Red (Rank 4) – Garbage, should never considered.
Explanation
Spiritual Focus - good
70% less pushback, pretty good and there is no other choice for the first row.
Seals of the Pure - useless
Obviously a retri talent.
Healing Light - good
12% increased amount for your healing spells, essential talent.
Divine Intellect - good
Increases your total intellect by 10%, a must have talent since it gives % mana, 5 points its recommended, it synergies well with Holy Guidance talent and the more mana you have, the more you will gain from Divine Plea and Arcane Torrent or anything else that gives % mana. More mana = more healing.
Unyielding Faith - useless
Clearly a pvp talent, there is no encounter where this talent would be useful.
Aura Mastery - very good
Makes you immune to silence and interrupts, this part is mostly for pvp, but the most important part is that it doubles the effect of your current active aura (it still works even if you switch your aura during the Aura Mastery effect). Aura Mastery and DSAC are the only defensive CDs in the game that affects the whole raid, this is why this talent its mandatory and its one of the best talents you can choose.
Illumination - very good
Every time any of your healing spells crits, 30% of the mana base cost its refunded. This talent its absolutely mandatory with 5 points in it, so that you have 100% chance. At bis you should have around 50% crit chance with holy spells, so this means that you are getting a lot of mana back.
Improved Lay on Hands - situational
It reduces the cooldown of your lay on hands by 2min per point and grants the target you used it on, a buff that reduces the physical damage taken by 10% per point. This is useful in situations where your tank is under geared and for fights that are heavy on physical damage such as Halion and Lich King, it can be used as a CD for a nasty soul reaper or when you are moving a lot and can’t heal the tank. Overall it’s nice to have, but it’s not something I would rely on, since even with the 4 min reduction, that still leaves you with 11min CD, which is still too much, you won’t have it for every pull if you are wiping a lot and thus it’s an unreliable CD, so you should consider this talent only if your tank is under geared or in extremely difficult healing situations. Use 2 points from improved concentration aura if you want this talent.
Improved Concentration Aura - situational
It increases the efficiency of your concentration aura by 5% per point, so with 3 points in it, that would bring the conc. aura to 65% less casting lost. This is huge, since it affects your whole raid. By default, you should always have 3 points in this talent, only take 1-2 points out, if you want to take the improved lay on hands talent. I personally don’t think it’s worth taking points out of this, for anything else in the talent tree, unless you're making your talents for a specific fight, that doesn’t involve your RPDS and healers in taking too much periodic dmg, that would make them lose a lot of casting time, or if you are solo healing and u have little, to no RPDS at all. (for example if you are going for a solo heal bane with full melee comp., this talent it’s kinda useless, but I think its absolute mandatory for most 25man raid)
Improved Blessing of Wisdom - not worth
It increases the efficiency of your blessing of wisdom by 10/20 %, so would bring you to a total of 110 mana reg. per 5 sec from 92. This talent its simply not worth wasting points in it for the following 2 reasons:
1. If your healers are struggling with mana on a fight, whether you have 92 or 110 mana reg. per 5sec, there are high chances that the 18 additional mana reg. won’t make any difference, since the only ones actually benefiting from the mana reg. are the rshamans and the druids, and 18 is rly not that much.
2. If you rly want that extra mana reg., a shaman can always use the mana reg. totem, which is 109 mana reg. per 5sec. (considering you always have at least 1 shaman for 25man)
Blessed Hands - not worth
Reduces the mana cost by 15/30 % for freedom, sacrifice and salvation (kinda irrelevant), it increases the effectiveness of salvation by 50/100 % and the effectiveness of sacrifice by 5/10 %. You shouldn’t really need the increased effect for salvation, if your hunter & rouges are doing their MD & ToT properly and if your tank is decently geared, the basic salvation should be enough to reduce the threat for any dps for 99% of the situations. And the sacrifice part, that would bring it to 40% of the dmg taken by the tank, transferred to you, which can be a little bit too much if you don’t use a cd on yourself or if you suddenly need to move and can’t heal, also I don’t think it’s needed since there is a cap regarding the amount of the dmg that can be transferred, that cap is equal with your health. So, for example, if you have 30k health, you can’t transfer more dmg than that. With the 40%, the amount transferred will be the same, you will just hit the transfer cap sooner and it can be problematic to heal, because you might get 1 shot.
Pure of Heart - useless
Simply useless, nothing to say about it.
Divine Favor - good
Your next healing spell is a guaranteed crit. Honestly with 2min cd and only your next spell is a crit, this spell it’s pretty useless, I’ve been playing hpally on wotlk for 10 years and I don’t think I’ve used this spell more than 2-3 times. I don’t have it on my bars or keybinded for ages now and I’ve done pretty much every possible healing challenge without it. You can add it in macro if you want, for example you can make a macro with divine illumination and divine favor or with wings.
Sanctified Light - good
Basically, a flat 6% crit chance increase, pretty decent and it synergies well with Illumination talent.
Purifying Power - useless
It offers you reduced mana cost for cleanse, that is a very low mana cost anyway, and for consecration, which you don’t care about it cuz you don’t use it, and 17/33 % CDR for exorcism and holy wrath, which you don’t need.
Holy Power - good
5% crit chance increase for 5 points, pretty good since you want to get above 50% crit chance with holy spells.
Light’s Grace - very good
Gives your holy light a 100% chance to reduce your holy light cast by 0.5 sec for 15 sec. I don’t think I need to say much about this, simply one of the best talents you can take.
Holy Shock - very good
This is your instant healing spell and it has 6 seconds cd. You mostly use it to keep people alive after they almost died and they have like 2-3k health left.
Blessed Life - not worth
All attacks against you have 4/7/10 % chance to cause half damage. On paper this doesn’t sounds too bad, but it’s simply not worth wasting points in it while you have better options.
Sacred Cleansing - useless
Just a pvp talent, not sure if it’s even good in pvp, but in our case, it is completely useless.
Holy Guidance - good
Increases your spell power by 20% of your total intellect. Now, we don’t normally care about spell power, unless we are talking about large amounts and since we have quite a lot of intellect, this talent its actually pretty good.
Divine Illumination - very good
Reduces the mana cost of all spells by 50% for 15 sec + makes your healing spells stronger by 35% with 2 pieces from T10. This is literally the best healing CD you have, not only it increases your healing but also reduces your mana cost. You should look to use this first over wings and try to use it as often as possible to maximize the mana you have through the fight, but obviously, you should prioritize keeping it, if the chances are high that in the next few seconds, there will be a spike of damage and you're going to need a cd for it.
Judgements of the Pure - very good
It increases your haste by up to 15% for 1 min whenever you hit a target with judgement. This talent is super good, since it decreases even further your casting time for holy light.
Infusion of Light - very good
When your holy shock crits, it makes your next flash of light an instant cast or increases the crit chance of your next holy light by 20%. Also, if your healing someone who has sacred shield on them with flash of light, it will leave a hot on them for 12 sec. The hot part its very useful in a lot of situations, for example you can keep yourself alive on Valithria just by applying the hot on yourself or on Sindragosa, you can apply the hot on the people who will be frozen, so they don't die in tombs.
Enlightened Judgements - very good
It increases the range from which you can use judge by 30 yards, bringing it to 40 yards and also gives you a 4% hit chance increase for judge. This is a huge deal, since you cannot always stay close to your target to judge it, having those extra yards is very handy, so you don’t have to worry about the range. Also, the 4% hit chance is kinda nice, it helps you miss less often.
Beacon of Light - very good
This talent, is the reason I started playing as a holy paladin, years ago. In my opinion, this is the best healing spell in the game. It gives you the ability to heal 2 people, at the same time, for the same amount.
Divinity - very good
So basically, what this talent does, is that it increases all the healing that you do by 5% and all the healing that is done on you, by an additional 5%. If your tank is the only one who is tanking damage, you should beacon him and heal yourself, because by default, all the healing, regardless of their target, is increased by 5%, but if it’s done on you, you get an additional 5%. So you heal the tank more if you heal yourself, instead of any other target.
Divine Strength - useless
15% strength -> Obviously this talent was not made for holy.
Stoicism - decent
Reduces the duration of all stuns by 30%. Not amazing, not something very useful, there are some mobs here and there that might stun you occasionally and this talent comes useful, but this is mostly kinda useless for bosses. The only reason your picking this, is because the other choice is to increase your dodge by 3%.
Guardian’s Favor - good
Reduces the cooldown of your hand of protection by 2 min and increases the duration of your freedom by 4 sec. Not bad, it makes your HoP a 3min cd, which is pretty decent, and also makes your freedom to last 10 sec, which is pretty handy for Halion if you're healing inside.
Anticipation - useless
Increases your dodge chance by up to 5%, clearly a tank talent, sadly useless for us.
Divine Sacrifice - very good
30% of all the damage taken by party members is redirected to the paladin, lasts 10 sec. Its good in some situations, for example it helps you to keep the tank alive if he is taking too much dmg in a short amount of time (you have to be in the same party). You generally take this talent to enable the next talent and if your tank is pretty geared, you shouldn’t need this party part of dsac. Many paladins actually use a macro that cancels this part when they use dsac, cuz what you want is the 20% dmg reduction for the entire raid.
Improved Righteous Fury - bad
While your righteous fury is active, all the damage that you take is reduced by up to 6%. While this looks good on paper, it’s actually very bad, because if you have RF up, you will generate a lot of aggro, which isn't helpful at all for fights where adds spawn. You're almost guaranteed to aggro them with RF up, so if your tank is not fast enough to react or if he didn’t get proper md/tot, you might die because you have to many adds on you. Personally, I take aggro sometimes even without RF, so with RF up and if you are doing job correctly, you will be in a lot of troubles, for way too little. 6% dmg reduction is not that much, if you take into consideration all the damage you take through-out the fight, the spikes of huge damage are very rare, so it is not worth the trade. Not to mention, that if you aggro some adds, you might end up taking more damage than you otherwise would, if you didn't had RF up.
For some specific fights, it can be considered okay, if that fight doesn’t involve any adds, but since most people want an all-around build, I suggest sticking with Toughness, especially if you are a beginner, cuz you rly need to know what you’re doing if you want play with RF.
Toughness - decent
Increases your armor value by up to 10% and reduces the duration of all slowing effects by up to 30%. It’s not that useful, but considering the other option, Improved RF, I think Toughness is the better option. Spend only 4 points in this talent, as you want to have 5 more points for dsac and improved devo aura.
Divine Guardian - very good
While this is active, all the damage taken is reduced by 20% for the whole raid, lasts 6 sec. This and Aura Mastery are the only raid CDs in the game. Divine Guardian is the best, because it reduces the damage taken for all sources, not just one.
Improved Hammer of Justice - situational
Decreases your HoJ cd by up to 20 sec. The only time you should need this talent, is if your guild is assigning a paladin for each valkyr to stun it, on Lich King. That is only time when you would need this talent, because otherwise your stun won’t be available for each wave of valkyrs. Most guilds, nowadays, don’t use this strategy as it is usually necessary for low geared raids, but instead they use holy wrath to stun the valkyrs. For this, take 2 points out from Improved Devotion Aura.
Improved Devotion Aura - very good
Gives an additional 50% armor bonus for your devotion aura (we don’t rly care about this part) and increases the healing done on any target affected by your aura, with 6%. This is a flat 6% increase of your healing as long as the target you're healing, is affected by your active aura. Unless you're using Improved HoJ talent, having 3 points in this is mandatory.
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The following talents are specific for the crit build, which is good only for Valithria, in case you want 2x holy specs:
- Maximize: Benediction, Improved Judgements, Heart of the Crusader, Conviction
These are the talents for the crit build and they should not be used for a standard, all-around, build, as your missing out on a lot of important stuff.
2.2 – Talent builds
Spoiler:Show 1 – Standard, all-around, build (recommended)
This build is what I consider as the perfect build, since it covers almost all the situations. This is what I use in an end-game guild for farming LoD and RS 25hc, without worrying if I should swap any talent for a specific fight.
TIP: If you are a beginner and you find yourself using Lay way too often, you might want to consider taking 2 points from Imp Conc and use them on Imp lay. Once you mastered the class and you are playing on the high-end, you should no longer find yourself in need to use lay of hands that often anymore, thus, you can consider using these points in something else.
2 – The HoJ buildSpoiler:Show 
If your guild uses the tactic that each Valkyr should be individually stunned by a paladin, with HoJ, then you’re probably going to need this build.
3 – Crit buildSpoiler:Show 
This build is no longer used, at least in end-game guilds. The main reason is that you if you go for this build, you won’t have dsac, which is a great cd to have, and the only thing you get in return is 5% crit. Currently, the only fight that this build is good for, is Valithria. So, unless you’re playing your character with double holy spec, the crit build and the standard build, you should never consider the crit build. But if you go for this build, for whatever reason, replace Glyph of Seal of Wisdom with Glyph of Seal of Light, and use Seal of Light instead of wisdom, for 5% more healing, since you don’t need SoW on Valithria.
Spoiler:Show 
2.3 – Glyphs
Spoiler:Show MajorsGlyph of Beacon of light – Gives you 30 sec more on beacon, from 1 min to 1min 30sec.
Glyph of Holy Light – This is your AOE healing, the best glyph for a hpally.
Glyph of Seal of Wisdom – Reduces the mana cost of your healing spells by 5%.
MinorsGlyph of Lay on Hands – Reduces the cooldown of your Lay on Hands by 5 min.
Glyph of Blessing of Might – Increases the duration of your BoM by 20 min (not GBOM)
Glyph of Blessing of Wisdom – Increases the duration of your BoW by 20 min (not GBOW)
Unfortunately, there are aren’t many useful minor glyphs. The only useful glyph is the lay on hands one, that one is mandatory on all specs.
3. Stats & gems, gear & enchants
3.1 – Stats & Gems
Spoiler:Show StatsIntellect
This is the best stat out of all. It gives you more mana, which means more healing through-out the fight. This is very valuable, especially for longs fights or when people underperform and you need to do more healing than usual to keep them alive. Also, because of the talent Holy Guidance, your spell power is increased by 20% of your total intellect, which is a big number, if you have a lot of intellect.
Haste Rating
This is the second most valuable stat. It reduces the cast time of your spells, in other words, you cast faster. Particularly, what you care about is reducing the cast time of your holy light, so you can cast more often, which means more healing overall and also decreases the chances of your tank to die. Having a decent amount of haste, comes in very handy for fights like LK or Halion, 25HC. There isn’t really a haste cap, you can gem as much haste as you want, but at the cost of intellect.
Crit Chance
Every healing spell that crits, does 50% more healing and also refunds 30% of its mana cost, because of the Illumination talent. You should aim to have your holy crit chance close to 50% or above, as you want most of your holy lights to crit, in order to keep the tank alive and also to get your mana back.
Spell Power
It increases the base amount of heal of your spells. In theory, this looks and sounds good, but in order to be worth taking it over other stats, it needs to be in huge quantities, which almost never happens. The based SP that you get from items, is enough, you should never gem or enchant, spell power.
The scaling with SP is different for every spell, by default, for FoL is +100% and for holy light is +166%, without any talent or anything else. This means, that 100 spell power will increase your holy light healing, by 166. In addition, most your holy lights will be an overheal anyway, so it’s really not worth to increase it any further, as long it comes at the expense of other stats. But if you are fine playing with lower haste/intellect, you can go for more SP. (not recommended)
Mana regen
Commonly known as MP5. This is the worst stat when compared to others. Its kinda the same story as spell power, unless you can get a huge amount of it, without sacrificing other good stats, is not worth. You have plenty of other ways to regain your mana, you should not rely on MP5 to regain your mana. Do not socket any MP5 gems/enchants, also you shouldn’t have any items that have mana regen, besides the ICC rep ring.
The priority of stats looks like this:
Intellect > Haste > Crit > Spell Power
Spoiler:Show ExplanationThis priority applies for general use, but it is not really set in stone. In fact, I would say that the stat priority depends on your performance or playstyle. For example, if you struggle with mana, you might want to consider swapping a few haste gems for Intellect gems. But if you don’t struggle with mana, maybe you want to consider adding one or two haste gems instead of Intellect. The thing is, you can never really reach a point where you have enough Intel or haste and adding more would be pointless, as no healer would say no to having more mana and even with bis gear and full haste gems, your holy light still wouldn’t be a 1 second cast or lower. Crit is also very important, firstly, every time you crit, 30% of the mana cost of that spell is refunded because of Illumination talent, secondly, you want to be close or above 50% crit with holy spells, because you want most of your holy lights to be crits, the reason being is that in some situations, your tank will take a lot of damage in a short amount of time (LK and Halion), and you want to be able to fill up your tank before the next big hit, otherwise your tank might die. You could find yourself pretty often in situations where your holy light didn’t crit 2-3 times in a row and your tank died because of that, so having a decent amount of crit, would make those situations very unlikely to happen. Sometimes you could even consider crit above haste, if you know what you’re doing.
For example, if you have a lot of experience as a healer and as a hpally and you’re in the process of gearing up, this is the time when you might want to consider going for some crit first, because as an experienced healer, you should know all the mechanics and fights; when you’re going to take damage, what type of damage, how much damage; in such a manner, that you should pre-heal every time, especially the important mechanics that can wipe your raid very quickly, such as infest on LK. So, if you’re pre-healing most of the important mechanics, haste isn’t that important as timing your holy light with the mechanic, so in that situation, is more important that your holy light crits, than casting faster.
So when it comes to gearing up, look for items that have Intellect & stamina as main stats, and haste, crit, spell power for secondary stats, because this is the bis combination. (haste > crit > SP generally, but up to your playstyle, because as long as you keep your raid alive, it doesn’t really matter how you do it)
My Stats Chart:
The values for the holy light cast are calculated with Grace and Pure buffs, since you should always have them up.
Stat Personal Minimum
RecommendedMana 37000 35000 Intellect 2182 2000 Haste 1300 1200 Crit (Holy) 45.28% 45% Spell Power
(Bonus Healing)3182 3100 Hit Rating 0 0 Holy Light Cast
(Grace & Pure)1.25 sec Between
1.2 - 1.3 sec
Gems
Insightful Earthsiege Diamond – As meta, for even more mana.
Nightmare Tear – We need this in order to activate the meta, since we use full yellow gems. Put it on the head slot, for max bonus SP.
Brilliant King’s Amber & Quick King’s Amber – For the rest of the sockets.
Besides the Nightmare Tear and the meta, you can gem full Brilliant King’s Amber or Quick King’s Amber, for the rest of the sockets, although a combination of both would be better. My recommendation, is to try to find a balance between haste and intellect. Like I mentioned earlier, if you struggle with mana, go for more intel gems, if you don’t struggle with mana, go for haste gems (even in very non-optimal raid setups, like no druids for innervate or retri for replenishment or very long fights). Also, I recommend that at bis, you should have at least 1200 haste, unbuffed.
3.2 – Gear & Enchants
Spoiler:Show Bis list:
Slot Item Enchant
Notes:
1. If you are playing with an off-spec, like retri for example, and you want to use the ring rep. Ashen Band for it, replace Wisdom with Cerise Coiled Ring.
2. http://wotlk.cavernoftime.com/item=38918 or http://wotlk.cavernoftime.com/item=44467 I was asked this question a lot of times and that’s why I decided to add it to the guide. So to put it short, the intellect enchant is simply the best option in almost all cases. Like I mentioned earlier, spell power isn’t that useful for a holy paladin, unless we are talking about big numbers and 63 SP is really not much. The intellect enchant gives you more mana, which means more healing, and not to mention that you actually get some SP too, because of the Holy Guidance talent. The SP enchant can be slightly justified if you have Val’anyr, because it will increase your shields, but even then, I still don’t think its worth.
But at the end of the day, play with whatever enchant you want, I’ve seen some players getting way too triggered over this debate. Having the SP or the intel enchant, it won’t have any significant impact, it won’t make you a better healer having one over the other, it’s just a 0.something difference between them.
3. Why are the Corrupted legs better than Plague Many people believe that the hit rating from the Plaguebringer's Pants is mandatory or let's say useful, that it helps your Judge to miss less often. Not true. Even with that 104 hit rating that you get, your judgement is still gonna miss almost as often as without it. While I was in the process of gearing my 3rd hpally, at some point I had 3 items with hit rating on me, because beggars can't be choosers, and I was still missing with judgement, almost just as much as without all that hit rating. So in other words, it's simply not worth losing 93 crit for 104 hit rating. But also, some may argue that the Plaguebringer's Pants give more intel, sp and haste than Corrupted Legs. Which is true, but you need to ask yourself, how much more and is that crit difference worth it? The Plaguebringers give +17 haste, +16 intel & +23 SP, while the Corrupted Legs give +93 crit. Basically, without taking the +23 SP into consideration, because SP is not worth that much, the Plaguebringers offer nearly 2 sockets worth of stats, while the Corrupted Legs offer almost 4.5 sockets worth of stats. So there you go, Corrupted legs are way better in my opinion. Probably another reason why most people say that Plague are better, is because many players underestimate the need of crit on a holy paladin. In addition, Rippling and Puresteel are just as good as Corrupted Legs. The only reason why I mentioned the Corrupted legs as bis, is because it's easier to obtain them and they don't cost anything.
4. Is Val’anyr really worth over Bloodsurge To answer that question, you must first understand the value of each item. So, both of them have the bis stats for a hpally, the difference is that Bloodsurge has higher stats than Val’anyr and a socket (DIFF: 24-intel, 5-crit, 22-haste, 272-SP, 1-socket). So then the question is, is the proc of Val’anyr worth sacrificing these stats? It depends, but for the the majority of the cases, having Val’anyr instead of Bloodsurge, is not going to make any significant difference, in actually saving peoples lives.
“But wait, Shater, what makes you say that? Don’t you see that my HPS is better after I’ve switched to Val’anyr?”. HPS is a big miss conception that people have when it comes to evaluating someone as a healer. What is your job as a healer? Keeping people alive, that’s your f*cking job. It doesn’t matter how you do it and it doesn’t matter with how much HPS you do it. It’s not something you can really quantify.
So yes, although Val’anyr will give you better numbers on the meters, the proc’s actual usefulness is not that good as people think. Its usefulness depends on the case, for example, let’s take a 25-man standard comp, with 4 healers. Not only in a usual comp, you will find a disci priest in 99.9% of the cases, but you also have 2 others healers with you. Now the proc itself, gives the target that you healed with holy light, roughly a 3-4k absorb shield and a very small amount to the targets healed from glyph of holy light, around 300-400 absorb (the numbers depends on the raid buffs, icc buff, cd usage, etc.). These numbers are not really that high, in fact, the absorbs coming from the glyph, are pretty irrelevant, since in a 4-healer setup, someone else would have healed that small amount anyway. The target’s absorb, is not that high either, I mean, there are a couple of cases when that 3-4k absorb could save a tank’s life, but these are 1 to 1000 probability. So my point is, that in a normal setup, the amount of damage that the proc prevents via absorb, is not that much in a short amount of time like the shield from a disci priest in order to be really worth it, because all that damage would have been probably healed anyway by you or the other healers in that short amount of time.
But in other cases, having Val’anyr, could help you quite a bit. If you’re going with an unusual comp, with let’s say, 2 healers at most, that proc comes in pretty handy, because that small amount of damage prevented by the proc, that I was talking about earlier, well since there is only two of you now, it won’t get healed that fast and easy, because there are fewer healers to cover up that damage.
So, the logic is as follows: The more targets you need to heal, and the fewer healers you have, the value of having Val’anyr increases.
In conclusion, the choice depends of what type of content you want to do and how you actually want to obtain Val’anyr. Because if you are going to play only in standard comps and you are not going to push some healing challenge agenda, maybe grinding out Val’anyr is not really that worth for you. Especially if you want to buy it with your IRL money, then I would strongly advise you to think twice and to consider everything I said above, cuz from my point of view, price per what you actually get, is really not worth, unless you are rich and you don’t care about money xD.
If you don’t have Val’anyr, you don’t need to be worried that you won’t be able to do some crazy challenges or you won’t be able to compete with other healers. If you master your class, you can out-perform the majority of players that you will encounter. To further proof that Val’anyr is not that big of a deal after all and you shouldn’t be worried if you don’t have it, if you check my YouTube channel, you will find that all the challenges that I’ve done, I’ve achieved them without Val’anyr.
I’m not here to tell if you should buy or not Val’anyr, or grinding it, I’m here to explain to you what is the difference between having it or not. At the end of the day, you make your own choice, we all have our own reason(s) to why we play the game, so if you want to whore the HPS meters, go for it.
For a LK 25HC fight, Val’anyr should give you between 700k-1M absorbs.
3.3 – Consumables
Spoiler:Show Flask
The best choice is to use double elixirs: Elixir of Lightning & Elixir of Mighty, the second-best choice is to use Flask of Distilled Wisdom. Using 2x elixir is the best, because it gives you a total of +90 to two beneficial stats compared to Distilled Wisdom, which gives you only +65 intel. Flask of the Frost Wyrm is not that useful, its only good for Valithria if you want to go full power, otherwise I would personally never use it, even if don’t have a flask/elixir at all.
Food
Imperial Manta Steak or Very Burnt Worg – they both give +40 haste and +40 stam, the only difference is that manta steak also regens mana while you eat it. That part is pretty irrelevant so, just get the one that is cheaper to obtain.
Potion
Runic Mana Injector, or if you don’t have engineering, use Runic Mana Potion. Make sure you are always prepared, you should have 1 stack, at least, whenever you’re going to raid, because you never know when you’re going to need them. Personally, I very rarely end up using them in a standard comp, LoD/RS 25HC end-game guild clear. Generally, I only end up using them on long fights.
If you don’t need extra mana, you can use Potion of Speed as a small healing cd. You can also use it as pre-pot if you really need it. Another alternative is Swiftness Potion, if you need to move out fast due to a certain mechanic, but you shouldn’t really need this, especially if you have Nitro Boots.
4. Professions
Spoiler:Show
Rank Profession Benefits Reason
the nitro boots provide, outmatches any other profession.
+20 in that stat and also, they last 2 hours instead of one.
The other professions, that where not mentioned, they simply give you additional spell power, which is not a priority for a hpally.
5. Races
Spoiler:Show Ranking:
1. Blood elves – Arcane Torrent, restores 6% of your mana every 2 min.
2. Draenei – Gift, gives 1% hit chance to the whole raid. Gift of the Naaru is pretty useless.
3. Human – EMFH, the ability to remove CC and some spirit.
4. Dwarfs – Stoneform, completely useless for holy, but good for off-spec tank.
Blood elves are simply the best, their racial their racial gives you 6% of your mana back every 2 min.
Unfortunately, the alliance races are pretty much useless, the human racial can be useful for some fights, for example on BQL you can remove the fear, although, it should not be needed at all, since the priests should fear ward themselves and mass dispel every time.
In other words, if you are playing alliance, just the pick the race that you like the most, all of their racials are not that impactful for a holy paladin.
6.Addons & Macros
6.1 – Addons
Spoiler:Show
- DBM – Obviously you need a boss-mechanic addon. I recommend DBM since BigWigs isn’t really that good for WOTLK.
- Healbot/Grid2/VuhDo/Elvui – Having a raid frames addon is mandatory if you care about your performance. The default raid frames from blizzard are simply not good enough, not only they are not esthetically pleasant, but they don’t provide you with enough information. If you get any of the addons mentioned above, you can customize them as you want, so you can see the information that you need and in the manner that you want. Also, healing mostly from your mouse, instead of mouseover macros or even worse, clicking the target and then healing, will boost your reflexes tremendously and your performance. VuhDo & Elvui are really good, they are the most advanced raid frames, but it’s really time consuming to properly set them up and they can be a bit tricky too. I personally use Healbot, its really easy to set it up and customize it.
- Weakauras – This is the best addon ever created. There are almost no limits to what you can do with it, if you know lua codding. Is very useful for tracking buffs & debuffs and many other things. You can always find the latest backported version of the addon here: download link. Also I’ve created a guide for this addon, Video Guide
- Details – Simply the best meter addon out there. I blessed the day I’ve found that it was backported to WOTLK. The name speaks for itself, it gives the most detailed information out there possible, although, it consumes a lot of resources. If you are playing on an older PC, you might want to stay on Skada. Download Link
- Quartz – It gives you the ability to customize your casting bars and also, it shows latency. This addon is recommended for healers and casters in general.
- OmniCC – It displays the cd numbers over weakauras and action bar spells.
- Elvui – This addon is an entire UI. You can customize almost everything and adds entire new skins to your interface. It’s the most used addon, that changes your UI completely. The latest back-ported version can be found here: Download Link. This is not mandatory by any means.
6.2 – MacrosSpoiler:Show
DSAC macro – This cancels Divine Sacrifice buff (the ones that redirects dmg. from your party members to you) and leaves only Divine Guardian, which reduces 20% dmg for all raid members:
#showtooltip Divine Sacrifice
/cast Divine Sacrifice
/in 0.2 /script CancelUnitBuff("player","Divine Sacrifice")
All Healing CDs – This will pop all your healing cds + GTS + eng. Hands. Good for Valithria:
#showtooltip Avenging Wrath
/cast Avenging Wrath
/cast Divine Illumination
/use 10
/use Glowing Twilight Scale
HoP mouseover – A macro to cast HoP on your mouseover target. You can use it for other spells as well:
#showtooltip Hand of Protection
/use [@mouseover,help,nodead][help,nodead][@player] Hand of Protection
Divine Plea – Pressed once, it will cast Divine Plea, If you press it a second time, it will cancel the buff:
#showtooltip Divine Plea
/cancelaura Divine Plea
/use Divine Plea
Camera – This macro will enable you to zoom out as much as possible:
/console cameraDistanceMax 50
Recount bug – If your meter bugs out and doesn’t register anything, use this macro to fix it:
/run local f = CreateFrame("frame",nil, UIParent); f:SetScript("OnUpdate", CombatLogClearEntries);
7. FAQ
Spoiler:Show Q: If I top the HPS meters, it means that I am a good healer, right?
The answer to that question is pretty complex, but to keep it short, NO, it doesn't necessarily mean you are a good healer. Your job as a healer is to keep people alive, it doesn’t matter how you do it or with how much HPS you do it. For example, let’s say that in a raid you are below another healer on the meter, but you can solo heal a specific challenge, while he can’t. In my opinion, you are a better healer than him. (considering fair conditions for both and if their play diff. classes, also it needs to be doable by both) A healer that keeps the raid alive and prevents a wipe, when an average healer couldn't, is a good healer.
Q: Why you shouldn’t rely entirely on auto-attacks to manage your mana?
While you are casting, you don’t auto-attack and you should be casting almost the entire fight, because your tank can literally die in less than 2 sec if he doesn’t receive any healing, especially in fights like Halion and LK. Also, in some fights like BQL, standing in melee range is not a good idea.
Q: Is the AoE healing of a hpally even relevant?
Yes, it is. By default, just with the glyph, is not a crazy amount in short-term, but long-term and especially on fights where the predominant type of damage is aoe, it will do a crazy amount until the end of the fight. Not to mention that even in short-terms, if you use a healing cd, your aoe becomes very potent. For example, if you use Divine Illumination, you should be able to solo heal an infest on 25man.
Notes
!! The purpose of this guide is to help the community. These where my ideas and opinions on how to play a holy paladin. Should you have any questions or feedback, you can leave them on the comments below and I will do my best to answer them.
If you happened to find this guide useful, feel free to check out my other guides as well. Or if you want to be always up to date with my latest findings, visit me on my other social platforms:
Weakauras Guide – A guide for the best addon in the game.
Armory Link – My main's armory.
YouTube – Healing challenges and video kills.
Twitch – Sometimes I stream too.
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Member
[Guide] PvE Holy Paladin 3.3.5
Greetings, my name is Shaterhand. I've been playing the WOTLK expansion on this server since 2010, going back to the Molten days. After 10 years of playing holy paladin alongside this beautiful community, I've decided to share my experience in hopes that it will help anyone interested.
Table of contents
1. Gameplay
1.1 - Toolkit
1.2 - Playstyle
2. Talents & glyphs
2.1 - Talents
2.2 - Talent builds
2.3 - Glyphs
3. Stats & gems, gear & enchants
3.1 - Stats & Gems
3.2 - Gear & Enchants
3.3 - Consumables
4. Professions
5. Races
6. Addons & Macros
6.1 - Addons
6.2 - Macros
7. FAQ
1. Gameplay
1.1 – Toolkit
Spoiler:Show
1.2 – Playstyle
Spoiler:Show
2. Talents & glyphs
2.1 – Talents
Spoiler:Show
2.2 – Talent builds
Spoiler:Show 2.3 – Glyphs
Spoiler:Show
3. Stats & gems, gear & enchants
3.1 – Stats & Gems
Spoiler:Show
3.2 – Gear & Enchants
Spoiler:Show
3.3 – Consumables
Spoiler:Show
4. Professions
Spoiler:Show
5. Races
Spoiler:Show
6.Addons & Macros
6.1 – Addons
Spoiler:Show
6.2 – MacrosSpoiler:Show
7. FAQ
Spoiler:Show
Notes
!! The purpose of this guide is to help the community. These where my ideas and opinions on how to play a holy paladin. Should you have any questions or feedback, you can leave them on the comments below and I will do my best to answer them.
If you happened to find this guide useful, feel free to check out my other guides as well. Or if you want to be always up to date with my latest findings, visit me on my other social platforms:
Weakauras Guide – A guide for the best addon in the game.
Armory Link – My main's armory.
YouTube – Healing challenges and video kills.
Twitch – Sometimes I stream too.
Edited: June 7, 2023
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Member
If that is indeed the case I have feedback for you, which you may or may not like, but I won't be quoting as the guide has so many tags that it would require too much to to go and look up whatever I'm looking for. Feedback is given in top -> bottom order and has mainly to do with factual mistakes or significant misconceptions.
Spoiler:Show
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Field Medic Moderator
Surely it's worth using once per minute though?
Just commenting for the benefit of noobs who may choose to read the guide, since it's not addressed in the comments here.
Dear lord. I never thought I'd see someone on here who thinks the same way.
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Member
To answer Beanlord:
I will begin with what I think you are right about:
Sacred shield - I actually completely forgot this stuff scales with SP since it was bugged at some point and truth being said, I dont rly read change logs. U are right about this one and I also I forgot indeed to mention that Divine Shield/HoP removes the redirected dmg from sacrifice. I will fix those in the upcoming days, when I have time, thank you for pointing these out.
The rest, well you don't really see the bigger picture on the rest of the points.
JoL on cd & Hit Rating - these actually go hand in hand, because you don't go for the hit legs, you have 1 MORE reason to use judge on cd, because you want to make sure u don't drop the buff and also every time you judge, it counts as an autto-attack and thus, will have that chance to give you 4% mana, cuz of wisdom. Sure it takes a GCD, that's why you also need to pay attention when u judge, because you can't rly judge if your taking is currently taking massive damage, you wait until the tank is stabilized and when u have a free window with no risk, you can judge. Personally, I know exactly when can judge and when I can't, this is something you will learn with experience. Also the thing that you mentioned that the retri/prot should keep it up, well, this is kinda situational, yeah sure prot can easily keep it up, but what if you don't have a prot tank, as you might want to go for a solo tank with DK or w/e your raid is set to do and if you have only 1 more paladin, which should be a retri, yeah he should be spamming wisdom for the most part of his rotation, but he can keep it up, if he is good. But if you are the only paladin in the whole raid, uhm, yeah, u are the one responsible for JoL. For my experience, I don't rly want to rely on others to do something that I can do it, because if they don't do a great, eventual I will have to step up anyway and do it myself. Relying on others when you can do that thing yourself just as good, is not something I would advise.
Also, I didn't say that the amount of hit that you get from the plague pants is 100% useless, I was just stating that is not THAT much of a difference and what you should in fact is to play around by using JoL on cd, its not the end of the world anyway if JoL drops 10 sec from the boss as you can even ask others to judge if you missed 2 times in a row, which is very rare.
The RF point - You are right that overhealing causes 0 agrro, I never said that it does nor was I talking or referring about it, I was purely talking about the effective healing that you do. Like I said, if you do your job correctly and you actually pre-healing most of the important mechanics and u spam like a maniac, which is that your supposed to do, you will notice that you might end up with adds on you, in some scenarios (NOT ALWAYS), these scenarios depend on the skill level of the tank, MD/TOT, if the DPS-ers actually do decent DPS...bla bla bla, there are many factors about this. Purely from my experience, there where a lot of times when I ended up having aggro on all shorts of adds, and that's without RF. We can go many hours debating this, yeah in some situations it can be good, you can make it work, I mentioned this in the guide, but overall, if you want a build that you don't want bother changing talents all the time, having improved RF is not worth in my opinion. I've seen many paladin dyeing because they where using this. You really need to know what your doing if you want to use this, so I would not advise it to any beginner, period.
The Val'anyr point- I think you need to read everything I said about this again. I will try to explain here again and shortly, because I think I've explained it pretty well in the guide. Firstly, I didn't say its a complete waste, what I said was that it's actual usefulness depends on many factors, which I explained in the guide, go read that again if you need. To put it short, the more healers you have, the actual usefulness of the Val'anyr goes down, because in standard comp with 4 heal for a ICC 25hc LoD clear, having Val'anyr is just padding the meters, nothing else. But if you are going for healing challenge, with less healers, then yeah, It becomes more and more valuable, because there is no one to fill up those tiny amounts of absorbs that the Val'anyr does on a short amount of time, but stacks up in big numbers at the end of the fight. So when I said and advise that you shouldn't really care to much if you don't have Val'anyr, is because I was referring to the average players that they care mostly for a LoD farm environment, and also because most of them they actually spend their IRL money for it, which is something really stupid, but hey, who am I to judge what you do with your money. Again, I'm just trying to say, that for a player that only cares about farming LoD, not having Val'anyr is not game breaking problem and to proof these myself, check all the healing challenges that I've done, which you can find them on my YouTube channel, you will see that I didn't had Val'anyr for either of those and still did them. So if you can do stuff that is harder than a standard LoD clear comp, with no Val'anyr, why would you waste your IRL money for it, when probably 99% of the content that you will do is farming LoD. This was the main point.
Trust me, having Val'anyr, it won't make you better healer, especially in standard comps, and for 10 mans is kinda meh, I would personally still use bloodsurge over Val'anyr in 10man, even when I solo heal.Edited: October 9, 2020
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Dargenslayer
Sacred Shield scales with both SP and Strength, which is why they're not as far apart as you would expect with Holy Paladins vs Prot Paladins. However, Holy Paladin Sacred Shields should come out on top (with equal gear), and thus its more optimal for the Holy Paladin to keep SS on the tank, no matter what class.
I really don't like this mentality.
First off, Its clearly better for any other Paladin (including a Ret that does not talent Divinity (the talent that would affect JoL healing) to keep JoL up, as the danger of missing a required heal is too great. The priority in my mind should be Prot Pal (with divinity talented) > any other paladin > Holy Paladin, and as you said, Holy Paladin's don't have the hit required to not miss their Judgement. If you choose to do it however, realize that you only need 134 hit rating to never miss a Judgment with your talents, 104 of which is provided by PSP, and an additional 44 can be provided by Valanar's Signet Ring should you choose this path (coincidentally, this ring has the most haste of any, a desired stat to have). On the flipside, potentially missing a heal that would save the tank in order to Judgement is actually insane to think about. Also keep in mind that a Judgement triggers a GCD equal to your attack speed, which is greater than the GCD triggered from a spell cast, so you have longer to wait before casting a heal as a Holy paladin when you cast a Judgement.
Second off, the point of a BiS setup or a guide of this nature in order to "min-max" playing Holy Paladin is to play to the limits of the classes. if you're doing so, why do you not trust the raid you are in. Also, if you're truly interested in playing your class to the maximum potential, you would never join or make a raid where you are the only paladin. Therefore, this argument in the context of your guide is completely moot.
When your Valanyr proc is active, the measure of the raid bubbles is purely a matter of what throughput the healing class can put out, not effective throughput. A Holy Paladin is the most flexible and by far the most potent at pure throughput heals, not effective heals, and this is where Valanyr shines. You can throw heals on the entire raid in order to build up a decent sized bubble on everyone for incoming raid damage. If the raid is not going to be taking damage in the near future, you can easily just build up a big shield on the tank(s) so that they can mitigate future damage for the next 20+ seconds. Remember that your Valanyr shields are cumulative. If you heal a target for 1000 (150 hp shield), and then heal them again for 1000, the shield duration is refreshed and will absorb 300hp. The Cap on this valanyr bubble is 20k, a very high cap to reach without a target taking any damage (you must heal the target for 133334). Using this knowledge, its extremely easy to build up a raid-wide bubble by the end of your val'anyr cast in order to protect against incoming raid damage, or to build up a large bubble on your tank(s) to protect against incoming tank damage. If neither the raid nor the tank is taking any damage, whats the point of even casting any spells, so any "better weapon argument" doesn't apply. Both of these outcomes are insanely desirable, and make the weapon truly potent vs any other, especially given its nearly 50% uptime including bubble duration post proc (15s proc, 45s gcd).
I feel as through your arguments in each of the sections above are tailored towards one of many playstyles:
- playing Holy Paladin in a progression raid for your group (doing something the group hasn't done before)
- playing Holy Paladin in farm (an example: 4-5 Healers and 2 Tanks, a normal ICC25HC Farm group on Icecrown)
- playing Holy Paladin in some sort of challenge (solo tank, less healers, etc).
It is impossible to make a setup or guide that is superior for all 3 of these categories, so you shouldn't argue for different categories in each of your responses. Don't bother arguing about "being the only holy paladin", or "being in a raid where righteous fury can pull aggro" when you mention doing healing challenges in the next paragraph. If a supposed reader of this is a Paladin engaging in challenges outside the norm of farming T10, they are clearly experienced enough to not bother looking at a guide.
this quote irks me the most. WTF is the point of writing a "bis list" or a "guide" if it doesn't really matter, and you can setup however the hell you want in order to clear 99% of the content out there. You can run full int gems, full haste gems, full sp gems, or every other gimmick possible and still run 99% of the content as you said. You make guides like this in order to push the envelope and reach your full potential, so again, don't bother citing situations where the whole raid isn't doing exactly that.
In my eye, you should be targeting your guide at one of the specific playstyles mentioned above, and not mention any situations from the other 2 playstyles.
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Member
there are other judgements you can also use. no one said you specifically are bound to jol.
Shatered. Look, ill give you props for your solo heals all day. mad respect. however while you may be a good player you seem to be clueless about your own class and how it works when it comes to the theorycrafting part.
i promise you beanlord has been here way longer than you. lets not go there.
are you high? in what guild have you raided with that is actually good that has ever only had 1 paladin? are people purposly gimping their raid buffs nowadays or what? that whole argument that you tried to make is just plain ludacris.
to use your analogy.... what if the other healers suck? and no its not there to pad meters at that point that is really dependant on what class you are playing. i mean in that case why even take a disc if you are going to view it that way? val can be used efefctivly if you use the absord correctly to build up on tanks for example priot to them taking damage if the situation is able to be applied.
shatered...man... like do you realize its so easy to sell gold/toons/other various items on the website for the mace right? like are you hating on people who buy it bc i promise you a lot of them are purchased bc of the website from selling coins.
what in the crapdoodle goat lava did i just read? are you advocading burning GCDs bc less hit for more crit? did i read that right?
so while you are busy burning and wasting GCDs random damage or a small mistake happens and now you are behind is that really worth like what is it 94 crit rating or something (lol 2% crit rating)? you have got to be joking. So you are refreshing sacred shield every 1min Beacon every 90 seconds and judging every 10 seconds? where in there do you attempt to heal at exactly? why not save yourself some GCDs, save yourself from possible super bad RNG with misses, and save yourself the headache of trying to wait for raid damage to steady (if it does steady) and just get hit legs? like where in all of that do you actually heal?
you used two opposite ends of the spectrum here to define your points. You made a point about being the only hpal in a raid for specific purpose and then want to ignore the possibility that others in your raid could be bad as well thus making using val worth it. so lets stick to a defined set of rules here and assume that in every situation described from here on out that you have a good guild.
In that case why are you going to screwing around casting judgements waiting for a proc and relying on RNG? what if you do not get it to proc or the time does not present itself due to the raid damage? You are at the mercy of RNG and getting that hit. Again, not to mention you have to waste time casting it when you could be spending that time healing. There is no reason for it. The gain of crit vs the loss in healing due to spending uneeded GCDs which are at the mercy of RNG more so than the other pants with hit, is just pure insanity.
why dont i wear all cloth and cast FoL all day? you can still do it and clear content. you can do it all with no hit rating and full hit rating. thats not the point of a guide and you need to understand that. in that case why even make a guide? plenty of players have been carried to LoD using garbage specs, gear, gems, talents. Does not mean they are right or playing optimal.
Anyways, it would be nice to have a guide on the forums for Hpal but i cant endorse this guide to players until that part is fixed or explained showing the difference in options and added into the guide or seperate guides as this one is kind of all over the place with crazy things like "if you are the only paladin in a raid" (you should leave it if you are btw) you need to define these things better and stop cherry picking theories that are absurd.Edited: October 10, 2020
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Member
After I've read the whole guide in more detailed manner as well as comment section I'm going to give my 2 cent on it and especially on the misleading part and misconception which's going on. I'll try do not repeat what Beanlord did already type.
Beanloard already did explain that SS scales with spell power. In additional this is approximately 75% of your spell power or 0.75 multiplier. Using Beacon of Light on main tank is not always a case so you should consider fixing this. There are bosses where you want to use Beacon on OT. Using Judgement ability right after precast of Holy Light is also not a case for every boss and perfect example is Lich King. I already covered this in my video with explanation why.
What the hell is going on here. The whole conception for JoL is wrong. Dunno why there is this misconception that holy paladin shouldn't rely on someone else to keep him the debuff like it's exactly opposite. You do the someone else's job. The truth is that on bosses like LK and especially on 0% or some challenges there will be always situation where you can't keep JoL and using it on cd. In that scenario Prot or Retri always will heal more in regardless of keeping it 100% simple because Judgement is a part of their rotation and it takes 0 effort for the job to be done. As a holy paladin you risk too much. So please, save me these phrases that with experience you will learn when to JoL and when not to JoL cause they are ala bala. I thought you already did learn this by progressing 0% solo tank 2 heals after you finally realize to pass JoL to another paladin in that regard after 2 days of wipe.
Raid with one paladin only? No way in 25 man and almost not a case for 10 man raid. Even for 10 man you always wanna run 2 paladins for buffs and externals and even if it happens one paladin on 10 man only, JoW is over JoL because of mana gain which will benefit casters. Who actually needs JoL on 10 man? Ridicilous don't you think?
JoL's GCD is not affected by haste and it's 1.5 sec. Considering that your cast time of Holy LIght is near 1.2 sec and after the batching system basically every time you JoL you leave tank without healing for nearly 3 secs. Imagine doing this each 10 or 20 sec and especially in second phase of LK where a lot of mechanics overlap. It will be interesting for me to see how you manage 100% uptime of the debuff by not risking and doing your job proeperly especially on 0%.
No. Divine Plea is not something you want to use it always in that moment and not a case at all to be used on cd. If you can not keep your mana without Plea on cd that means something is wrong with your setup or gameplay. Divine Plea should be used when it's really safety to do it. Again I'll give an example with LK 0%. Try to do it on cd and leave the tank to feel the healing penalty.
If you are still running out of mana after everything you did advice + using Plea on cd then better change the class. Holy Paladin is not a prio for you. The only boss which matter in terms of mana and longevity is LK. The whole point for your mana is to survive second phase thats why you want to start this phase with nearly full mana which is basically easy cause it happens right after transition phase where you have plenty of time to return your mana and basically where shaman use Mana tide as well as Innervates and Hymn of Hope happen.
About potions I really hope some day Warmane to fix this because removing combat in load screen while leaving frostmourne is not how the game should work. But anyway it is what it is.
Moving into your 3 types of talent choice. All of them are completely wrong just by not using Imp LOH or even Blessed Hands but Imp Conc Aura which is completely useless. On top of that you did put one point into Imp Devo Aura for idk what reason. You get all 3 points or nothing. The most interesting part is the talent choice which includes Imp Conc and Imp Devo for idk what reason. You gonna use one of the two auras anyway in regardless of what is missing in the raid and never switch to another. There is a reason why talents including imp LOH, Blessed Hands and Imp Devo Aura are the best nowadays. I did also cover this in my video. There is a option also to sacrifice Imp Devo Aura for Imp HOJ for really early progress of LOD 0% and puting the missing point into Blessend Hands or sacrificing already 2 points from Blessed Hands for Imp BoW.
While you are right in regardless of math's prespective, in reallity I've never seen someone to play without talents or buffs. If there is a newbie in the game reading this he will keep the misconception that each 100 SP increases Holy Light amount by 166 which is completely wrong. This also goes for other spells.
The base healing for Holy Light (Rank 13) - from 4888 to 5445 -> avg. 5167
Spell Power Coeff - *1.66
Crit multiplier - *1.5 (*1.545 with Revitalizing Skyflare meta used for VDW)
Healing Light (Rank 3) - *1.12
Divinity (Rank 5) - *1.05
Imp Devo Aura or Tree of Life - *1.06
ICC Buff - *1.3
The last 4 multipliers gives total of *1.62.
If we do some calculations starting from 3000 SP and increasing by 100 we get:
HIT = (1.66 * 3000 + 5167) * 1.62 = 16438
CRIT = 16 438 * 1.5 = 24657
+100 SP:
HIT = (1.66 * 3100 + 5167) * 1.62 = 16707
CRIT = 16 438 * 1.5 = 25061
Difference for HIT = 269, for CRIT = 404
+100 SP:
HIT = (1.66 * 3200 + 5167) * 1.62 = 16976
CRIT = 16 438 * 1.5 = 25464
Difference for HIT = 269, for CRIT = 404
+100 SP:
HIT = (1.66 * 3300 + 5167) * 1.62 = 17245
CRIT = 16 438 * 1.5 = 25868
Difference for HIT = 269, for CRIT = 404 and so on... you got the idea.
The truth is - how spell power will scale with healing depends on multipliers. More multipliers means more increasement from SP and vice versa. On the other side of the things spellpower basically scales linear with healing for given multipliers. If you add VDW stacks as separate multiplier you have *(1 + X/10) where X is amount of stacks. Cooldowns like DI and Wings or Guardian Spirit are also multipliers as well as personal talents or cooldowns which directly increase healing receiving for that target. There are another reasons why SP is not aim for gemming outside of VDW encounter. Some of them you already did cover.
I don't advice anyone to use this macro. It's always better to manually disable the effect of Divine Sacrifice (/cancelaura macro) simple because there are situations where you want to actually keep it especially on LK and for some challenges. It ofc requires tank and holy paladin to be in one group. In regardless of pure external cooldown for the tank in some scenarios Divine Sac + Divine Guardian is better than Hand of Sacrifice if used in right moment when only the tank is receiving damage from the party. Perfect example is some of the Soul Reapers which doesnt overlap with Infest.
While Val'anyr is not so huge boost, you can accept it as a cooldown for the tank and raid. Your math of how it scales with GoHL is also not correct since GoHL doubledip with multipliers and it's not just flat 10% by amount of Holy Light healed. Basically there are many ways to manipulate Val'anyr and use it as a tank cooldown epsecially if it happens to proc right before Soul Reaper and combining it with DI or WIngs will give huge amount of shield to the tank especially when shield cap is broken on Warmane and it's not 20k. I have some doubts its unlimited since I already tested it to near 30k.
In the end there are a lot of things to be fixed in the guide in order to be really usefull for new players.Edited: October 10, 2020
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Member
To answer the JoL GCD part, I guess I didn't made it clear enough that you shouldn't judge while your tank or someone else is taking loads of damage, you obviously wait until you find a window to do so, when people are stabilized and there is not really much going on. From my perspective, I thought that was self explanatory, but since many people pointed this out, I suppose I should mention this in guide, to make it very clear and to leave no room for interpretation. Thank you for sharing feedback regarding that, it's something I will look into clarifying.
I still stand for everything else I said. I dunno in what world you're gonna build a 20k absorb shield for the tank, especially on fights that you would actually need these kind of absorb on the tank like LK and Halion. If you tank doesn't take dmg for more than 2-3 seconds, you can make a note on the calendar for that day, cuz that stuff happens so rare, so therefor, realistically you can build up a shield for the tank worth of 2 holy lights at best. Not to mention that the proc is random so therefor it may or may not proc when you actually need it. I said it in the guide and I will say it again, Val'anyr is not 100% useless or whatever is you think I said about it, that is not what I said in the guild, I tried to define the situations where Val'anyr would have the most impact, useful impact, not just for padding meters, mkay ? So that an average player, that reads this, understands that if the content that goes, will be nothing but farming LoD with his guild in a standard comp, he shouldn't be worried that he can't be competitive if he doesn't have it. That kinda the main point I was trying to get across, because across the years I've played here, I saw many hpaladin complain that their performance was not as good as it should have been, because their where missing Val'anyr. I wanted to bring out that the common opinion of the players is overrated when it comes to Val'anyr.
The thing that I was trying to say when I mentioned that I cleared everything that can be considered standard challenges for a healer and more, without Val'anyr, is to again point out that even in those situations, you can still perform without having Val'anyr.
And for the rest:
When I created this guide, I've tried to focus on creating a playstyle/build, w/e you want call it, that will answer the most cases, for especially an average player would find himself in, because yeah, like you mentioned, people who are experienced already shouldn't need a guide.
I believe that I've done that pretty well, there are some mistakes here and there, that I'm going to correct because of your feedback, but for 98% of it, my points still stand. I've played with this kind of playstyle/build for years and I've clear all the standard content will normal factors that there is there and more. Not only it goes very well for ordinary situation, but it goes even better, for when people around your underperform and you are the one who have to step up and carry people. I've carried many people and guilds that where not by any means elite or top end players, without any problems and I don't say this because I want to brag or anything, but I say it to further strengthen the point, that this playstyle is very viable and is very good in answering the majority of situations and to disproof many misconceptions people have about hpally. Again, if you need further proof that everything is said is viable or if the build is good, feel free the check my videos on YouTube and see for yourself, because I play with this kind of playstyle/build, w/e you whana call it and I've achieved everything in the game, while very often carrying people.
The whole idea of my build is to answer most of the situations out there, so yeah that means that if you where to define a specific situation, it obviously may not be the best choice out there. But to solve that, I've explained many things logically, like I've done in the talents section, so that the player who reads, can judge for himself and decide when a certain talent is good for what situation mind find himself in, so he can make the right adjustments. I'm not going to say that I've explained it the best manner possible, I'm only human and I personally have sometimes periods when I can't find the right words and as this guide took over 100 hours to right and finish it, some things could be better explained than other. This is something I will look forward into, as people submit their feedback. I will made the right adjustments where they are needed.
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Member
@vsetoq
Well, if you read carefully, you will see that I mentioned, that obviously you should not use Divine Plea if the time is not right to do so, like there is tons of damage going on. Learning when to use Divine plea at the right times, just comes with experience and that's why I also advised to have a macro that cancels it, because if you realized that you used it at a wrong time, you can cancel it asap. Same for the DSAC macro thingy you mentioned, I've said that there are situations where you may want to keep it as it serves as an additional CD for the tank, I've tried to explained that logically so the player can make the decision for himself when he should cancel it and when he should leave it, but for the MAJORITY of things, you want to cancel it. This is the whole idea of the build btw, that is answers the majority of the situation and if the players wants to adjust for a specific situation, he has the explanation provided to judge for himself, when and what adjustments should be made.
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Member
Wait what?! Come again?
SS doesn't scale with Strenght in any way!
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Member
I didn't see you acknowledge the obviously wrong hit rating info you've given when discussing fest hc pants (this part is REALLY not ok), imp conc aura vs imp loh, changing of chest enchant, albeit being a small gain, and rs 25hc ring. I do hope that you consider the first two with the highest prio.
Here's the thing, you can give up jol duty to someone that does it in their rotation anyway and each time you would've otherwise judged and put yourself in a 1.5s GCD you can instead AA for a chance at 4% mana return from SoW. It is more optimal in terms of gameplay and is a point you cannot argue.
Of course, as I stated in my original feedback, ^ only holds true when you have more than two paladins. If you're solo or two, you'll be using jow and jow + jol at 100%.
Also, you should rely on others. That is part of min-maxing a raid comp. Casters do not go out of their way gemming/enchanting 3% hit rating because there would be no spriest/moonkin in a raid or them dying. Faerie fire has a specific spec casting it from druid side, restoration druids don't cast it "just in case" the proper spec forgets. Warlocks do not cast curse of weakness (AP reduction) on bosses since tanks/warriors pick up improved versions. The only people that ever have the mentality of "not relying on others" are tanks and ONLY for AP reduction and attack speed debuff. Holy paladins are not tanks and should not think as such.
Effective healing has a 0.5 modifier to threat as opposed to dps which has a modifier of 1 and most classes bring that down via talents or presences in the case of dks (Blood presence) to 0.7 minimum as far as I'm aware. In order for you to outaggro someone doing damage, you'd need to match their dps in hps and add another 20% on top. To put it simply, this is not possible for any encounter outside of infernals in rs. There is no debate to be had, you literally gain 6% DR with no risk for all encounters at the end-game besides 1 where you may not even be outside. As opposed to this you prefer to take another 6% armor. I don't know how this is a favorable trade.
You missed my point, actually. What I was telling you is that mitigation is never useless, just knowing that it is there will already be extra survivability for the entire raid and most importantly your main heal targets, the tanks. I never once mentioned money, this is a discussion of what is better, or so I thought when I read your point on anyr. Anyr is better for fights not concerning VDW, be it 1% or 100% better. It does not matter as long as it is an upgrade and you should treat it as a main weapon.
Of course new players don't need to care about whether they have the highest end-weapon, but that was never a point I contested anyway.
Shoes, SS does not scale with strength, only SP. Prot paladins do convert strength to SP and therefore have a "scaling" so to speak, but they do not reach anywhere near hpal SP levels at the end-game. They are reasonably far apart.
It does not matter. Divinity was previously bugged to influence all jol heals. Now it works properly and takes healing mods from the target that casts it on themselves. Prot paladins with 5/5 divinity will receive 5% extra on jol if it came from a ret with 0/5 divinity and vice versa. The order can stay as you've described it w/o the talent part. The crux of the issue here is that hpals shouldn't have to judge more than once a minute if there are at least 2 other paladins.
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Field Medic Moderator
???????
No ****. It's almost as though I wasn't talking about the type of judgment. Wasn't pertinent to what I said at all. The tunnel vision here is real....
Thank you.
@Shaterhand, some posters can be abrasive in their approach, but try not to be disheartened. Instead, take the feedback and use it to improve the guide. It'll be in the best interest of the noobs to have a decent guide out there instead of just letting those noobs find Gnarly Guides and use that as their source....Edited: October 10, 2020
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Member
sorry paladin god. guess you should have specified then huh? since you quoted the part about jol. yea you legit havent provided any meaningful conversation here or theorycrafting except agreeing with beanlord, maybe try adding something to the conversation instead of being a fly on the wall? thought u were done with the forums anyways? but either way its cute to hear from somone who has done LoD like once ever? and has no clue what they are talking about in their priest guide comming here to comment. Whens the last time you even played an hpal?
So you are seriously advocating casting jol and playing the RNG card with way less hit? why not just keep the pants on say screw the crit rating which is pepega anyways and spend less time playing the RNG card with your judgement buff and more time healing targets?
i seriously do not understand the logic in that at all no matter what you are trying to do with this guide.
Then make it for that. you legit brought up a situation where you are talking about using 1 paladin in a 25m raid yet totally leaving out the fact that other healers could be garbo compared to you as well. still a lot of work needs done on this and some of those above who are far more intelligent than me about this class have pointed out some obvious glaring flaws as well that need adressed.Edited: October 10, 2020
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Wind of Northrend
All I can say is that I agree (for once) with Mercy:
"Some posters can be abrasive in their approach, but try not to be disheartened. Instead, take the feedback and use it to improve the guide. It'll be in the best interest of the noobs (and yourself) to have a decent guide out there instead of just letting them find "Gnarly really bad stuff" and use that as their source."
You have some great players here, you don't have to agree with 100% of the things they say instantly, but think a lot about it, and be open minded, they are not here to make you look bad, they are here to try and help you make a great guide with a lot of editing. :D
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Member
Don't worry about it, I don't hold any grudge against people who are stating their opinions, even if they don't exactly do it a kindly manner sometimes, so to say. After all, I personally advised people to give their feedback and their questions, in the comment section. I really don't mind debating stuff, as long as we all act like grown up adults. I've already made some adjustments according to the feedback provided, when it is reasonable, makes sense and it is objectively true.
Now to answer @Beanlord:
Chest enchant:
The diff btw powerful stats and the mana enchant, is like +- 90 mana or so. It's not really a game breaker by any means, but sure it is viable indeed and significantly cheaper, since that can be a factor too for some players. I suppose I can add it as an alternative for the chest enchant and leaving the decision up the player.
Imp conc aura vs imp loh point:
Uhm, I'm not sure what is the problem here exactly, because I'm pretty sure I've marked both of these with the blue color in the talent section, meaning that they are purely situational. In the talent section, I explained every talent in details, so that the player can judge for himself and make the decision all by himself when he should consider changing talents and it in what situation. For me, personally, I don't take improved lay, because I don't want to rely on a 11 min cd to keep the tank alive at any point, for standards LoD farming comps, but if someone else wants to do so, go for it. Like said in the guide and I will say it again, your job as a healer is to keep people alive, not padding any meter, it doesn't matter how you do it or with how much HPS you do it, it is not something you can really quantify that easily. I think I already mentioned somewhere :D, that if you want improved lay, you should actually take 2 points out from imp conc aura, sooooooooo, again, I don't really understand what is the problem here.
RS ring:
For real ? RS ring ? I'm not exactly sure if you mean why I didn't put it as bis instead of the ring rep or why I didn't mentioned the RS ring instead of Coiled ring, for the people who want to play dual spec and have the ring rep for retri or prot, but in both cases, uhm, MP5?, no thanks. The only reason why I didn't rank Coiled ring as bis even above the ring rep, is because the ring rep has that spell power proc, which can be even more valuable if you have Val'anyr. I know it, RS ring has higher ilvl and thus slightly higher intel and haste, but you really underestimate the need of crit apparently. I know I did say intellect > haste > crit, but I also said that these are not really set in stone and that they mostly depend on your playstyle and many other factors. A thing that I didn't mentioned I guess, is that stats weights are actually very close, in my opinion, which means even if crit is the lowest in prio from these 3, in general, it doesn't mean that is not worth anything at all. I have all the items for a holy paladin, including the RS ring and since recently I started playing retri too, I will play with Coiled Ring as a replacement for the ring rep, because of crit. In other words, although haste and intellect are important, I don't think they are worth sacrificing crit with a completely useless stat MP5, just to have slightly more intel and haste. But if you think otherwise, well, you do you, I'm not really gonna argue any further about opinions.
The hit rating point
The thing is, that if you take things out of their context, without taking the bigger picture into consideration and how things work together, you will end up not understanding some reasoning for some parts of the puzzle. First of all, I didn't say that hit rating doesn't make you miss less often at all (mathematically speaking, it obviously does), I said that the amount that you get from the legs is still way to low in order to make a significant difference and that is not worth sacrificing that crit for it. In my playstyle, I judge as often as possible (OBIOUSLY, only when I have a window to do so, without putting the tank at risk, there is no RNG here, this comes with experience, knowing when to judge, without risking anything), which means roughly 5-6 judges per min. When you judge that often, you don't really give a dam if you miss 1 more judge than a person with legs would. Again, I played at some point while I was gearing my 3rd hpally alt, with way more hit rating than just the legs would offer, and I still didn't notice a significate difference in how often my judge would miss. So, no, the hit legs are simply not worth in my playstyle, even less in yours btw, since by your ideology you should judge only every 1 min or so, just to keep the haste buff up, I really don't see the value in having that hit if you are using judge that rarely, and if you are still worried that you would miss, common bro, in 1 min you could easily find a window to do more than 1 judge without risking someone's life or when you had to move and couldn't cast anyway. The are ways to play around not having hit, so therefor, I value the crit more, than the hit rating.
The overall conclusion: This is my playstyle/ideology/build, w/e you want to call it, regarding holy paladins. I've been perfecting and using it for many years, so I'm fully confident in what I said above, as I've done everything a healer would push himself to do.
So to put it short and simple, you clearly have different visions/opinions, which is fine. Both playstyles can clear every content/challenge out there. My build focuses on relying less on others, so to say, and offers you solutions, to a higher variety of scenarios, in my opinion. Perhaps I can improve on explaining some things better and leaving less room for wrong interpretations.
At best, I can consider adding another playstyle, the one you are describing, in the "Playstyle" section, but regarding my playstyle, I don't see anything wrong with it, sorry.Edited: October 11, 2020
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