I’ve recently had several people both in guild and out ask for some holy paladin advice. Since the demand seems to be there, I thought I would give you all the benefit of my learnings. Here you have it, the Holy Paladin Guide for Dummies. This is meant to be aimed at someone who leveled ret or something like that, and wants to jump right in the deep end.
Alright Holy Pallies, listen up. You want to be the best tank healer on the planet? Well, you have some reading to do.
First off, there are two different types of holy paladin, the so called “Flash of Light” paladins, and the “Holy Light” paladins.
Flash of light paladins stack spellpower and haste, and tend to go down the retribution tree to pick up the exta crit talents. The spec is built around stronger FoL and HS casts, making the spec a semi-raid healer with longevity, since a pally can pretty much cast FoLs continually for a few hours. Here is a post outlining your basic FoL paladin.
http://www.holypaladin.net/index.php/explaining-the-flash-of-light-build-for-holy-paladins
Now, let me tell you this: they are full of shit. The way intellect converts into our other useful stats makes it dumb to ever stack anything but, and the simple fact is that no matter how much you buff your small heals, a paladin will essentially never be a viable raid healer, even if it’s some sort of tank healer-raid healer hybrid. The author of the above is working from a couple mistaken assumptions, those being 1. overhealing is bad, and 2. a more difficult spec equates to a better spec. Holy Light is the highest HPS spell in the game, and if you play intelligently, mana will never be an issue, so why not use this tool? In trying to help raid heals you ironically lose vast amounts of raid utility in the form of bypassing Divine Guardian in favor of going down the ret tree and picking up redundant talents like Heart of the Crusader (because there WILL be another pally with that talent in your raid).
Now, don’t get me wrong, there are high end guilds that raid with FoL paladins, and it’s a wonderful spec if you aren’t running end-game content, but you are in my opinion gimping yourself by trying to make a holy paladin something it is not. I’m sure there are those out there who will disagree with me, but here’s is a good breakdown of why FoL specs aren’t optimal in the end game, written by people smarter than I am.
http://www.wow.com/2010/02/14/the-light-and-how-to-swing-it-its-all-intellects-fault/
“Alright Naz,” you say. “I’ve got my Divine Guardian spec, an int gem in every socket, and I’m ready to tank heal. What now?” Here are my thoughts on a few key areas for holy paladins.
1. Stats
Remember, intellect is king. Gear with more intellect, or a socket you can put an int gem in, is typically an upgrade. The stats you want to see on your gear are (in order) int, haste, crit and spellpower, followed by mp5. Mp5 may be considered a healer stat, but the others are better for holy pallies, since we have other mana regeneration tools (and crit turns into mana back, thanks to Illumination). If you are undergeared, the mp5 may still be more valuable, but once you get into ICC gear, this will change. If there is spirit on an item, don’t you dare put it on. Spirit does exactly nothing for paladins, and so help me, if I see you in spirit gear, I will slap you. Leave that crap for the trees.
However, don’t be afraid to go down in armor types. There is a fair amount of caster mail, boomkin leather, and spirit-less mage cloth that is great for paladins. Don’t be a jerk and take the gear from people of those armor levels, but if the boomies don’t want that leather, then by all means take it and wear it.
2. Accessories
Librams: Go right now and buy the ilevel 200 heroism badge libram. It is best in slot. No arguing. Get the ilevel 245 libram to wear around town for your gearscore (and to use during Valithria), but always heal with your i200 one. And don’t go anywhere near the 264 libram, it is pure crap. Even on Valithria, the 245 one is better. You are better off buying and vendoring saronite, honestly.
Trinkets: The 245 trinket with all the intellect on it is a must. You won’t be replacing this anytime soon, if ever this expansion, so make friends with it. The frost emblem trinket is alright, otherwise, go farm regular ToC and get the intellect trinket from the Black Knight. Don’t bother with the Ephemeral Snowflake, it’s terrible for pallies. I know it hurts to have those ilevel200s equipped, but trust me, your performance matters more than your gearscore.
3. Enchants
Enchant intellect to everything you can, except maybe your weapon. Put Tuskarr’s Vitality on your feet, the run speed is far better than that crappy mp5/hp5 enchant (and hopefully you didn’t even look twice at spirit to feet). If you are an engineer, the crit/rocket boots are also nice. Stats to chest is still better than mana to chest.
For your hat’s arcanum, I personally prefer the spellpower/crit one from the Kirin Tor, though the spellpower/mp5 one from Wyrmrest isn’t bad. The same applies with shoulder enchants. Get a feel for if you think you need the mp5 or not, and enchant accordingly.
For your meta gem, I personally use and love the Insightful Earthsiege Diamond (Int and chance to restore mana on cast). It ends up working like half a trinket. You can activate it with either a Royal Dreadstone, or a Nightmare Tear. This one is a little more up to personal preference, though, there are some +%int/+%mana ones that are arguably as good as the above. Make sure you get one easy to activate, every socket without a straight int gem is a Bad Thing.
4. Consumables and Buffs
As a holy light paladin, 90% of your heals are going to go into overhealing. Due to this, stacking spellpower consumables isn’t worth it. Skip the fish feast, kill some rhinos and make some mp5 food, and flask pure mojo (or that one intellect elixir). You can also experiment with haste food. Always carry a stack of mana potions on you, and maybe even some Dark Runes. Have the latter two keybound.
(For Valithria, flask spellpower and eat haste food, and have haste pots instead.)
Unless you’re a little undergeared, buffing Kings is best. If you need the mana, Wisdom is fine, but otherwise Kings anyone and everyone, including yourself. Only exception is maybe rogues, and some hunters, where Might is more appropriate (and don’t forget to Might their pets! Unless there is a warrior in party, then they will be buffed with the warriors.)
Always keep Seal of Wisdom up (again, except for Valithria, where Seal of Light plus it’s corresponding glyph is necessary) and assuming you specced down the prot tree, Righteous Fury. Keep an eye on Righteous Fury, though, it’s not so good for some fights. Definitely click it off for Rotface, and possibly Saurfang depending on how the ranged are at pulling blood beasts, and also for those randoms with shitty tanks. The rest of the time having it up should never be an issue, and the damage reduction is quite nice, though you should remember to give the tank a couple seconds on the pull before dropping a judgment, lest you end up holy tanking.
For auras, judge the situation. Pally tanks will generally have devotion covered, and retribution aura is useless. Concentration is a great default aura to run, especially in fights with raid damage (think Stinky). If you specced into Aura Mastery (and you should have), make sure you research your fights to know which kind of damage will be occurring, and run the appropriate aura there. Aura Mastery only works on your OWN aura, so running Frost Resist and then popping Aura Mastery for the White Out on say Toravon is a great raid mitigation tool. Shadow Resist and Aura Mastery is a requirement for zero inhale Festergut, and your fellow raid healers will thank you for it.
5. Glyphs
For your major glyphs, you should have Glyph of Seal of Wisdom, and Glyph of Holy Light. For the third you have a choice between Glyph of Beacon of Light, or Glyph of Divinity. I personally use the former because I love utilizing beacon and don’t really need the extra mana cooldown, but they are both equally good glyphs depending on your needs.
For minor glyphs, make sure you pick up Glyph of Lay on Hands so it’s always off CD for every attempt on a boss, but the other two are your choice.
(If you are running Valithria, buy a stack each of Glyph of Seal of Wisdom and Glyph of Seal of Light, so you can reglyph to the former for that encounter.)
6. Addons
PallyPower. Get it NOW.
CLCBPT. It has an odd name, but it tracks your beacon of light, judgments of the pure buff, sacred shield, and FoL hot. It’s wonderful.
Decursive. It’s in my mind preferable to putting cleanse into your unit frames, and you likely want it anyways for if and when you run prot or ret.
You also need a healing addon of some type. I use Healbot, but I hear great things about Vuhdo, and there are others out there. Make sure you have easily bound click commands for Holy Light, Flash of Light, Holy Shock, Beacon of Light, Sacred Shield, and Target (for utility Hand of X spells) and Assist (for dropping judgments intelligently).
Omen is still required for healing, believe it or not, since it’s good to know who is creeping up in aggro. It lets you know who could use a Hand of Salvation, and which caster might need a quick Hand of Protection shortly. It also helps you judge if Righteous Fury is alright to run in a particular fight.
You also want some manner of buff/debuff tracker. I personally use Power Auras to track these things for me with handy icons and timers, but that’s a very complicated addon, so you might have an easier time with something designed for buffs. Essentially, you want to be able to tell very easily when your Divine Plea is active, when you have Forbearance, if your Divine Guardian is active, and so forth.
7. Macros
A lot of macros are up to personal preference. I use an all-in-one judgment modifier macro that is nice, and I have some of my cooldowns macro’d together (Divine Illumination + Trinket for instance) though you should definitely NOT macro every single one together.
My judgment macro:
#showtooltip
/cast [mod:ctrl]Judgement of Justice; [mod:alt]Judgement of Wisdom; Judgement of Light
This gives me a default Judgement of Light, but lets me drop others should the need arise, without taking up three keys. You can change the modifiers as works for your settings, and make a second macro with the primary Judgement changed to Wisdom for your ret and prot action bars.
The majority of my macros are simply ones that put a /stopcasting in front of the spell so that I can hit things proactively and not have to worry about being in the middle of a Holy Light cast. I have this for my Hammer of Justice and Arcane Torrent (and Holy Wrath for that pesky undead trash in ICC), should I need a fast pinch interrupt (and yes, healers CAN help with interrupts), and also on my Aura Mastery, Divine Shield and Protection, and Lay on Hands, so that I can cast those in a hurry should the need arise.
Here is what such a macro looks like:
#showtooltip
/stopcasting
/cast hammer of justice
Another macro you should ABSOLUTELY have is this:
#showtooltip
/cancelaura divine plea
/cast divine plea
This allows you to hit one key to pop Divine Plea, and then hit the same key to cancel it should you suddenly not be able to afford the healing loss halfway through. Make sure you aren’t in the habit of mashing keys to trigger spells, though, or you will immediately pop and cancel Divine Plea.
8. Resources
Go to http://wow.com and read every single The Light and How To Swing It post. Now.
There is also http://www.holypaladin.net/ but they say dumb things like “FoL specs are viable” so I don’t know if I would trust them.
http://thephysicianslog.blogspot.com/ has some good stuff, though there is a RP bent.
I will continue updating this section.
Alright, so now we have the basics of your holy paladin setup. It’s time to talk about actually healing, and how it should likely go. Keep in mind that this is simply how I prefer to heal and what works best for me might not be what works for you. This should be good to give you an idea of how a holy pally heals though.
1. The Basics
Paladins are tank healers. This is simply how it is. The first thing I do is throw a Beacon of Light and a Sacred shield on the tank that will be taking the most damage (if there is a pally tank, they can SS themselves and you can throw yours on the scrub DK tank). For fights like Marrowgar with cleave effects, I simpy beacon one tank and heal the other(s) (though I’ll drop a holy shock or even a holy light on the bonespiked person in 10 man). In 25 man, stick to healing the tanks, unless only one is taking damage at a time, such as with fights like Saurfang and Festergut.
Learn to love your beacon! This is the most powerful tool we have, as it essentially doubles our healing capability. It also has a huge 60 yard range (though incidentally, Lady D’s room is larger) and works around corners. It is the only healing spell like that in the game. Always, always, always have someone beaconed, and don’t be afraid to jump it around as needed in a fight. (The one exception is 3 inhale Festergut, where it’s fine to let the beacon fall off, as you can’t afford the GCD to refresh it.)
Beacon is wonderful for fights like gunship, where you can beacon the jump tank and then stand on the horde boat and spam heals on yourself. You don’t have to worry about them going out of LoS, or going out of HL range on the other boat (and you should never ever jump yourself). You can also beacon yourself for fights like faction champs.
2. Raid Healing
“But Naz!” you say. “You’ve bitched and moaned about how pallies are always going to be tank healers! Why does that heading say ‘Raid Healing’?” Here is something far too many pally healers don’t realize:
Just because you are a tank healer does not mean you aren’t a raid healer.
This is especially true in 10 man raids. Beacon the tank, then heal the raid. Even if someone only needs to be topped off, you might as well Holy Light them, since even the overhealing goes to the beaconed target. Holy Shocks are nice instant cast spells that can save a dps from the brink of death long enough for a proper raid healer to get to them, and you should never let yourself die to incidental raid damage. (In fact, for decimates on those two dogs, I will cast holy light on myself so that it hits just after the decimate casts, THEN heal the off tank. The currently tanking tank will already be beaconed, obviously.)
3. Thoroughput Management and Healing on the Run
You will get the most HPS from spamming holy light, but this is often not ideal. Giant mana pools can still get emptied, and there are plenty of times when our big heal is just overkill. If there’s not a lot of damage happening, go ahead and FoL and HS. Some phased fights deliberately have low damage phases (a lot of phase one Lady D is this way, as long as your dps is intelligent).
Now, a lot of ICC fights involve large amounts of movement. Here you should also make good use of your Holy Shock, which is a great instant cast, and if it crits, it will also give you an instant FoL. That’s ~15000 healing in 2 GCDs while running, not to mention the FoL hot the tank will get should they be the recipient (you DO still have the tank sacred shielded, right?). Make sure your HS CD is somewhere you can track it easily for these fights.
Don’t get so caught up in running around that you neglect your healing duties, however. You DO wear plate (well, mostly), so sometimes it’s better to stand and take the damage, and just heal yourself (and subsequently the beaconed tank) through it. I’ll commonly just stand in place for Bone Storms on Marrowgar and spam heal myself and the raid, and Rotface also comes to mind. You should have the boss tank beaconed, so if you get the debuff on you, immediately run out and cleanse yourself, then just stand there and spam heals on yourself while the kite tank comes around to you to get your ooze. I’ve chosen to eat and heal myself through a couple slime sprays as well, if I thought I needed to. Just make sure that you are taking care of yourself in these moments.
Finally, if you need to be casting giant heals NOW but oh god theres slime everywhere what do I do, just go ahead and bubble. Cast Divine Guardian as long as you have a bubble up, then stand there and spam those heals as long as you can. Hopefully you will get through the pinch with enough time left on your bubble to get to safe ground and full health. Better to use your cooldown and not need it than the reverse, since the beauty of being a holy pally is having a shit ton of CDs at your disposal. This brings us to our next topic.
4. Cooldowns Cooldowns Cooldowns
Holy crap, we have a lot of cooldowns. Here’s a list of the big ones and how we should use them.
Divine Sacrifice/Guardian: This is our best mitigation cooldown, in my opinion, and the reason why all holy pallies should go down the prot tree to grab it. It provides a brief 30% damage reduction to your party, and a 20% reduction in damage to the entire raid within 30 yards, which is amazing mitigation. This is a CD that saves raids. Just keep in mind that it transfers the damage to yourself, which is why you want to use it with one of the following two abilities.
Divine Shield: The pally bubble. You can use it in conjugation with Divine Sacrifice/Guardian for all that mitigation with no damage taken to yourself. This is the perfect combo for when the raid just needs to make it 20 more seconds. Think zero inhale Festergut, or the burn phase on Putricide and Rotface, to use the plague wing of ICC as an example.
Divine Protection: Alright, so Divine Sacrifice only has a 2 minute cooldown, this means we can use it at least twice in a fight. Conveniently enough, that’s the length of Forbearance. But your bubble won’t be off CD, or perhaps you want to save your bubble for the last DS. Well, you can also Divine Protection and then Divine Guardian, just make sure you can heal yourself through it.
Hand of Protection: Our other, other bubble. I never ever use this on myself, since it puts Forbearance on you and you typically have better Oh Shit buttons ready anyways. However, this is wonderful for saving aggrowhoring casters on trash pulls, and has a couple great raid encounter uses. First off, when someone gets a mark on Saurfang, it is entirely physical damage. Throw this on them right off (only if they are a caster, though) and you have a nice 10 second window to get them set up with a beacon and covered in hots by the raid healer(s). Another great use is on Anub’arak, during the underground phase. Those spikes? Physical damage. Throw it on the bad kiters to save em, or use it deliberately to let them kite spikes longer (necessary in ToGC).
Lay on Hands: The last of our Forbearance-granting cooldowns. This isn’t that substantial of a heal, since your holy light crits will hit harder, but if you are specced into Imp. Lay of Hands, this will grant a 20% reduction in physical damage for 15 seconds. Speccing into Imp Lay on Hands isn’t necessary, but I like it for fights like Festergut or maybe frenzy Saurfang (or even the mark if they are particularly squishie). If you are glyphed for it, this will return you mana, or you can even use it on yourself for the mana it grants, if you aren’t glyhped. I’ve used it on myself after a battle rez before to get back on my feet as fast as possible.
Aura Mastery: Spec into this. In fact, ret pallies should go spec into this too. This doubles the effect of whichever aura you have up for 6 seconds, which doesn’t seem that great, but for a few fights it is a lifesaver. The big one here is Festergut, where the raid takes brutal amounts of shadow damage. Run shadow resist aura and pop this for zero inhale phases until the raid healers have the hots rolling. This has a short CD too (2 minutes) and is off the GCD, so you will soon find all sorts of great uses for it.
Hand of Sacrifice: this CD has it’s uses, but you have to be careful. If your beacon is up, I’ll throw it on the tank on Festergut as he is casting his third inhale then heal the crap out of myself, but sometimes this CD gets scary. Good for use on marks for Saurfang, and a couple other places (ranged tank on Blood Princes during empowerment, perhaps).
Hand of Salvation: Watch Omen, throw this on DPS as needed. Hunter feign deaths are on the spell hitcap and can be resisted, and warlocks just have shitty threat CDs anyways. This is good to have ready for phase two Lady D, or even after the tank swap on Festergut (the stacking debuff is also a damage buff, but it’s Very Bad if they repull aggro).
Hand of Freedom: Sometimes I throw it on tanks for trash pulls, I guess. It’s good for Dreamwalker if you get frostbolted right before taking a portal and are too lazy to cleanse yourself.
5. Judgements
You need to at least drop a judgement once a minute to maintain your Judgements of the Pure haste buff. I generally judge quite a bit more often than that, to keep the judgement active on the target for the raid’s benefit, and also because judgements cost very little mana but usually proc your Seal of Wisdom for a 4% mana return. It also keeps you auto attacking on the boss, which keeps your Seal of Wisdom going.
I typically always drop Judgement of Light. Part of this is because healing is my job and my Light Judgements are better than Ret ones due to the Divinity talent, but it’s also because you want to play nice with the other paladins in your raid. Prot and ret pallies typically drop Judgements of Wisdom, as they need the 100% uptime on that so as to not go oom, and because they typically both spec into Heart of the Crusader. If you judge and overwrite their judgement, the raid will lose that 3% crit buff until the next time one of them judges again.
Keep an eye out, though. If you are the only paladin in a 10 man and there’s little in the way of raid damage, drop a Judgement of Wisdom and the hunters will love you forever. Saurfang is a good fight for this.
6. Mana Management
Now, just because we stack intellect and have a 38k mana pool does not mean we can’t go oom. Holy Light and Beacon of Light are mana hogs, and those are our two main spells. This means you need to manage your mana pool very carefully. Here is how you do this:
Melee the damn boss. There are very few fights where you can’t stack and melee between casts to trigger your Seal of Wisdom. Saurfang is one exception that comes to mind, but most of the other ICC bosses you can spend the bulk of your time whaling on. Use a healing addon so you rarely have to untarget the boss, and drop judgements often.
Divine Plea early, and often. As soon as you dip below 75% mana you should use this CD at the first opportunity, and then every time it is available thereafter. “But Naz, it cuts my heals in half!” you say. Well, so? Remember what I said about most heals going into overheals? There is typically always a lull in the fight where you can safely Divine Plea (particularly in phased fights), and if you do need to compensate for the loss in heals, just hit your wings. If you have 2set t10, you can also Divine Illumination. Problem solved.
Similarly, keep your arcane torrent on CD. Don’t go reroll fucking Tauren for Cataclysm. Just don’t. Try to save your mana potion for the end of the fight, and don’t be afraid call out for innervates if you need them, though you should strive not to rely on external CDs (I haven’t needed an innervate in a few weeks, but I also have a 38k buffed mana pool now). If you see a mana tide down, make sure you are in range (and in party).
You can also run Scholomance a few times or hit up the AH for some Dark Runes. These grant you 900 to 1500 mana at the cost of 600 to 1000 life (we can all pretend to be warlocks), and most importantly, are on a separate CD from potions. 1k mana doesn’t seem like that much, but it can be the difference between a wipe and a last second save. It doesn’t hurt to have them on hand.
You can also Lay on Hands yourself for mana, as mentioned above, or LoH someone else if you have the appropriate glyph.
Healing in Action
To give you a better idea on exactly how healing as a holy pally goes, here is a stream of consciousness style rundown on healing Festergut, as an example.
Before the pull, I beacon and shield the appropriate tank. I slap a FoL on them for the hot right as they go to pull, then Holy Shock and maybe FoL them as I run to stack on Festergut. Once I get there, I drop a Judgement of Light and cast a HL on the tank while I wait for the gas to enter the room.
As soon as I see the gas coming in, I hit Aura Mastery with Shadow Resist Aura, or even Divine Shield and Sacrifice if I know raid heals will have problems with it. Then I begin dropping Holy Lights on whichever ranged has the lowest health. Watch your DBM, the people with Vile Gas will need the most heals.
I arcane torrent almost right away, and pop Divine Plea somewhere in the first inhale, usually. If raid heals are struggling, I’ll pop wings or Divine Illumination as well, if not I’ll save them for 3 inhales or the later Divine Plea. I try to keep Judgement of Light rolling on Festergut at all times. Somewhere in the second inhale the tank swap will occur, so I usually go ahead at 7 stacks and switch my beacon/shield to the new tank while HLing the current tank until the switch. I watch omen here as well, and drop a Hand of Salv on the first tank if they need it.
Then Festergut begins to cast his 3rd inhale. Since there is a cast time without him meleeing, I take this opportunity to drop CDs on the tank (usually a LoH, or maybe a Hand of Sac) and pop Divine Illumination. Then I spam the ever loving hell out of Holy Light, and watch the tank’s CDs, just in case I need to burn my Divine Guardian here. I don’t even watch my Beacon timer here, or my Judgement timer. There are no free GCDs. I Holy Light nonstop until this phase ends.
While Festergut is casting Pungent Blight, I will pop Aura Mastery, or Divine Guardian if it’s up. Then it is a repeat of the first phase where I beacon a tank and spam Holy Lights on the ranged. I have a HS ready for any ranged that might have gotten very low on the Pungent Blight, though. The tank can survive getting smaller heals from the beacon here, and people WILL be low enough to die mid HL cast.
At this point my mana will be getting low, so I will usually Divine Plea with a CD if I have one to burn, and maybe drink a potion. From here on it is a rinse and repeat of the first phases, and if Festergut isn’t down soon, well, he won’t be down at all. I typically am under 5-10% mana when the fight ends, depending on Seal of Wisdom RNG.
So that’s most of what you need to know to get your start as a pally healer. This is all written from my personal experiences and research, so please feel free to tailor all of the above advice to your own style, and some things that work for me may be horrible for you. Just take what I’ve said as a starting ground for finding your own way. And if you think I’m mistaken about any of the things I’ve said here, please feel free to tell me. I love theorycrafting this stuff with other people, and I still have plenty to learn.
Thanks for reading!
Naz
