holy-paladin-mastery
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The Light and How to Swing It: Just how masterful can mastery healing get?
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered, like why paladins are so awesome. Sometimes I feel like I can't get away from Illuminated Healing. Our holy paladin mastery has been receiving nonstop tweaks since its introduction, and it's always flirting with viability. Stats like haste and critical strike rating are predictable. I can draw up some formulas to show you how many extra ticks of Holy Radiance you'll receive at a given haste level. Mastery is much more nebulous than that, as its effectiveness depends entirely on the encounter and your healing assignment. Everyone has some amount of mastery rating on their gear, and there's even some passively built into our characters. While having a bit of mastery to make our heals bubbly helps our throughput, it's certainly not overpowered. There are a few holy paladins who, in an attempt to see how far Illuminated Healing can go, have enchanted, reforged, and gemmed into mastery completely. With IH bubbles absorbing 35% of the value of the original heal, stacking mastery can obviously make something interesting happen. How potent can Illuminated Healing really become?
The Light and How to Swing It: Patch 4.2 lets our mastery stack
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered, like why paladins are so awesome. Intellect is the best holy paladin stat. There's no need to discuss it, as everyone agrees that intellect is king. Since all of our gear has intellect on it already, most of our stat choices revolve around our secondary stats. Haste and spirit are currently the two stats that most holy paladins prefer, with critical strike rating and mastery rating taking up the rear. Blizzard has already tried making our mastery bonus more attractive a few times in Cataclysm, but with little success. In patch 4.2, the developers have made several changes to our mechanics that make the healing secondary stats much more powerful. Our critical heals will be healing for 200% of their original value in the next patch. Critical strike rating will be more valuable in a double-crit world, but haste will likely still be champion. On a more interesting note, our Illuminated Healing mastery bubbles are stacking on the patch 4.2 PTR. Each heal adds more absorption, up to a maximum of 33% of our total health.
The Light and How to Swing It: Holy paladin patch 4.1 roundup
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered, or catch me weekly on the Matticast. The section of the patch 4.1 notes dedicated to holy paladins was particularly sparse this cycle. The only significant change was the buff to our Illuminated Healing mastery, as the Aura Mastery / Crusader Aura interaction was supposed to be changed some time ago. Some holy paladins may have been concerned with the note about Word of Glory receiving a 20-second cooldown, but luckily that's neutralized by an addition to Walk in the Light, one of our passive mastery bonuses. The bulk of new content in patch 4.1 comes from the revamped troll instances of Zul'Gurub and Zul'Aman. New dungeons means new gear, and that includes several new epic items that are of interest to holy paladins. Guild challenges also introduce sizeable rewards for running dungeons in a guild group, and so you'll be dragged into healing these new 5-mans in no time. There's also the possibility that the new Call to Arms feature could yield bonus loot for healers volunteering to pug a heroic, but I haven't seen the little bag icon move from the tank icon since the patch's release.
The Light and How to Swing It: Illuminated Healing still no Val'anyr
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered, like why Val'anyr was totally a hunter weapon. When playing a healer, there's no single "right" way to play. Tanks can adjust their gear and strategy to boost their threat or avoidance, but both of those statistics are easy to track and monitor. Damage classes are obviously optimizing for one thing: DPS. Healers, on the other hand, can both get to the same point while taking completely different paths. Checking your healing per second on a healing meter won't show all of the times that you saved someone's life or made a great decision, and it never tells the whole story of an encounter. The best example is how your total healing done will plummet as your raid group gets better and better at avoiding damage on a particular encounter. Healing meters do have a few useful purposes. They allow us to empirically test different strategies and gear choices, and we can monitor the effect of changes that we make. They also allow us to evaluate talents and individual abilities, which means we can make educated decisions about our talent and spell selection. When reviewing my healing done, I can figure out exactly what works and what doesn't. One thing has consistently stood out as negligible to my overall healing: Illuminated Healing. How did our mastery bonus end up so impotent?
