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The Light and How to Swing It: Holy paladin gear enchants, part 2

Elizabeth Wachowski
Updated ·7 min read

In my last Light and How to Swing It, I covered some good enchants for the upper part of an endgame healing paladin -- the head, shoulders, cloak, chest and bracers. Now it's time to head below the belt (har) and take care of hand, ring, leg, foot, weapon and shield enhancements. Okay, hands and rings aren't technically below the blt, but I ran out of room for them last time.

Gloves

Major Healing: As a holy paladin, you're all about healing. Whether you focus on PVE or PVP, more raw plus healing is always an excellent choice. The only drawback here is that the mats are pretty pricey. 9/10 PVE, 9/10 PVP.

Blasting: It doesn't sound like a paladin enchant, but Blasting is an inexpensive alternative to Major Healing for healadins. Spell crit isn't quite as good as it used to be, due to the Illumination nerf, but it's still useful -- particularly if your gear lacks crit.

Rings

Healing Power: First off, ring enchants are enchanter-only, and enchanting a ring immediately soulbinds it. That means that unless you have enchanting as one of your professions, you're out of luck. But just in case you do grind your way up through the grueling leveling process of enchanting, you get the ability to give yourself an extra +40 healing by enchanting both your rings. Like we said before, raw +healing is one of the best stats for healers and scales well with gear. 9/10 PVE, 9/10 PVP.

Stats: For an alternative ring enchant, you can check out stats. If you're not purely a healing paladin and like to do a little bit of everything, stats might be an option, particularly since it's affected by Blessing of Kings. A commenter on the last installment noted that they liked using stats for leveling and grinding, since it effectively made their char a few levels higher. I'd consider this more for PVP than PVE just because of the extra emphasis on stam stacking in PVP. 5/10 PVE, 6/10 PVP.

Legs

Silver Spellthread: The tailor-created spellthreads are the leg option of choice for casters and healers. (Tanks and DPSers have the leatherworking-made leg armor.) This is the non-epic option, made by the simple combination of a rune thread and 5 Primal Life. Many tailors make this to level up, so you'll probably be able to get it done with no crafter's fee or buy it complete for less than the cost of mats. 8/10 PVE, 8/10 PVP.

Golden Spellthread: To quote the Wowhead comments on this one, "I'm posting in an epic thread!" This upgrade to Silver requires 10 Primal Life and an increasingly-easy-to-get Primal Nether. Since your tailor needs to be exalted with Aldor to make these, you'll probably have to pay a crafter's fee (as you should.) If you feel like complaining about the Primal Nether requirement, please head over to the Dungeons and Raids forums, where they will call you a casual and punch you in the throat. Or just buy one at the AH. 10/10 PVE, 10/10 PVP.

Boots: Edited to add: Comments and Armories have convinced me that Boar's Speed, rather than Vitality, is the premier PVE boot enchant.

Boar's Speed: Boots are confusing. There are lots of good PVP options, but little that's great for PVE casters. Boar's Speed is expensive but very helpful for PVP, as it combines two essential elements -- stam and movement speed increase. Also useful in the many PVE encounters where you need to run out of/into/in circles around some sort of effect. Note that the speed increase does NOT stack with the similar increase from certain meta gems.6/10 PVE 9/10 PVE, 9/10 PVP.

Fortitude: Oh joy, more stam. It's up to you whether the 3 extra stam is worth forgoing the movement speed increase from Boar's Speed, but like Silver Spellthread, this is a popular way to level enchanting and you may be able to get it done free/cheap. If you're a PVPer who already has the speed increase meta gem, this is your best option. 5/10 PVE, 9/10 PVP.

Surefooted: As a non-PVPer, I'm not sure how the 5% chance to resist roots and snares stacks up against the guaranteed stam/speed increase from the other boot enchants. It is incredibly costly, though. Anyone care to enlighten me on what they think this should be rated? 1/10 PVE, ?/10 PVP.

Vitality: This is actually pretty interesting. It's an early 60s enchant with low mat requirements that restores 4mp/5 and 4hp/5. However, the formula is an incredibly rare random world drop, so you may be paying out the nose to find someone to do it for you. There's also a BOP version now that drops off Kael'Thas in MgT, which should have lowered prices a bit. The clear best choice for PVE, unless you're in an encounter that prizes mobility or stam. 10/10 PVE 8/10 PVE, 7/10 PVP.

Weapons

Major Healing: We're all using one-handers and shields, right? Okay, this is a darn good enchant. As we said before, healing is the backbone of healers (durrrrr), and while it's pricey, it's probably going to be your best option for PVP ... and probably for PVE too. 9/10 PVE, 9/10 PVP.

Major Intellect: It looks nice, but yodamc2 on the Wowhead forums calculated that it's a lot better to replace your healing/int gems with Int gems until you get 30 Int and then just take the Major Healing. He adds that it's only worth it if you have 2200 healing and run out of mana every fight, which is ... unlikely. 5/10 PVE, 5/10 PVP.

Spellsurge: I love these sorts of enchants. Spellsurge, as noted, has a 3% chance on spellcast to restore 100 mana over 10 seconds to all party members. However, recent calculations suggest that it's actually a much higher chance with a 50 sec hidden cooldown. It's super-useful, particularly if you have multiple casters in a group with this weapon ... but it puts a hit on your individual heals. So what to do? Elitist Jerks recommends that you get two healing weapons and put this on on and Major Healing on the other. Then use a weapon swap mod like Caster Weapon Swapper to swap to your plus healing weapon after Spellsurge procs for the duration of the hidden cooldown. Presto! Best of both worlds! 9/10 PVE, 6/10 PVP.

Shields

Intellect: Pretty simple, 12 extra int. Good if you're running OOM or need a slight boost of all those int-related stats. I'd pick it for PVE, simply because it's the best of bad options and PVP has better choices. 7/10 PVE, 6/10 PVP.

Major Stamina: No more stam enchants ... please ... I've run out of things to say ... 6/10 PVE, 9/10 PVP.

Resilience: It's really difficult to say whether stam or resilience are better unless you know your particular stats. If you're at 490 resil, go for stam ... if you've got enough health to double as a tank, put this on your shield. It's generally assumed that you want to mix the stats until you hit the resilience cap, and then go for stam. If you're a PVEer, come closer so I can smack you for considering this. 2/10 PVE, 9/10 PVP.

Resistance: In general, the multi-resistance enchants and gems aren't useful unless you're tanking or off-tanking. Even in PVP, it's better to have resistance or something you can swap in that's useful against a particular school of magic than have a generalized low resistance level. 1/10 PVE, 3/10 PVP.

Well, we're done for now. Join me in two weeks when we'll either talk about what enchants are best for tankadins or discuss paladin roleplaying.

Want to delve deeper into the Light? Read The Light and How to Swing It weekly! Check out Zach's recent three-part series on Seals, Blessings and Auras here (part 1, part 2, and part 3.) If you're tired of the light, check out the dark side with Daniel's Death Knights Revealed. And if you're not into paladins, you can look up whatever else you need to know in our feature directory.