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An introduction to the holy paladin's healset
Seasoned paladin Dan Desmond is here to answer your questions and provide you with your biweekly dose of retribution medicine, now with a strong hint of holy. Contact him at dand@wowinsider.com with any questions, concerns, or suggestions! Some say that hell is other people. Still others claim that hell is repetition. As for myself, I ask, why not both? I recognize now that resolving to level this paladin solely through the Dungeon Finder was a decision fueled by the type of naïveté only afforded to the impetuous. "Surely it can't be that bad," I assured myself as I began my journey at the eager level of 15. Now, fifty five levels later, I can only shake my head at my own hubris and rock myself to sleep at night. Granted, I may be waxing a bit melodramatic here, but don't judge me until you have spent as long as I have "randomly" queuing into the same section of Blackrock Depths. There is a silver lining to all this, however; repetition, although tedious, helps reinforce muscle memory. I could map out every Clique binding I have while mumbling in my sleep. One thing that I made sure to do while making my way up the leveling ladder was to really get to know my heals: how they functioned and in what situations they would be most useful. Therefore, this week I'd like to touch on those most important of abilities to the holy flavor of paladin, our heals.
So you want to be a holy paladin
Seasoned paladin Dan Desmond is here to answer your questions and provide you with your biweekly dose of retribution medicine. Contact him at dand@wowinsider.com with any questions, concerns, or suggestions! On a clear day, just after the sun has set and there is no moon in the sky, if you are very, very lucky you can just make out the approach of Warlords of Draenor. People with expensive telescopes and bucket hats will insist that it's Mercury, but I've learned to never trust anyone wearing a safari vest. Let's address the question that is undoubtedly burning in your mind: should I use the "boost a character to level 90" feature on a paladin? Well that's a very good question, thank you for asking it. If you don't already have a paladin at max level and want one, Warlords provides a great opportunity to hit the ground running with your new favorite class. Personally, I'm not entirely sure what I will boost. One thing I've always wanted to try was a holy paladin, which would seem to be an easy option given that my protection offspec saw about as much use as Denver's offensive line during the Super Bowl. But just jumping into a completely new role with mostly new abilities never appealed to me, especially if that first jump happened during raid time. I like to be able to prepare for my inevitable failure so that I can write up a short list of excuses why I Beaconed a hunter pet and healed only myself for four consecutive attempts. Scenarios like that are why I try to learn a class from the ground up. Not everyone is like this though; many people prefer to go on the internet and read about these things. Therefore, as I'm leveling I'll recount what I've learned - my triumphs, my mistakes, my body count – in the hopes that should you choose to exalt one of the Light's blessed warriors out of the dregs of the single digits to the heights of the nonagenarians, you might find the transition just a tiny bit easier.
The Light and How to Swing It: Major AoE healing changes in the Mists beta
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. Blizzard has been deploying beta patches at a record pace, which has a lot of stale info being bandied about as fact. The official Mists of Pandaria talent calculator is wildly out of date, and much of the commentary made over the past week is now superannuated. The developers haven't been shying away from making major class changes in these early days of the beta, and so everything is still up in the air. What we do know for sure is that there's work being done to modify our holy AoE arsenals specifically. First, Holy Radiance still generates holy power points for us. The holy power generation mechanic was moved from Tower of Radiance and placed directly onto Holy Radiance itself. Other than that, every other piece of our holy toolkit has been updated, and for the better.
The Light and How to Swing It: 4 Dragon Soul tips to make your DPSers love you
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. With the 15% nerf to Dragon Soul slated for Tuesday and Mists of Pandaria's beta test here already, Cataclysm is winding down. Many guilds are on autopilot in Dragon Soul, simply clearing the place each week for another shot at an elusive trinket or item. You can buy the heroic Dragon Soul title or mount on most realms without too much trouble. With a few months of the same eight bosses ahead of us, it's easy to understand why everyone is focused on what's coming next. I am always looking for ways to optimize my guild's raids. If there's a way that I can shave a few seconds off a boss encounter, I'll take it. There are plenty of areas in Dragon Soul where a clever holy paladin can help move things along. I currently run with a secondary holy talent build that includes Denounce specifically for the purpose of speeding up our runs. If you're still learning Dragon Soul or working on a new heroic encounter, these tips probably won't apply to you.
The Light and How to Swing It: 4 holy talents I want to see in Mists
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. When I look at our upcoming talent tree in Mists of Pandaria, I'm not blown away. Repentance and Divine Purpose are nearly identical to the versions in the retribution tree today. Pursuit of Justice and Speed of Light have been edited slightly but fulfill the same general roles. There are definitely some new talents in the mix as well, like Holy Avenger and the new Sanctified Wrath, but many of the choices are simply repeats of existing talents. I have a few ideas on how to fix that. With equal parts of stealing talents from other classes and coming up with brand new ones, we could liven up our options quite a bit. I want to see more dynamic healing options available, rather than yet another cooldown like Clemency to manage. We spend most of our time in the trenches, pressing Holy Light and Holy Shock until our fingers are numb. Improving holy's style of healing will go a long way toward making the class more exciting to play.
The Light and How to Swing It: Evaluating Mists of Pandaria talents for holy paladins
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. Speculating on talent choices that aren't even being publicly tested yet is risky business. Mists of Pandaria isn't in beta testing yet, which means that everything is still be up in the air. What if holy power gets scrapped between now and then? What if the developers decide that shockadins should actually be viable? There are simply too many unknowns when discussing an upcoming game that hasn't faced any public scrutiny. At the same time, speculating on talent choices with no empirical evidence whatsoever is also fun, because we get to make it up as we go along. I am already imaging a build with the new Pursuit of Justice, where I stack up 5 holy power points via Boundless Conviction and run around with 60% bonus speed for an entire encounter. Will it work with 5 holy power points, or will the speed boost only count 3 of them? Only time will tell. Or Ghostcrawler. But mostly time.
The Light and How to Swing It: Evaluating Holy Radiance's fifth tick
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. I made a lot of sacrifices to hit the 3,500 haste break point, which grants our Holy Radiance spell a free fifth tick. The truth is that the extra tick wasn't free, and it came at a great cost. The question in my mind was whether or not the cost was worth the benefit, whether or not the fifth tick made up for the losses in other areas. Holy Radiance is a pretty important spell in our arsenal right now, and haste is good generally, and so I figured there was at least a chance that the fifth tick could prove valuable. I knew I was making sacrifices to get to that haste plateau, but I had no a priori way to quantify exactly how that would affect my overall healing. I just went for it. After last week's full clear of Dragon Soul with my 3,500 haste build, I now have data to parse. I started matching encounters and parts of encounters in apples-to-apples comparisons using CompareBot to evaluate my performance. The results of my experimentation with a 3,500 haste build had me quite intrigued.
The Light and How to Swing It: The road to 3,500 haste
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. I love the stat break points in WoW. The idea is that at certain values of a stat like critical strike rating or haste, your character's power improves dramatically due to some complex interaction. Not ever spell scales linearly, and so as you reach certain thresholds, your potency can vary wildly. Holy Radiance's interaction with haste rating is a perfect example. The haste rating we acquire obviously lowers the spell's base cast time, which is how every spell works. However, at certain values of haste, we can actually cause Holy Radiance's AoE HoT to proc for an additional tick of healing. The extra tick of healing tacks on an extra 10% to 15% healing to each Holy Radiance we cast, dramatically affecting the spell's potency. The problem is that while the first haste break point for HR is easily achievable at 777 haste rating, the next break point requires nearly 3,500 haste rating to achieve.
4 major updates for holy paladins in Mists of Pandaria
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. Blizzard recently promised to release a flurry of Mists of Pandaria information in March, but apparently it's opened the gates early. The Mists of Pandaria talent calculator and ability list received a massive update this week, giving us new info on the talents and spells that holy paladins can look forward to in Mists. In addition, the Blizzard community managers have been answering questions about the new data at a rapid-fire rate. Holy paladins have a lot to look forward to in Mists. It's clear that the developers have been looking at our weaknesses as healers, as several of our long-standing issues have been addressed. While we've always had a wide variety of utility abilities, until recently, holy paladins really only had single-target heals at their disposal. With the introduction of the revamped Holy Radiance in late Cataclysm and now the new talent options we'll in Mists, our base healing toolbox is looking more and more complete.
The Light and How to Swing It: New tools for evaluating holy paladins
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. DPS classes have it easy. Their only goal is to deal more damage than the other guys. Their existence revolves around a single, immutable metric: DPS. There's no ambiguity when comparing two damage classes, as their DPS speaks for itself. As a DPS player's gear and skill improve, it directly increases their damage done, allowing them to evaluate their performance clearly and instantly. Evaluating a healer is much more difficult. As their group's damage and skill improve, their healing numbers will actually go down. Healers are relied on the most when a raid is attempting a new encounter and gradually become marginalized as the fight moves toward farm status. As a healer, your best HPS performance might be the very first time you down an encounter. If you're killing heroic Ultraxion in four minutes, your raid simply isn't taking enough damage for you to parse highly. In order to properly evaluate a holy paladin's play, you have to dig deeper.
In defense of intellect plate
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. There was some talk on the official forums recently about the logistical issues presented by plate gear with intellect on it. The best part of the preceding sentence is that it was true last year, it's true this week, and will probably continue to be true next year. While the gear itself was originally called spell plate due to its spellpower stat, it's now usually referred to as intellect plate. The issue isn't with intellect plate or holy paladins, because they've both been serving their purposes perfectly. The problem is how intellect plate interacts with boss loot tables, affecting everyone else in the raid.
The Light and How to Swing It: Nerfing Holy Radiance to the ground
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. Paladins haven't always had the most amicable relationship with the community team and developers at Blizzard. Retribution paladins have fought for years with the blues over their perception of being constantly nerfed, which is a nice way to say that ret paladins enjoy playing the victim. Their claims do have some merit, though, as the paladin class has undergone major transformations in nearly every expansion, and not always for the better. In patch 4.3.2, the developers are handling a few balance issues. Fire mages are being tweaked downward, while hunters should be doing slightly better overall. Oh, and the mana cost of Holy Radiance is going up by 14%. Holy paladins are already complaining on the forums about this nerf, but the truth is that it's irrelevant. Even as Holy Radiance has seen two nerfs in as many patches, it's still an amazing spell. It takes a lot more than a 14% mana cost bump to erase Holy Radiance's dominance.
The Light and How to Swing It: 3 essential addons for holy paladins
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. Holy paladins have come a long way from the days of five-minute Blessings and WhisperCast. There's a good kind of complexity that comes from being given choices, and there's the bad kind of complexity that comes from busy work. The developers are constantly streamlining the game and removing outdated mechanics, and I can't complain. Even though addons like PallyPower made our lives easier, the new Blessing system is so simple that we don't need any external help to handle it. Today's holy paladin has different addon needs from the healer of yesteryear. Three of the most important holy paladin addon concerns are unit frames, holy power management, and raid-specific alerts. In Dragon Soul, there are plenty of important things that we need to keep track of. Raid encounters are only going to get more and more complex and chaotic, and we need to be able to quickly get the information we need.
The Light and How to Swing It: How to compare intellect and spirit in Mists of Pandaria
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. With Mists of Pandaria coming up on the horizon, many holy paladins are looking ahead to the changes that the expansion will bring. Most of the talent and ability info is still very malleable at this point, and as such, I haven't begun to worry or get excited just yet. One thing that we do know is that in Mists, intellect will finish the transformation that it started in Cataclysm. Intellect is going to become a throughput-only stat, as it will stop increasing our maximum mana. Today, intellect and longevity are nearly synonymous. Replenishment and Divine Plea are two of our largest mana sources, and they both scale off of our intellect. Most paladins are sporting intellect gems and trinkets, and intellect flasks and food fill up our bags. Holy paladins have been leaning on intellect for a long time due to its versatility, and it seemed like the decision to roll spell power into intellect would permanently ensure intellect's role as our best stat. By decoupling intellect and mana, the developers are changing everything we know about gearing a healer.
The Light and How to Swing It: Examining secondary stats for holy paladins
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. Despite any arguments to the contrary, I don't feel that spirit is a true secondary stat. I know you can reforge in and out of it and that it's not as ubiquitous as intellect, but it's actually closer to being our fifth primary stat. In Mists of Pandaria, intellect will no longer grant additional mana, making spirit the only game in town for improving longevity. Because of the way holy paladins function with the new Judgements of the Pure regeneration mechanic, spirit has gone from a good choice to a must-have stat. When we start talking about the true secondary stats, we realize that there's a lot of baggage here. Haste rating was the de facto champion due to its ability to affect all of our heals, critical strike rating was avoided after the removal of Illumination, and our master rating has gone through more iterations than any other spell in Cataclysm.
The Light and How to Swing It: Remembering our first year of holy power
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. As I looked forward to this year last December, I wasn't sure holy paladins were going to survive 2011 in one piece. We were just learning to adapt to the three-heal model and figuring out how to manage our holy power properly, and I had serious doubts about our AoE healing and mastery bonus. Luckily, I was wrong, and we have thrived in Cataclysm. We started by focusing on our specialty, powerful tank healing, and then expanded to take over the raid healing role as the year progressed. While holy power and the new healing model were the big topics of early 2011, AoE healing has clearly been the topic that defined this era in holy paladin history. Holy Radiance's first beta version, Healing Hands, was loudly trumpeted when the Cataclysm NDA was lifted. Light of Dawn's struggle to find a place in our arsenal has caused more lines of paladin patch notes than any other ability. Learning to AoE heal has been our biggest challenge this year but also our greatest success.
The Light and How to Swing It: 5 clever tricks for maximizing your Dragon Soul healing
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. If you're a holy paladin with a pulse, there's no reason not to be raiding Dragon Soul. The Raid Finder allows us healers to find groups in minutes, with no strings attached if you have to leave early. The normal versions of the bosses are all accessible for guilds across the spectrum of dedication levels. Healing a raid in Dragon Soul gives you access to the best gear available and provides us with the greatest challenge we can face today. I was looking at my World of Logs parses from the old days, and I was surprised to see how bad my HPS looked then when compared to more recent parses. The first step in preparing yourself to heal in Dragon Soul is to realize that the instance isn't built like Bastion of Twilight or Firelands. While the Ascendant Council repeatedly punished the raid for clumping and Baleroc crushed our tanks, many fights in Dragon Soul involve tight stacking and tons of AoE healing. Optimizing our AoE healing has become a key to succeeding in Dragon Soul.
The Light and How to Swing It: Juggling Yor'sahj's oozes
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. While Ultraxion is definitely the most unique fight for healers in this tier, Yor'sahj the Unsleeping is a close second place. The boss' abilities are simple for the DPS classes and tanks, but healers will constantly be reacting to the summoned oozes and their various effects. These globules cause us to shift our healing strategies with each new wave, and learning to handle the globules will be the key to mastering this encounter. Every raid group is going to handle the ooze packs differently. You need to familiarize yourself with what each ooze can do, and then combine the effects based on your raid leader's preference. You'll be faced with three oozes at a time on Raid Finder and normal difficulties, with the option to kill one ooze out of each wave. On heroic difficulty, there are four oozes per wave, for a total of three effects on the boss after you've killed one of the oozes.
The Light and How to Swing It: Blinding Ultraxion with the Holy Light
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. As the fifth boss of Dragon Soul, Ultraxion is the gateway boss to pursuing Deathwing and stopping the second cataclysm. While Thrall and the dragon aspects are busy with the Dragon Soul itself, we're tasked with defending Wyrmrest Temple from Ultraxion's assaults. Simple, right? Ultraxion is an incredibly simple fight for tanks and damage dealers. In fact, it's already being called the Patchwerk-fight of this tier. Aside from a few extra button presses, non-healers are simply tasked with bringing Ultraxion down as quickly as possible. Healers, on the other hand, play a very special role in this fight. We're fighting against rapidly increasing AoE damage to the raid, and the aspects themselves step in to help us accomplish our task. Ultraxion is the healer-centric fight of this tier, like Baleroc and Chimaeron before him.
The Light and How to Swing It: Latest holy paladin preview for Mists of Pandaria
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. The official Mists of Pandaria talent calculators were released by Blizzard recently, including a list of each talent tree's abilities. By diving into the skill list and analyzing the talents, there is a lot of information available. Most of the information is old, as we learned about many of the changes at BlizzCon and in the developer question and answer sessions. It's hard to draw any concrete conclusions from the talent preview because the Blizzard team has stated that everything is still up in the air. Since the information is still in a pre-alpha state, I can guarantee you that what we're seeing today will be changed dramatically by the time Mists of Pandaria is released. While we can't make any firm predictions, we can gain some insight into the direction that holy paladins are headed, and we can offer feedback to the developers on that direction.
