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The Light and How to Swing It: Adjust your healing in patch 4.3
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 patch 4.3 looming on the horizon, holy paladins need to be prepared for all of the changes that are headed our way. Both of our AoE healing options have been significantly altered, along with several of the talents and glyphs that support these abilities. Retribution paladins are also looking forward to a few buffs to their sustained DPS, but their ability to help with AoE healing is being greatly reduced. Our core mana regeneration mechanic is about to be completely scrapped. In fact, if we continue using Judgement without making any adjustments, we'll actually have less mana in patch 4.3 than we do today. We've been healing with holy power for nearly a year now, but many of the habits we've picked up along the way will need to change.
The Light and How to Swing It: Putting our Hands to work
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 healers were defined by their heals, then holy paladins would be the strong, silent type. Our roster of healing spells has always been meek. The three-heal model of Cataclysm and the introduction of our holy power heals definitely increased our selection, but we have nowhere near the healing spell diversity of a priest or druid. We're only now receiving a true AOE heal in patch 4.3 with Holy Radiance's redesign. Rather than leaning on a variety of healing options, holy paladins like to keep it simple. We're able to compensate for our undiversified healing tool box by drawing on our numerous other abilities. We might not have as many healing spells as the other guys, but we certainly have more utility spells than they could ever dream of. Our "Hand of" spells allow us to go further than any other healer can.
The Light and How to Swing It: How to use holy cooldowns efficiently
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 are blessed with a robust selection of cooldown abilities, which improve our performance for a short period of time. Other classes like the restoration shaman have far fewer options for increasing their healing output on demand, which makes holy paladins one of the most flexible healing classes. In addition to boosting our single-target throughput, our cooldowns can also vitalize our AOE healing and reduce incoming damage. When faced with such a large number of cooldown options, it can be difficult to pick the right ability for the job. Each of our cooldowns works in a unique way, with different strengths and weaknesses. By choosing the right opportunities to use each of our cooldowns, we can maximize our healing and minimize the chance of someone dying. Because of how powerful our cooldowns are, you should be using them on every boss encounter. They become especially important on heroic fights, as our healing capacities will be put to the test.
The Light and How to Swing It: Dissecting the melee healer myth
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. Back in the day, the paladin and shaman classes were exclusive to the Alliance and the Horde, respectively. The two classes were designed to be polar opposites, highlighting the differences between the factions. Paladins were designed to be defensive melee hybrids with tanking as one of their talent trees and no true ranged build. Shaman, of course, were offensive ranged hybrids with a caster DPS option. Because of this original bifurcated design, paladins have inherited several traits and abilities that have caused us to be typecast as the melee healers. While the truth is that holy paladins don't need to stay in melee range to get the job done, the ideal has always persisted that paladins should be getting down and dirty with their foes. The gap between that dream and reality hasn't been a serious issue for us, but Mists of Pandaria might change that. The new mistweaver healing spec for the upcoming monk class has been described as a unique healer that relies on melee attacks to do their job efficiently. With another healer moving into our melee territory, do we have any reason to be jealous?
The Light and How to Swing It: Throttling holy paladins in PVP
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. Last year, Nethaera, a Blizzard community manager, informed us that the interaction between Protector of the Innocent and Beacon of Light was completely intentional. Holy paladins were still feeling out the new spells and talents that we received in Cataclysm, so it was nice to know that at least one thing was working as intended. Now, some ten months later, we're seeing Beacon of Light and Protector of the Innocent disconnected from each other on the patch 4.3 PTR. Why break a mechanic that's worked right since its inception? The developers aren't happy with healers in PVP situations. The massive Holy Radiance changes were a nerf to PVP holy paladins, and the PotI nerf affects them more than raid healers. The devs are also buffing Mortal Strike effects to allow them to cut our healing down by 25%, up from the 10% healing debuff that we've been working with for months. The Seal of Insight/Judgement changes also affect us negatively in PVP environments. Removing Holy Radiance from our Speed of Light talent reduces holy's mobility.
The Light and How to Swing It: Working with a single school of magic
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 several features that make them powerful healers in PVP environments. Our diverse utility spells provide us with capabilities that our rivals can only dream of, and we have plenty of cooldowns that can counter our opponents' actions. While holy paladins are generally considered to be strong PVP healers, we aren't without our weaknesses. Our most notable flaw is our complete reliance on a single school of magic -- holy. All of our spells and abilities are tied to one school of magic, which means that interrupts are incredibly potent at shutting down holy paladins. Even Judgement, which feels like a physical attack, is tied to the holy school. Interrupts are obviously potent against any caster, but holy paladins are especially hurt since we don't have any alternative spells to fall back onto. Mages can still cast Frost Nova if their Arcane Blast gets Kicked, and shaman can use any of their fire spells after getting a heal hit by Pummel. Holy paladins are useless when interrupted, which provides us with a unique set of challenges.
The Light and How to Swing It: The AOE heal we deserve
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. From launch until Cataclysm, holy paladins survived on just a handful of heals. We traded healing complexity for unique utility, gaining Aura Mastery instead of Wild Growth or using Hand of Freedom instead of Prayer of Mending. Holy paladin healing was so simple for so many years, as we tended to gravitate toward a single spell like Flash of Light or Holy Light in each expansion. While any other healing class could have complained that their class had become stagnant, holy paladins had literally been playing the same game of whack-a-mole for years. Cataclysm's massive retooling of paladins and introduction of the three-heal model helped breathe new life into playing holy. Holy power gave us a unique mechanic to manage and gave us additional choices to make when healing. The three-heal model ensures that we're forced to choose between throughput and efficiency, and now we're challenged with managing our mana as well as our healing. Even though these changes drastically shifted the way we play our paladins, we were still relying on the same single-target heals we had always been. Healing Hands, now known as Holy Radiance, was the spell designed to upset the status quo.
The Light and How to Swing It: Radical changes to holy paladins on the 4.3 PTR
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 first checked out the official PTR change list for the upcoming patch 4.3, I wasn't expecting many holy paladin changes. We've been performing admirably in Cataclysm, comfortably straddling the line between obsolescence and ubiquity. Upon the reading the changes, I was shocked to see such radical changes to our talents, spells, and playstyle. Patch notes like these are always scary, as we don't know if we're being gutted or reinforced. I immediately downloaded the latest PTR client and got to work. Holy Radiance was completely retooled into a cast spell that we use on a friendly group member, with talents changed to reflect the new design. We gained two new holy power sources, and Light of Dawn had its target count shifted. Our bread-and-butter mana regeneration mechanic, the Seal of Insight and Judgement system, was also scrapped in favor of a flat regeneration buff that scales with our spirit.
The Light and How to Swing It: Healing by the numbers
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. Every raid encounter is designed to challenge the players attempting it. Tanks can be faced with controlling several mobs at once, while DPSers often have enrage timers to race against. Blizzard's developers have a few different tricks for putting healers to the test. The first and most obvious danger that healers face is the rate of incoming damage, which we have to counter with spells that are appropriately powerful. We are also often tasked with reacting quickly to stimuli, like instantly dispelling or bringing a raid group's life back to full before another incoming attack lands. With the release of Cataclysm, the developers specifically focused on a mechanic that had been sidelined for quite some time -- mana management. Our spells' mana costs have been tweaked and mana regeneration capabilities have been altered to ensure that we focus on choosing the right spells. We used to be able to spam Holy Light carelessly in Wrath, but now we can't sustain nonstop Divine Lights for more than a minute or two without emptying our mana bar completely. Learning to live with a limited mana supply is paramount to being a successful holy paladin in Cataclysm.
The Light and How to Swing It: Synergizing with druids and shaman
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 asked my favorite restoration shaman (David the shaman) what the resto spec's weaknesses were, he had listed off several areas he'd like to see improved. I posed the same question to a restoration druid, and he replied back with an emphatic "There isn't one!" Restoration druids are currently the most powerful healers in the game, and by a large margin. Every other healing class might pale in comparison to a druid's massive HPS capabilities, but resto druids aren't the indomitable healers that they might think themselves to be. Holy paladins have a diverse and robust toolkit of spells that allows us to complement restoration druids and shaman. We can focus on each class' strengths and weaknesses to choose our healing spells and strategies effectively. We learned how the two priest healing specs vary and how to work with each, and now we'll cover the two restoration healers.
The Light and How to Swing It: Synergizing with priests
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 can't do it all. While we might be the best-dressed spec in the game, we occasionally need for other healers to give us a hand. The developers have done a great job giving each healer a niche for them to fill. A holy paladin must know the strengths and weaknesses of the other healing classes in order to be able to work alongside them. While all healers are somewhat normalized by Cataclysm's introduction of the three heal model, it's each class's unique spells that give them flavor. We all start with the same base, and then our signature heals and cooldowns allow us to differentiate ourselves. Holy paladins can adjust their healing style and strategy to complement their partner healers instead of competing with them.
The Light and How to Swing It: Leveling your holy paladin in Cataclysm
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. Of the three roles in WoW, healers are the odd man out. While mages might call it damage and a warrior might call it threat, the fact is that DPSers and tanks both excel at hurting their opponents. One of my guildmates often refers to tanking as "just DPSing from the front." Healers, on the other hand, have nearly no offensive capabilities. The developers were nice enough to give every healer a cheap spell or two to spam to make us feel like we're contributing, but our DPS is abysmal. Healers, more than any other role, are pointless without a group to support. Throughout the years, we've heard the legends of the shockadin -- the holy paladin build that doled out merciful healing and wrathful judgement in equal doses. While offensive builds for the holy tree have always been around, they've never been truly viable in any serious situation. I love the thought of Holy Shocking some hunter right off his high horse, but the numbers just don't add up.
The Light and How to Swing It: Healing is a zero-sum game
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. Have you ever cut a cake at a party? Dividing a cake into portions is an example of what economists call a zero-sum game. The total amount of cake is fixed, and you can slice it how you see fit. There's only so much cake to go around, so giving someone a bigger portion means that there's less for everyone else. You can't take half of the cake for yourself without reducing the size of the other pieces. In a zero-sum game, you're sharing a limited resource with your fellow players, and one person's gain is another's loss. Healing is a zero-sum game. Over the course of any given encounter, your raiders are only going to take so much damage. If one healer is handling 75% of the incoming damage, then there's only 25% of the incoming damage for the other healers to handle. The more HPS a healer does, the less their teammates are capable of. DPS classes work in the opposite way, where the more DPS one class does, the more DPS everyone does. Because of this unique zero-sum game that healers compete in, judging a healer's performance can be difficult.
The Light and How to Swing It: Healing against Ragnaros
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. What is it with bosses in WoW not learning from their mistakes? We've had to put an end to Kel'Thuzad's sick experiments in two different expansions, while Nefarian actually rebuilt his sister so that we could fight the two of them again. Nobody can forget Kael'thas' infamous return, and I know I've killed Anub'arak like 12 different times now. It seems now that Molten Core was merely a setback for everyone's favorite Elemental Lord, Ragnaros the Firelord. Ragnaros must've missed the memo about Al'Akir falling to our might, or else he might've hired a few more majordomos. Ragnaros isn't a difficult fight for healers, at least not specifically. There's plenty of damage getting tossed around, but nothing terrible life-threatening. I would liken the encounter to Heigan of Naxxramas, where positioning and reaction times were more important than raw throughput. Ragnaros has two types of damage: damage that's simple to heal through, and damage that will instantly kill you. If you can teach your raid to avoid the one-shot abilities, then you'll have no problem dealing with everything else.
The Light and How to Swing It: Healing against Alysrazor
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. My 10-man raid team has three healers, but none of us has an off-spec. Once we mastered the fight, Alysrazor feels like an encounter that only really requires two healers. We loved having three healers while learning, but now that it's on farm, I decided to try out a shockadin hybrid build for this encounter. I actually spent the majority of my time spamming Exorcism on the adds and Rebuking their casts. The reason that I'm able to be in melee range of the casters is Beacon of Light's massive 60-yard range, which allows me to heal a tank even when I'm way past any other healer's effective range. When you first engage Alysrazor, your entire raid is knocked back and blasted with fire damage. I immediately assumed that the encounter was going to revolve around heavy AOE damage, and I readied myself to use Holy Radiance on cooldown while bracing myself for a good crying session once it was over. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Alysrazor actually doesn't require that much AOE healing outside of her final phase. For the majority of this fight, holy paladins get to focus on what we do best: single-target healing. I like to use a Divine Favored Holy Radiance to counter the opening AOE blast, as Divine Favor will be up again for the AOE phase later on.
The Light and How to Swing It: Healing against Rhyolith
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. Firelands and the Molten Core have a lot in common. Ragnaros is the end boss of both raids, with a majordomo in place as his last line of defense. We fight Flamewaker bosses in both zones, and the skinning professionals in your guild will be complaining that nobody is looting the hounds. There's plenty of fire to stay out of, and you'll fall into lava if you leave yourself on autowalk. While the developers don't have any issues reusing old idea, they also create their fair share of new designs. Lord Rhyolith is the perfect example of an encounter that implements new mechanics and forces us to think outside of the box. Every fight has its unique flavor, but Rhyolith (at least phase 1) is nowhere near what we would consider to be a standard tank-and-spank encounter.
The Light and How to Swing It: Healing against Shannox and Beth'tilac
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 only seven bosses to claim, Firelands is one of the smallest raid tiers we've seen over the past couple of years. I've found that the raid can seem much larger than it actually is due to the massive size of the zone. We're able to explore the terrain and advance in any direction that we please. The first five bosses can be killed in any order, and we fight each on unique terrain. There's also a plethora of interesting trash mobs and mini-events along the way. Two of the easiest bosses in Firelands are Shannox and Beth'tilac. If you're just starting in Firelands, it's highly likely that you raid will be facing one of these two bosses first. The encounters are very different for healers, at least until their final phases. You'll want to spend most of your time conserving as much mana as possible, as healing against these bosses gets more difficult as the fights progress. Your ability to keep the raid alive will buy your DPS the time they need to finish the job.
The Light and How to Swing It: How to rock Baleroc
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 how to fly, you fools. While I hate to boil down an entire encounter to a single idea, sometimes it simply can't be helped: Baleroc is the healer fight of this tier of raid content. The developers have been throwing one healer fight at us per tier since Wrath began, making Baleroc the latest in a long line of mechanics designed to let healers play outside the box. Chimaeron and Anub'arak made us focus on keeping health pools low but not too low, while Loatheb and Valithria challenged our burst and sustained throughput. General Vezax's awful aura forced us to make every point of mana count, although our love affair with intellect helped us weather that storm. Baleroc makes us choose between healing the raid and healing the tank. It's one of the age-old questions for healers, but Baleroc has upped the ante with the Vital Spark/Vital Flame mechanic. The choice of healing targets is transformed from a simple problem to a crucial decision, as the wrong move can cause a wipe. Luckily for you, Beacon of Light will help you truly shine on this encounter, allowing holy paladins to dominate the top 40 board on World of Logs.
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's effect on holy PVP
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 have a feeling that the developers have a hard time balancing healers for PVP combat. How should healers be killed in PVP? Should we run out of mana eventually, or is a bursty switch the only answer? Can the focused efforts of a single DPSer be enough to topple us, or should it take two players to finish us off? Trying to balance all of these elements for four different classes with five different healing trees is a challenge by any measure. Every organized PVP encounter revolves around the healers involved, especially in the golden bracket of 3v3. Prior to patch 4.2, teams loved seeing a holy paladin across the arena from them, as holy paladins weren't exactly amazing at 3v3 matches in the first few months of Cataclysm. We have a few key weaknesses, notably our lack of any long-term crowd control like Hex and our lone school of magic, holy, which leaves us defenseless when interrupted. We weren't completely ineffective in arenas before patch 4.2, but we also weren't breaking any records or winning any #1 Healer trophies.
