WotLK Trinkets for Holy Paladins

February 7th, 2010

Now that Arthas’ loot table has been released and we know the entirety of Wrath of the Lich King loot, I thought it’d be fun to look back at the trinkets that raiding Holy Paladins have at their disposal. I often find myself looking at subsets of trinkets for a given task or tier, but I’m not sure that I’ve ever sat down and taken a broad view of the trinkets that we used throughout Wrath. Let’s do that.

Trinkets, by design, are hard to categorize. Their variety is intended to add some flavor to our gear sets. Sometimes we might want a constant effect, other times we might want to trigger a proc at just the right time during an encounter. Depending on what you want, the best trinket for the job might be a weird drop from three or four tiers back.

To bring some order to this mess let’s group the trinkets by their primary passive effect. Then we’ll list the secondary proc effects of the trinkets in each list. We’ll use a bit of shorthand to describe the procs. Something like “15s/45s Chance:” means that every 45 seconds there’s a chance of triggering the proc which lasts for 15 seconds. “20s/2m Use:” means that every two minutes you can chose when to trigger the effect which lasts 20 seconds.

This isn’t an exhaustive list. There are a decent number of trinkets which have an effect that we’re interested in that is paired with an effect that we don’t really care about for healing raids. PvP trinkets, trinkets with hit, and trinkets with secondary effects that proc on “harmful” spells are examples of trinkets that fall into this category. Sure, using one of these would be better than using no trinket at all. We wouldn’t search them out as a valuable raiding trinket, though, so they’re not included in this list.

This list won’t tell you what to use. It’ll let you glance at what’s available and maybe, hopefully, help you come up with fun ideas for when to use which trinkets.

Intellect

Personally, I use the talisman and pandora’s plea in my day to day healing. Tears of the vanquished stands out for being a strong trinket that is very easy to farm.

MP5

Am I the only one who thinks that the direct heal procs are underwhelming? My resto tree BFF and I routinely sustain thousands of HPS in 10-man ICC. A single heal proc with a cooldown measured in minutes, even if there was no overheal, is a drop in the bucket. If I were to value a passive MP5 trinket, I think I’d aim for the spell power procs. I’m also having fun triggering the snowflake just after popping out of the emerald dream in the Valithria encounter.

Spell Power

This expansion is crammed full of spell power and regen trinkets. There’s a few decent throughput options, as well.

Critical Strike Rating

These were a lot more compelling before Illumination’s regen was cut in half. These days a Holy Paladin would be teased for wearing these.

There we have it! I think that covers most everything that we’re likely to see in the wild. Enjoy!

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What a Wonderful Raid

January 29th, 2010

Over the past few weeks first the holidays and then the various wings of Icecrown opening kept delaying our attempts at Alone in the Darkness (10 player). We’d been sitting on a save with Yogg up for all that time. After clearing ICC10 earlier this week we finally got around to Giving AitD some real attempts tonight. Once we got the kiting down it really wasn’t all that bad.

It was still a fun time and wasn’t a complete pushover, even two tiers later.

But it gets better. Our hunter sometimes records FRAPS movies of our kills. He also had a funny song he used to sing when we were still figuring out how to stay out of the green clouds.

I’ll leave it at that and let the movie do the .. singing.

See? That, right there. That’s why I play this game with these guys.

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Should Holy Paladins use the Ember Skyflare Diamond?

January 24th, 2010

Vivalabambam posted a comment in the 3.3 gear post which asked when it might make sense to consider using the [Ember Skyflare Diamond] instead of the [Insightful Earthsiege Diamond].

Holy paladins, by and large, are taught to use the IED without question. The dogmatic justification for this is that it will take an outrageous amount of Intellect for 2% to approach 21, that the mana from the IED is useful, and that the spell power from the ESD is useless.

Viv’s — I can call you Viv, right? I’m not sure what else to do with such a fantastic name — question is based on the clever observation that the metas were designed back in early wrath before gear scaling was inflated by the introduction of heroic gear tiers. As our gear scales into the stratosphere in ICC it makes sense to re-evaluate gems which scale with that inflated gear.

It’s an interesting question. Let’s take a look.

2% vs. 21

In deconstructing the comparison, we first can look at the Intellect bonuses of the two gems. On the surface it’s a trivial question. At what level of Intellect will a 2% bonus equal 21?

X * .02 = 21
X = 21 / .02
X = 1050

So you’d have more Intellect by wearing the IED if you have more than 1050 Intellect, right? Heavens, no. We’d all have switched to the ESD long ago if this were the case.

The first complication is the activation cost of the meta effect of each gem. If we’re stacking Intellect we can activate the IED with one [Nightmare Tear] and put [Brilliant King's Amber] in all the rest of our sockets. If we’re activating the ESD we must have three gems with red components. Activating the ESD requires socking two more gems with red components at a cost of 20 Int.

Raid buffs are the second complication. The 2% bonus from the ESD stacks Gift of the Wild and Arcane Brilliance. Blessing of Kings stacks with the bonus of both gems and so can be ignored. And yes, let’s keep it simple and assume people aren’t using [Elixir of Mighty Thoughts] — though I have been known to in some fights!

((X + 52 + 60) *.02) = 21 + (2 * 10)
X = (41 / .02) - 112
X = 1938

At 1938 Int from gear and talents the two gems will give the same amount of int when counting socketing costs and raid buffs. If you have more base Int than this the 2% of ESD will give more Int.

If you’re already wearing the IED, and have gemmed with a tear and all brilliant, that’ll be 1979 unbuffed in the character sheet and 2300 in the character sheet with full raid buffs.

If you’ve gemmed differently the cut-off point might be lower because you may already have red gems and have already been paying the activation cost of the ESD.

2% vs. MP5

If the gems only granted either 2% or 21 Int then it would be painfully obvious when to make the switch. But the ESD gives spell power and the IED has a chance to restore mana. It’s the IED’s proc, oh so cleverly named Mana Restore, that has everyone so excited. It has a 5% chance of restoring 600 mana with a 15 second internal cooldown. Let’s examine it in detail first.

The 5% proc chance means that the duration between procs varies wildly. Here are the seconds between procs that I saw on a 10m Marrowgar kill: 88, 35, 16, 47. Here are the total amounts of mana it gave in regular 10m ICC kills:

Marrowgar: 3000 mana / 207s = 70 MP5
Deathwhisper: 1800 mana / 214s = 40 MP5
Saurfang: 1800 mana / 247s = 35 MP5
Festergut: 1200 mana / 207s = 25 MP5
Rotface: 2400 mana / 244s = 25 MP5

So the IED proc gives us an unpredictable mana source. What else does that do for us? Absolutely nothing. It only returns mana.

The ESD’s 2% meta effect scales with our gear. As we get upgrades we get more Int than we would otherwise. For every 50 Int from upgrades we get 1.1 (with kings) additional Int. That, in turn, gives us more mana, spell power, and crit chance.

It should be possible, with a theoretical fight, to construct a sufficiently complicated model to compare the 2% Int benefit to the IED proc as Int scales with upgrades. The more mana we get from Int from the ESD the more mana we’ll get back from Divine Plea, Replenishment, and Seal of Wisdom. The more crit chance we have, the more mana we get back from Illumination. At some point the scaling regen from the ESD would truly overcome the static regen from IED. It would take an enormous amount of Int for that to be the case.

That sounds really complicated. I think there’s a much simpler way of looking at it: If you don’t have mana problems then IED’s mana restoration proc is worthless.

There’s an obvious test. Did you worry about having to use DP or did you ever drop below the amount of mana IED restores in a fight? Given our giant mana pools, and its unpredictable total returns, that’s a pretty low bar. When’s the last time you were at 3% mana in a fight? 8%? When’s the last time you really didn’t have some down time in a fight for a well timed DP?

If the mana proc is worthless then all the benefits from ESD’s scaling int, no matter how small, are better than nothing.

Should you? You tell me!

In the end, whether you’re interested in the ESD once it gives more Int comes down to how you’re comfortable playing. If you feel like you’re always chewing through mana and are having to worry about it then you might not like the ESD. If it feels like you haven’t worried about mana in months then you might be interested in toying with the tiny, but scaling, bonuses that the ESD gives as we get upgrades in ICC.

If you’re not sure, give it a shot. A few weeks ago I hit the transition point after a handful of ICC upgrades and made the switch. So far, so good.

(This was edited from the initial post. Having spent most of the post typing “2%”, I initially mistyped the IED’s proc as 2%, not the current best guess of 5%.)

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Appreciating Seal of Wisdom

January 18th, 2010

The majority of holy paladins heal while using Seal of Wisdom simply for the 5% mana cost reduction from [Glyph of Seal of Wisdom]. What about the proc effect of the seal, though? Is it worth it?

Let’s spend a few minutes looking at just how amazing it can be.

The Basics

Some experimentation, like this comment in Wowhead, helps us understand the basic mechanics of SoW.

  1. It scales with our mana pool. The proc restores 4% of our total mana. This puts it in league with Replenishment and Divine Plea, our other major sources of regen which scale.
  2. The proc from melee swings scales with haste. The proc seems to have no internal cooldown and procs on a little less than half of our melee hits, regardless of their frequency. This turns significant sources of haste — Judgements of the Pure, Heroism, [Ephemeral Snowflake], [Potion of Speed] — into non-trivial sources of regen.
  3. Melee swings don’t proc while casting. They couldn’t. If they did, we’d really and truly have infinite mana. Spells with cast times seem to reset the melee swing timer. However, instant cast spells leave room for a melee swing to get off while the global cooldown counts down before our next cast. This gives instants an interesting secondary effect of making room for regen from seal procs.
  4. It procs off judgements. Holy paladins almost universally put two points in Enlightened Judgements, extending the range of our judgements to 40 yards. Yes, we have a long range spell on a 10 second cooldown which has a significant chance of returning 4% of our total mana.

In Theory

SoW generates a positively absurd amount of mana if all you’re doing is auto attacking. Give it a try!

  1. Throw up SoW.
  2. Switch specs back and forth so that your mana pool is empty.
  3. Start auto attacking and start the built-in stopwatch (/sw).
  4. When your mana is full stop attacking and stop the stopwatch.
  5. Find the total mana gained for the “fight” in Recount’s ‘Mana Gained’ page, divide by the number of seconds, and multiply by 5.

When I did that with my ToC-era gear it came to about 1900 MP5. That’s without any buffs. With JotP, raid buffs, and consumables that increase Intellect and Haste — the stats that SoW scales with, remember — I measured about 3200 MP5. Yeah, seriously.

In Practice

So, sure, it’s ridiculous regen if all we’re doing is bopping something on the nose with our silly mace. It’ll proc a lot less often when we have to run out of fires and, you know, heal people. Is it worth trying to get some regen out of it?

If you upload your combat logs to World of Logs, and you should, you can see the amount of mana gained from SoW in a given fight by looking at the ‘Power Gains’ table in the ‘Buffs Gained’ tab of your character’s page.

wol-power-gains

As of this writing the bosses in the Plagueworks of Icecrown Citadel are the farthest available progression bosses. Let’s look at our guild’s logs and see how much mana I got from SoW in some kills.

That’s not kidding around.

The 25m Festergut result is interesting because almost 500 MP5 was sustained while keeping the tank up through Inhaled Blight and while keeping the raid up with four other healers.  Even while healing hard we can get decent mana from SoW procs off melee swings.

I was surprised by how much mana it returned in 10m Putricide, I have to admit.  As you can see in our Putricide kill video, I’m almost never anywhere near the boss. In the entire fight I had 14 SoW procs out of 8 melee hits and 17 judgements. We spent 439 seconds in the fight, 399 when you remove the pauses during Tear Gas. That’s about 40 possible judgement cooldowns. SoW sustained 250 MP5 while staying at range and judging about half as often as was possible.

Gear MP5 Still Wimpy

In all those fights I had around 100 MP5 in my gear.  In fights where we can hang out with melee, even when we have to chain cast hard, SoW gave me back around five times as much mana.

But stop and think about the SoW regen from Putricide in the context of MP5.  That encounter is one of the most mobile in Wrath — arguably second only to Firefighter in the list of awful fights to heal as a paladin.  In that fight, without even trying, regen from SoW managed to give back more than twice the mana as MP5 from gear.

So yes, I heal with Seal of Wisdom.  Not for the 5% cost reduction from the glyph, though that’s nice.  I use SoW because, when executed properly, it gives so much mana that I’m free to avoid spending gear itemization on MP5 without running out of mana.

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Patch 3.3 for Holy Paladins

December 8th, 2009

Patch 3.3 is finally here!  Hooray!  Let’s see what the 3.3.0 patch notes have in store for holy paladins.

(This has been edited a bit since it was first posted. I was willfully misreading the patch notes in the hope that our FoL would always leave HoTs on the target — no such luck.)

  • Divine Guardian: This talent no longer increases the amount of damage transferred to the paladin from Divine Sacrifice. Instead it causes all raid and party members to take 10/20% reduced damage while Divine Sacrifice is active. In addition, the duration has been changed to 6 seconds, however the effect does not terminate when Divine Sacrifice is removed before its full duration.
  • Divine Sacrifice: Redesigned. The effect of Divine Sacrifice is now party-only and the maximum damage which can be transferred is now limited to 40% of the paladin’s health multiplied by the number of party members. In addition, the bug which allowed Divine Sacrifice to sometimes persist despite reaching its maximum damage has been fixed. Divine Sacrifice will now cancel as soon as its maximum damage value is exceeded in all cases. Finally, damage which reduces the paladin’s health below 20% now cancels the effect early.

Yikes! That’s a mouthful. There’s four major changes.

  1. Shorter duration. DS is now six seconds instead of 10. Darn.
  2. Only redirects from your party. DS now redirects damage only from your party, not the entire raid. Boo. But maybe it doesn’t have a range limit now, which would be nice.
  3. Actually caps redirected damage. Supposedly it now will actually stop redirecting damage. This is awesome. It stops us from having to chain it with Divine Shield to protect ourselves from 100k incoming damage.
  4. Raid-wide damage reduction for the full 6s, always. Even if the redirection stops, the raid still takes less damage for the full duration.  This is  fantastic.

On balance, I’m awfully excited by these changes. Decoupling DS from having to bubble, and so also from anything that triggers Forbearance, should give us more flexibility in when we can use our long cooldowns.

  • Hand of Sacrifice: Damage transferred via this ability can now be prevented by damage absorption effects.

I haven’t seen a lot of chatter about this, but I’m excited about it too. It used to be awfully risky to try to heal through damage from HoS which was redirected from a tank. Using Divine Protection to mitigate that incoming damage might give us another tool we can feel safe using.

Notice that Blizzard also accidentally put in a duplicate entry for the HoS bugfix under Blessing of Sacrifice, which hasn’t existed since the great renaming of blessings to hands. It’s almost like naming spells by putting seven words in a bag and picking them at random can be kind of confusing!  Those of us who are still cranky about the naming of Hand of Reckoning (which has nothing to do with the fistfull of “Hand of” spells (formerly blessings), nor Reckoning; nevermind [Reckoning]) can hopefully be forgiven grinning a little.

  • Flash of Light: This spell no longer causes a heal-over-time effect unless the player has the Infusion of Light talent.
  • Infusion of Light: This talent now causes the paladin’s Flash of Light spells to heal the target for 50/100% of the Flash of Light healing amount over 12 seconds.

It’s not entirely clear from reading the patch notes, but the HoT still only appears if the target has Sacred Shield. Previously any paladin’s FoL could leave a HoT on shielded targets, but now only holy paladins can do it. There’s no change for PvE healing, but it makes soloing as ret slightly more irritating.

  • Divine Intervention: This ability now also removes Exhaustion or Sated from a target if the recipient is out of combat when the effect ends. In addition, the cooldown on this ability has been reduced from 20 minutes to 10 minutes. Cannot be used in Arenas.

The thinking paladin hasn’t been speeding up wipe recovery with DI because the target would be left with (exhaustion|sated) and could not benefit from (heroism|bloodlust) on the next pull.  Now we can.  It would have been great to have this back when we were chain pulling Algalon.  On the downside, there went another bag slot.

  • Lay on Hands: This ability will place Forbearance on the paladin if used on his or herself. It will not place Forbearance on others.

Paladins now have to put casting Lay on Hands on ourselves in the bucket of mutually exclusive cooldowns: Divine Protection, Divine Shield, and Avenging Wrath.  Keep it in mind if you use LoH to top yourself off after being resurrected.  I try to reserve LoH for reducing damage on a tank so this doesn’t feel like a big deal.

I think that’s it.  Let’s go heal some stuff!  Dibs on the [Battered Hilt]!

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Holy Paladin Icecrown Gear List

November 23rd, 2009

(This post now includes Arthas’ loot table. Enjoy. — Z, Early Feb ‘10.)

Well, it’s that time again. Patch 3.3 brings us Icecrown Citadel and the final set of upgrades that we’ll be seeing in Wrath of the Lich King. Blizzard has gone all out. We have items available from bosses, crafting, emblems, faction rep, and even quest lines. Let’s see what Holy Paladins have to look forward to.

I want to keep this post nice and simple. I chose to build this gear list with the following guidelines:

  1. No cloth, leather, or mail and no items with hit or spirit.
  2. The relative value of an upgrade will depend on the individual healer. For this list I’ll use the following simple priorities: iLevel > Crit > Haste > MP5.
  3. Heroic upgrades of items are omitted, as are the 10m tier pieces.

I liked the icons I used in the Ulduar gear list to show which stats a given piece has. Let’s use them again:

  • Items with crit and haste
  • Items with crit and MP5
  • Items with haste and MP5

Here we go!

Head

  1. [Sanctified Lightsworn Headpiece] T10
  2. [Faceplate of the Forgotten] Festergut 25

I can’t see many paladins preferring the faceplate once they’ve acquired these well-itemized tier pieces.

Neck

  1. [Blood Queen's Crimson Choker] Lanathel 25
  2. [Holiday's Grace] Festergut 25
  3. [Soulcleave Pendant] Saurfang 10
  4. [Choker of Filthy Diamonds] Rotface 10

We have a pretty decent set to choose from. With luck we can pick up the soulcleave pendant from Saurfang early on and then sit tight until we finally get to Bloodqueen and have access to the choker.

Shoulder

  1. [Sanctified Lightsworn Spaulders] T10
  2. [Rusted Bonespike Pauldrons] Marrowgar 25
  3. [Emerald Saint's Spaulders] Valithria 10

Like the head slot, our shoulder tier piece is fantastic. Either of the 10-man pieces will do until you can get your hands on the tier upgrades.

Back

  1. [Frostbinder's Shredded Cape] Valithria 25
  2. [Drape of the Violet Tower] 50
  3. [Heartsick Mender's Cape] Blood Princes 10

This is certainly a step up from Ulduar. We have a great best-in-slot piece to watch for and we can blow some emblems on an upgrade until we see it drop.

Chest

  1. [Sanctified Lightsworn Tunic] T10
  2. [Rot-Resistant Breastplate] Rotface 25
  3. [Chestplate of Unspoken Truths] 95
  4. [Chestplate of Septic Stitches] Putricide 10

Tier wins again! I’m starting to get used to this lightsworn business.

Wrists

  1. [Crypt Keeper's Bracers] Princes 25
  2. [Bracers of Pale Illumination] Gunship 10

Honestly, there’s not a whole lot to choose from here. Grab what you can.

Hands

  1. [Gauntlets of Overexposure] 60
  2. [Fallen Lord's Handguards] Deathwhisper 25
  3. [Sanctified Lightsworn Gloves] T10
  4. [Festergut's Gaseous Gloves] Festergut 10

Oh no! We have to decide between strong off-tier pieces and the 4pc T10 bonus! It was a little too easy to ignore the terrible T9 set bonuses and happily take whichever pieces were best itemized. I’m undecided, but am leaning towards dropping the 4pc bonus.

Waist

  1. [Lich Killer's Lanyard] 60
  2. [Belt of the Lonely Noble] Trash 25 (BoE)
  3. [Waistband of Righteous Fury] Gunship 25
  4. [Tightening Waistband] Lana’thel 10

The lich killer’s lanyard is readily available, very well itemized, and has an awesome name. Expect every holy paladin in your neighborhood to be sporting one.

Legs

  1. [Puresteel Legplates] BS 8
  2. [Sanctified Lightsworn Greaves] T10
  3. [Leggings of Dying Candles] Valithria 25
  4. [Corrupted Silverplate Leggings] Marrowgar 10

Oh no! T10 vs no-MP5, round two. We might have dodged a bullet, though. Both the leg and hand tier pieces have crit. There’s a decent chance that we’ll be around the point of diminishing returns of haste rating with this gear level so trading haste for MP5 in these tier pieces might not be such a bad thing at all.

Feet

  1. [Protectors of Life] BS 5
  2. [Boots of the Funeral March] Valithria 25
  3. [Ancient Skeletal Boots] Marrowgar 10

Another slot with not much choice. It’s nice that the strongest piece out side of 25-man hard modes is crafted, though it’ll be no fun competing with melee DPS for primordial saronoite.

Finger

  1. [Ashen Band of Endless Wisdom] The Ashen Verdict - Exalted
  2. [Ring of Rapid Ascent] Gunship 25
  3. [Incarnadine Band of Mending] Princes 25
  4. [Marrowgar's Frigid Eye] Marrowgar 25
  5. [Cerise Coiled Ring] Princes 10
  6. [Runed Signet of the Kirin Tor] 1000 1
  7. [Signet of Putrefaction] Festergut 10

Boy, there’s quite a lot to choose from here. Everyone can easily get the kirin tor and the friendly ashen verdict rings right out of the gate. At the high end expect a mix of rapidly ascending, coiled, and endlessly wise rings. That spell power proc and gem socket are both fun.

Trinket

  1. [Althor's Abacus] Gunship 25
  2. [Purified Lunar Dust] 60
  3. [Sliver of Pure Ice] Marrowgar 10
  4. [Bauble of True Blood] Lanathel 25

The abacus is interesting because its proc is a smart heal that can crit and which appears to have a long range. It has a 45 second internal cooldown, however. The lunar dust proc works out to about 100 MP5, the sliver about 67 MP5 if you always spend a GCD on it when it’s up. The bauble is underwhelming, to put it politely. None of these seem compelling when compared to trinkets like the [Talisman of Resurgence] or [Pandora's Plea].

Main Hand

  1. [Bloodsurge, Kel'Thuzad's Blade of Agony] Arthas 25
  2. [Royal Scepter of Terenas II] Arthas 25
  3. [Valius, Gavel of the Lightbringer] Arthas 10
  4. [Trauma] Rotface 25
  5. [Quel'Delar, Lens of the Mind] [Battered Hilt] quest chain
  6. [Lockjaw] Rotface 10

Both of the weapons off Arthas that have MP5 also have crit. We might well see holy paladins leaning towards bloodsurge and rolling with every other caster DPS in the raid. It’ll be [The Turning Tide] all over again. Trauma has no internal cooldown and a 1% chance to proc, making it fun to play with but better left to our druid friends. Quel’delar and Lockjaw give nice throughput or regen options.

Shield

  1. [Bulwark of Smouldering Steel] Marrowgar 25
  2. [Lost Pavise of the Blue Flight] Sindragosa 10

Like our wrist slot, we have very little to choose from here. The fantastic news is that the bulwark is available from the very first boss in the raid! You might even be able to get it from PUGs if you don’t regularly run 25-man with your guild.

Libram

  1. [Libram of Blinding Light] 30

I can’t decide if this is worth it. On the one hand, it takes quite a while to get up three stacks and we have to burn a spell we’d like to keep available for emergencies to do it. On the other hand, it’s a guaranteed stack instead of the random chance that ToC’s [Libram of Veracity] will proc. And we can keep the stack up while running. Hmm.

There we have it! Now go beat up some bad guys and take their stuff.

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Healing Herald of the Titans as a Holy Paladin

November 9th, 2009

About two months ago our 10-man group got the server-first Herald of the Titans achievement,  much to our surprise.  We managed to get it on the last pull of our fourth hour of attempts.  We were less than a minute away from wiping the raid as the hour-long timer expired.

herald-achievement

As part of my effort to return to blog posting, let’s look at healing this as a holy paladin.  Here are my recollections of the fight, two months later.

alg-door-thumbBring a strong healing team.

This sounds silly, but I can’t stress it enough.  The tanks will be taking extreme incoming damage.  You won’t be able to keep them up by yourself by spamming Holy Light.  You won’t have spare cooldowns to top up the raid between spikes of tank damage.  We got it done by bringing my holy pally, a shaman who was speced mostly for tank healing, and a resto druid.

Gear up.

The achievement is a bit gimmicky, to be honest.  There’s no way we could have done this with gear that is actually only available from 10-man content.  Almost all of us had ilevel 226 gear from regular 25-man Ulduar in almost every slot.  Even with that, it’s still a challenging fight and you’ll be cutting it very close.  Every little bit of oomph you can bet by bringing your gear up to the limit will be needed.  Here’s a link to a wowhead search that is a decent starting point..

Heal from melee.

You’ll be chewing through mana as you throw Holy Light around the raid.  I found it most comfortable to heal from melee for the huge regen from Seal of Wisdom procs.  You need to watch out for Cosmic Smash targeting melee near you, but you don’t have to worry about gimping your healing with Divine Plea.  Be very careful getting into position, though.  When you pop out of the black holes don’t go running all the way back to Algalon in one go.  Stagger running with Holy Light casts.

Be very careful with the tank switches.

The tanks will be taunting off each other as they reach a given number of stacks of Phase Punch.  Do everything you can to see this coming.  Use DBM to get timer bars for each application, use Grid and GridStatusRaidDebuff to see the stacks, and have your tanks call out on vent.  The taunting tank will need to have heals incoming before they taunt.  I found it most comfortable to throw up Sacred Shield on the new tank a few seconds before the taunt, start spamming Holy Light on the new tank, and only move Beacon of Light over once the new tank has aggro and the other healers have buffed them up and started hots.

Use a variant of the 52/17/2 “bubble” holy/prot spec.

You’ll be healing from melee so you’ll have nearly infinite mana.  The regen from the crit talents in the retribution tree aren’t very useful in this fight, and even less so now that Illumination’s regen has been cut in half.  The duration and absorption buffs to Sacred Shield from 2/2 in Divine Guardian, however, are enormous in this fight.  The damage reduction from 3/3 in Improved Righteous Fury is also very valuable.

Embrace Sacred Shield’s absorption.

Don’t be fooled by Sacred Shield’s relatively low position in the list of healing you do with each of your spells.  Look at some parses and calculate how much of the tank’s incoming damage it absorbs in a fight.  It can be on the order of 5%.  Think of it as a tank survival cooldown that is always up.  Since we have so much regen from seal of wisdom, we can use trinkets and consumables that give spell power and buff the absorption even further.  Get the T8 4pc bonus if at all possible, it’s just incredible.

Target melee to make the most of the Holy Light glyph.

The tank will be catching the stream of holy lights from beacon. Our goal is to target the holy light cast at a raid member with the lowest health who has the greatest number of people near them.  This maximizes the splash healing from the [Glyph of Holy Light].  If you can, ask a melee class to always try to be within 8 yards of the tank so that the tank can catch the glyph’s splash healing.  This is especially useful after the raid’s health is cut in half as a Collapsing Star dies.

Aura Mastery is worth the cooldown.

The raid has two significant sources of damage which can be resisted by our auras: shadow damage from dying Collapsing Stars and fire damage from Cosmic Smashes.  Either resistance should be buffed by Aura Mastery every time it’s up just before the incoming damage.  In our case we found it most beneficial for our shadow priest to use Prayer of Shadow Protection while I ran Fire Resistance Aura.  The cosmic smashes were easier to predict than coordinating with the DPS who were killing the stars.

Use Divine Sacrifice to iron out difficulties.

In a perfect world, we’d pop Divine Shield and Divine Sacrifice such that the latter’s duration covered the most incoming damage.  That’d mean just as Collapsing Stars die or as Cosmic Smash hits near melee.  Those tend to happen when the raid is in a comfortable rhythm, though.  After a few wipes you’ll have a feel for when you tend to lose people.  Pop divine sacrifice then.  Maybe it’s on tank switching, maybe it’s bad luck as a star dies just as a cosmic smash lands, or maybe it’s while people are getting back into position after being phased.  Whatever it is, use Divine Sacrifice to give the raid a little more breathing room when it has the most trouble.

alg-chest-thumb

Enjoy it!

This is my favourite fight in WoW. We’ve pulled it a ridiculous number of times and I still get excited as the initial effect kicks in. Have a blast with this, it’s fantastic content.

Finally, a personal note. There are very few things in WoW that I’m not embarrassed to be proud of. Getting this achievement with our 10-man group is one of them. Dusty and Jace have said it before me, but I’ll say it again: you guys rock.

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I can use my sockets again!

October 20th, 2009

It’s been two months since I last posted.  That’s unacceptable.  I’ll get back into the habit of posting with the embarassing story of how I just found myself leveling blacksmithing.. for the second time!

Zabery’s history of professions is as follows:

  1. Leveled to 80 with mining and blacksmithing.
  2. Dropped mining for jewelcrafting, awesome.
  3. Having gone temporarily insane, dropped blacksmithing and leveled enchanting so I could disenchant and be self-sufficient.
  4. Having over-valued the lame utility of enchanting and under-valued blacksmithing’s sockets, dropped enchanting and leveled blacksmithing.
Ore and bars needed to level blacksmithing to 400, almost.

Ore and bars needed to level blacksmithing to 400, almost.

Notice anything in that screenshot?  Yeah, if you do the math you’ll find out that I fell for Blizzard’s awesome trick.  Fel Iron and Adamantite both require 2 ore for ever bar, unlike every other bar in the game.  Hilarious.

Crafted pieces from leveling blacksmithing from 350 to 400.

Crafted pieces from leveling blacksmithing from 350 to 400.

There really should be some achievements for this level of nonsense.  Maybe [So.. Much.. Thorium.] for leveling blacksmithing more times than is healthy.  Or for having dropped one ridiculously expensive crafting profession and leveled another ridiculously expensive crafting profession in its place: [The Grass is Always Greener].

Mark these famous last words: I’m never leveling another crafting profession again.

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Holy Paladins should love 3.2

August 14th, 2009

It’s been a little over a week since patch 3.2 went live. I’ve had a chance to heal most of Ulduar with the holy paladin changes. So, in a word, what’s my impression the changes so far?

Ignis 25

Ignis 25

Mimiron 25

Mimiron 25

XT 10 Hard

XT 10 Hard

Mimron 10 Hard

Mimron 10 Hard

Awesome.

I think it’s fair to say that paladin healing received a huge buff in 3.2, when put in the right hands. There’s now quite a lot of healing throughput available to the holy paladin who can make the most of our available tools.

Beacon finally frees us from focusing on a single target.

Imagine we’re assigned to the main tank and the raid is taking a decent amount of damage. Examples in Ulduar are legion: Ignis scorching the tank while the raid eats flame jets, XT’s tantrums, Kologarn tanks waiting for taunts during oblivion, Hodir’s frozen blows, Mimiron’s plasma blast while some raiders eat napalm blast, and on and on it goes.

Before 3.2 only effective healing flowed to our Beacon of Light. It was awfully risky to let our beacon keep our tank up while helping heal the raid. If our awesome raid healers beat our pokey Holy Light to a raid target then our assigned tank would get a tiny amount of the holy light’s potential. We want to shower our tanks with giant holy lights, not 2k beacon left-overs. So we had to put on our blinders and spam our tank.

In 3.2 the full amount of a heal flows to the beacon, regardless of how much it healed our target. We can now contribute significant bursty raid healing while our tank receives the same healing stream that they did before 3.2. This can also add healing from the [Glyph of Holy Light] if our target is in a pack. Previously our tank might have been on the other side of a giant hit box from our raiders, rendering our glyph useless.

I can’t over emphasize how significant this change is. It’s a huge buff to our healing throughput when the raid is taking significant damage — exactly the situation in which our healing throughput matters the most.

Beacon’s range is now 60 yards.

Yeah, as if buffing beacon’s throughput weren’t enough it can now transfer heals from as far as 60 yards away. Did your beaconed dummy tank just run out range of your 40 yard heals? No problem! At the very worst you can always heal yourself and magically extend the range of every single one of your heals to 60 yards, a 50% buff.

That’s just a cute fringe benefit, though.  The intent is to stop us from having to worry about healing DPS at max range, on the other side of the boss from the tank, who ends up being too far for the heal to make it to the beaconed tank.

The Flash of Light HoT rewards competence.

Flash of Light now leaves a HoT on the target if it was protected by any paladin’s Sacred Shield when the heal lands. A casting paladin, of any spec, can have HoTs up on multiple targets. Each paladin can only have one HoT up on a given target, however. A paladin’s HoT on a target will reset each time the paladin lands a new FoL on that target. So you won’t get any HoT ticks if you chain FoL a shielded target.

Combine this with beacon transferring the entire heal and you have an opportunity to shine. Beacon and shield your assignment. Only cast FoL on your assignment to renew the HoT, otherwise always cast heals on other targets and let the beacon transfer the heal.

I hacked GridStatusHots to show the duration of my FoL HoTs so that I could easily keep them up and ticking. During the boss fights in a typical 25 person Ulduar farming night it came to 4.4% of my overall healing. In comparison, the glyph of holy light came to 9.7%. That’s not bad for something that’s so easy to keep up.

The FoL HoT also creates a hilarious mini-game to play during mind-numbing trash. See if any healers notice the paladin rolling HoTs around the raid by chain casting SS and FoL. Extra points for having a UI that shows you other paladin’s shields that you can use to skip a SS.

Divine Sacrifice doesn’t seem to have been fixed.

I’m still seeing parses that show a single cast of Divine Sacrifice lasting the full duration and transferring much more than my health, while bubbled.

wol-xt-ds-healing

I can’t imagine dropping the 52/17/2 Holy/Protection build as long as this remains such an incredibly powerful tool.

The mana regeneration nerf isn’t so bad.

I haven’t found myself in serious mana trouble even though our mana regeneration took a serious hit.  To try and quantify the situation, let’s take a look at the Kologarn fight where we can’t really get into melee and feed off of Seal of Wisdom procs.  Here’s the regeneration as reported by WoL parses before and after the patch, expressed as MP5:

kologarn-32-regen

Illumination took it in the teeth and Replenishment didn’t do much better.   I swapped out my previous [Ember Skyflare Diamond] for the trusty old [Insightful Earthsiege Diamond] since Divine Intellect was nerfed, making ember’s 2% intellect less appealing.

I didn’t include MP5 from gear because I don’t really have it recorded before the patch.  If you factor in the buff it received and Blessing of Wisdom then you start to see that the change in total regen isn’t anything like illumination’s “50% nerf” that people focus on. Overall our regen probably dropped by, what, on the order of 15%? That seems much more manageable.

I think this brings us back to the overall theme of 3.2 — if you play well, you’ll do fine.

Stop spamming, start playing.

Yes, we can no longer mash holy light while watching TV in a raid.  Excellent holy paladins were not doing that in the first place.

Holy paladins should move their beacon and shield around, precast, mix flash of light and holy light, use hands when appropriate, keep their judgement up, melee for seal procs, maybe throw around some aura mastery, and weave in DP and DI — all depending on the conditions of the raid.

If you’ve always been doing that then you’ll excel in 3.2.  If you haven’t, now’s the time to learn.  You’ll love it.

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We miss our Hobbes

August 6th, 2009

This lit up AC’s forums today:

Raspberries, foshizzle.

Raspberries, foshizzle.

The very first thing that came to mind when I saw the link was a memory of BRK asking who to misdirect on to with a mouth full of cookie.

/salute

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