A Holy Paladin and his Ephemeral Snowflake

February 28th, 2010

A few posts back I wrote about wrath trinkets.  I included the [Ephemeral Snowflake]. For some reason I felt compelled to summarize its performance with a single MP5 value. Honestly, I just skimmed the wowhead comments and made up a number. 100’s nice and round, right? Codi, of Moar HPS, pointed out that 100 MP5 for a pally was something not entirely unlike crazy talk.

That, of course, got me wanting to see how it actually performs. The next week I tossed it on for some of our ICC fights on our way to Arthas. Let’s see how it went.

Replenished: Energizes for 11 mana.

The snowflake returns mana every time certain heals land. Its cooldown is very low, on the order of .3 seconds. The cooldown was added after the trinket was first created to stop it from generating an enormous amount of mana for healers who kept HoTs rolling on entire raids.

To understand how much mana it can give us we have to find out which of our heals can trigger its effect. I joined a group with a guildy, threw on the trinket, and we ran to our nearest training dummies.

I was disappointed to find that I couldn’t get it to proc on JoL heals. I have seen reports that it does, but I couldn’t get it to for the life of me. If someone can, I’d love to hear about it.

The mana regen does proc when you’re at full mana and it does proc on heals that are 100% overheal.

So to get the most out of this trinket we have to generate heals at the highest rate. That means spamming HL and getting all 5 heals from the glyph, transferring the base HL through beacon, while keeping the FoL HoT rolling.

The Snowflake Storms Some Citadels and Plagues Some Works

Here’s the average MP5 the trinket generated in the following regular ICC 10man kills:

  • Marrowgar: 2442 mana in 2:50 = ~70 MP5
  • Deathwhisper: 2310 mana in 3:15 = ~55 MP5
  • Saurfang: 3135 mana in 3:17 = ~75 MP5
  • Rotface: 2354 mana in 2:41 = ~70 MP5
  • Festergut: 2882 mana in 2:54 = ~80 MP5
  • Putricide: 3905 mana in 5:34 = ~55 MP5

So, on average, it amounted to about 70 MP5 for me in those fights. That’s not terrible. Compare that to [Binding Light], for example.

Scaling Regen

But that average MP5 number doesn’t tell the whole story. The trinket proc depends on our casting rate. If we generate more heals it will return more mana. That’s an interesting twist. To understand that, let’s look at two fights in depth. Let’s graph the amount of mana returned in every 5 second interval during the fight.

Snowflake regen during Festergut, 5s intervals

Snowflake regen during Festergut, 5s intervals

In the Festergut fight we’re healing pretty hard. Melee is nice and grouped up so we have a great chance of maximizing the number of heals that the HL glyph can generate. The trinket never drops below 44 MP5 in the fight and sometimes gets as high as 110 MP5. That’s 10 procs in 5 seconds, or .5 seconds per proc. That’s awfully close to the supposed internal cooldown.

Snowflake regen during Putricide, 5s intervals

Snowflake regen during Putricide, 5s intervals

The snowflake’s regen during Putricide is less consistent. We’re not generating heals when we hike up our t10 pally skirts and run across the room. The trinket stops giving us mana. The Tear Gas stuns also show up clearly. The trinket stops giving us mana all together while we’re staring at the floor waiting for tear gas to fade. A trinket with normal passive MP5 would happily be ticking away in that case.

So? Figure 70 MP5. Ish.

If you keep the FoL HoT rolling and consistently land heals that also transfer through the beacon you’re almost sure to get 7 heals every 5 seconds. Just keep in mind that if you’re not casting it’s not giving you mana.

If you know the fight has lots of motion or down time then the trinket might not work out so well. It’s no [Solace of the Defeated], that’s for sure. But it’s much easier to get.

I’ll close by pointing out that in every single one of the fights I measured the trinket returned more mana than the [Insightful Earthstorm Diamond], sometimes twice as much. That puts both the trinket and the IED proc into context, I think.

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Holy Paladins vs. The Lich King

February 22nd, 2010

Last night our 10-man crew got our first Lich King kill.

lk-10m-regular-kill

It took us probably around six hours of solid, focused practice. Every few hours we’d slide into a comfortable rhythm with another phase and perfect the next transition. We managed our server-first kill (without Val’anyr or heroic 25-man gear, we’ll have you know!) on the second pull on our third night of serious attempts.

I thought it’d be fun to go over the highlights of healing this fight as a Holy Paladin while the experience was still fresh in my memory.

Overview

There are four distinct modes of the fight. It’s cut up into three main phases with two transition phases between them. The first phase isn’t so bad and will feel comfortable after you’ve learned it. The second phase is the meat of the fight. Even after learning its rhythm you still must pay close attention. The third phase still feels chaotic to me, but we didn’t get much time to practice it. We managed to push through it to the kill after a handful of clean transitions from phase two.

I won’t cover every single detail of the encounter. The following links do a far better job of that. I’ll focus on the aspects of healing the fight as a holy paladin.

Background Reading

Phase 1

Mechanics

  • Necrotic Plague — Cleansing this is the only new trick to learn in this phase. Watch the timers and call out when it is about to go out and then who it lands on. Once that person is in range of the adds you’ll want to cleanse it. You only have 5 seconds so be careful with long casts as it approaches.
  • Plague Siphon — The longer this phase lasts the more stacks the LK will get. Hopefully the LK tank won’t exhaust their cooldowns before the phase ends. Be ready to pop cooldowns and land heavy heals if the stacks get too high.
  • Infest — Sadly, The LK regularly casts this on the raid in all of the three major phases. Ideally you’ll bring a discipline priest to roll Power Word: Shield on the raid. More often than not the shields will absorb enough to stop everyone from dropping below 90%. If something keeps that from happening, though, be ready to throw heavy heals on those with the DoT before it gets out of control.

While this is going on the MT will be taking decent damage. The OT might take significant damage if they get a few horrors up and some number of them enrage. Be ready for it, though you won’t have much time to react.

Cheat Sheet

  1. Heal from melee on the LK
  2. Keep beacon heals flowing between the tanks
  3. Watch for spikes from LK’s stacks or from enraged horrors
  4. Cleanse the plague the moment its target is closest to adds
  5. Watch for the add tank to catch the plague from dying adds
  6. Run to the add tank if you get the plague yourself
  7. When the LK runs to the center, run to the outer edge of the platform

First Transition

Mechanics

  • Pain and Suffering — This is the majority of the damage taken in this phase. In practice, raiders will not be evenly spread out and the DoTs will stack. Be ready to quickly throw moderate heals around the raid.
  • Raging Spirit — Raging Spirits will be summoned on raiders throughout this phase. They’ll most likely be running to tanks as their adds are spawned, but it doesn’t always work out. Be ready to top them up if the adds hit them a few times. Bubbling casters can’t hurt. Be ready to run to a tank yourself. Finally, the adds have a nasty frontal cone attack which silences.
  • Soul Shriek — The adds use this liberally. Stay the heck away from them. Be ready to cleanse the silence immediately, including tanks. It can stop them from taunting the newly spawned adds.
  • Summon Ice Sphere — It’s likely that DPS will worry about killing the spheres, but they’re worth mentioning. Some strats talk about having healers take care of the spheres so DPS can focus on the adds. The spheres have very little health. If you get a chance, a well-timed Hammer of Wrath or 40-yard judgement could be well worth it. At the very least have name plates up so you can call out of the spheres get too close to the raid.

As the transition starts the add tank will still have some adds with the plague left over from phase one. Keep them healed up until their adds are dead and you can finally cleanse the plague off of them. Everyone will stay away from them until that happens.

From that point on, pick a nice spot away from the action and spam heals as the tanks and DPS deal with raging spirits.

When you see the LK cast Quake — you’ve had him as your focus target, right? — tons of blue cracks will appear on the platform. That’s your sign to run back to the center of the platform.

As you run in there are two big snags to watch out for. It’s likely that a raging spirit will be up. First, don’t run in front of its silence. Tanks will likely run in towards the edge while everyone else hugs the center. Second, watch out for lingering spheres. It’s surprisingly easy to overlook them. Keep name plates up and make a conscious effort to watch out for them. If you get too close they’ll explode and send you flying, oh, half way back to Outland. It’s funny the first few times.

Cheat Sheet

  1. Pick an empty spot right up against the edge of the outer rim of the platform
  2. Cleanse the plague off the add tank as the last add dies
  3. Beacon/SS/FoLHoT the tank who will be catching most of the adds
  4. Be ready for significant damage from stacks of the DoT
  5. Boogie to the nearest tank if an add is spawned under you
  6. Stay the heck away from the raging spirits’ silence
  7. Watch for spheres and nuke ‘em only if you have downtime
  8. Run back to the center when you see blue cracks, avoiding spheres and raging spirits

Phase 2

Mechanics

  • Summon Val’kyr — Absolute requirement #1: be as close to the center as possible when each newly summoned Val’Kyr swoops down. In practice, this means running to the center immediately as the phase starts. From then on, only leave the center to spread out for a defile when a Val’kyr is out or on cooldown. In an emergency you might be asked to stun an escaping Val’kyr with Hammer of Justice or Holy Wrath, but that’s better left to DPS with longer stuns.
  • Defile — Absolute requirement #2: Never, ever, be in a defile. Spread out as it comes off cooldown. Run away from its target during its very short 1.5 second cast. Give existing pools a lot of room, they’re bigger than they look. Maybe pop Aura Mastery with Shadow Resistance Aura and hope for a full resist — the pools don’t grow unless they deal damage.
  • Soul Reaper — Work with your tanks to avoid deaths. We let the tanks use cooldowns and we healed hard as it expired. We only taunted and traded tanks as they ran out of cooldowns. This can hit while you’re all scattering to avoid Defile, so keep an eye on where the tank is.
  • Infest — Infest continues to irritate in phase 2.

This phase will seem terrifying the first few times. Eventually you fall into a rhythm of collapsing to maximize the distance the Val’kyr will have to travel and then expanding to keep Defile away from everyone. You’ll get good enough to drop Defile pools right on the edge of the platform. It just takes practice watching the timers and coordinating over vent.

Things can get hairy if a healer is picked up by the Val’kyr. It can be particularly unsettling to have your discipline priest grabbed, leaving you to deal with Infest while everyone runs all over the platform.

As he hits 40% everyone has to get to the outer rim of the platform again, but it’s still gone from the quake during the last transition. It is reformed after the raid is forced to eat a few ticks of Remorseless Winter. Aura Mastery with Frost Resist Aura can take some of the bite out of those ticks.

Cheat Sheet

  1. Get in a few SoW procs off the LK while everyone is grouped up for an incoming Val’Kyr
  2. Spread out a bit the moment the Val’Kyr picks someone up
  3. Haul to the edge as the LK starts casting Defile, maybe pop Aura Mastery with shadow res
  4. Move Beacon/SS around as the tanks taunt, be ready for cooldowns for Soul Reaper if needed
  5. Go into overdrive if a healer gets picked up
  6. Lather, rinse, and repeat for what seems like an eternity
  7. Run to the edge for another transition at 40%, maybe popping Aura Mastery with frost res

Second Transition

Second verse, same as the first! But more. There are more spirits and ice spheres spawned at a time. It wasn’t enough to force me to blow cooldowns. Just stay focused.

Phase 3

Mechanics

  • Vile Spirits — Instead of a Val’Kyr, we now have a bunch of little exploding adds to deal with. Tanks and DPS will hatch cunning schemes to deal with them. We just have to know to stay away from their targets and heal hard as they explode. Their targets will have aggro and so will show up in healing addons. Be ready to coordinate all healing cooldowns with the raid, especially Divine Sacrifice and Aura Mastery with Shadow Resistance Aura.
  • Defile — Defile is still here, but at least now we’re trying to spread out for the summoned adds instead of initially grouping up.
  • Harvest Soul — Heal hard the moment it shows up on the radar. You only have a couple of GCDs before most raiders will die so do not hesitate.
  • Terenas Menethil — If you survive Harvest Soul you’ll have to heal Terenas. Be sure to cleanse Soul Rip.
  • Infest — Boy, this never gets old!

There will be a lot of motion in this phase. Try to choose a place where you can be at a safe distance from people while healing hard. The more you move the more the raid is at risk. Don’t spare cooldowns. It’s possible to have Heroism up for a second time around now, it’ll help you light up the raid.

Stay focused and push hard even if you lose people. As you can see in our video, we goofed up quite a bit in the third phase and still had enough raiders up to manage a kill. Don’t give up until everyone is down. At 10% you win. And for heaven’s sake, don’t release.

Cheat Sheet

  1. Move Beacon/SS around as the tanks manage Soul Reaper
  2. Heal hard and immediately when Harvest Soul goes up
  3. Spread out for Defile and to minimize raiders hit by exploding spirits
  4. Try to watch for raiders with spirit aggro and precast heals around them
  5. Blow all cooldowns, there’s nothing left to save them for
  6. Coordinate raid-wide survival cooldowns as spirits descend
  7. Blow throughput and haste cooldowns if another healer is pulled in to Frostmourne
  8. Heal Terenas, cleansing Soul Rip, if you get pulled into Frostmourne

Magical Mystery Phase

Do not release!
…
Profit!

In Closing

What do we get for our trouble? The Lich King only has weapons in his loot table. For our tank and DPS specs we have [Troggbane, Axe of the Frostborne King] and [Warmace of Menethil]. For Holy, though, we have [Valius, Gavel of the Lightbringer]. In addition to having satisfying lore, Uther’s pointy mace only shares a model with its 25-man cousin: [Royal Scepter of Terenas II]. Guess who lucked out on our first kill?

zabery-valius

I think Blizzard did well with this encounter, like they did with Algalon. It’s rewarding because it’s difficult.  After all, we show up for the challenge, right?

Good luck out there!

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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

The weapons off of 25-man Arthas are going to be [The Turning Tide] all over again, except this time we have a mace and a sword in the mix. We might have preferred haste on the mace from 10-man Arthas, but it’s still worth it. Trauma has no internal cooldown and a 1% chance to proc, making it fun to play with but better left to our healing friends with higher spell cast rates. 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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