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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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!
- Throw up SoW.
- Switch specs back and forth so that your mana pool is empty.
- Start auto attacking and start the built-in stopwatch (/sw).
- When your mana is full stop attacking and stop the stopwatch.
- 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.
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.
- 10m Festergut: 25390 / (3 * 60 + 9) * 5 = 671.65 MP5
- 25m Festergut: 29221 / (5 * 60 + 3) * 5 = 482.15 MP5
- 10m Rotface: 23899 / (3 * 60 + 48) * 5 = 524.10 MP5
- 10m Putricide: 21370 / (7 * 60 + 19) * 5 = 243.35 MP5
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.
Tags: holy paladin, MP5, seal of wisdom
To all the newer Holy Paladins out and about. I use this same theory, try it in a heroic and you will see you are at FM the entire run; it is truly amazing how useful this is. Just be careful, some mobs will rip you up if you’re in melee range. So if it’s one of those bosses or trash mobs stay at range and keep your judgment up, you will be wasting the MP5 gains on healing yourself back up if you are taking too much damage. In most fights, if you attack from behind (like you were DPSing) and you will be fine.
Really great study on SoW! I always try and find my way to throw in melee swings and extra judges for this reason exactly. I’m spec’d Holy/Prot and some of my guild members rant about going holy/ret for the mana regen, but if im never out of mana and crits pretty much add to my over healing, whats the point? Great post.
[...] but when she does brings up topics the rest of us don’t really stop to think about, such as appreciating Seal of Wisdom beyond the glyph bonus or the in-depth implications of the 3.3 Paladin [...]