Archive for March, 2010

Holy Paladin Raiding 101, ca. 3.3.3

Saturday, March 27th, 2010

Over the past few days I’ve found myself chatting with holy pallies in vent. We’ve talked about reasonably big-picture changes they could be making to improve their healing. I thought it’d be fun to write down the lessons I found myself repeating in each conversation.

Here’s the general idea: if you’re not already hugely comfortable with paladin healing and are kind of lost on where to begin, give these suggestions a try. There’s an decent chance that you’ll do very well.

It should be obvious, I hope, that this isn’t the only way to heal as a paladin.  If you know what you’re doing and you’re doing something different, hey great, keep up the good work.  This post isn’t for you.

This post is trying to give people who are lost a direction to head in.

Before the raid

Before the pull

  • Discuss your healing assignment with the healers.  You’ll be most productive if you can beacon someone taking a lot of damage while spamming heals around the raid.
  • Discuss whether you’ll be judging light or wisdom with the other paladins.  Light is a good choice when you have 5 points in Divinity, but chances are it won’t matter if there are a few protection and retribution paladins keeping both up with their rotations.
  • Discuss your beacon/SS targets with the other holy paladins. It’s bad news to have more holy paladins than significant targets of damage to beacon.
  • Talk to your tanks about healing with Righteous Fury up. The damage reduction from Improved Righteous Fury can help.

During the fight

  • Always Be Casting. If everyone’s at full health realize that someone won’t be by the time your next cast finishes. Aim for them, and realize that your next heal is also on the way to your beaconed tank.
  • Don’t just spam Holy Light. Cast it at least every 15 seconds to keep Light’s Grace up. Cast it when your target or beacon is at a significant deficit. Cast it to hit a group with the glyph heals. But do not underestimate the speed and mana efficiency of Flash of Light. It’s often very powerful to cast it around the raid.
  • Use Holy Shock while moving, but also if someone is almost dead. Appreciate the value of landing an instant heal on someone who may not have another second to live. It’s your fastest heal. Don’t let it go unused.
  • Never let Judgements of the Pure fall off. Ever. Read that twice. Write it on your hand. This is the most common problem I see. Judge at least once a minute. Judgements proc SoW, though, so consider judging as often as possible.
  • Keep your Beacon of Light and Sacred Shield up at all times. Make sure you have a strong indicator of when they fall off or you’ll miss it. I use GridStatusHots. The FoL HoT is often worth keeping up.
  • Heal while autoattacking at melee range, as long as it’s safe to do so. This gives all your instants (beacon, SS, judgments, shock, DP, etc) the ability to make room for auto attack hits which can proc Seal of Wisdom. Mastering SoW regen reduces the pressure to gimp your healing with DP and lets you spend more of your gear budget on throughput (crit and haste) instead of MP5.
  • Time your Divine Plea carefully, but do use it. Know the fights and pick times when the next 15 seconds are relatively calm. Don’t over-estimate the risk. Outside of hard modes you’re almost certainly fine, just step up healing during it.
  • Don’t save your wimpy cooldowns for a time that never comes. I use a holy shock macro that tries to cast Divine Favor before every shock. I have FoL and HL macros that try to use both trinket slots.
  • Do save your major cooldowns for emergencies or fight mechanics. Divine Illumination, especially with the T10 2pc bonus, Avenging Wrath, Divine Shield+Divine Sacrifice+Divine Guardian, and Lay on Hands+Improved Lay on Hands can all mean the difference between a wipe and a kill. Think about the fight before the pull and predict where trouble might occur.
  • Use Aura Mastery to buff resistance auras. Know which fights have instants where the raid takes a lot of frost, fire, or shadow damage. Festergut’s Pungent Blight, with three stacks of Inhaled Blight, is a prime example of this.

I think that covers the most important stuff. There’s a lot of depth that’s glossed over here, but those are the big moving pieces. The Holy Paladin Compendium over at Elitist Jerks is a good place to start if you want to start digging into the details.

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Shield of Righteousness meets Seal of Wisdom

Monday, March 15th, 2010

How many holy paladins out there have Shield of Righteousness on their bars? I’m guessing not very many. I kept it around when I switched from protection to holy and, until recently, only really used it when goofing around.

I bring it up because I’ve been thinking about it as a tool for sustained regen for holy paladins. Around patch 3.3 (I think?) SoR was changed to proc seals. At the time I saw that as a way for protection paladins to proc their threat seals and didn’t give it much more thought. In the last few weeks, though, it struck me that having an instant on a 6 second cooldown that procs Seal of Wisdom might be an absurdly powerful regen tool.

How much regen are we talking about, here? To use it we have to be in melee range. We’ll have a chance to proc from the SoR attack itself, and then we have a chance of getting a melee swing in while the GCD is ticking down. We could be getting two SoW procs, 8% of our mana, every six seconds. To put that in perspective we can look at Divine Plea. It gives back 25% of our mana every minute, or about 2.5% every 6 seconds.

That could be a ton of mana depending on the SoW proc rate. But at what cost? Spending a GCD every six seconds is very expensive indeed. Depending on your cast speed and latency you might be sacrificing, say, 1/5th of your holy light casts. 20% of your healing throughput. Compare that with DP’s 50% for 15 seconds, or about 12% over the course of a minute of spamming holy lights.

But the nature of the cost is very different.

On the one hand, the healing reduction of weaving SoR into the stream of heals is more consistent. Every few seconds you’ll miss a heal, but there will never be 15 solid seconds where all your healing is cut in half. The resulting consistently reduced throughput might well be sufficient for many encounters.

On the other hand, there are gaps in the healing stream. DP nerfs your healing, but works in the background. Keeping SoR on cooldown introduces significant downtime. Every 6 seconds we’ll go over two seconds before a heal lands. Often that’s not a problem. In some encounters, with some healer comps, that’ll guarantee losing a tank.

This is all fascinating stuff to think about. Let’s see what it looks like on a dummy.

That comes to 37k mana.

That comes to 37k mana.

I threw on a weird assortment of buffs to get a little closer to a mix of int and haste that one might see in raiding these days. This was further complicated by having removed items that proc spell power to make the tests more consistent. I used the level 83 dummy because SoR can now be dodged and we want to take that in to account. In every test I started by judging and would keep Judgements of the Pure up by judging every minute, at least.

First let’s set the stage by seeing how long we can just spam holy light:

Seconds until OOM: 65
Heals: 564896 (8690 HPS)

OK, now let’s first cast DP at 85% mana and then every minute as it comes off cooldown.

Seconds until OOM: 104
Heals: 770899 (7412 HPS)
DP mana returned: 18505 (~890 MP5)
SoW mana returned: 2960 (~142 MP5)

DP bought us an additional 40 seconds but our average HPS took a 15% hit. That’s more than the theoretical 12.5% for two reasons. First, we paid the 50% cost for two runs of 15 seconds but didn’t have enough mana to amortize that across two full minutes. Second, the DP itself costs a GCD and delays our healing when it’s initially applied. We got a drip of SoW regen from keeping JotP up and from the melee swings that can arrive during the GCD we spend popping DP.

Now let’s use SoR every time it’s up.

Seconds until OOM: 237
Heals: 1548033 (6531 HPS)
SoW mana returned: 65133 (~1374 MP5)
SoR hits: 36

Using SoR on cooldown cost us 25% of our throughput but let us go four times longer than we could just spamming holy light. Comparing it to DP, we went more than twice as long. We had less throughput, but it was more even. The constant 25% reduction never approaches the occasional 50% reduction of DP. Some back of the napkin math implies that we got around 4% of our mana back for each use of SoR.

While we’re on the subject, let’s see what it looks like to keep judgement on cooldown while healing from melee.

Seconds until OOM: 87
Heals: 694894 (7987 HPS)
SoW mana returned: 7410 (~425 MP5)

By judging every 10 seconds we only drop throughput by 8%. If you only need those extra 20 seconds, or so, this is a much safer way to go than popping divine plea. It’s also interesting because it ensures that our judgement buffs are kept up.

So where does this all leave us? In practice, I doubt that most situations call for using SoR very heavily. These contrived tests just help us better understand where SoR fits in amongst our other tools.

At the end of the day, knowing when to safely bonk the boss with your shield is another opportunity to set yourself apart. Maybe you’ll only do it as you’re running by and holy shock is on cooldown. But maybe you can work it in enough to avoid having to risk the spikey reduction of DP.

I have a dream that some day holy paladins the world over will make the most of their regen tools. We shouldn’t always be that guy standing in the corner calling for Innervate a half dozen times in a long fight.

Wouldn’t that be nice? Give it a try. Surprise your raid leaders.

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