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25m Heroic Portal Jockey Video: I am renewed!

Tuesday, July 27th, 2010

Alpacaa’s been asking for a video of healing the Valithria Dreamwalker encounter for, well, ever. I finally remembered to flip on recording on a recent farming night. Happily, we had a few DPS go in that night so we get to see Portal Jockey (25 player).

The thing that still gets me about this encounter is how maddening it is to try and guess the position of the barely visible red clouds. They’re not 3d objects. No, they’re flat textures that are always rotated as though you’re looking at them head on. It takes a silly amount of camera fiddling to discover their position in space. I hope they do away with this particularly clumsy bit of rendering in Cataclysm.

For the overly thorough: here’s a link to the worldoflogs healing report for the fight in the video. Before it expires into the mists of time, at least.

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First Impressions of the 31-point Holy Paladin Talent Tree

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

I’ve been avoiding posting about Cataclysm so far because it’s still so early in the process that it’s likely to change quite a bit. I generally don’t want to sink a bunch of analysis into such a moving target. My motto has been that once it’s on the PTR then we can start to really dive in to changes that might actually hit the live realms.

But today Blizzard released a build that included the initial drafts of the 31-point talent trees. It’s fascinating stuff, so interesting in fact that it’s convinced me to break my rule. Let’s take a look at what the holy tree might look like in Cataclysm, complements of mmo-champ’s talent calculator.

If you’ve been living in a cave and missed it, we’re talking about Blizzard’s intention to slim down the current talent trees for Cataclysm. The idea is to fold the bland mandatory talents into the core of the class (trained abilities, spell base values and coefficients, mastery bonuses), throw away some truly clumsy stuff, and leave interesting choices as talents. You can read the original blue post announcing 31-point talent trees from July 13th.

To set the stage, here’s my incredibly detailed rendering of the difference between the current holy tree on potential cata holy tree:

initial-cat-holy-tree-illustrated

It was just too crazy with arrows showing where things moved..

Let’s start with the talents that vanished all together.

This all seems reasonable to me.

We can definitely do without divine favor. If you’ve spent any time with combat log parses recently you’ve probably noticed that most holy pallies don’t bother to cast it.

I guess we can now walk through the talents in each tier of the new tree. Some of the talents don’t appear to be updated in Wowhead’s database yet. I’ve tried to mark them as having old tooltips.

Tier 1

Sanctified Light -> Sanctified Light
(holy light and shock crit +6% -> judge and shock crit +15%)

Not much here. The choice of buffing judgment might seem strange at first, but wait a few tiers. We’re going to care a lot more about judgement damage as holy.

Spiritual Focus -> Spiritual Focus

A simple addition of our new heal to pushback protection, not much to see here either.

Divinity

Divinty trades spots with Seals of the Pure, which then ends up in the prot tree. This makes sense in the Cataclysm model where you can’t spend talents in other trees until you spend 31 points in your first tree. This gives people leveling holy access to divinity much earlier.

Tier 2

Healing Light -> Healing Light

Again, the simple addition of divine light.

Improved Lay on Hands

No change. It’s still a huge DR cooldown available pretty early in the tree.

Judgements of the Pure -> Judgements of the Pure (old tooltip)
(25% seal and judge damage, 15% haste -> 9% haste)

That’s a decent amount of haste to lose, it’ll be interesting to see if we feel the difference with the new raid buffs and healing gear itemization. The other big change is that it flew up the tree, giving early holy pallies faster casts. I’m willing to write off the loss of the judgement damage as noise during rebalancing.

Unyielding Faith -> Unyielding Faith (old tooltip)
(-30% fear and disorient duration -> -50% cast time after fear or disorient)

Now that’s interesting, but I’m not a huge fan of PvP so I don’t have a strong feel for the implications. It certainly feels in line with the general rhetoric to slow down crazy bursty arena matches.

Tier 3

Illumination -> Illumination (old tooltip)
(30% mana back on HL/FoL/shock crit -> 30% back on all “abilities”)

Instead of scaling the percentage chance to get 30% back up with 5 points, we scale the mana returned up to 30% with 3 points. That’s a fine cleanup. It’s also nice that it presumably now procs on all our heals, it’d be interesting to see if it also procs on damaging abilities. That might make some attacks even more potent regen tools if part of their cast can be refunded in addition to their current SoW procs.

Divine Light

Our new slow, large, heal.

Beacon of Light -> Beacon of Light

Beacon flies up the tree! Today it’s available at level 60, in Cata it becomes available at level 20. This will be a great help to early paladins who are trying to heal groups.

The real news, though, is that only holy light and holy shock are transferred to the beacon. Today everything transfers to the beacon. One could say that we chose the size of our heals by what our beacon target needs, but we can help out the raid by landing that heal just about anywhere. With the new beacon we might have to return to our beaconed target if the appropriate heal they need doesn’t transfer. We’ll be duplicating our healing out in the raid less often.

This’ll be awfully interesting to see. It’ll chance our triage flexibility, for sure.

[Inspired Judgement] (not in wowhead yet?)

Are you sitting down? “Your Judgement spell also heals your Beacon of Light target for 100% of the damage caused.” That’s just crazy talk.

Today we rely on judgements for haste, at the very least. Most of us also judge reasonably often for SoW regen. But every time we do that we’re creating a gap in the healing stream. On some fights (enraged shambling horrors, juggling multiple saurfang marks) that gap can be pretty risky. Making judgements also heal cleverly mitigates that risk.

It’ll be awfully interesting to see how much damage and healing judgements can end up doing. All the other talents that mention Judgement just got a lot more interesting.

Tier 4

Infusion of Light -> Infusion of Light

There went the FoL HoT. I haven’t noticed if it’s surfaced somewhere else. I rather like it ticking away, I have to admit, so I hope it’s not gone for good.

Blessed Life -> Blessed Life

No change. Maybe PvP rebalancing will make this more interesting, but it seems like a long shot.

Enlightened Judgements -> Enlightened Judgements
(judgement range +30 yd, +4% hit -> judgement range +30 yd, +100% spirit as hit rating)

Remember those judgements that now heal our beacon? Yeah, I don’t want them to miss either. The change from a flat hit percentage to scaling hit rating with spirit is an interesting choice. It’s hard to get a feel for what that implies without seeing how all the stats balance out.

Tier 5

Improved Concentration Aura

I’m a little surprised that this hasn’t changed, given that it feels like a participant in the PvP arms race. Maybe it still will.

Aura Mastery

Also unchanged. While we’re here, can I vote for a return to a longer duration? Thanks.

Sacred Cleansing -> Sacred Cleansing (old tooltip)
(30% chance on cleanse to increase resistance -> cleanse also dispels magic)

A previously unreliable PvP talent (”chance of having a chance of..”) is reborn as our corner of the great dispelling redesign in Cataclysm.

Tier 6

Purifying Power -> Purifying Power (old tooltip)
(confusing pile of mana cost and cooldown reduction -> judge debuff caster on cleanse)

“When you Cleanse a harmful effect, you have a 100% chance to strike the caster of the harmful effect with your Judgement ability.”

OK, that’s just awesome. Presumably the judgement will then heal our beacon. Will it work on bosses? Will the judgement proc seals? How will line of sight work? Can we use this to cheese the range of Judgement of Justice? Man, now I want to fool around on the beta.

Holy Power -> [Selfless Healer]
(5% holy spell crit -> 6% healing spell crit on others)

It’s a subtle tweak, but it seems reasonable to suggest that selfless healer is taking the place of holy power in the tree.

I have to admit that this, along with quite a lot of the other healing effect and crit buff talents, feels exactly like the kind of boring required talents that we are trying to get away from. It seems like these math talents should be hiding behind coefficients and gear. If we don’t want other specs to have access to them then hide them behind the tree’s mastery bonuses?

Tier 7

Divine Illumination -> Divine Illumination
(50% mana cost reduction for 15s -> 30% “spell and attack” crit for 15s)

That’s an interesting take on the current DI. Instead of just flat out reducing mana it takes a round-about path through Illumination to provide a weaker equivalent. With larger health pools that increased crit might actually amount to something. It’ll become relatively less powerful as we gear up and our crit increases, and it could theoretically push us into the crit cap. Though hopefully we won’t see anything like the inflated gear levels of Wrath for that to be possible. Maybe it’s just me, but this doesn’t feel quite as consequential as the final tier in a lot of the other trees. Though I’ll admit that it’s in line with the clicky cooldowns given in quite a few trees.

Full speed ahead!

I’ll close by sharing that I love where this is going. Maybe it’s the techy in me, but I feel a lot of sympathy for trimming the trees down to the bare essentials. KISS, “perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”, and all that.

Finally, what might a cata holy pve spec look like? Something like 35/3/3 sure looks like fun.

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Holy Paladin Ruby Sanctum Gear List

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010

It’s that time again! Another round of stepping out of some fire and cleansing some stuff. Another round if icons and names. Another incremental increase in stats. And for flavour, another trinket.

Let’s see what Halion’s loot table has in store for holy pallies.

10 player:

The belt’s a much cheaper and lower ilevel alternative to spending frost emblems or a few grand for the current 264 equivalents. I suspect that it’ll be an upgrade for approximately zero of us. The gloves are good if you don’t mind wearing gross leather and haven’t had access to, say, the gloves from 25-player Deathwhisper. At least the cloak pairs its lame mp5 with haste, making it a nice alternative — again — to blowing frost emblems on the crit/mp5 cloak.

25 player:

The boots are great, grab ‘em. The cloak is fantastic but, like the cape from Dreamwalker, you’ll have to pry it out of the cold dead hands of every caster dps in the raid. Let us know how that goes. The ring’s Wowhead tooltip is apparently lying to us, evidentially the item has haste instead of crit. So, not too shabby.

And then there’s a sea of non-plate upgrades. Grab ‘em only if they’re about to be disenchanted, I say.

The trinket is the only truly interesting bit of loot in the raid. Let’s look at it from a few perspectives.

In the ranking of trinkets with passive spell power, it comes in second only to the heroic [Althor's Abacus]. Presumably the heroic twilight scale will come in first. That alone makes it interesting for a lot of healers in a lot of situations.

But the on-use effect is where the real fun begins. For 15 seconds every two minutes our direct heals leave a 6 second buff on people who then heal people within 10 yards every second. Read that twice.

First, the cooldown is disappointing. We’ll only get a few swings at it each fight. That’s fine for the single exhale in a farming Festergut kill these days, but it won’t do a thing for Sindragosa’s constant frost AoE pulse. The trinket is nothing like a pocket druid, it’s more like being able to duct tape healing stream totems to a few of your raiders a few times a fight.

The range of the AoE healing buff further limits when it’s helpful. If you’re spread out and still want lots of raid healing, you’re out of luck. That applies to a decent number of raiders in a decent number of fights.

The most critical limiting factor, though, is that it’s only proced by direct heals. The closest we have to a multi-target direct heal is the [Glyph of Holy Light], and the current working theory is that the glyph heals won’t trigger the buff. If this ends up being the case then this trinket will almost certainly be put to better use in the hands of shammies and priests.

Finally, it’s fun to imagine the trinket’s proc generating shields during [Val'anyr, Hammer of Ancient Kings]’s proc. That might be a bit of a stretch, given that JoL doesn’t generate shields, but one can hope. Right?

We’ll see. I’ll try to upgrade this post once I learn how the trinket really works.

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Data Mining Endgame Raiders with Wowhead

Sunday, June 6th, 2010

As wrath winds down our 10-player raiding group only has one serious goal remaining: a heroic lich king kill. This is a very unforgiving encounter, even with aggressive gear and the icecrown buff. No one gets to slack off here.

In preparing for this fight, I wanted to see how other holy paladins were suiting up as they zoned in.  I ended up using the wowhead profiler to check out the spec and gear of holy paladins with the heroic lk kill achievement. I thought it’d be fun to share what I saw.

I started with a search that gives us paladins with at least 51 points in the holy tree who have the bane of the lich king achievement. I then went down the list, opening tabs for a few characters at a time.  After reloading the profile I’d close the tab if I saw gear from our brethren specs or — gasp — PvP gear.  I stopped after finding 10 pallies in holy raiding gear. I figure that’s enough to be interesting.  Obviously one can keep going to get a more representative sample.

Let’s see what came up.


Out of 10, Holy Paladins sporting Bane of the Fallen King who….

spec into the prot tree for 2/2 Divine Guardian: 9
use [Glyph of Seal of Wisdom], [Glyph of Holy Light], and [Glyph of Beacon of Light]: 9
activate 2PT10 with head and shoulder tier pieces: 10
ignore 4PT10 with off-tier chest, hand, and leg pieces: 9
have [Insightful Earthsiege Diamond] in their meta socket: 10
have [Nightmare Tear] in their other helm socket: 9
have [Brilliant King's Amber] in every other socket: 10
are jewelcrafters: 9
wield [Val'anyr, Hammer of Ancient Kings]: 6
use [Solace of the Fallen] (or heroic): 9
use [Meteorite Crystal]: 5
use [Ashen Band of Endless Wisdom]: 10
use [Bulwark of Smouldering Steel] (yes, heroic): 9
equip [Libram of Renewal]: 9

Raise your hand if you can spot the pattern! Stifle your giggles next time someone tries to tell you all about FoL builds, please. They mean well.

There’s almost no variance here. If you chose a holy paladin who’s completed the heroic lich king encounter, it’s almost certain that they’ll look like this cookie cutter picture of an end game raiding holy pally. It shows how tightly tuned the encounter is. If there was more room to maneuver you’d see fewer winners with gear from heroic 25-player drops, never mind legendaries that require persistent dedication from an entire guild.

It’s a little cruel, to be honest. The corollary to the observation that everyone with the achievement looks a certain way is that if you don’t look this certain way, your ability to get the achievement is called into question. Many of us are going to be sitting around waiting for further increases in the Icecrown buff before this fight is approachable.

But it’s great to be able to see all this data with a simple tool. Kudos, Wowhead. I find myself using this more and more to see how given specs are handling the end game.

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The Power of Creation

Saturday, May 15th, 2010

On April 22nd, 2009, Aetherial Circles’ officers invested in a relatively new healer by passing me their first [Fragment of Val'anyr]. On May 9th, 2010, we received our 30th fragment.

I think the other 4 screenshots disappeared with a previous PC.

I think the other 4 screenshots disappeared with a previous PC.

Looking back, it took much longer than I could have imagined. It’s been an entire year. First the guild stopped running Ulduar and moved on to ToC after initial Yogg-Saron kills. We certainly never pushed Ulduar hard modes. We’d rekindle interest in farming fragments every few months, but it always fizzled.

In recent weeks the guild has seen quite a lot of strong raiding recruits. The officers took this surge in interest in raiding as an opportunity to push to acquire our final fragments and get the mace assembled. It worked.

I, and the guild, assembled [Val'anyr, Hammer of Ancient Kings] just in time to start serious 25-player regular Lich King attempts. The mace is certainly doing its part to help me keep the tanks up.

Legendary.

Legendary.

I’ll second Dusty’s description of Val’anyr as a symbol of teamwork and perseverance. This wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for officers continuing to make it a priority and raiders consistently attending.

Thanks everyone.

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Optimizing HPS for Valithria Dreamwalker

Monday, April 12th, 2010

Raise your hand if you’re a Holy Paladin who loves healing the Valithria Dreamwalker encounter! It might be hard to tell, but I have both my hands raised right now. This fight was built for us. We’ve spent an entire expansion being teased for our overhealing. With the stroke of an encounter designer’s pen, a goofy property of our healing arsenal has become our strongest asset.

dreamwalker-meters

And this was a messy heroic kill.

The risk, of course, is that we get complacent in this fight. It’s possible to ignore the details and spam holy light and finish the encounter. This would be a crying shame because the mechanics of this encounter give us an opportunity to optimize our throughput. It’s our turn to minmax our HPS.

I won’t get into the basic details of the fight, the following links do that.

I’ll assume that we’ll be assigned to heal Valithria and that we all already know to keep stacks up and maximize healing time. This post will wander through the laundry list of tools we can use to boost throughput while mashing a button.

Stats

We’ll start with the stats to stack to boost the throughput of spamming Holy Light.

  1. Haste is our highest priority. We need about 33 haste rating for each 1% increased casting speed. No matter how much spell power we have, every additional 33 haste rating gives 1% more throughput. We have enough haste once holy light’s cast time hits 1 second. That could take quite a lot of haste, depending on raid buffs and cooldowns.
  2. Spell power is our next priority. Holy Light heals for ~5166 + (spell power x 1.66). The more spell power you have, the more you need to get a 1% increase in throughput. At 3000 spell power, for example, you need about 60 spell power for 1% more healing. At 4000 spell power, 71 for 1%. This is why we prioritize haste.
  3. Critical strike rating is OK. Heals only get a 50% bonus if they crit, so crit is relatively less valuable. We won’t be stacking it, but it’s better than nothing. At level 80, we need ~46 crit rating for 1% additional crit chance. That’s ~92 rating for a 1% increase in throughput.
  4. Intellect is less OK. Divine Intellect and Blessing of Kings inherently buff int on gear by 21%. About 138 base int gives 1% crit, or a .5% throughput gain. With Holy Guidance, talented and buffed, ~24% of that 138 base int is converted to ~33 spell power. As above, at 3k spell power that’s another ~.5%. So 138 base int gives us ~1% increased throughput. Sadly, this relatively low priority is at odds with our usual PvE strategy of stacking int.
  5. MP5 is worthless in this fight. Each stack of Emerald Vigor gives 200 MP3. That’s 333 MP5. After the first entry into the emerald dream you should have infinite mana.

The truly ambitious can use this stat priority to maintain a second set of gear that is gemmed and enchanted for throughput. Personally, I don’t bother. These priorities mostly inform our decisions of consumables and trinkets to bring.

Consumables

Given our preference for haste, some consumables jump out. [Imperial Manta Steak], [Elixir of Lightning Speed], and [Potion of Speed] are the big ones. [Elixir of Mighty Thoughts] appears to be the guardian elixir to pair with lightning speed to bring the most throughput.

[Flask of the Frost Wyrm] is also great, especially if you’re working on the fight and are wiping or happen to have a raid comp with all the caster haste buffs.

[Potion of Wild Magic] is an alternative to the potion of speed if you’re going to be at one second holy light casts when stacking cooldowns, as is likely.

Trinkets

Not many of us have trinkets that are great for throughput. Most have some form of trinkets that primarily give int or mana. Furthermore, a great deal of caster throughput trinkets are keyed on doing damage rather than casting spells, rendering them useless for us. Some example trinkets that can work include [Scale of Fates], [Talisman of Resurgence], [Pandora's Plea], or even [The Egg of Mortal Essence].

Trinkets with “Use:” procs that can be synchronized with cooldowns are particularly valuable.

As ever, trinket selection greatly depends on what you’ve had access to. Personally, I run with the dynamic int/sp duo of [Talisman of Resurgence] and [Pandora's Plea].

Glyphs

[Glyph of Holy Light] — The glyph healing does far more than 10% in this fight. It’s not uncommon to see glyph heals that do 50% of the holy light’s heal. It is critical to make sure that she’s being healed by the glyph. This means keeping your beacon on her while parking your target, most likely yourself, close to her.

[Glyph of Seal of Light] — We don’t need the regen from the [Glyph of Seal of Wisdom]. We’ll be using seal of light for the throughput buff.

Meta Gem

[Revitalizing Skyflare Diamond] — This meta is weaker than it might first appear. It’s not a 3% overall healing buff. It’s a 3% buff to the 50% increase to the 50% of our heals which crit, resulting in a .75% overall healing increase. That is still stronger than the drop of intellect and trickle of mana from the more conventional [Insightful Earthsiege Diamond].

Libram

[Libram of Veracity] is perfect for this encounter. We have infinite mana and are spamming holy light.

Cooldowns

They should go without saying, but to be thorough we’ll mention Divine Illumination (with the T10 2pc bonus) and Avenging Wrath. They’re both on a three minute cooldown. At the least we want to pop the cooldowns as the fight starts and then again once we have enough stacks to blow heroism and heal her up to full. How long that could take depends on the raid. If it takes long enough, be ready to pop the cooldowns again in the middle of the fight.

Teamwork

This is where the fun truly begins. Lots of our fellow raiders can significantly increase our healing throughput.

Work out in advance how these cooldowns are going to be used throughout the fight. I heal the fight most often in 10-player heroics with a disc priest and resto druid. I prepot, blow cooldowns, and get PI at the start of the fight. From then on my friendly neighbourhood priest hits me with PI every time it’s up and I come out of the phase. Except when we’ve called for heroism on the last portal exit. In that case the priest channels DH during heroism, all cooldowns are popped, and we heal her up to full.

Blood of the rhino deserves special mention. It’s a tenacity pet talent that offers a huge increase to incoming heals. Some of us will recall the early days of beacon’s testing when this increased heal was transferred directly to our beacon. They nerfed that almost immediately. As researched by the hunter community, the buff does increase the healing from the glyph of holy light, which is a huge portion of our healing in this fight. If you have a pet to spare, it might be worth parking a tenacity pet next to val and spamming it with your heals. Personally, I haven’t tried this.

I left out the typical raid buffs like Blessing of Kings and Arcane Brilliance. They’re useful, as always.

Putting it all together

(123K + 66K) / 1.1s ~= 170K HPS. o.O.

(123K + 66K) / 1.1s ~= 170K HPS o.O

When you combine all of these little buffs with a good number of stacks of emerald vigor you end up putting out some seriously ridiculous numbers. It’s a rip roaring good time. Make sure you give it a try before WoW moves on to the next tier of content.

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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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A Holy Paladin and his Ephemeral Snowflake

Sunday, 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

Monday, 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, Hammer of Ancient Kings] 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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