Zabery

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

• Get addons: healing raid frames (Grid/GridStatusRaidDebuff), cast bar with latency overlay (Quartz), and personal buff warnings (Power Auras Classic) at the very least. The specific addons don’t really matter as long as the job gets done.
• Point-cast, not point-click-cast. Set up your UI so that you can mouse-over a target and then hit a button to cast a spell on whoever is under the mouse cursor. I use mouseover macros and a field of buttons mapped to letter keys. Clique is also popular. Check out an old video of our first TOGC10 Jaraxxus kill to see this in action.
• Use a holy/prot “bubble” spec. Something like 52/17/2. The utility talents in the prot tree are more valuable than the crit talents in the ret tree.
• Major Glyphs: [Glyph of Holy Light], [Glyph of Seal of Wisdom], and [Glyph of Beacon of Light]. Minor: [Glyph of Lay on Hands]. The other minor glyphs are optional. I like [Glyph of Sense Undead] and [Glyph of Blessing of Kings].
• Gear and enchant for int > haste > mp5 > sp > crit. Do not wear pieces with hit, spirit, or resilience. Don’t worry about a haste cap.  The better you get at managing mana the less mp5 you’ll need.
• Use the [Libram of Renewal]. It’s easy to acquire and saves an incredible amount of mana. The [Libram of Veracity] is good when mana is infinite. Do not use the [Libram of Blinding Light], it’s a cruel joke.
• Gem [Insightful Earthsiege Diamond], one [Nightmare Tear], and all [Brilliant King's Amber]s. Ignore socket bonuses that can’t be activated with yellow gems and your single prismatic gem.
• Bring flasks and a stack of food. I carry [Imperial Manta Steak] and [Flask of the Frost Wyrm], but anything in line with our gearing priorities is fine.

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.