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.