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.
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
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
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.
Last night our 10-man crew got our first Lich King 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 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.
Blood Legion’s world first 10-man kill videos: part 1 and part 2
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
Heal from melee on the LK
Keep beacon heals flowing between the tanks
Watch for spikes from LK’s stacks or from enraged horrors
Cleanse the plague the moment its target is closest to adds
Watch for the add tank to catch the plague from dying adds
Run to the add tank if you get the plague yourself
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
Pick an empty spot right up against the edge of the outer rim of the platform
Cleanse the plague off the add tank as the last add dies
Beacon/SS/FoLHoT the tank who will be catching most of the adds
Be ready for significant damage from stacks of the DoT
Boogie to the nearest tank if an add is spawned under you
Stay the heck away from the raging spirits’ silence
Watch for spheres and nuke ‘em only if you have downtime
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.
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
Get in a few SoW procs off the LK while everyone is grouped up for an incoming Val’Kyr
Spread out a bit the moment the Val’Kyr picks someone up
Haul to the edge as the LK starts casting Defile, maybe pop Aura Mastery with shadow res
Move Beacon/SS around as the tanks taunt, be ready for cooldowns for Soul Reaper if needed
Go into overdrive if a healer gets picked up
Lather, rinse, and repeat for what seems like an eternity
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.
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
Move Beacon/SS around as the tanks manage Soul Reaper
Heal hard and immediately when Harvest Soul goes up
Spread out for Defile and to minimize raiders hit by exploding spirits
Try to watch for raiders with spirit aggro and precast heals around them
Blow all cooldowns, there’s nothing left to save them for
Coordinate raid-wide survival cooldowns as spirits descend
Blow throughput and haste cooldowns if another healer is pulled in to Frostmourne
Heal Terenas, cleansing Soul Rip, if you get pulled into Frostmourne
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?
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.
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.
Patch 3.3 is finally here! Hooray! Let’s see what the 3.3.0 patch notes have in store for holy paladins.
(This has been edited a bit since it was first posted. I was willfully misreading the patch notes in the hope that our FoL would always leave HoTs on the target — no such luck.)
Divine Guardian: This talent no longer increases the amount of damage transferred to the paladin from Divine Sacrifice. Instead it causes all raid and party members to take 10/20% reduced damage while Divine Sacrifice is active. In addition, the duration has been changed to 6 seconds, however the effect does not terminate when Divine Sacrifice is removed before its full duration.
Divine Sacrifice: Redesigned. The effect of Divine Sacrifice is now party-only and the maximum damage which can be transferred is now limited to 40% of the paladin’s health multiplied by the number of party members. In addition, the bug which allowed Divine Sacrifice to sometimes persist despite reaching its maximum damage has been fixed. Divine Sacrifice will now cancel as soon as its maximum damage value is exceeded in all cases. Finally, damage which reduces the paladin’s health below 20% now cancels the effect early.
Yikes! That’s a mouthful. There’s four major changes.
Shorter duration. DS is now six seconds instead of 10. Darn.
Only redirects from your party. DS now redirects damage only from your party, not the entire raid. Boo. But maybe it doesn’t have a range limit now, which would be nice.
Actually caps redirected damage. Supposedly it now will actually stop redirecting damage. This is awesome. It stops us from having to chain it with Divine Shield to protect ourselves from 100k incoming damage.
Raid-wide damage reduction for the full 6s, always. Even if the redirection stops, the raid still takes less damage for the full duration. This is fantastic.
On balance, I’m awfully excited by these changes. Decoupling DS from having to bubble, and so also from anything that triggers Forbearance, should give us more flexibility in when we can use our long cooldowns.
Hand of Sacrifice: Damage transferred via this ability can now be prevented by damage absorption effects.
I haven’t seen a lot of chatter about this, but I’m excited about it too. It used to be awfully risky to try to heal through damage from HoS which was redirected from a tank. Using Divine Protection to mitigate that incoming damage might give us another tool we can feel safe using.
Notice that Blizzard also accidentally put in a duplicate entry for the HoS bugfix under Blessing of Sacrifice, which hasn’t existed since the great renaming of blessings to hands. It’s almost like naming spells by putting seven words in a bag and picking them at random can be kind of confusing! Those of us who are still cranky about the naming of Hand of Reckoning (which has nothing to do with the fistfull of “Hand of” spells (formerly blessings), nor Reckoning; nevermind [Reckoning]) can hopefully be forgiven grinning a little.
Flash of Light: This spell no longer causes a heal-over-time effect unless the player has the Infusion of Light talent.
Infusion of Light: This talent now causes the paladin’s Flash of Light spells to heal the target for 50/100% of the Flash of Light healing amount over 12 seconds.
It’s not entirely clear from reading the patch notes, but the HoT still only appears if the target has Sacred Shield. Previously any paladin’s FoL could leave a HoT on shielded targets, but now only holy paladins can do it. There’s no change for PvE healing, but it makes soloing as ret slightly more irritating.
Divine Intervention: This ability now also removes Exhaustion or Sated from a target if the recipient is out of combat when the effect ends. In addition, the cooldown on this ability has been reduced from 20 minutes to 10 minutes. Cannot be used in Arenas.
The thinking paladin hasn’t been speeding up wipe recovery with DI because the target would be left with (exhaustion|sated) and could not benefit from (heroism|bloodlust) on the next pull. Now we can. It would have been great to have this back when we were chain pulling Algalon. On the downside, there went another bag slot.
Lay on Hands: This ability will place Forbearance on the paladin if used on his or herself. It will not place Forbearance on others.
Paladins now have to put casting Lay on Hands on ourselves in the bucket of mutually exclusive cooldowns: Divine Protection, Divine Shield, and Avenging Wrath. Keep it in mind if you use LoH to top yourself off after being resurrected. I try to reserve LoH for reducing damage on a tank so this doesn’t feel like a big deal.
I think that’s it. Let’s go heal some stuff! Dibs on the [Battered Hilt]!
