Posts Tagged ‘holy paladin’

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.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

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.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

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.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

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.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | 11 Comments »

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.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

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.

Tags: ,
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

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!

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Appreciating Seal of Wisdom

Monday, January 18th, 2010

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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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!

  1. Throw up SoW.
  2. Switch specs back and forth so that your mana pool is empty.
  3. Start auto attacking and start the built-in stopwatch (/sw).
  4. When your mana is full stop attacking and stop the stopwatch.
  5. 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.

wol-power-gains

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.

That’s not kidding around.

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.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Patch 3.3 for Holy Paladins

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

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.

  1. Shorter duration. DS is now six seconds instead of 10. Darn.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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]!

Tags: , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Comments »