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.
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.