 |
| Don't freak out! We're still OP! |
1. Don't top the Tank Off
This is the hardest thing to get used to. Your tank doesn't need to be at full hp all the time! The less you overheal them for, the less mana you're wasting. Keep your tank high, but unless you know a big hit is coming, there isn't really a reason to keep him at 100% all the time like we used to.
2. Don't be afraid of Holy Light
I know, it feels weak. But in most situations, this spell is enough to get the job done. My mana actually comes back faster than I use it if I'm using Holy Light and Holy Shock as much as I can. This spell WILL be your primary heal. Get used to how it feels.
3. Use your Holy Power
Make sure you have something to monitor your Holy Power. When it hits 3, you should be using it. With Tower of Radiance that should be fairly often. Don't be afraid to use it before 3 if necessary either; Word of Glory scales fairly linearly. It's not a huge waste if you use it at 2. Mine heals for just over 5k/point, non crit. It's tough to get used to a new resource, but it's powerful and costs no mana.
4. Don't be afraid to use cooldowns
I'm using them less now that I am geared from the heroics, but coming in, cooldowns were my best friend. There is no shame in using them often. Glyph yourself for Lay on Hands when you're running 5 mans. Use it if you're scared, or if you're oom. Same thing with your guardian, it's a powerful cooldown that can save you in a pinch. Get in the habit of popping them. You also should be aware of Aura Mastery + Resistance Aura; There are a lot of nasty magical damage fights, that can soften the blow a bit. And lastly, Hand of Sacrifice is still there, and it's still a great tank cooldown. Hand of Sacrifice also shouldn't be feared. With the Protector of the Innocent talent, it shouldn't gib you anymore even if you don't bubble when you use it.
5. Don't expect Beacon to do all the work
Beacon is flat out not strong enough to take care of a tank on it's own now. Healing your Beacon target directly is something you should be doing frequently. Not only does it keep them alive, but it generates holy power.
EDIT: We've been nerfed. Tower of Radience no longer works with Holy Light. This seems bigger than it is, I'm not a fan of the change, as it is a very significant nerf to our regen, but at the same time, ToR is still doing what it's supposed to. Heavy tank damage, when you're flashing, you're getting extra hp for WoG. This still keeps our biggest heals cheaper than other healers. It sucks, but it's not the end of the world.
6. Judge on cooldown
Fairly self explanatory. Judge a lot, it gives you a decent chunk of mana back.
7. Use Flash Sparingly
It's expensive. You'll run yourself oom if you try to rely on flash. My general rule of thumb is Holy Light unless the tank is under 30-40%, or there's 3 people that need healing. Granted, there are exceptions, but you'll be able to easily judge it with a little practice.
8. Divine Light should only be used if you have an Infusion proc
Don't touch it otherwise, it's too slow. Use Flash instead. Power auras can be used to monitor procs pretty easily. I've had a few requests for a video on how to set up power auras, and it's in the works.
9. If you're oom, chances are it's not your fault
If you're not spamming Flash or using Holy Radiance on cooldown, you shouldn't be running out of mana. if you still are, check your groups damage. Is someone standing in fire, or taking otherwise unnecessary damage? Running oom is a good sign that your group is missing something. Take a second between attempts to re-evaluate. Unnecessary group damage is then only thing that's been running me out.
10. Don't use Plea during a fight unless there's a phase change...
...and even then, have it on a cancelaura macro. It nerfs you pretty hard, so you don't want to try to heal with it on anymore. Even cushioned, it can often end up making you waste as much mana as you're gaining. Save it for when no damage is being taken, even if you can only get a tick or two in before you have to cancel it off.
~~~
Heroics in Cataclysm are tougher, yes. But don't be afraid, people will adjust. Heroics having mechanics like they do means raiders will be more used to not standing in the fire in your pug raids. It might take awhile, but they're excellent practice for weaker players. With a little practice it will make you a better healer, and a better player overall.
If you're having particular difficulty with something specific, drop me a comment or an e-mail and I'll get back to you as quickly as possible.
/bubblehearth
I gave up my Holy Paladin when 4.0.1 hit, after I'd had some attempts on HC Putri. It just wasn't fun for me anymore.
ReplyDeleteBut I must admit, I'm getting itchy. I'm starting to look forward to a different healing model, in which it actually makes sense to use the right spell at the right time. Although, for raiding, I am focusing on my Enhancement Shaman first, I will definitely try my Holy Paladin again when I can.
Although, I still have to wait for Cataclysm to finally be delivered. No telling how long that'll take :(
The instant casts are definitely something different, but 85 you'll be casting a lot more than at 80. Holy light has a place. All in all, I want to say it feels closer to bc healing, except even then it was flash spam. It's hard to describe. Definitely more difficult, yet more rewarding.
ReplyDeleteI leveled all the healing classes pre 4.0.1 and then leveled a pally post patch (tauren pally love) and I have to admit that I enjoy the changes on the holy side of paladins with cataclysm and am looking forward to getting my newby pally to 85 from his 68 I left him at after the 7th. And lots of these work with all healing classes.
ReplyDeleteIf you've got a screenful of distraction already, you might want to consider "Hear Kitty" for holy power monitoring duties. It plays ascending tones for HP gains with a small flourish for 3hp, and whilst I've not used it Holy-side yet, it seems to be working well for questing as ret.
ReplyDeleteHear Kitty is a pretty good mod, but altogether unnecessary if you're already using Power Auras for holy power, or anything else. You can set up audio cues within it fairly easily, and it's not hard to even add your own sound files. (For pvp I have myself recorded yelling "cooldown!", "Silence", etc)
ReplyDeleteGood suggestion though. By and large, I avoid specific Paladin mods since I like my ui to be streamlined across all my healers, so I often forget to mention the good ones.
enjoy being incredibly fucking op.
ReplyDeleteNice Post. I have only started Pally Healing in WOTLK so never experienced the cc'ing of BC days. But have gotten used to the pally heals faster than most on my server atleast and found that your tips are bang on. Another tip I can offer to new pally heals is to hit your beacon with a couple HL's before they pull, so that you have some Holy Power built up already, just incase.
ReplyDeleteI've completed all heroics except SFK and have 75k mana pool, but still have mana issues at times, but like you said, it's usually due to group damage getting outta control.
During a good guild run, I almost never have to use anything buy HL on tank, and use my holy shock and WOG on the group when they take damage.
On a side note - how is everyone gemming/reforging? I've found that so far the socket bonuses are almost always worth it, so gemming Intel first, followed by Haste and then Spirit. So far, have reforged everthing into Haste - since I use HL so heavly, haste is a huge boost.
Cheers,
D
Gemmimg I'm hitting socket bonuses more often than not, but there have been a couple I outright skipped. What's interesting is that between the two meta gems, I'm getting MORE intellect out of the wrath int/2% mana gem than if I were to use the cata one, simply due to requirements. The wrath one just takes reds.
ReplyDeleteAs for reforging, I've been reforging everything with mastery and no spirit into spirit, and I haven't touched haste or crit yet. With a haste buff in the group my HL is 2 sec, and I'm a little leery to stack it at the expense of regen right now. I suppose I could look at it like this: The faster I get my holy lights off, the less mana I'm using from not flashing, but I'm going to wait until a bit higher gear levels before I worry about anything other than Spirit.
At what point do I stop reforging for haste? I've heard 1100 but I've also heard up to 2200 which seems impossible. And what should my mana pool be at before I attempt heroics? I'm at 68k unbuffed 70k with kings.
ReplyDeletejust wondered if Holy Light and Tower of Radiance has actually been nerfed or if it is a bug as the talent tree still mentions Holy Light as being one of the spells to give Holy Power from Tower of Radiance
ReplyDelete@ Stoneiferus - You shouldn't be reforging for haste at all. The Elitist Jerks compendium is garbage right now, don't listen to it. I have like 1400 haste and it's not even lowering me .1 second. Helps a little with radiance, but that's it. If the piece does not have spirit, reforge mastery to get it. That's really about all you should mess with at this gear level. It takes something like 3500 haste to gcd cap, and it's just flat out not worth it. My holy pally guide goes into more detail, you can find it from the front page, or the "posts of interest" link up top.
ReplyDeleteAs for when to attempt heroics, I'm not sure. I jumped right into them as soon as my ilev was high enough to let me queue. You mana pool size isn't as important as how you manage it. Just run with friends at first and it should ease things a little. Pugs can be rough if you're not familiar with the instances.
@Anon - It's a nerf and intended, the tooltip just needs a patch to reflect the change. I wrote another post explaining it in more detail here: http://tinyurl.com/2dypu7d
In Wrath, I was a highly sought after focus healer.
ReplyDeleteIn Cata, I go OOM on trash pulls, and can't heal thru a boss fight.
They took the class that i LOVED playing, and turned it to sh*t.
I too have hung up my healing towel. I play games to have fun, not get frustrated.
If you're ooming on trash and can't make it through a boss fight, chances are you're just playing incorrectly, or you aren't mentioning that your group isn't ccing and they're standing in fire. Either way it's an easy fix. It's an adjustment, but if you attempt some normals first, and then try to do some heroics with guildies before pugging, you should be fine.
ReplyDeleteAs my gear stands now, I rarely drop below 90% mana. Even on boss fights. It's all about careful usage of spells and proper itemization when choosing gear. If it don't have spirit, don't gear it.
Healing now is different than it's ever been, but the difficulty level is really the same as it was in BC. Wrath was all about how fast you could spam one button and we had infinite resources, it just wasn't engaging. Now, it's just about picking the right spell for the job again, which means there's room to shine if you're good at what you do.
If you were highly sought after like you say, that would lead me to believe you were very good. That tells me you did research about your class, utilized all your cooldowns, and were quick to react when things went bad. This is the same idea, just with a little more of a learning curve.
Now I've played priest, disc, for about five years, and I must say I'm having huge problems healing heroics, even with my almost full heroic gear. Soon after I hit 85 I specced holy for the first time ever, as Blizzard nerfed our shield mastery so bad. Now I know it all has to do with how well you know your class, but as I find holy extremely boring I decided to wait until they balance disc out a bit more to play her. So I've rerolled paladin! I always found paladins annoying, and a bit of an easymode bore but I love the holy power system. It brings a lot of fun to healing and playing in general, and although I do think the Holy Light nerf was a shame I do see why Blizzard did it as holy light is now the main heal and it would've been too easy compared to other healing classes. Now I have to see of course how healing Cata is as a paladin, the first time I healed Deadmines on the priest was a complete disaster. The imbalance between mana pool, regeneration, spellpower and the cost of heals hit me like a brick in the face.
ReplyDeleteAnyway! I do have one question though. The spirit for paladins?! Is the spirit regeneration actually important here. Do we need it? Shall I go for gear with or without. I've been looking around a lot, and people have different views on this (as always).
Yea, disc is in a bad place right now. As I haven't been able to get onto the ptr and test it for myself, I can only hope it's improving. From a raid standpoint I can see how shields would be tough to manage. We aren't dealing with large hits anymore and folks usually aren't topped off, so they seem to be losing some usefulness from the new system; at least in 10's.
ReplyDeleteAs for your question, spirit is key. If it doesn't have spirit, reforge mastery or crit to it. Mastery is garbage, so it should usually be reforged anyways, and the priority for that is Spi -> Haste -> Crit. At low gear levels you'll feel like your crit is abnormally low, don't worry about it; it will go up on it's own.
Eventually you might be able to start looking for pieces without it, but I have 2 regen trinkets and spirit on about ever piece. In heroics I rarely drop below like 80 or 90%, but in raids I've seen the bottom of my pool a couple times. Regen is also the only thing keeping us from 2 healing a few of the fights we are currently using 3 on, so we've been stacking it to up our raid dps.
Alright, I finally hit 81 so I'm ready to heal normals. I guess we'll see how it all works out. I should reforge mastery to spirit? I did think the mastery seemed extremely crap for paladin healing, but I suppose we'll see how it turns out.
ReplyDeleteGreat guide, and thanks for the advice. I'm still loving paladins (and since I specced holy/protection I've been leveling as protection, and actually find it more efficient than retribution, part of it being because of my survivability in world PvP haha)
Hey all. I was always a retardin until i try to tank. I wasnt great but i was ok ish for most Wrath hcs. Now i know im only at level 82 but it seems as though Cata is leaving me a tad cold. So in my stupid or crazy infinite wisdom im gonna respec as a healadin. I know absolutely nothing and is healing totally situational or is there a kinda routine to it. I realise that some people will always make it hard by standing in the fire ( /shame i have done it myself ) but i would love to give it a go. Any advice would be great ... cheers
ReplyDelete@ Надя - Yea, our mastery is garbage. This is mostly due to the fact that it doesn't stack with subsequent casts, so a good chunk of the time it is wasted. Basically, when looking at itemization, you want to focus on things that will matter all the time, on every cast. The way mastery currently works is that if you cast, a shield is placed on the target. If you cast again, and the new heal is smaller, the shield is just refreshed. If it's bigger, it uses the new shield but does not combine the two in any way. With all our instant casts, we often cast much much faster than bosses are swinging, meaning a good portion of our shields go to waste. Even Val'anyr, the legendary mace, stacked a little bit with itself. Unless they change that, mastery will remain a situational stat for us. It's not bad to have some, but it's he first thing you should reforge since spirit is king, haste is our best throughput stat, and crit affects some procs.
ReplyDelete@ Heggs - It depends what you want to do. If you're asking if Prot Paladins suck, the answer is no, they don't. We use one in our raid and he does great. Plus, tanks are generally in more demand than healers. But, to answer your question about healing being situational...the answer is sort of. On progression content, and farm content to a degree, yes it is. Your ability to adapt to incoming damage is a huge factor in making you a strong healer. But, there are plenty of time when the damage is also predictable and planning appropriately is key, such as the first boss in Heroic SFK. He casts an aoe ability that knocks the whole raid down to 1 hp, then doesn't do much for awhile, so, you can plan ahead there and know that the tank will need some hp but the raid can sit at 10-15% and be just fine until he does it again. It comes down to understanding the mechanics of the fight to avoid unnecessary healing.
If that isn't what you meant and you meant more of "do we have a rotation", then the answer is still sort of. while we do have a specific combination of buttons we can press for max hps, there are more factors than just that. Is the healing necessary? Did I get any procs to change the outcome? What are the other healers doing? Do I have the mana for this? Short answer to your question, usually we are just adapting, but occasionally things do become routine.
Hi again and ta for the reply. No im not saying anything bad about prot pallies ... mine was ok at times sometimes brilliant but it was probably my lack of skills that made mine so-so. I did do some healing on my druid which was fun. I did like the rolling hots way of doing things ..... keeping the tanks up that way. So is it worth me trying it now or wait till 85 ? I can get hold of some stormforged gear or should i just pick up quest gear? Is shockadin a possible way to level if i do pick up the healing quest rewards ?
ReplyDeleteCheers
@ Heggs - That's a pretty subjective question. I know paladin healers who have done it all 3 ways. I leveled Ret, and did just fine until Twilight Highlands where I struggled a tad, and I just picked up holy quest rewards so i could dungeon at 85. However, another Paladin I know leveled Prot and said it was very easy, and I know yet another who leveled as a Shockadin and he seemed to do just fine.
ReplyDeleteIt depends how you want to level. If you want to mostly quest, ret or prot are probably better choices but holy is certainly an option. If you want to focus on dungeons and quest between them, shockadin probably isn't a bad choice for that. Just be aware that if you dungeon a ton and forgo quests completely, you will have a lot more rep to farm at 85 than if you'd quested.
That is exactly what I wanted to know, Aunna.
ReplyDeleteI was doing some experiments with mastery in healing, and since they didn't stack like the absorbant shields from a priests PoH (don't know if they changed that, but they used to stack) I figured it was mostly useless. Besides, it's a really weird thing for a paladin, as we have all the instant casts and usually lots of haste. So what I've been going for is spirit, and crit for now which work excellent, and as I'll hit 85 in an hour or so I'll go for the spirit-haste-crit as you said, and reforge the mastery. Thanks for the advice.
Btw Heggs, I leveled as retribution till level 70 when I realised prot is so much faster, and much more fun and I wanted to try tanking as well. I've never ever leveled faster to be honest, I just pull a shitload of mobs and I've all my kills and drops for several quests.
I haven't tried the holy 'leveling spec' but what I'm saying is that you can easily have a prot and a holy spec and level as well. It'll get you groups much faster too.
hi and ta for the replies. I have now tried all 3 ways on my pally. Shockadin seems to be a little slower than ret at the moment. I am still wearing some str gear so maybe thats why. All in all its good fun. Definitely different and im just trying to work out the best rotation as it were. Think i may have taken too many holy "dps" talents to be viable for healing though. I will keep you posted on how it goes ... cheers all
ReplyDeleteOkay so I've been reforging mastery to spirit, and trying to get stam-int-spi gear with haste or crit rather than mastery and I must say I don't feel like I'm missing anything skipping the mastery. I've thing for crits, but I've been trying to stack haste and it's currently 1029 which with judgements of the pure lowers my HL to 2.06 instead of 2.25, and with hurricane proccing it's 2 sec. That's 0.30 sec and it does help a bit. With my crit currently being around 14% I'm well balanced for now, though I'd like my crit to get higher. Should I stack some crit as well as haste?
ReplyDelete@Надя This is probably a lot longer of an answer than you wanted, but: http://www.bandagespec.com/2011/02/on-haste-crit-and-other-secondary-stats.html
ReplyDeleteTo answer your question specifically there, yes. Check the haste section in that post, it will explain it a little better. Hopefully that will answer your question, it's been sitting in my drafts folder for awhile, about time I finished it >.<
Hi there, you don't mention using [Crusader Strike] I use this on every cooldown so it generates holy power on every swing. As this means i am always in melee range am i doing something wrong here?
ReplyDeleteI address it in my holy pally guide, this is just some quick tips.
ReplyDeleteIn regards to crusader strike, it depends on the fight. A lot of the time I just plain don't need the holy power or the mana from meleeing so the benefit of not being in melee is greater than using it. Also, it takes a gcd. If it was off the gcd, I'd use it more. So unless I have some downtime but instant heals are important, it's not worth using too often with the way I play. However, some fights, Like Chimaeron, the instant heals are vastly important and I need the extra holy power gen to pump them out quick enough.
It depends on the fight but in most cases I use it very little or not at all. It's worth noting however that I run only 10 mans at the moment and have a very ranged heavy group so light of dawn sees very little use. My only big use for holy power is Word of Glory. Having not done 25's much this expansion I can't really do more than speculate, but it seems that crusader strike would be of more value there, where you use more aoe healing and are more likely to have other healers at range so you can be in melee.
Thank you so much for your advice. I'm honestly starting to enjoy hcs now. I was terrified to use 'Holy Light' because it felt so weak, and when the tank fell below half way I started to panic. Now that I'm getting used to my new way of playing, I am finding it a lot easier and im almost never oom (except on the odd large pull ;) ) Once again Ty for the tips. SM.
ReplyDeletedo you have any raiding tips?
ReplyDeleteThx all for this guide. used to be top healer in burning, went ret in wrath. Started ret in cata, but just swapped holy. I mainly pvp and been testing it all night. Been running oom all night, but after reading this and doing some adjustments it looking better. Just have to face the fact that flash and holy has kinda swapped spaces, and that i now need spirit on my gear...hrmphhh:-) (always concidered spirit for be for fairy priests:-) But these posts helps alot. so thx!
ReplyDelete