PVE Healing = Prot Vs Holy

I've mentioned previously that my little 10 man guild is intent on getting hard modes. One of those next on our list is I Love the Smell of Saronite in the Morning, which is the General hard mode. We also intend on 2 healing it as we really don't have many options though my partner is a kick ass priest.

General Vezax is a mana control fight as there is basically no way for me and my partner to regen mana via normal means such as Illumination, Arcane Torrent, Replenishment, Divine Plea or Shadowfiend. While researching the fight, I learned that you can use a pot so that will be the sole way for us to regen mana and has to be used as a last resort after the Saronite Animus comes out. I also learned that healers can use Spark of Hope to minimize the cost of spells.

In the course of my research, one really interesting thing I discovered was that holy paladins actually resort to an extreme spec to minimize mana usage as it makes FoL extremely viable as the sole healing spell in the General fight. It is also this spec that has gotten attention in the healing forums as a potentially viable raiding spec in 3.2 in the face of our regen nerfs, particularly by a top raiding paladin named Eloderung.

In my experience, my prot healing spec is unbelievably better than my normal raiding spec when it comes to healing the General fight. I used it in General and I didn't have to use one saronite vapor at all.

Usually as holy in General, I use 4 piece T7 and the libram to minimize Holy Light cost while cancel-casting on the tank. As prot healing in General, I use 4 piece T8 and all I do is maintain SS while casting FoL if the tank goes below 50% HP. I do not even need to judge because I do not have the haste buff talent while as holy, I would have to maintain it so my HL would cast faster. Both my healing specs have Divine Sacrifice, Aura Mastery and Improved Devo Aura.

There is a HUGE difference in mana usage between the 2 specs as FoL is not even 300 mana while HL is at least 1100 mana even with modifiers to cost (keep in mind that this is with SoW up). The HPS of FoL is also solved by being prot as I have higher SP (~23-2400) and extra 6% crit as well as extra 30% healing when I do crit. My SP would be higher if I had changed out all my gems but I maximized my mana pool for General. To give you an idea of the healing, my normal FoL as prot will be ~4k and I crit for ~8-10k! So it is not strange at all that I could easily end phase 1 with 20k mana left for when the Saronite Animus comes out.

We had other issues that prevented us from getting the achievement such as perfect avoidance of Shadow Crash and Life Leech but healing was not an issue for me with spec. It was almost upsetting how much easier it was healing as prot than holy for that fight. My priest partner, who went disc for that fight, had to go back holy when we did normal mode or else we would've activated hard mode since we were using so little mana. That's how easy the fight became with me as prot healing spec.

With my experience as prot, I can really see how healing prot pallies are equally viable in 3.2 along with the usual holy pallies. As I've mentioned before in a previous post, 2 schools of paladins will appear - those that stack intellect and those that stack spellpower. I erroneously asserted that I felt the paladins stacking intellect would be a little bit more flexible but with the advent of the prot healing paladin in PVE, the stacking of stam/SP will actually be very viable.

The only trade off for being prot instead of holy is losing Beacon of Light and Holy Shock for incomparable mana efficiency. In terms of throughput, prot and holy healing specs should actually be very close depending on the skill and gear of the paladin.

Another caveat is that that holy paladins will value haste more than crit due to HL usage while prot paladins will value crit WAY more than haste due to the short cast time of FoL and the benefit to HPS from critting FoL.

I just feel it is sad that paladins must spec into the tanking tree to overcome their impending mana issues. I suppose I can think of it as the priests disc tree for paladins but no matter what paladins are still shoe-horned into single target healers. Despite that fact, it is becoming ever more clearer that we are going to get pushed out of raid spots due to heavy raid damage incurred in raiding content. We are just not very flexible healers compared to other healing classes.

Again, I will try to be successful as a holy paladin in 3.2 but I really do think that many holy paladins will still reroll because it is just disappointing to be treated/handled badly due to your class. I hope to see paladins successful in 3.2 so please prove me right!

P.S. The prot spec I use can also be used for PVP (though it is not perfectly PVP).