Raid Optimization for Holy Paladins

I always felt that speccing, gearing and gemming a holy paladin is pretty straight forward. We had only a few spells and it is absurdly easy to pick up how to heal on a holy paladin due to our small toolbox of direct healing spells.

The true mastery of the holy paladin I feel comes with learning the tricks of the trade and managing the CDs, ensuring you can pump out the healing numbers as well as keeping on top of mana regen - just like every other class.

I really believe that half of the holy paladin's ability to perform in raids is preparation, even more so than other healing classes. You have to gem right, gear right, talent right and glyph right. This is because of the weird dichotomy of our healing arsenal - a big, inefficient heal or a small, efficient heal - so we must optimize for usage of 1 spell over the other (though not used to all exclusion). The other half of the equation is execution, which takes practice depending on the difficulty of the fight along with experience to get a hang of healing.

So here I am, reading Rhidach's post about this site called Armory Datamining. I like these types of websites because they tend to compile information in WoW in a different way, revealing things that are new or from a different angle.

Anyway, I went to look at the holy paladin data, expecting there not to be much deviation. Lo and behold, I was wrong.

I may be presumptive but I really want anyone reading this that is not preparing properly as a holy paladin to sit up and take notice! There is leeway if you want to do things differently but there is still such a thing as wrong gems/glyphs/talents/etc for holy paladins to do! So here is my little troubleshooting attempt.

Healing Valithria Dreamwalker

When I first heard about this fight before ICC came out, I was super excited. OMG, a fight where you have to heal the boss to full instead?! Cool!!!

I felt like this is something that is really fun and new for healers. Now that VDW is out and available for those that clear Lower Spire, I have to say it is an interesting experience.

I had a lot of fun doing it the first time around but after a while, it actually got a little un-fun (yes, I know that is not a real word).

Why?

I know that there are always healers that care a little too much about where they are on the charts but this is actually the one fight where healers need to care about their numbers. Plus, you have limited resources (aka clouds) that healers can jostle over in order to make their green numbers bigger. This is a completely different mind set than I am used to for healing.

When I raid, I am not concerned about my pretty green numbers to the point where I have all my healing combat text turned off. That is because I have a really good idea of how much my FoL, HS and HL will heal for in general.

I also tend to only worry about CDs in the context of mana management.

That is all completely changed in the VDW fight.

Despite how they tried to disguise it, VDW is still at heart a DPS race. Instead of DPS though, it is HPS we have to worry about and there is no real enrage timer though the raid may get overwhelmed by adds over time.

For healers that are to heal VDW and go in to the portal, their main concern is to grab clouds that will stack the Emerald Vigor buff. The problem is that it is very possible to "steal" clouds from other healers if they happen to be going for the same cloud and they were a little slower.

Even worse is that it could potentially have screwed over their stack timing and thus lowered their HPS. Unless of course you are going to have all the healers get stacks together but you are still jockeying for portal spawns, which are subject to RNG that can be frustrating.

In short, it is hard for team work to take place when everyone is fighting over limited resources.

Even so, I have some tips for healing this fight as a holy paladin that may make HPS output a bit easier. Hope it helps! (I still don't have Portal Jockey! I don't get it, I've been trying to make sure I go into every portal!! WTH!)

Healing 5 mans as a Holy Paladin

I think that playing a holy paladin for as long as I have, I take for granted how new holy paladins have to deal with 5 man dungeons. If I think back on it, when I was first leveling to 80 and trying to heal dungeons with 16k mana and 1500 SP, it was difficult to say the least.

For a freshly dinged 80 paladin, it's even harder to heal heroics especially since you are more vulnerable to any fail/noob players in the group. Yet, what can you do? With patch 3.3, heroics are a necessity to grind for Emblem of Triumph so you can buy the gear you need to be able to get a start on raiding.

I'm assuming that your glyphs/spec are right for the task at hand. With that in mind, here are some tips for healing 5 man heroics.

Dueling Etiquette

I remember my first duel. I was leveling in STV near Grom'gol and I came up against another player, who was ~2 levels higher than me. I don't remember their class. There was no greeting or emote, just a duel window popping up suddenly while I was questing.

I was curious to see how duels worked so I nervously clicked the "accept" button. I really wanted to win my first duel but to my chagrin, I was losing. At this point, I already knew that even with my HP low, being oom was a bigger concern. I used my mana pot to try to regain some precious mana but too late, I was dead before I could heal myself up to full.

Later on, I told my boyfriend what had happened earlier and he told me that I did wrong by using a consumable. This was my first hint of the existence of a loosely followed dueling etiquette.

The Unspoken Rules of DI

Most raiders know of Divine Intervention, the paladin only spell that kills the user and places a bubble of immunity on the target. The target is immune to all damage but cannot move or cast anything until the buff wears off after 3 min or until they click it off themselves.

I actually leveled all the way to level 70 in TBC and as a fresh 70, I was talking to a fellow holy paladin about DI and how useless a spell it seemed to be. I remarked that what was the point of a spell that killed yourself and thought it was a very quirky spell.

I later discovered I was a noob.

My mistake in my first experience using DI was that I had targeted no one and therefore, I only killed myself with no discernible advantage. The whole point of DI is that it is a wipe saving mechanism. With that said, there is actually a whole art to using the spell.

Patch 3.1.2: Equipment Manager

We just got a new patch and the equipment manager that we were supposed to get in patch 3.1 is finally here. I tested it out on my alt and it seems straightforward to use.

To enable it, you go to your interface options and underneath the controls, you check off the very last box that says "Use Equipment Manager." With that option checked on, in your character sheet will be a new icon in the upper right hand corner. For those that use outfitter, this icon will be underneath the outfitter icon so you must disable it to access the in-game equipment manager.

When you click on said icon, you will see empty boxes. Each box basically represents a potential item set you can save as an outfit. Just equip what you would like to save as an outfit and click save. You will then be able to name the outfit and choose an icon for this outfit. The first few icons that appear will be those in your outfit for easier identification.

As a basic equipment manager, the Blizzard in-game option is quick and easy but I find the fact that you must access it from the character info sheet to be annoying. With that said, I dislike Outfitter's automatic equipping of certain item sets though that can be disabled. However, Outfitter allows you to have all your outfits on a bar that you can click without accessing the character sheet. In my eyes, this makes Outfitter a better option as it offers slightly more versatility.

Then again, it's up to you guys to decide.