Holy Speccing for Dummies

Three months away from World of Warcraft, and four months away from raiding. I feel out of touch! Since I came back to the game I’ve been leveling up on a different server with a friend, and it’s been a blast. But there is a disconcerting trend I’ve seen while leveling. It would appear that when many young paladins choose a holy spec, they actually just close their eyes and click on the screen frantically. Well never fear, Hammardin is here, so let’s talk about viable PVE holy specs!

I’m ready to heal!
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#sxAzxG0sVu0tGdxZVcbx

This build is about mana regen and supporting your party/raid. Holy Power and Conviction are there to help out your crit value and regen. Pick up Aura Mastery to grant immunity from Silence or double the armor value from Devotion Aura. Enlightened Judgements and Heart of the Crusader will make it easy as pie to increase the crit chance of your whole raid. I’ve picked Improved Blessing of Wisdom and Blessing of Might to provide more raid support. It should be noted that I only put 3/5 in Judgements of the Pure. I personally think that 2% more crit is more valuable than 10% haste, especially at a lower gear level. Feel free to play around with the two, you might find that you’d rather have the haste instead of the crit value.

So you really want to level as holy?
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#sEAzg00siz0xxbZVf0×0I

It’s not a decision that I can personally fathom, but if you’re deadset on leveling as a shockadin this is probably your best route. This build provides healing and damage talents, but I’ve leaned it towards dealing holy damage. You don’t want to take all day killing that Hellboar, right? Take Purifying Power and Sanctity of Battle to increase your damage from Exorcism. Improved Judgements and Enlightened Judgements will help keep you from standing there auto attacking. Most of the talents in this build will boost your holy and melee crit, so you’ll get bigger holy shocks!

If I didn’t click it, don’t let me catch you doing it!
Not true of everything I didn’t choose, but I’ve seen quite a few people running around with bizarre talent trees. So if you’re not sure how to spec, take it as a rule of thumb. Think about what use the talent will really have before you take it. Is it for PVE or is it for PVP? How often do you need to break fear while leveling? Probably just having Divine Shield will do the trick without taking the talents. 99% of the time, you want to max out a talent. Trust me, it’s not worth it to have 4/5 in Divine Intellect and 1/3 in Improved Concentration Aura. And if you’re really still confused, it’s ok to /who 80 paladin and just ask someone. If you happen to whisper me, I promise I’ll be nice!

Back – now with 99% less qq

It’s been a long time.  After getting over some serious beefs with paladin healing (sometimes you just have to cry it out), I feel like I’m back in the swing of things.  Leveling to 80 was a blast!  I chose to level as protection and I didn’t regret it for a second.  It made soloing, especially group quests, easy as pie and it was fun to learn that aoe grinding isn’t dead.  Far from it.   After hitting 80 I tanked a few heroics – let’s just say that my gear is pretty fail and I feel very sorry for my healers.  If you are reading this people who healed me, I apologize profusely.  A few days later I dusted my old healing gear off and gave it a try.  It reminded me of when I first hit 70, everything was such a struggle!  In some ways it made it fun again, to have to really work to keep the tank up. I’ve been to Naxx a few times now, done Sartharion on 10 and 25, and healed several heroics. Five mans are still a struggle, and I think on some encounters it is because of our lack of an aoe heal. In spite of that, we got some pretty cool new tricks up our sleeves. I made a video showing some I’ve discovered recently – hope you all enjoy it, or at least lol at how long it takes me to figure things out.

Sometimes you eat the bar

I wish I had something positive to say about holy paladin right now, I really do. I love my class and spec very much; but really I loved being a powerhouse back in Karazhan and Season One. Paladins could heal well, our mana regen was something to marvel at, and we had powerful buffs to help us in arena fights. Then something changed – someone decided (cough Kalgan cough) that paladins were simply too powerful. Clearly, we deserved the long arm of the nerf bat. And a hard beating is what we received.

No longer were paladins able to compete in any arena group except 5v5 – and really, who was afraid of us? Paladins are no big deal, CC them the whole time then kill them when the rest of the team is dead. In PvE our mana regen and overhealing grew into a cruel joke. While it didn’t stand out very much in SSC and TK, by Sunwell we’re laughable. There to provide buffs and nothing more. Or perhaps our real purpose is to see how high we can get our overheal?

I hate to post such pessimism, but after the recent list of wotlk nerfs it’s really all that’s on my mind when it comes to the game. I encourage anyone with some time on their hands to read this post. It’s one of the best written posts I have ever seen on the current state of holy paladins. Sadly, Blizzard responded to this well written post with:

“You had some thoughtful things to say in your post, but your tone and subject are over the top. Try again and maybe you’ll get a better response.”

And sometimes, well, the bar eats you.

Humble Pie

I’ll take a large helping, please.

In all seriousness

I really just can’t be serious.

I like to eat.

My consumables that is! I like to eat IRL too, but I’ll try to restrain myself for the purposes of today’s post.

I used to get this tell a lot during raids: “Hammy, why is your mana pool so huge?!”
One of the best consumables for a raid healer also happens to be rarely used.

Awhile back, Blizzard changed this flask from granting 2000 mana to granting 65 intellect. It’s still a lot of mana – roughly 1065 if you’re a holy paladin. It will also give you 25 +heal, and about 1% spell crit. If you have Blessing of Kings on it’s even cooler – 1170 mana, 27 +heal, and still about 1% spell crit.

Let’s compare this to

Without getting too mathematical (because I’m not good at math and I hate reading things like that), it’s just not as good. The 65 intellect from Distilled Wisdom is 6.5 mp5, and us holy paladins get about 71 intellect from this flask, so that’s 7 mp5. I know what you’re thinking, that’s still an 18 mp5 difference from Distilled Wisdom to Mighty Restoration.

Mighty Restoration doesn’t scale with Kings.
Mighty Restoration provides 25 mp5, while Distilled Wisdom provides up to 7 mp5, 1170 mana, 27 +heal, and 1% spell crit.

Intellect also works with spirit based regen. Does this matter if you’re a holy paladin? Not really. When people ask me for advice on how to raid heal as a paladin, I always say this: don’t ever let me catch you taking advantage of the 5 second rule. But if you’re a druid or a priest reading this blog, take note. With the change to spirit based regen, Distilled Wisdom packs quite a punch. If you had about 600 intellect and 700 spirit, Distilled Wisdom will give you roughly 25 mp5, plus extra mana and some spell crit. Makes me jealous just thinking about it!

Why is my mana pool so huge? I’m rockin’ it old school – Distilled Wisdom ftw!

Is it love, or is it hate? I just can’t tell.

Blessing of Might got a buff and a nerf.

But really, it got a buff!
With Rank 10 Might and the old talents, players would gain 525 AP.
With the new talents and new Rank 10, players would gain 687 AP.

Blessing of Sanctuary received a major overhaul.

Blessing of Sanctuary will finally be a buff that other tanking classes want during raids. Sadly, this is goodbye to aoe grinding.

Beacon of Light was also redesigned.

And the new version, in my opinion, is even worse than its predecessor. This is now almost useless as a leveling tool and as a 5 man tool – wasn’t that the whole point of the talent in the first place?
I’ll probably be speccing Sheathbot.

More information is available at MMO Champion.

Where the heck is my trainable Kings?!

Quel’thalas

From http://www.wowwiki.com:
“Quel’Thalas is a lush forest region north of the continent of Lordaeron.”

Hrm…doesn’t look that nice to me.

The coast is nice though.

Wotlk QQs and Woo Hoos

Every time I log into my email account I keep hoping I’ll see a beta invite! No luck yet – but let’s be honest, if I got one the first thing I would probably do is tame a Rhino on my Hunter just so I can block off the Orgrimmar mailbox.
I am trying to keep tabs on the Paladin changes – some thoughts on a few:

Huge thank you to Blizzard for finally listening to the player base, and giving us our own evocate. Mana regen has been a problem for paladins ever since the Illumination nerf, and I think Divine Plea will be a big help. For other artwork/graphics nerds, here’s the animation:

Not the most exciting thing in the world, but it gets the job done!

Up to 1 enemies within 8 yards. I am unsure whether or not this is a tooltip bug, as I’ve seen conflicting reports on it. Does anyone have more information on this?

Vengeance got nerfed.

Warriors got Wrecking Crew.

Quite a few people were upset about this, and I can’t say as I was happy either. The damage bonus on Vengeance was lowered from 15% to 10%, and Warriors got a new talent with a 15% damage buff on critical strike. I decided to do a little theorycrafting. I’m terrible at math, so feel free to correct me if I messed up anywhere.

The setup:
100 damage per swing
3.0 second swing
Left out seals, judgements, and warrior special attacks to make it easy on myself.

Over a 30 second time period, 12 seconds with the buff for warriors, and 18 seconds without, the warrior would deal 1060 damage as opposed to 1000 damage.

Assuming 2 stacks of the paladin buff were up the whole time, over a 30 second time period the paladin would deal 1100 damage as opposed to 1000 damage.

It’s a nerf, but possibly not as bad as it seems. It remains to be seen whether or not Ret Paladins will get nerfed into the ground. This may be an isolated incident, or it may just be the start of many, many changes.

Lolret has been a long standing tradition – can Blizzard really bear with letting it go?

So Divine

Sorry it’s been awhile since my last post – I’ve been getting pwned by World of IrlCraft. So with that in mind, today’s post is a shortie!

In the past, I always forgot these existed. I mean sure, I specced into them, they were on my hotbar. But I didn’t really use them during fights. Maybe I would if my mana situation started looking really scary. Then came Black Temple. If you haven’t been in there before, some of the fights are very mana intensive. Over time, I greatly improved at remembering my cooldowns. So pop them early, pop them every time they’re up. And if you’re still using Lower City Prayerbook, remember to show it some love!