The BEST Healadin strats are…

There is no one best strategy to use as a Holy Paladin that applies for every person in every situation.  There are a million different variables that factor into what the best strategy is for you at any point in time, including the encounter, the 9 - 24 other people with you, your gear level, their gear level, and your own skill and preference.  Despite that, let’s go over the options and help you figure out what will work best for you in your situation.

#1 Way to Improve your healing

The biggest thing you can do to improve your healing as a new healer is to get a single-click healing add-on like Healbot or Grid + Clique, or at least some rollover macros.  Healbot is easiest to set up, just download it and its ready to go.  Grid + Clique is more customizable (although Healbot is pretty customizable too).  Without one of these Add-ons, you are forced to target someone first and then hit your healing hotkey in order to heal.  This isn’t BC days where we can wait 1.5 to 2.5 seconds between each heal.  With the amount of haste on our gear in Wrath and our instant cast spells, you’re going to need to be able to target and heal multiple targets very quickly.  Hitting two buttons will always be slower than hitting one button.  And its more annoying.  I use left-click for Flash of Light, center-click (or wheel) for Holy Shock, and right-click for Holy Light.

In addition to your healing UI, you need to get your macros and hotkeys set up correctly.  You should have a hotkey set up for your Judgement (at least one), Sacred Shield, Beacon of Light, Divine Shield, your on-use racial ability, Divine Sacrifice (if you have it) and even Holy Shock and Hammer of Justice so you can use them offensively (in arenas, or on adds, or something).  You may also want hotkeys for Divine Plea and Lay on Hands, although its not usually a big deal if those don’t go off instantaneously (if you’re using Lay on Hands on yourself for mana).  You’ll also need your on-use trinkets, Divine Favor and Divine Illumination on hotkeys if you don’t have them macroed, although by now you’re probably running out of accessible keys.  I just macro them.

In addition to all of those, you need Hand of Sacrifice, Hand of Protection, and Hand of Freedom as single-click casts on your mouse buttons, usually using a Shift-click.  Those three (especially Hand of Protection) usually need to be cast very quickly on any potential target, so using a single-click is the best way to go. You might want Hand of Salvation on a single-click or hotkey if you have the glyph (which is useful for arenas).  Lastly, Cleanse needs to be single-clickable as well.  I use Decursive for that.

Which Talent Spec - Holy/Prot or Holy/Ret?

The two most popular PvE Holy Paladin specs are:  51/20/0 and 51/5/15 (or 51/2/18).

You can view the details of these specs and more detailed discussion in my post on the PvE Holy Paladin talents.  51/5/15 has become even more useful with Patch 3.2 compared to 51/2/18.  I still prefer 51/2/18 because I love Holy Shock crits and instant Flash of Lights and it gives slightly more mana due to more Illumination procs.

51/20/0 is mainly useful because of one ability:  Divine Sacrifice.  It can by itself save your raid from a wipe and reduce a lot of damage that you won’t have to waste mana healing up, but only once each encounter.  Currently it absorbs 30% of all raid damage for the entire 10 seconds when you have Divine Shield on (instead of only 165% of your health when talented), but I believe this is a bug that will be fixed soon.  Until its fixed, it is very powerful.  Personally, I prefer 51/2/18 over 51/20/0 because it gives more consistent benefits and I know its not going to be changed in the future.  It also has less wasted talents.  And did I mention I love the mechanics around Crit?

There are, of course, other talents not in these specs that are very useful at various times and others that might not be useful.  For example, Aura Mastery and Improved Contentration Aura can be life savers if there is a lot of fire or frost damage going out at a specific time or if you have a risk of getting silenced or interrupted in that fight.  But taking thes talents means you have to give up something else.  Improved Blessing of Might or Improved Blessing of Wisdom might be useless to you if those buffs are already covered by others.  Ideally, you’ll be able to re-spec to the ideal spec for each fight/group you’re in, but since that’s not usually the case, take whichever talents you think you’ll use the most.  In general, most PvE fights don’t have a lot of silences, interrupts or elemental damage, so the basic spec is good for most people most of the time.

Glyphs

Glyphs are one of those areas where which glyphs are best for you can really depend on the fight, your group, and your own skills and preferences.  The top two glyphs are pretty easy choices for just about anyone, anytime.  The third one is more situational.  I’ll go over each one below and let you make the choice.

• Glyph of Holy Light - This is a glyph that almost every Healadin will want all the time.  Its insanely powerful on fights where everyone has to group up closely.  Its mostly useless if everyone has to spread out a lot.  Usually its usefulness is somewhere in between.  It helps a lot to heal up melee dps.
• Glyph of Seal of Wisdom/Light - You should get one of these and only one since you can only have one seal at a time.  One might be more useful than another depending on the fight and your group, but in general Seal of Wisdom is better because you can use it to whack a mob and get a ton of mana back on some fights.
• Glyph of Holy Shock - I love Holy Shock and this glyph lets you do it more often.  Although, if you aren’t already using Holy Shock every 6 seconds, it probably won’t help you much and one more second usually won’t break the raid in most fights.  In PvP though, this is a must-have.  Get it if you really love using Holy Shock.
• Glyph of Beacon of Light - this glyph can be useful on very intense, long fights where you can’t spare a GCD to re-apply Beacon and you need all the mana you can get (like some hard modes).  Other than that, re-applying Beacon usually isn’t difficult, so its mostly a mana-saver and a convenience.
• Glyph of Divinity - This glyph is useful to give you an extra 2000 mana every fight.  If you don’t usually run out of mana then you probably don’t need it.
• Glyph of Flash of Light - This glyph is for those people who like to use Flash of Light a lot and who want slightly more heal throughput instead of mana (although it will give some mana back because of Illumination).  Its probably most useful in PvP.

Minor Glyphs

• Glyph of Lay on Hands - one of the only useful minor glyphs
• Glyph of Blessing of Wisdom - this one is useful out of combat so you can buff the other pallies with something and then put wisdom back on yourself.

Gear, Gems, Stats, Food Buffs, Flasks?  What to get?

This is where the Holy Paladin discussion gets religious.  Which stats you focus on is a very personal topic and people can have very strong convictions.  Most people believe the answer is obvious and straightforward, correct all the time, and anyone who disagrees with them is completely wrong.  There are two sides to the debate - Intellect vs. Spell Power and Holy Light vs. Flash of Light.  The changes in Patch 3.2 only made the discussion even more heated.

The general consensus is that stacking Intellect and using Holy Light as much as possible is the most optimum way to play as a Holy Paladin.  The idea is that, if your mana supports it, you can get more heals per second by using Holy Light than you can by raising your throughput stats like Spell Power.

The truth is - that isn’t correct all the time.  Which stats are better, like always, depends on the encounter, your other gear, your talents, your glyphs, your group, your other healers, and your skills and preference.  Yes, you can do hard mode, cutting edge content using a mix of gem types without gimping your group at all.  Yes, you can top healing meters and keep people alive using both all Intellect gems and all Spell Power gems or a mix of both.

The fact is that there are some hard mode fights where Holy Light spam and a large mana pool is absolutely required in order for your group to survive.  There are other fights where Holy Light spam will just give you more overheals and slower casting and you can actually get more heals per second and save more lives with a quicker casting Flash of Light centered build.  It especially depends on your other healers and their skills and preferences.  If your dps are dying a lot very quickly, you might want to focus more on Flash of Light use.  Ideally you’ll have the flexibility, like Ensidia, to switch out gear and gems for each encounter.  But barring that, you’ll have to find a good mix and go with it.  Lets do a quick review of each stat below.

• Intellect - Intellect is a great stat for Healadins.  Not only does it give us mana, it also gives us a small amount of spell power, crit, and Mp5.  It can even give more Mp5 than Mp5 (more on this below).  As far as item budgets, Intellect gives us more bang for our buck than any other stat.  Its not as good as it was in Patch 3.1, but its still a great stat.  It also allows you to cast Holy Light more, which means it can actually improve your heal throughput on many fights.
• Spell Power - Spell Power increases the power of your heals.  If you are using Holy Light very often, you probably don’t need a lot of it because you’ll be doing a lot of overhealing anyway.  However, if you are using a more targeted, focused healing strategy with less overhealing and more Flash of Light, spell power can help you pump out more heals to your group.  A spell power/flash of light build makes AoE healing easier, especially when people are spread out, and can save lives at times when the longer cast of Holy Light can’t.  A constant steam of strong Flash of Light heals on the tank, in combination with other healer’s small heals and shields, can lead to a more consistent, stable level of health on your Beaconed tank and on your raid compared to a bursty Holy Light build.  It also strengthens the power of your Sacred Shield and your Flash of Light HoT, which provides even more stability.  Flash of Light (and Sacred Shield) is also much more efficient than Holy Light, especially at high levels of Spell Power, so you won’t need the high amount of Intellect.  For more details, read my article on Spell Power vs. Intellect.
• Crit and Haste - Both are great stats for Holy Paladins.  You’ll need more Haste with a Holy Light centered build then you will with Flash of Light, but both stats are very useful in both builds.  For more details, read my article on Haste and Crit.
• Mp5 - Even after the changes in Patch 3.2, Mp5 is still a mostly worthless stat.  Its not as worthless, but it is mostly worthless.  Intellect will still give you more Mp5 than Mp5 will if you use Divine Plea every cooldown, and especially if you whack things with Seal of Wisdom.  However, you won’t be able to avoid the stat on your gear and you don’t necessarily want to.  If you ever do run out of mana (which you shouldn’t ever), you won’t be able to do anything until Divine Plea is off cooldown if you have no Mp5 at all.

You should start off gearing up with Spell Power so your heals are strong enough to actually keep people alive.  Once you’ve done some heroics and gotten some gear you can look more into other stats.  When choosing stats, the main thing you need to do is figure out where your weakness is.  If you are spamming Holy Light and people are dying before the cast lands, or your heals are always getting sniped, you probably need to use Flash of Light or Holy Shock more or you could try stacking more haste instead of Intellect.  If you’re using Spell Power and Flash of Light but you’re always 7th on the healing meters or the tank is dying a lot, you could try switching to a more Holy Light centered build with more Intellect.  If you’re running out of mana, you could stack more Intellect or use more Flash of Light.  Try things out and see what works best for you.  You should be able to top the healing meters and keep people alive with either build, depending on the fight.

Metagems

As far as metagems go, you should always use the Insightful Earthsiege Diamond.  Its by far the best meta gem.  The mana return you get with it is amazing.

How to Heal

I’ll leave you to puruse my other guides for tips on the actual act of healing.  A good start is my Holy Paladin Healing Guide.  In general, you need to do what works best for you and your group.  If your Resto Shaman is very good and loves tank healing and you are very good at and love Raid healing, and you can beat every encounter you go up against, then more power to you.  If you love the big Holy Light numbers and the big mana pool, then Intellect stacking is probably for you.  The best way to find out is to experiment and try out new things.

Good luck!