A common question by many Holy Paladins is whether or not they should take Blessing of Kings over other talents, primarily Sanctified Seals.  The decision can get quite complex, so we’ll explore the different issues below.

Do you have a Ret Pally?

The first thing to consider is whether or not you will be regularly running your raids and groups with a Retribution Paladin.  Unlike Retribution, the typical PvE Holy build allows for very few spare points or customization options.  In order to take Blessing of Kings, you have to give up another talent that will directly buff your healing ability.  Retribution, on the other hand, has more spare points available.  They can pretty easily spec into Blessing of Kings without any hit whatsoever to their overall dps potential.  Because of this, most Retribution Paladins will have taken Blessing of Kings.  It’s a no brainer then that if you’re running with a ret pally, you should not spec into Kings.  Considering the large number of ret pallies in the game today, this reason alone is a pretty good one as to why Holy should never spec into Kings.

What am I giving up?

However, let’s say for the sake of argument that you don’t run with a Retribution Paladin.  Blessing of Kings is a powerful buff and is useful for every class and spec.  Should you still forego Blessing of Kings?

There are some paladins who claim that buffing yourself with Kings is the better way to go, even without taking into consideration the needs of the group.  Let’s look at the choices from that angle first and what the pros and cons of each are.

Assuming you have 1000 Intellect, If you spec into Kings and buff yourself with it you get an extra:

• 1500 mana;
• 51.8 Mp5 (with Divine Plea always on cooldown, Replenishment, and Arcane Torrent);
• 20 Spell Power and
• 0.6% Crit.

These amounts will be lower if you have less than 1000 Intellect, and higher if you have more.  Compare this to speccing into Sanctified Seals and Pursuit of Justice and buffing yourself with Improved Wisdom and you get:

• 109.2 Mp5
• 3% Crit
• 15% run speed increase (very useful on some encounters, less running = more healing)

Many Healadins grab Sanctified Seals.

With Blessing of Kings, you get 1500 mana off the bat.  With Blessing of Wisdom, the extra regen will give you an extra 1500 mana after one and a half minutes of combat and will continue to generate mana as the fight goes on.  I’ll go into the value of Crit in a future post, but for now remember that Crit provides a ton of benefits for Holy Paladins, (including stronger heals, faster heals, and better mana efficiency), and an extra 2.4% Crit is a very significant increase (much, much more than 20 Spell Power).  So, if we’re looking at the benefits Kings gives to you alone, speccing into Sanctified Seals is the clear way to go.

Who wants BoK?

Of course, you don’t run dungeons by yourself.  Let’s take a look at what other classes and specs benefit from Kings.

Tanks
Blessing of Kings is a flat 10% stamina boost for tanks, a quite significant buff to survivability.  The alternative, Blessing of Might, will give tanks a boost to threat generation.  In most enounters, Kings will be preferred.  Tank survivability is one of the most important aspects of almost every encounter.  One downside:  there is usually only one (or possibly up to 3) tanks in your entire group who get this much of a benefit from Kings.

Melee DPS
Melee DPS will always prefer Blessing of Might over Kings since they’ll receive a much larger dps increase.  However, if there are two paladins in the group, Kings is a solid second blessing, increasing strength and agility, and is the only other useful blessing for melee dps.

Hunters
Hunters will also prefer Might over Kings, however Blessing of Wisdom is also useful for them as a second blessing.  Hunters will still prefer Kings over Wisdom for the extra agility, strength, and stamina.

Caster DPS
Ranged caster dps don’t have a blessing that increases their dps significantly like the melee dps have (there is no Spell Power blessing).  However, Kings is still preferred over Wisdom for the dps increase it does give.

Healers
All healers (including you) will usually prefer Blessing of Wisdom over Kings, since an OOM healer is completely useless and it gives a healer more flexibilty to cast less efficient heals.

Kings is a nice buff to have for all classes because of the stamina boost, if for no other reason.  Almost every encounter now has AoE damage and running out of health is not good.

In Summary
The majority of Holy Paladins should not spec into Kings.  The other blessings (Might and Wisdom) are both very powerful blessings, and many classes would prefer them over Kings.  Nowadays, almost every group, especially a 25-man raid, will have a Retribution Paladin who can buff the group with Kings. Taking Kings will cause you to lose an extra 3% Crit (and 2 other talent points), which is a huge loss to your potential healing output and mana efficiency.  While Kings is a great blessing to have in general, it is usually not a good choice for Holy Paladins.

Note:  This article will be outdated once patch 3.1 hits, since Blessing of Kings is being moved baseline and the talent is being replaced by a new healing talent.