Holy Paladins as Raid Healers
Pink Raid Frames posted a guide to Holy Paladin healing today and I’d like to go through their guide quote by quote and give my opinions. So, stop by their site and read it if you haven’t yet.
There are two strategies to Holy Paladin healing and their guide is a great guide to the most popular and easiest strategy. Its an awesome strategy especially for a couple of specific encounters, namely Patchwerk and Sartharion with 3 drakes. However, it isn’t the only strategy and there is a much more fun and effective way to heal as a Holy Paladin that I personally follow with great success. To illustrate this strategy, I’m going to counter-point a couple of quotes from their article.
“When selecting gear, you need to have priorities in mind (in this order):
1. Not going OOM. It doesn’t matter how much spellpower you have, you aren’t healing anything once the blue stuff runs out.
2. Healing. Once you’re guaranteed not to run OOM, you need to ensure that your healing throughput is as high as possible.”
In my opinion, Pink Raid Frames has this backwards, especially for new healers doing heroics. Your most important job in a raid and 5-man dungeon is to keep people alive for the entire fight. You can’t keep people alive with mana. You keep people alive with fast, powerful, mana-efficient heals. If you’re relying on Holy Light to heal everyone in your raid or group, your tank may stay alive, but your group will likely fail.
Your first priority should be to raise your Spell Power to give you those fast, powerful heals using Holy Shock and Flash of Light that will keep everyone in your party alive. Once you’ve reached about 2000 Spell Power, you can start stacking Intellect to raise your mana pool if you wish. Personally, I still stack Spell Power even at 2200 Spell Power. Using this strategy, I’m able to effectively keep everyone in the raid alive, not just the tanks. One side note: blue sockets should be filled with purple Spell Power/Mp5 gems, not straight Mp5 like it says in the article.
“Firstly, you cast Beacon of Light on the tank you aren’t healing. Then you spam Holy Light, over and over and over again.”
There’s no question that this is a very effective healing strategy. Your tanks will stay alive with no one else healing them at all. But there’s no reason that any Holy Paladin should be forced to do this. Yes you will keep the 2 tanks alive, but you’re wasting a lot of your healing potential and strengths and doing a ton of overheal. Also, its very boring and it doesn’t apply for any situations where there’s only one tank or where the tank damage is minimal. A good Holy Paladin who has his UI set up correctly can keep up much more than just the tanks in a 25-man group.
A better strategy is to cast Beacon on the main tank and then heal the raid with all 3 of your healing spells while watching the tanks’ health closely. With a few HoTs and heals from other healers on the tank, Sacred Shield, and your own Beacon, your group should have no problem keeping both the tank and raid alive. Holy Pallies are the healer most capable of handling unexpected bursts of raid damage with our very quick, powerful and mana-efficient heals. Don’t give up the speed, power and efficiency we have in Holy Shock and Flash of Light for a boring Holy Light spam strategy. Use all the tools Blizzard gave you to do the best job you can.
One final form of mana management available to you is Divine Plea. It’s an excellent tool if you’re struggling, but it’s really best avoided.
I disagree that Divine Plea should be avoided. Divine Plea is a great tool even after the 50% healing reduction nerf. There’s many points in a fight where its appropriate to use it without being hurt by the 50% healing reduction. In my opinion, it should be used as often as possible. Like they said, you can’t heal when you’re OOM.
Holy Paladin Spec
The spec they’ve posted is a good one for anyone who is just doing Holy Light spam. However, if you’re interested at all in a more interactive way to heal, there are a number of talents you should use instead. Here is the spec they’ve posted: 53/0/18. Here is the spec I’m going to recommend: 51/0/20. You can find the updated specs for Patch 3.1 in article about Patch 3.1 PvE Holy Builds.
If you’re going to follow Pink Raid Frames strategy, then skipping Infusion of Light makes sense, since you’ll never use Holy Shock. However, if you’re interested at all in raid healing, then skipping this talent is a big mistake. Holy Shock is the spell that gives us Healadins the power to keep anyone in the raid alive at any time. Holy Shock is the spell that saves the day and makes us such powerful raid healers. This talent increases our ability to do that tremendously. It improves our mobility and flexibility. It is slightly less powerful with the 3.1 nerf, but it still improves our healing throughput and strengthens our position as emergency healers. The best healers are the ones who can keep the raid alive even during an emergency.
Aura Mastery and Improved Concentration Aura
These are mainly PvP talents. Their usefulness in PvE is pretty small. A better talent to take is Improved Lay on Hands. The 50% armor bonus on tanks and large instant heal will save your raid from a wipe. This continues my argument that healers should do everything they can to keep the entire group alive through any situation.
In general, I disagree with Pink Raid Frames that Holy Paladins should throw out most of the tools we’ve been given in favor of a single button. Holy Paladins have all the tools we need to be very effective raid healers while simultaneously keep the tank alive. To do this does though requires skill, good decision making and a good UI setup. Check out my other posts to the right for strategies on how to do this. More will be coming soon.
Hey, nice post. I pretty much heal the way you describe. One thing though - the link on your 51/0/20 build seems to be incorrect.
Thanks, its fixed now.
What? Skip Infusion?? That’s the synergy! And reason for QQing due to the 3.1 change! >.<
I don’t heal how Pink Raid Frames or how this entry describes but it works for me. I’m just a little disappointed because WOWInsider linked Pink Raid Frames and I was expecting the content to be top par.
For example, I would never gem a blue slot with Lustrous, which is pure mp5 gem. I would gem with Dazzing or Timeless if I didn’t have the JC only Brilliant gem available.
For a class and spec that is deemed “simplistic” there are actually different healing styles I feel and no one way to go about it. My style is more raid healing rather than focused on tank healing and I just try to use all the tools I have available at my disposal.
And for me mana efficiency always trumps throughput anyday! I have enough haste that getting my heals out the door is no problem as long as I can react fast enough. That is why I can completely outheal all the other paladins in my raid, because my mana efficiency is so tightly regulated. I heal with DP up all the time, using it as soon as it is off CD.
Then again that is just my style of healing. That’s why I prefer when people suggest ways for holy paladins to spec or gem or gear as healing style is ultimately up to the player. There is no real “right” way to do it.
Your spec 51/0/20 link is wrong, it’s just another link to the 53/0/18 spec.
Many thanks for taking the time to write this. I am one half of the team at PRF writing about holy paladins and I feel compelled to post here to say that this kind of feedback is exactly what we need.
As to your argument, I agree. Paladins can indeed raid heal, and I personnaly do so often. I appologise if you were disappointed but if I’m honest expecting rock solid proffesionalism off the bat from a new sight seems a little over optimistic ;P. Perhaps here we overlooked an evenhanded approch in favour of the tongue in cheek humor of the piece and we shoulnd’t have.
I will convey your counterpoints back to the original author and either he or I will try to update this with a more rounded perspective as soon as possible. As another reply said there is no one “right” way, however this only means we’ll just have to try and cover as many functional methods as we can.
Once again thank you for taking time to create this feedback, in future we have forums set up at http://www.pinkraidframes.com/phpBB3/index.php where you can post feeback like this because it was really chance that I happened to peg this post from the WI article and this and similar are too valuble to be missed.
- Sanctity
No problem, Sanctity, it was good post and no one really expects anyone to post every single healing strategy and guideline in every post they make. A good post is one that gets a nice discussion going. That’s what follow-up guides, counterposts, comments and blogs in general are here for. =-)
The tongue-in-cheek humor is also really common. How many posts on the official forums exaggerate by telling new Holy Paladins “just spam Holy Light” even though that’s not really exactly what they mean. General strategies are just that - general - and people have to be able to think on their own too and interpret how what you say applies to their situation. You can’t tell someone exactly what they should do at every moment.
I wasn’t disappointed in your post at all. There’s always more that can be said about any given topic. There’s no such thing as a perfect post/guide.
I like your build more than the one on Pink Raid Frames, so thanks for the counter point. It’s much closer to my own practices when it comes to raid healing.
At present I’m using the following 51/5/15 build (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-talents.xml?r=Steamwheedle+Cartel&n=Leonatus). I’d prefer to do something closer to your recommended spec, but I’m one of 2 level 80 pallys in my guild atm & for the benefit of the Raid I’ve specced to be able to give out the 10% BoK. When 3.1 drops I’ll probably be able to put those 5 points from the Prot tree into something else - most likely the crit related talents in the Ret tree.
Wonderful post and some excellent counterpoints. I always like to see ALL thoughts on Holy Paladin healing since it generally promotes good discussion, thinking and improvement. I was also pleased to see your build as that is about exactly what I use and actually came by that build by looking for the most crit and haste I could get. I don’t read anywhere in discussions where movement has become such an important part of raid survival (and 5-man as well) since the release of WoTLK and I believe it to be fairly important. Being able to get out or avoid hazards and still get off healz is important and placing some emphasis on that helps. I also like your rebuttal in favor of still using Divine Plea. A little experimenting I’ve done recently, in an average of about 5 raid runs, I noticed that overall I was collectively overhealing approx. 45% - 55%. So even with a 50% reduction in healing output, I’m still putting out the amount of healing that is needed with Divine Plea active (I hope that made sense). Good work and good reading, thank you.
I do agree with your point, healing purely with Holy Light is the actual trend, but is not the way it should be. The thing is, with HL glyphed, and as long as you’re not OOM, you’ll most of the time get better results with HL spam on splash damage fights.
Let met take one very simple splash damage fight: Archavon. Beacon on your tank, and HL spam as soon as splash damage happen will give you the best “results” on the healing meter.
But this is probably not a good habit to get. Using Holy Light when we should, regularly enough to keep the reduced casting time buff up, and between Sacred Shield, Holy Shock, Flash of Light should be your main tools.
It increases your awareness of the whole raid status, and unless you’re doing a very intense MT damage fight (like Sartharion with drakes) you should be able to raid & MT heal without going OOM.
On the stuffing part, I’m in great favor of int & crit over spell-power, but this is a choice that makes your first heroic 5-Man quite hard.
On another point, I’ve selected you for an “Honest Crap” award
Just because you’re doing a great job for all of us healadins.
You can go collect it there:
http://atouchofarcane.blogspot.com/2009/04/lets-take-that-scrap-honestly.html
Thanks Dreaming! Great comment too!
I have a question, but as a holy paladin, I was interested in reading into talent spec and ability to do raid healing.. looking at you talent build like to know why you bypassed Divinty in the prot section of your talents.. as this increases your healing and healing to yourself?
Your 51/0/20 build is off.. what comes up is a lvl 53 build.
Sorry guys, this article was for Patch 3.0. I added a link to my post on the Patch 3.1 specs including Divinity. You can also find it here:
http://www.holypaladin.net/index.php/patch-31-pve-holy-paladin-talents
Thankyou for updating your build, this is build is exactly what I use. Yesterday I succeeded in top healing Raid OS25. Recount score put me well above everyone else for Overall Heals by 400k. I pushed Beacon onto MT and helped OT heal with acouple raid heals here and there.
My comment is about Divine Plea and MP5 gear. IMHO spamming Plea while continuously healing isn’t good. At 50% healing you basically are taking twice as long to heal and using twice as much mana, which is totally against why you’d use it in the first place. Learn the slow parts of fights and coordinate with the other healers and tanks to come up with the best time to use it.
As for mp5, I like BoL on the main tank and Fols on the raid. Most tanks that raided naxx are very well geared and have many ways to keep themself up so this works well and is much more fun and involved. Because this strat has you spamming mostly FoLs, mp5 isn’t a wasted stat at all. Plus, it sounds like blizz might nerf crit based mana regen, so gearing for it before it happens might help you out in the long run.
Good post and cool website.