Holy paladin 4.0.1
Ghli — Sat, 10/16/2010 - 14:07
As 4.0.1 came out on Tuesday, new changes came out for paladin healing. Gone are the days of Holy Light bombing to help AoE Via the Glyph of Holy light. Now our AoE heal is Light of Dawn, or rather our flashlight. It appears to not have a cap on the amount of people it can heal at once. Currently it heals for about 2.5-2.7k for 922 mana, but is currently on a 20 second CD unless glyphed down to a 10 second CD and becomes weaker by 20% (not sure if this is a good idea at level 85, but we will see). It’s not a bad way to proc Solace to a full stack for 288 spirit.
Judgment of the Pure has not changed, but with no Judgment of Light around, There’s no reason to judge every 10-15 seconds or so.
Our big heal is now Dawn of Light. Heals for about 13-15k, but costs 1318 mana and has a base cast time of 3 seconds. With the haste that I currently have, this has been knocked down to 1.99 seconds/ 1.82 with Judgment of the Pure.
Holy light is still our main heal, but isn’t as strong as it was. Heals for 5.6k, costs 395 mana, and has a base cast time of 3 seconds.
Flash of light is has changed to the fastest heal that we can do, next to instant casts. Heals for about 10, costs 1186 mana, and has a base cast time of 1.5 seconds. With haste, this is down to 1.19s/1.09s
Beacon of light got wacked by the nerf bat, and did it get nerfed hard. Half of any heal that I do gets sent to the person with the beacon. Costs 263 mana. However, it’s also a combo point generator, if my beaconed target is directly healed
Although Crusader Strike is now a baseline ability for every paladin, it’s still viable to use as it generates combo points. Might as well stay in melee range, and generate combo points as a filler for not needing to Judge every 10 seconds.
Holy shock become a combo point generator with the new Holy Power mechanic that we picked up. Glyphable so you can increase it’s crit rate by 5%. It's still on a 6 second CD. However, casting holy shock now has benefits.
1. A holy shock crit can reduce the next cast of holy light by 1.5 seconds. In 4.0.3, this will make the cast time of Dawn of Light or Holy Light be reduced by 1.5 seconds.
2. Casting holy shock (crit or not) grants 30% haste for the next FoL, HL, or Dawn of light. HOWEVER, when 4.0.3 comes out, this(speed of light) has been changed to only grant 1%/2%/3% spellhaste
Word of Glory is our Holy Power finisher. 1 charge 3k heal, 2 charges 6k heal, 3 charges 9k. Costs no mana.
Protector of the Innocent is not exactly a heal we do, but something like a nerfed Beacon on ourselves. It can crit (this might get nerfed so it doesn’t crit all all). In addition, if you heal yourself, you do gain PotI heals(might get nerfed as well).
Illuminated Healing is our Mastery bonus. This turns us into a weaker (8% baseline)/stronger version of Val’anyr with no 45 second cooldown. I reforged crit on all my armor pieces (down to 32.7%) to mastery (up to 17.93%). However, World of Logs doesn’t take account into Illuminated Healing yet, so I expect the true healing+Absorb for me to go up when it is added.
Going over what happened with half of ICC being completed, healing as expected was strange. Marrowgar, not everyone was grouped up, so the healing from Light of Dawn wasn’t very effective. Then again, we were attempting to do Boned, and failed the achievement, which probably explains why no one was grouped up.
Not sure what was going on Lady Deathwhisper as we were doing Full House.
Gunship was snoozeship. Nothing unusual except Nuit wasn’t on for his usual kiting duties.
Saurfang was strange to everyone. The order of people getting marked were me, Kish, Crawfeesh, and Puregenius. People healing marks were me, elapsed, raziella, and silentalaram, with kish healing the first melee mark. Since I was marked first, healing became a breeze just for healing myself. Marks were doing about 6k-8k damage per tick. Holy light+PotI would heal myself for 6k+5k +whatever spell decided to crit at that point. Mana was never an issue; I never dropped below 70%, no innervates, and no divine plea(which is 10% mana regained on a 2 minute cooldown now).
Not sure what people were doing on Rotface. We were supposed to Dances with Oozes. I was one of the first people to get diseased. Stood in area away from the other ooze with my ooze just hitting me (2k-3k hits)and let PoiI keep me up while healing Orky.
Heroic Festergut was nothing but full of bugs. Vile gas was being thrown at anyone, and I mean anyone in melee or ranged. It was at the point where I was barely out of melee range, and somehow I got vile gas chained into the melee. I hope this gets fixed by the next lockout.
Other than that (and the nuking of illumination and DI), it seems like we’ll be fine at 80 and ok at 85. We’ll have to see when we get our hands on our level 81+ abilities that we don’t have access to yet to see if we’ll be fine at 85.
A few additions:
Ghli — Sun, 10/17/2010 - 21:58I went pvping with Grasen and Derch for about 3-4 hours. With the way healing was going on, it was very annoying to loose my holy shock -> instant cast FoL as i was trying to kite dps into our dps. Granted, we were basically running with only 1 healer, but I did feel like an unkillable healer. There were points where I would go lower than 10% mana, and started to go chain cast holy shock and word of glory for about what felt like an hour when in reality was nearly 6 minutes. I was wearing mostly pvp gear, with Heroic Solace, Heroic Bulwark, and normal Bloodsurge. Granted, all my pvp gear did not have any mastery, or was regemmed to take socket bonuses. Now, If i was truly PvP Spec, there are things I would have picked up, namely http://wowtal.com/#k=Yf3S1Vv.a6d.paladin. Light of Dawn is virtually useless with everyone being spread out. However, if and when I did get locked out of the holy tree, light of dawn was the only spell that was not locked out(bug?). However, there were times where i felt it was 15v1, and kept getting 3 shot, probably because the other team was in full pve gear.
Out of the time that I was pvping, there were 2 spells that I did not use extensively was Holy wrath (15 second cooldown) and Exorcism(no cooldown, base cast time of 1.5 seconds, 1.19 second cast time in my pve gear). I decided to do a heroic as a healer (I usually tank heroics so i don't get bored and fall asleep casting holy lights). H OK popped out, and I got a semi-geared DK. This was more of a tryout of a few plugins to grid (gridstatusabsorbsmonitor and gridstatusshield both updated to work on 4.0) that I was using while healing on my priest, but never bothered with using with my paladin since the only shielding I had was sacred shield before 4.0. Now with Illuminated Healing. It may or may not be useful to see it. With these addons, I noticed that Light of Dawn does proc Illuminated Healing shields, although the shielding was around 400. Obviously, building the shield up stronger doesn't work; a stronger heal would proc a stronger shield and likewise, a weaker shield doesn't override a stronger shield.
Now, onto the final boss of H OK, I decided to go chain cast Exorcism. We had a shaman, so he decided to go cast heroism a few seconds after the DK engaged the boss while my Exorcism with less than a cast time of a second. To my surprise, the boss finished casting insanity with about 20% left on his HP. With everyone having about 12k HP, my Exorcism 2-3 shot everyone. Upon everyone loosing their insanity debuff, the boss promptly died. I took a look at the damage meters, and to my surprise, I was 4th in damage at about 2k dps, doing about 20% of the damage just from casting 2 or 3 judgments to proc judgement of the pure and the rest was nothing but exorcism. Damage probably could have been more, but being at level 80, there's not enough talent points to grab blazing light or denounce.
I just boomarked this using
garreth — Sun, 10/17/2010 - 17:13I just boomarked this using our new bookmark system. Will BBL to read more.