Holy Paladin PvE Healing Guide

The Holy Paladin Guide

I. Stats


Stamina
It is not needed much but it is quite useful when there are Boss fights that do a lot of AOE dmg

Intellect
Intellect is now the best stat for Holy Paladins by far. Let me list what 100 Intellect gives you:

126.5 Intellect, with BoK and Divine Intellect
1897 Mana at the start of the fight
39.5mp5 from Divine Plea, if its used on CD.
21.3mp5 from Replenishment, with 90% uptime.
25.3 Spell Power
0.759% Spell Crit

This gives you a lot of mana, which lets you cast a lot more Holy Lights and be more liberal in using them. If you stack this stat you will be able to spam Holy Light during most fights.

Spell Power
Increases how much healing your spells do at a rate dependent on each spell, exact values are given in the spells section. FoL scales really well with Spell Power because it has a low mana cost, but gets more benefit from Spell Power then most 1.5sec spells. So once you get to higher gear levels its low amount of base healing won't really matter, since 75% of the healing it does is from Spell Power. 100 Item points gives you 120 Spell Power, which increases each FoL by 134, and HL by 223.

Critical Strike Rating
Critical Heals end up healing for 50% more and cost 60% less mana, and 100 Spell Crit gives +2.17% crit rate at 80. Crit scale really well, but it starts out not being that great compared to other stats. This graph shows you how much effective mana is gained when you add 1% crit at varying initial crit rates. As you can see crit scales geometrically with itself, because you spend the extra mana from crit heals casting more heals which can crit. So going from 48% to 49% crit gives you twice as much mana as going from 0% to 1% crit. It also scales with how big your effective mana pool is.

Crit Rating is a good stat, especially at high gear levels. Though Intellect gives you 1/3 of the amount of Crit for the same item points, while also giving you all the additional mana.

Haste Rating
Increases how fast your heals cast, but they cost the same amount of healing per mana. 10% Spell Haste does not mean your spells cast 10% faster, rather it means in a given time period you will cast 10% more spells. So the cast time after haste is calculated by (Base Cast Time)/(1 + Spell Haste). The more haste you get the less cast time it will reduce, but it will increase how many spells you can cast by the same amount. Its important to note that all haste effects (Wrath of Air, Sanc Ret, JotP, and Gear) stack multiplicatively. So with all of them you only need 20.6% haste from gear to get haste soft capped (50%, for 1sec GCDs). 100 Spell Haste at 80 will give you 3% haste. With the amount of mana we have now and that people rarely die if a HL reaches them. Haste increases the chance that HL will reach them in time, and increase the amount we can put out.

Mana per 5 sec
Gives you the specified amount of mana over 5 seconds, wether or not you have been casting a spell. This stat is pretty crappy now, with Divine Plea intellect is better then it in every single way by far. 100 item points will give you 40mp5, which is 2880 mana over 6 minutes. Even though it isn't a great stats, you can't just ignore it though.


II. Abilities


Holy Paladins are no longer restricted to just casting two spells in combat. At level 80 a Paladin has 4394 base mana, which is a 48% increase over level 70. This is a brief run down of all the skills.

Holy Light
With how much mana you can have now, because of Intellect and Divine Plea, this is your main spell that you can spam most of the fight. Holy Light receives 188.5% of spell power per cast if you have Healing Light, which was buffed by 25% with WotLK. There are a lot of new mana reduction effects (Libram, GSoW) that if you have all them brings the HPM for HL and FoL very close. Remember that the amount of mana returned by Illumination is unchanged, so these effects are even more powerful. HL will very often overheal with how much we can cast it now, but that is okay. Unless you are going OOM before the fight ends, it doesn't matter how much it overheals.

Flash of Light
This is now used when mana is tight, or if there is a lull in a fight and not much is needing healing. It receives 113% of spell power per cast, if you have Healing Light. This was buffed by 25% with WotLK, so it scales even better with +healing now.

Holy Shock
Yay! This spell has sucked for so long, it used to only deal damage, and now it is finally a good healing spell. This spell got greatly improved in WotLK, to heal for a lot more, have a 40 yd range as a heal (finally), and a 6 sec cooldown. Along with Infusion of Light, which makes it so whenever you crit with Holy Shock, your next FoL is instant or your next Holy Light is 1 sec shorter cast time. It receives 90.5% of spell power per spell casting, if you have Healing Light. This is great a spell to use when you are moving and can't cast anything else, or the tank took a huge burst and they will likely die before you can get a Holy Light off. It is around as efficient as Holy Light, so I wouldn't use it in place of FoL if you don't need the extra hps or an instant heal.

Beacon of Light
This is the spell that we were given to help us deal with being able to heal multiple targets at the same time. This is no CoH or Chain Heal, but its not meant to be. It can be much better, or it can be worse, it depends on the situation. This only takes into account effective heals, so if you heal someone for 4k, but they are only down 3k then the BoL will get healed for 3k. If you place the Beacon on tank and go to raid heal you will need to watch the tanks health still and be ready to toss Holy Lights on him when needed. It can be a huge mana sink to keep it up, but it can be very worth in a lot of situations. But don't feel like you need to have 100% uptime on it, sometimes it just won't be effective when you only have 1 target that can use heals.

Sacred Shield
First I will clarify how SS works, when you cast the spell on someone they gain a 30 second buff. Nothing happens until the target takes damage, when they do they will take the full amount, but will gain a second buff. This new buff will absorb the next 500 + 75% of your Spell Power damage and then expire, while it is active it will also increase the crit rate of FoL by 50%. This 2nd buff lasts a maximum of 6 seconds, and can only occur every 6 seconds. The ICD on the proc is shared between all SS's on the target, so it doesn't stack between multiple Paladins.

This is most effective on Tanks since they take damage often, but can also be useful on group members if you know they are going to be taking damage more often then every 6 seconds.

Avenging Wrath
Should be used often in sticky situations when u need faster and bigger heals unless you think you might need Bubble in those 30 seconds.

Divine Plea
This spell gives an insane amount of mana back, 25 % of your mana back to be exact and makes Intellect an amazing stat. You do lose healing output, but the extra amounts of Holy Lights it lets you cast makes it worth it on all but trivial fights.

Divine Illumination
Nothing really changed with DI, try to save it for when you are going to be casting a lot of Holy Lights or have to renew BoL. But, don't let it sit off cooldown for too long.

Lay on Hands
Its uses are pretty obvious, save it for when the tank gets a huge burst and will likely die before a cast time spell reaches him. If you cast this on yourself with Glyph of Divinity and Glyph of Lay on Hands you will get 4680 mana back. Which is a substantial amount mana if you won't need to use it on the tank.

Judgement of Wisdom/Judgement of Light
With Crusader Strike no longer refreshing Judgements and JotP, a Holy Paladin needs to actually judge on a regular basis. There are two main different strategies you can use for judging, you can either be trying to keep a 100% JotP uptime, or to keep 100% uptime on the Judgement debuff. Either way though with 15% extra haste you will be able to get more total healing spells out even after "wasting" 7 GCDs.

Hand of Protection
Its good to use on someone when they pull aggro. Can also be used on tanks in some fights when you need to force a tank transition.

Hand of Salvation
This now gives 20% threat reduction over its duration. A dps will likely call for you to use it on them when they are close to pulling aggro.


III. Glyphs


Glyph of Holy Light
With 3.0.3 this Glyph got change, so the initial target of the heal can no longer get a proc from the Glyph, and how much it procs for is different. If your heal doesn't crit, it will proc off of effective healing amount if its less then 50% overheal, otherwise it will proc off total amount. If it does crit, it will proc off of effective healing amount if its less then 66% overheal, other wise it will proc off total amount. It does not smart heal, but rather heals 5 random targets in range. Which greatly diminishes the effect compared to CoH, but it can be very effective at healing when the whole raid takes damage. It can do a substantial amount of healing in some fights (I have had up to 15% of healing done), so I wouldn't go anywhere without it.

Glyph of Flash of Light
This is getting changed to +5% FoL crit chance in 3.0.8. Reduces the average cost of FoL by 9.21, and increases the average amount healed by 2.5%. The Glyph I would consider using this over is Glyph of Divinity. I don't currently cast FoL enough to make it better then Divinity though, but with low gear levels or long fights it can be better.

Glyph of Seal of Wisdom/Glyph of Seal of Light
Both really good glyphs, especially since you will be keeping a Seal up anyway for JotP.

GSoW ends up reducing the average mana cost of Holy Light by more then 5%, because it doesn't change the amount of mana returned by Illumination. With Libram and 4pcT7, GSoW takes the mana cost from 1102 to 1044. Crits restore an average 344 mana, with 45% crit rate. That takes the average cost for HL without SoW to be 758, and 700 with it. That is a 7.6% average mana cost reduction.

GSoL will be better if you are having issues with not having enough burst healing, otherwise GSoW lets you output a lot more healing.

Glyph of Divinity
A good Glyph with no downside. If you cast LoH on yourself with this you will get double the mana returned. Which will make it great for fights where you are crunched on mana, and don't need the burst heal of a Lay on Hands.

Glyph of Cleansing
Not a good Glyph, since if you are spending a lot of GCDs on cleanse you won't have mana issues.

Minor Glyphs
Glyph of Lay on Hands - A big increase to LoH mana for a minor glyph, use this one.
Glyph of the Wise - Great Glyph to use with Glyph of SoW. Saves the cost of approximately 1 FoL per cast.
Glyph of Blessing of Kings - If you have Kings, this makes your life easier, and there is no better 3rd minor for raids.


IV. Consumables

Potions
While you can only use 1 per fight now, you do have some choice about which that will be.

Runic Mana Potion - The good old bland mana potion. Thankfully they also greatly reduced the range of mana restored.
Potion of Nightmares - This got changed from its former brethren, so that it lasts 6 seconds and is no longer dispellable. Can definetly see being able to use this easily in many fights for the extra 1200 mana over Runic. I will carry a stock of both of these along with me.
Potion of Speed - This could be useful in some fights if you know there will be 15 seconds where you will need to totally maximize output.
Potion of Wild Magic - Same idea as Potion of Speed, but I don't see any reason to use this one over a Potion of Speed though.

Well Fed
These are the 4 relevant different buff types, but you can get different food that give the same benefit. Just chose them how you would your gems.

Firecracker Salmon
Imperial Manta Steak
Mighty Rhino Dogs
Spiced Wyrm Burger

Flasks

Flask of the Frost Wyrm - A solid throughput increase, my flask of choice for WotLK.
Flask of Pure Mojo - With how poorly Mp5 has scaled to WotLK content I don't see any reason to use this over Frost Wyrm.

Elixirs

Spellpower Elixir
Elixir of Deadly Strikes
Elixir of Lightning Speed

Elixir of Mighty Thoughts
Elixir of Might Mageblood

Spellpower/Mighty Thoughts could beat out Frost Wyrm (67 SP vs 45 Int), but is more expensive to keep up while learning a boss.


V. Trade Skills

Listed are the benefits you get from being each profession. With WotLK enchants can require you to have the profession to receive the stats, so you can no longer level Enchanting (or any other profession) for ring enchants and then drop it.

Alchemy
Mixology - 37 Spell Power or 13mp5 depending on Flask used. Also reduces how much gold you spend on consumables.

Blacksmithing
Socket Glove/Socket Bracer - Gives you 38 Spell Power, 32 Int, 32 Crit, 32 Haste, or 12mp5.

Enchanting
Enchant Ring - Greater Spellpowerx2 - Gives you 38 Spell Power.

Engineering
Hyperspeed Accelerators - Which is pretty crappy for healing, it averages to 23 haste rating, and the normal spell power enchant is better then that.
Unbreakable Healing Amplifiers - Decent helm to start off with, but can be replaced easily with [Helm of Purified Thoughts] from AC rep.

Herbalism
Lifeblood - Small amount self healed, but it is off the GCD.

Inscription
Master's Inscription of the Storm or Master's Inscription of the Crag - 37 Spell Power increase over The Sons of Hodir version.

Jewelcrafting
Dragon's Eye Gems - Gives you 33 to a stat, 39 spell power, or 15mp5. These gems are prismatic, so they let you achieve some socket bonuses and meta requirements while only using one gem type.
Sapphire Owl - A really good trinket that is better then many epic trinkets.

Leatherworking
Fur Lining - Spell Power - Offers you 37 spell power upgrade over normal enchant.

Mining
Toughness - This is pretty useless.

Skinning
Master of Anatomy - 25 spell crit.

Tailoring
Darkglow Embroidery - 18.75mp5 on average at the cost of Enchant Cloak - Greater Speed.


VI. AddOns

A good UI for a healer is essential, you can be much more effective at healing with it then the stock UI. Here are some suggestions for AddOns.

Grid (Raid Frames)
Grid is a raid frame addon that I highly recommend for any healer. It makes it much easier to see the health of everyone in your raid, and is very customizable to fit your needs.

Healbot
The Best Healing a Holy Paladin can want u can put all your spells on the clicks and use the addon only for healing

ClassTimer (Spell Timers)
Keeps track of the time left on all of your buffs/debuffs like Beacon of Light and JotP. Being able to see the time left on these spells at a glance makes it significantly easier to keep them up.


Talent Builds

Here Is A link Of a talent build I recommend u to use

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The BEST Healadin strategies 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. 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. 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. You 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.

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

The two most popular PvE Holy Paladin specs are: 51/20/0 and 51/5/15

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. I prefer 51/5/15 over 51/20/0 because it gives more consistent benefits. It also has less wasted talents.
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. 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, but Seal of Light inscrease you healing by 5 %, but as i mentioned above "one might be more useful than another depending on the fight and your group".

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 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.

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.

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.

Ahh and yea i forgot about 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.

That's all guys. I hope i helped you with that ^^ /Cheers and Good Luck.

Link to another Holy PVE Paladin Guide i posted few days ago (basically the same stuff)

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And Link to ATM best spec for Holy Paladins on Magic WOW

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Checked your topic, same stuff thou as you said above. Worth to keep them both.

Good guide. Maybe we should merge those 2 topics?

Do that cos its basically the same stuff like i said just with different specs
Merge them in 1 Guide For PVE Paladins tough keep both posts

Done

Hrotgar i died today fock u bad healer

AOE more Nub

merge those 2 topics and make a unanimous guide or spec or talent w/e