Holy Paladin; Alternative Guide

[Sn00p]

Holy Paladin Guide:
Ok so I saw Asbert's guide and couldn't be doing things much differently; I was (until I cancelled my account) one of the better holy paladins on World of Warcraft, including having done some theorycrafting with Paragon's paladins as well as having drawn to many of the same conclusions. So I figured I'd give my little composition on holy paladins that should work quite well regardless of if you're just doing normal raids, or heroic raids.

Talents:
This is the way I lay my talents out:


Why no Improved Judgements?
Enlightened judgements give you a 20 yard range, with hit cap; ontop of this the heals given from that judgement are affected by beacon of light. My judgements can heal me for around 6.8k, giving the tank approximately 3.4k, resulting in 10.2k healing from judging! That means you're not 'wasting' your GCD with your judgement!

Blessed Life?
Most bosses do AOE attacks with "waves" or in rapid succession; for example, Cho'gall's blood AOE attack hits for several time. With a 50% chance of getting holy power, this can net a lot of extra holy power over an evening. It's possible to gain around 200 holy power on a farm raid overall from this talent point alone!

Eternal Glory? But Light of Dawn does so much more!
As it stands, if you don't get the talent proc up then Light of Dawn does do more healing - but with 4.2 this changes drastically. They're increasing the healing done from Word of Glory by 30%, meaning that overall Word of Glory is not only more powerful, but has a chance of being cast twice!

Glyphs:
Prime:

• Word of Glory - Future proof and ideal for any situation! Light of Dawn is situational.
• Glyph of Seal of Insight - 5% Extra healing? Who can pass that up?
• Glyph of Divine Favor - Already (debatably) our most powerful cooldown; the haste benefits Holy Radiance hugely, and in 4.2 you'll be able to get off 2 Holy Radiances within the duration of your Divine Favor!

Major Glyphs:

• Glyph of Divinity - 10% of mana on your biggest heal? With a Power Torrent proc that can be as much as 13k mana and a 180k heal!
• Glyph of Divine Plea - 18% (an extra 6%) mana over 9 seconds is a pretty good tradeoff, especially with Hand of Sacrifice to cushion your fall! (Used 3 times in 1 fight this glyph can give around 20,000 mana alone - based on a mana pool of 120,000)
• Glyph of Divine Protection - You're not gonna take melee hits realistically... but Nefarian still does his Energy Crack, for example...

Our minor glyphs are hilariously bad, knock yourself out on those ones.

Gems:
Red Sockets: 40 Intellect
If Jewelcrafting; replace 3 of these with 67 intellect.
Yellow Sockets: 20 Intellect + 20 Haste
Blue Sockets: 20 Intellect + 20 Spirit
Prismatic Sockets: 40 Intellect

If yellow/blue socket bonus' are mastery, take a 40 intellect gem.

Gear & Stats
In order of priority:
1.Intellect
2.Spirit/Haste (Equal priority)
3.Critical
4.Mastery
Seriously, avoid mastery. Just avoid it.

Important Gear Aims:
I respect that some pieces of gear are optional, may not be necessary, or are simply down to personal preference. So I've narrowed it down a little:

Tier 11 Shoulders, Head, Legs & Gloves
Chest from Magmaw
Tyrande's Favorite Doll (Non-heroic BiS)
Darkmoon Card:Tsunami (Non-heroic BiS)
A weapon with <2 seconds attack speed is ideal
Elementium Stormshield (although BiS websites will say differently; with a gem this shield has slightly lower stats than the heroic Atramedes shield - however, this shield has haste which is worth substantially more than haste as it stands)

The Tier 11 4 set & Darkmoon Card together give you a constant stat increase of 940 spirit; this is a substantial gain as against going for the raw stats available on the dropped items.

If Crit/Mastery are present on an item, reforge these to either Haste or Spirit.

Enchants:
Head: Arcanum of Hyjal
Shoulders: Greater Inscription of Charged Lodestone
Back: Greater Intellect
Chest: Peerless Stats
Bracers: Mighty Intellect
Hands: Haste
Belt: Extra Socket (Unsure of name)
Legs: Powerful Ghostly Spellthread
Boots: Haste OR an enchant that increases speed
Weapon: Power Torrent (if you have no mana issues) or Heartsong (if you're still gearing and sometimes struggle with mana!)

Playstyle:
Enlightened judgements and haste come in very important here; being hit capped gives you a solid 50% chance of regenerating 937 per melee hit. This means you can get around 1400 MP5 from raw melee swings. As a result, you want to stand close to the boss whenever possible.

Judgement and holy shock every cooldown - these have the highest critical rates and give back massive amounts of mana, as well as still healing through use. The high critical chance means your stacks of conviction are not going to fall off, and they provide a solid 9% healing increase!

Divine Light is brilliant, it does the greatest heals, is affected by beacon and takes the least amount of mana overall - by using less time to cast your heals (spamming holy light) you get more global cooldowns and more time to melee the boss for your mana back!

Manaburn at the start of the fight; burn yourself to around 90% mana and use your first trinket. When you hit around 80% mana use your divine plea. Keep these cooldowns going hereinafter to make the most out of them!

It's also a good idea to use Hand of Sacrifice with divine plea, to minimise the lost healing. Do NOT use Hand of Sacrifice on Chimaeron... ever...

Hand of Sacrifice counts as magical damage! Mitigate some of this with Divine Protection if you're in a dire situation! Your self heals will outweigh the damage you're taking regardless of your choice through it!

Use Lay on Hands on someone other than yourself; it's ideal to use it on a tank when they're in a bad situation and you have low (0-50% mana). You have Bubble for yourself, remember!

Aura Mastery is insanely powerful, combine it with Resistance Aura to give a 6 second period where the raid mitigates 49% of (I believe all) magical damage in the current raid tier.

Healing the beacon target is a huge waste; you'll need to learn what bosses to put the beacon on the main tank & raid heal, or put it on the off-tank and main-tank heal! It varies between bosses, so you'll need to find what works for your raid best in this case.

Use cooldowns separately! Don't pop Wings with Divine Favor! They do stack and work together, but the chances are you're just going to push into overhealing; it can be a massive waste of a cooldown that could save your raid later!

Use Hand of Salvation for melee, Hand of Protection for range to reduce their threat levels; if you've got strong melee, it's likely they'll eventually draw aggression! If a healer takes aggro from adds, don't be afraid to throw him a HOP to stop them from a deadly fate!

Holy Radiance is also a dash; use it if you find yourself in an absolute pinch! My personal favourite for this was on Magmaw; everyone is stacked up, running as a group, and when nasty stuff spawns you can get where you need to go faster!

Final tip:
Blizzard hates us. Prepare to cry every time they add a patch, because you'll see your class getting nerfed again.

[Anonie]

Doesn't anyone link to wowhead? Not everyone knows what Holy Radiance - Spell - World of Warcraft is, and would be nice to just link the spec (Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft) to be able to mouseover the talents and see easily what they are doing. If someone knows what a spec is without having to look at the mousetips, they don't need your guide.

That said, like OP said, Asbert's guide is just strange in alot of places. Like Blessed Life - Spell - World of Warcraft is mandatory to give a few free holy charges for extra holy charges is pretty much mandatory now. But glyphs and such is play style based like Glyph of Holy Shock - Item - World of Warcraft vs Glyph of Divine Favor - Item - World of Warcraft. Some people don't feel the need to extend a cd since pallys already have many cds available to use.

One strange thing is that OP never mentioned Crusader Strike - Spell - World of Warcraft. He's swinging away at the boss in melee range, might as well grab a few free holy charges while there's not much healing going on.

[Sn00p]

Why would you ever use crusader strike? It defeats the point of holy power (free heals) completely.

[Anonie]

Crusader strike gives holy power. So it gives free heals.

EDIT: Yes, CS costs 2k mana, but it also procs Seal of Insight which gives mana/hp. http://i53.tinypic.com/n2e58y.png the red is regular melee hit, yellow is CS, blue is mana gain. I stopped attacking for a few seconds and attacked once for a melee + CS.

[Sn00p]

Why would you do that..? Losing 1k mana (including regain from Seal of Insight) for nothing? Word of Glory and Light of Dawn have a uniformal increase, which means that the increase spike up at 3 holy power - it gives a consistent rise in the healing it does.

There is absolutely no purpose of crusader strike. If you have that much free time, judge, holy shock and melee while you wait. Maybe even divine plea, but there are far more useful things to use a GCD on than crusader strike.

[swii]

i like to spec 31/3/7 the movement speed from pursuit of justice is pretty strong

Final tip:
Blizzard hates us. Prepare to cry every time they add a patch, because you'll see your class getting nerfed again.

i learned not to care too much... since every time blizz nerfs us i manage to get on top.

[Anonie]

Holy shock should be used on cd every time on lowest hp person, or tank to build up holy power and for the crit proc. Costs 1.8k mana.
Judge still has a cd, besides the self heal and the refreshing the haste buff, doesn't do much. Costs 1.1k mana.
CS only costs one gcd and 2.3k mana same exact as a holy light, and a gcd.

I only mentioned CS as a filler for a free holy charge, and if you happen to be in melee range. Like I said "grab a few free holy charges while there's not much healing going on." The only time I've consistantly used it is during BH just as both sides are topped off and nothing to dispel. Grab a free holy charge, and make sure your Judgements of the Pure - Spell - World of Warcraft has enough time on it. Sure as hell is cheaper than a FOL or DL on the tank which costs 6k and 7k respectively.

[Asbert76]

Oh my god, i LOVE how EVERYBODY says they're either the best paladin on their realm, or was the best paladin on their realm...... This is the 5th guy in 2 days saying "Your spec is wrong, trust me I'm the best paladin on my server" lol...

[Mirham]

Grab a free holy charge, and make sure your Judgements of the Pure - Spell - World of Warcraft has enough time on it. Sure as hell is cheaper than a FOL or DL on the tank which costs 6k and 7k respectively.

If you are a good paladin, you will never need to check if judgements of the pure is up. I dont know if you realise it, but judging always proc a seal, so you are always gaining mana if you use judgement on cooldown.

[Sn00p]

Oh my god, i LOVE how EVERYBODY says they're either the best paladin on their realm, or was the best paladin on their realm...... This is the 5th guy in 2 days saying "Your spec is wrong, trust me I'm the best paladin on my server" lol...

Nice troll, 0/10

But I also wrote a guide for playing Holy Paladins in WOTLK. Your guide was... well... bad... compared to what most high end paladins are doing..

[Aramourn]

dont get light of dawn, it has its uses in very rare occasions, but that tier2 thingy, I know im terrible for forgewtting how its called, is way more usefull then the holy 'ultimate'

[Vyre]

Agreed, it's kind of bad tbh, for being a last talent, just the fact that you think about skipping it, should make blizzard buff it or do something about it honestly.

[Parrky]

dont get light of dawn, it has its uses in very rare occasions, but that tier2 thingy, I know im terrible for forgewtting how its called, is way more usefull then the holy 'ultimate'

horrible paladin don't listen to him

[cam1020]

This guy obviously has no idea how to play a paladin rofl :P for starters Tier is completely terrible for holy as it has none of the required stats. Blessed life is fairly pointless as it only works on directed attacks and finally improved judgements at least 1 point is needed to avoid any unessential running.
Finally two points in enlightened Judgements is pointless you gain hit capped with just 1. Putting two points in there will result in over 1000 hit over capped.