[Holy PvE] Prot vs Ret for extra talent points

[Baelor]

So I was bored the other night and playing with Wowhead's talent calculator. Have any of you holy paladins considered going with a 54/17/0 spec and combining Blessed Hands, Divine Sacrifice, and Divine Guardian? Using Divine Sacrifice with talents in Divine Guardian and Blessed Hands, plus Divine Shield'ing and using Hand of Sacrifice on a target is a metric ton of damage absorption.

Trade from the 51/0/18+2 spec -
Gains = better Divine Sacrifice (20%ish?), stronger and longer lasting Sacred Shields, 5% increased healing, 2 mins off HoP cooldown
Losses = 8% crit, 10% reduction in Holy Shock cost, Imp BoM/Imp Judgement, Heart of the Crusader

In a 25-man, Imp BoM and Heart of the Crusader are covered by other people (the ret) / classes (I think ele shaman have the same debuff). So in truth it's 30s extra on Sacred Shield, buffed Sacred Shield and Divine Sacrifice absorption, 5% stronger heals and 2 mins off HoP cooldown in exchange for 8% crit and 10% Holy Shock cost reduction.

Thoughts?

[Selgar]

Baelor...healing?!? My vision is shattered...

[Baelor]

Baelor...healing?!? My vision is shattered...

Who said anything about me healing? I'm just playing with a talent calculator. My holy gear is still in shambles and I have yet to heal an instance, aside from one ill-fated OS-10 run, since Black Temple, maybe even SSC.

[sherck]

Trade from the 51/0/18+2 spec -
Gains = better Divine Sacrifice (20%ish?), stronger and longer lasting Sacred Shields, 5% increased healing, 2 mins off HoP cooldown
Losses = 8% crit, 10% reduction in Holy Shock cost, Imp BoM/Imp Judgement, Heart of the Crusader

To be fair, it is a 10% of mana reduction to EVERY spell you cast that is not named Flash of Light and Holy Light. And a good raiding Holy Paladin casts a butt-ton of spells that are not FoL and HL. Also, I would put PoJ in the Loss column as well as there are a lot of movement fights in Ulduar and to get there 1/2 a second faster in order to get your heal going faster is a life-saver.

I also believe that your mana regen issues are going to be impacted by the loss of the Crit for Illumination. While there are a lot of fights in Ulduar-10 that I do not worry much about mana because of a known regen phase (Razorscale / XT-002), there are other fights that I have to watch my mana much more carefully and typically end the fight at probably below 20% mana. I don't know how much of a mana regen change it would be to lose 8% Crit, but it would be noticable.

The stronger and longer Sacred Shield is nice, but probably not gamebreaking. The better Divine Sacrifice / Hand of Sacrifice / Divine Shield combo is potentially gamebreaking. The extra 5% healing from Divinity is probably going to translate directly into 5% more overhealing because FoL is never enough and HL overheals a ton.

So, that being said, I would love to hear of someone doing this. I am a Crit whore and demand that Crit be on every piece of my Holy gear with the exception of my Libram slot and my trinket slots. So, losing the Ret tree for me is not an option at this time; but I would love to hear the results of someone who has done this.

Cheers,

[Lore]

There are enough fights in Ulduar in which Divine Sacrifice makes a massive impact that I personally wouldn't consider speccing anything else. It's not as useful in T7 content and 5-mans though, and mana is more of a concern, so the Ret tree is probably better there.

[Doogiehowser]

My vote is for the ret talents but it's probably because we always seem to have 2 or 3 ret pallies in our 10 man raids that spec into the Divine Sacrifice.

I really like the idea of the build though.

My guess would be that it depends on your group make up (ie abundance of ret pallies?) and your raid dps.

Our casual guild has some great tanks and healers, but our dps is lacking so we healers have to be prepared for extended fights at every turn. I'm a crit fiend like sherck. I worry about my mana regen and crit is a fantastic way to keep my blue bar going to the right and benedicition is a nice mana reduction as well. I'm glyphed, spec'd, and libram-ed for any kind of mana reduction I can think of.

Below is a graph that elitist jerks came up with on the effective increase of your mana pool per 1% of crit rating that you have.



Source: http://elitistjerks.com/f76/t55577-holy ... ide_3_1_a/

If you don't worry about extended fights or are lacking ret pallies with that build, then it could be a great tool to add some additional functionality to a pally healer.

I think both builds are very viable but in different circumstances.

[Panzerdin]

I'd say go for it once Mana ceases to be an issue.

[Dorvan]

Yeah, the DSac question depends largely on the make up of your raid imo. Prot and Ret have to give up less than Holy to grab DSac, so if you have enough of them to cover the need of the fight that's preferable imo.

On the whole I prefer a Ret sub-spec for Holy because the crit is a lot more useful than basic +heal, but DSac is useful enough to tilt the balance depending on your raid and the content.