Holy 4.3

So I haven't seen a thread here on this so ima start one.

The changes to Holy AoE is the largest since giving them one. You can cast holy radience at a target and it has no cooldown, and might generate HP, (can't remember). Granted this is being done because Dragon Soul is AoE healing heavy but the the play style might feel very different.

Also judgements won't grant straight up mana anymore, instead pallies will get 10/20/30% more in-combat regen from spirit.

Discuss

Thread is fine but we got offspec forum for this :p

Besides, Tower of radiance makes Holy Radiance generate 1 HP when successfully cast.

That you can cast Radiance at another target (say a tank) or someone at the center of a distant rally point is pretty cool to AOE heal at a distance (or was that spooky action at a distance?), but a 3 second cast scares the hell out of me if we are going to be losing casting time due to AOE raid damage.

I'd rather have an instant cast with a 3 sec duration and a 3 sec CD. The 3 second cast time implies that a 10m raid might be faced with choosing either concentration aura to counter lost cast time OR resistance aura if there is no totem or other pally nearby. So get an AOE heal, but suffer more AOE damage...

I was uncertain if it indicated that Radiance would also apply the mastery shield on its targets, I thought that was the implication, but I haven't more than quickly glanced at the notes yet.

It's 3 seconds baseline because it's an AoE substitute for Holy Light/Divine Light. It gets all the same benefits from talents that those spells do, so the actual cast time is the same. If you're managing to cast HL and DL now, you'll manage to cast HR in 4.3.

A couple of thoughts on Holy for 4.3....

1. The Spirit regen/Judgements of the Just change is a good one and "could" significantly change your talent picks. You technically only need to Judge once per minute now to maintain your 9% haste and 30% in-combat regen buff so any of the talents that either increase range of Judgement, allow for the Spirit>Hit conversion OR heal you off Judgements are now way, way undervalued. It is up to one's own choice on which talents to retain or get rid of between: Enlightened Judgement, Improved Judgement, Protector of the Innocent but sufficient to say that talent points can come out of them in order to put them elsewhere.

My plan is to dump the 3rd point in PotI (have to take 2 points to get down the tree), both points of Enlightened Judgement but retain the 2 points in Improved Judgement to get down the tree to Pursuit of Justice. I also plan to try to Judge about every 30 seconds so that if I get a miss, I still have time to Judge again (or again) before my buff is lost. So, now I can max out Blessed Life and Paragon of Virtue and all that good stuff.

2. The Light of Dawn change is huge for a 10-man raider. Base effect is being increased to effect 6 people but the glyph will drop it to only effecting 4 people but will increase the amount healed by 25%. The glyph is an "on paper" loss of healing but since it is rather hard in 10-man raids to always hit 6 people... I did not spec into LoD during any of 4.2 and but will now and will try to use it as our primary user of Holy Power. Which then leads me to....

3. The Eternal Glory talent is now, I believe, undervalued. If I am no longer mashing Word of Glory whenever I have 3x Holy Power and am instead spending it on Light of Dawn, then it no longer has much appear for me. I like the proposed 5.0 talent change which applies it's effect to both WoG and LoD but, alas, that is not a 4.3 change.

4. As mentioned above, the Holy Radiance change is big. Base 2.5 second cast due to talents, it will cast in about 2.0 seconds just like your Holy Light and Divine Light do now based on the amount of Haste rating you carry. You will only now need 901 Haste rating to get a 4th tick out of the HR HoT (with the 9% haste bonus from JotJ) and not under BL or Divine Favor so you are not as restricted on how much Haste you carry. I went ahead this week and dropped from the 1861 Haste breakpoint down to 1350 Haste rating and saw my cast time for HL/DL rise from 1.9 seconds to 2.0 seconds. I can live with that and all that extra Mastery is, hopefully, going to improve my throughput some.

5. Something I learned from playing my Holy Priest and their Mastery is that you do not heal people fully up in AoE situations because you HoT will do some work as well. Holy Paladins are going to need to learn that same skill when using Holy Radiance because while the HoT is only 20% of the heal, the 3 seconds time length will "seem" very long while waiting for the HoT to tick. Discipline will save you an extra, wasted HR cast.

6. Max throughput model for AoE healing will be spam HR x 1000. A better rotation will be to cast HR x3 and then a LoD from the generated Holy Power. A more mana friendly AoE rotation will be to cast HR, HS on someone low (to also get Beacon benefit), HR and then 3x LoD. A much more mana friendly, less HPS rotation will be to cast HR, 1x LoD, HR, 1x LoD, HR, 1x LoD. I think a lot will depend on your group size, role as a healer and encounter lenght/mechanics. I would say that don't go into 4.3 just assuming you will always cast 3x HR and LoD in any AoE situation.

7. Yeah for Transmog. Now I will no longer look like one of my kids on days they get to pick their own clothing. Stripes on the pants going horizonal and stripes on the shirt going verticle. I have hated virtually every look of gear since about Naxx days. I fricking hate skirts for Paladins. I will be glad to get rid of them forever.

8. You can get VP gear in lots of slots but a lot of it has Critical Strike on it which I rate as being my least desired stat for 4.3 (I put Mastery just a hair above it). Make sure you plan out your VP purchases.

Kurn had a good suggestion on his website in that the VP boots are BoE and perfectly itemized. Make sure you run an alt hard this week through the 5-mans (all award 150 VP now for completion) and you can get your BiS VP cloak from your main's VP collection next week before you raid and your BoE BiS VP boots from your alt giving you 2 pieces of 397 BEST IN SLOT gear prior to your second week of raiding. I thought it was a good suggestion.

Poptart

After healing tonight, I take it back. I LOVE the healing changes to holy. They are FUN. Casting Holy Radiance wasn't a problem once I found a convenient place for it in my interface, and casting time loss wasn't an issue. Seeing the healing bubbles build on people was very gratifying. I also noticed that the mastery bubbles only seem to proc once per radiance, rather than tick up over time. HOWEVER, they are additive, so if I chain cast Radiance, then I can build up Mastery bubbles on everyone withing range until they take dmg. It was definitely fun.

Using HR - HR - HR - LoD was also a usefull rotation in many situations since we are so frequently stacked up. Now that I get Mastery bubbles from HR, I am much more interested in maintaining some Mastery, although I haven't reforged any back yet.

I also really enjoyed all the graphical changes to the game. The only bad part was the trash while opening Ultraxion, when the platform was covered in fire and I couldn't see squat. Hopefully we will get better at that part so there won't be so much fire everywhere.

I "respec'd" my pally... I say that in quotes because really only one point got moved (out of the judgement heal/spirit->hit conversion, into LoD.) Didn't have a chance to play around with it before I had to log out, but I couldn't bring myself to pull stuff out of WoG talents until I've had a chance to see how often I will/won't be using it. I will need to revisit my glyphs when I get home, however, since I didn't do anything with them (need to figure out what is getting replaced by the LoD glyph.)

It took doing a few 5 man pulls before our raiding holy paladin went from "I am unsure of the new HR" to "HR fucking rocks."

Skye1013 wrote:I "respec'd" my pally... I say that in quotes because really only one point got moved (out of the judgement heal/spirit->hit conversion, into LoD.) Didn't have a chance to play around with it before I had to log out, but I couldn't bring myself to pull stuff out of WoG talents until I've had a chance to see how often I will/won't be using it. I will need to revisit my glyphs when I get home, however, since I didn't do anything with them (need to figure out what is getting replaced by the LoD glyph.)

The LoD glyph is a Major, not Prime, which makes it a somewhat less painful choice. I was running the Holy Wrath glyph for Rag, so I swapped that out. The reduced cooldown on Divine Protection makes that glyph pretty attractive - I can see it saving a huge amount of HP on a fight like Zon'ozz. I'll probably drop Glyph of Divinity for it.

I think Eternal Glory and Glyph of Word of Glory are still good for a tank healing role, but I'm going to continue to evaluate LoD vs WoG for the various raid fights and might end up specing out of these.

I'm not sure whether to put this on the offspec forum, or in the dungeons thread, or even whether to make a new thread in this forum, but here goes.

Halp! Most of the time Holy paladin healing seems Really Easy, but every now and then everything goes completely to hell in the space of like four to six GCDs, and I don't know what I did wrong, or what I could have done better.

This is my armory: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/kirin%20tor/caelus/advanced
(Shame: I need to enchant some of the recent upgrades. However, I think my tactical mistakes are outweighing this.)

I tend to save my holy power in anticipation of bursty healing needs, and try to use mostly Holy Shock and Holy Light. However, when things DO start to go south, I've already spent my Holy Power on someone, and am watching my group wither while I am casting Holy Radiance or Holy Light.

I was having a lot of trouble last night with the Queen Azshara fight in the Well of Eternity -- I had three melee, so Holy Radiance was pretty easy to get on them, but I was still generally watching the group melt. (Perhaps I should gem for haste/mastery rather than spirit? I'd assumed that I needed all the spirit I could get.) Are there any particular tricks to that fight, or was I just failing hard at healing? (It felt like it.) Next time I'll mark a kill order better, but I really feel like I have a lot of room to improve my play, but no clue as to how. I'll be really grateful for any advice that you guys might have.

Cast more Divine Light. In dungeons, my main strategy is to use HS on cooldown and WoG at 3 HoPo. I'll only sit on HoPo if nobody needs healing or I know a big attack is incoming (are there any situations like this in pre-raid content?). Cast HL more or less all the time. Remember it transfers 100% through Beacon, so try to remember that casting HL on the tank is probably a waste. Bust out DL if anyone is down around 50%, unless you know there's a lull coming where you can just spam-HL them back to health. I really only keep FoL bound to use as an extra instant (under IoL proc) while moving.

Radiance eats a lot of mana (slightly more than DL). If you can hit at least 3 people who actually need healing, it's more HPM than DL, but otherwise it's not. The situations where I would use HR in a 5-man are very limited, mostly in unavoidable AoE phases.

Gear-wise I'd probably reforge to (and gem for) Spirit then Haste. I don't think Mastery will do much for you at low gear levels, and in 5-man if you're throwing a lot of HL on the group and relying on Beacon to do a lot of the tank healing for you then you're not getting the most out of it anyway.

Spec wise, it shouldn't be hugely important in 5-mans, but I'd make a few changes/suggestions:

1) Drop PoJ and enchant Earthen Vitality on your boots - it's cheap and doesn't sacrifice a lot of stats.
2) You probably have too many Judgement talents. You're way over hit-cap, so could drop a point from Enlightened Judgements. You could probably also lose one from Improved Judgement withough feeling it too badly, but that's up to you.
3) Divinity is nice if you're having throughput problems
4) Speed of Light is the most fun talent ever, and also very useful. Sprint and permanent 3% haste.
5) Paragon of Virtue is pretty sweet too. A 30s Divine Protection is way OP when combined with the glyph and Speed of Light. Reduced AW cooldown is also very handy for those nasty moments.
6) Blessed Life at 2/2 is probably overkill, given the internal cooldown. There's also a lot less unavoidable damage in 5-mans to trigger it.
7) Denounce is a PvP talent. Do you PvP a bit as Holy?

Last thought: Don't forget your cooldowns. Popping GAnK and dropping 5 Divine Light will heal everybody up from anything, AW is handy, DF is sick - especially with Radiance, and LoH is as OP as it always was (just don't put it on Paladin tank or they might get mad).

I rarely use Holy Light myself, as it is small and a full mana bar is no use in a wipe. Usually I spam DivLight with liberal use of HolyShock. I almost never sit on HolyPower, and instead use it as a free heal to maintain mana level. When things pick up and a fight gets intense, I will use FoL, and I will look to CDs like Wings and DivFavor. GanK is great for tight spots. Its usually better to use CDs to try to avoid a wipe than to save them and eat the wipe. Given a wipe run back, your CDs will probably be back up anyways.

I rarely run LFD on my healer, but when I do I rarely use HolyRad or LightOfDawn as they are too innefficient for a 5man group (maybe LoD if its glyphed and everyone is stacked, but otherwise no), you are better off using WoG.

You can get a little more mileage out of your mana by prioritizing heal targets with certain spells. Prioritize DivLight for use on the tank as it will build HolyPow through Beacon, but cast it on others if they need it. Prioritize HolyShock on non-tanks as it will still build HolyPow, but cast it on Tank as needed. I generally prioritize WoG like HolyShock on non-tanks as the Beacon will give him some heals. I also put self heals as lower priority (unless I am in serious trouble) as I get the heal refund and I have glyphed DivProt and DivShield to protect me and so can last a little without heals.

That being said, Queen Azshara is an interesting fight. Party members can be MC'd and sometimes LFD folks do NOT free them, causing the adds to last forever. Those adds can put out a lot of AOE magic damage at times, especially if they are not put down right away. When done propperly the fight is a breeze, when done badly it is painfull. For the most part the fight is short enough that if you are entering at max mana, you should be able to spam at will.

Queen Azshara is an interesting fight.... When done propperly the fight is a breeze, when done badly it is painful.

The difference between a group with 7k-9k dps and a group with 15k-18k dps was night and day. Total cake when things actually die fast.

rodos wrote:Gear-wise I'd probably reforge to (and gem for) Spirit then Haste....
Spec wise, it shouldn't be hugely important in 5-mans, but I'd make a few changes/suggestions:

Interesting point about mastery in 5-mans.

In general, I've aimed my spec in a more pvp direction, as I plan to pvp with him - so yeah, some talents are less optimal for PvE.

How much crit should I aim for in order to reliably keep Conviction rolling?

I'd picked the judgement talents because of the self-heal, less than the hit rating. In 5mans, most of my self healing is via PotI, so it's less useful. I'll see how I like skipping that. It seemed like it would be useful (and the judgement range) in 2v2, also, but maybe not a lot.

1. PoJ: Good suggestion. I'd looked at it for the holy power gains, but in practice I don't think I've noticed them. My rationale was that extra holy power in time of need was good. I'll experiment with not having it.
2. Judgement talents: I was liking the self-heals, and as filler to get to PoJ. Without that, and depending on how arenas go, I'll reevaluate them.
3. Divinity: I don't feel the love, but more than speed of light. 3% haste vs 6% healing ... most of my throughput issues I think are due to mistakes in play.
4. Sprint is nice. I should spec for the mobility, esp if I am dropping PoJ.
5. What do you think about Crusade? When leveling I was holy shocking all the time, and 30% more healing with HS still sounds hot to me.

Speed of Light, Paragon of Virtue, both look so nice, and I feel like I can't fit them in.

I don't PvP much, but I feel like the sprint on DP would be better than PoJ. I love HS, so I like Crusade

I don't PvP much, but I feel like the sprint on DP would be better than PoJ. I love HS, so I like Crusade

I haven't PvP'd much since December but I don't have PoJ either, although I did put the 35Mastery + 8% speed enchant on my PvP boots for the mobility, and somtimes I equip them for wipe runbacks or just when I want the extra speed. I don't think talenting for PoJ is necesary for heals.

I can't look at my specs atm, but I believe I took both (all?, can't recall if its 2 or 3 max) points in Crusade for Riading, but only half fo PvP. The Holy Shock boost from Crusade is totally worth it for a high volume cast, but in PvP I wanted some points elsewhere.

The sprint from DivProt is nice enough, but its now on a 1min CD, whereas before 4.3 it was a 20sec CD (HolyRad), so its a net loss of mobility. But it can still be nice to get to or away from something.

The sprint on DP is on 30 second cd due to Paragons of Light.

Hrobertgar wrote:The sprint from DivProt is nice enough, but its now on a 1min CD, whereas before 4.3 it was a 20sec CD (HolyRad), so its a net loss of mobility. But it can still be nice to get to or away from something.

It's 30s if you have 2/2 Paragon of Virtue. Not being able to chain it with HR is a bit of a bummer, but I only ever used that combo as a gimmick anyway (e.g. on a wipe run-back).

Having 40% magic damage reduction (with glyph) for 10 out of every 30 seconds is pretty rad, and the sprint is icing on the cake. For PvE fights like Blackhorn it's hillariously good. You can sprint to the little swirlies and take greatly reduced damage too. Hemmed in by fire? Bubble-sprint! Love it. Too bad the CD will be back to 1 min in MoP (reduced a little by Unbreakable Spirit if you take it).

Interesting. I'll definitely need to think more about that, because those sound useful. The most frustrating thing is that most PvP specs have no Flashlight, whereas it seems to be pretty much mandatory for LFR.