Updated Holy Gear Guide?

My main off-spec is holy (thats what itll be when dual specs come out) and Ive collected a lot of gear for it and have heard a lot from our healing officer about it too.

Blizzard seems to have screwed up the itemization on some pieces - there's a lot of MP5 (which is more or less the worst "caster" stat that's on our gear) and a lot of haste. The haste is good but not all that necessary because of our large amount of passive haste.

As our best stats go, spellpower, int, and crit are all really good. Int is far and away our best stat, as it grants spellpower, crit, a bigger mana pool, and more regen from Divine Plea. That last one is big.

When you talk about specs, Holy really shouldn't be picking up Kings. If they are, they're just nerfing themselves by losing some crit from the ret tree (though the group gain is arguable if they're the only holy paladin in the raid). I personally use this build when I heal, as I love my PoJ and find imp concentration aura/aura mastery unnecessary in many cases. Even at low gear levels that spec has so much crit that it can keep up a fair of holy light spam.

Learning to use Beacon (lol bacon) of Light effectively has been the hardest thing I've done so far in this expansion (though it's obvious and easy in some cases, it's very tough in others).
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For the reasons why intellect is FAR greater than mp5, we can just compare the benefits of a 16intellect gem vs. a 6mp5 gem of the same quality.

First of all, 16 intellect = 240 mana. That means that it would take 3 minutes and 20 seconds for the 6mp5 gem to provide similar amounts of mana.

with replenishment up, 16 intellect ALSO provides 3mp5. Meaning that if your raid has a ret pally, shadow priest, or survival hunter, it takes 6 minutes and 40 seconds for the 6mp5 gem to catch up.

If you use divine plea at all, 16 intellect provides 60 mana. Each time you use divine plea, add 50 seconds to the time it takes for 6mp5 to catch up.

If you look at how long the average boss fight lasts, intellect clearly wins out. This is without even factoring in blessing of kings, divine intellect talents, increased crit, and shaman mana tide totem. In conclusion, mp5 is almost NEVER worth stacking for raiding purposes. If it comes on the gear, fine, but the benefit of mp5 to healing is like spell power for tanking.

What exactly do we want/need from this guide? Do we need a guide for paladins who are actually specced holy or a guide for prot paladins to stack up some healing gear they can use when they're prot specced? Or do we want both in one guide?
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Well personally for me, I needed a guide to spec holy ... pally tanks are getting popular and our guild has about 7 well geared tankadins. We however only have 1 priest, 2 resto druids, 1 resto shammy and 0 holy pallies.

Perhaps you are implying that this is not Mainhealadin.com .. which would be correct .. so we can kill this thread now if you like .

For others looking at playing a healing role because your guild is all full up on tanks .. and because holy pally's are all stars for some naxx fights ... i found another fantastic forum to use as a resource

http://www.plusheal.com .

Thanks for indulging me everybody .
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Paladins are very much the FOTM right now, as you pointed out. We legitimately took SEVEN paladins to our raid last night, no alts or anything. Four holy, one ret, me as prot, and our other prot paladin specced ret (because I've been respeccing holy a lot so he can be prot lately, so we changed roles tonight).


I ask the other question because I can try to pair with my guild's healing officer who's one of the best paladin healers I've ever met - he beats most of the other healers in our guild even when he's got a pvp spec and almost no points in the ret tree, and we've got some very good healers. We could probably write a guide together that would cover most everything including healing as prot. The Elitistjerks guide for Holy is very good, however.

He's actually written a separate guide on my guild's website, I'll talk to him about updating it/adding a bit and reposting it here.
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Well to be honest, I feel that I found everything I needed to right here:

Theory Crafting: http://www.bananashoulders.com/2008/08/08/spellpower-and-you-gearing-in-wotlk/

Gear List: http://www.bananashoulders.com/2008/12/09/pre-raid-holy-paladin-gear-list-v1/

Gemming/Enchanting: http://www.bananashoulders.com/2008/12/17/gemming-your-holy-paladin/

Discussion: http://www.plusheal.com/viewforum.php?f=7

UI Mods: http://www.plusheal.com/viewforum.php?f=8

Macros: http://www.plusheal.com/viewforum.php?f=11


Hope this can help others trolling as much as it helped me


and yeah i know what you mean ... we had 5 paladin's in one of our 10 man runs. *sigh* how many times do I have to roll and lose on T7 gear? lol ...

And as an aside .. i'm too the point that any raiding paladin in my group that doesn't have Pally Power installed ... get's the boot lol. All you pally's do yourself a favor and install that addon .. please?

and while respec'ing .. make sure at least ONE retadin takes kings ..

/end rant.
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Because of the glut of Holy pallies in our guild, I've been trying a sheathadin spec.

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=sxAzg0zhcZZVfbxbIzbdsx0h

Simply put it trades haste, ranged judgements and Holy Shock for Ret buffs and some improved single target healing. Because of the added spellpower from Sheath of Light, I found my heals were hitting for almost exactly the same as the better geared Holy Pallies in our raid. My crit was 10-15% higher, cause I prioritized crit over Int and SP.

http://wowwebstats.com/yuekh6c2nf44y is my second attempt at it. The overhealing was off the charts, but on fights were the healing gets through, like Patchwerk/Gluth, I easily topped the healing meters.

http://elitistjerks.com/f76/t35975-holy_paladin_guide_wotlk/
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I would vote for a "healing as prot spec" guide. I will probably always be a tank but not necessarily always the MT. When dual-spec comes out then I would love the "healing as holy guide". Right now I can get that kind of information from EJ and Banana Shoulders, which isn't quite what I'm after today.

For the most part, the rules still apply. Crit is important as each crit is a massive heal. You still have repentance and divine plea, so stacking int is no less important.

It's arguable that mp5 plays a bigger role when healing as ret or prot, since you lose the regen benefits of illumination. YMMV.
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The sheathadin spec has been good for standing back and healing, forgoing judgement when the fight doesn't allow for it. When the fight allows for it, having an extra source of replenishment, as well as personal mana replenishment from Judgements of the Wise is great. When I first tried it, I expected to be in melee more, using judgements, and running in and out. In practice I find that I simply stand back and just spam Holy Light. The spec has incredible mana efficiency, and I can spam HL, and let the glyph do a good amount of splash healing. On Patchwerk the splash healing combined with the HoT is amazingly effective. On fights like Sapphiron were you have to move a lot a traditional Holy pally has the edge. The big reason I tried this was because we are running with 3-4 Holy pallies in our 25 mans, so it's nice to have a little different style in the raid.

For now, I think the problem is that the fights are too easy. I haven't seen how well this spec can react when things hit the fan. The lack of haste, and instacast heal really hurt mobility and reaction time. I'm going to keep playing with it, until I see that it's lagging behind.