I've been trolling EJ for months now and thought I'd pipe in with a couple of comments re: Pally Judgments.

Judgment of Wisdom is insanely good and should be up whenever possible. For a BM hunter like myself it translates to about 150 mp5 which, when combines with proper consumables and chain potting, allows me to go all out for most boss fights lengths without a shadow priest in group. The benefit of being able to move hunters out of shadowpriests groups allows you to put warlocks in those spots along with the mages and healers in there already. This means the locks will need to Lifetap less often and when they do, VE will rapidly heal them up meaning instead of Draining Life or Draining <Healer Name> Mana, they can continue nuking hard.

Regarding Loot Reaver, we've found it easiest to simply pile more people into melee range to avoid the problem described above about darting in and out to refresh judgments. All healers other than trees stand in the pound with the melee along with shadowpriests in both the melee group and healer group to help with group healing. That usually puts about 15-17 people in the Pound which is still manageable since your healers are outputting so much more healing due to standing still.

Obviously compensate with Concentration aura for everyone applicable and you likely need Tranquil Air in both your melee group and caster group to prevent the shadowpriests from pulling aggro. It's not like the enrage timer is tight on this fight, even when you're learning it. This makes it trivial to keep up Wisdom and Light even without a Ret pally and those two debuffs are sensational, particularly JoL for healing of such regular damage as Ground Pound.

It also leads to easier orb dodging because there are simply fewer people out there. Not fewer orbs of course, but fewer bodies running willy-nilly so it's easier to track who is targetted and where.

Obviously some fights are not well suited to the maintenance of Judgments but some, such as Gruul, Tidewalker, Void Reaver and Magtheridon are virtually giftwrapped to provide substantial returns and ought to be seriously considered.

Set the boss as your focus, and use a macro like this (going from memory here):

/cast [target=focus] Judgement
/stopcasting
/cast Seal of ...

No need to switch targets, and you can refresh the Seal on yourself to boot.

We had 2 Paladins just hang out in melee range on VR this week, and the results were dramatic:

Wow Web Stats

Light: Wow Web Stats
Wisdom: Wow Web Stats

13.5k Mana to the Enhancement Shaman, 9k Mana to our top Hunter. I've been asking our Paladins to Judge more often, and they're finally getting the hang of it. I think an important point is to plan around it in your healing strategy, as others have mentioned. After the initial resistance, it's becoming less and less of a problem for them to keep it up. Probably helps that I point out how useful the Judgements were via the WWS parses, naturally.

Using Quartz, my Judgment macro is just /cast Judgment /focus, and I can always keep an eye on the Judgment's time remaining. Refreshing every 20 seconds via Judgment is extremely not ideal.

OT: how does Quartz display a JoW timer on a focus target?

Shows timer bars for buffs/debuffs you cast on yourself/target/focus.

You can't really make a macro that doesn't switch targets when applying Judgements, since Judgement initiates Auto-Attack.

Perhaps a /targetlasttarget at the end will switch back? Sorry, I didn't realize casting Judgement switched your target, that's good to know (been trying to help my guild's Paladins with this as well).

I think you also have the weigh the cost of having the only 2 Paladins in your raid basically there just to keep judgements up.

Many guilds bring Paladins to MT heal and can't really spare to have them just raid healing and keeping judgements up.

Varius, the Paladin who was keeping JoW up, put out 350k healing. Almost a third of that was healing himself because he also took 170k damage.

Nezzera, the Paladin doing Light, died 2 minutes before you killed VR. A Paladin not in melee range would rarely die on VR because of bubble. Nezzera put out 200k healing, but was on the receiving end of 150k healing because of the damage taken in melee range.

I'm not trying to bash on your guild Paladins, but I'm just trying to show that while Judgements are undoubtedly good, certain fights can require certain trade offs.

No question there are tradeoffs. We normally have 3-4 Paladins, the others weren't available that night. Previous attempts we've had 1-2 Resto Shamans in melee range healing everyone with Chain Heal, and in this particular attempt, the Paladins were primarily supposed to be healing the tanks.

It was only our second ever kill, so there's plenty of things about our execution that need to be cleaned up. I was pleasantly surprised at the amount of Mana returned to the Hunters in particular, they've been on my case about getting a Shadow Priest for a while (we just picked up our second regular one this week, finally).

Having re-rolled from a healing Shaman in the pre-tBC days, I've gone from ecstatic (35 to 68 as Prot) with the Paladin class, to annoyed (68-70 Holy getting Kara attune and gear), to happy again (still Holy, but now over my old designs on tanking; learning Kara and to a month or so ago when we moved into SSC / TK with the attunement lift), and now back to annoyed (working on Mag again, VR and Lurker loot-pinata'd down).

I tie part of this shift back to annoyance on refreshing judgements.

On trash mobs, unless it's a particularly robust one like the Colossals or those damned manaburn AoE dragonhawks, I have time to judge and watch the mob die in less than 5 seconds, so I just stick with healing and wait for a bigger mob.
On bosses, well, VR is a giant pain to time properly for judgement so that I don't take the Pounding AND don't get an Orb fired into the melee crowd. Lurker isn't so bad considering I stand within Judgement range the whole fight, though I did manage to get myself whirled off the platform once due to a harebrained scheme to save some mana refreshing the judgement with a periodic rush in melee strike. But when we go back to Gruul each reset and I spend the entire fight running into Judgement range for JoLight and back to a rock to avoid the Ground Slam, oi.

I'd like to keep judgements up more often. They're, in the words of our Hunters on Void Reaver, "oh so sexy" for a lot of classes. But putting them up and keeping them up as a Healadin is a headache and a half for most stuff.
Not only that, I think I've managed to break my brain with my fervent attempts to find a place for judgement in my healing rotation. My healing fell from consistently in the top 3, often #2 behind one of our crazy-good Resto Shammies, to dead last in our healing corps most nights the last two weeks.

I find it hard to believe that working in a judgement has borked my healing performance that much, and I'm still scrambling to figure out what exactly it is, but I can't find it. There was no appreciable gear gap with our healing corps. I didn't respec. They didn't respec. So I'm left with either they suddenly all got a LOT better, I suddenly got a lot worse, or I'm doing something insanely stupid in trying to put up judgements here and there. Granted I know full well that Resto Shamans are built to snipe heals as far as the effective healing meters are concerned, and our two beastly-good Shammies have been dual-attending more often in the last month, but people that never touched my healing before are passing me up now.

Any of you folks that've done the Pally thing for a while had an experience like this? Did you go through a period where you tried to actually get some mileage out of your judgements and somehow FUBAR your healing in the process? Because the last thing I can think of as a catalyst was when I started trying to judge more effectively (read: at all on trash, and more than just a passing thought on bosses).

Keeping Judgments up is easy if you don't panic about it. Getting whirled on Lurker is purely bad timing; watch the whirl timer when you go in to melee and nothing bad will happen. I have yet to attempt consistent judging on Void Reaver out of laziness, but next time we go I'm going to try sticking with the melee and keeping Light up.

Just as an example, I started parsing again and on our Tidewalker kill tonight my JoW returned 50,394 mana to the raid; 14.8k to our enhancement shaman alone, and he still ended the fight out of mana. If that's not worth missing some Flashes in your 'rotation'(You have a rotation as a Paladin?), I'm not sure what is. No, you probably can't e-peen on your healing meters anymore, but I think the trade-off is just a bit fair. Unless people start dying, it's purely a gain in efficiency.

Kasonic:

Yeah, "rotation" is probably the wrong word there. More of a groove sort of thing. For whatever reason, I think that keeping judgements active on bosses instills a little bit of that "new role panic" that I'm sometimes subject to, and that jogs me out of my rhythm on healing sometimes. The whirl thing was a prime example - I saw the judgement scrolling down to like 3 seconds left, nobody needed a heal, and I just moved in to get a swing in and ate the whirl I neglected to notice was due any second. Noob move, and I haven't repeated it since.

I definitely love the returns to the raid my greater judgement uptime provides. My concern about the healing meters is more a matter of external justification of my place in the raid - I'm usually running or helping run one of these raids and I feel a responsibility to basically "not suck" at my given role in order that I can reasonably ask people to step up their performance when it lags behind what they can do.

Kinda looks bad saying "guys, that was sloppy, pay more attention" when I did 2% less healing than the second-to-last place healer on an attempt.
>.>

Those were good times, lightforge was pally "healing" gear but had no +dmg or +heal lol (dire maul wasn't in the game yet), lawlbringer has melee stats!

Just don't bother heading to a rock to avoid Ground Slam. That was important in the original release version of Gruul, but I personally never bother to do so any more now, and the highest damage I've taken in the past month (And that was from a particularly unlucky one) was about 3k damage.

One other thing to consider: Has the nature of the encounters you are facing changed? If a Resto Shaman can fully optimize his usage of Chain Heal on a fight you shouldn't expect to beat them, it's what their highest end talents make them best at, and the total healing this can output is not going to be easy to match.

I have this truly amazing ability to always, without fail, be Ground Slammed to the dead center of the Lair. The MT proceeds to Intercept back to Gruul, and *boom.*
Hence why I get back to the rock.

But yeah, I only mess with the JoLight refresh dance for the first 5 Grows, then I just sit back and resume normal healing, leaving the melee to their own devices (like, not standing in the falling rocks) to survive until Gruul's dead.

Interestingly enough, our encounter target map hasn't modified all that greatly; the one real change is Void Reaver being added to the mix and I fully expected to be spanked by Chain Healing Shamans there (which I was, considering the 5 or so melee dps people we often have in for VR). My healing performance on Lurker and Mag is what's been a sad-sack thing. Seeing as I haven't been back in Kara for like two weeks (taking my Warrior to give other less-geared healers a shot at gear), I think I'll take the Pally back there and see if my healing continues to suck in an environment in which I don't have said heal-sniping Shamans to possibly be the root of my problem. Maybe I'll finally get a Shard off Maiden while I'm at it.

Very not true. WWS just has a problem showing Seal of Light.
If you look at the top Illidan kill (ranked by DPS I believe) on WWS, it is Blood-Legion. According to the abilities tab, there are no Gains for Judgement/Seal of Light. However, if you look into the Paladins and then trace through their abilities used, you find that Seal of Light indeed did +78k healing. For some reason, Seal/Judgements of Light/Wisdom have a problem showing up, even though they are quite clearly evident in some fights. WWS tracks them and shows their healing/managain, but doesn't seem to show them in the list of buffs and debuffs.

In fact, according to the WWS top kills of Illidan/Mother, it seems the majority use it. Blood-Legion, Aurora, and Celebrity all use judgement of light and judgement of wisdom. Vodka doesn't use it. I'd look for more, but stupid Blood Legion has hogged up like the top 5 million spots on all the kills.

Suffice to say, the apperent lack of Judgement of Light/Wisdom speaks less about how powerful top raid guilds find the abilities and more about possible problems in the manner that WWS reports things.

EDIT: Also, trolling a forum=saying inflammitory things to get a rise out of people and is generally considered a bad thing unless it's 4chan, in which case it is a form of art. The word you're looking for is lurking, sitting back and reading without posting.

The numbers are there to prove how useful judgements are. I think alot of it comes from people being to lazy or stubborn to do it.

Back in naxx I used to have massive arguments with the rogues about dropping WF/SoE on fights like PW where a gcd could and would see my healing assignment die. I didn't want to have to drop my totems, i was trying to conserve amna and do my job as efficiently as possible, then i tried it and it wasnt a problem if i did it at the right times.

Just as judgements aren't a problem, I've noticed some of you mention about VR being an issue to judge on, surely not, take the pound its insignificant with a half decent melee healing tactic.

Morogrim I think someone mentioned, how is throwing a judgement even a slight problem? Being in range doesn't matter, you're still going to get quake.

The pure healing and mana is enough to save me on so many fights, mother shahraz healed myself, 3 rogues and 1 warrior for 200k.

Our melee dps get bol on most fights, it removes the need for most of the melee raid healing, and when you get the bugged bol ticks for 300+ its better than lifebloom.

My only slight whine would be the threat I get for constantly regening mana, but thats nothing major, it just means a smaller gap between me and the MT.

It might be interesting to note that Blood Legion uses a Ret Paladin, might explain some of the WWS problems as the judgements are being refreshed in a different way to most guilds.

Indeed, and it's the same paladin - Grant - that was being discussed in the Retadin use in raids thread. Isn't the world... er, forum small

Which is an interesting mechanic I've noticed about judgements. If you melee-refresh a judgement, it counts as a spell cast every time you melee (and can really noticably be reflected, and for the longest time would eat up a grounding totem charge. Whenever I melee a mob with a reflect shield I end up with multiple Judgement of the Crusaders on myself), while Cstrike refreshes just reset the debuff timer without any other interaction.

Is there a way to determine your Judgments' overall uptime? WWS is already finicky about them and I've found no way to do so.

Yeah our paladins are starting to take judgments more seriously, especially when we pulled numbers like this on VR.

Judgement of Wisdom provided 56610 free mana to the raid.
Sp1 provided 47345 free mana to the raid.
Sp2 provided 34836 free mana to the raid.

Needless to say our hunters absolutely loved it