Holy-spec paladin DPS - worth it or not?
 

I searched around but couldn't find any spreadsheets already done on the subject -- closest thing I saw was a ret-paladin crusader strike DPS calculator.

Here's the holy spec I'm pondering: 40 holy/21 retribution

Imagining that the paladin has 750 +damage, 400 intellect, about 20% chance to crit with holy spells and 10% chance to crit with melee weapons, this is the spreadsheet I worked up to figure how much damage he should be able to do:

Paladin Holy DPS worksheet for SoR, SoV, and Holy Shock (old version!)
Revised Holy DPS worksheet

It looks to me like a holy shock paladin should be able to hit around 602 DPS using SoR, JoR, and Holy Shock, or 577 DPS with SoV, JoV, and Holy Shock. I didn't work out numbers for combining the two, because that's in a class with working out hunter shot cycles, a lot depends on how well you can actually execute on switching between SoR and SoV.

Questions: are there obvious bugs in the spreadsheet, and does that seem like 'good enough' DPS for a raid, or should I shelf the idea of playing a 'holy DPS paladin'?

For a raid? No way.

Any spell damage gear + holy build is for grinding and maybe a little pvp, while not losing the amazing healing talents that speccing 41+ ret makes you lose.


Very nice spreadsheet though. :)

I'd recommend adding rank 1 consecrate use into your numbers, it's a extraordinarily efficient means of doing damage. Rank 1 retains the full coefficient of 96% over the 8 seconds. So at 750 damage with sanc aura you're looking at an easy 107.8 DPS increase just using it for 15 mana/s.

Ahh I also noted your use of Imp SoR, it only affects the base spell itself, so the 15% increase should come directly after "average damage per hit". In addition why are you factoring in crit to SoR? The seal cannot crit, unless you've merged white damage into it which doesn't appear to be the case.

The chief problems with holy pve dps are:
Must fight in melee range thus no range modifier for agro reduction
Must fight in melee range welcome to cleave etc
No passive -threat other than Blessing of Salvation
Horrible mana efficiency
Lack of spell hit on paladin gear

With that said it's probably possible to get over 1k unbuffed +dmg in the game with plate more if you use cloth/leather/mail.

Biggest problem is going to be resists and getting enough spell hit.

Nice spreadsheet, you probably need to factor in resists/spell hit vs lvl 73 mobs and some measure of mana usage or "time till out of mana" with a standard rotation of holy shock every 15sec, consercrate every 10sec, jor, reseal every 8sec.

Fixed per your comments, thanks very much, Drekor!

SoR actually drops below SoV in DPS with the revised model, which makes it a decision whether the mob is going to last long enough to 5-stack SoV for any reasonable amount of time, which seal to use. Also, improved SoR loses a lot of value as a talent, in my opinion. Which is just as well, I can take the points out of that and put it into Light's Grace.

SoR DPS goes up to 546, SoV DPS goes up to 596... That's getting more reasonable.

Not sure if you considered it this way or not but remember imp sor applies before +dmg from gear and holy guidance. Yes I know it's stupid and makes this 5pt talent near worthless.

Edit: Ah I see it's been mentioned

This is how spell hit works for holy spells as far as I'm aware:

Spell hit rating: 12.5 hit rating = 1% hit
Maximum chance to hit: 99%

70 mob - 96% (37.8 hit rating for 99% hit)
71 mob - 95% (50.4 hit rating for 99% hit)
72 mob - 94% (63 hit rating for 99% hit)
73 mob - 83% (201.6 hit rating for 99% hit)

Someone correct me if I'm wrong

Unless, like a Shadowpriest, there's an additional benefit to having a Holy Paladin DPS, anything under probably 800 - 900 theoretical DPS isn't going to be worth the loss of what is currently the best healing spec in the game at this point.

Prot Pallies seem to be the only real viable alternative to a Holy specced Healer at this point, and they struggle just because of how far behind a warrior their base stats start.

Fortunately 40/0/21 is still a very strong healing spec, 38/0/23 even stronger. This assumes you already have 1 kings paladin in the raid which you would since almost every paladin is 41/20/0 atm (even I am 41/20/0 atm).

I think a holy/ret paladin with a gear switch to good +dmg gear is going to probably do alot more damage then a resto druid or holy/disc priest with dps gear on.

It's just added flexibility for trash, easy bosses or areas of an instance were you don't need all x of you healers healing and where you can't be bothered waiting for a healer to sub out for dedicated dps.

Grab your http://www.wowhead.com/?item=19169 and keep JoW up do 500ish dps, throw spot heals/bop's/cleanse. It's probably more effective than standing idle at max range with a tank targeted waiting for them or something in the raid to take damage on non healing intensive encounters or trash.

On a random semi-related note, I'm currently ret spec (12/0/49) with warrior gear (str/ap/crit) for soloing/easy instances and happy enough with how it works out (although my shadow priest alt makes my paladin look silly, but that's another story). My question then is:
1: how effective is +dmg gear for raw damage done? (I realise overall utility of a holy-damage paladin is far higher than that of a warriordin with 4k of blue rage, but my actual damage done is low enough as is.)
2: what stats do I look for for really good holy damage gear?
3: 2H or sword/board? I guess this one comes down to holy/ret or pure holy, since with SoC slower is better and with SoR +dmg is king?

Well I don't have the numbers with me atm, I'll see if I can dig through my notes and find them, although I think they're pre-BC numbers so I may to update but it actually works out relatively close.

Ideally paladin gear would be high +damage with lots of crit(as a ret spec) which simply does not exist well in current itemization so you get forced down 1 of 2 avenues, one is holy spec using the added spell of holy shock to gain increases from your +damage or go down ret and gain the use of vengeance. I made a suggestion a long time ago to blizzard about making a token based system for epic drops that you gave to a crafter to customize armor based on their item value so you can toss whatever stats you wanted on there up to the item value limitation implemented by the token drop... would work nicely, shame it's likely to much work to implement already.

Stam, Int, +damage are your main stats. Spell crit and spell hit are secondary, both are very exceptional for dealing holy DPS though, the spell crit will help you get more consistant burst and spell hit is even more effective then spell crit because of our lack of crit damage modifiers. Problem comes with your melee+SoR needs melee hit as well, so often your best to focus on a certain area, which imo is the straight +damage.

You pretty much got it, +damage is king. There are 2h weapons with +damage on them and it's important to evaluate the overall DPS provided from white damage as well as the added damage gained on your holy damage from the +damage on the weapon, as well as the melee mitigation of your target. In the end... you want both, if you run out of mana using a 41 DPS caster weapon is no damn good to you.

This is true, luckily us paladins are sneaky bastards... but my limited testing has shown consecration to have no level based resist check, maybe because it has no initial application like a traditional DoT, so it only faces normal resistance based resists, of which their is virtually none against holy.

It all depends on how good the itemization is. Take for example 5/5 T2.5 (Avenger set). It was fairly well itemized it had a really nice mix of crit, ap, +dmg. Compared to wearing all warrior gear you lost a little AP but gained alot of int and +dmg. In the end it was superior, at the time people rated 1 spell damage about equal to 1 AP.

Strength/Attack power is cheaper than spell damage in item points generally so it's easier to stack but if you can get a large chunk of spell damage from a hybrid set al la Avengers (perhaps full Arena set) while maintaining crit and not loosing too much AP it will come out ahead.

The T4 ret set fails because it has no way near enough crit. Full arena ret set vs non set warrior gear would be an interesting comparision imo. However the arena sets "waste" item points on resilience and stm which you simply don't need for pve dps.

Bottom line there's no decent pve ret hybrid set in the game currently, hence you're probably better off stacking warrior gear.

The Ret arena set has no resilience on it at all aside from the one set bonus, and the stamina isn't terribly high either.

To get back on topic, there's no room for a holy pally in a raid who's just there to DPS. That said, with 3 pure healers in a Kara run, I'd have no problem with him switching to +dmg gear for trash pulls if we have good crowd control. But on bosses, there's no way I'm going to waste one of the best healing specs in the game on mediocre DPS.

I believe this was assumed. That said, on boss fights like maulgar (which I hope everyone wanting to contribute a "I wouldn't do blah, you shouldn't either" type opinion has seen) there are definitely places you can put a holy paladin to good use as a healer, that he will at some point in the fight have nothing much to do (because his tank's add is dead) at which point figuring out how he can best contribute damage output to the raid is useful.

I think every holy paladin in creation will admit that they are a better healer than damage dealer, what is valuable to learn here is in the cases where they cannot contribute anything but overheal, how can they best adapt to provide damage.

I tank seer in fury dps gear, because I know I won't be tanking for the majority of the encounter. It would not be unreasonable for a holy paladin to be solo healing me with spell damage gear on for the same reasons. Especially if we had a heavy paladin turnout. In that event, I'd like that paladin to know what the heck they're doing, so bravo to the OP for working it out.

I doubt the intent of the thread was "Holy paladin DPS cycles vs patchwerk, omg I can top the meters".