If there's a mage I rarely start healing without using my bubble first. By the time it's done, he will usually have silenced another healer, so I can keep healing fine. Good mages are always waiting to cast anything so they can CS me, so I'm used to it now, and while losing the bubble that early is annoying, getting CSed on your first heal is pretty much an instant loss since that's when everyone's burst is the highest. But well, even if I didn't use DI, I would have gotten CSed still. It's not like I can get a much better return for 1talent points either. 1reckoning? -5secs on HoJ? +7% of my int as spelldmg? Could drop some other talents and max HoJ, which I might do once I have 4arena pieces, but until then I don't find the trade to be worthwhile.

As for the Talisman of the Breaker, yes it stacks, and yes other classes can get another 15% from their own talents, but from my experience, mages would rather CS a paladin than any other class because they're totally worthless while CSed, while other classes can still manage to do a few stuff(AE fear, mana burn for priests, switch forms for druid, drop totems and frostshock for shamans), so imo it's better for paladins. Wish they would have fixed engineering too, I'd sacrifice 800armor for 25%resist silence/interupt any day.

You're arguing in opposite directions here. A patient mage, by your logic, will simply wait out the bubble and then lock you down and use alternate methods to disrupt the other healer (unless that healer happens to be a Paladin too).

That's true, but Avenger's Shield is a similar amount of aggro on three targets. Still, your point is taken.

I think it depends on just how Holy of a Holy build we're talking about here. If we're looking at anything with 41+ in Holy, then there's no Sacred Duty, Spell Warding, Blessing of Sanctuary, Reckoning, Ardent Defender, Holy Shield, Avenger's Shield. Those add up to a monstrous loss of tanking utility. The Holy talents may offset the threat generation losses of Reckoning, Holy Shield, and Avenger's Shield, and you get the lucky proc potential of Blessed Life if you spec into it, but nothing offsets the avoidance and mitigation losses of those other talents. Holy Shield is essential for eliminating crushes, obviously.

I would imagine that a build with slightly less Holy focus would certainly gain back several of those most important talents, but obviously Holy Shock and Holy Shield are mutually exclusive. Personally, between the two, I would choose Holy Shield; and at that point, there's really no reason to be so deep in Holy, so you might as well just go 41 into Prot. Then it's up to taste.

Avenger's Sheild has a deadzone, Holy Shock does not. The fact that Avenger's shield can hit 3 targets can be either a blessing or a curse depending on your situation.

Aside from that I agree that too much tanking utility is lost if you go beyond 31 holy, and you're certainly not going to be able to reliably push off crushing blows for the time being.

Just like to report back that the info in this post has been very helpful. I have quite a ways to go in terms of personal tanking skill, as wlel as gear, but I have something to shoot for now in terms of gear and the like.

Also, at least for the moment, I -adore- Avenger's Shield. Puling with it, breaking sheeps with it, ect, is very nice. And my dps was loving that I could shield toss on the pull then again when the sheep needed to be broken, giving them a HUGE threshold for pure damage before I even get into melee.

I thought about grabbing the heal gloves with the 2% crit on FoL bonus, but I think for the moment I'm holding onto my points since they said they would be adding more healing stuff. The weapons don't interest me as much as a nice shield with +heal and resilience.

I am investing all my arenapoints in the Lamellar set. And this is purely intended for a role as pvp healer in arenas. I am planning to pick everything but the leggings probably and after that I guess I will wait and see if Blizzard releases some nice healingstuff. I don't fancy the Ornamented set at all since it is so marginally better for healing and mana, I like to be able to do some damage as well when needed.

Im tempted by the libram as a second trinket.
Lack of healing weapon/shield upsets me, as does the fact the lamellar set has the most stamina of all the sets.

I'd just like to mention that Earth Shield not triggering Spiritual Attunement sucks after tanking in a group with a resto shaman last night (getting double bonus out of FT totem is somewhat hilarious though)). I finally conned a druid into healing instead of tanking last night to try out 38/23/0 and after having done some tanking with 41 prot and having lockdown aggo full time it was a pretty harsh reminder of how important Holy Shield and Avenger's Shield are for serious business tanking. I really missed Avenger's Shield, even with Holy Shock there's no comparison for snap aggro at the start of a fight. Trying to grab on to multi-mob pulls was tough without the head start that AS provides, but I was fine when the group waited a few seconds to engage. Holy Shield reinforcing Consecrate's lock-on was apparently something I had taken for granted as it didn't take much for the extra mobs to start running off. Holy Shock wasn't nearly as useful as an aggro tool as I had hoped; either RD was horribly screwing up last night or RD+Holy Shock wasn't enough to keep mobs off the DPS if they went right in to it out of a trap. I suspect the trap mechanisms were messing with things but I'm not sure, and it probably wasn't helping that I was very undergeared compared to the hunter I kept losing aggro to.

On a small tangent, does anybody ever use Holy Shock as anything other than a nuke? Its mana efficiency as a heal is terrible, and I never seem to use it when I'm healing. Maybe it's just holdover from my Shaman days. Once I clear out my solo quests I'm considering dropping it to squeeze a few more points in to the prot tree.

Holy Shock blows in terms of efficiency/amount healed, but it's instant, I usually use it when I can't stop moving, like when you're knockbacked or pulled to the mob(auchenai shirrak) or when you have to move from something(steamvault thunder cloud from first boss). Also use it in PvP, mainly for self healing if I get assisted while I keep moving. It's not good, but well it's the only thing you can use, and it's about as good as a 650dmg shock on someone(shitty +dmg in healing/pvp gear).
As for tanking with it, I don't have tanking gear so I don't know, but when I'm in dps gear I can keep aggro on anything just fine, but that's cheating I guess since I have +600dmg, which I doubt you could attain in tanking gear.

I use shock in arenas and PvP pretty liberally as an instant heal if someone isn't MSd and needs a heal right that instant. It has its uses in PvE too with the same conditions - when Aran is about to smoke someone with arcane missles who was already low, I'll sometimes juice them with a crit holy shock just to keep them alive long enough for another heal to land. But yeah, it's not great.


Anyway my issue with the healing armor is that it doesn't seem like it will improve my arena healing at all. Again, teams almost never try to kill me first, and people are far, far more likely to die because I am not producing enough healing or I'm CCd than because I'm dead. Because of that, I'm pretty loathe to give up on the superior healing stats from a lot of the PvE gear.

I'm at a loss as well, its tempting to get the retribution gear because of the fact that its going to be hard to get in PvE for quite a while. You are correct though, the healing set is crap, In order to last long enough on some of these burst teams you NEED the PvE healing gear, resiliance instead of mp5 and the like just does not cut it at the top of the bracket.

Anyway, I bought the Spell-damage chest because i thought maybe I could double stack the res bonuses, afterwards I realized that it does not work, so I'm just building up points at the moment.

Grabbing the lamellar set as well. Healing set doesn't have all that much more healing, I was more worried about the loss of int, but then I figured what the hell at least I can grind with lamellar too.

Gonna post in this thread since I thought it was most appropriate.

I am a bit new to the Holy Paladin scene, having just gotten to 70.

I'm really struggling and wrestling with the +spell crit vs +healing vs +mp5 choices. I swear to god I have like 10 rings of different flavors, but it's not just rings, it's all the gear.

How do I balance those 3?

How often do you guys drop plate to wear cloth/leather/mail with great healer stats?

Find gear with a balance of each. When you can't find that, take +heal, then pick mp5 or spell crit and stick with it.

These days, hardly ever. Cloth/leather is poorly itemized for Paladins, Mail is decent if you can't get good plate to drop. Plate is itemized far better for Paladins in TBC. For reference, I wore Robes of the Guardian Saint pre-TBC, because the itemization before Naxx just didn't exist. Don't be afraid to drop down gear but there isn't much of a reason to anymore.

The paladins on this team:
http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/#t...ect=Power+Trip
seem to be in favour of the ornamented set. The sockets/enchants are heavily +heal biased though.

I highly doubt that. Too tired to run some numbers right now, but the complete lack of any form of mana regen and the complete reliance on +dmg for boosting damage output seems inefficient for grinding.


+dmg does more than AP point for point when using SoR, but AP does not require the use of mana, and having both AP and +dmg on your gear yields more overall stats than simply stacking either AP or +dmg. (Which should yield more damage output)


Main thing is the complete lack of Mp5 or spirit. (Mana => damage, and when grinding, your damage output is limited by your mana regen)

Does anyone else see a higher than normal crit rate with FoL?


Was looking at some healing stats after doing a heroic BF:

Character sheet spell crit: 8.78%

Holy Light crit rate: 8.1% over 321 casts

FoL crit rate: 16.4% over 452 casts.

(I did swap a few pieces of gear, but the pieces make less than a 1% crit difference)

The +dmg set doesn't really help much for grinding. It doesn't even have all that much spell damage when you really look at it. Sta and Resilience don't make mobs die any faster. Besides, I'm pretty sure you're better off getting some halfway decent Ret gear and just grind with that and SoR (or SoC if you specced Holy/Ret). And nevermind the fact that it's a pretty terrible spec to grind with to begin with.

I got the Gladiator's Lamellar Shoulders but I'm regretting it now tbh. Oh well, hope it shapes up better with a full set, even though my +heal and int will get an absolute tanking compared to wearing actual healing gear. I'm getting the arena set for arena play after all, and in arenas I heal. The survivability boost is nice but our team runs a 2.5 healer (Priest+Ele Shaman) setup with at least one Hunter so I'm rock bottom on the focus fire list. Still it at least it looks sexy if nothing else.

As far as HL/FoL crit rates go:

My listed holy crit rate is 16%.

Holy Light: 64 in 235 crit = 27.2% crit (I use DF with holy light though, so that number doesn't really mean much, I also have sanctified light)
Flash of Light: 161 in 841 = 19.41% crit

Is 3.4% difference significant over that number of casts? It's interesting, but doesn't mean too much (and no, I don't have the pvp gloves with +2% FoL crit).

I have a few questions for you guys -- my regular 5-man group of late has been:

Feral Druid
Rogue
Warlock
Shadow Priest
Paladin

The Paladin has been our main healer, but is currently 20/41 Prot spec. We're finally getting to the point where we can start running Heroic instances, so I'm curious what your experiences of healing in Heroics have been like. Is our Paladin going to struggle due to the spec? Would it make more sense to have her respec to 40/21 or something similar? She's still gearing up and isn't at the point of being able to tank much, but longer term I think she'd like to. Having 2 people who can tank and 3 who can heal for any given encounter gives us a ton of flexibility. We did Heroic Slave Pens last night with a Shaman instead of the Paladin, and really had no problems after the initial learning curve.

Being Horde, I'm still learning about Paladins obviously. She's done such a great job of healing our group so far that I thought she was Holy spec I realize that a lot of it is going to come down to experience on our parts, just wondering if anyone can offer advice or guidance.