flyingtoastr

I use it on trash pulls when I'm meleeing and too busy to reset my swing timer to heal.

As I said, it affects pretty much nothing, but its a nifty little change anyway. Its also bugged right now and doesn't eat the charge of Divine Favor. 100% crits on everything is pretty fun.

 

galzohar

You can't value mp5 like that and at the same time value haste the way you were. Valuing haste like that assumes mana is a total non-issue which is contradicting the fact you're giving mp5 a value that is >0. If mp5>0 then haste<2.9 (or whatever it would be depending on your HL/FoL ratio).

This is all based on my stats with a shadow priest! Just to give an idea, for more details how to do it for your own stats and setup and spell distribution check out the other therad.
Crit value is set to 120%, which means I'm assuming I'll "intentionally" waste 60% of my crits due to not relying on crits (this only affects the healing bonus of course and not the mana returns which are always there).

If you're looking at pure emergency HPS, it's more at the area of (may vary depending on your FoL VS HL usage):
heal=1
haste=3
int=0.385
crit=0
mp5=0

If you're looking for better efficiency, taking the extra efficiency gained by HPS into account, it's more like:
Healing=1
mp5=3.73
crit=1.31
int=1.41
Haste=1.16

If you're anywhere in between (not impossible to go oom but also feel your mana doesn't really limit you from doing crazy burst when needed) your stat values should be somewhere between the 1st and 2nd evaluation. Again how to derive those values is explained in the other post.

Anyway this looks like that if you're "in between" haste is actually a decent stat. If you're more towards needing mana and/or not have a shadow priest (int/mp5 increase noticeably in value) haste is pretty bad but not useless, and if you're needing nothing but burst haste is amazing.

 

Paperclip

Umm im new to elitistjerks and have tryed to read all of this thread.
Ive noticed thats lots of people talk about FoL spam and thats about all they do, they talk about a HL use and thats it far and wide within there time healing.

Ive been wondering if these people only heal the raid or are solely healing the MT? From my experience you cant just FoL a MT and expect him to live, even if you got three pallys doing it on him, you might as well get druids in for hots.
I only use HL, and the FoL far and wide withing my healing.

Ive gone thru a whole night using HL for 96% of the night after looking it up on WWS. I usually never go under 50% HL use, and my avg. HLs are always less then the other pallys cause i downgrade(use 8,9 and 11). I havnt got the 2set T6 and cant wait to get it.

But im just wondering why most of the pallys on this thread recommend spaming FoL and pretty much going for +healing. Im personally at 2khealing and going for crit now(got 22% base crit).
I know im not doing something wrong and i keep telling the other pallys to switch from FoL to HL cause there using it 75% of the time and they usually are lower on the healing meters then me(its not that we have diff jobs healing).

 

fredshino

There's all types of healers. Each of them gear differently and play differently.

The best thing you can have in your raid is a good mix of all of them. My guild for instance has 2 druids keeping full hots on tanks, 1 paladin (me) doing mostly FoL spam and 2 paladins landing big HLs when the tank gets bursted.

The druids and I make sure the tank is getting constant small heals that increase the tank's effective health. Why? Because we make sure he's healed by at least 3-4k health between each boss attack. We make sure he lives on the worst case scenario (even if the tank ends up at 1 HP), then the other paladins' responsibility is to heal him to full.

Then there are the 2 priests and 2 shamans that cover the raid healing. They're the best to do that job. Paladins shouldn't be covering raid heals, we excel at tank healing.

There is no such thing as the best way to heal. Each raid will have their style of healing, you just need to adapt.

 

Quozzy

I probably talk about FoL spam a little too much myself, I find it intriguing and the math was fun to do with regards to haste in a perfect FoL spam world

I however do not heal like that, it really comes down to a multitude of variables, here are some of the things that I find important in decided how to heal on a given encounter:

Am I completely gimping my regen by wearing SR?
Do I have a shadow priest?
Am I a primary tank healer, or am I just helping out on the tank with some cross healing too?
What other healers are doing the same job as me? (HoT's/FoL's or Priest/Shaman big heals)
Am I wearing regen trinkets, or my +healing trinkets? (I swap these around depending on the encounter, and if I'm wearing SR gear).
Is there anything specific to the encounter which requires specific amounts of healing at any time?

The following are just some thoughts on my experience of MT healing:

1) Some encounters FoL spam is good even necessary, this is either because your constant healing stream is needed while other big healers pick up the excess (if i have lots of mana to spare and the tank is taking a decent amount of damage I just switch to HL6/7spam), or it is because your group sucks, or you are completely gimping your regen with SR.

2) Others I find a mix of FoL and various ranks of HL to be fine, the question of course is when is it safe to swap to HL, sometimes that extra 0.5s (assuming you have kept LG up) will mean a dead MT. This depends who I am healing with, and what boss it is. Sometimes if you switch to HL then you must do it when the tank is at 80%hp, others it is just about safe to do it at 50%.

3) I rarely only use HL for an entire encounter, at least I don't find this to be the best method. I did however heal like this on council when it was just me and 2druids on the paladin tank.

4) Encounter specific: Two bosses spring to mind here, on Bloodboil I just spam FoL in phase1 (unless the tanks have messed up/got unlucky) and phase2 it is imperitive to spam HL11 on the fel raged person. Secondly RoS phase2 again FoL spam is fine, phase3 I just uprank from FoL7->HL6 up to HL11 as the damage increases towards the end.

----

Again this is the way I heal, I have tailored my healing style for specific encounters in BT/MH. I have socketed my gear for +heal and the IED purely because most of the time FoL is my primary spell. If I do need to use HL alot for a specific boss then I will just switch in some mp5 trinkets and I can usually get some shadow priest support if needed.

 

Quozzy

Removed - double post

 

Linden

Zurm, i think putting points in LoH is a waste...in my opinion improved concentration is a must for raids, to help other classes such as mages, locks etc with thier spell interuption.

 

flyingtoastr

Well the PvP build also took 2 points from Holy Guidance and used them to max out Blessed Life (which you would never do). I think all the builds on the first post are just general guidelines, no end-all-be-all specs (and no matter what anyone says 42/19/0 is the best spec ever!).

The points in Improved LoH are to get you to the next tier. You can't get past tier 3 without going either 1/5 Divine Strength (right...), 1/5 Improved Seal of Righteousness, 1/2 Improved Lay on Hands, or 1/2 Unyielding Faith. It just so happens Improved LoH is slightly more usable than the other talents in a raid.

 

galzohar

improved conc aura does nothing to destuction warlocks, fire mages and any properly specced healers - the regular is enough to bring them to 100%. It's still nice for silences and shadow priests.

 

• goss

Improved Concentration Aura is a pvp talent, there is no room nor need for it in a raid build. Improved LoH on the other hand can armor cap a warrior for 2 minutes, which is very valuable, and there is simply no reason not to get it.

 

Rho

Is anyone else slightly miffed at the spirit change? It seems like, unless they compensate by restoring illumination, that paladins will be significantly diminished as healers compared to priests and druids. Shamans are affected as well but they just got the water shield buff.

Edit: I realize it's ptr, but it seems somewhat absurd.

 

• goss

Yeah, its been frustrating to have started the expansion as the de facto dominant healer (raid or PvP), and to see every other class rebalanced (and us nerfed fairly regularly) to land Paladins with an ever shrinking niche in both PvP and raiding. That being said, I think its pretty obvious paladin healing once again needs some serious retuning (to be brought in line with the utility and output of resto shaman or CoH priests), and I think the small changes to Holy Shock show that Blizzard is aware of that. Its also pretty obvious that no massive changes are going to appear before the next expansion, so c'est la vie - I still have fun as a paladin, and they're still worth it up to 3 in raids (most of the time...).

 

Rho

Yeah, buffs/survivability make us still worthwhile, and maybe the changes to ret will warrant bringing one of those along. Maybe we'll see a talent change that gives us I5SR regen (Pure of Heart maybe, at 5% 10% 15%? or rebuffing illumination). It just seems like our niche (longevity) is being taken away by this spirit change.

 

flyingtoastr

Our Shadow Priests seem to enjoy it. That alone makes it completely worthwhile in my book.

Honestly, what else are you going to pick up? Blessed Life? Purifying Power? Those are surely worth it. There is nothing else to get unless you're raidbitch specced. You get more pushback resistance for your main source of mana, a small but nice bonus on fights where silences are involved, and 6% damage reduction to boot.

 

Zraknul

I assume you define "raid bitch speced" as imp might/imp SoCr? Ie: a spec that's a lot more valuable to a raid than 42/19 which you've declared the best spec ever?

 

• goss

Speccing for pushback protection (basically useful for RoS and Gorefiend) for at most 3 people in the raid, all of whom are unlikely to have a paladin/spriest combination (we almost never have paladins in spriest groups, unless they're being rotated in after a LoH or something, there simply is no need) is pretty silly. Yes, Blessed Life is a better alternative. Not sure why imp. RF comes into the picture, its an obvious talent choice, and not linked to imp. conc in any way.

 

flyingtoastr

Raidbitch is a pally who picks up Improved BoM and Improved BoW in some fashion.

Its valuable to have one pally spec that way. If all your pallys are 42/11/8 you're not gaining a thing.

Elemental Shamans, Frost Mages, and Moonkin Druids (on spells other than Wrath) also lack pushback resistance of any kind. My raids are generally caster heavy so we get a lot of use out of the increased pushback resistance. I fail to see how one out of every 10 attacks hitting you for a little less is better than the additional DPS gained by these classes.

 

Draconna

Just commenting on this since I raid as prot but arena as holy. This buff is pretty big for arena and general pvp survivability. When you're being constantly locked out or are forced to move holy shock becomes a very valuable ability. They buffed the amount healed by ~1.75, but the mana cost only went up by ~1.5 so it's definitely a buff for pvp (although not quite what we wanted since most paladins wanted both the healing to increase and cost to decrease). It's use in raids is still very low (the only times I recall using it while healing in raids was while moving out of an AoE effect), but at least blizzard is starting to throw us some bones in the pvp world. Hopefully they'll continue to address the imbalances that we're suffering from.

 

• goss

Even if for some reason you're caster heavy, why on god's good earth would you stack Ele Shaman and Moonkin with paladins? Any (marginal) dps increase you see on the 2 fights in the game where pushback is an issue is surely less than the dps gain of having intelligent group composition. Blessed Life isn't an amazing talent, to be sure, but the number of fights where a paladin can take damage resulting in death is pretty high relative to the number of fights where pushback is even an issue (much less mucking around with foolish group comp).

 

Pixen

It may be that I haven't really done a lot (ok, any) group optimization at the bleeding edge, but why is stacking two classes with crit bonuses with a class whose talented mana regen relies on spell crit such a ludicrous idea?

 

• goss

Because you're much better off stacking them with firemages or destro warlocks.

 

flyingtoastr

As galz is so fond of pointing out in the crit vs. healing arguments, you can't rely on something that is a random proc percentage to save you. I'll bite though.

Lets just say we have a nice Frost mage in Tier 6 with about 1400 spell damage. Along with all the usual percentage modifier deubffs (Misery, Curse of the Elements) and the spec modifiers (Piercing Ice, Arctic Winds, 4-piece Tempest), his normal Frostbolt (rank XIII) will look something like this (not including crits or partial/full resists) for an uninturrupted cast.

Average Damage: 2569
DPS: 1027.6

According to WoWWiki (not sure how accurate it is) the first pushback of a spell is 1 second. So if you have 1 pushback, the cast time for the spell becomes 3.5 seconds. The DPS of said cast will look like so:

Average Damage: 2569
DPS: 734

Now we can bring in Concentration Aura. At a baseline amount it will prevent 35% of the casts from being pushed back. Extrapolating to 100 casts, you're looking at 65 casts with a 3.5 second cast time, and 35 with a regular 2.5. His DPS from those 100 casts will be:

Average Damage: 2569
DPS: 815.6

With 3/3 Improved Concentration Aura you're going to be getting 50 normal casts and 50 pushed back casts.

Average Damage: 2569
DPS: 856.3

40 extra DPS for that one person is not too shabby at all. Since auras affect the entire party it is possible that even more will be gained.

 

galzohar

On extremely pushback-heavy fights it is very worthwhile to have concentration aura in all parties. Just remember destruction warlocks and fire mages will be pushback immune with non-improved. However you can have LoH, imp RF and still have imp conc aura while maintaining all healing talents as long as you have someone else with might/wisdom. And yes it makes a difference for shadow priests at least, those even lose mana efficiency on pushback due to mind flay getting interrupted.

I'm still not sure if imp conc is acutally worth it over pursuit of justice, though. Movement speed is ace.

 

vorda

While movement speed is nice, I cant imagine any scenario (but maybe hyjal trash, and even then..) where I would need such a massive speed boost.

Giving up vitality for Boars speed is a no-brainer to me, but putting talent points in PoJ is an absolute waste in my opinion.

 

galzohar

The only alternative is improved righteous fury + concentration aura, and it's possible to argue for decades which talent is more situational. Not to mention if you pick up imp might you can't pick imp concentration regardless.

Basically it's a 6% damage reduction VS 7% move speed increase, 5 mp5 and -9 stamina (over boar's speed) if you're picking might already. It's a tough call considering some fights the 6% damage reduction will do more and on others the extra healing you'll do and less damage you'll take due to increased movement speed will do more.

Keep in mind that if you move 10% of the time, 7% faster movement is approx 0.7% more throughput, which would otherwise require 11 haste rating.

At the end it's very hard to compare although I think I'll eventually stick with improved righteous fury. Conc aura or not will depend on if other paladins have might or not. But there's no "no-brainer" here.

Imp LoH imp is a no-brainer in a raid spec, putting 42 in holy grabbing both it and improved wisdom doesn't affect any of what I said above except it'll cost you fear resistance or blessed life if you grab imp RF and either might or imp conc aura.