What you mention here is pretty much in line with that what Vorda said earlier... this is a case of failure to optimize your raid. You really shouldn't cross the line of 4 paladin healers in your raid. Actualy prefered would be 3 holy paladins with a prot or retr one. So you take only 3 healing spots but still have Light on the entire raid. We usualy play with 3 paladins, 2 resto shamans & then either 2 priests & 1 druid or the other way arround. Making a total of 8 healers. Ofcourse if you play with 5 paladins you are gonna have to do healing jobs a paladin isn't made for & then ofcourse your gonna have to make gear sets etc that don't really get the best of your character.

Naj'entus is a fight where quite a bit of raid dmg is going on. 1.5-2k dmg from the splashes... 200mana. 8500 dmg from the bubble... 850mana. If you play it well on raid dmg heavy boss fights, you should barely ever go oom. Same thing with Gurtogg. I spam Holy Light Rank 11 on the Enrage target there for the entire phase, drains about half my mana bar. But by the next Enrage I usualy regained about 25-30% mana from healing on bloodboil it's np to keep this up.

I barely ever heal myself on bossfights... mostly because I'm assigned on the Main Tank & there's raid healers to heal me up (at least that's my point of view).

Meh I never kept more then 1 set of healing gear. I just use the same gear everywhere... 2450 healing, +- 28% holy crit raidbuffed.
For the sunwell I'm gonna socket my gear with haste gems I think. It should increase my HPS more then healing gems & since untill now I never had mana issues. Maby I will with all this haste (should be able to get about 240) I will get some mana problems but I doubt it tbh.

Yeah a paladin healing himself is double penalty - first you pay mana to heal yourself and then you don't gain the mana regen you would've gained if someone healed you. Not to mention you stopped healing the tank and thus risked his death if it's a tough fight (morogrim, while easy, is a great example for where a single spot heal can kill the tank given the right conditions).

Regarding your najentus and council comparison, yes the raid playing better on an easier fight does have a huge effect on your mana needs. Also if healers are more on top of their game you don't have to panic-heal yourself and let others heal you so you don't lose that regen (which can be massive on those fights).

Just remember to tune your gear to a well-playing raid, as a poorly playing raid will probably wipe no matter how you gear while you will want to have optimal gear for when the raid actually does the fight properly. Then again when everyone do everything properly it's so easy you want to gear for "what if they mess up a little or we get bad luck" - it's kind of a paradox

I'd have to disagree that Paladins being on spot healing is a bad position for them. Our quick heals are perfect for spot healing better then most classes. We frequently run 4 holy paladins in a raid, not on purpose but out of a lack of other classes willing to raid in healing specs.

I do not run my high crit gear n all fights. It is usually reserved for the mana and healing intensive fights. Still, Its hard to compare the builds when you take into account the different roles in fights. I'll say from my experiences on Council fights, high crit has me at #1 on healing meters hands down, usually by 50,000 or so. Again, I am on a raid healing position which is a good place to be if you care about meters at all.

In the end, we usually have no deaths and thats all that matters in the end.

I stack healing and when on any other tank then the paladin tank (who I massivly overheal because of the burst damage), guess what, I also top healing meters by a massive amount.

Posts like yours -while not badly intended- are rather worthless because they do not add much to the discussion besides some 'it works for me'. (which, without any reasoning behind it is completely void)

Now, on topic; Our spot healing is decent/good when the incoming DPS on the raid isn't too high and the targets are predictable. Once you have a certain DPS on your raid -and flash spam just doesn't do it-, we are bad (illidan p2 by example). Also worth noting that in the cases where out spot healing is good, a resto druid does much better, assuming you have a healing squad which sticks to its assignments. (aka: don't overheal hots)

Also, why try to do something another class is completely build around? In a balanced raid one can expect 2-3 resto shamans who have the perfect tool for raid/spot healing.

Hi, I'm a paladin who just got into a real big fight with my raid leader, I'm here in hope of someone to give me some suggestions on how to improve my healing.

Scenario:
Main tank gets parry gibbed by Illidan and dies while two paladins are casting FoL on him. Since getting the maintank killed is unacceptable, our raid leader declared that whenever a paladin is main healing the tank, flash of light should not be much used.

I tried to argue that it is impossible to predict damage and cast holy light 1.8 seconds or so before the tank gets hit, it is also impossbile to chain cast holy light in any fight that lasts over two minutes. Therefore, excluding "predicting damage" and "chain casting HL", the only other methods I can come up with is chain casting FoL and switch to HL whenever the main tank gets a dent on his health bar, and Casting-and-interrupting holy light.

Our raid leader proceeded on that my "spam FoL and switch to HL" is what gets the main tank killed, so I then precieved his statment as casting-and-interrupting holy light. I continued to argue that casting-and-interrupting holy light heavily depends on human reflex, hardware and network latency, I said that spamming FoL and switch can be more robust while casting-and-interrupting can be more powerful if executed with someone with agile fingers, both methods has its pros and cons.

Our raid leader then replied that I did not understood what he said, he said that it is important to spam holy light on the main tank to while no one else is healing him to ensure that he does not get killed. I reasoned that even with end game gear, paladins will go oom after 30 or so holy lights, while chain casting holy light can ensure the main tank's survival, some sort of moderation is a necessary evil, whether it is weaving FoL with HL or stop casting to regen mana.

I compared the odds of the maintank getting parry gibbed with high school probabilty, and the inevitable case of going out of mana of a paladin sapmming holy light. The man then said that his wife can use holy light without going out of mana, that math has nothing to do with raiding, and told me never to join his raid.

After the argument, people start posting on our forum that I should listen to the man. I'm just boggled, is there a way of healing that I don't know, that keeps you from going oom even if you spam holy light? I respect the man, but if a policy is issued, I have the right to know how to execute it. So when things I post turns into a flamewar on my guild forum and nobody is doing any logical analysis, I'd like to have some expert's opinon on how to get most out of my holy light.

It is stupid of your raid leader either way to blame two paladins, when almost every other healer should be healing the MT. Only other things that need healing then is parasites and agonizing flames, which require at most one healer.

If your MT is dying before you can switch to a Holy Light when 6-7 healers are on him, something else is wrong.

Well, while putting 2 healers only on MT is weird (unless you mean P2 tanks), ONLY FoL is a no go for paladin raiding T6. Usually you do HL rank 4 each 15 sec to keep Light's Grace up and when needed do HL rank 9/11. While you don't stream-heal with HL (save fel rage and probably P2 of illidan fight), reactive healing is mostly done with holy light, not flash.

Also if you are assigned to heal FR tank in p2, flash won't be enough. Unless you assign 3 healers per tank (but I doubt you could heal raid damage with the rest of your healers). In P2 you use HL often. I would say 50/50 HL/FoL.

I think in BT there are only 2 fights where you could exclusively FoL - Teron and Akama (prolly Supremus too if you are on MT). On Najentus you are forced to HL at least after bubble, in RoS P3 flash simply won't be enough, BB - no comments. on Mother flash in gimped gear may not be enough too. On council HL is usefull too, either after burst on pally tank or occasional heal of mage tank - FoLing him is waste of mana imho, reactive raid healing when envenom/wrath is being casted, etc.

About optimal setup - not all guilds could allow to have as many healers of each class as they would like to. Our server has only few guilds raiding T6 and since we are not the best on server, our recruitment pool is really small and we simply don't have many healers (1 shammy, 2 druids, 4 priests and palas). Therefore I should optimize my gear to our own setups, and not optimal setups.

Also question for people who aim for +healing mostly. Why I almost never see paladins using sun-touched leggings from Kazrogal over T6? They are highest healing legs in game (176 +healing with 3 +22 gems).

I'm pretty sure he knows this. His RL was complaining about using FoL at all.

(That being said, there have often been situations where the tank takes a massive burst and I keep casting FoL because I see everyone around me switch to their big slow heals)

Considering LG should be up, is a .5 second increase to your cast time really considered your "big slow heal"? Healing for 5-8k vs. 2-3k seems like it might be worth it. I wouldn't really know though as I am crit speced(I stack 10 Crit gems and items with crit, vs mp5 and + healing - I think im around 45% HL crit fully raid buffed), so I primarily cast r6 and switch to r11 when needed. I love Bloodboil, it really favors HL paladins.

Partially those situations are when I mess up and let light's grace drop, other part is a DW boss where I know the next hit will arrive quicker than 2 seconds.

About Light's grace; we've found out here a while ago that because of the fact it's a buff, the haste cast time reduction is calculated from the 2.0 instead of the 2.5 cast time. Would it be safe to conclude that the +heal bonus also suffers under that same effect?

With 2000 healing that'd make the amount of healing done by Holy Light reduced by 286 if Light's Grace were up. While that is still within the healing range of a max-rank Holy Light, having it consistently that much lower would be highly noticeable.

It'd also make it the only spell in the game for which a cast time reduction talent/buff reduces the amount of healing done per cast.

Spell haste applies after the talent cast time reduction for all spells. For reference, Fireball's cast time from Vontre's spreadsheet:
=(((Base cast time)-(Points in Improved Fireball)*0.1)/(Haste modifier)/(Bloodlust Modifier))/(1 + (Icy Veins)*0.033333)

Hey all.

I've been using the below macro for Blessing of Protection and need some advanced advice to see if I can improve it. (I'm writing this from memory, so if there are any obvious errors, please assume I have it correct in game.)

/cast [target=player,modifier:alt] Blessing of Protection; [target=target,help] Blessing of Protection; [target=targettarget,help] Blessing of Protection; Blessing of Protection

As you can see, this macro casts BoP on me if I have alt down, otherwise on the target if it's friendly, otherwise the target of my target if that target is friendly. I use this template for all my heals: it allows me to keep the boss targeted but continuously heal whomever he is damaging (I use Clique to raid heal).

Not to toot my own horn, but this macro worked beyond my wildest dreams. I am constantly BoPing casters and healers. It is fantastic and has saved a lot of people during trash and bosses alike. I can even imagine it saving the raid from a wipe, simply due to the law of large numbers. I am very happy with it.

Occasionally, and by that I mean "very rarely" and "quite seldom", I will use this macro but the target has already switched back to the tank, either because it has oneshot the caster/healer or because the tank has reacted just as quickly as I have to the overthreat and gotten agro back. In these circumstances, I BoP the tank. This has happened maybe 5 times over several months of T6 raiding. All but one time, it was on a bear tank during Hyjal trash. We laughed about it.

Last week, however, it happened again at precisely the wrong time: Illidan Phase 1. An Elemental Shaman (a class I have no idea who you would ever properly manage threat with) pulled as we were kiting him around the circle, and Illildan turned and booked it straight for him. I reacted by hitting my macro. At that point, however, he had already oneshot the Shaman and turned back to the tank, who received the BoP, which of course caused mass havoc and a wipe. All of a sudden, my guildmates... were displeased.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to improve the macro or my use of it to eliminate the possibility of this happening? I have only two solutions at current:

1. Add a "noparty" condition to the macro and make sure I am in the group with the tanks. This is not ideal, to say the least.

2. Have the tanks add a line to their macros: "/cancelaura Blessing of Protection". I understand there is also an addon which tanks use to automatically drop Blessings of Protection and Salvation. Current problem: none of my tanks use macros (apparently tanking is not as tough as it looks ).

Any other ideas?

Thanks,

Minister.Kel'thuzad

ATTENTION: please, please, please don't reply if your solution is not to cast BoP. This is not an option for me, and frankly, shouldn't be an option for you, either. Even if there's no fix to my problem, using this method to cast BoP is still worth it to me, because I only "miss" one of one hundred casts, and even then it's not a guaranteed wipe. This is the cost of doing business for me. Suggesting I not cast BoP because it's risky is like telling an Enhancement Shaman not to use Windfury because if he catches several procs in a row, he could pull agro. Please, don't waste your and my time by telling me not to cast one of the best spells in our arsenal.

Minister: First off, that is a pretty cool macro; however, with the issues you are currently having with BoP'ing the tanks, I would cease to use it. My preference is to have both a regular macro, and a mouse-over macro for Grid to BoP targets, rather than a target-of-target macro (due to the problems you have been having).

My regular BoP macro is nothing more than casting BoP while whispering the target so that they know they have BoP on them (might also help if a tank gets it, so they can quickly click it off).

Ex: /script SendChatMessage("** BoP on You **", "WHISPER", nil, UnitName("mouseover"))

You can also replace "mouseover" with "target" (which is what my regular macro is).

While this does cut down on the speed of which you BoP a target, if you pay attention to Grid, you can see when someone gets aggro, and BoP them preemptively, as it usually takes time for a boss to run over to the unlucky Warlock who pulled aggro.

My mouse over macro is as follows:

#showtooltip
/cast [target=mouseover,exists,nodead,help]Blessing of Protection
/script SendChatMessage("** BoP on You **", "WHISPER", nil, UnitName("mouseover"))

Hope this helps!

Edit: I forgot to mention that I rarely BoP myself, as I opt to use Divine Shield instead to save BoP for a DPS'er.

Macros:

I think we've arleady discussed it here, it's very useful to have your spells macroed like that (I have it too).

Tou have to be extremely careful with the BoP macro. Only use it when you're 100% sure there's no way the tank is getting aggro back - if in doubt just assist the mob and *then* BoP. At the end no matter how hard you try, with how the human brain works there's a timeframe in which your tank can get aggro back where you have absolutely no chance to avoid BoPing the tank. So every time you click this macro you're taking a risk, but no reason not to keep it as it works as a normal BoP anyway when needed so having it keeps you the option to BoP target of target in cases you know it's not possible for a tank to get aggro. Most of the time, though, assist, look that the target is not a tank (if you mindlessly chain the assist and BoP keys you'll run into the same issues you run with using the macro for the exact same reasons), and then BoP. Yes it's slow but it's nescessary for when you want to be safe of tank-BoPing and usually a major slap in the face ;p

The explanation of why it's impossible to avoid tank BoPs is that human reaction time is generally well over 0.2s. That means from the moment you decide to BoP the tank has at least 0.2s to get aggro back during which you have absolutely no chance to cancel your action - as you're already decided to do it the earliest you will be able to regret is 0.2s after you see him getting aggro back, which will obviously be after your finger hit the BoP macro. I think the way the macro works is that it BoPs the target of target on your UI (although I'm not sure), but if it actually goes by the server's target of target you'll need to add latency to that reaction time. And note that under less than perfect conditions (or even perfect conditions) your reaction time will likely be well above that 0.2s figure.

For actually healing with that kind of macro, I try to use it only when it would be faster and otherwise target the player. This makes sure I heal what I want to heal and not what my macro wants me to heal. In emergencies or on bosses that constantly swap and you want to always heal their target this is very useful.

Adunsavior's wierd raid leaders
Most had been said already, and most you already know. 2 healers won't keep the tank up and shouldn't when you have so many healers just healing him (you said parry gibbed by illidan so I assume it's not a phase 2 problem). If your raid leader says his wife can spam HL without going oom, tell him to teach her to hit the button more often than once every 4 seconds... It is not possible to chaincast a high rank HL, and no encounter requires it for MT healing (only encounter where anyone should chain max HL is bloodboil's fel rage and even that is for a short period and after you get a mana refill from spiritual attunement and bloodboil damage).

Cast-canceling HL is at least as risky as chaining FoL while keeping LG up for emergency HLs. Due to latency and reaction time you will generally have up to 2.5-3s from the moment the big damage hit until a heal lands, the tank will be already a bit low before the big hit even hits because you canceled when he was 2k short so your 5k HL doesn't overheal like hell and get you oom and due to reaction time issues stated above you can actually cancel your heal after the tank took damage (hence the possible >2s wait for a heal). While FoL spamming doesn't improve how fast you get a HL in, it helps by both keeping the tank topped off during "normal" damage periods (which are the majority of the time in most/all fights), and when he does take a burst, you'll let your FoL land and cast a HL right after it, making a max of 3.5s wait from the big burst to the HL hit but you also got a FoL in within 1.5s. To sum it up FoL spamming is better for your mana and isn't any worse than cast-canceling when it comes to healing burst damage assuming you don't have the mana needed for never canceling and chaining max rank HLs (which nobody has).

crit/low rank HL/gear choices
You'll every once in a while hear someone who gears a certain way and tops meters. It's natural becuase the gear is the least important factor in how well you heal - how fast you target people, who you target and how much overhealing you avoid (which is also a result of the former 2) will make the most difference. A little extra mana efficiency and HPS is always nice to have but it's not something you'll find yourself able to measure on meters. Even DPSers that can calculate exactly how much DPS they're supposed to be doing in a given fight will find themselves having a large discrepancy, both due to skill differences and the RNG (with the bigger factor depending on who is actually raiding and how long the fight is).

Crit stacking and downranking HL, while works (because of what said above), is giving you a lot lower efficiency for a very small HPS gain (or even an HPS loss considering that crit stacking could've been +healing/haste stacking), on top of not having 1.5s heals and having to cancel more (since if you use a 3K HL you will cancel when a tank only needs 1.5k while you'll let your 1.7k FoL go off). For stream healing I see no reason to not FoL, and even if you HL there is absolutely no real efficiency gain for stacking crit over stacking the exact same stats you would gear for using FoL. Not to mention you keep LG up so that 2s rank11 HL is just within reach as for the pally next to you spamming low rank HL - but yeah don't let LG fall off if you're afraid of burst.

Crit for raid healing is just a silly argument. There is no real noticeable difference in need for stats between raid and tank healing (even though the way you actually heal may differ a lot, the itemization needs are quite the same). Both need reliable healing when it comes to burst (heck, raid healing needs it to be even more reliable than tank healing as damage is more predictable and often more dangerous on low HP raid members), so having a slightly bigger heal is more likely to get you through the fight with no deaths than slightly higher chance for that heal to crit. And if mana efficiency is your issue, mp5 will give you a lot more efficiency (read: efficiency not mana, that takes into account the occasional extra healing done) than crit. Heck if you give a right mix of healing and mp5 you will most likely out-do crit on both efficiency and HPS (although it doesn't mean it's the way to go, but it would be a proof against stacking crit if you actually go and do the math for it).

At the end you'll see a lot of people suggesting all kind of wierd things all over the place in just about every game you play, like Adunsavior's wierd raid leaders banning HL or crit stacking AB spamming (in 2.3, sometimes even without 2/5 T5) mages, pallies that swear by sanctity aura to help their prot pally's threat and the list can go on forever. Remember just the fact that it worked does not at all mean it's the best way.

Im still trying to do my "wishlist" of ekips for BT/Hyjal, since we have bt/hyjal on farm status now, but im not sure exactly of what look for.

I want to use the less Tier drops as possible, because there is ALOT of warlocks and priests, and this tiers will be really hard to dispute.

Still i want to gear myself the best possible for Sunwell.

My armory: The World of Warcraft Armory

Im right now with:
2012 of heal, 10,7k of mana, 27,53% of Holy crit, and 71 Mp5.

Im having mana inssues on fights like Illidan... illidari, and well long fights. I dont raid with a SP most of the time, and neither a shaman. (I keep pot on CD, and i top meter in most fights, being in worst case in top 4, and normally in first on fast fights, but i go OOM even on some fast fights due to healing Tank, and do raid healing at same time. )
But my guild have a "weak" heal, and im assigned to tank healing normally with a bad geared druid or something alike. So i need to use alot of HL. 50% of my mana goes into HL most of time, and i need to maintain a FL spam most of the time.

Anyone have any idea of the best way to gear for this? Pure +Heal and heal less so conserve mana? Or go for Mp5? Or get alot of Crit that gives me both, mana efficiency and a "random" HPS?

Most of armorys have ALOT of Heal, and little Mp5 with 25-28% crit. But all the charts says that Mp5 is ALOT better in all ways...

Thanks, and sorry for my bad english. =/ (not american)

What i dont understand is why only the pally topic have so little information...
All other class topics there is complex math, and a well discussed "point per attribute" to compare gears.

But the Holy pally topic just have alot of people with totally different opnions, and charts that tell you do to exactly the oposite to comum sense. (Like stack 4Mp5 Gems over everything else...)

It sounds to me like you are victims of miscommunication.

Your raid leader is correct, if for some reason only two Paladins are on the MT which may well happen for a brief period of time during a Ph2 - Ph3 or a Demon - Normal switch, it is obvious that FoL is not the spell you should be using.

I find it highly unlikely that your raid leader assigned only two healers to the Illidan MT and expects you to heal through all of the fight using HL. I also find it highly unlikely that both of you understood what the other one actually said during this argument.


Even so, a T6 geared paladin with a shadow priest and mana pot usage will be able to spam HL 8 for quite a while, definitely through all of phase 2 for example. You definitely should remember that the fight is not over when your mana is, but when the MT dies.

Well, still, how good is crit for haste paladin compared to mp5? Anyone have done some math?

Now I value 1% crit as 4-6mp5 and about +20 healing for average T6 fight. So 10% haste should increase crit effectiveness by about 0.5 mp5 and a few healing points.

I have read through this forum and found lots of useful macros to switch Librams, but I am wondering if you guys know any Add-ons that can incorporate the Libram switch. I like the mana regen when casting HL but would llike to switch to something useful when casting FoL as well, while using a good healing add-on. I currently use HealBot and love it, but it doesn't seem to have this functionality.

Thanks!

No. Crit multiplies the amount of healing you can do with your mana. Casting faster by iteself doesn't make you able to heal more with same conditions, so crit doesn't give you any more total healing done in the fight when you have more haste. That's why your whole crit->mp5 conversion is just plain wrong (it greatly overvalues crit if you assume it's for HL spamming or undervalues crit if you assume it for pure FoL spam).
Casting faster does allow a bit more efficiency since you'll less often run into needing to use less efficient spell, but that effect is much much smaller than your "10% haste -> 10% more gain from crit".

Another way to explain this is that you can't assume you chaincast non-stop yet still care about mana. Those 2 situations cannot exist at the same time, as if you need mana you already cannot cast that spell 100% of the time and if you already have the mana to cast the spell 100% of the time additional mana will not change it, meaning your whole "I use X mana/sec and get Y of it back per 1 crit rating and therefore 1 crit rating is worth X*Y MP5" is completely wrong.

Librameister, but I personally strongly favor macros.
(its on wowace I think)