Spamming FoL is a good way to find your tanks eating the dirt. You can't really judge a lot of the time when a tank is going to take huge damage spikes. Sure, some are a bit expected, but an unlucky string can put your tank on the floor real fast. While I do agree you can't simply spam your HLs or you'd be in big trouble for mana, FoL simply doesn't cover the damage tanks take in SWP in most cases. You should always have a HL loaded and ready to go off. You can't just wait for a tank to take a big hit and then cast it. By the time that heal goes off (unless you're making the other healers pick up your slack) you are going to have a dead tank.

If you're using Flash of light more than 50% of the time on Sunwell bosses you're doing it wrong, even 50% I'd consider on the "too high learn2play side". Maybe you're bringing too many healers or something, or not enough aoe healers?

You only bring a paladin to 25 man raids for 2 things a blessing and sub 2sec powerful heals (aka R7, R9, R11 holy light). Three flash of light style paladin's can be replaced by 1 player spaming chain heal, lifebloom or CoH. Paladin's are best utilized always healing tanks or something taking significant single target damage (like burn) and never raid healing.

Flash of Light is not going to keep any tank up alone on anything that matters.

Totally agreed, I as raid leader taking 3 paladins on raid, in most of cases 2 holy and 1 retri. 2 Holy paladins are enough with that 2s HL to get wellspammed tank by HL rank 7, rank 11 when needed. Rest of damage in most of cases (BT) are covered by Renews, Druid's HoTs.

For a fight like Brutallus I actually take FoL off my bars so I cant use it by accident as its just not man enough for the job. Coupled with the fact I am on a 1sec delay from the other paladin so we have a HL hitting the tank every 1 sec or so FoL just screws things up.

For other fights I do use FoL quite a bit but completely disagree with Lizzie that you should never chain HL. At the end of the day you should cast the biggest heals you can maintain over the length of a fight. So what if you have large overheals, better that than a dead tank...

Unless they've logged out in a different set, Lilmissheal is not similarly geared to you. You are geared for haste and she is not.

I observed results similar to yours when I was using gear with as little as 4% haste and my co-healers were not, except more pronounced; my overheal dropped to 30% or so, and everyone else's rose a couple of %. Haste isn't helping you heal more or better, it's just letting you sneak your heals in first. It's an artificial inflation.

1. In Sunwell alot of paladins do 90% HL or more. At least I do and the good ones in my guild do too. You just have to goto extremes when its HL11 spam time. Also you do have the lurker libram.. right?!

2. In BT/Hyjal it is relatively easy for a skilled paladin to sit near the top of the meters depending on strategy. In council I almost always came top. I frequently topped Mother too just spamming a mix of max rank HL and FoL on the raid (we had too many pallies). I would often come first in Najentus, Supremus. Bloodboil, Teron and RoS are fights where its extremely unlikely a paladin will top meters. In Sunwell though your shaman and priests are doing something wrong if the paladins beat them. In fact your shadowpriests are doing something wrong if they aren't doing similar healing to the paladins on alot of fights.

3. Overheal is what paladins do. Get used to it. If you have 60% overheal I consider that to be dedication. If you overheal your tanks.. they will love you. Tanks adore seeing a juicy flow of constant 6k-8k heals coming. You will become the "goto guy" for keeping your tanks up and you'll be in for every progression fight which requires tank healing (hint: all of them).

[Plans: Sunblessed Breastplate] and
[Plans: Sunblessed Gauntlets]

are good reasons to be a Pally Blacksmith. Especially because the [Sunblessed Breastplate] is by far better

I would rather take shammy or priest crafted chests . Though plate one is good too. If it is worth or not to learn BS from scratch depends what you will drop for it. If you drop a gathering profession that you don't need or it could be picked by one of your alts it may be worth it.

M'uru chest is about the same. I am not sure if I, personally, would lvl BS purely for this chest. But since I am BS I have no dilemma.

Er, no. If your tank is alive at the end of the fight, you are doing it right. The less overhealing you do in the process, the more right you're doing it.

Time and time again you've stated that you cannot reactively heal. If you cannot reactively heal, then you cannot control your overheal because you have to account for the maximum spike potential with every single heal. RNG can potentially turn up a lot of fights where damage is much higher than average and many where it is much lower. So if you cannot reactively heal, how can you judge if you're doing it more right by your overhealing?

But, I do agree with the first half of what you said. As long as you are assigned to main tank healing, the tank stays up, and you don't run out of mana you're not doing anything wrong.

I was responding to someone who is halfway through BT and hyjal. Not talking about sunwell here. You dont spam holy light in bt and hyjal.

The gloves are BoE, so you don't need to be a blacksmith to use them. Unfortunately, they use Sunmotes and it's likely all of your sunmotes are going to goto best in slot gloves for your DPS so you can make the various series of gear checks.

It doesn't help that there's an equally useful pair of gloves that drop off M'uru: [Gauntlets of the Soothed Soul]. Whether you prefer one over the other is up to you. I personally cannot justify taking glove-level sunmotes from DPS, but this is probably more of a raid culture aspect.

Practice it on the easier fights and you'll adjust faster to sunwell where it all becomes alot harder.

Urr I have to disagree. If you're spamming the tank and they still die then chances are another healer screwed up, the strategy is wrong or the tank screwed up.

Since healing is a team effort a single healer can be doing almost everything perfectly and still watch the tank die. Thanks to RNG you might be doing almost everything wrong and still have the tank survive so simply stating that "because the tank survived I was doing the right thing" is totally the wrong attitude to take.

I take a different view. I heal the maximum I can over the entire course of the fight and actively aim to end the fight oom. Obviously you can't spam HL11 constantly so that does mean you do some down ranking or flash healing but I prefer to be safe rather than sorry and that means if I can sustain it I will spam HL11 even if I don't think its needed.

And what happens if the fight takes longer to finish than you expect? You're OOM, the tank is dead and the raid wipes as a result of your profligacy.

My guild's number 2 Paladin healer, Tenar, thinks the same way you do. The only place he regularly beats me out on the healing meter is on trash pulls. He consistently generates less effective healing on boss fights than I do, despite having comparable +heal and significantly more crit. The longer the fight goes on, the greater the disparity becomes.

Take a look at this report from our last night in Hyjal (please ignore the two wipes on Kaz, we were trying a new tank and it didn't work). Can you tell me with a straight face that he's doing it right and I'm doing it wrong?

I've been trying out spell haste for a few days now and I saw something today that made me wonder. With 199 spellhaste I have 2.22 sec HL casts pre-Light's Grace. With Light's Grace however I have 1.78 sec holy light casts.

I suck at maths, but I can just about deduct 0.5sec off 2.22sec (which makes 1.72 secs) so how come my tooltip says its 1.78secs after Light's Grace? Where do the 0.06 seconds go?

It is far, far easier to accurately predict the length of a fight as opposed to predicting spike damage. You know all those wipes you had learning the boss? If you couldn't figure out how long a fight was going to take from that then you are definitely doing something wrong.

I'm not saying I overheal for overhealing sake. In phase 1 Illidan I would very often just go and keep up wisdom on the boss since I know there is more than enough healing going around. But should I know from experience that the tank is even in remote danger of dying I will do absolutely everything to stop them dying. Worrying about what is going to happen later in the fight means you aren't focused on the present and increases the chance that things will go badly.

The Raids & Mobs, Who Heals Whom, and Browse Log Files portions of the WWS report are much more important than the overall meters, especially for Paladins. I only took a quick glance at your link, but Tenar is likely being "out-performed" by you for the night because he is keeping a tighter focus than you on trash. You've provided a pretty limited sample size here though (instead of a full Hyjal / BT report) so I can't say anything about it with a straight face (except wonder what your multi-target healers are doing).

Generally, the duration of the fight is pretty easy to determine. Saving mana just in case the fight takes longer than expecting is going outside of your assignment to cover for someone else.

^

If that were the case, then why is Tenar doing more effective healing than I am on trash pulls? He nearly always beats me out there; it's only on the boss fights where I surpass him.

As I'm sure you are aware there are a variety of reasons that someone will do more effective healing. Since WWS won't load the report I want here is a (non-exhaustive) list of possible causes:

1. You afk on trash (I know I often do)
2. You have a different healing assignment. Often solo healing a tank might end up giving more effective healing often being a raid healer lets you top meters.
3. You heal people who aren't on your assignment.
4. Gear
5. Play-style

In all honesty it is impossible for us to say with 1 report why someone beats someone else. That sort of thing should be readily apparent to someone with access to the full WWS history and a solid knowledge of what the healing assignments were.

PS: Your shaman and priests are under performing and/or not being utilized correctly.

Are you kidding me? Look at the bosses - congratulations, you cross-heal from the tank and do some raid healing and he stays on the tank. Thus, he has higher overheal, and you have more effective healing. Neither is wrong, because Hyjal is a complete joke.

I think spell haste is a really nice stats because it also scales with your crit. Faster spell -> higher total # of spells casted -> more crit spells -> more mana return.