Shouldn't be that hard really. It has a 400 base value, then 200 from the shield and another 100 blockvalue from some odd strenght you've picked up here and there should give you 1400 crits already.

There's hope yet for holy paladin grinding:

It will be interesting to see what they come up with.

The hope for holy paladin grinding is the dual spec system.

Nonetheless offensive utility for holy will be good for arenas.

The easiest thing to do is buff SoR/JoR, but do it using deep Holy talents banked in.

I tested the premade on Beta, and had about 25% damage from SoR/JoR.

Those for Retadins count for about 40%, so buffing the ability to add up to 30% sounds about right.


Leave the Tier 1 talent in, but bank the talent into Light's Grace (because it is a lackluster talent), adding 20% more damage from SoR.

While this maybe possible later, dual spec is likely part of 3.1, so it would be nice to get Holy dps added sooner than that system.

Can someone link the best possible specc for retri in raids?

Ghostcrawler made a comment about Holy dps:

Holy's dps does seem low and it is something we're discussing, since as you pointed out, other healers got a nice dps boost. Getting a Seal / Judgement system we liked was a more pressing design change, but now we think we can go back and figure out how to help a Holy paladin who wants to do decent dps especially when soloing or when healing isn't needed.

Maybe by patch 3.1 ...

Read like five posts above you.

Also, for holy offensive utility to actually be useful in arenas, it has to either be significant burst potential or something scary like mana burn or cyclone. Just have "passable DPS" isn't really worth anything.

Holy paladins burst is pretty scary - if they pop wings and judge + shock somebody that's a hell of a lot of burst. The problem is that it requires giving up holy shock defensively, and that once you push out that burst, you have used up all your offensive abilities.

Giving paladin a threat that they can do when not under pressure to heal is very long overdue, but right now paladins and druids are both way ahead on the ability to keep team-mates alive while under extreme pressure, so they might have to trade off some healing power for some offensive one. My intuition is that something like repentence should be a base ability, at 6 seconds it is absolutely fine and holy paladins could absolutely use some CC.

I am also surprised by how amazing ret paladins are at being healers in arenas. With flash of light + sheath a ret paladin + dps team gets to play both outlast AND double dps. It is pretty frustrating to lose to a double dps team because they run your healer out of mana by just pumping nonstop dps and healing through all the damage you do. They can easily outheal/cleanse a warlock's damage just with cleanses + sheath'd flash of lights.

It doesn't. Neither does the AoE portion of a Glyphed Holy Light.

A lot of that is because my mana pool is ridiculous. I did predict this.

On the beta, I have 3 or 4 heals on me before I have to immediately get back in there and start dpsing - which sometimes even includes hitting SoW. (I'm a seal-swap whore now).

On live, I can throw a heal every dps cycle, not to mention my FoL's, and I'm good. When I get backed up, I can chain heal like 6 holy lights - and still have enough mana to seal back up (any seal), and move back in for dps.

Judging light is likewise not trivial - nor is SoL, even after the nerf.

At the same time, I took 12k damage from an arcance mage that I couldn't hit and trying to get to a hunter is the most annoying thing in the world. So, it's not like I don't feel sorry for you because we've been wankers for so long - but it's possible, you've finally met a counter comp.

And that, sadly, is something you're probably not familiar with.

I'm a holy pally end-game raider. Specced: 53/0/18
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
This discussion is only on Spiritual Focus, Conc Aura and Pushback. Other talents will be discussed in another post.

Almost every holy spec recommendation has 5/5 Spiritual Focus. I've always been leery about the effectiveness of 5/5 Spiritual Focus as a raider. How much pushback immunity is really needed? Is 5/5 Spiritual Focus and 3/3 Impr Conc wasted points??

If:
Conc Aura (0/0) = 35% pushback immunity
Spiritual Focus (5/5) = +70% pushback immunity
Impr Conc Aura (3/3) = +15% pushback immunity and -30% silence/interruption effect
If you have all of them, then total pushback immunity can be 120%. Overkill?

My Playstyle Assumptions:
- I am an end-game raider (holy heals) first
- I want to have some Ret Abilities (18pts) to help with DPSs while soloing/dailies/BGs/5man Instances.
- I do not participate in Arena
- I usually have Conc Aura up & running; therefore, I have 2 or 3 pts in Impr Conc Aura.

Questions:
1st: How often does a raiding pally really experience push back? I don't rember geting pushback in raids. Though my attention could be elsewhere when it happens...
2nd: Do I really need 100% pushback immunity as a raider?

Based on the above assumptions & play style, wouldn't one of these options work or am I missing something about needing 100% pushback immunity?:

Option 1:
Seals of the Pure (2/5) = For DPS viability (+6% damage)
Spiritual Focus (3/5) = +42% pushback immunity
Impr Conc Aura (3/3) = +15% pushback immunity and -30% silence/interruption effect
= 92% Pushback Immunity and -30% silence/interruption

Option 2:
Seals of the Pure (3/5) = For DPS viability (+9% damage)
Spiritual Focus (2/5) = +28% pushback immunity
Impr Conc Aura (2/3) = +15% pushback immunity and -30% silence/interruption effect
= 78% Pushback Immunity and -30% silence/interruption

With regards to Spiritual Focus, I feel that it's simply a personal preference choice from a purely PvE perspective.

If you take SF instead of Seals of the Pure, you save yourself from some minor pushback on some rare raid AOE occasions and give yourself some out-of-raid PvP skills.

If you take SOTP instead of SF, you gain an out-of-raid farming DPS increase and some PvP burst.

Both of them will rarely come into a play if you're actually healing inside a raid, since you'll either never get hit (for SF), or you'll never be using an SOTP affected Seal (you'll be running a Glyphed Seal of Wisdom or Seal of Light).

I would do something like this, except 4/5 Focus adn 1/5 SotP so I would have 100% pushback immunity. Most Paladins are doing 5/5 because that is what they are used to specing.

Spiritual focus was never a raid talent. A lot of periodic raid damage counts as a dot and dots don't pushback. I always had it though so I'm not sure. With the new pushback mechanics 100% pushback resistance certainly isn't necessary you can probably get away with just the conc aura, but SotP is very lackluster from a raid healer pov; if it worked with SoL and SoW - which is what you're going to be running with due to glyphs - still maybe.

Your post was complete after the first 6 words.

The FoL glyph is utterly horrible. There's pretty much no reason to ever pick it up. The best thing we can do at this point is simply pass on it and hope Bliz notices that it is undesirable enough to make a change. Ironically, it got nerfed thanks to a glyph that was massively useful (Regrowth), and even the pre-nerf version wasn't worth considering.

I'd still love to see them swap the utility of the FoL and HL glyphs, as it would make both spells far more appealing. Something tells me I shouldn't hold my breath, though.

BS overwriting BoM is stupid, they should just add 1 AP to BoM so it doesn't do that anymore. BS wastes a GCD; it's just that with it being such a short duration buff it gets reflexive for warriors to refresh it, really shouldn't be doing that anymore.

Has there been a statement about buffs like BS vs BoM by blizzard yet?

I believe they've acknowledged that the situation with BoM/BS needs to be fixed. We ran BT last night as our first "real" raid post-patch and ended up just making the warriors take BS off their bars. (Even the one who wanted to BS for his Solarian trinket.)

Regarding SF for Holy raiding, one thing to consider is that if you have 3 paladins in a raid, you'll pretty much always have Concentration Aura now (and one of those paladins might even be specced for it). I've off-healed on a lot of fights in BC as Prot (i.e., no points in SF) and the only one where I remember knockback being a serious issue was Shade of Aran. And that was of course the old "infinite knockback" mechanic. I'd say you're probably okay going without SF for raiding, but there might be that one encounter where not having it really hurts.

As far as Holy dps and/or offensive PvP utility, the Aura Mastery talent slot is absolutely begging to be turned into something useful. If they replaced AM with something neat for Holy dps, then they could finally admit what's obvious to everyone: that there's no good reason for our Auras to be limited to a 30 yard range.

This statement makes so much sense it will never happen.

If the FoL HoT worked with Beacon then I could see some playstyle changes where it would be useful. I stuck the Flash Glyph on to heal some heroics and there it was actually useful...I could toss flashes around the party whenever people would take damage and just move back to the tank knowing they had a HoT ticking away but beyond that it's a joke.

I'm the person who posted that thread. I did my tests against a level 80 test dummy (with the premade paladin character) because it's a simpler way to test DPS output between many dissimiliar characters, without the variation that grinding mobs will give you. (i.e. whether or not cooldowns will reset by the time you find another mob) Also, it's difficult to evaluate Seal of Vengeance without sustained DPS testing because SoV requires time to build to 5 stacks.

My suspicion is that you're seeing higher DPS because of the initial burst and being able to finish off the mobs before your DPS dips to the sustained level. Should it be considered equal for a paladin to do only an initial burst of 990 dps but then to drop off to 750 dps, when the disc/holy priest can keep doing 990 dps?

I don't think this requires a huge buff - but I think a small buff would make things more equal. And that's the approach that Blizzard seems to want to take. Note the key line:

We've seen one fight before where healers had to do damage - Leotheras, with Inner Demons. Perhaps they're anticipating they may want to have other fights where healers have to suddenly do DPS.

One of the WotLK 5-mans has a fight where each player has to separately beat off "evil clones" of the other 4 players. Sort of like Leotheras crossed with the second boss of Shadow Lab.