Has anyone absolutely confirmed that two different paladins cannot have beacons up on the same target simultaneously? I rarely have a second holy paladin to test with, so I've been unable to collect good enough data to confirm it.

Hi, protardin here. This has been touched on by some folks but I'd like to clarify a bit.

Using any absorption effect (Sacred Shield, PW:S, etc) will reduce the amount of healing required on the tank. Because of this, prot paladins will receive less healing, and therefore less mana back via Spiritual Attunement. I've noticed a difference in my mana return when using this on myself when running groups with non-paladin healers. (Incidentally, this is why I don't like running with Discipline healers -- they're great at keeping me alive, but not so great for regenerating my mana. A small gripe, but nonetheless...)

This is primarily a concern for content you overgear, or content which requires sustained tanking of low-damage mobs with no downtime (Violet Hold, Pinnacle Gauntlet.)

Of note is that Sacred Shield's absorption effect WILL NOT PROC until the tank takes a non-blocked hit. Dodges, parries, misses, and blocks will not trigger the shield. Protection paladins can, very realistically, become unhittable (counting blocks), especially when Redoubt is up, so Sacred Shield will definitely proc much less frequently for them.

Also, to clarify something re: Blessing of Sanctuary -- the mana return from this buff is, in my experience, a pittance compared to the amount of mana we can mulch through, especially when tanking single targets. The mana return from this buff becomes more meaningful when the number of mobs tanked at once increases, but so does spiritual attunement mana regen (due to the increased healing load.)

tl;dr: Sacred shield reduces mana regen for prot pallies, but not significantly. Keeping the tank alive is more important.

I agree for the most part, I suppose it just depends on how quick the priests/shamans in my guild are that day. By the time I get to the second HL after an Arcane Volley everyone is topped off. Maybe I should just take it easy and wait for Uludar.

I want to point out that Seal damage is fairly negligible when it comes to Prot threat in 5 mans. If you're with someone who is using a lot of absorption effects, just run Seal of Wisdom.

Based on this snippet multiple paladins can beacon a target:

So you can see that Lauder beacon healed Dark while Holysmasher had a beacon on Dark and a little later they both had beacon heals on Dark (Lauder refreshed his beacon before it expired).

I don't seem to have any instances of *simultaneous* beacon heals in my logs if that's the question you're asking though.

And SP in particular has a hidden regen value allowing you to cast more FoL and less HL.

The front page says "Paladin healing abilities" which at least Judgement of Light certainly is. The tooltip says "Any heals you cast on those targets", which I don't feel is clear enough - particularly since JoL certainly appears in the combat log as my healing "X's Judgement of Light heals Y for Z". I don't think it'd hurt to add a clarification to page 1. I don't want to come across as pushy (I've got my answer so I really don't mind), but *shrug*

One of the big questions I see in this thread is "What should we be stacking?"

I would suggest that if it's possible to reach the point where your heals are overhealing often (throughput capped), and you're ending fights with mana left (regen capped), Haste is the *only* stat you should be stacking.

The problem with sp is the huge gap between FoL and HL. A fight that requires HL will require it no matter how much sp and haste you stack for fol.

Hmm,before the WotLK it was quite easy to avoid the massive overhealing paladins had, but now -it's just crazy..
Glyphs,judgements do massive overhealing,isn't that so?
Basically - seeing all paladins having about 50% overheal in raid isn't the prettiest look I've ever seen. Any advices how to avoid it,because it's quite annoying..

To put it simply, over-healing is not a problem, unless you are running out of mana or your tanks are dieing.
If you have a Raid Leader that loots at raw over-healing and goes "paladins are too high, so they can't come to raids", then you need to find yourself a new raid leader.
Now, if you start looking at things like over-healing for Flash of Light, and that's at 50%, then something is wrong. If you look at Holy Light and find it's at 50% over-heal, but that's because it keeps getting sniped, then it's time to have a talk with the other healers.
All in all, take out Judgement, HL Glyph and Beacon from the equation, and then look at over-healing numbers. If you are still in the 50% range, then you are doing something wrong. Holy Light should have your highest over-healing, Flash of Light should have an extremely slim over-healing amount, and Holy Shock should have almost no over-healing.

Do you guys consider Judgment of Light our "true healing" ?
Last night I ran 2 wings in Naxx 25man with the guild and constantly was in top 2 healing done, but, Judgment of Light was also often in top 3, sometimes the spell that did the most healing. So I kind of have a mix feelings about this.
Sorry if my English bothers you in any way.

While Judgement of Light does a ton of healing, on my parses it is over 80% overheal. So it a great ability, it is not as good as the parse is saying.


Since it seems many people want to use less healers, that means HL is required to make up the healer gap compared to BC.

Since it is a mana hog while healing for a lot, the best stats to help you spam HL are Int and Crit rating. I prefer Int since it gives a little bit of everything, however in some slots you can only stack Crit (like the trinket slot), since there is no great Int trinket (just a green that is fair).

The Holy Paladin in the 10 man 3 Drakes video was stacking crit rating in every slot, and chain cast a lot of HL.

I stack int and itemize towards crit a bit more and can currently spam HL for every fight in nax 25 with nonstop spamming including BL for patchwerk.

I'm starting to get pretty annoyed with judgement of light.

When you have two paladins in the raid, JoL doesn't stack, correct?

I am stacking Int, but trying to gear for Haste second. Since with the amount of mana I have (30k raid buffed) I can in every fight spam HL. So then Haste will give me the best throughput increase. I am trying to stay at around 30k raid buffed mana and get to 1sec FoLs (with Buffs).

Glyph of Holy Light is proving to be very good in some fights. Like on Patchwerk-25 since all the tanks are standing on each other it procs constantly, this week it accounted for 15% of my Healing done.

It will certainly be interesting to see how things turn out. I like the idea of permanently throwing HLs around, but I see an eventual tweak of some sort to put a wrench in this methodology. I realize that it is impossible to delve into Blizzard's intent at times, but I don't think it's falling in line to expect Paladins to hit a perpetual Holy Light loop, as the output is already bordering on silly. We talked about this extensively on our server, and most of us came to the conclusion the hit will come on divine plea in some shape or form. Until that happens though, I am sure everyone should be taking advantage of the infinite HL loop.

To be more on topic: a 25K mana pool is about the bare minimum that I've found for an infinite HL loop, in addition to a 50% crit rate (it's more like 45%, as I average out over multiple parses). This averaged out to roughly a 4:30 fight period for me in my data. I suspect at 30k, you're probably perpetually infinite.

On the topic stat stacking after you solve the mana regen equation: I think it's honestly strongly dependent on what role you typically take on in your raids. Haste stacking is very favorable to a raid healing paladin of sorts, or if you like to heal outside of your tank healing assignment. The faster cast times will allow you to heal through a backlog of damage in a quicker fashion, obviously. Alternatively, haste stacking potentially lets you heal sustained damage in a smoother fashion given the steady-rate (a lot of us learned this back on Brutallus) of heals, but I think this has started to take a backseat in the face of lower sustained damages on tanks (such as the removal of crushing blows).

I have actually taken a different spin on things (since it's fun to test this early in the content, as it's pretty easy stuff to those who've been around the block) and have begun to re-stack a sizable amount of spell power as my fulcrum. At the current level of content, I see more opportunities for specific timed heals for healing very deep damage. Examples of this are: Malygos breath, Sartharion breaths, predictive RSTS abilities from bosses such as 4H, etc. Haste in these circumstances doesn't benefit so much as it's not a sustained damage matter that I choose to tackle, but rather the immediate danger.

Ultimately, I think either haste or spell power are very good statistics after you solve any mana regeneration issues that you may have at your current level of content. What stat you choose to stack is ultimately what fits your style and your persistent role on a healing crew.

Sorry just to clarify, are you basing this on using Divine Plea on every cooldown?

Yes. Divine plea is really the mechanism in which this all revolves around. Specifically, the scaling nature of its mana regen with the current attainable intellect levels. The price of using divine plea is very pathetic compared to the ability to chain-cast HLs, although one could make the argument that the healing penalty scales very negatively as well as your spell power climbs, but it still pales in comparison.

There are other elements that add to it as well, including illumination with the current crit levels (higher than any ever seen, much higher than what I ever had in Sunwell) and to a lesser extent: replenishment. Crit is still important in maintaining this loop, most of which you get from raid buffs and stacking a lot of int.

Judgement of light does stack. But it hits for the value of the lowest coefficent. As you can see below both jiudgements are the same approximate value. Now if a holy Paladin had judged light his judgement with no melee buffs is around 220 from memory. So the combined judgemnts from one ret+1 holy pally (220+220) would be barely better then what the ret would do by himself.

As for crit rates I would say you just got hit by RNG. Even on a full clear of BT I have seen a crit rate difference of 20% between almost identical geared paladins.

As a community do we have a response to the ability of being able to spam HL for any reasonable fight length?

Because you can almost guarantee that this is not working as Blizz intended. Thus get hit sooner or later with the nerf bat, and knowing Blizz get over nerfed.

So if Plea went to base Mana at a higher rate say %100 of Base Mana. It would stop it scaling to the atmosphere as currently. Would this leave us in a sustainable position?

Doubtful. The main reason you see the "spam HL" going on right now is because we only have 2 heals. Flash of Light, just as with later TBC, doesn't cut it in a raid (hell even in some heroics) becuase it can't match the incoming damage on a tank. The only way we can keep a tank up is through abusing Holy Light. As a result we stack huge amounts of our regen stats (crit and Intellect) and don't worry about overhealing (which we do an absolute ton of).

The easiest way to fix it would be to give Holy a middle-line spammable heal that has HPS and mana costs somewhere between FoL and HL.

You must be referring to downranking this is discouraged.

But yes, paladin healing is becoming all HL because FoL heals for a pathetically small amount.

If Divine Plea doesn't scale it kills the spell as a Spirit regen replacement. If its value is lowered it becomes useless to Ret and Prot. If the CD is increased it loses its power against Mana Burn. If the penalty is increased it severely gimps holy for 25% of the time. Maybe a possible solution is that it causes 1 minute of forebearance.

This isn't true at all. The fact remains that flash of light is still functionally powerful, but with mana concerns more or less out the window there's really no need to cast flash. In any cases where we need an isolated twitch heal, HS can serve that purpose every 6 seconds (and does very well). It's not so much that FoL is a bad spell, but so much that Holy Light is a very good spell.

As I said originally, nobody can really say what Blizzard's intention is. All we can do as a community is outline the best practices to each other. I think the OP's guide does this very well. If the developers want to change the fundamentals, then I am sure the community will adapt and the Paladin class will still be very strong as a whole as our individual tools are still inherently strong. If someone wanted to directly stem the infinite HL loop, then its going to happen in the divine plea mechanism since the loop depends on hitting divine plea on cool-down, every time. This sort of goes against the "we want you to manage your mana" secondary goal that Blizzard set out.

I think most people agree DP is pretty good with prot/ret right now since their int doesn't scale to incredibly high values like holy. Ergo, it would make sense to tweak the price of using divine plea, rather than the mana regen effect - e.g., the healing reduced effect to something higher than 20%. For those of us who healed Sunwell, we all know the price if we ever stopped healing, or something effected our healing output (e.g., downranking for mana concerns). If the healing penalty were increased to a noticeable amount, such as 50%, and in the right damage settings, I think you would see a lot more paladins not hitting DP on CD for fear of tank death. Instead, paladins would then be smarter about their spell selection. Remember that since HL hits for such large values, percentage modifiers from DP have a much larger impact on it than the lower values of FoL.

We probably wouldn't see any changes until the next level of released content, since tank danger in general is very containable at this level with the exception of Sartharion+3 breaths, but we'll see.

I was thinking, given people are already able to sustain a chain-cast HL cycle, the [Item not found!] could actually be worthwile taking and keeping up on the tank.