So what to do in scary continuous burst is clear: HL spam
What to do when content is stupidly easy: Faceroll FoL

So the debate of the last 2 pages has been: What to do to conserve mana during those less scary times (endurance)?
To investigate this I modeled 2 strategies that both have the assumption that'll you'll cast HL on the tank if you think your current spell landing won't top the tank off, though that spam I leave out:
1) FoL spam
2) alternating melee swings and HL

The result is (in HL based gear):
1) 4.5k HPS and 814 mp5 spent, heals landing every 1.1 seconds
2) 5.4k HPS and 140 mp5 net spent, heals landing every 2.54 seconds

Calculations are at:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dgqzk8fm_1gvw97kd6

That's right, SoW is so stupidly broken that you can basically get 1 average cost of HL worth of mana per swing on average. The only benefit of (1) vs. (2) is the event that the tank got hit during your melee swing timer, the FoL has the 4-6k health buffer, while in melee/HL model they receive no healing for up to 2.54 seconds. Of course one could argue that for (2) you could just immediately cast after the tank takes significant damage, if they can't hold out for that long.

What resets the swing timer? Is it a spell with an actual cast time or do instants reset the swing timer? If you do cast an instant, can you still swing during the GCD or does it delay/reset it?

I ask because Holy Shock could be used in the SoW/HL example to lower the time between heals if it doesn't reset swing timer.

Spells that are instant casts (HS, Beacon, DP, SS) do not reset the swing timer. There was bugs months ago with either the holy or ret instant FoL talents still resetting the swing timer, but I think they are resolved.
Edit - yes you can swing during GCDs.

I think this idea has merit: maybe the proliferation of medium to long cooldown significant damage transfer abilities is a bid to making Holy paladins the healer counterpart of a DK tank. We do high HPS on the tank amazingly well, but maybe all these transfer abilities are intended to be used to help us do our job in a wider context. Some do a good job in helping us with secondary targets (HoSac/Beacon/Old IoL) or raid damage (Divine Sac) during periods of high burst (either on the secondary target or the raid) - though the new HP limits may render them less useful. The mechanics is arguably still wonky. I think the talents improving the abilities should absorb some of the transfer as well as increase the total amount negated on the target instead of simply making them more dangerous to the paladin for example. Overall, HoSac and Divine Sac are definately something I'd like to be made powerful and useful more often than on gimmick encounters (Ulduar seems to offer appropriate fight mechanics for these to shine, but the new limits imposed, as well as the full transfer of the damage make the use of them questionable... there is no net gain and there should be. Absorb 30% raid wide and only eat 10% perhaps?)

Other mechanics that could function in this way fail almost entirely. I'd like AW to be reworked. The extra 20% is almost guaranteed to overheal on a single target because HL is so big as is. It probably sees use in PvP, but in PvE the healing benefit isn't all that attractive. I'd rather it actually feel like a cooldown ability rather than another boring +% modifier.

I know I'm wishlisting with this one, but work it into the long discussed Holy Consecration that heals idea? You pop wings and start a healing/sec. effect within x yds of you, a la Tranquility (though not as strong at half the talented cooldown). It gives us a medium cooldown ability to catch-up on AoE and makes it worth popping often if raid wide AoE is going to be prevalent. Maybe too powerful, but at least it would see more use than it currently does.

If you can get the timing down, you can melee between your HL casts at less than a 0.5 second penalty. You basically have your auto attack active against your target and start casting the next Holy Light a fraction of a second after the previous one lands. You just have to get the timing down not to trigger spell queuing. If the boss allows it, you don't even *have* to DP to keep yourself at full mana.

Doing some quick numbers on what I mentioned before, it looks like we can keep our extra healing/mitigation cooldowns up just under 45% of the time

Hand of Sacrifice = 12/120 or 10%
Avenging Wrath = 20/180 or 11.11%
Divine Sacrifice = X/120, I didnt see a duration on the talent itself but I think its safe to say around 12 seconds or 10%
Divine Illumination = 15/180 or 8.33%
Heroism(Bloodlust) = 40/600 or 6.66%

Keeping divine illumination in there because as a FoL spammer, even with the reduced mana and whatnot with DI up you -should- be able to still chaincast HL for those 15 seconds or at the very least cast HL a lot more often to make good use of that.

If we add all these up together it would actually be 46% of the time, but considering that we have 'wasted' time where the cooldowns are ticking down at the start of the fight it's safer to say that we have under 40% net uptime on these cooldowns. On the flipside though this isnt accounting for what happens to the uptimes on fights with different durations. A fight of 3 minutes should have us able to keep these up 75% of the time because of how the cooldowns would line up (Heroism -> Hand of Sac -> Divine Sac -> Avenging Wrath -> Divine Illumination -> Divine Guardian -> Small wait -> Hand of Sac -> Divine Sac).

I'm gonna try healing with FoL gear and glyphs tonight and see how it goes in my naxx run, I'll see how it goes from paper to practice and then come back with the results.

*Edit* Not worth making a new post about it, tried it out and tbh...was completely unimpressed with FoL, ran oom faster (was gemmed away from int) and still less HPS. Ultimately I can chain the above abilities together regardless of if I'm FoL spamming or HL spamming so really I think the only difference will be that we still go for the traditional HL spam, but should be more aware of our abilities and decide how to use them based on the fight. If really bursty we can use multiple cooldowns together (I think Hand of sac+avenging wrath is a good one because AW SHOULD buff the HPS of your initial heal and then buff again the healing of your beacon, so it'd in theory be close to double the effectiveness of AW.) or if its more of an endurance fight string them out together as I originally hoped would work with FoL spam and then because of it rely more on FoL to let us last that extra bit.

Divine Sac is 10 or 12 seconds.

Divine Guardian was removed and replaced with a talent that buffs Divine Sac by 10% (I assume that means instead of 150%, you get 165% of total health) and increases the duration of Sacred Shield by a few seconds.

Correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't DG announced as a talent improving Divine Sacrifice (it's not yet implemented, but it was in a blue post or something) a few days ago?

EDIT: beaten to it.

Similarly, I thought I'd read they were going to switch the cooldown/debuff on bloodlust to prevent stacking shaman on fights beyond 5min. Something like going from 5min debuff/10 min cooldown to 10min debuff/5 min cooldown (also to cut down waiting time between attempts in case of wipes I should think).

"Bloodlust/Heroism: Cooldown reduced to 5 minutes, but Sated and Exhausted now last 10 minutes"

Yes, sated goes away when you die, so you should always have a Lust up for boss attempts.

Well, considering my guild runs quite a few druids and shamans on our raids, it might be interesting to work out the math of having our top DPS die intentionally, get rezed, have our enhance shaman die and ankh (other guy is resto, need him to have his mana), and have them use bloodlust again. (And do pally buffs/MoTW on the go)

From Test Realm Patch Notes

They did in fact remove Spiritual Attunement from Holy Pallies.

Works fine with a wee bit of delay and all the extra haste you get in a raid setting. You still have to wait a bit after a Holy Light lands, but you certainly will be throwing out HLs faster than every 2.5 seconds while swinging away.


@Tzeni: Or focus. What I've also been doing it "manually" so to speak: smack the boss and select Holy Light and then cast it on whoever. With the human delay it syncs up pretty well with the melee swings, but it's not reliable if you have to move or switch targets. Using macros/Clique would still be best.

Except it doesn't work because casting a spell resets the swing timer whether or not the spell is finished casting before the swing timer completes. Even with a slow two-hander, putting a flash of light in the middle of the swing timer, starting it after the swing timer started and ending it before the swing timer ends the swing is still cancelled.

I just tried it on a dummy in org and you can definitely melee a boss for SoW procs while maintaining a fairly decent HPS. It was much better with JotP up than without, however (w/ gear haste and JotP my melee swing about 1.3 seconds).

In practice if I just wait for my character's hands to drop after casting a HL (due to animation lag+server lag, it takes approx. 300 milliseconds), then I will get a melee swing in before my next HL starts. Actually, it looks like your character is hitting the mob in the middle of the HL cast, but I suspect that's just the lag factor. It's pretty funny to see my toon swing his sword in the middle of a HL cast, for sure.

It's quite the neat trick, hopefully we'll be able to use it on some Ulduar bosses and there'll be no need for Divine Plea at all.

I think you're correct in that casting a spell does reset the swing timer. However, the method as described takes advantage of server to client lag to squeeze in melee swings. It's somewhat akin to the method casters used to use with /stopcasting macros.

So the goal here is to cast just before the swing completes and hope the server/client lag lets the melee hit finish even though you're casting? That at least makes sense. But, it's the exact opposite of what Zarua first said -- he said to start casting right after the last melee attack hit, which most definitely does not work. Perhaps with higher latency it could? I.E., if you've got 400ms latency you can easily start casting .4 seconds before your melee hit lands and still get them both -- it would actually be easier with worse latency.

So would hit be a regen stat for pallies now?

Did he say that? What I understood from his post was to wait "tiny bit" after you finish a HL to start casting another one. What happens is that with all the haste you have plus raid haste and everything, your will have a really fast swing timer. So that little bit, which might be like 0.5-1 second, is enough that with lag your melee swing will occur slightly after your cast has started.

So basically what I did was: Finish a holy cast->Watch for my character's hands to go down after casting (it's an animation)->start another holy light cast-> watch my character do a swing with my quartz showing my HL cast as being like ~0.3 seconds in.

With 1.5 second HLs, this stretches my total time between cast completions to like 2.2 seconds, which to me is acceptable HPS for the MP5 I'll be getting back.

I hadn't tried it, but what seems to be happening is that by waiting a "tiny bit" you're in reality waiting a lot more than that, just enough to get a swing in. Normally to chain cast you have to click your next heal before your current heal completes. If you wait for your heal to complete before clicking the next heal, you just added a <latency> spacing in between your heals. Wait a little more and you may actually get a swing in. I'd be surprised if in the end you don't need to spend <attack speed> time not casting in order to get an attack in between spells, unless the melee swing timer isn't reset at the end of every cast. Anyway I would love to see some more hard data on this.

With the changes to melee haste, shouldn't being at the haste soft cap also put a 1.8 speed weapon at just slightly faster than one second swing time? So any time you cast an instant you could get a swing in without incurring any penalty.

It would be foolish to consider you can be in constant melee range for Ulduar boss fights.

When I leveled my pally in february, art of war flash of lights were still resetting swing timer.

That was a bug and is fixed in 3.1