Personally In my guild I'm making the switch to raid healing with a spec utilizing Sacred Shield.

The spec I look to be using is 51/20/0. I speced obviously for what my guild what need and a few points could be moved here and there to accomidate other needs by other paladins.

I also intend to start making a change of instead of just simply stacking pure int on my gems to switch to a set up of using INT->CRIT->STAM

Int obviously to effect my over all spellpower, mana and crit.
The crit to assist my Illumination, and be more effective at getting bigger FoL heals and procing IoL.
Stam comes into play to help out my Divine Guardian and Hand of Sacrifice, as at the moment I still raid as a raid wall, and enjoy it.

I have a rough estimate and I'd appreciate it if anyone has the correct awnser if mine is not but it seems to be for every 1.3spell power SS approximatly asorbs 1 more point of damage I tested it out with a base of 2000 spell power.

Obviously play style will revolve in my beacon and Sacred Shield on the main tank, keeping those two as active at all times on them and healing them via the raid.
When there is going to be a lot of damage coming in utilizing my HoS and DG to minizmize the raid damage/minimize tank damage. (a strategy many healadins might recall if they did 3D Sarth.)

Personally I kind of wish the Libram was a little better but I intend to get the Deadly Glad Libram.

I also thought about grabbing Glyph of Holy light in change of Glyph of Holy Shock just in case the fight happens to have a lot of raid damage, I'm still a little unsure with that at the moment.

Well if the change to Sacred Shield goes through limiting it to being on one person at a time, your build is basically invalidated. If your focusing on raid healing and Sacred Shield is your primary means of doing so, wouldn't you weigh Spellpower the highest?

Seems a bit premature considering the upcoming changes but I see no value in Paladins doing raid healing. It means less suited classes will be on maintank healing which defies standard raid logic of assigning raid roles based on your classes strength.

Even when it is on one person the fact its going to negate so much damage might simply outweigh the fact its single person, and honestly seeing how you get the crit and spellpower from int it might be more beneficial to continuing the int stacking just so you can get both effects.

Also, disc priest seem to have it down pretty good as far as mt healing goes.

I think Kroy was going for more of a Beacon + SS on the main tank, then healing raid damage with FoL / HL / HS sort of idea, which imo isn't even close to viable. Your heals will get sniped, cutting beacon's effectiveness drastically, and you ultimately won't be able to compete with dedicated raid healers in most situations. If you're even in a position where you've got 1-2 dedicated healers on the MT who need just a tiny bit extra help, and the rest of your raid healers are falling just a little bit short, and you have no more resto druids around, then you might be able to sort of fit that role. Even then, it would never be worth actively speccing / gearing for (and certainly not via stam).

For the foreseeable future, Paladins will be bombing holy lights into the main tank and stacking int to the detriment of everything else. There's simply no other way to do it. Beacon an OT / MT / yourself / nobody, but you'll still be pumping a steady, high stream of heals into one person for 99% of fights.

edit -- if you have disc priests on the MT and you're short on raid healers, it might be time to sit them down and have a little chat I like to call 'taking one for the team'. You may not be that kinda guild and that's really not a debate that belongs here, but yeah, holy priests raiding healing + holy paladins on tank will be the most efficient setup if that's the situation you're in now.

SS scales at 75% of your spellpower, so yes, 1.3(recurring) is about right. With the 3.1 talent in prot, this will go to 90% / 1.11 per point.

Feya, it's not impossible for there to be more Paladins in the raid than there are main tank healing spots. Our little group has had as many as four Paladin healers before, which makes Sapphiron interesting.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: There is at least one fight in Ulduar where Beaconing the MT and raid healing is actually the best strategy, and that would be Kologarn. Every ~20 seconds Kologarn will do 14,000 damage to the entire raid. In that kind of scenario your beacon reaches almost 70% efficiency -- even if your target gets hit by a chain heal or CoH or two (which is unlikely given that 25 targets are all at roughly the same HP) before you finish casting you will still get at least half your HL transferred to the tank. Between the hots of two druids and the beacons of two paladins the MT stays up with very few direct heals.

Obviously this is the exception to the rule, but saying that beaconing the tank and raid healing is always the wrong method is incorrect.

1) Holy shock is a really nice spell for healing, lets say you need to heal player A and player B, Fol one and shock the other. And with the nerf to Glyph of Holy light no longer criting and how random it is its just losing causing inefficacy and unneeded over healing.

2) that was for myself really our mage likes to dps in addition to taking just a tad more damage off a tank when he needs it.

3) I meant that to be in LoH, whoops.

Even accounting for Glyph of HL not critting and mostly overhealing, it is better than 1 second off HS for raid healing.

However, if you really need to raid heal, drop whatever your 3rd glyph is to pickup HS.

The two all PvE Pallies should have is Wisdom/HL, with the third being whatever one likes (Flash, Divinity, HS, Beacon).

Well with a "FoL Raid Healing" Strategy im guessing Glyph of Seal of light is probably preferable if you are using Flash that much....


And while we are on the topic, What glyph would (statistically speaking) be the best choice for that third glyph spot? I cant decide between Divinity and Beacon both would give a large chunk of mana.


Edit: Hooked on Phonics = win

Currently, I have Divine Protection set up right next to a standard heal-through/mouseover macro for Hand of Sacrifice (the former bound to Q, the latter bound to E).

First off, whenever I'm in a dangerous situation, I make a habit to always Bubble and then smack my HoS macro so that it automatically applies to whoever the boss is targeting, or whoever I'm hovering over. In other words, I use HoS whenever I Bubble--I don't necessarily use Bubble whenever I HoS.

HoS is on a 2-minute cooldown, while Bubble is on a 5-minute cooldown (3-minute Forbearance). By only using it when your bubble is available, you're missing out on 50% of its effective use. Instead, try this on for size:

0) An enrage, breath, or otherwise high-damage scenario is coming up

1) Beacon the tank

2) HoS the tank

3) Bubble

4) Wait 2 minutes

5) HoS the tank & Pop Avenging Wrath (you can do this in one press through a macro)

3) Heal the froob out of yourself

4) Wait 3 minutes

5) Repeat from step 3


Now, be mindful of using a rotation like this. By planning to use your bubble, you can get the most effect out of HoS, but it will also leave you vulnerable if you need to use the bubble defensively. Use at your own risk.

The periods where you don't have bubble up so instead use Beacon/AW to offset the damage are reasoned because AW gives +20% to the healing done to yourself, which is then transferred through Beacon and given another +20%.

It's not recommended that you use HoS without either Bubble or Beacon+AW up, since that would mean you're just shifting damage around without preventing any of it or boosting your healing power.

If you're putting beacon on yourself specifically for using HoS, you're probably just wasting both mana and GCDs unless the fight necessitates its use. If you had beacon on yourself anyway, though, it's more useful but still risky if raid damage is high enough to make you beacon yourself in the firstplace.

Also don't macro AW to HoS, use it on your next heal so you don't waste <GCD> time out of your AW.

Even for burst prevention I don't think I'd use HoS unless I knew exactly when it's coming (like patchwerk, maxxena, sarth3d) - 2 GCDs can be enough time for the tank to die even with 30% damage reduction (and if you beaconed first, then he won't even have 30% damage reduction for both GCDs).

Are you able to put two beacons on the same person? I thought I had read somewhere that the second overwrote the first.

After being sceptical and doing some math, i actually like this AW+HoS idea!

In theory, you increase the amount of damage you heal through to up to ~260%.

Math example, very rough, optimum case:
tank gets hit for 36k
damage is split
tank takes 24k, you take 12k
you heal yourself with an AW'd HL: 12k
AW'd beacon heals tank for 14.4k

voila: 26.4k incoming damage healed with 1 holy light

I have to try this for mitigating the penalty of DP (after DP double dipping beacon is fixed).

however:
1. beware of being raidhealed!
2. tank is "keeping" at least 27 % of the damage he gets hit for > tank needs extra healing.
3. beware of AoE damage, while some extra damage taken means more heal on the tank, bigger spikes of damage leave you watching the fight from the floor!
4. While Divine Protection sounds nice to help against being AoE killed, it also means your beacon heals less on the tank > tank needs even more extra healing.

Well there's good and bad obviously for all the glyphs considered.

Obviously with a raid healing shock/FoL strategy there is no use for Glyph of Wisdom over Light.

Glyph of Flash of Light provides that additional 5% crit chance which is very nice.

Glyph of Beacon is saving you ~1000 mana every 30 seconds just by adding a bit more time

Glyph of Holy light obviously a very good way to get some nice healing numbers out, It has been known to be ALMOST as effective as a Circle of Healing on Some fights like KT when the melee get tomb'd.

And lastly we get to Glyph of Holy Shock, you figure the more healing you can put out the better, and Shock is a very nice spell, like I said before if two people need a heal, and are more than 8 yards apart, Shock one FoL the other. In a fight like Sapphiron which usually takes my guild ~4:00 (I'm using this as example) you have 40 shock uses unglyphed, but with the glyph you could get 48 and It really comes down to, the fight and where the damage is for this glyph.

I don't think anyone said that it was always the wrong method. What I said was that it was in no way worth gearing / speccing for specifically, and I'll stand by that. I'm not entirely sure what or who you're replying to here but you seem to be imagining things.

My guild runs with 3 Holy Paladins in our 25's makeup.

Now in Naxx, because of the ease it's simply boring. 3 Holy Paladins is like bringing a nuclear bomb to a knife fight. With all the AE damage that is said to be in Ulduar, I'm curious as to how effective we will be as we progress forward with our current makeup.

My question is, with 3 Holy Paladins in the raid, and the new changes to SS, set bonus and all that. Would it be more effective to do what is being talked about above? Have a 51/0/20 pally on the tank, and then me as 51/20 a secondary, using the strategies mentioned above? Dedicating the other paladin to Off tank healing. With the changes to IoL, in my opinion it seems that it would be much better to use it for FoL than HL. I mean.. our crit is already through the roof, I'd rather toss out instant FoL's to people who need them than just pad my overhealing more with another HL crit.

I mean, really it looks like we're gonna have a hell of a time in Ulduar if the AE damage is that bad, aside from the 3 holy pallies the only healers we run with is 2 resto druids and a resto shaman.

Then again, I haven't been on the PTR. So I have no idea how Ulduar feels from our perspective and I could be totally off here. Just stacking INT, using HL in abundance and watching my overheal just keep going up is getting really boring. I'd rather stack a variation of stats, and use all of my spells equally, but without losing effectiveness. I'm hoping that this is possible with the new changes and T8 4pc bonus.

I have OCD when it comes to overheal, I hate it. I need to be as efficient as possible and if I have high overheal numbers, it drives me insane. So I would rather have more utility over more, wasted, throughput.

1) I strongly believe that HS glyph is aimed at PvP use. It is true that it's really helpful in PvE and if the infusion of light stayed the same, I'd consider very seriously about taking it, but there are better alternatives. HL glyph as been pointed out before, is the best PvE glyph for holy you can find for raiding. That is still the case after the critting splash nerf. My answer to your question would be no, 1 sec faster HS wouldn't help as much as HL.

On a side note for PvE glyphs, with the minor glyph giving 5 min CD reduction to LoH plus the imp LoH giving 4 more minutes reduced, it's down to 11minutes CD from 20, which in turn means that you can use it on every boss fight, or every 2nd try if your raid wipes at a boss. This way, you get some mana+1k (because you don't use one HL, but use LoH instead) and give the tank a nice buff for a small time. When this is the case, why not benefit from Glyph of Divinity as your 3rd major glyph? I'll try with HL glyph, Wisdom glyph and divinity glyph. I might switch divinity for HS glyph to see how it helps

2) With 10% efficiency, it means more burst damage on yourself, so I wouldn't recommend using it without bubble. At least, not on the MT. 40% damage redirection can hit you for lots. The idea behind it is that you buffer some of the incoming damage to yourself. This comes in handy in some occasions:
- when the tank gets hit for shitloads that he might not survive otherwise. If he's guaranteed to survive it without the HoS, there's no point in using it and putting yourself at danger. Instead you start casting your holy light timing it so that it hits right after the tank gets the hit. (Sartharion breaths) One way to use sacrifice in this case is to tell your tank to use a macro to "/cancelaura Hand of Sacrifice" which saves your bubble and still buffers the big hit. You can heal yourself with a single HS or can just wait to get healed by raid healers. Other way is to Sacrifice and bubble since both are 12 second duration. You want to make sure Sacrifice is on the tank which is why u use sacrifice first, and use bubble afterwards because the initial hit won't kill you if you bubble one second later, but it will kill the tank if u sacrifice one second later.
- when you are on divine plea, u bubble and sacrifice on tank and can overcome the 50% healing reduction penalty to some extent.
- when you are moving and your HS is on CD, you can sacrifice on MT to make up for the lost healing while you're moving. This is too much of an optimization and most probably not very applicable to practical game play.
- when some dps takes aggro or is sacrificed in some way, u can try and let them survive by using sacrifice on them. Though, if it was an aggro issue, I'd bubble them straight away regardless of they are a melee or a caster. If they overaggro regularly, and not even ask for hand of salvation, it's their own problem. If they stand in fire and you sacrifice them, you're not helping them imo. You must let them die and learn from their mistakes. unless it's an immortal run

3) practical result is what the tooltip says. with every single HL cast, you have 66% chance to be able to cast your next HL 0.5 second faster. You will have LG up after your first HL, but it will only mean that you have 66% chance buff active. it's not like you get LG up with 66% chance and keep it for the next 15 seconds after you get it once. So, it's no go! get 3 points in LG.

Sorry for wall of text. I can't help it.

Well the thing with HoS a tank without having a bubble up is simply you can prebeacon the tank and put HoS on the tank, I don't know of any encounter thats going to hit me for 20-24k when full raid buffed.

Not to mention now with the 20 points in prot it becomes a semi good idea to grab some extra stam to make use of a raid wall since now its a based percentage of your health.
And so is HoS now.

It comes to, why bring a Paladin when you can bring a Disc priest who can pretty much do the same thing?

The awnser right now is "Hey look I have this awesome raid wide 30% damage reduction I'm good for using on a 3D sarth run, I'm good for utilizing a survival situation in Immortal run, or even I'm good for using when starting Phase 2 of a 6 minute maly to help remain in a spark for as long as possible.
Hello I'm a paladin enjoy your kings.
Need a salv? I got your back.
Lets stack Mana spring and Blessing of Wisdom!

Sacred Shield was an awesome skill that we got and they gave us the chance to make it even better, if prot had a talent to increase the ability of Beacon in some positive way would you not get it? It's almost the same idea in the end.

We have diffrent tools in 3.1 than some other classes really it comes down to utilizing them, makeing the best of them and getting your raid leader to go "Hey get so-and-so they're a great asset." Yea it brings back bring the class not the player to an extent but that never really left the game.

And when it comes down to raid healing, we have the advantage. Think what your melee is doing, they're all bunched up in one area, chances are you have more than 5 melee. But the beacon on a tank, heal the lowest melee person with HL while glyphed for HL as well, boom you've just now healed 7 people at maximum. Or you can go the other way and spam quick FoL while using HS every cooldown hoping for the crit heal, or simply just to get a nice bigger heal off than FL can provide. FoL worked in vanilla and BC, and it still can work.

But ultimatly what I'm trying to get at here is this is a good build to help you utilize t8, and secure yourself a raidspot because you can bring a lot of tools to a raid, hard mode is going to be hard friends, you'll need all the mechanics you can get.

When talking about the holy shock glyph remember there will be a HUGE difference between the HPS of your HoT from 2 pc t8 if you get your followup holy shock casted in <6 seconds because of how much extra healing you 'roll' into the next one. If I holy shock crit for 10000 we deal with a 1500 HoT over 9 seconds or in other words a 500 tick three times. If 1000 of that ticks and then I do another 10k crit we're talking about 2000 over 3 ticks or 666 per tick. The next one would be 714 per tick. Now if we take the same scenario and presume instead that we roll two ticks of our holy shock instead of one, the numbers become dramatically different if you successfully roll them long enough. It starts with 500 a tick again, moves to 833 a tick and then 1055 a tick. Eventually both scenarios will reach a cap, the difference is the first one has the hot capping at 750 regardless of how long you roll your holy shock crits and the second one caps at 1500, effectively doubling the potential for your crits.

Obviously, I understand that given the nature of crit we wont be able to reliably reach our 'maximum' HoT for our ticks, but we still should factor it into our discussion regardless.

I don't think holy shock is the tool to use on every CD to heal the MT whatever the bonus is. HS is mainly a raid saver. It is meant to be used while you are forced to move, when you want to save a DPS some time for reactive healers who need cast time, meant to be your way to catch up with your healing cycle if u fall behind for some reason. The HoT is a bonus but not a static bonus like the current T7 2piece bonus (instead it's RNG with your crit chance). It will most probably make PvP healadins happy for 2v2 rather than it makes raiding paladins happy.

To be fair, I don't think people are talking about Ulduar throwing enough damage at our tanks that 40% of it would oneshot you. I believe the general concern is that there is huge amounts of raid damage, and 40% of the tank's damage + raid damage WILL kill you. That's a pretty valid concern, especially on Kologarn.

I do agree with your comments about working to prove we're worthy to take to a raid. BT and Sunwell reduced us to, at best, 1 holy paladin per raid, and I honestly don't see any reason to bring more paladins than you have MTs. Unfortunately, holy paladins are fruit of the month right now, so you've got to really go for it to prove to your raid leader that you're the one he should take instead of the 15 others in your guild.

However...

...is sadly off the mark. We have anything but an advantage when it comes to raid healing. Every other aoe heal in the game has a 15 yard range (ours is 8 yard) and smart targets the lowest health member (ours does not). FoL is too far behind in HPS to be worth using now, and it's only going to get worse as raiding progresses. Consider that a Holy Priest can instantly heal the same amount of damage on 5 targets, with a wider range and automatic target prioritization, as it would take us 5.5 seconds to heal. There's really no way around this. You need aoe heals to heal aoe damage. Spending 1.1 seconds per target healing an aoe that hit 15 targets at once does not work. It's like a druid healing the MT using nothing but rejuvenation and lifebloom with no direct heals.

I don't know where you get the rolling hot from.
Has anyone been able to test the 2-piece set bonus?
I mean, won't it just be so that if you crit 10k with HS then you get a 1.5k HoT over the next 9 seconds.
If you crit again for 10k you either get another HoT for 1.5k over the next 9 seconds or in worst case it will overwrite the old HoT, making the rest of the old hot wasted.
From where do you get that it will stack up?