I myself have traditionally been an avid proponent of Sheath feasibility, but even I have to agree that it's simply not going to float--at least not since 3.1.

There were only 2 viable reasons to consider Sheath healing builds as of 3.0.8: 1) "infinite" mana and 2) buffed SS's through the increase in spellpower. The HPS/utility of Sheath has been debated and generally agreed to be at best equal to traditional holy, and at worst, noticeably lesser. Thus, if you can disprove the benefit that Sheath provides in those two fields, the motivation to even try to make Sheath work is consequently eradicated.

Infinite Mana
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This is something that has been beaten to death. Maybe you can try to gem SP and go for FoL while praying your HPS is large enough to cover the MT, maybe you stack gobs and gobs of MP5 and play a resto shaman without chain heal, but the best option for mana longevity continues to be stack Intellect, cast holy lights as appropriate, and pop Plea when you can. You know the saying; "if it's not broke, don't fix it." Stacking Intellect works. Mana is not an issue for a traditional Holy Build.

Supercharged Sacred Shields
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I ran the calculations recently, and discovered that for a typical 25-man raid with all possible AP buffs, you would need to acquire ~1850 Intellect in order for Spiritual Guidance's SP contribution to match Sheath's. That means that from a pure spellpower perspective (which is the only thing that matters when talking about the amount of damage SS absorbs), no Holy paladin can muster as much Spellpower as a raid-buffed Sheathadin.

Prior to 3.1, this meant that no Holy paladin could push out a Sacred Shield as powerful as a raid-buffed Sheathadin's (if SS had been coded to properly receive spell benefit from Sheath at the time). However, this is no longer the case. +20% absorption on SS from mid-level prot is enough to compete with or outweigh Sheath's contribution to SS, while still allowing you to pick up the tools Blizzard has designed paladin healing around.

Simply put, the maximum-spellpower build prior to 3.1 could take sheath and Illumination, as well as many other backbone holy talents. However, nowadays you have to choose between sacrificing Illumination or +20% SS absorption if you want Sheath. Losing Illumination breaks the entire paladin healer regen mechanic, and if you're giving up 20% absorption on SS just to gain a couple hundred spellpower, you're defeating the point entirely. Sheath is no longer the answer to crafting the strongest SS possible.

-'-

The ONLY way you could argue in favor of a Sheath build is to try to prove that the mana gains from JotW combined with melee ticks from SoW are enough to sustain a paladin without Illumination, allowing him to pick up both Sheath and +20% SS absorption. However, if you try this, you're very likely to fall behind in HPS against traditional Holy, as you end up sacrificing even more than the old proposed Sheath builds did.

Honestly, we all know that TbtL/Sheath builds are not viable, and if they ever become such, it would be an unintended change that Blizzard would fix. I really think the allure of these "exotic" healing options is almost purely psychological. We're the only healing class that hasn't received a new heal since launch. It's understandable to want to find something new. But it doesn't look like the status quo is going to change any time this expansion.

In my original post, I stated i hadn't used this specc in ulduar yet. However, on Razorscale (might possibly be my luck) I was not in a safe position long enough to cast holy lights more often than flash's.

On Deconstructor my MT was just as easily kept up with FoL as with HL, but of course I used HL when the melee were taking damage.


Tonight on patchwerk I tried this specc out. Sheath had an average tick of 6k, with a maximum tick of 12021. Making its throughput very viable. however i'm still trying to determine if the hot applies the throughput I'm looking for, which I will know tomorow after our next foray into ulduar.

new raids mean new needs as far as healing, and this specc might be viable JUST for my guilds healer makeup.

Ulduar did bring new changes to healing needs. and if we're not sacrificing throughput, our effective hps and hpm could be increased by considering options like a ret centric, or prot centric healing build. We never know til we try it.

The goal with my sheath build is of course to attain a 100% chance to crit with FoL, stacking the hot, reducing the mana cost, and raising throughput. Losing illumination would destroy the specc. The absorption on SS is a loss, but the SP makes up a margin of it, and through the ret talents FoL will always, if not be expected to crit, stacking the hot.

The losses i will miss is divine guardian, holy shock for mobility and beacon, all of which i pick up with my second specc.

Tomorow is ulduar. I will try to get some figures for some more number crunching as I fail at it, It should be apparentl very quickly if the specc will achieve what I'm looking for.

We did our first effort in Ulduar thursday. I had decided to get Flask of distilled wisdom to see how effective it was compared to other flasks. So full raid buffed I was standing at 31k mana and 48% crit with all my gear gemmed for int, the one noticable thing that I noticed that with HL spamming I wasn't getting under 50% mana at all.
So the question I'm wondering what I should gem for if not int, most likely the answer will be just gem for int but since I cant see how I could benefit from int more than I already do would it be best to gem for sp or crit? as far as I see sp would not benefit my hl at all but it would help healing burst dmg if I use HS.

If you are keeping the tank up easily with FoL, you are running with too many healers.

I'm casting FoL less in Ulduar than I did in Naxxramas. Nothing has changed that would make a sheat or mainly prot healing build more desirable than the traditional HL-spamming holy build.

You are including tons of talents that help you save mana into your FoL builds that are already low on throughput and high (so high that you don't need more) on longevity.

If you plan on keeping the tank up with FoL, you should replace yourself with a priest that can easily keep the tank up and heal the raid better than two FoLadins should it get hit by aoe. (or a HL-holydin, if there are periods of high damage on the tank)


You wouldn't have gone under 50% had you not used the flask. You have to think realistically what kind of effect 65 int might have and how that compares to the fight's and RNG's effects. 65 int is not the difference between going oom and having 50% mana left.

Your mana pool or crit chance doesn't impress anyone here, so there's no reason to post them.

Well my original question was gemming for something else than int, and it is pretty relevant for the fact how much int I have and crit as I asked if I should gem for crit or sp. But if the answers are like this you can really forget my question.

If you're going to use "experience' to judge a flask's effectiveness, at least make sure you were monitoring everything else that was happening during the fight. Like already said, a flask swap won't change you from 50% mana to oom, so don't jump to conclusions about what the flask did for you. The truth is you just can't test those kinds of things, since you simply can't repeat the same fight with the same conditions twice, and can't repeat the same fight enough times to actually get a good average of the results. The difference between wearing X or Y stats is just not going to be noticeable enough for you to get any "experience" that'll tell you what's best.

What I can tell you is that stacking INT will give you more than any other stat, but at a certain ratio INT becomes not worth it - 65 INT may provide some more total healing done than 125 spellpower, however it does provide a lot less burst healing, so I find it not worthwhile most of the time. If there was a WotLK level INT flask, it'd probably be worth using, as it would've been giving 111 INT which would've been very worthwhile over 125 sp even considering the burst losses - since the gain in total healing done would be simply huge.

Swapping your gems to crit because you don't go oom is silly. Crit provides little burst (and no reliable burst), and a lot of its value comes from the total extra healing done over a fight that it gives. Int may provide slightly less burst (though it does provide a very small amount of reliable burst that crit doesn't give at all), but it lets you heal for so much more (mostly via extra mana) that it's a lot more worthwhile. If for some reason your mana needs are near-zero (very short fights, very bursty fights for example), then gem sp or haste, not crit. However I doubt you can actually ignore mana in any of the current fights - even in pre-3.1 content the extra mana had uses while the burst from HL was plenty no matter how you geared.

This was the kind of answer I was expecting, thank you for it. I have made my own testing between one item in my gear and come to the conclusion that I dont need more haste atleast, I switched between 550 and 610 haste and the result in hl was somewhere near 0.05-0.04s and since i'm not planning to dumb all my int gems, maybe just changing some gems to sp+int gems for the extra sp. The burst was mainly the thing I was getting with this question since I want to be more efficient in fights were ppl may take random big hit and aoe after that, ofc I cant do much for the aoe but I can atleast quarantee that the other healers who have better aoe capabilities can start to use them and dont have to worry about single persons getting knocked out before the aoe heals hit them.

Hi,

With 3.1 out, may I respectfully suggest that the talent builds on the OP be updated? There is still a cookie-cutter build there for BoK, which is a little off-putting for newly-dual specced ignorants such as myself.

I am in the process of writing an updated OP for 3.1. I have been busy with Ulduar for the past few days, but it should be done soon. If anyone else has anyone suggestions for particular things they would like to see updated/add/changed please let me know soon.

Like I suggested in the Ret thread, it would be nice to have a new 3.1 Holy thread. The reason is that new people don't feel like they need to read all the posts.

They needs that could be added: discussing the new glyphs: Beacon and Holy Shock and updating the changed Glyphs (like Divinity).

In the profession section, Skinning is 32 Crit rating and Lifeblood is on the GCD.

The build section needs updating, can add the 51/0/20 classic spec and the new 52/17/2 spec (for Divine Guardian)

Edit: I am a retard for forgetting Trees can apply this. Please delete post.

Imp devo does nothing if you have a tree or a prot pally in your raid.

What do people think about the interaction between [Spark of Hope] and a FoL build? It seems to me that stacking haste and using that trinket would allow for some very high HPS and HPM. Although I just got the Spark last night, so I haven't gotten the chance to test anything, and I was just wondering if it was even worth testing.

There's a reason FoL is a bad idea. It's because you can never use all your mana by spamming FoL practically regardless fo how you gear, which means that the only way to push more healing is to use more HL. The result is that to do max healing you use a lot of HL and little FoL, and increasing the efficiency of FoL will not give you a lot of mana. FoL spamming, even if you gear for best sp/haste ignoring everything else, is just much lower HPS than you'd get by casting as much HL as your mana allows and FoL as little as your mana allows you. That said, there is no such thing as a "FoL build", and even if FoL was a free spell the only thing it would change is that we'd be allowed to cast a bit more HLs with the small amount of mana we saved on the few FoLs we did have to cast.

First time poster, long time lurker...


Question I have for people is glyphs. From a 25 PvE raid perspective, and MT healing of course. What are people's thoughts now with new glyphs? I run with FoL, HL and Seal of Wisdom major glyphs now, but since I seem to be spamming HL almost exclusively in Ulduar I was thinking of dumping FoL glyph and picking up the Beacon glyph for more mana efficiency. Any thoughts?

And yet your HPS is still strictly inferior than that achieved by maximizing the number of HL casts...

Quite the contrary. I simply spec'd into it for the armor bonus we can provide, as we run 1 ret pally, and 2 holy. The healing bonus isn't applied as we have a druid healer, but hey armor never hurt anybody with trash the way it is now.

Why the hell would you use HS on every cooldown? It's less efficient and less HPS than HL. If you're standing still and are actually casting before the target has 3 HP left (which is most of the fight), you shouldn't be using holy shock.

The only reason I could see for using holy shock while standing still, is if you're trying to top healing meters on a fight where the raid takes so little damage that it's basically a competition who lands the heal first for it to show on the meter - in that case the more instants the better, and HPS doesn't matter (and nothing else either for that matter if you care about succeeding in the fight rather than topping the healing meters). Of course this thread is not about such fights as nobody really cares about them since nobody is ever going to die there.



As for glyphs, like said many times in this thread, you cast too little FoL and too little beacon, which makes divinity win hands down, especially after the buff it got in 3.1. The cooldown is low enough that you should be able to use it on every or almost every fight attempt that matters (and if you really need its mana to get through an extremely hard fight the raid can wait on the CD too, so you can pretty much assume you always have it, because if they won't wait then the fight is probably easy enough to be done without it as well). Also glyph of seal of light has some advantages over seal of wisdom - wisdom gives 7.6% (or something like that) efficiency increase plus the ability to melee the boss on some fights/situations but 0 burst healing, while glyph of seal of light gives 5% efficiency increase and 5% burst increase. Whichever is better simply depends.

1200 armor is very little and 600 extra on top is even less. Not only should you run conc aura on any fight with any kind of pushback so a healer doesn't get his heal delayed long enough for someone to die, but even if you run devotion aura you're giving up whatever is your choice of talents is in ret. Though if you're already going for DS might as well pick up imp devo for the fights where you don't need conc, since once you go down to DS there isn't really much else to get since the good talents in ret are at the first tier and more than 51 in holy doesn't really do much.

Did you miss the part in my post saying we run 2 holy, 1 ret? Which means our other holy pally has Imp conc running continuously, the ret is obviously using ret aura, while I run devo. Unless a resilience is needed in that fight, which isn't too often, since we have hunters, shamans, and priests with as well. Also with the new aura mastery, a cooldown for fusion punch I found effective was Imp LOH, and aura mastery with devo on as it boosts the tanks armor to a shit ton. Our other holy pally doesn't run imp LOH, since he covers conc.

I just find 3 points to devo, better then 3 points for mana off instant cast spells. As you said, we use HL, so cutting back mana for instant casts is worthless, especially when you can have your aura in place when the tree druid dies to something stupid.

I was running the standard Holy Light, Seal of Wisdom and Lay on Hands (Divinity) glyph for my majors. This seemed decent enough for 25 man Naxx.

After having progressed through almost all of the Ulduar bosses I can safely say the need for quicker response heals is more vital for success then an emergency mana pot that Divinity provided. I've now switched divinity to the Holy Shock glyph and based on the spell break down of my fights will likely increase my effective hps.

It seems most of Ulduar is all about quick response reactive healing. Very few fights permit us to plant ourselves and spam heals (except maybe Thorim) so this is beneficial.

I've also noticed that very few fights allow us to use Beacon to any significant contribution to our heal makeup as the majority of damage is spread very evenly amongst the raid. I've typically found myself casting it on myself and have found few circumstances that would make it beneficial to use it otherwise. Increasing beacons duration therefore is ... of little tangible benefit in my opinion.

I have not done or researched the majority of what would be required for achievements or hard modes quite this early so this could all change.

Or how about your retri pally taking imp devo as it's perfectly gainable in proper pve retri spec. That way you can also use concentration and resistance aura (actually used pretty often in ulduar) or retri aura.

Also don't forget that ss, judgements and beacon are all instants.