Most of your post seemed to hint that you perhaps haven't played much through Ulduar. I know of only one fight specifically where I was able to plant myself and ignore everything going on and just cast Holy Lights.

Why would you want to use holy shock every time its up? How about 20% more crit to Holy Lights via Infusion of Light? I've seen so many fights were raid damage was so abundant, sending a holy shock out to top off a raid member in need was not about toping meters but about keeping my raid alive. I found myself wanting MORE holy shocks.

I'd suggest you re-evaluate your way of thinking about Holy Shock. Its an incredible spell to not use every cooldown. It is certainly here to stay.

Well, his response was to a person wanting to spam FoL, with HS being used every CD. If the person is wanting to spam FoL, they certainly aren't doing a lot of moving. So yes, why would that person want spam HS every CD?

HS obviously has its uses. But, it typically should not be your duty to keep raid members alive to such a degree that HS needs to be cast every CD. HS is what you cast when moving, plain and simple, in almost every other scenario it is inferior to HL.

I found HS extremely useful to pump out burst heals or group heals in a time-critical situation. For example, I could frontload a lot of healing by using a HL/HS combo on a tank, then whenever the HS crit (more often than not), I'd have another HL landing just over a GCD later. While this offers lower healing than casting 3 HLs, the fact that you can land all of that healing in the space of 1.5 GCDs was extremely useful. But now it's no longer as feasible purely because of the change to Infusion of Light (a change which was likely made, annoyingly, due to PvP). Now the healing lands in the space of 2.5 GCDs instead, which is pretty much useless and you might as well cast 3 HLs instead.

Old (assuming soft haste cap - 1s GCD):

• 0.00: First HL lands
• 0.00: HS lands
• *GCD*
• 1.00: Second HL start cast
• ~1.50: Second HL lands

New:

• 0.00: First HL lands
• 0.00: HS lands
• *GCD*
• 1.00: Second HL start cast
• 2.50: Second HL lands

Not to mention the usefulness of being able to holy shock a non-tank during an aoe phase then quickly throw a HL back on the tank. I'm still using it during movement phases, but nowhere near as much as I used to.

No one's saying HS isn't useful. It is, however, strictly inferior HPS to HL. Yes, even taking into account a chance at 20% extra crit.

As such, using it every cooldown is, without a doubt, a net reduction in the outgoing HPS on your target COMPARED TO chaining HLs. If you can't cast them, of course HS is attractive and it would be asinine to suggest not using it in that case. No one suggested that.

To your second point on saving teammates... of course saving people is useful. But if you're casting HS on others every 5s and still finding yourself wanting more, you're spending 25% of your time not healing the MT. Bring more raid healing or make sure they're awake, because you're doing something you really aren't equipped very well to do.

Hello!

I've read some spec suggestions here and this is what I have been using since 3.1 for PvE PvE - 51/20/0
I haven't checked the ret/crit spec which i had been using until 3.1 but I find this one quite ok.

Our guild has 9/14 in heroic ulduar and during all this I have only used 2 mana pots and did LoH to restore mana only twice (Yes, you got it, I was battle ressed). Unbuffed, my toon has 25.5k mana (~30k raid buffed) and 28% crit. All the nights I've been raiding in ulduar, my paladin has always been #1 healing, so the spec doesn't kill your crit/burst as long as you have the haste. I've put some more explanations below. Hope it's helpful for people looking for a viable raiding spec. At least it gives some alternative.

Before anyone asks, 3 points in Divine Strength is becase I think 3 points in Stoicism is 0 bonus to my PvE raiding while some strength is good for my harmful spells, first of which being judgements. Pretty negligible addition but still an addition compared to stoicism.

Full rank blessing of wisdom because of the moving around and going out of range of shaman totems (thorim?) I find BoW more convenitent. I do not know if anyone has a comment but, when we have BoW and check our character pane for MP5 (with no mana totem present), then a shaman puts a mana totem down (while we have imp BoW buffed), I see the regen number increase. Is this only a problem in display?

Aimed for Imp Devotion Aura because we've only raided with a prot pala in raid one evening, and I aimed at Divine Sacrifice for the very obvious reason.

As far as I know, AP doesnt help judgements unless you have sheath of light to convert your AP into spell power. So unless Im wrong, divine strength isnt doing anything. As you pointed out stoicism doesnt do anything really currently either, but for gimmick fights that might change and theres no reason not to pick it up as a filler.

I'd say you might want to look into taking aura mastery and blessed hands, I find both talents to be very useful. Aura mastery because there are a few fights where resistance can come into play, 260 FR/Frost/shadow certainly helps. I've seen people on ignis full out resist the punt in the air and take no damage as well as no dot because of aura mastery, not 100% reliable of course but its a noticable effect if it does happen. Blessed hands, depends more on how often you use hand of sacrifice. I've been doing hand of sacrifice on the tank and beaconing myself a lot recently to help out with the damage, because of beacon if you time it right its effectively simply 40% damage mitigated because its just converting beacon overhealing into effective healing.

One thing to know with hand of sacrifice, it doesn't stack with divine sacrifice on your target. If you already have DS just save your hand of sac until after. Currently divine sacrifice and hand of sacrifice both calculate that they reach their HP barrier based on when you take damage not when the tank's damage is mitigated, so using divine protection or bubble will increase the potential mitigation, but don't know currently if this is a bug or working as intended.

Judgement of Light: The amount healed is affected by your Spell power and Attack power. (I stayed on 18%Sp + 18AP value)

So divine stench increase seal, but for very few % because of few base strength...

Anyway, there often ret or prot pala to do a more efficient JoL...

It does add a small amount (as I said it's a negligible addition, but still currently better than stoicism for PvE imo)
I was refering to the mmo-champion definitions of all attacks. Check this webpage and you will see the attacks are worded in %AP + %SP: Wrath of the Lich King - Paladin - Holy Skills

I already have it with my Divine Guardian talent. Divine Guardian - Spell - World of Warcraft It's 40% damage absorption on everyone in range (When I'm in bubble). I find it very risky to use especially an improved sacrifice on MT in ulduar without yourself bubbling. It doesn't matter if you have beacon on yourself. With the aoe-damage in that place, if you absorp 40% of tank's incoming damage, it's pretty much a suicide in my book. As for aura mastery, i didn't feel that it would break the fight at any point. If i feel that it will make a fight easy-mode or will make the difference between a wipe or a kill, i'll surely spec into it. At the moment, I have my reasons to skip it to be able to get imp devotion aura (6% more healing and yes divinity and imp. devotion aura do stack)

Practically they should stack, no? making the absorption faster but with the same threshold. so, say you have 40% hand of sacrifice and 30% divine sacrifice, you tank will get 0.6x0.7 = 0.42 of the damage while you get 58% directed at you. That my friend is very likely to one-shot you because divine sacrifice is redirection from all sources, not only one target.

I personally divine sacrifice only when I'm in bubble (40% raidwise) and in extreme situations I use both Sacrifice on MT, bubble, Divine sacrifice = 58% damage reduction on MT.


As for judging Light, we go with single Holy and single ret in raids, and I can not guarantee judgement debuff up 100% of the time (I just need it every minute for the haste although I renew it on every spare GCD). Our raids choose to have JoW 100% uptime instead of JoL.

If you run with a resto shaman (which I assume you do) I would urge you to drop the 2 points in Imp BoW, drop them in Aura Mastery and Blessed Hands (I'd also removed 1 point from Imp LoH to max both), in your prot tree I'd also suggest removing 3 points from Toughness and placing them in Imp RF, 6% reduced damage with the amount of AoE in Ulduar adds up a lot over the course of a full clear; especially now that we don't have any mana regen from Spiritual Attunement.

Try grouping with a friend and casting hand of sacrifice on your target and then divine sacrifice. You wont see him get the divine sacrifice. I went a step further and had him jump into the lava around sarth, he had 40% damage mitigation instead of the 64% expected mitigation (0 FR and only using those two abilities). I redid the test twice to make sure that it wasnt a one time bug, each and every time hand of sacrifice would work but divine sacrifice wouldnt.

Now I don't believe I said to use the two of them together without bubble, divine sacrifice I agree should most of the time have your full pally bubble up and with divine protection is risky but at times I believe usable (eg if you did on razorscale, the raid takes damage but not THAT much burst damage). Sacrifice I try to spam on cooldown and so far have not died as a result, admittedly I have not experienced enough of 25man to say it works on every fight and 10mans I'm my groups tank instead of healer for the most part.

Please read my original post for why I have imp BoW.

LoH on it's own is not the best, but with the minor glyph (which I linked in my talent build) it's down to 11minutes which allows me to use it on every boss, or every other boss try. With Glyph of divinity (major glyph) it becomes more important than your 1 point in blessed hands. So thanks for the advice but i think you're missing the point here.

Imp RF instead of toughness is interesting though. I think I'll try and see if it causes any aggro problems.

Your first paragraph is really interesting. I hope someone can confirm this. Thanks for the info if this is the case. So that means they did change the stacking sacrifice mechanics. Though if it's true, I have more reason to keep it like this, since I use DSac when my bubble is available. Maybe it's me being too cautious, but I wouldn't want RNG to kill me when 40% damage redirection from tank + raid AOE hits me on a phase I need to move (say, kologarn eye beam)

Just did some more testing with divine sacrifice and hand of sacrifice, contrary to what I thought our shield wall doesn't work with hand of sacrifice damage or divine sacrifice. So for the most part using divine sacrifice will be limited to our bubble, when the raid damage isnt high enough to one shot us or when it is worth sacrificing ourselves to prevent the damage (one example would be on emalon if your group is too slow on DPS for that debuff).

Other numbercrunching I did confirmed that damage mitigation on the original target applies before the damage transfer (ie righteous fury) and that our other damage mitigation such as BoSanct and righteous fury (and shield wall) doesn't affect damage taken via sacrifice. With both these in mind, I think its likely that your tank casting safeguard on you isnt mitigating any damage. I'll ask a warrior tank to join me in OS again (jumping in lava and watching numbers) to see if my hypothesis is true.

For me, I'm not going to change my playstyle too much because I already hadn't been using divine sacrifice except for bubble. Just now I am more aware of it, I think it is possible to still use it during certain situations, if raidwide aoe is more predictable we can pop it early so that we take >75% of our HP in transferred damage and start spamming on ourselves so that we maybe can survive depending on if its steady raid damage (Steelbreaker aura) compared to if its heavy burst damage (kologarn swipe). I also need to test and see if you can take >150% HP if all the damage is taken simultaneously. If thats the case, then using it without bubble will be exclusive to steady smaller raid damage like steelbreaker and never on kologarn, ignis etc.

I am interested in seeing your test results. I really can not understand it.
If bubble+sacrifice yields 10 seconds of damage reduction because damage transferred is, in effect, 0, how does it not make it 2x paladin's max HP when he uses sacrifice with Divine Protection.

Also on very simple maths, if your raid is getting say 3k aoe damage from a boss ability (this is not very unlikely if you consider ulduar aoe damage), that is 3x0.4 = 1.2k redirected at you. multiply it by 24, you get 28.8k damage, and keep in mind you also get 3k, that makes 31.8k damage in a single hit. Make the damage 2k instead of 3k, you still get 21.2k one-hit. How on earth can you survive this without bubble?

Reason it doesn't make 2x max HP with divine protection is simply put, because divine protection does not affect the damage taken by hand of sacrifice or divine sacrifice at all. I had my party member jumping in lava with hand of sacrifice on and I was taking 335 damage at the time consistently over multiple sacrifices. Using divine protection I still took 335 damage every tick.

Your second point is partially true but your numbers are a bit off, divine sacrifice does have a 30 yard range on it, if your raid is spreading out to avoid chain lightnings (thinking iron council damage atm because its close to the numbers we're talking about) you most likely won't be in range of the entire raid. Can have resistance aura/totem up as well helping reduce the base damage. I'm not saying that it should be spammed, but it CAN be if we want it to. Numbers are also a bit more favorable towards doing this in 10mans because of fewer raid members taking damage and slightly smaller numbers.

*edit* Still more testing, found sacred shield procced and mitigated divine sacrifice. I tried with a priest bubble and it absorbed damage as well, so if we are worried about being bursted down we -could- ask for a quick bubble beforehand. I'm still now for a resto shammy to test earth shield and a warrior for the safeguard talent to test with.

While I don't share the same degree enthusiasm for holy shock, I too switched Divinity to Holy Shock. I haven't needed LoH for mana even once in Ulduar 25 man, but there are many fights with a lot movement where a shorter cooldown will benefit you. On Vezax it's almost mandatory.

Imp mana spring and imp wisdom are actually stacking currently, for what it's worth (tested this sunday morning). This is contrary to what is advertised in the patch notes.

I tested it with another shaman and we were not getting any mana spring or BoW stacking. If I did not have imp wisdom and he had imp mana spring, mana spring would remove the BoW buff. If we had imp BoW we would never get the imp mana spring buff.

On fights where you are also within totem range of a resto shaman Imp BoW isn't worth it. There are a decent amount of fights in Ulduar though where that is not that case, and there isn't really anything better to spend the two points on.

Hmm, guess it got hot fixed or we did a flawed test. I can't say we've been doing much to hedge the cards for our paladins for mana anyway. More so giving totems to priests and various DPS as of late.

Actually, word from the shaman camp is that Healing Stream totem glyphed and talented is a huge contribution to raid healing, pushing out as much as 10% of a resto shaman's overall healing on a heavy raid damage fight like Kologarn. I don't know of any 2 talent points we could consider as replacements for Imp. BoW that would equate to 10% of another healer's HPS.

While it's true that if you have enough paladins you won't need to worry about it, the actual scenario where this is the case is rarer than one might think.

Preferably, a raid would have all four blessings available--Sanc, Kings, Might, Wisdom. And all of them at their highest talented benefit.

All paladins will have Kings.
Prot paladins will have Sanctuary.
Holy, Ret, & Prot paladins will potentially have BoM (talented to full potential).
Only Holy paladins will potentially have BoW (talented to full potential).

First off, assuming you bring 4 paladins to the raid is already tipping the balance scale in favor of us, as theoretically you should have 2-3 of each class. But we'll work with that. The point is, Holy paladins are the only of the three specs that have viable access to Improved Wisdom. Paradoxically, though, we are the spec that a raid receives the least benefit out of bringing more than one. Four ret paladins, two prot paladins, is totally fine--more than one holy paladin is really pushing it, since you typically only have one MT healing niche and the other healing slots would be better served by group healers.

The odds that a min-maxed raid will have more than one holy paladin are very slim. Thus, it's a necessity for that paladin to take Improved Wisdom to allow for Healing Stream totems. If, however, you end up with 2 holy paladins in a 25-man raid by God knows what coincidence, one could coordinate with the other about who takes it and who doesn't.

I, too, thought that the stacking change would mean we'd never have to waste points in I.BoW again since Resto Shamans are required to take Improved Mana Spring for Mana Tide. But I don't think any of us were expecting Healing Stream to actually become viable again. I'd say it's well worth the sacrifice.

my guild still tosses imp BoW out to make sure everyone has the mana buff, in case they go out of range of the totems.

All imp RF does (assuming you aren't attacking) is make your heals create the same aggro as other healers. It is a viable talent to get to reduce damage.


As others said, you cannot chain DiSac and HoS at the same time. Also DiSac cap makes it not all that game breaking in 25 mans (still very useful) except on a pull like Auriaya, where a few people take some huge hits as you are positioning.