Endoscient

While that was true in TBC, it isn't anymore with the removal of Blessing of Salvation. The threat modified for healing spells with RF becomes .25 * 1.9 / .7 = 67.8%, compared to a normal healers 50% (without any talents). This is still very manageable on almost all bosses, and if you have Divine Sacrifice you should get Imp RF and use it on almost any fight which you take damage.

 

Joy

Pretty much this, I also found Gl o HS a life saver when solo healing the brain areas

 

galzohar

Even 100% healing->threat would make it very hard to pull aggro, as you'd need well over 6k effective HPS to beat a tank that does 6k TPS. So having righteous fury on is not a problem and is recommended if you're going down to DS anyway.

Don't get me wrong about imp wis, I do think you need to spec it - my point was that even though it's not a very useful talent, its benefits are better than the alternatives, though if you don't use it often, but you do LoH the tank often (spec 2/2 imp) and want aura mastery, then you can't afford 2/2 imp wisdom as well. Holy tree has 47 useful talent points (that require 51 points in the tree due to beacon being one of those 47 points) and 5 not-that-useful talent points (imp wis, imp loh, aura mastery), out of which you never get more than 4 since spending the remaining 20 points in prot/ret is much more beneficial regardless of how you spend it in those trees.

If you're running single-pally consistently, I'd get aura mastery / LoH.
If you're running with at least 1 other pally consistently then get imp wis and lose either aura mastery or 1 in LoH. Unless he sancs the whole raid (which is probably not worthwhile), in which case you can skip wis again.

Swapping points from prot to ret is possible to gain a little bit of efficiency (gain 5% crit lose 5% healing which is somewhat of a net efficiency gain) at a high cost to your burst healing (5% is high burst loss compared to the efficiency you gain). You can also trade 5% burst for 2.6% efficiency by swapping SoL to SoW. If you stick with Divinity you can lose movement speed to gain 2% crit.

Out of the holy talents I have 0 points in the only one that could possibly be of any use is blessed hands, but I'd only move points to it from one of the other three talents (AM/LoH/imp wis) if you find yourself never using them, as the benefit from a stronger salvation is quite tiny, transfering more damage to yourself might actually be bad sometimes (30% is already a lot), and reducing their mana costs is a joke. If you get to actually use the other 3 talents at all they would most likely benefit the raid more.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Something I'd like to see is a breakdown of fights where aura mastery can do any good (probably via resistances) to decide if it's really worth the point compared to imp LoH. As far as I can tell imp LoH is useful on certain fights where the tank takes a massive burst for a short, known period of time and the survivability increase is more important than the extra mana.

 

• Mex

Aura Mastery seems to have a use (not necessarily a worth-spending-one-talent-point use, but that will always be subjective) on

Razorscale -- Breaths during last X% with high buffet stacks
Ignis -- OTs standing in scorch / jets if it's changed to provide immunity to the interrupt
XT (maybe) -- Boombots reaching melee (are they fire damage? resistable?)
Auriaya (tentatively) -- Sentinel blast, although ideally this should interrupted, and immunity to interrupt from defender if you want to guarantee your next heal gets off (ie tank will die without it, etc)
Freya -- Elder Stonebark's Ground Tremor interrupts casting
Hodir -- Frozen blows
Mimiron -- Napalm shell
Vezax -- Animus' AoE

I haven't done Thorim's hallway so can't comment on its use there, but it's also technically useful in arena, since it's almost impossible to guarantee 100% add pickup, and some of them do kick. Like Auriaya though, it's just not predictable, and could easily have 0 effect.

It's something I'd definitely throw a point in, but I haven't done Ulduar as holy yet, so I can't say for certain.

edit -- it's technically advantageous on every fight, if used with devo aura, although if you're weighing up imp LoH vs AM, then imp LoH will obviously outshine it in this regard.

I'd also say that imp conc aura is potentially useful, even if only vs Auriaya / Freya, for the interrupt reduction. Freya's can be reliably avoided by cancelling casts, although Auriaya's are random.

People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. ... this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.

 

• frmorrison

With tank swaps, it isn't that great on Razor, but nice if there is a taunt resist.

The XT boom damage is not resistible, but it is fire.

I never saw a Sentinel Blast interrupt on Auriaya, is it single target?

Hodir it is nice there, since when Frozen Blow is up it is 100% frost damage. I haven't done the other watchers, but nice to see more uses.

DK - Ashbane Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

 

gcbirzan

I don't think you can live through the fight if you don't interrupt it. It ticks for 5k the first time, 10k the second and 20k the third. Pretty much useless to count after that. I doubt you're meant to resist it, and taking even one tick is pretty bad if you get feared into a void zone.
I do, however, believe AM (edit: Meant to say Improved Concentration Aura, as the OP said, AM is not all _that_ useful) is great for the stupid add that keeps interrupting your casting. That, and the Mimiron trash are the most annoying things in Ulduar so far. (The Ignis trash was bad as well, being chainhit by the whirlwinds, meh, but apparently they changed that.)
Edit: I was actually thinking about getting Improved Concentration Aura, and the first thing I would drop would be Infusion of Light, I think. I don't remember the last time I used HS+FoL.

 

Terlig

Hi,

First - Divine Sacrifice. Concerns me much. Everyone knows, that damage transfered to pally is capped by 150% of his HP. I also read a lot, that if pally is using Divine Shield before Divine Sacrifice (i can't imagine atm. different usage) then cap does not work, and any 40% damage will be transfered (because pally gets 0 of this transfered damage). Is it really so? I'd say yes, because visually i see tons of damage transfered. If yes, then next question - is it intended? Or it is a kind of bug, which will be fixed one day? Personally i couldn't imagine value of this talent if it is always capped by my health ...

About Glyph of Holy Shock. I see one big advantage of taking it - it improves our mobility healing a lot.

 

• Mex

The last 5+ pages of the 3.1 ret thread deal predominantly with this topic, including several logs, theories, ideas, etc. I'd suggest taking discussion there to avoid two parallel topics with the same basic content.

I must admit we never considered tank swaps on Razor, we simply burned her and chained CDs sub-20%, but that actually makes much more sense.

As gcbirzan noted, Sentinal Blast is pretty brutal if you take more than 2 ticks of it. It's a cast time->channelled ability though, and can be interrupted reliably, so AM isn't really super useful at mitigating it.

Still, I think AM is prob worth the talent point, although could probably be skipped once the instance is on farm.

People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. ... this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.

 

Sansei

I'm pretty sure it is the "Feral Rush" ability of the "Feral Spirit", not any of the sentinels.


On a note to non-stacking totems: I haven't tested it, but will surely do when I log on this evening.

When I buffed everyone with imp Greater BoW, and later, a shaman dropped the totems, we saw an increase in the mana regen numbers in our character panes. When I buffed myself with 10minute BoW however, it got removed as the shaman dropped mana spring totem. My PallyPower showed my small BoW being removed but didn't show any Greater BoW being removed, and I really didn't check if anybody actually continued to have the buff, more importantly if they continued to have the effect from both. But I remember seeing stacking numbers when we had greater BoW and dropped totems after that.

It might have gotten hot-fixed, the displayed numbers might not be reflecting the actual effect. I really have no combatlog snippet to say anything for sure, neither have i tested it separately. If anyone could try and confirm it, it would be much appreciated.

 

Saladin

From my experience, it's hard not to justify just one talent point to drop in AM--however, even with so many fights that benefit from it, it's still really not that good. Mostly because of the 2-minute cooldown.

On patch day, I specced into it and was all excited to try out my new toy. First fight I did it on was Ignis, with Flame Jets. (As I understand it was bugged at this time, but I didn't realize it.) Woohoo! And then we had to just dry-hump three more Flame Jets before it came off cooldown.

The problem is that heavy magic damage fights usually produce that extra magic oomph far more often than 2 minutes. For example, Saphirron's frost damage is constant, which makes 10 seconds of doubled frost resist useless for the other 110 seconds it's on cooldown.

Now, to use a more up-to-date example, and one that many others are using, consider Hodir's Frozen Blows. He gains it for 20 seconds after every Flash Freeze, with each Flash Freeze rocking an effective cooldown of 14 seconds. (Although I don't know of any reports of him having 100% uptime on Frozen Blows.) However, he does gain them noticeably often, meaning that AM can only buffer half the duration of one Frozen Blows per 2-minute time period. In 2 minutes we're likely to see anything between 3-6 Frozen Blows, which translates to 2-5 Frozen Blows that AM is completely void against.

The cooldown on this talent feels really harsh and prohibitive. It's not really the utility spell I was expecting it to be, but rather, just another domino you have to line up with your tank's own cooldowns. Personally I'd much prefer the talent if they dropped the interrupt immunity and put it on a 40-second or 1-minute cooldown.

All of that being said, I can't see me really speccing without it anytime soon. As long as you communicate with your tanks, it can be pretty decent. I.e., set up a rotation before the fight so you know AMS -> HoS -> IBF -> AM -> UA or whatever order you like to use them in.

 

Lianya

Hello,

Forgive me if I've missed this. I was looking for a thread/post similar to the Retribution Paladin 3.1 thread. That thread is simply amazing. It lists out everything needed to understand being a Ret Paladin from specs/variations, gems, to gear, enchants, etc. It's extremely well done and seems to be very up to date. When I visit the Holy Paladin thread, the info seems old, and, as far as I can tell, you have to dig through the thread itself trying to pick out bits of info here an there.

Is there a Holy Paladin concise thread/post that I've missed?

I appreciate the info. These forums have been an amazing source of info for me.

In case you wish to armory the Paladin:

Name: Chasse
Realm: Blackwing Lair

 

galzohar

Keep in mind you're not comparing AM to anything useful, really. You're comparing it to imp wis, imp LoH and blessed hands. It doesn't need to be a good talent to deserve a point, it needs to be better than 2 of the above.

 

Ariashley

I've noticed two oddl things this week in raids looking at web stats. I did a search to see if anyone else was asking/talking about it and don't see any recent posts on these topics.

1) Sacred Shield procs don't seem to increase crit on Flash of Light by 50%. If you look at the web stat report (http://wowwebstats.com/t4ey4hcwplltg...01dee920#buffs) this is showing an attempt where I (Auriane in the report) was healing the MT (Ridge). My Sacred Shield procced 23 times on Ridge (a bit less than 50% uptime). My buffed crit rate is around 51% on Flash of Light without a Sacred Shield proc. My crit rate for that nearly 5 min attempt was 50%, which means that Sacred Shield procs did not result in any more than the expected amount of crits without using Sacred Shield. I noticed this in 10 mans this week also. I wasn't really using sacred shield + flash that much prior to 3.1, so can't say that I ever looked for this as an issue previously.

2) Lay on Hands is critting for 2x the paladin's max health instead of 1.5x. (see http://wowwebstats.com/kdgnhhvdocjty?a=x1800000009794ab). Selvia has around 25k health or a bit over and his LoH crit for 52k.

Also, is anyone else finding that with the changes to mana regeneration and the overall speed and amount of raid damage, flash+holy shock is proving to be a lot more healing than holy light spam?

 

Pirjo

To me, Imp LoH is required. We have resto shaman so that means it is AM vs. 1/2 points in blessed hands.

I personally won't give up the extra 130 raid wide resist button for 10% additional threat drop on 1 target every 2 minutes. Usually the 30% drop is enough to keep that person out of trouble for the rest of the fight.
Flame Jets was a great experience - between the fact that the ability is resistible, and the damage ticks are resistible, the times I popped AM people rarely dropped below 8k.

The weakness of AM is the fact that most AoE damage is nature in Uld. Most fights you'll use it just to boost devo aura to pull cat lady. Or right when the guardian spawns to prevent interrupts. But in specific fights that resist can represent a massive amount of damage prevented - moreso than divine sac.

 

Drayton

From your WWS, it appears the player had Guardian Spirit active on them at the time, accounting for the additional healing.

 

Endoscient

For your first point, you need a lot more statistical evidence then that to disprove SS not increasing crit rate. The bonus crit only lasts as long as the damage absorb shield is up, so if due to fight mechanics the shield drops almost immediately after being applied it can have a very low impact on FoL crit rates. You would have to perform a comprehensive analysis of the amount of FoL crits and non-crits while the absorb shield is up. Even with that you would need a much larger sample size then just one fight. This can be very easily tested on your own though with the new Divine Guardian talent and fighting mobs that do trivial damage, since you will have 100% uptime on the absorb proc. I also noticed that you had two Pallies casting SS on one target, and since they don't stack (they share ICD), it can obscure the results even more.

Your second point is not true either. The reason why it healed for so much is because your tank had Guardian Spirit at the time, which increases all healing received by 40%.

 

Melnor

Regarding the SS not adding bonus crit testing. An easy test is to just get naked and shield yourself and have something proc the shield. I'm not sure what a paladin's crit rate is completely unbuffed but it should yield a good enough answer to tell that SS crit bonus is or isn't bugged.

 

Ghon

Hello, well I have been playing with a mixed style of Healing using FoL, HL and HS depending on the situation since 3.1 and its actually working pretty good, I don’t see any point arguing which one is better between HL spam, staking as much int as you can, or FoL spaming since you can regulate how much mana you will use in a fight, changing between them and Having a lot more spell power, crit and a good mana pool average, I’m using all the spell power enchants and a lot of gems with +int, I have 2464sp(including trinket stacks), 38.56% crit, 375 haste, 22k mana pool, and 140 mp5, with FoL, HL and SoL Glyph.

1) Judging by that stats what do you think is better?, 3% crit from Sanctity of battle or 3% more healing from Divinity since I’m using 2 points already on it, I would love to have those 2 extra talents to complete it but there is no way, did someone thought about it before? Can you tell me which one is better?

2) is Divine Sacrifice worth the lost of 8% crit? since its a 2min cd and SS will not absorb as much as you can do with all that crit.

 

Ariashley

Edit: double posted in error

 

Ariashley

I didn't heal on the paladin in BC and also didn't raid on it. Sorry if my questions were stupid, but wasn't really trying to make a "point" per se. I meant to be asking whether anyone else had observed similar issues and for someone to point out what mistake I might be making in looking at it. Three different people (one of them a priest) looking at the log didn't notice a Guardian Spirit proc prior to the LoH (and the priest tells me he was looking for it - I know I wasn't).

It wasn't just this raid when I've noticed the issue with SS. I've definitely seen the buff from my SS active (on Dotimers) on a tank and seen a normal (non-crit) flash land on that tank - which shouldn't happen. When/if another paladin's SS procs, my SS proc immediately drops from Dotimers. That could be a weird latency issue I suppose, but I only have about 170ms latency.

I considered the multiple paladins casting SS idea, but I was the only paladin in a 10-man VoA this week and was still not observing more than 44% Flash crit rate (37.44% holy crit rate from gear/talents + 5% from Flash of Light glyph + a little crit from int buffs) healing a warrior tank with sacred shield active. SS had more than a 50% uptime (96 sec out of 3 min - Wow Web Stats). While I am aware that the time period wouldn't meet a statistically significant criteria, when I never observe more than my base buffed crit rate for Flash, it strikes me at least worth asking to find out if anyone else had similar experiences or if I'm just extremely unlucky.

Thanks, I'll take that suggestion. I take it that no one else has noticed a problem with Sacred Shield? Also, at the moment, neither of our Holy Paladins, are specced into Divine Guardian. We have several healers having major frame rate issues in Ulduar and by the 4th attempt on any boss in Ulduar, we paladins have ended up raid healing since we neither one are having frame issues.

 

Endoscient

Sacred Shield is infact working as it should, you can't use your anecdotal evidence if "it doesn't seem like it is critting enough", when there is no way for you to possibly know the actual uptime of the Sacred Shield absorb buff compared to when your FoLs landed. When the servers came up I used my method of fight a trivial mob with Divine Guardian and spamming FoL to test it. Here is the WWS report of it. As you can see it is clear the Sacred Shield is working as it should. I had a 31% normal Flash of Light crit rate (I was my ret spec with Divine Guardian in Holy gear). I got 85% effect crit rate on FoL over 100 casts, which is within an expected random deviation. It is extremely statistically unlikely that I could have received that many crits if Sacred Shield was not working.

 

KYA1337

I just tested that, with 17% (naked) holy crit, no FoL glyph.

For 144 flashes i got 103 crits, which computes to ~72% crit - a bit more than expected, but this might be due to the small sample size.

Seems like "onyxia deep breaths more" again.

edit: Got beaten to it.

 

Tuftears

I'm trying to figure out how a 10-man raid with 2 paladin healers can handle Hodir's Frozen Blows. Is this pretty much the case where the whole raid needs frost resist gear to help the paladins have a chance to keep up? Party members take 4k every 2 seconds, so 40k over the course of 20 seconds, plus the tank is getting hit for large amounts. The tank'll be wearing full frost resist, that's no problem, but it's the raid damage I'm concerned about.

As I see it, Flash of Light has a 1.5s cast time and heals for 3.8k average. So assuming paladin A beacons the MT, paladin B beacons the lowest health person:

Paladins should be able to get off 4 heals to four different people in their assigned groups in 6 seconds, beacon covers the last person. In that time, each person will have taken 12k damage and been healed for 3.8k. (MT was healed for more, but I'm concerned with the AOE damage here)

Next round. Another 4 heals, another 6 seconds. Now each person has taken 24k damage and been healed for 7.6k, for a net deficit of 16.4k damage.

Third round. Another 4k heals, another 6 seconds. Now each person has taken 36k damage and been healed for 11.4k, for a net deficit of 24.6k damage. This generally spells death for most people.

It looks to me like two paladin healers are incapable of keeping up the heals themselves. Yes, I know, third healer should cover the difference, especially if we get a priest, and maybe if we have the elemental shaman (who usually gets traded off between our runs) he could off-heal for Frozen Blows, but I'm trying to figure if there's a better way to handle this - my aim is to try to get the bosses to be 2-healable in general, but I'm coming up blank for this particular situation.

Is there an obvious solution that I'm missing, besides 'don't bring two holy paladins to heal a 10-man raid'?

upstart feline miscreant (47 feral/14 resto)

 

Endoscient

Protip, if people are dying while you are casting FoL, then you should use HL instead.

 

Varuk

Paladins should use Holy Light in any situation where healing is an issue. Also, don't forget haste. Myself, fully raid buffed, I have a 1.1s FoL and a 1.4s HL.

Using the same example, allowing for a bit of lag, you can get 4 HL's off in 6 seconds, each hitting for 10k to 11k. Over the course of 6s people take 12k damage. The deficit is much smaller. I'm not saying it won't necessarily be easy, but with people using health pots and maybe an Avenging Wrath or two it should be doable.