Hey guys I have a QQ question but its really important for me.

I started lvling my pally 2~3 weeks after WOTLK, beause on my guild we have being short on healers, but now, he have more than enough, but I still the only active Holy Pally ( we have 3~4 retris and 1 Prot Tank. )

Im really well geared, I have done almost everything pre-ulduar ( sarth+3 etc ) and we are working on Mimiron right now, but I just dont like how the healing is going for me since I can´t beat priest/druids/shammys on healing. A few weeks ago I started question myself, 'why should my raid leaders bring me over another healer?'. I really enjoy the Holy Healing for PVE, its why I play the game, but there is no point to spend 2~3hours for 3 days/week to lose to someone that can just spam HoT´s and keep 3/5 peoples alive when I just can keep one, maybe two with beacon.

I can´t judge Light for raid healing because this judge works better on Retri Pallys with high AP, I almost lost to a retri pally on XT-002 last night because of it, and my overheal its around 63%. I never go oom, so its not a mana problems, but this just suck and blizzard its going to nerf healing more and make things more "interesting"?

I just want some 'light' and maybe some advice. Should I start a new alt healer/dps? I like my retri pally, I stoped playing with my warrior ( 2 years ) because of it, but now idk if worth it.

You shouldn't top healingmeters in most fights, since you have to be assigned to MT healing as only holy pala. The point is that paladins have highest single target HPS, both burst (HL spam with wings) and sustained - almost 'indefinite' HL spam in terms of standard fight lengths. So while you can not keep many people topped like other healing classes, you will make sure (better than any other healing class) that 1 person is topped.

Based on:

You should probably be playing a dps'er. Competing against your fellow healers for total effective healing is a futile battle and is really not the point of playing a healer. It's basically the most team oriented part of your raid, and "competition" (and I use this word so very loosely) exists mainly in how much people trust you versus another with a particular assignment.

It's not a paladin's job to beat anyone on a epeen meter. It's even quite dumb to judge healer performance by meters without excessive further interpretation.

It's your job as a paladin to keep the MT alive no matter what. We can dish out some serious HPS over a significant amount of time. In every boss fight where there's non-trivial damage done to the tank, you should be assigned to MT healing. Sure, times like mimiron phase 2 don't make you feel that valuable. But Whenever theres a tank, your HL should be landing often on him.

To add to this: use HL. If someone is going to die before your HL will it, use HS. If that is on CD, use FoL. The only other situation when to use FoL is when you have to save mana.

A holy pally can nearly keep up a tank solo nearly forever via spamming HL. No other class can do that. As was said, since a Holy Pally can only heal 1-2 people, so you will never top the healing meter if you play with good non-Pally healers. The only thing such a meter is good for is comparing dps classes performance.

A Holy Pally should rarely cast JoL if a Ret Pally is alive, since you reduce JoL healing. A Holy Pally must overheal, in fact I would say if a Holy Pally doesn't have over 50% overheal, then they aren't healing properly.

If you wish to "top" the healing meters, I believe the best is a Holy Priest with Circle of Healing, Prayer of Healing, and Prayer of Mending.

Yes – exactly.

Also, @ansky5o: Tanks don't look at Damage Taken meters to see who took the most/least damage. Healing meters, while fun to top, mean just about the same thing between separate healer roles (MT vs. Raid) as Damage Taken meters mean between tanks. If you're going to compare yourself to someone, compare yourself to MT healers in other guilds.

I recently compared myself to other Holy Pallies and came up with this conundrum, that I'd very much like to solve, but can't figure it out for the life of me:

Holy pallies in other guilds seem to heal more per Holy Light than I do, and I'm wondering what's going on.

First off, if you look at the Healing Done during a Mimiron kill for both of the holy pallies in my guild, we get 2.6k and 3.2k average effective healing per Holy Light (crit+normal).

However, looking at some pallies from top guilds, I see numbers like: 4.8k, 4.2k, 4.3k, and an astounding 6.1k and 6.9k. These numbers seem to correlate more to overhealing than to spell power (this is effective, so any overhealing's chopped off).

It looks like those 6k pallies healed a Warlock tank in phase 3, which makes their effective heals bigger than the rest of ours, but I'm still a whole 1k behind the rest of these guys, and I want to garner some insight into what I could be doing better.

Any thoughts/insight?

Could that have something to do with mimiron's rockets or laser barrage?

By the looks of things, the guys getting the high average effective HL numbers are doing so by being selective with their heal spells, and deciding that FoL is a better choice. Check the number of FoL casts they have, it's much higher than from your guild. By doing this they've avoided a lot of mostly-overheal HLs, and kept their average effective healing up.

This can be the right decision to make not only when you've got a raid taking lots of 4k hits, but also if you're raid-healing something like razorscale, where a random person will take a hit large enough to warrant a HL, but since you'd expect several other healers to respond, HL will mostly either overheal, or cause your other healers to overheal.

My guild hasn't attempted mimiron yet, so it's pretty hard for me to work out where FoL might be appropriate in that fight and advise you further. The general scenarios I can come up with are sporadic light damage that hits lots of targets, or sporadic heavy damage on one or two targets when raid damage is otherwise light. Obviously though, you should mostly just ignore raid damage and stick with HL if you're assigned a tank and the encounter's mechanics present any great threat to that tank's wellbeing at that time.

I am guessing this guild's Holy Pallies are running with less healers, maybe 6 vs 7-8 than you are, so there is "more" to heal. Also on Phase 1/3, you can safely cast Flash of Light due to light damage. Also those top Pallies may be cast-canceling their heals if the target is at full health.

Well from what i understand i was all about intellect .. Pre Ulduar i was 27k mana UB and i noticed that on most of these Ulduar fights( including hard modes... all we do is spam tanks and avoid stupid things like obvious deaths... 27k mana in all is imo too much now.. in order to keep the tanks up i find that having the spellpower i had with all my intellect wasent enough even though i could never go oom....so there for i am forced to regem spellpower... this is kinda random in all, but when does anyone plan on refreshing the Holy Paladin class mechanincs.. ive done some research and theory crafting on spellpower to intellect and i think that gemming spell power for Ulduar isnt such a bad idea

Which is going to happen anyway as all the actual group healers are using abilities that heal multiple targets. When we need to support the group healers, our job is not to fill health bars to 100%. It's to keep endangered targets alive long enough for the groupies to get round to healing them. Flash is thus our group healing spell of choice because it lets us heal more targets in that manner.

No, I have been casting it during Heat Waves while Mimiron wasn't doing Laser Barrage. And no one got hit by rockets. I've tested DS several times on Mimiron and it always wore off after about 2-3 seconds.

if youve ever done hard modes (not saying you havent) youd know tanks are taking spike damage 40k + in 2 seconds... for example thorim hard mode my guild is progressing Hard mode and WILL have him down soon <PUG> and our tanks are taking so much spike damage that it really doesnt matter how much int or haste you have.. i have 476 haste 40% Holy crit and 2080 Spell Power if i go anymore over haste ill run into a wall.. my holy lights are 1.75 UB

1.75 HL is slow, make sure you are casting Judgement. With raid buffs I have around 1.5 HL second cast time with around 400 haste. Haste will help with spike damage because you can cast HL faster to react to the damage.

Anyway, I find 1.5 seconds is fast enough for me, so I stack Int so I don't have to use Plea so much.

Heat Wave does massive AoE damage, so that should quickly eat the DiSac 40-50k damage cap.

1.75 sitting in if...no JoTp just 1.75

ful lraid buffed i have 1.3 holy light and 30.1k mana

Yeah ima lil new at the forum things , but anyways im looking for the best way to socket gear.. and haste prolly wouldnt cut it.. give details please

My math was a lil wrong sorry =( 1.55 in if with jOtP and light's grace

I want to have spellpower to haste compared and spellpower to int.. again there is no new cm for Holy Paladins. if you could update me on any new formulas for needed stats.. and soft cap(haste) that would be great. Also if Mp5 plays a big roll in Ulduar now.The reason i ask here is because i come to this site because they have broguht great coverage on my spec agear i need and they give me the math that i need to know my class. again thank you and please post back if you can give me formulas and any new info i dont know =)

do you have a WWS from your raids? the best way to see what happens if you increase spell power is to look at the combat log of a fight and filter it just for your heals (flash of light, holy shock, holy light, etc). scan down the list and see how many of them end up with some overhealing. Every heal that has even 1 point of overhealing means that adding spell power would be a waste. Adding crit is similarly wasted in overhealing, but you get a lot of mana back even if it overheals. If you never go OOM, then that part of crit is wasted too.

With haste, especially when chain casting, 1% haste is 1% more healing output. At higher levels of gear, haste does more for you. Don't look at it from the perspective of "it only lowers my cast time by 0.03 seconds, etc". In my last Mimiron fight, I put out 2,000 effective healing per second (6,900 total HPS). Adding 1% haste then bumps that up by roughly 20 HPS which is a very strong increase for 25.2 haste rating. Then you also factor in that you heals are getting there slightly faster which has the potential to decrease overhealing. The equivelant item budget (i.e. gems) would give 30 spell power which will be heavily wasted on overheals and comes no where near the increase haste gives for your HPS output.

The final consideration, though, is for spike healing. Crit and SP can really shine here. You can argue that a 20 effective HPS increase is the best overall, but most the time it's not needed. When healing tanks, you aren't worried about most of the fight where they take steady damage. It is the big spikes or short, heavy bursts from bosses that can kill a tank and wipe a raid.

For me, it comes down to my fellow healers in the raid and how well I can rely on them. We run with a Disc Priest and two holy paladins (myself included). All three of us are strong healers with good reaction times, so I have some confidence in our ability to handle large spikes through big heals and strong mitigation. That's where I'd go with Haste once mana is no longer an issue. That all assumes a healthy spell power base for sufficient heals.

Fully raid buffed (according to rawr in my regular gear) I have:

30,050 mana
46.7% holy crit
44.21% haste
2,660 spell power

So long as my mana is fine, geming for haste ends up being the best way to go from here. Spell power is high, as well as crit rate so I feel fine in that department. Plus I'd say that 90% of my heals (or more) end up with some component of overhealing. That means adding spell power is wasted, and removing some isn't going to hurt much.

Gonna point out, when people are saying that you are 'fine on mana' that should pretty much mean that you don't ever cast divine plea or cast it only during no-heaing scenarios. Pretty much if you feel forced to cast any holy lights that are diminished by the divine plea, more mana still will mean an effective increase in HPS because of fewer nerfed lights. As others have said, if you're using divine plea during razorscale downtime, deconstructors heart or even quickly getting a few ticks while running out of aoe or eyebeams, that's different.

Really though, gearing will depend a lot on the fight. If you're dealing with something like razorscale where beacon and FoL spam the raid keeps the tank up easily, theres no real reason to go for int especially because you can do the meleeing with seal of wisdom. But on other fights like say hodir, crit and SP become more effective than haste for HPS because you already should be past the hard cap when in the moonkin light. I can create multiple scenarios in different boss fights where different gearing styles is 'best' based on the parameters I set out, ultimately none of the options will be best in every situation, so if you want to min-max every encounter, you need to gem heavily into one of the areas (this is where most choose int) and then collect multiple side-grades where you prioritize differently.

*edit* Should go back in my first paragraph, if you are perfectly fine on mana without divine plea and everything...I'd also go ahead and say that you should think about speccing into prot (my favourite still is 52/17/2, but any (51/17/0)+3works) because of the extra divinity HPS, SS HPS and the divine sacrifice mitigation that DOES have an effect on the raid regardless of when the bubble wears off, given 30000 damage mitigated, used on cooldown (5 minutes) thats still 1000 'HPS', if its less than that then the healing is light enough where it shouldnt matter either way.

Thanks for the answers, if Im not suppose to 'fight' to top healing Im not going to try anymore ^_^.

About HL, I have 1.3 Holy Lights with raid buffs + [Scale of Fates]. Its really good to use it when the boss start doing large amount of dmg on the tank. Right now Im using [Scale of Fates] and [Forethought Talisman], Im a JC, should I drop one of them for the JC trinket?

I have to disagree Malleus.

As TimWischmaier stated before: If people are about to die in the next 2 seconds, HS and FoL are usefull.
However if i hit somebody with a HL he won't (usually) be targeted by the smart-AoE-heals of the other classes, automatically redirecting these heals to people who need it more(if in range).
Also if someone would - by chance or through bad positioning - not receive any raidheal, HL keeps him safe.

Imho HL is the better spell for overall raid healing, and i think its wrong to present a dogma of "Hl is for tanks, FoL is for the raid".

Keep 2 chars safe, or buy your raidhealers enough time on 3 chars - whatever works with your group and healers is good.

Yes, I was saying that because in some cases (like tantrum), DS lasts the whole duration and transfers a lot more damage and in some other cases (like on Heat Wave) it just instantly falls off. Divine Sacrifice is pretty inconsistent in how it works, at least for me. Many people are definitely getting it to last the whole duration and I definitely get it to last much less time than that.