I havent gone through and read all the posts, but is Holy Light still the best HPS spell we have? For some reason it seems like I am lower on the charts than I should be, but I also seem to be doing more overhealing than I used to.

and anyone know any good judgement or beacon macros?

That is a weird question. Out of all spells we have HL surely has biggest average HPS. And how do you define 'should be'? You basically can't heal for more than HP deficite of your assignement + sniped targets. Thus if people tend to get less damage (learning to move, tanks getting better gear) you obviously will have less and less effective healing. And for the same healing pattern aka HL spam your overhealing will be bigger and bigger in the same encounters. Doing hard modes will put more strain but then again, gear + knowledge of the encounter will make you heal less and overheal more when time goes on.

Now, you can of course decrease your overhealing by using FoL more, but it's really hard to increase effective healing assuming that your guild actually progresses and gets better gear. Because effective healing represents damage done to your targets minus healing done by other healers to your targets and you can not really control it. With the gear and experience damage done is decreasing and healing done by other healers is increasing. That's the math.

Yes, HL is still the best. It's not like it has many alternatives anyway. The new way of paladin healing is not only spamming MT. We have beacon, Glyph of HL and a Sacred Shield utility which can not be ignored. HL increases your HPS not only through the high amount of healing power per second, but also through the HL Glyph. The overhealing comes as a consequence as well. Both from the big numbers coming from HL and coming from the glyphed splash heals which are not smart heals in any way. That doesn't mean overhealing is something you can or should avoid. It's just a side effect...

If you are lower in charts, that is an indication of a few possible things:
- Your tanks have outgeared the encounters you are fighting, hence little dmg on tanks
- You use more than necessary healers, hence little effective heals for you
- You are competing against healers who are better than you.
- You fight some encounters where tank damage is relatively smaller compared to the raid damage.
- ...
- ...
The list goes on. On top of all that, you should add the amount absorbed by your SS. It's your one and only zero-overhealing-spell. I don't know if you use only one holy paladin, and/or a retri judging JoL, but either of the cases will make your rank on the charts go down for sure. Nothing bad again. It's perfectly normal to see your rank in healing charts go down as your raid gears up because the raid damage will stay around the same (since it's mostly magic damage where people do not gear towards resisting it) and your tanks will get less and less damage as they gear up.

About judgement and beacon macros... I did not quite get what you mean. If it is for timing your remaining duration of the judgement and beacon, you can use some addons to keep track of that.

For tracking ss, jotp, beacon I use AzCastBar with AzCastBar paladin plugins. I turn off all the basic features of the mod, and all the other paladin stuff other than those 3. (unless you want to track other specific things that are exclusive to a paladin) The thing I like about this mod is that, you place each spell's timer bar into a specific spot on your ui, regardless of how many spells you have up, your SS or whatever timer bar will always be in the same (x,y) coordinates on the screen.
With SS/Beacon it will say on the bar who currently has the buff.

If at anytime you respec/reglpyph to increase/decrease the duration of your buffs, you will need to reload your ui though. The mod checks for durations of those spells at load time.

AzCastBar Plugins : WoWInterface Downloads : Plug-Ins & Patches
AzCastBar Paladin Plugins : WoWInterface Downloads : Plug-Ins & Patches

I use Healbot to track Sacred Shield and Beacon of Light. I like how it actually places the icon of the spell next to the person that I've cast it on, and starts counting down with a tiny number when it is running out.

The "lowest tech" solution for cooldown tracking is simply to make the following macro without the use of any addons, DBM or otherwise:

...wherein obviously you would replace Jackadin with your character's name. The /in command starts a timer that will whisper you when your buff is wearing off. If you want to get really clever, you could with something like this:

This sort of macro would warn you 5 seconds before Sacred Shield expires so that you can refresh it early if a phase is coming up where you can't spare the GCD.

You should definitely play around with it to see what you find to be most useful, but whispering yourself with the /in command is a great alternative for addons for those of us who like to keep things simple and addon light.

Regarding the OP's Guide:

I think this has been fixed as far as I can recollect, yeah?

With 50% tank avoidance the chances of a tank taking two consecuitive hits is 25%. For 55% avoidance, 20.25%. For 60% avoidance, 16%.

But that isn't the accurate way of finding the chances of SS helping. With each SS having a ICD of 4 seconds and a boss swing speed of 2.4 (post slow) we have to find the chances of taking at least 2 our of 3 hits for each SS to be effective in an 4.8 second period (exactly 3 swings).
60% avoidance: 35.20%
55% avoidance: 42.53%
50% avoidance: 50.00%

Those are pretty favorable odds.

Yep, that was fixed at least a month ago. That bug didn't last long.

I disagree here. Most of the reduction in damage isn't from better gear on the tanks, but from people learning the encounter. Standing in less fires, learning how to DPS properly, they both add up to more than the .5% increased avoidance your tank got from the last raid. Overall, fights get way easier to heal as time goes on, but traditionally people bring the same number of healers, making it just a sniping game for some healers.

That is not true. If you did go 'holy/prot', your SS would last 12 seconds and have an internal cooldown of 6 seconds. With the 4 piece T8 bonus, that would be reduced further, to 4 seconds. I do believe most tanks get hit at least twice in 12 seconds, and if you're lucky and he doesn't get hit more often than 4 seconds, he will always have the shield up. That's a 2.5k shield up on almost every hit, for a minute, for one GCD. Not to mention the buff to FoL, if that floats your boat.

Not to mention, even without the prot talent, SS absorbs damage when you need it, that is within 6 seconds of getting another hit, not when the tank gets hit every 10 seconds, but when he's getting a larger burst of damage than normally.

To play Devil's Advocate, no other guild has cleared Algalon-25 as of yet. That means that while Mackzter may not have the best playstyle, it is by definition a highly feasible playstyle if it produced a kill on the hardest fight in the game. Honestly it doesn't matter if Ensidia hunters stack Strength and Ensidia paladins stack Spirit--if they're killing bosses that we're not, they're doing something better than us, somewhere somehow (unless you want to chalk it up to RNG). And remember, Ensidia is also SK-Gaming, not just Nihilum.

That being said, wise players won't try to "copycat" anyone, whether it's Sparty, Mackzter, Athene, Sailan, Ferraro, or whoever. Copycatting is what happens when you don't know what it takes to do your job so you just mimic someone who can do the job and hope it works out. Instead, you should learn for yourself why [Insert Godlike Paladin Name Here] does what they do and then apply it to your situation if it's optimal to do so.

When someone asks you why you stack Int, your answer should be "to increase regen, throughput, and all important holy paladin stats the most efficient way possible;" your answer should not be "because some other guy who killed more bosses than me does it."

Yea, I really need to update a few sections of the main post. I have been busy recently and I haven't had the time.

Do we have a definitive idea of whether or not Divine Sacrifice will always last the full duration if you don't actually take damage (ie. you're shielded)? I've been playing around with it, and (very subjectively), it'll often seem to stay up the full time period, even during Frozen Blows on Hodir, for example. Admittedly this is not scientific in the least (it's one of those "set and forget", "every little bit helps" kind of spells, that I just pop and then not pay much attention to), but I haven't seen any proper testing in a while, apart from some fairly ambiguous combat log parses. Can anyone shed some light?

Tifordin: Anecdotal experience here. Before I had a macro made that automated divine shield // divine sacrifice I used to cast them by pressing two buttons in a row. If I was late on casting divine sacrifice by more than two seconds, my shield would wear off before sacrifice would and I would instantly die from all the damage redirected from sacrifice. (This was during Frozen Blows.) This pretty much proved that divine sacrifice was lasting the entire duration, at least to me.

This is backup-ed by our Assembly of Iron Hardmode Kill and several wipes:
World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

Full ten seconds duration during divine shield and ~148,914 damage mitigated.

I just recently started using a holy/prot build (mainly for vezax) as my 2nd spec. On the first page of this thread it states that:

Is it still the case that it only absorbs 1.5k per person? If so, I still don't get how Divine Sacrfice is actually a useful spell.

I think that was written prior to testing having been done with the ability. The 1.5k hp being based on having ~25k health. If you take 150% of that and divide it by 25 you get to 1.5k per person.

In practice it seems the damage limit only applies to actual damage taken by you, so if you're immune to the damage, Divine Sacrifice does not automatically remove itself. There are occasional cases where it does do so, though I haven't seen that happen since the last minor patch.

If they wanted that, they shouldn't have changed Infusion of Light. That being said, trying to keep the buff on the tank is really a bad idea, you lose so much HPS by doing that, I really doubt it's worth even considering. Still, the only two situtations HS is useful are when you're on the move, or when the person you're healing would (probably) die without a heal at this very instant.

I wouldn't consider too much logic in their moves. They nerfed Infusion because of PvP IMO. Maybe it sounds like a consipracy theory a bit, but in my opinion they have completely no clue about holy paladin - what we need, where are our strengths, etc. They are comparing only some meters when they judge us ... Nothing more IMO.

While it's true the nerf was motivated by holy paladin performance in arenas, it's pretty paranoid to come up with persecution complexes for the class post-3.0. Regardless of past performance, Blizzard has pretty staunchly demonstrated that viability is something they want for all classes and specs, rather than being "out to get us." Of course, they're not omniscient. But Ghostcrawler's latest comments (the four numbered ones) about the state of the holy paladin union were dead-on. Developers may be confused, but they're not clueless.

In my experience and that of the rest of the holy paladins in my guild, 2pt8 is completely negligible for every situation except for raid healing. Even then, it's a very small, very limited bonus. And of course, you can guess how often we're tasked with raid healing.

Don't lament it too much though. With a few notable exceptions (resto druid 4pt8, prot warrior 4pt8, holy paladin 4pt7), set bonuses have been notoriously forgettable for most classes in Lich King. Some think it's just because we're only on the first two tiers of raid content and Blizz doesn't want us to power up too fast. Others think it's because Blizzard wants to shift the focus towards choosing gear for stats rather than bonuses (which is a pretty legitimate point, with all the hardmode loot flying aroundl; imagine the conundrum we'd be having if T8 set bonuses were so good we wouldn't even consider upgrading to hardmode gear). Make of it what you will.

GC quotes makes me think they are clueless. GC is talking about niches.
Using HL spam is only pally answer for raid AoE damage atm - FoL is useless here, HL with GoHL is pretty good, but it's not such a lifesaver like smart CoH or WG. And you need really good mana regen to support raid healing with HLs, which is delivered by Illumination.

I can't imagine to keep raid healing with some improved version of FoL, unless it will have some special effects instead of increased healing done.

Personally i am happy with current holy pally state. I can't do anything so good, like priests can, but i like my niche (which is very exceptional if we compare holy pally to any healing class).

Yeah, i am overreacting i suppose.

I have another question concerning the 51/20/0 specc. Yesterday I was asked during the raid, to switch my specc from the "normal" crit-spec to the version with Divine Sac and imp Dev. Besides me we had two other Holy Pallies (51/5/15 + 52/1/18) in the Raid. I do not have any of the T8 pieces yet, just T7 4/4. With the Holy/Prot specc I felt going OOM more rapidly (because of the -8% crit?).

• Does the 51/20/0 specc makes sense for me (Armory Link) without the T8 4/4 bonus?
• Is it useful for the Raid to have one Pally specced this way in Ulduar 25?
• Has Div Shield to be up every time Dic Sac is used -> so only usable every 5min because of the CD of Div Shield? (sry for this question, but I used Div Sac only two times yet^^)
• Are there "standard situations" where Div Sac is very helpful for the other healers (XT Tympanic Tantrum, Kologarn Shockwave)?

Thx for answers / advice.

Edit: two more questions and correction of errors (my english is not the best^^)