Well, Nightmare Tear will count for both your red and blue gem and activate your mana restore meta without having to use any more non-INT gems.

So, you have 3 options

1. Nightmare Tear
2. 12 SP/mp5 purple will also count for both red and blue gems
3. Use both a 12 SP/10 INT gem and a 10 INT/5 mp5 gem to meet meta requirements:

Going with the nightmare tear gives you a 10 INT (well at 10 STA) bonus over any of the other gemming options. What you lose by doing that is 12 SP and 5 mp5. 10 INT gives more regen than 5 mp5 by a fairly large margin for HL spamming and SP is a very weak stat for HL paladins which will result in more overheal more than anything. That's why so many people prefer the nightmare tear for meta activation.

EDIT: The only other factor to consider is socket bonuses. If using the green and orange gem option lets you get a socket bonus that gives you 6 or more INT, I think its probably worth doing. However, I have not seen very many pieces of gear with INT bonuses on them.

Thanks guys. I appreciate your input. I went ahead and bought a Nightmare's Tear and an extra Brilliant King's Amber. Like I said before, I had NEVER used a prismatic gem except for Dragon's Tears (when they still counted as one...lol), so it's been a while.

In regard to a poster who said that mail will be better for crafting: I noticed that both holy plate have the haste/crit/sp combination. Why would mail be better unless it has mp5 and that's what you're going for?

So resistances don't help if the damage is shadow/nature (two schools) at the same time? I haven't paid attention in the few dual school damage types that have existed before.


For my Holy gemming, I use one Nightmare + all other 20 Int gems.

My understanding of the dual-school attacks is that you need to have resistances against both in order to properly resist the spell at all.

You shouldn't undervalue SP based on the overhealing assumption. If it was possible to see it you'd see that the vast majority of your overheal over a whole fight comes from heals that are 90%-100% overheal, i.e. cast on the tank/someone when they are at full hp. Well this is the case from my experience atleast if i was HL chaining on a tank it would look something like 100% overheal > 0-10% overheal > 100% overheal > 0-10% overheal. So SP will increase your effective healing when you need it, you also get stronger sacred shield, bigger heals with plea up (Maximum HPS is achieved with plea used on CD btw), a stronger FoL HoT (still should be used along with HL spam imo).

I use a int/mp5 gem for a blue socket such as in Boots of Tremoring Earth that have Blue+Yellow and a SP socket, and then a int/sp gem for a red socket when it has a SP bonus.

So you are saying that is uses the lowest resistance to calculate? So if you had 75 nature and 260 shadow, the game would just use 75 to find the resists for a nature/shadow attack (so AM is useless then)?

That's correct. My experience is with The Black Knight's phase 3 ability that deals "shadowfrost" damage. I've used Aura Mastery + Shadow Resistance Aura and we were still taking full damage per hit. On my next run, I had a second paladin run Frost Resistance Aura, and we saw reduced damage across the board.

There are also instances in Ulduar where a "Spellfire" damage type is used, which works off both arcane and fire damage types.

In regards to a cloth/mail piece being BIS for crafted items, is because for the respective boots and leggings, the armor type he listed had the most haste for that slot of any armor type.

I just realized that for Holy the change to Raid Wall is a buff, since you can safely cast it every 2 minutes instead of every 5. That makes up for the change to AM.

It's not a buff. It's got at best 20% of it's previous ability and doesnt really help a lot in the situations it was most needed (huge predictable incoming raid damage)

I prefer to be able to use an smaller ability 2 to 3 times instead of an ability once, and saving bubble for when I need it is nice change. In addition, the devs can assume that there isn't someone absorbing a huge amount of damage all at once.

I forgot about Hand of Sac, it will be nice to be able to use that ability again without worrying about getting killed.

Perhaps you are right about the devs ignoring the raid damage absorbs of Raid Wall, but after 2 patches of it being overpowered it would have been taken into account in 3.3, so now they don't have to worry about it absorbing so much at once. Plus Ret can't get DG without losing a lot of dps, so less absorbs from dps is easier for design.

I could still see Ret Paladins picking this up for certain encounters that heavily benefit from it. Losing 2 points in Seals of the Pure is about a 2.5% personal DPS loss, which is significant for the paladin. But if it means raid survival on a progression fight that dps loss shouldn't hurt the raid too bad. For example a raid only running 2 paladins (ret and holy), which we ran for a while, might want their ret paladin picking up the ability. Several boss abilities work on a 1 minute or 90 second cooldown where a single raid wall every 2 minutes won't cover it.

I think in any progression fight I'd want to have at least 2 paladins with divine guardian. Holy is the obvious first choice to have it. Prot would probably be next since the added incoming damage would be negligible for them and could be healed through if it's called out. Prot can easily pick up the talent too. But if there's only two paladins in the raid and one of them is ret then the small raid dps loss is made up for by very high raid utility. One new bonefit of a ret paladin picking this up, if needed, is that they don't have to use bubble before popping it. That saves the 10 second dps penalty and also means they don't have to worry about holding off on avenging wrath.

That all is going to change fight to fight, and not all of them will really benefit from having a DG every 1 or fewer minutes. I guess my main point is: don't overlook ret paladins picking it up if the fight warrants it.

edit: please delete. Answer to deleted post :P.

Well with GC's latest post about tank damage it's really going to push us more towards flash of light. Huge nerf to tank avoidance, but lower boss damage will mean more of a steady damage stream that will allow us to use FoL a lot more w/o worrying about the tank getting killed between heals.

edit:
i just realized the post above may have been in response to the deleted post with the 'suggestions' and not real info

It may or may not push FoL use actually. To quote a blue
We'll have to see just how much damage is going out, but I'll stick with HL majority on anything but the "easy healing" type of fights.

GC also added:
and also

So I think it's pretty obvious that the damage on normal wont be hard to heal at all, but on heroic I'm forseeing tank 2-shots untill icecrown geared.

Like tim pointed out, bosses hitting for less just means you can plea more freely without risk to tank getting gibbed, these changes make HL even more favourable over FoL.

Relatively high health pools, which some tanks appear to intend on focusing on come ICC, instead if spiky damage does seem to favour HL when you think of fights like Razuvious.

E: When you actually outheal all the damage he does and thus occasionally overheal, not like when you were in ilvl 200 blues.

Less tank damage means beacon on the tank and HL into the raid. I didn't feel like I should switch to FoL at Freya.

I have been following these forums for almost a year. I really appreciate everyone's point of view and input.

Recently, I switched from the conventional HL spam + int stack to FoL + SP stack. I know there has been significant debate about the two types of "play styles". There are pros and cons to both, but the overwhelming consensus is that HL spam, int stacking is the "way".

A couple of weeks ago, we started raiding with 2 Holy pallies. We quickly realized that 2 HL pallies is a lil excessive in Heroic ToC (25 and 10 man), given our gear lvl. So I decided to go FoL spam to see if there were some more synergies having 2 different styles. I was pretty reluctant to try because of all the "negative" reaction to FoL spam, but I remembered what one of the previous posted said "it really depends on your healing team and what works best for the raid".

So we had our first week of raiding this past week, and to my surprise, it worked out extremely well. There were fights that HL completely out healed me (ie twins, jarrax). Overall I was top 3 of 6 healers the entire night in 25 man. I was very apprehensive about solo tank healing with FoL, not knowing what to expect. I hand the chance to solo tank heal 10 man heroic on Anub and amazingly had no problems. I topped out at 6656 HPS on that fight, and was soloing healing the entire raid for the last 20 sec b/c our other healer died.

So my point is dont underestimate it until you try it. So far after a week of raid AND our current raid healer setup, one HL and one FoL pally works better for the most part than 2 HL pallies, imo.

How does that compare to when both of you were holy light spamming for the fights? With at least one holy paladin doing the beacon + HL spam you will not have any issues keeping the tank up. that frees up the 2nd holy paladin to go with a FoL build (or just keep the HL spam too). and though HL spam is very overkill, for most fights i've seen it still come out on top. The FoL build works great for champs though, and woudl probably be stronger for Anub'arak as well, to minimize extra haling in P3.

edit: nevermind.