I disagree. If ~7k HPS is enough to keep the tank up, than tank can 'live' without healing for 6-7 seconds - plenty of time for different HL numbers to average out (to a higher HPS than FoL spam). And if tank risks to die within 2-3 HL casts, then 7k HPS simply won't cut it.

Or put it this way - spiky but higher in average HL spam will only be more dangerous than FoL spam if you have very high burst on tank. But in this case FoL won't be enough anyway. So I would choose higher average HPS tactics - HL build + HL spam.

You know Diamond is an int-stacking/HL paladin and is in the guild with the world first Anub and world first tribute to mad skill, yeah? Maybe something has changed though! The leading guild argument is always silly.

Anyway, you can page quite a few pages back when the FoL/HL debate first came up and see good points on both sides. At this point it's as much stylistic as it is functional.

You react to those phases and boss abilities by switching to HL, because you know you can sustain HL spam for a short while. And they don't really make the damage more predictable, they just make the spikes bigger. If you go from having a chance of taking 40k damage in 3 seconds to 60k damage in 3 seconds, is that really more predictable?

1)
When you already have 2 holy paladins covering both your tanks... The 3rd holy paladin isn't going to be performing efficiently since nobody else in the raid is taking high enough damage to make use of the big HL heals.

On a fight with just 1 tank, you get the same with the 2nd holy paladin, he's not performing efficiently.

It makes sense putting the extra paladin(s) on raid healing and in that job the faster FOL's will be better at covering a larger amount of people.


2)
In a fight where the tanks are taking big hits fast (say every 1.25 seconds), you'd guess the best healing strategy is to just have everyone spamming their biggest heals so each individual can fill up the HP deficiency. But that doesn't necessarily work out. If everyone is using 1.5sec heals, and heals get synchronised the boss might get 2 hits in between 2 heals (of everyone) and you have a dead tank. A dead raid is not far away.

Yes, you're supposed to stagger the heals, but how are you going to organise that with people having various amounts of lag, and any technology you could use will equally have delays making precision timing in the order of fractions of a second near impossible.

Now... If someone's spamming fast heals, and those fast heals are large enough to get the tank up by enough (even just barely) to survive the 2nd hit, you're not out of the sh.t yet, but you've just bought yourself enough time for the 'big healers' to cover the real damage.

It's an extreme, but even withotu a boss as extreme as that it's easy to get enough holes in the healing to get soemthing like this to happen. The HL paladin still needs to cast Beacon, they still want to cast judgements for the extra haste, SS and DP's, those are all extra GCD's where no healing is happening. Murphy's law dictates that there WILL be a time when all your tank healers decide to do one of the 'maintenance' spells all at the same time...

Fast heals and no need to DP (as well as damage prevention and hots) means you flatten out the spikyness of the damage on your tank. The FOLadin may not be able to keep the tank up alone and even 2 FoLadins may not, but it can buy you the time you need to finish casting those big heals.


3)
A FOL healer will have a bigger SS. Damage prevented is always better than damage healed. Your tank may also have the FoL hot on them, this will also help with keeping him alive.




I'm not saying FoLadins are better than HLadins, I'm not even claiming the other way around. I'm just saying you need to look at the healers in your raid as a TEAM, and they work best when they work together maximizing their individual strengths and covering for eachother's weaknesses. As good as HL is it has weaknesses. Each extra HL paladin you add in your raid instead of another type of healer, strengthens the weaknesses of the HL paladin, while at the same time offering less means to cover for them. There's fights that may be heavily stacked in favour of the HL type healing, but there's also fights stacked against it. You want your healing team to be as strong as it can be, but you also want it to be versatile enough you can handle the wide range of fight mechanics.

Mathematically, FoL is a substandard spell in nearly every respect. The only argument that can be advanced on its behalf is that having multiple paladins undermines the effectiveness of HL for many fights (which is true). However, a FoL pally isn't benefiting the raid any more than ANY other healing class would, and the same logic for switching to a FoL build could be used to just remove the paladin from the raid and bring a different class.

To me, the "merits" of FoL seem to lie not in the fact that it's a good build, but rather that it's less bad than other options in an already-suboptimal situation. Like if I had to build a campaign slogan around FoL, it would be, "When life gives you lemons, stack spellpower."

Is your argument that the FoL build is substandard not just to other Holy Paladins, but any other healers you could bring along?

If that's what you're saying, there's several responses. The FoLadin might bring some other utility (paladin specific, for instance) that's not covered by the raid already. Additionally, you might want to bring in another holy paladin (even if you have 2 in the raid already) because that specific player is a stronger/better healer than anyone else you can bring. This probably isn't the case for many people in this situation, as I doubt high-end raiding guilds are hurting for healing talent. But for some guilds it might work.

That leaves us with the point that the FoL build is very much dependent on your raid composition, healers, goals, etc. Which is what the FoL people have been saying from the very start, it's just no one seems to be listening. I can definitely see the power in a constant, consistent stream of FoLs on the tank without any need to divine plea. Not enough to keep the tank alive on its own, but enough to smooth out the damage if something goes wrong with the other tank healers.

I've read through most of the thread and I'm still having a tough time getting a bead on the value of the T9 4 piece, especially at lower gear levels. I've got 3 pieces of the 232 and enough badges to get a 4th, but I've also got the 245 offset chest and legs from the 25-man. So, what I'm trying to figure out is whether its worth it for a non-FoL build to go for the 232 4-piece or sport 4 245 offset pieces, which seems to have a better stat allocation over all. Anybody got any insight on that?

For a non-FL build, don't worry about the 4 piece at all. Take the best itemized and highest ilvl pieces. Only a FoL based build should really go for the 4 piece.

If you have those 245 pieces in your bags, you should definitely equip them, since the intellect gains alone should be large.

Edit: missed last page.

That sounds wonderful until I realise you're advocating we use a healer spot (which any encounter we actually care about demands we minimise) for someone who provides an iffy insurance policy in the event of main tank healer misadventure, and woeful raid healing the rest of the time. Perhaps I've just played with terrible examples of the breed, but I've yet to raid with a Flash spammer and not conclude we would have been better taking, well, anything. I return to my unreconstructed dinosaur persona and simply observe that the point of Paladins would appear to be sustaining maximum HPS on one or two tanks, as encounter design dictates, a role at which we still excel. I just don't see the appeal in turning my character into a dangerously nerfed Resto Druid who can only roll on two targets at once.

Most people get stuck into a min/max way of thinking and can't see merit in anything else. They believe that a raid is best when each individual is performing at his personal best achievable DPS/HPS/TPS/WhateverPS.

It's the "don't stand in fires and brute force everything else" type of approach. But things don't always work out that way. It's equally funny to notice that a lot of the 'hard' fanatics of the HL builds tend to have tanks that are basically HP sponges (STA is king, to hell with avoidance). Guilds that are actively using FOL paladins tend to have tanks that favour avoidance. Coincidence ? I'm just going to blame it on statistical irrelevancy since I only had a quick look at a dozen or so "top" guilds.

Also keep in mind that not every guild is so lucky that they have so much members that they can cherrypick the perfect raid composition each time. I friend of mine is in a guild that typically raids with 4 holy paladins. They cleared ulduar (apart from algalon), did most of the hardmodes, and are now working their way through TotGC (they're on twins atm). Having all 4 of those paladins spec HL would not be a really good way out for them. Yes, it's not an ideal situation to begin with but they aren't the only guild in that kind of position. And even when you don't have these contorted raid composition issues to deal with, there's more than a fair share of 'top' guilds actively using a FOL paladin in their raids already, they get their progress this way, are they all wrong ?

It's a playstyle preference above all. If you don't like the FOL approach, then by all means don't use it. It's a game afterall and if you have to do something you don't like, then you're already working against the prime reason of playing a game. Having a FOL paladin in your raid has advantages, but if all you can see is 'that raidslot only does X HPS where it could be doing more' then you're just missing the whole point about it. It all depends on how your healers work together. If they have little cooperation (just assigning heal targets and little more) and are mainly just all doing their own thing, then a FOL paladin probably won't work out for your guild.



One thing to keep in mind though... Blizzard has been continuously pushing the FOL style of healing by making it better. At the same time they've been nerfing the HL style of healing. They even hinted at the fact they don't like paladins being able to spam HL for the entire duration of the fight. It wouldn't surprise me at all that for 3.3 or cataclysm things will be changed even more in favour of the FoL style.