Expected changes

I play a hunter, used to play a paladin. I swapped to the hunter the moment the hunter took over the crown of "most changed class" and "class which gets adjusted every patch." This was purely coincidence and not something I enjoyed while playing the paladin, but it gave me this outlook:

I don't really care how they want to nerf us and how PTR changes might potentially effect us... Yeah- I stay up to date so I know what to expect, but I figure with each patch I'll run a few sims, check out the changes, and adjust accordingly. People who scream sky falling way too early just end up stressing about things too much. If they nerfed hunters so bad they are unplayable, well that's unfortunate but I could always hop on my DK or my priest. If they nerf a single spec to it being crappy in comparison with another- then I'll swap over to it. If they give me a new meta, I'll use it- and if they don't I wont. It amuses me at how worried people get when generally speaking Blizzard is aiming for balance in raids among classes, and so far they've done alright. They buff what sucks and nerf what is overpowered.

This all being said- I like the buffs I bring as survival with WF and such. I dislike the general playstyle of BM, but have never really given it a chance. MM was always my favorite due to it's inherent complexity, but it is the most difficult to perform as when I'm trying to track my whole raid and stay alive (Survival is hilariously easy to maintain on the fly), but I'm sure I'd fare fine with it.

So, I hope they don't break hunters, and now that we have two I suppose it would be nice to be able to have us as different specs so we can bring more interesting buff combinations, but it really isn't game breaking. The way it is panning out- it would be expected that blizzard is looking to scale back surv dps by ~5%. This seems reasonable to me.

Hunter DPS-ing Cataclysm, with STYLE

The hunter is getting pretty jacked as of late. Made my engi goggles, got my epic ring from the ER, looking to upgrade trinkets to 346, legs, and shoulder and I'm all there and above. I leveled as MM, and have DPS'd heroics in a MM spec as well as the Surv one I'm running right now. I've heard that BM is behind in pure damage (to a point where getting BL for a non-BL group isn't even worth it) and I haven't even tried it out. BM's simple priority rotation just isn't my cup of tea.

MM does decent enough damage, and the burst potential is definately there. After you ramp up and pop racial+rapid fire, a chimera, readiness another chimera and burn through a second rapid fire I was usually around 16k. Surv can also do this, but that's happening when you are critting and procing a LnL which can possibly be RNG (If you are not trapping). Surv overall in heroics is much better as the AoE is leaps and bounds ahead, while also being higher overall damage on any boss fight, as MM comes back to earth after its 2 CD's are blown. Also, Surv get's an additional CC method (which is nice in that even in a great guild run I'm usually the only one CC'ing and I'll get both off with ease, and they are staggered in length). There is not a Heroic trash pull that isn't easier with effective use of CC of some sort, and I use my hunter utility as much as possible.

This brings me to my next point- the reason why I'm better than my other two dps counterparts in our 5man. Let's say we are all doing ~12-13k depending on the fight, CC'ing as much as we need to, and not being bad. What separates me out from them? I have MD, I have a tranq, I have a taunt, I have two slows, I've got a blind (in scatter shot) and I use them as much as possible. Scatter shot is harder to find times for, but I've been known to scatter healers who are marked as our secondary kill target so they don't get a heal off while we burn down the first target. Tranq should be used any time possible. If you can tranq it off, then you probably should be. I run most heroics with my good buddy who is a rogue and there are things I can tranq off and things he can't shiv. If he can get it easily and isn't moving around a lot- he usually does. If he's dodging fire and ground slams and such, I take over fully even though it's a larger dps loss for me. It's easy to work this out and my dps loss is made up for the fact the healer uses less mana and we move as a group faster. MD is used every fight, sometimes multiple times. No longer does transferred threat stay there forever, so I don't usually use it mid fight unless adds are running around, but every trash pull, every time. Why wouldn't you!? Slowing mobs is VERY useful. If you have a pull where you healer is going to get aggro and your tank is trying to round things up, slow them down for him! Your tank will love you as it becomes so much easier to grab everything and build threat if it isn't running, but walking.

Our taunt. You may say "Tur! Why on earth would you ever use a taunt in a group! You would kill yourself!" This may USUALLY be true, and when I'm tanking if someone starts taunting my stuff I usually get real mad- BUT if you know what you are doing you can do some SERIOUS help here.

Case 1. The tank death.
-Tank died? OH NOES!? What to do what to do! Generally our Boomkin has more threat than me (which is good) and things go running for him. If it's a big ugly I usually get as much space between the boomer and me, and when he's about to smash his face in I taunt and keep running. I throw up a slow (if he can be slowed) and dude keeps running at me for the length of the taunt. Note- while running at me he probably isn't hurting anyone, allowing your healer to catch up or take a break. When my taunt wears off he runs back to the boomkin and I taunt again when he's close. I ping pong them around until they are all dead.

Case 2. The Tank is getting low on life.
-Tank getting hit REALLY hard and has a lot of mobs on him? Taunt the biggest one if the tank has sufficient threat, let him get near and FD. This allows the tank a few precious seconds of not getting hit, and any healer will tell you that now 3-6 hits from the harder hitting melee mobs will give that tank time to get his life back up. Be careful on this one, you can die if your FD is resisted and you are too close.

Case 3. Adds.
-In a lot of fights we don't have our tank even deal with adds. We have enough dps to burn them down fast enough and the only real problem is they aggroing on the healer. Taunting them to you allows your healer to heal you instead of getting pushed back while trying to heal himself. And you are in mail as opposed to his cloth/leather/spirit plate.

On top of this, I've bought time for druid tanks to battle res, reposition mobs, and countless other useful things. Once you start using your utility buttons other than just straight dpsing, you become a more complete hunter. Also, make sure you are communicating each of these uses to your group. The worst thing ever is when you try to taunt a mob from your tank to let him take less damage and he taunts back and dies. If you talk it out, people will usually understand.

Happy hunting!

Cataclysm Heroic 5 mans

Well, my guild has ran every heroic 5man there is to offer. Only one boss actually gave us second pause- as none of us knew what to do- the last boss of Grim Batol. Once we realized we needed to burn adds at all costs the fight was fairly simple. 3 wipes and done. I've personally ran all the heroics but stonecore and throne. I have yet to find why they would be "Hard." I can however concur that with a random pug they could become extremely difficult.

Twice now, I've had healers in our guild complain that healing is horrible. Twice now, I've had healers remark that when your group CC's every trash with as much as possible healing trash doesn't feel harder than bosses and feels like it should. In a group with my hunter, a spriest, boomkin, and shaman healer we usually throw out (for the standard 5 trash pack pull) a trap, MC, and hex if he can get it off. I throw down my CC in under 2 seconds of standing in front of the trash, the healer hex's the moment he sees my trap go up, and the priest does the same. We have a blast doing it and it goes MUCH faster than attempting to AoE crap down. Currently it's stupid trying to use AoE when you can do more damage with single target dps. I'm pretty much amp'd for raiding to start again as I do not forsee us having too much trouble with much of the regular modes.

Just remember! As long as your group moves as a cohesive team you will succeed. When you begin to think and act as a bunch of individuals put together in a group you will most likely face difficulty. This game doesn't require much skill, and the most important of that is being a team player.

The 5 minute Ret Guide 4.0.1

To be honest, as we're not pushing content and I'm not extremely interested in staying cutting edge at the moment, I stopped using epic gems, stopped min/maxing my gear to the T, and more or less set up a gearset that makes sense but isn't complicated at all. This conversation also brings itself into a full realization of our priority rotation as well.

Here's how I'm gearing for Ret:

Hit to cap(8%), Expertise to cap (which is actually 23, NOT 26-this was confirmed by a blue and you can google "ret expertise cap 4.0.1" to find ample evidence) STR, Haste to a flowing rotation (More on this later), Crit (this is about equal with haste, with the flowing haste in mind), mastery (mastery does not compare to anything else and can cause problems).

That's really about it. I find it much easier to keep these guidelines in mind when I'm reforging all my gear and gemming is still pretty much +STR (following the guidelines above). Enchanting is still the exact same as before and isn't hard to logically reason out.

The discussion of haste flow- The goal of haste currently is to get (the amount changes depending on your lag, if you are playing with a larger amount of lag you'll need less haste) your CS to time itself with every other ability. You want to be able to hit CS after everything else you hit. This allows you to maximize your HoPo gains while never having downtime in your rotation. If you are adding an extra ability between CS and something else, it means you are missing out on HoPo gains and will be able to TV less during a fight (which means less overall dmg). If you have too much haste and your CS is coming off CD while the GCD is running from your "off-CS" ability then you just wasted the time when you could be gaining HoPo (less TV, less dmg, less crits, less big recount numbers, less epeen).

I usually play with ~100-200ms in lag. This is apparently much better than most people get, and may explain why I don't find many movement fights difficult at all... But that's a different story. I currently can't get enough haste to even this out- yet. I end up waiting about .25-.4 seconds waiting for my CS to come off CD (which is still a DPS gain than not using it). Granted, this is an ideal rotation, and one I don't see a whole ton of (with the exception of fights like Marrow p1, LK p1... etc), and if you are waiting for your CS to come off CD, but have a moving enemy or you have limited time left, you are better off putting in an extra ability than nothing (I usually would save an Exo proc and Judge for sindy so when she took off on flight phases to tag her with both for the extra dmg).

Anyway, ~100ms, my 700 haste isn't enough. I'll update this with the true total, but I believe I'm looking at like 1100 as my exact number, while if you are playing with more lag you will need less haste.

EDIT: My current haste is 704.

Paladin Guides and such

I just wanted to point out real quick that I'll probably never lose the inner healer in me and I'm not sure I'll ever be able to stop thinking "like a healer." (Note: This is a good thing in terms of raiding.)

That being said I have been complimented many times over from friends and apprentices of all sorts of specs for being able to analyze and theorycraft, then break it down in layman's terms for the common folk (you).

When I took Statistics in college, I had a professor who most people didn't like because he would move through topics with extreme pace. He would basically start a class by showing all the information behind calculating certain stats but would tell us not to write much down in what he was doing. He would then, after showing us how the calculations are working and what effects they have on end results finish by showing us the "shortcut" way of calculating these same results. The things most Math teachers tried to hide from you- Now, this teacher I believe thought that we were smart enough to handle the shortcuts and if we needed to gain a further understanding, we would do so on our own. I was in love with this method, so I try to apply it myself.

My outlook on theorycraft is as follows: Every good raider needs to UNDERSTAND what the math is doing behind the theory. If you don't know WHY you gear a certain way, you are just a mindless follower and will never be able to be cutting edge and leading the way. BUT, you don't always have to be the one hashing out the math itself. I don't think it is lazy to consider other things more important in life than re-doing what other people have already done and made available.

This is where EJ comes in, one of my favorite websites ever. They more or less have the same outlook and say "Hey, if you want to post, contribute. If you don't want to contribute, we'll just let you read." Which is fine by me. I contribute to theory from time to time, but I'd consider myself more of a reader than writer there. My gift is translating the pages upon pages of goodly information into more sensible writings for the common person. (You)

That being said I plan on giving my own synopsis of ret and holy in their current form for 4.0, while continuing on with hunter information as well with brief overviews of at least Surv and Marx (Idk why I am so inclined to hate BM so). Along with this I could possibly throw in a quick this and that about priesting of all 3 specs because I do love me some priesting as well. I'd say "hey, want to know about DKs?" Because I could probably do a decent writeup on Frost at least, but to be frank- I hate my DK.

So yes, more to come.

Haste Gearing, and where it should be on your gear.

I am always talking about haste this, haste that. Haste is the new sliced bread... Truly. The one thing I get asked most about haste.... "How do you get so much haste!?!" And it got me thinking, I really never tell them the items that they really ought to not be picking up more Int/spellpower/crit for because of the Haste. (The right amount of Int/spellpower/crit can in my mind outweigh some haste... I'm looking at you...Crappy and what I tried to replace it with...)

So here are a few tips to those of you trying to balance where you can drop off the haste pieces so you can get to be more uberpwning...The bolds will give you a generic balance of where you will be at with these items.
Total(0 haste)

Rings:
You want about 100 haste from your rings. I find it VERY difficult now to pick up a ring that DOESN'T have haste on it. Really, you need 670, and this helps bucketfulls to get.
Total (100 Haste)

Weapon/shield:
Again, 100 haste. Seems logical right? Get in this neighborhood on these 4 slots so far and you are already 1/3 of the way to cap... more or less.
Total (200 Haste)

Neckpiece/Back:
Roughly 50 haste combined is all you can expect out of this I suppose. Everyone wants these drops. Really though, this is something I strongly recommend, but I was wearing a ilevel 200 Cloak and picked up this so it was difficult for me to keep it... I was also sporting the 226 badge neck until I had the fortunate circumstance to get this. So I was forced into wearing more haste on my main set pieces as a result of this.
Total(250 Haste)

Tier eligible Pieces: (Head/shoulder/Chest/Hands/Legs):
300. No lies. The offset pieces that tend to drop for me are filled with nummy intellect, but I can't get the haste on them so I generally stray from our 4pc bonuses... being as we haven't had a good one since T7... it's really nice to be able to snag the two that you want with haste on them, leaving the rest for offsets.
Total(550 Haste)

Offset Pieces: (waist/wrist/booties)
100. Between the 3 of these, In areas >ilevel232 if it has haste, it's got about 50 or so on it. This means you are able to snag two out of three of these in haste and the other can be without. Currently I run a setup where wrist/boots have haste and the waist does not.
Total (650 Haste)

Given that you can snag this or that, you are so damn close to your 677 you will be set!! Good luck getting your drops! As always, if you have questions just toss them my way and I'll do my best to get you a response timely!!

Some notes on my personal gear, and advice I'd give to those not in raids
that are full buffed with everything:

In our 25man we haven't had a ret pally or boomer druid in a long time at raider rank show face frequently... This means I need a lot more haste than usual... I roll with around 800. The way I keep this up is I wear ilevel 245 gear, and I drop
about 1k int. Dropping 1k int from 38k buffed to 36+ isn't going to
destroy your mana pool, but you will land your heals more reliably and in a better rhythm with the 1 second GCD that the haste cap provides... The way I get to that 800 is my shoulders go back to haste, same with my waist. Also, at this point I am wearing haste in every slot on my toon with the exception of my neck and back. I do have decent alternatives for them with haste on them... but they are not that fantastic.

Second note: These numbers are very difficult to hit when you are
just starting out... Take what you can get when you can get it... Just don't
break your old gear just because you think it is better now. I have a LOT
of gear sitting in my bank that gets pulled out when I need it... And I never replace it until I have an item that fills the role it filled COMPLETELY (I.E. New shoulders? Don't have haste on them? Save your haste ones, even if you can wear the ones without... Because let's say your chest drops without haste on it, and it's a greater upgrade over your current one than those shoulders were... you can decide to go back and wear your other ones!! Seems smart to me.)

Healbot, and why it really is better- No matter how you feel about addons.

To begin- I first used Healbot when I was around level 40 on my paladin, my first character and used it all the way up to when I got bored with it and how it looked in ToGC and decided to finally give Grid+Clique a fair shake. I still am using Grid+Clique on my main computer, but my backup laptop still has healbot on it. So I love them both.

First off, I’ve never liked the whole “Addons make the game less pure, and I’m a purist.” I said that once to a good friend (and healing companion) and he lol’d at me so hard I couldn’t talk to him for a week. Maybe if you had an addon that took over your toon for you, or actually moved you out of the fire, and chose what spells to cast, when, and on who- Sure, that’s like using steroids in baseball (Mark McGwire, you suck!) as it just plain hurts the game. Now, if you have an addon that just makes your choices and abilities easier to use, and more streamlined in your gathering of information then it is simply like you are deciding to use a glove in center field, not just your bare hands. And you decided to use signals to your base runners, instead of them just figuring it out. Limiting yourself to not have these things does not make logical sense unless you are a masochist or you are looking for a challenge. Hardmodes do the same thing- Do this fight, but with one hand behind your back. Quite the feat, but you chose to make it harder.

Also, Blizzard supports addons now a day. If you don’t believe me look to the quest interface; I dumped my Questhelper on my alts because I more or less have the utility it provided from Blizzard now in their built in UI. They have an in game threat meter. They made arena enemy frames. These are all very useful and popular addons that they decided to make a part of the main UI. One part of the game that I really feel is lacking in the UI is simply the raidframes. To be frank, the ones in game have to be pulled out manually (I think? I haven’t used them since I was leveling in TBC on my first char) they are ugly, and don’t provide the necessary information or customizable options needed from all classes for raidframes to be effective. On top of this, Blizzard has a built in, easy to use, macro writing tool. And who doesn’t love macros??

It always amazes me that people who claim addons are useless and not needed claim their macros work just as well. Well good sir! I have only this to say to you- “Your macros work almost as, or just as effective as my addon does. But my addon’s benefits come from the fact that it is more malleable to multiple classes/uses AND better at processing information than your macros are.” In fact, macros just DO what your healbot or Grid+Clique do. The problem is that both those setups outstrip your prewritten macros when you say… Use a different character, a different spell, decide you want to respect, your targets change, your raid change, your tanks respect, the encounter messes you around, and so on. I can think of thousands of scenarios here, but instead I’ll just get into personal experience where my addons allow me freedom to do more things in a raid.

On my pally specifically, I hated having to target people before I healed them, I found it clunky and cumbersome. To be honest, I became a monster at being able to raid heal on my paladin specifically because I did NOT have to select the target for where my heals were to land. Also, having to judge (and wanting to do so as much as possible) means that a paladin must target the boss/adds from time to time. Even if you have raid frames and are clicking them then using a macro, as druids always tell me is so easy to do… you are losing fractions of a second. Fractions of a second? What’s the big deal Tur?!?!?!?!111ONE111!!??? It’s not like a fraction of a second is going to do much for you on that heal! Sure, that one heal may not matter and it could have been delayed… that one time… but let me tell you, in a 10 minute fight fractions add up into real seconds, and seconds mean GCDs, which means more raw healing output. Plain and simple, you will be more active. Secondly, if you think that fraction of a second won’t matter… well go heal ToGC25 Gormok when the worms are about to come out and have your tanks tell you their CDs are all, well… on CD. You will WISH you had fractions of a second there (especially considering you swap tanks many many times there).

On my priest, How could I swap targets with so many different spells if not for the click-casting of either addon? I couldn’t. I just heal more efficient, and the same raidframes I click on also tell me if they are in range, have debuffs, or anything else I need to know. About 70% of the druids I met did not use any sort of healing addon when I first met them. I convinced about half of them to give an addon a try. All of those who tried looked at my addon and said “Hey, it does exactly what I do already… except it just eliminates one little step in between, making me just slightly faster. Why wouldn’t I use this??”

Shaman?? Well that healing companion of mine who laughed at me in that conversation way back when, he’s been my healing shaman partner my entire raiding experience. He’s always used healbot, and he has the worst setup for his buttons. His mouse wheel click button is Chain Heal. He claims it made sense back in 5mans when he set it up, but I just lol at him now, Cause he has to hit that thing so often in raids. Anywhoo, Shaman healing is more similar to Pally I guess in that it is more stand in one spot and cast with cast times, and I just got him to try the swap to grid+clique after he’d been using HB for as long as I had.

All in all, there is literally zero downside to using one of these addons, other than resources on a slower computer. I will say though, Healbot does NOT use a lot of resources and is pretty much all you need considering if you use decursive, you may disable that as HB does that as well, and either addon can be used as a full set of raidframes as well. To me, healbot or Grid+Clique is like using PallyPower, and to not use that just does NOT make sense? Even the “I don’t have a nice computer” argument makes sense! All it says to me is “I’m really lazy and I don’t like to be efficient.” This is odd to think that people ACTIVELY MAKE THESE DECISIONS TO HURT THEMSELVES, yet they do it on a daily basis. Hell, I make those decisions when others tell me they are no-brainers I suppose. I decide to stay up 4 hours playing wow and go to work for a full 11 or 12 hour day on 2 or 3 hours rest? Sure, why not. Makes sense to me! Most of my RL friends don’t get it.

*here’s to hoping everyone sees that I am the smartest one and they should all do what I say*

The foolproof way to be awesome at holy paladin-ing:

This will also be known as my "How To: Holy" Post

Covered in this post:
• Gearing goals/choices
• Talent choices (but not the discussion on DS/DG, that is another post entirely)
• Spell choices/”rotations”

Main points:
1. You are a single (dual) target healer, don’t try to be more than that.
2. Int.
3. Holy Light.
4. Int.
5. Intellect.
6. Haste is very very nummy, and crit has gone away for the most part… kind of.
7. Int.
8. Utility is nice, and you can bring a lot of it.
9. Int.

Now, before I get into the meat and potatoes of how to get ‘er done, I just want to clarify to those who are reading to see WHY you will be gemming/gearing/chanting towards these specific goals. If you have illusions of being some monster raid healer who tops everyone off whenever they get hit with any damage, think again. Roll a holy priest, a resto drood, or a chealing shaman. They all do very well at that job in different ways. CoH is fast, hits hard among many people and a 3 stack serendipity hasted PoH will unload on more people (even more so when glyphed). The pure HPS potential of the raid healers is just inherently higher than ours in current raiding situations. That being said, they can’t even come close to single target bombing a tank (or two!) to keep them alive for as long as we do. If you do this right you will be able to fully unload on your target (or two!) for well over 2 minutes self buffed, and with raid buffs you will near 5 minutes going at full bore.

The end goals for being that monster tank healer:
Currently I aim to at these goals for healing as a pally-
-The 2500 spellpower (raid buffed) minimum.
I used to consider the minimum at 2000, but with ICC having things hit slower and more consistently, our HLs have become more effective and I have seen more times where one is landing and not topping off the target (or the beacon target) which means more spellpower could have been utilized. This being said 2500 spellpower is still quite low and I generally sit above 3k in raid buffs. If you hit the other minimums and can’t tote 2.5k spellpower you are probably doing something wrong.
-The haste softcap.
670 haste (I think it’s actually 677? I’ll math it out after I post this and edit it up). This pulls your FoL to 1 second and your GCD at 1 second (which makes you using your other abilities faster too… I.E. reapplying your SS, beacon, or hitting the magical DP button.
Just so you know, wear more haste when you don’t have full buffs in your raids, meaning you need shaman for wrath of air (5%) and a ret pally (ret aura 3%) OR boomkin (3%) to make sure you hit that cap. I have 2 sets of gear that I actually raid in consistently, one sits around 800 haste for our 10mans where I don’t get all my favorite buffs, and another that sits at 668 which is close enough to cap for me in 25mans. The one with less haste has about 1.5k more mana on my bar for it.
-Intellect, as high as that sucker can go.
After you hit your other two minimums, the rest is pretty much stacking int. There are many reasons why you do this, but the first being that above all else, it makes you able to cast longer and longer the more mana you have. More int=more mana=more mana back with DP. DP is wonderful, it scales with your MAX(ask your friendly priests to hymn sometime, its amazing) mana. Also, Int is fantastic because A. it scales with kings B. it gives you extra spellpower via talents C. it gives you extra crit from naturally being int D. its sexy

Now, those are the basics for gear and what you want on it. Honestly past that it doesn’t matter *AS MUCH*
Here is where many people scoff at me for not talking up crit and mp5. I say that they are “not great” but clearly they are good stats for us, just not even as close to as good as Int/Haste. I’d take free crit or mp5 over extra SP, sure. But, really mp5 and crit just kind of “happen” on your gear choices when you gear for Int and haste. (if you stay in mail and plate that is) Really though, my sword currently is awesome, it’s absolutely stellar, so nice… And some of our caster dps hate me for having hit on it. I don’t care about it, it’s truly a wasted stat (Hey! I judge!) but the other stats make the weapon better than most of what was available in T9 for sure.
If you didn’t get it already, the meta to use is insightful earthsiege (Int plus mana back!) and all your gems should be yellow Brilliant King’s Ambers with one Nightmare tear for the meta activation (10 int!) or a purple with spellpower and Mp5. Almost every socket bonus is not worth dropping some int for like 8 spellpower, or haste, or crit, or mp5. It just isn’t even close.

Now you know how to gear!

Let’s put those talents into place!

For the most part we will all agree that beacon is one of your best assets and maybe your most valuable talent point spent. I have seen some fun combo specs that could probably do decently well, but beacon (not-effectively) doubles your healing output for 1 GCD every 60 seconds. I suggest taking it…

So you go into the talent choices and find that for the most part it’s pretty easy to see what is for PvP and what is for PvE, you get your cookie cutter going in the tree and find you can spend 51 points easy. There are only a few real choices:

Aura mastery- I have seen a lot of people tell me this isn’t that great because holy pallys usually have Concentration aura up…. I don’t get why people think we need to only use that aura?? If a fight has no pushback on the ranged, it is useless. Literally zero use, throw up ret aura if you have nothing better to throw, or a resist if there is some form of resistible damage… which MEANS! You now have a 6 second CD to double that resistance. Last I checked it gives something like 40% resistance to your aura’s defense at level 80, which is nice being as blizz now loves to send predictable AoE onto your whole raid which has to be healed through. Truly an underrated talent. I have found so many uses for this and all smart raiders will as well.


Imp Conc aura- This is a raid buff, not for you. With conc aura up and your holy talents you cannot be pushed back, at all. Realize this. Also- if you have one paladin with this in your raid there is simply no reason two need to have talent points in it. Why would you stack conc auras? I can think of a handful of fights where you could claim that the raid breaks up into groups… but really? You will break up the paladins and NEED that extra help from pushback where you wouldn’t rock a resist aura?? You have got to be kidding me.

Spell rotation!!

Now, it’s difficult to claim that healing has a “spell rotation,” but really we can describe what using different spell rotations will net you as each and every one will change in your HPS output, the speed of your output and your mana usage.

Ideally we’d be just chain casting flash of light. Coupled with SS on a target FoL is in my opinion (at 1second cast time 1 second GCD) just a really big hot ticking for like 7k a second. This sounds powerful because it is at high gear levels. Unfortunately though, it is not always big enough. In 25man ToC and above even with much ICC gear you will still have tank deficits far greater than what your FoL can do. And let’s face it… if the raid wanted a big hot-casting machine they would put a geared resto druid in your role and have 6k hots ticking on multiple targets, not just one. BUT with an understanding that in our “downtime” or when tank damage has slowed down for a moment there really is no need to queue up monster HLs (unless you know the pain is coming down the rails and your tank is standing in the tracks) and then cancel-casting them or even worse burning mana on pure overhealing. Also with small tank defecits you can do some decent healing with FoL. During the majority of the fight though you will fall into HL spam and the length of your mana pool will be extended by squeaking FoLs between HL casts and relying on your other healers to be actively healing that target as well for those moments.

So there you have your best case scenario, FoL spam, with your most likely scenario, HL spam, but both of those require you to stand almost perfectly still to execute. Due to Blizz enjoying tossing fire at you frequently you will be on the move, a lot. How do we keep tanks up during this arduous task of NOT EVER USING YOUR S-KEY WHILE HEALING (more on that later) well they gave us the wonderful Holy Shock!! It is our most mana-consuming spell per healing which makes it BAD to use on CD if you care about not ooming. BUT it is our only spell that is instant which heals. This means people can die during cast times of FoLs and HLs, but you can use HS to keep someone up if they are on the verge of death, but that’s about it. Either moving, or your cast time is just not going to cut it.

Getting used to using all of these in their correct ways simply takes feel and practice, but once you get it down you end up being a monster. Just remember that HL is the only spell that allows you to continue to tank heal WHILE DPing. FoLs cut in half hit like wet noodles, while HLs cut in half hit like small vehicles, instead of cement trucks. Understand when you need a cement truck do NOT DP. Also try to use your wings or trinket during DP phases as it is about the only time when you can say you need a boost in oomph in your heals. If you need to boost your non-DP’d heals… then you need more gear to be in the instance anyway and should just leave. (or get better healers to heal with you.)
The most wonderful thing to ever happen to paladins- DP. With the inception of DP we became infinite mana machines until Blizz nerfd us (rightfully so) to where we are competitive with the spirit based healing classes and the shaman who has the mighty mighty water shield. I get asked more often than not about healing the most simple question- When do you use DP? My answer for this All the time. My first DP is when I get somewhere between 80-90% mana. Yes, 90% mana. I’d rather stay topped off at 100 for the first 45 seconds of a fight and have DP come back off of CD early to keep me up in mana than to chain spam HL and melt my own mana pool during a heavy tank healing phase. If I’m healing ANYTHING during DP I try to use a healing increasing item per DP to make the healing reduction slightly less. I also note before I hit it with the quick thought of “is this an awful time to plea?” If the answer is even remotely yes, do NOT hit that button, but use it at your next available moment. After that every time it comes off of CD you need to be finding a moment to use DP for as long as you can (you can always let it tick for a few seconds and cancel it so you keep your tanks alive). Currently I don’t have an addon to tell me it is off of CD, omniCC/Bartender4 aside. I’ve been in the market for one, considering PowerAuras.

A new blog

First post ever:

1. Decided today that I like writing.
2. Thinking I might actually take this thing somewhere and try to post a bit on it from time to time.
3. Who knows what could happen!
4. A clarification for what the title here means. (Though I expect most healers already know what sparkle wars are) When two healers of any kind stand in the bank together, inevitably they have to show each other how awesome they are by healing the crap out of the other. Most notably turn up your graphics and actually watch Holy Lights land on someone.

I'm thinking this will be a blog about how I mainly heal on the priest and pally (mostly pally) and basically anything else I decide to write about.