Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Paladin Glyphs: Major Holy and Protection

Background

Glyphs are items made by the Inscription profession. Each glyph modifies one of your spells, changing it slightly. At 80, you can have 3 Major Glyphs and 3 Minor Glyphs. Major Glyphs are powerful, while Minor Glyphs tend to be cosmetic.

Glyphs need to be applied near a Lexicon of Power. This can be found in the major cities near the Inscription trainer. Essentially, you have to return to a city to change Glyphs, so you can't change them in the field. However, I think they will rapidly become fairly cheap, so re-glyphing might be something you do before you head out to an instance for the night.

Here's a listing of what I think the top 3 major glyphs are for Holy and Protection at level 80, and some comments on the others. I'll cover Retribution and Minor glyphs in another post.

Holy

1. Glyph of Seal of Light - You need a Seal up to get the haste from Judgements of the Pure. This improves your healing by 5%, making it very powerful, especially on shorter fights.

2. Glyph of Seal of Wisdom - Like Light above, but for longer fights. It's an interesting decision if you should take both of the Seal glyphs, because you can only use one at a time. But it makes you a bit more flexible for different fights.

3. Glyph of Holy Light - This can do a fair amount of splash healing, helping a traditional paladin weakness.

Glyph of Cleansing - Mana reduction is always useful, but not very exciting.

Glyph of Divinity - Lay on Hands doesn't drain your mana anymore, and only has 20 min cooldown. So it's a very useful spell, and this glyph makes it even more useful. You get to drop a large instant emergency heal, and you get a fair bit of mana back.

Glyph of Flash of Light - This glyph is currently terrible. The HoT does not stack, so you severely hurt your tank-healing capabilities. It might be decent if you were raid-healing, but given that Glyphs are permanent, it's really hard to see this being useful. Perhaps a Ret build (with Art of War) or a levelling build would consider it, but it's pretty much a waste otherwise.

Glyph of Seal of Righteousness - Might be good for soloing, but in an instance you will be using a glyphed Light or Wisdom.

Protection

1. Glyph of Righteous Defense - Having taunts miss usually ends very badly.

2. Glyph of Seal of Vengeance - Vengeance is a solid seal for Protection, and reducing boss dodge and parry rates by 2.5% is very nice.

3. Glyph of Avenger's Shield - This glyph is a bit of a toss-up. I think it will become more useful as you move into raiding, and precise pulling and having large initial threat becomes more important. However, you might prefer building threat on multiple mobs in the 5-man dungeons. As well, 100% more damage makes it more feasible to toss AS on every cooldown, just to build threat.

Glyph of Consecration - This glyph does increase damage per cast of Consecration. However, Protection has a very smooth rotation with an 8-9s Consecration cooldown, and this glyph spoils that rotation. Still, if you're very comfortable with managing your abilities as they come off cooldowns, this might be a good choice for you.

Glyph of Exorcism - Gives you another spell interrupt, which is something we lack. However, this is very specific and may depend greatly on what instance you are planning to run.

Glyph of Judgement - Extra damage and threat from one of your main abilities is always good.

Glyph of Seal of Righteousness - I think most Protection paladins will be using a glyphed Vengeance on bosses, but this could be decent for trash.

Glyph of Spiritual Attunement - You shouldn't need this glyph, as regular SA and Blessing of Sanctuary will provide enough mana. But keep it in mind if you do find you have mana problems.

10 comments:

  1. eI have to agree with you about the FOL Glyph. It is worth using as a raid healer. At first I thought "why would I even want this?" but after a few BT raids I have come to a conclusion.

    When I have Beacon of Light up on the MT I find that I am Never targeting the MT while healing except to renew the Beacon. Mean while I am FOLing every single melee around the MT and every once in a while I through a Holy light there way when they get agro. In this example I can cast a FOL heals them up for to almost full hp and then the ticks after it tick them up to full health. It is really nice.

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  2. Regarding Glyph of Seal of Vengeance it's currently not obtainable yet. It requires Ink of the Sea which is milled from Northrend herbs.

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  3. Yeah, this is all for Wrath. Not a lot of point in considering 70 anymore.

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  4. I personally found the Glyph of Flash of Light completely underwhelming in Beta, so I'm not using it on live. I feel it knocks off too much up front. I don't like the fundamental alteration to how the health is delivered to feel comfortable with it.

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  5. I've been thinking about it a lot, and talking with my guild's main Pally tank, and we're starting to think that Glyph of Avenger's Shield is going to be a good idea even for 5 mans. The splash threat from the bouncing shield isn't really important since you can Consecrate or HotR to make it up, and a bouncing shield just gives too much risk of pulling more then is intended.


    Also, you'll be able to have 2 Glyph loadouts when the dual-spec system launches.

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  6. @vexilla
    I can see Glyph of FoL being useful for raid healing, but seriously, when is a paladin ever assigned to raid healing? We've got druids, shamans and priests for that.

    Personally I see it as being far too situational to be a clear benefit. Better off Ret paladins using this with their instant FoL casts.

    Maybe once we get our dual specs I'll set up one for AoE damage/Raid healing.

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  7. @aaron
    I think you are missing my point. With Beacon of Light you are always healing the MT as long as you healing someone close to him. So yes Paladins can now through heals just about anyone that is not a caster and still heal the MT.

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  8. @Vexilla
    I understand the mechanics of Beacon, I've used it quite a lot for healing. All I'm saying is it's too situational for it to me to consider it a clear benefit. I'd rather be landing larger faster vanilla FoL heals on the raid and tank. There's not always large raid damage going on, and the 50% initial heal is too much of a gimp, meaning I'd be dropping HL's a lot more and possibly go oom.

    Even though we paladins are not raid healers, Judgement of Light heals for so much I beat our druid, priest and shammies last night in TK; it seems a little OP at the moment, but I guess it's tuned for future lvl80 raids. Maybe at that level the FoL Glyph will be mandatory for paladins.

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  9. yo, I'm a lvl 51 ret pally, and I just learned about glyphs, I would like to know what you think the best major and minor glyphs are for ret pallies, you seem to be pretty enlightened on the subject.

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  10. The FoL glyph is actually really usefull, now if your in full t6 (as I am) you grow attached to your 3.2k FoL crits, however as many of you have said its is good for raid healing; I personally found this out in Sunwell especially after 3.0.2 with the Beacon on MT and now on KJ I'm actually assigned to keeping the 6 melee players up and myself, looking at the meters afterwards i was 2nd up there with the CoH priests and waaay above the shammies. As well as this Lich is only 2 days away now and if you wanna level holy you'll probs be spending alot of time in the 5mans where you will most likely be the only significant healer to keep 4 other people up and the glyph helps to keep the group topped up from group dmg whilst you pump out the bigger heals on the tank or whoever needs it. The glyph goes for 15g AH buyout on our server so its not exactly an expensive investment if you find its really not for you and want to get rid of it later.
    Finally you have to remember that if you crit with the glyph on you still have a 2k crit but then an extra 2800 healed from the HoT, if the tank needs a quick heal use Holy shock, it heals for aroun 2.7k and 4.5k crit and with a crit chance of around 47% you'll more than likely get a instant cast FoL or 0.8sec Holy light.
    Anyways just my ramblings haha
    Jarez - Khadgar EU

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