Monday, November 28, 2011

Holy Paladins in Patch 4.3

So, Patch 4.3 is upon us. I'm looking forward to the new 5-mans and the new raid.

Kurn has a very good roundup posted. I'll just focus on a couple of the major changes for Holy Paladins.

Holy Radiance

Holy Radiance has changed significantly. It's now more of a heal you cast multiple times on the raid, rather than a "fire-and-forget" heal.  The new Holy Radiance is a group heal with a direct heal component and short heal-over-time component. It also generates one Holy Power with the Tower of Radiance talent.

The heal-over-time component means that you should cast Holy Radiance on different people if you cast it multiple times in a row. Cast it on Player 1, then Player 2, then Player 3, then back to Player 1 to get the most healing out of it.

The thing is that Holy Radiance is no longer something you have active while you are tank healing. Rather, you have to switch modes when you use it, to move from tank healing to raid healing.  A lot of times, this will be the wrong thing to do, as your raid will rely on you to keep single-target heals flowing on the tanks while other healers raid heal.

But now, you might be assigned to raid heal, while someone else tank heals, and that's when you bust out Holy Radiance.

In raid-healing mode, the new rotation is something like:

  • 3x Holy Radiance, 1x Light of Dawn - Maximum throughput, high mana cost
  • 2x Holy Radiance,  1x Holy Shock, 1x Light of Dawn - Less throughput, but less mana cost

You'll have to see which works out best. But the key is to remember to target different people when you cast it in succession.

Judgement

The other major change is to Judgement. Along with the Haste buff of Judgements of the Pure, you also get a significant boost to your regeneration from Spirit.  This means that you must Judge as soon as you enter combat, to get the JotP buff up right away.

You don't need to judge on cooldown any more. In fact, it is a waste of mana to do so. So you may want to move your Judgement keybind if you are in the habit of hitting Judgement often. But you absolutely cannot let the JotP buff fall off.  I would recommend judging every 45 seconds or so.

Get the Judgements of the Pure buff up ASAP, but only Judge to refresh the buff, instead of Judging on cooldown.

Stat Value Changes

Gear-wise, the Judgement change means that non-Spirit builds are no longer viable. Spirit is pretty much established as the best secondary stat. (Intellect, of course, is still the best overall stat.)

There is some debate over whether Mastery or Haste is the next best secondary stat after Spirit. At this point, I would lean towards Haste, but I think it's still inconclusive.

3 comments:

  1. 3x Holy Radiance spam is actually our top HPS option (by about 15%), although the HPS/MPS ratio is pretty poor when compared to the 3xHR/LoD rotation.

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  2. "The thing is that Holy Radiance is no longer something you have active while you are tank healing. Rather, you have to switch modes when you use it, to move from tank healing to raid healing. A lot of times, this will be the wrong thing to do, as your raid will rely on you to keep single-target heals flowing on the tanks while other healers raid heal."

    This is my problem exactly. Before we helped out a bit on raid heals while keeping our tanks up. Now we either help out with raid heals or keep the tank up. I think this is going to make it really tough on 10 man holy pallies.

    Worse, this change requires a mindset change - now I have to mentally start tracking where people are standing much like if I was playing a shaman, to make sure that HR isn't a waste. So things that didn't really matter to holy pallies before like "what's the group comp of ranged vs melee?" "are melee positioned near tanks?" are now really important if we are to use that spell effectively. This makes me unhappy. Mentally tracking people's positions is going to take a lot of time and practice :(

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  3. CLCBPT is a great add-on which i feel is a must for all holy paladins, it tracks your beacon (also has the name of the character its on.. which you should know that anyways lol) and tracks your JOTP, so you'll waste much less mana.

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