My current stats:
9.8k mana
84 MP5
22% holy crit
1850 Bonus heal
Have only been doing Kara for about a month up to Aran/Chess.
Questions.
In post Kara raids, are healadins MT healers? Raid healers? Either?
Main tank healers. We can raid heal in a pinch, but as we can only heal one person at a time, the other classes are better choices for raid healing.
How important is spell haste? I currently have Scarab of the Infinite Cycle with a chance of 320 spell haste for 6 secs. Noticed an imba healadin is also still using this at Sunwell. Perhaps he hasn’t found an upgrade (seems very unlikely!) or is spell haste a great way to increase your heal per second in addition to Healing bonus?
Spell Haste is very powerful, but it comes with a cost. Haste increases your heal per second, but it also increases the amount of mana you spend per second. So if you start using Haste too early, you'll find that you are running out of mana too soon. Sunwell paladins have lots of mana regen, so they can afford to use lots of Haste. You may find it a little harder at your current gear level.
So the question to ask is if are you running out of mana? If you are not, you can pack on the Haste. If you are, bank your Haste gear, and get some more regen gear for the time being.
Currently using purple & orange gems with some + healing and +intellect or + MP5. I believe you get better value for gold from these as opposed to purely +healing. How high should I get my spell crit and MP5 before I start only increasing healing bonus? Vague reading suggests 30% and 100 MP5. Or does this depend on whether you are MT healer or raid healer?
You should probably use red +healing gems for red slots (but purple is okay for now, I wouldn't change unless you have lots of gold). The purple gems are fine for blue slots.
However, the orange +heal/+int gems are a poor choice for yellow slots. Int provides a very small amount of crit and +heal. I would go with pure Spell Crit gems for yellow slots.
Would you ever take an armour piece which is not plate but has better stats? If so would you go to mail only? Or all the way to cloth? There does appear to be a number of pieces like this that have the same investment cost, say number of badges but where the non plate option has better healing stats.
In general, plate that comes from tokens or badges is optimized for paladins. So I would recommend sticking with plate for badge or vendor gear.
For drops, I would take a non-plate item if no other healers wanted it. If a nice mail healing piece dropped, I would let the shamans have first shot at it. I would take it if it was going to be sharded. Cloth and leather healing pieces tend to have Spirit, which is a useless stat for paladins. So I would usually only downgrade to mail. But if it's better than what you are currently wearing, and it's going to be sharded, pick it up.
Which craft would you recommend? Enchanting gives you 2*+20 healing on rings. Alchemy allows you to craft some amazing mana saving/+MP5 trinkets. Blacksmithing for Dawnsteel or Sunblessed armour, though you would need to have a lot of gold for these.
I would recommend Enchanting, Alchemy or Jewelcrafting. Also remember that there's a new profession, Inscription, coming in Wrath of the Lich King, and that may also be a good choice. I wouldn't really recommend Blacksmithing for a pure Holy paladin.
If you are looking ahead to WotLK, then Blacksmith will be a very valid crafting option, as shown here
ReplyDeleteNow, it's possible that there will be no viable healing BoP plate, in which case the value will be greatly diminished, but since they haven't added any of the high quality (blues or purples) BoP crafted items, it's too early to tell.
My guild has just started on Sunwell, and I'm still using the Scarab as well. I've found that adding a fairly small amount of +healing hasn't been a good use of badges until quite recently, so older stuff like the Scarab and the LC Prayerbook still have value. We've also seen a dearth of healing trinkets as loot.
ReplyDeleteThe value of the Scarab hasn't been the haste, just that it's a decent +heal trinket with a nice proc if you're lucky.
I leveled with Blacksmithing and have kept it, though if I were starting fresh I probably wouldn't do it again. The high end BOP pieces are a nice reward for sticking it out, but if I were able to make my own consumables I'd save a *lot* of money.