Thursday, October 13, 2016

Legion Raiding as a Holy Paladin

I ended up joining a small, somewhat casual guild. We've gone 7/7 Normal Emerald Nightmare, and hopefully will end up completing Heroic mode.

Here are some initial thoughts on raiding as a Holy Paladin.

  • Healing feels very much old-school, with you focusing on the tanks, and having other healers cover the raid, though helping out occasionally.
  • Bestow Faith is the standard Tier 1 talent, but I don't have a good feel for it. It felt like it was always getting sniped, and it seemed to have a much higher overheal than my other spells. I did try Light's Hammer, but it never seemed to work nicely.
  • I used Aura of Mercy for the most part. I think Devotion Aura has a better cooldown, but it requires you to be proactive. Aura of Mercy actually does a fair bit of healing, and it supplements your raid healing which is your weak point. I think I want to try Devotion Aura and see if that works better next time.
  • Judgment of Light actually does a decent amount of healing. Of course, it's all ambient healing, and you do have to remember to judge a lot.
  • I couldn't decide between Beacon of Faith or Beacon of the Lightbringer. The increase to Light of Dawn from BotL is really strong. But double-beaconing is a lot easier in fights where you need to focus both tanks.
So far, my initial impression of Holy Paladin healing is that you have to choose between strengthening your strong points of focused tank healing, or trying to shore up your weakness of raid healing.

I started with the focused build, but we were a little healer-light to start, and it felt like the dps died too easily. So I switched talents around to add more raid healing, and that felt a little better. If we had another healer though, I think the focused build would have been better.

Of course, I'm very rusty with raid healing, and we're only a Normal-mode guild at the moment, so keep that in mind.

Any other holy paladins care to share their experiences and tips?

8 comments:

  1. We have the opposite problem where we are healer heavy.
    We got 4/7 heroic last night. So far I found the beacon talents to be dependent on the fight and whether the raid is stacked away from the tanks. For most of the fights I'm running Beacon of Faith.
    Bestow Faith is good for regular damage bursts e.g. Ursoc's charges and roars.
    I found the auras pretty balanced too, like you said it depends on if you can pre-empt an AoE damage burst for the Devo Aura Mastery CD.

    With the new mastery, I find the biggest challenge is positioning. Generally I'll try to be in the melee clump if there is one.

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    1. Yeah, positioning is hard, especially when you don't know the fights. I'd like to be in the melee clump, but the other problem is that we're melee-heavy as well, so it feels like there aren't enough ranged people to soak boss abilities.

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  2. I had flashbacks to the tons of poorly designed spam attempts when I read "7/7 Emerald Nightmare".

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    1. I think this reference is lost on me. :(

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    1. Not yet. I've only done a few regular Mythics at the moment.

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  4. Bestow Faith is as proactive as a heal as you can get. If you know the tank will be taking a bunch of damage in x seconds, Bestow Faith is amazing. If it's getting sniped, you're casting it too late.

    As a Paladin tank in Normal Emerald Night are right now, though, the only time I take enough to justify extra healing is big trash packs or if I miss my active mitigation cooldown. Emerald Nightmare doesn't threaten tanks very much on Normal. I end up sniping my healers with Hand of the Protector, if not on me, then on a DPS that's sitting at half.

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    1. Yeah, probably just need to learn the timing of Bestow Faith more.

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