What you should be doing with your Holy PaladinFollow

I get PM's every now and then asking me question about the class and I tend to answer them but I just wanted to make a forum post. It's pretty simple


Itemization

Do: Stack Intellect, Crit and Haste

Don't itemize Mp5, in fact at 80 do everything in your power to avoid Mp5 gear. In Wotlk Mp5 is universally acknowledged as an extremely poor choice of itemization for Paladins. Also don't stack Spellpower past 2100, it's an extremely bad idea.


Gems: Insightful Earthsiege Diamond, is really the only choice. Ember Skyflare Diamond is actually trash. Even with Ulduar gear the 2% int won't beat insightful by enough to negate the mana restore effect. Deal with it. Other than that, you gem exclusively for Intellect, with one red equivalent and one blue equivalent to make the Meta work. Why Intellect, because stacking SP is bad, crit isn't as beneficial as Intellect and you should get enough from gear and talents, and haste is no bueno. Intellect gives you mana, spellpower and crit also the more you get from divine plea.

Glyphs: Seal of Wisdom, never Seal of Light. This comes down to a fundamental basic of Paladin healing in Wotlk, once you have 2k healing you are good. Stacking healing benefits by gemming SP, trinketing for it is not a good plan. You can argue this but once again, elitist jerks or go look at any holy paladin in any top 100 guild, or just watch your overhealing.

The next two are contentious, FoL vs Holy Light, personally I rather take 5% guaranteed crit over 8yard heal that is very situational. Though HL glyph does react with Beacon so if you hit a Melee with an 18k heal, heal the melee around him for 1.8k each, and had beacon on tank, then the tank gets 18k + 1.8k x 5 or whatever, buts thats just overhealing though it won't overheal. So once again 5% crit for mana.

Divinity vs Beacon. For the avg raider I would say hands down divinity, if you are doing hard modes get beacon.

Spec 51/2/18 this is the spec you should be unless a guild leader forces you to be 51/20/0, which I don't like at all but there are a few fights where it is nice to have the survivability. The loss of 8% crit in the 51/20 spec is a pretty hefty kick in the cajones.


The most overlooked enchant in the for Holy Paladins!!!!:: Tuskarrs Vitality. Basically any fight where you move more than 10 seconds out of every minute this enchant starts to scale onto a level equivalent of a major amount of haste, more importantly 8% run speed will help avoid aoe. When compared to the other options Vitality giving Mp5 which is poor itemization or a very negligible amount of crit from Icewalker, this not so obvious choice is actually quite obvious. Some pallies will take 2 points out of Prot and put it into PoJ (Pursuit of Justice) however if a enchant can do the job and free 2 talent points up for 2% healing then the choice is obvious.

Professions Jewelcrafting. Hands down the best, while others are strong they don't even stand a chance against how OP JC is for Min/Maxing a Paladin. Blacksmithing synergizes with JC extremely well with extra gem slots and easily beats out Inscriptionist. However you only want to min/max that bad its assuming you already have another lvl 80 alt with an epic mount that will be farming for you.

Anyways, other than that once you get to Ulduar keep you eye out for Elemental Shaman pieces, they are more often than not best in slot for you. Hope this helps all the new pallies.



Edited, May 11th 2009 12:16am by bodhisattva

Edited, May 11th 2009 12:16am by bodhisattva

Edited, May 11th 2009 12:23am by bodhisattva

The guide is superbly done, however I think even mentioning the Ember meta is a bad move, because even at release of wotlk the math was overwhelmingly in favour of the Insightful.

My Paladin is sitting at about 1025 intellect unbuffed, (I am fairly geared and have been full clearing Heroic Ulduar easy mode for a couple weeks now) so I have a my T8.5 and I am using a greatness trinket which gives 90 int as well. 2% of 1025 is 20.5 intellect gained. Lets say I have 1200 mana with BoK, GoW, Arcane Brilliance etc, still only getting 24 int. So on a reasonably geared Ulduar toon its giving 24 int + 25 SP which is a poor choice of itemization.

Insightful gives 21 int, and a 5% chance to proc. I will steal a bit from a poster on Wowhead named Xiphias, direct link



In my Naxx/Ulduar gear my FoL is down to 1.11 seconds in a 10 man with JotPure up and 572 haste. 25 man it is less. Which I don't mention to fluff myself over but to just give you an idea of haste will affect it. Course you need to remember the internal cd.

Edited, May 11th 2009 7:56am by bodhisattva

Two options really.

0.26% crit from Icewalker with, 2 points into PoJ.

2% increased healing to you and by you, with Tuskarrs giving you save speed and 12 stamina.

Neither is large enough to have a distinct advantage, so as long as you have run speed and are doing one or the other you should be fine.

Thanks Bode, your always a HUGE help, I see I have some work to do, finally got in a decent Naxx 25 run yesterday got a few upgrades but no t7.5 yet, lost on a roll for Turning Tide to a lock(argh) but I will look at getting a new boot enchant and replacing some more sp gems as my guild is now attempting Ulduar reg mode. I've already gotten a few upgrade from there also, but looking to get My Val set.


What do you guys thin on enchants, go for the best or wait for the best in slot gear to put the best enchants on? Ie; 23 sp on regular epic bracers vs 30? max haste on a naxx cloak, etc?

Again, Thanks for the help Bode!

Now that I think about it, divinity does seem better. My spec isn't that optimal, it was a bit of a hybrid PVP spec from back when I was dual speced holy/ret. Now I have holy/holy, I might as well tighten up my raid spec.



Seperate question for everyone though. I just rolled engineering, mainly for PVP. So I have JC/engi right now. But I was thinking about switching my glove/cloak enchants to the engineering versions.


Gloves - 28 spellpower vs. a 340 haste cooldown. Lasts 10 seconds, doesnt activate GCD, 60 second cooldown.
Cloak - 23 haste vs. 18 spellpower and slowfall
Boots - icewalker vs. tuskarrs vs. nitro boosts

I think the haste to gloves is nice, an extra cooldown to pop when healing gets intense. Popped every 60 seconds its 56.7 haste rating. Cloak, they're probably so close it doesn't matter, but I might go with the spellpower enchant just for the slowfall effect. Nitro boosts vs. passive run speed. The boost only lasts 2 seconds and the cooldown is long. But possibly useful to avoid AOE or something.

Ah totally forgot they added 16 crit to the nitro boosts ^^

No it doesn't, it adds 2% intellect. I am gemmed for int, greatness trinket and replacing Naxx BiS with Ulduar 25 man gear, currently have 1025 intellect, unbuffed. 2% of 1025 is 20.5 intellect gained. Raid buffed you are going to see it jump to about 24 intellect gained or in other terms 360 mana. Insightful comes with 21 intellect base + 600 mana with a 45s internal.



Ulduar loot is pretty terrible for Paladins, especially Plate healing gear. For the most part you will be looking to poach Elemental Shaman gear sincce it has the Int/Crit/Haste, where Paladin plate will break it up to either Crit/Mp5 or Haste/Mp5 never Crit/Haste, and Mp5 is just so bad for paladins right now. The weapon, well I guess you can wait for the Legendary, or T9 till then you better like your sword.



You should only have 1 red gem, and it shouldnt even be red it should be orange. +sp/intellect

If you are a holy paladin and app for a really really top end guild a lot won't even look at your application if you don't have the greatness trinket. It is that good. 25 man raid buffed Divine Plea with the trinket procced is about 1700 mana per tick.




Swap it back in and gem it intellect, unless you have soul of the dead and even then I would lean towards JC trinket. All the +healing trinkets are bleh, though if you have to have one the badge one ain't bad with haste proc.

Does the Skyflare work off buffed intellect or unbuffed intellect, i would imagine the former but with blizzard you can never be too sure.

For example - If i have 1500int + 150 from kings + 60 from mage + 51 from droods ... is skyflare working off of 1761int or the original 1500.

I only ask because i remember reading that when you approach 2k intellect the skyflare actually starts to become on par if not better than the insightful, and since im approaching that breakpoint im debating switching them out, but obviously i wont do that unless i have the evidence to prove that its better.

You know what? No one seems to bring it up. How good or bad is the http://wow.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?witem=41389 ?

2% mana would give me.. 550 mana, compared to the roughly 400 from the Insightful. And yes, I did subtract that mana before I did the +2%.

Would the crit be worth as much as the chance for 500 mana?

But then I have to remember Int gives crit and SP, pure mana doesn't. I wish I was better with math.


Edit: Wrong link.

Edited, May 12th 2009 6:25pm by Ehcks

Well, hey. I trust that it's the best, I just like wondering about alternatives. Maybe someday either the 2% int or 2% mana will come out better. Maybe on the Vezax fight the mana regen proc is useless and the others come out slightly ahead. I don't know. I've only gotten to him once, for a couple hours of attempts before the trash came back.

But hey, you're not *always* right.



At this moment, I have 1344 Int with just Kings. With MotW, AB, and the Int elixir combo, I get 1585. If I went BS/JC I could get to 1677. If I had the Greatness card, 1790, and 2169 when it procced. Oh how I wish I had the gold to do that. But I also have a blue ring, no Int trinkets, and a shield that's only from normal Naxx.

Oh, and I forgot to add in Mixology. It wouldn't matter if I went JC/BS anyway, but I get more than 1585 right now.

I actually have 1600int completely unbuffed. Feel free to armory me. Granted its still a slight ways away from 2k. But i am curious on the math behind it.

I hesitate to post this, since it makes me look retarded, but i actually did the first 7 bosses of 25uld last night with my ret libram on :(. Still didnt have any mana issues, so if the returns from the inisghtful arent required, then wouldnt the obvious choice be to switch to the Skyflare?

It's not that mp5 is necessarily bad. It's a question of item budgets. For a given amount of mp5, an equivalent (or equally valuable) amount of Int or crit "costs" less for Blizzard to put on an item (this includes gems). So if they put crit on instead of mp5, "spending" the same amount of item budget, the crit is more valuable than the mp5 would have been.

And this is true for every regen and throughput stat - as paladin healing goes right now, we get more value from any of them than we do if they were switched out for an equal item budget of mp5.

Mp5 still works like it did before LK, and it's still quite valuable in and of itself (unlike, say, haste or ArP for Ret). Especially with fights getting longer and stretching us more than in Naxx. We just don't want to see it on gear, because every time we do it's a lost opportunity to get a different stat that would be more valuable.

Note that some recent comments suggest that Blizzard realizes this and are planning at least a minor revamp of how passive mana regen (i.e. mp5) works. I wouldn't be surprised to see a "rebalancing" in the 3.2-3.3 timeframe with a slightly reworked mp5 rolled out along with a (big) nerf to Replenishment.