New holy paladin seeking adviceFollow

Basic tactics for paladin healing.

Beacon and sacred sheild the tank. Use FoL to activate the HoT on the sacred sheild then heal the rest of the raid using FoL and Shock, use Holy if you have to. Try to keep the HoT up and make sure to refresh Beacon when you have to.
Use Sacrifice when there is big spike damage.
Pro Tip: In raids Divine Sacrifice with bubble can be used along with Divine Plea so you get 12 seconds to regen mana with Seal of Wisdom as well while the 40% reduced damage means the other healers will cope fine without you.

Beacon on the tank means you can heal the rest of the raid without being overly concerned with the tanks hp.

Above plus a couple more:

Seal of Wisdom has two benefits beyond the obvious - it makes Judgements, on average, return a little mana (so you don't need to worry about the cost and can concentrate on the benefits) and it allows you to recharge your batteries by meleeing mobs in your vicinity.

The high level of tanking threat makes Hand of Salvation situationally useful, but I am trying hard to remember that it's there when I'm under pressure. Hand of Protection, too.

On fights with movement or with phase changes, that's generally downtime as far as healing is concerned, and thus a good time for Divine Plea. Another wrinkle you can do with DP is to have a /cancelaura macroed in so that a second click will get you back to normal - this allows you to steal a few ticks of regen without risking being overwhelmed.

Keep Beacon up. Get a good timer for it and learn how to use it. I use DoTimer.

Sacred Shield is worth keeping up. You can track it with DoTimer as well.

The SS HoT... well IMO its not worth keeping up. Mainly because I beacon the tank and SS the tank. To get the HOT I'd have to target the tank to cast FoL, which is counter productive to Beacon healing. I usually SS and FoL the tank right before the pull so he starts with the HoT, and then I don't worry about it too much.

Divine Plea whenever its up. You can use wings to counter DP's reduced healing.

Glyph of Holy Light is very good.

Lay on Hands - I'm doing better, but I could still use this more often. Its no good if you never use it.

I'm not so sure. I'm a big believer in having one raid frame. I don't think it matters if you prefer a healer-specific (Grid, Healbot, VuhDo) or general-purpose (XPerl, Pitbull) - as long as you can tune it to give you all the information you need in one place.

My Grid configuration shows me the debuffs I can do something about in the center icon, and gives me a corner indicator for curses (which, of course, I can't do anything about). This allows me to do my jobs (staying alive, healing, cleansing) while only dividing my attention two ways (the raid frame and the environment). On some fights, there is so little time to react to environmental hazards, having three places to watch would be dangerous.

The more experience I get (less than some regulars here, I freely admit) - and especially as we get close to hardmodes - it becomes clearer to me why it's a constant theme in "serious" forum UI discussions to make people's interfaces simpler, to shrink the footprint or make more information available in the same space, to reduce the number of places to focus, to maximize the space where you can see what's actually happening in the raid. Never to increase the footprint, or add bells and whistles, or spread vital information around the screen, or present the same thing in two places (or, worse, in two different ways in two places).

Especially with a new player, or a player new to raiding, I wanted to emphasize that there will never be a better time to start this process. Decursive, in its day, filled a vital need (so I hear, I wasn't around at the time). Since then, raid frames have improved, and the allowable functions for addons have been tightened - so it adds value, yes, but it's not unique anymore. A raid frame can provide the same information, in a place you're already looking.

Everyone who's been doing a job for a while has accumulated some things that are quirky, and which work for them. The more streamlined you can force yourself to be when you start, it seems that the fewer of these quirks you'll accumulate.

Speccing into Ret is where you pick up the Crit talents, if you go for the full 18 points, you'll add another 8% crit. This is good for some increased throughput (but is unreliable) and increased regen through illumination. At the gearing up stage, a lot of palas will pick this up to increase their personal healing ability.

Once geared to the level needed for the content you are running, most good paladins will drop the ret points and spec into Prot to pickup Divine Sacrifice. This is a talent that (when used with a bubble) absorbs 30% of the raid damage for 10 seconds. This is a VERY powerful talent, especially in later raids where there is a lot of raid damage.

Hope this helps you.

EDIT: Just thought I'd add that i geared up prior to the illumination nerf so 8% crit was a big deal back then. I think that Heroic ToC is about the only instance that you might need to use bubble sac. It's the new HoL for us palas. If I were leveling up now, I'd almost definitely go for the Ret tree for the crit.

Edited, Sep 30th 2009 12:19pm by bawbaag

Gem Intellect


Look for gear that has Haste/Mp5 or Haste/Crit. Aim for 500+ haste.


Download Healbot, while we can argue that Grid/Clique is better (cause it is), there can be no argument that for a new healer Healbot has the smaller learning curve.


If someone is greater than 75% health then cast FoL. If someone is less than 75% health cast HL. L2Cleanse.



Later on you can worry about throwing up hands of X and more complex stuff but that is the basics. Work on getting it mastered.

Those who have done the legwork say that, the vast majority of the time, DS/DG runs its full duration if the sacrificing paladin is not taking the damage (i.e. is bubbled). Sometimes, regardless of shield, the damage reduction breaks early, so the ability can't truly be counted on, but it generally does work as advertised. I haven't mined our combat logs, but my perception is that the damage dampening runs full duration when I use it.

NOTE, however. This is the case as of 3.2.2. Recent blue comments and/or patch notes imply that DS/DG are being reworked for 3.3 - and as a consequence the synergy with bubble will be broken. You will still have to use at least Divine Protection to survive, but the intent is that DS/DG will break after the threshold amount of damage has been directed to the sacrificing paladin, regardless of whether or not that damage causes her health bar to drop.