Paladin HealingFollow

Hey guys. I have an 85 holy paladin that when I hit 85 I mainly used healing in bg's and dabbled in some arena. I never really got much pve gear because I wasn't holy before hitting 85. I would like to get into healing dungeons and eventually raids but I have a few questions. Is it completely unacceptable to heal regulars with a mix of pvp/pve gear because, like I said, I have mainly only pvp'ed while at 85. Also, I have limited experience healing as a paladin restricted to the bg's and some arena; I am wondering if I should be able to jump into regular cataclysm dungeons with no problem or should I try some of the old Lich King regs/heroics to get acclimated? Sorry for the long post and thanks for any responses.

folsomdog

I see a lot of healers using PvP gear. As long as you have the right stats in the right amounts, you can get away with it. Although you would want to reforge that resilience into a more desirable PvE stat, but at that point you should just replace with a PvE set anyway.

I've never healed a BG or any PvP content so I don't know how you heal there, but on this side you will use holy shock heavily, and a lot of the time hope for infusion\daybreak procs while using our new AOE fillers. It's a different world than it was in wrath, and people have mixed feelings about it. You won't get a good feel for how to heal in Cata by doing Wrath content. It will simply be too easy.

Beacon tank (or overzealous DPS), Holy Shock on cooldown, Light of Dawn\Word of Glory because it's free, Holy Light\Divine light when Infusion procs cause it's fast, Radiance after fights on way to next one (or if major aoe damage and LoD won't cut it), Divine Plea\Avenging Wrath when mana low, Judge as often as you can, and you will be fine. It "seems" like they gave us a ton of spells and it can be overwhelming coming from the old days of one build or the other, but you will get used to it and it will be second nature. Also, it seems like we have better mana management now with the "free" spells and overall I like the way it's working out.

I will mention that the most popular PvE spec doesn't take the judgment talents in the ret tree and I'm not entirely positive that's the way to go. I'm thinking about changing out the Word of Glory talents for the Improved Judgment talent - since I go to LoD more often to splash the healing around. You'll have to decide for yourself and your playstyle, just thought it worth mentioning.

Awesome guys. Thanks for all of the tips they are all really helpful. I guess i'll throw on what pve gear I can get my hands on and hit up some dungeons. Another quick question though, According to what Torrence mentioned. I am assuming it would be worth it to reforge my pvp pieces from resil to haste until I can get a true pve piece in those slots? Thanks again.

folsomdog

As a Holy Pally raider I can assure you that PvP gear will not help in regulars or heroics. While in terms of itemization intellect has the largest effect and therefore should be prioritized, PvP gear lacks any valuable secondary stats. I typically gear/gem/reforge/enchant in a Intel>Haste>Spirit>Crit>Mastery priority list at an iLvl of 340 and higher otherwise put spirit in front of haste. At higher levels of gear your mana pool, returns from judging on cooldown, and strategically using Diving Plea a Holy Pally can last nearly indefinitely, so haste becomes largely important in reducing the cast time of Holy Light and Divine Light. I typically shoot for about 19% haste (28% with judgement haste)before any buffs while keeping crit at around 17%. Crit is only important for keeping conviction up. Mastery should always be reforged out of. At this point the base shield and the percent per point of mastery is too low to have any desirable effect. In terms of how to heal: I prefer to sit in melee range. Here I judge, Holy Shock, and Crusader Strike on cooldown. Using crusader strike allows you to build Holy Power at very rapid rates. At 3 HP use WoG or Light of Dawn (depending on the situation) before HS or CS, otherwise you waste HP. Use Holy Light and Divine Light as fillers depending on the individual situation.

Oh, good thread - thanks all - I just started a healadin on a PvP server to help out a friend's guild so I had some questions along these lines.

What sort of glyphs and spec should a PvP healadin be looking at as well?

My toon is only 38 right now but looking at the spells to come, I have to say that I'm a bit distressed at what appears to be a lack of variety of healing options for us - my shadow priest has his SHIFT2 bar nearly completely full of healing spells and he's only 71 but from the looks of things, I'm only going to have maybe half that as a healadin - I take it our healing rotation is pretty simple then?

INT as primary stat - NP, pretty much a given for any caster.

Looks like there's a bit of a debate between haste and spirit though - lots of fast little heals combined with taking advantage of our freebies vs good regen and some of the bigger but slower heals I take it?

Right. The theory is that more regen actually is more throughput if it allows you to convert Holy Lights to Divine Lights/Flash of Lights (whereas if you're chain-casting DL anyway, the only way to get more water through the hose is haste). Spirit will be more important with the new spell costs in 4.2, since Blizzard is continuing to try to make mana considerations more important, even in groups where you aren't compensating for the raid healers. And the mastery changes /might/ mean that while you don't seek it out, maybe you don't automatically reforge it away, either.

As for rotation, I personally find that the complexity comes from HP management, cooldown management and long-term throughput/mana balancing (including DP usage) rather than GCD-to-GCD spell choice. So it's probably for the good that we have only two real rotational spells, one filler, and one real HP finisher (YMMV in 25-mans). And even with that said, I don't use, say, Aura Mastery, as much as I should. I suspect the toolbox is of similar size as that of other classes, just broken out differently.

Haste will still trump Crit/Mastery in 4.2.


The sad thing is that the changes to Paladins in 4.2 have pretty much guaranteed that I won't be breaking down and coming back to WoW.