The Light and How to Swing It: Holy paladins are impossible to kill
by Chase Christian 
Oct 17th 2010 at 4:00PM
While the title of this article may be a bit sensationalized, our strength on live servers after the release of patch 4.0.1 has me very excited for Cataclysm and the rest of the holy paladin changes. I'm incredibly happy with my choice to use mouseover macros instead of a mod like Clique, and I was at nearly at full capacity without any addons. After spending a few hours getting my addons configured to bring myself to maximum potency, I was finally ready to do some serious healing.
I managed to make my way through a few heroics without any issues and then joined a pickup group for Naxxramas, just to make sure my raid frames were working completely. It's always good to do a few stretches with a new addon setup before you bring it to the big leagues, so I used an easy raid as a farm club before I tried it out in Icecrown Citadel.
Baby Beacon is the new all-star
Protector of the Innocent has completely changed the way I play my holy paladin, and it's definitely for the better. The basic concept is that any time I use any heal except Light of Dawn, I heal myself for a free 5,000 health. Think of it as a "Baby Beacon" that is cast on yourself at all times. The heal scales with spellpower and it can crit, and it doesn't matter how powerful your original heal was. Every single Holy Shock or Word of Glory is healing me for a significant amount, even if I'm healing myself. Because of this, I'm able to survive just about anything that's being thrown at me without having to worry about my own health.Back in the day, on heroic Marrowgar, my guild kept into running into the same problem every week. One healer would be spiked, I would have to move out of a Coldflame, and we'd start losing players. I came up with a new strategy to deal with that issue -- I put Beacon of Light on myself. After that point, I would simply stand still and drop my biggest healing bombs on whoever I liked, without ever needing to move. I'd be getting cleaved by Marrowgar and standing in Coldflame without even faltering for a second. As long as I continued to cast, I was invulnerable.
Healing three people at once
With Beacon of Light on yourself, Protector of the Innocent more than compensates us for the 50 percent nerf that Beacon saw in patch 4.0.1 when trying to heal yourself. With Beacon of Light on another target, you're literally keeping three people alive every time you cast a heal. With Light of Dawn healing multiple targets (including yourself), you can seriously keep your party up through some pretty punishing damage. I was worried about our AoE healing without Holy Radiance, and while we're not up to holy priest or resto druid levels yet, we're able to keep multiple targets alive with ease.
Use your instant spells
Put a sticky note on your monitor. Have Power Auras yell at you when they're off cooldown. Bind every key to Holy Shock. Whatever it takes to get you in the habit of using Holy Shock and Word of Glory as often as possible will be worth it. I initially had a hard time getting used to using Holy Shock as a primary heal and even trying to get Word of Glory into my normal triage methods. I ended up swapping Holy Shock and Holy Light's keybind on my action bar so that every time I would've gone for a Holy Light, it'll try a Holy Shock instead. While it might be crude, we need to get in the habit of using Holy Shock and Word of Glory as often as possible.
Our mana pools are going to be balanced around using HS and WoG often. HS is one of our cheapest and yet most powerful heals, while WoG doesn't even cost any mana at all. Between the two of them, we'll be doing a significant amount of healing without denting our mana pool. Think of the HS/WoG combo as the old Flash of Light -- it doesn't even dent your mana. Our other heals are used when HS and WoG can't handle the damage, and we draw on our mana reserves to keep the raid and tanks alive.
Our new fire hose
I'm not going to pull any punches here: Our single-target throughput is never going to be the same. Holy Light was too quick and too powerful for what it accomplished, and I am certain that many holy paladins will remember with great nostalgia the time we spent in ICC as tank-healing gods. Unfortunately, we live in a post-4.0.1 world now, and we've got to adapt to keep everyone alive. Divine Light is the right tool for the job. Well, it will be the right tool once tanks have massive life pools and we have free time to cast slower spells. In today's pre-Cataclysm period, Flash of Light is usually the better choice. That's going to change shortly, though.
The basic idea is that while Divine Light takes longer to cast than Holy Light does, it also heals quite a bit more health per second. Unfortunately, its mana cost is also significantly higher. If you can, you want to heal someone with Holy Shock first, as it's cheap, quick and powerful -- the perfect heal. Holy Light is the heal of choice for picking up life bars efficiently, albeit slowly. Flash of Light can actually put out quite a bit more healing per second than Divine Light, but its mana cost is pretty prohibitive. FoL is better reserved for the heroic Marrowgar situation in which mana isn't an issue and you only care about keeping everyone alive. When you've got a tank getting slammed, look no further than Divine Light to keep him afloat.
Learning to manage our mana is going to be the most important skill we learn going into Cataclysm. Holy Light is easy enough to spam all night long, but we need to anticipate high periods of tank damage and swap to Divine Light. If the entire raid is going to get lit up, then Flash of Light becomes our only option. Basically, we have to figure out how much HPS we're required to put out. Light of Dawn and Holy Radiance are the wild cards in this model, although I have been using Light of Dawn on cooldown just because it looks so awesome to cast. I haven't had any mana problems when using the Glyph of Divine Plea and making sure to use Divine Plea during any sort of down time, such as the Tear Gas phases of Professor Putricide.
The Light and How to Swing It (Holy Edition) helps holy paladins become the powerful healers we're destined to be. Learn the ropes in Holy 101. We can help you keep a tank alive, heal a raid when necessary and beat the global cooldown. Tanking is a job, DPS is a craft -- but healing is truly an art.Filed under: Paladin, (Paladin) The Light and How to Swing It
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
Travieso Oct 17th 2010 4:18PM
I've resorted to costumes for whenever I plan on casting Light of Dawn. I can't stand that the blood elf female throws her healing straight up into the air. I prefer the male dwarf who actually shoots the healing into the people in front of him.
MusedMoose Oct 17th 2010 4:23PM
And *that* is why I'm giving life as a dwarven paladin a try once Cataclysm hits. ^_^
bloodfyr Oct 17th 2010 4:38PM
I imagine they'll fix it, since you more or less have to use the animation for targeting.
Travieso Oct 17th 2010 6:05PM
As far as I can tell, the animation is based on where your character's hands are during the instant cast animation. Since most races throw their hands into the air for an instant cast, it's going to remain broken until they come up with a new way to direct the light.
Amak Oct 18th 2010 11:22AM
I would hope they would just use the /roar animation and the light comes from your chest. Sacred heart and all.
Felix_rew Oct 17th 2010 4:24PM
Gotta agree with you on this, in Warsong Gulch today I was being attacked by 7 hordies and I was easily able to keep myself and my beacon alive :D
CastersR4BeeItches Oct 18th 2010 3:11AM
Ya sounds super powerful, which worries me back to a time when a resto shaman couldn't be killed, kinda made BG pretty much just me waiting for my friend to log on or get a guild member to go with me and be ever living warrior. Though it was fun to watch my two guild mates go like medic combo in TF2 and just keep them selves both healed, one killing one healing, one popping cooldowns like a Medic's Uber.
korruptor Nov 2nd 2010 12:00PM
yeah I can't wait till ghostcrawler swings the bat at holy pallys in pvp. Impossible to kill if you don't have at least 5+ or more people focus firing and cc'ing
Elhannan Oct 17th 2010 4:29PM
I've been playing with a healer or two since ICC came out, and my usual litmus test is healing a PuG Heroic HoR.
Holy paladin did me proud, and was fun to heal with. Mission Accomplished. ^_^
Heilig Oct 17th 2010 4:30PM
The title of this article is not sensationalized at all. I play a ret paladin and my friend plays a holy paladin. We are similarly geared and it is literally impossible for me to kill him unless he just stands there. Another friend of ours, a gladiator DK in full 277 gear came to see if he could kill him and the ONLY way he was able to do it was to not only wait until all his CD's were available, but he also had to wait until his trinkets lined up with his CD's AND he had Killing Machine and Rime procs. A rogue friend of ours literally gave up and went to go do something else. Our Warlock buddy was able to kill him with all his demo cooldowns plus fear spam, but that was only because his bubble was down at the time.
Holy paladins are essentially unkillable by any single person at this point. It takes crazy luck, a huge gear gap, or multiple people to kill a holy pally right now.
bloodfyr Oct 17th 2010 4:37PM
Hasn't that always been somewhat the case though? I BG a lot on my Pally and sometimes I notice I can heal through four or five people pounding on me at once.
Darias.Perenolde Oct 17th 2010 9:10PM
Arthas is dead.
Holy pallies are the new hero class. :)
Andrew Oct 17th 2010 4:33PM
Good article. I don't play a holy paladin, and the only paladin I have is a level 25 tank, but reading this makes me really want to level him and try out holy. I have a dual spec disc/holy priest as my main right now and he makes up for about 99% of my healing experience. I'll admit, after playing with the massive toolbox priests have, the other healing classes, particularly paladins, seemed rather dull to me. Too easy, if you will. That's just my perception, however, and I am in the process of leveling and experimenting with all four healing classes extensively. But this article certainly makes it sound like holy paladins are a lot of fun.
Drakkenfyre Oct 17th 2010 4:38PM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtK9EvhqEIw
Deathknighty Oct 17th 2010 5:04PM
I now love my holy pala SOOOOOO much.
Thanks for linking that. :D
Rolly Oct 17th 2010 8:03PM
lol that looks really balanced.
Incoming massive nerfs unfortunately.
Elish Oct 17th 2010 4:40PM
Your not supposed to tell them!
Amberlee Oct 17th 2010 4:48PM
Holy shock is great and word of glory is great--but we can only spare the talent points to pick one or the other unless we skip divinity. Where do you put those extra few talent points?!
Harvoc Oct 17th 2010 5:27PM
As I don't play a Holy Paladin, this is probably my fault, but I don't get what you mean by not being able to not get both Holy Shock and Word of Glory unless you skip Divinity. Aren't both Holy Shock and Word of Glory trained, not talented? Do you mean talents that boost Holy Shock and Word of Glory?
Amberlee Oct 17th 2010 5:29PM
Yes sorry - I meant the talents for improved power to Holy Shock or the talents that mean Word of Glory sometimes doesn't require holy power. We can't get both of these unless we don't take divinity (overall boost to all healing) -- so which is more important?