Playing around with Holy Paladin RotationsFollow

Lets face it, we got hit harder than a red headed child in foster care. Arguments about the class being balanced for 85 are bunk as well, since all reports from top end paladins on the Beta at present have stated that at 85 we are pretty turrible as well.


This week we cleared ICC HM 25 (including LK) Yogg 0, Halion Regular (cause he was bugged all to hell), and some ToGC this week. Our holy paladins played around with spell rotations, gemming and reforging.


This is what worked:


1) Don't even look at FOL, remove it from your bars, binds or clique.

2) Spam Divine Light

3) Use Holy Shock on CD

4) IoL procs are one of the few times other than low damage parts of the fight when you should use Holy Light.

5) We stayed gemmed Int for the most part, though Purified Dreadstone (10 int + 10 spirit) for blue gems works.

6) Lost all mail items for plate bonus, reforged with a focus on spirit. I dropped about 100 haste, and about 2-3% crit


I would beacon tank, spam DL. HS and WoG were my tools for topping off spike damage in raid. If splash damage hit the raid LoD would be cast. During low points in damage I would HL the tank to build up Holy Power, but HL made up less than 10% of my healing last night. Seemed sustainable for fights under 6 minutes, but I am also sitting at 6400 gearscore.




Edited, Oct 18th 2010 10:06am by bodhisattva

I had very much the same experience. It looks like the intent is that we're already balanced around their intended "healing is mana management, we wipe when you OOM" rather than the LK "healing is damage control, we wipe when you miss a GCD". The problem I see right now is that - regardless of how it will work at 85 - our toolset is mismatched with the current paradigm.

On fights where the tank isn't in much danger of being 2-shot, I can see the plan. It's a game of efficiency and planning, making as much use of the free (WoG) and the cheap (HS, HL) as possible, saving up for when DL is needed, and even then use only just about as much as necessary.

But when I need four straight 1.35 second LK-power HL, I reach back for throughput and it isn't there. I'd rather it not be that way, but I'll adjust - as long as the encounters are designed with that possibility in mind. From the sound of it, they don't have it quite right even on the beta.

I'm glad I pushed for us to tick off LK-10 before the patch while both myself and our progression tankadin were in the group. Now we can stand down until Cata and let the flavors-of-the-next-month-and-a-half deal with LK content.

I fully agree with Bodhi's assessments. I still have some mail pieces that I need to replace with plate again, but my guild hasn't really been going into Icecrown Citadel lately, as people are more or less goofing off and taking a pre-expansion break. FoL is pretty much trash now. I think I've cast it maybe twice when holy shock was on cooldown, word of glory was gone and the warlock was pulling aggro again. I have it bound to an out of the way button on my mouse, and have more or less forgotten it.

Currently thinking about regemming some of my blue sockets with purified gems, as I haven't anywhere near the mana efficiency I was used to, and I also no longer have viable ways of restoring my mana, be it via divine plea as needed or the much lamented seal of wisdom.

I'm not really sure how my guild will do Lich King on 25 anymore. We'd been running with four or five healers even on most of the heroics we did, and now that I haven't the tools I once had for dealing with heavy tank damage, it'll be a little tricky. Here's to hoping that Blizzard will figure out sooner rather than later that holy pallies might need a little love.

I found flash of light to be pretty useful actually. Then again we're just doing reg ICC 10. But it is what helped saved the day when we took on Festergut and he started hammering the tanks hard. Average was about 13k and crits were approaching 26k (and consistently I might add).

Edited, Oct 22nd 2010 12:58am by ekaterinodar