A Touch of Arcane

Be nice with your healers.

2011-01-11T22:18:00.002+01:00

A short post today, I'm swamped by work and don't have enough time to finish my big post about healing in Cataclysm. It will have to wait a little bit more.

Until then I wanted to say one thing to all the tanks and dpsers around here (that I sometimes am on some of my chars).

Be nice with your healers.

Seriously people, healing in cataclysm isn't the piece of cake that it was before, now you can really say that The cake is a lie! (ok bad pun)
Mana quickly becomes a serious issue for all healers (with level 83 very often you feel the bite even with ICC gear). But more than only mana, sometimes we just don't have the time to get everyone up, esp. when some people stay in poisonous pools or other fiery areas ...

I once had a player complain I let him die while he was standing in a green poisonous ground that a mob put under him ... I healed him ... he stayed ... after 10s he died. I could have saved him, spending all my mana and 50% of my gcds, that should have been used on the tank.

Please everyone, don't be silly, be nice to your healers and help them. Just ...

Don't stand in the fire.

Until later, Peace, and have fun :)

A Much Needed Blogroll Update

2010-12-30T09:38:00.004+01:00

Last night I was finally taking some time "off" from both work and the game to read some blogs I enjoy and have neglected for too long. I also discovered that through the summer (ok I know I'm very late) some have closed or changed names or have just fallen into slumber. So it is time to update the Blog Roll List (on the right part of the page).

I'm going to point a few changes for those used to it:
Holy Paladin .net: I'm finally repairing a grave miss in my blog roll, I discovered yesterday that, even though I've linked it numerous time here holypaladin.net was not in my blog roll, when it is the home of the Holy Paladin blog list.
Critical QQ: one of the "fun" blogs I enjoyed to read has changed name to Preposterous Pretentious Prattle, this is not much about wow anymore but has some nice (though often sad) fanfiction on it, go give it a look.
PorkchopsnHolysauce: a new entry into my blog roll, I just discovered this informative and lighthearted blog, give it a go, it's worth your time.
Divine Plea: yet another Holy Paladin site for your reference, I think I'll soon need to make 2 blog rolls, one for paladins, and another for general blogs :)

Have fun reading :)
And see you next post.

Restoration Shaman Cataclysm Talent Build

2010-12-29T14:09:00.009+01:00

Did I say Shaman? I did just say Shaman. If some of you don't know yet I'm now playing a shaman as my main character, and very much enjoying it. Probably just needed some changes after the stressful period of Wrath of the Lich King, but totems are fun!

I will try to make that post as complete and instructive as I can with all the information I have gathered so far about healing as a mostly PvE shaman. First I will point you to the very nice blog called Totemspot and its article about restoration after patch 4.0.1 . And second to the Elitist Jerks Shaman forum and resto discussion where you can find the most updated discussions about resto.

Now let us go on with the long talk, get some crackers it'll be long :)

Part 1 The Restoration Tree Bonuses

When you spec into Restoration you get 4 bonuses, the last one being tied to your mastery rating and only accessible once you hit level 80.

Earth Shield
Earth Shield is one of the Restoration Shaman trademark, the most unique healing spell we have, and one that should be on at all times. It is obviously intended for your tank, but should be on the target on which you expect the most hits to come.
Purification
Increases the effectiveness of your healing spells by 10%, and reduces the casting time of your Healing Wave and Greater Healing Wave spells by 1 sec.
A 10% bonus to healing is far from being as appealing as the 25% bonus druids have. But the casting time reduction to two of our core healing spells, combined with the Tidal Waves effect make them much more effective than they would be without it.
Meditation
This talent allows you to get half of your out of combat mana regen while fighting. This allows healers to endure longer fights and the ooc/ic mana regeneration are displayed in your character sheet. This makes spirit a very desirable stat for all healers.
Mastery: Deep Healing
Increases the potency of your direct healing spells by up to 20%, based on the current health level of your target (lower health targets are healed for more). Each point of Mastery increases direct heals by up to an additional 2.5%.
Shaman restoration mastery is kind of tricky, and the final call about it's efficiency is not yet done. The healing bonus is directly proportional to the health of your target, bonus will be full if your target is near death, and zero if your target is full hp.
To say things simply:
As long as you maintain your targets near full health, your mastery will be pretty useless. But when you need it the most (large raid aoe damage, damage spikes on your tank ...) it will be at its strongest.
This very contradictory statement makes it hard to evaluate properly the value of mastery for shamans.
Deep Healing’s effects also stack with other healing multipliers, making it a very complementary stat nearby spellpower, haste and crit. The sad part though is that Earth shield is not affected by our mastery. And ES is an essential part of our playstyle.

Part 2 About our Talent Trees

I will shamelessly use the very nice talent description from Totemspot. Though this analysis is done for lvl 80, it is still very true at level 85. I added Ancestral Swiftness that was not reachable at level 80 and now considered as nearly mandatory for all resto builds.

Every talent is flagged either Optional (filler talent), Recommended (should be strongly considered, there are options but you should not leave this talent behind without care), Mandatory (every resto should have it) and PvP (guess what?).
Every talent also has x/x numbers beside it, indicating the max number of ranks and what I chose in the build I'll discuss.

The build I propose is a 3/7/31 build, including both Ancestral Swiftness and Telluric Currents.
I will discuss motivations and variations after the talent list.

Restoration Tree (31pts)
Ancestral Resolve (0/2) – Reduces the damage you take while casting by up to 10% (Optional)
Tidal Focus (3/3) – Reduces the mana cost of your spells by up to 6% (Mandatory)
Spark of Life (3/3) – Increases the (active and passive) healing your spells do on other targets by 6% and increases the healing you receive from all sources (active and passive) by 15%. (Mandatory)
Improved Water Shield (2/2) – Provides up to a 100% chance to gain a Water Shield orb when you land a critical heal with GHW, HW, or RT, a 60% chance when you crit with HS, and a 30% chance when you crit with CH. Do note, in regards to the latter spell, each CH bounce has the chance to proc Imp WS, so it is possible (although unlikely) that you will proc multiple mana returns on one CH cast. (Mandatory)
Totemic Focus (2/2) – Reduces the mana cost of your totems by 30% and increase their duration by 40%. Do note, the increased effect does apply to Mana Tide totem, adding 5 seconds to its duration, which in turn, equates to more regen. (Recommended)
Focused Insight (0/3) – Reduces the mana cost of any heal which follows a successful shock and increases the effectiveness of that heal by 30%. Do note that Wind Shear does not count as a shock which will proc this effect and the shock must land for FI to be activated. (Recommended)
Nature’s Guardian (0/3) – Whenever your health is reduced to below 30%, your total HP is increased by 15% for 10 seconds and your threat against that target is reduced. (PVP)
Ancestral Healing (2/2) – Reduces the physical damage taken by a target of one of your critical heals by 10%. The effect lasts 15 seconds and can be refreshed by subsequent critical heals on the target in question, though it’s worth noting that the effect does not stack with multiple shaman nor does it stack with Priests’ Inspiration. (Mandatory)
Nature’s Swiftness (1/1) – When activated, it makes your next spell an instant-cast, provided that you cast it within 10-seconds of activating NS. NS can be combined with any cast-based spell in the Resto arsenal, very useful with CH and GHW for urgencies. (Recommended)
Nature’s Blessing (3/3) – Increases the effectiveness of healing done on Earth Shielded targets by up to 15%. This applies to direct healing spells only (HS, HW, GHW, and CH) and is shared between Resto shaman (meaning that your healing on an ES’ed target is increased even if it is not your ES on the target). Do note that this effect also stacks with other healing modifiers like Spark of Life and Focused Insight. (Mandatory)
Soothing Rains (2/2) – Increases the amount healed by your Healing Stream by up to 50% and increases the amount healed by your Healing Rain by up to 30%. Healing Stream will be your totem of choice if you have a Blessing of Might when raiding, if it is the case don't skip this talent. (Recommended)
Improved Cleanse Spirit (1/1) – Enables you to dispel magic effects along with curses. Do note that this no longer enables you to remove poisons or diseases. Magical effects are the most common debuffs in Cataclysm, you should not pass that talent. (Mandatory)
Cleansing Waters (2/2) – Reduces the cost of cleansing by up to 40% and provides a small heal on the cleansed target. Dispels cost a lot more in Cataclysm and you should strongly consider this talent that even provides a small free heal. (Recommended)
Ancestral Awakening (3/3) – After you critically heal with any single-target healing spell (HS, HW, GHW, and RT), you will also heal the lowest HP target in your party or raid for up to 30% of the amount of the critical heal. Do note that this effect is not instant, as indicated in the tooltip, but rather follows your critical heal by about a 1-second lapse. (Recommended)
Mana Tide Totem (1/1) – Increases party members’ Spirit by 350% for 12 seconds, 17 seconds when you pick up Totemtic Focus. Do note, in patch 4.0.1, MT was changed to a 3-minute CD to align with other class’s regen mechanics. (Mandatory)
Telluric Currents (2/2) – Will restore 40% of the damage dealt when you cast a Lighting Bolt. Do note, this talent is intended to be mana-neutral and not a viable regen mechanic for Resto Shaman. Nevertheless when you reach raid level gear, even at tier11 pre-raid gear, you will do enough damage to regen with this talent, especially during enhanced damage boss phases. This could be your only hope during long fights when you get near the zero mana state. (Recommended)
Tidal Waves (3/3) – After casting RT or CH, you will gain 2 charges of a Tidal Waves buff which will decrease the cast time of the following GHW or HW spells by 30% and increase the critical effect chance of Healing Surge by 30%. Tidal Waves will last until 2 spells are cast or after 10 seconds. (Mandatory)
Blessing of the Eternals (0/2) – Gives your Earthliving hot an 80% chance to proc on targets below 35% HP. This talent no longer increases critical strike chance, as of the patch. This is a minor healing gain, but it is a free one, if you have spare points it is ok to put them here. (Optional)
Riptide (1/1) – An instant cast spell which also applies a hot to the target, it will also increase the healing done by a CH hit by 25%, if CH is cast on a target with a Riptide hot still active. (Mandatory)

Enhancement Tree (7 pts)
Elemental Weapons (2/2) – Increases the passive bonus granted by Earthliving Weapon by up to 40% and increases the effectiveness of Unleash Elements. (Recommended)
Improved Shields (3/3) – Provides up to a 15% increase in the return of Water Shield orbs and a 15% increase in the healing done by Earth Shield. This effect stacks with other healing modifiers like Spark of Life. (Mandatory)
Ancestral Swiftness (2/2) - Reduces the cast time of your Ghost Wolf spell by 2 sec and increases movement speed by 15%. This does not stack with other movement speed increasing effects. This a very strong mobility talent. (Recommended)

Elemental Tree (3 pts)
Acuity (3/3) – With an increase of up to 3% on all spell critical chances (both dps and healing), Acuity is a very good talent to have. (Recommended)

The whole build can be found here: Resto Shaman 3/7/31 .

There are variations of the build to get 3/3 Focused Insight. If you want to get Focused Insight, which can be better either for instances or for some bosses when you can't find the time to shoot any Lightning Bolt, you have the choice to drop some of these: Totemic Focus, Cleansing Waters, Telluric Currents. If you have another resto shaman in your group with Totemic Focus, then you can probably drop these 2 points and 1 into Cleansing Waters. The other option is to drop Telluric Currents and another point either in Totemic Focus or Cleansing Waters.
My view at the moment is that I can not be sure I'll be able to finish a long fight without Telluric Currents, when mana regen becomes better with gear then we can probably go away from it.

Part 3 The Glyphs

With Cataclysm, the glyph system changed to a 3 layers one, with Prime glyphs, Major glyphs and Minor glyphs. Not all classes/specs have the same amount of useful glyphs and we are probably in the middle, with some glyphs being mandatory as boost to our core play, and other just marginaly useful.

Prime Glyphs

Glyph of Earth Shield – Increases the amount healed by your Earth Shield by 20%.
Glyph of Riptide – Increase the duration of Rptide by 40%.
Glyph of Water Shield – Increases passive regen of your WS by 50%.
Glyph of Earthliving Weapon – Increases the effectiveness of your ELW’s periodic healing by 20%.

These three glyphs are probably the only ones we should look at. The three of them are increasing some of our most used abilities.
Earthliving Weapon is much stronger for raid healing than instances, and could be an alternative to consider once you're starting to run more raids than instances. There has been some interesting tentative raid log analyses about the "hps" value of each of these glyphs. The conclusion seem to be the following:
As long as you need the regen keep the Glyph of Water Shield, once you're doing well mana wise you can drop it for ELW. Until then, for raids, ELW seems to be roughly the same strength as riptide, and about half better than ES. So drop ES and take ELW, even if you're tank healing. This is partly due to the fact that, sadly, ES does not benefit from our mastery.

Major Glyphs

Glyph of Chain Heal – Increases the healing done to targets beyond the first by 15% but
decreases the amount received by the first target by 10%
Glyph of Ghost Wolf – Your GW gains 5% additional movement speed.
Glyph of Healing Stream – Increases resistances by 195.
Glyph of Healing Wave – Your Healing Wave also heals you for 20% of the healing effect when you heal someone .
Glyph of Hex - Reduces the cooldown of your Hex spell by 15 sec.

A little more "choice" here. The only glyph that should probably always be taken is Healing Wave. After that take Chain Heal for 25-Man raiding, Healing Stream if you're using that totem and/or don't have access to kings/wild, Hex for instances, Ghost Wolf for a small speed boost when you need to move quickly in a raid (or between wipes :p).

Minor Glyphs

Glyph of Renewed Life – Your Reincarnation spell no longer requires a reagent.

The other minor glyphs can be useful but are not linked to healing in any way.

Part 4 The Relative Weight of Stats

Now that we have considered our basic bonuses, have looked at our mastery talent, and all our other talents, we can discuss the relative use of the different basic stats we will be interested in as a healer.

Many analyses have been done on sites like the elitist jerks forums about the relative values of each stat. If for some classes a common point has been found it is still unclear for shamans, mostly because our mastery is very hard to model.
The agreed point is that intellect will be better than anything else, as for all other healers and casters. Int is a main stat though, a difference from any other we will discuss. Knowing what stat is better than another (at least on paper) will be important for several things: choosing the right gear, gemming correctly, and finally reforging.
I am not going to details the discussions I have read, and a final common ground hasn't yet been found by the community, but the one that makes the most sense to me is:

INT > SPI > CRIT > MASTERY/HASTE

The reason is that mana regen, at least for the moment, is very important. Some classes have tools or abilities to regen mana, shamans have very few, the two strongest being spirit and water shield with Improved Water Shield procs, hence crit rating. Because of IWS, crit is for us both a throughput stat and a regen stat, when haste and mastery are only throughput stats. That is the reason for crit to be considered better for resto shamans than haste, which was our desired stat at the end of LK. Take also in consideration our numerous talents that are activated by crits.

Haste can also be considered a "plateau" stat, also called "break points" because some specific values of haste can now give you more ticks of hots during a fixed hot duration. I copied for you an extract of the EJ forum with the 3 break points you should consider (at least for your first raids):
Number of Riptide ticks Haste Needed Haste Needed with WoA Totem
9 ticks 708 Rating 518 Rating
10 ticks 1176 Rating 964 Rating
11 ticks 1645 Rating 1410 Rating
You should probably target 518 haste at first, and then 964 when your gear increases. The next break point should probably not be your target before the next tier of raiding (tier 12).

To Sum-up the stats discussion:

When you chose gear, keep to the Int > Spi > Crit > Haste/Mastery choice.

When you chose your gems, always go for a pure Int gem, unless the socket bonus is good, and then gem for Int/Spi (Blue socket) or Int/Crit (Yellow socket).

When you reforge, follow this priority: Haste / Mastery reforged to Spi / Crit
You can reforge mostly haste as long as you keep to one of the break points, having at least 518 haste rating. Haste is a good stat but only crucial for urgencies and mastery will serve mostly the same goal with no mana cost. Keeping up to a Riptide hot break point is a good plan though.
As for Spirit or Crit, that depends on how you feel with your mana regen and your ability to keep WS up at all times (trust me, that is a skill that has to be learned). If your mana is ok, reforge to crit, if you're oom often, reforge to spirit.

Part 5 The Way of the Wave

Here I will try to talk a little about gameplay. I'm only playing a resto shaman since a few months, and have only raided normal ICC with her, I'm now trying my hands at heroic cataclysm instances but have yet to touch lvl 85 raids.
This is to warn you that even though I did my research, please take my advices with a grain of salt, and if you want to add ideas and comments, you are the most welcome.

Gameplay Synergies

Playing a resto shaman is a very interesting experience. There is a lot of synergies between very different abilities created through the restoration talent tree. I'm going to detail them by order of importance:

Tidal Waves - TW will allow you to burst heal (increasing the crit chance of your HS) or fast spam costless heal (hasted HW) or faster cast a big heal (hasted GHW). This talent is the reason for which you should never cast a direct heal if you're not under the effect of TW, unless there is a pressing urgency (Riptide coolddown being a little longer than 2 casts of HS). Remember if you have a free gcd that Water Shield needs to be recast regularly (it costs 0 mana to cast) and that Telluric Currents, if you have it, is a mana regen.
Improved Water Shield - Most of your crits will give you mana through this talent. Recast Water Shield as often as you can, and preferably before it reaches 1 charge left. TW + HS + IWS is a strong combo, strong enough for TW+HS being considered better hps and hpm than TW+GHW, despite HS being worst hpm than GHW on paper.
Nature’s Blessing - Increases the heals you give to your Earth Shield target. This is the second reason for which you should keep ES on your tank at all times (the first one being that ES is really good by itself).
Ancestral Healing & Ancestral Awakening - Two other talents activated by your criticals. The first one is a damage reduction for your tank, the second one a free heal proc on your raid. Both are passive and you won't have to look for them, but they are here as reminders that our crits are so very useful for us on many different ways.
Focused Insight - If you have this talent, it can make good combos like TW+Shock+GHW for a big strong burst of heal. You can also use Earth Shock that reduces atatck speed by 10% on any mob not immune to that effect, that will be roughly 10% less damage on your tank. Having FS is getting used to shock regularly will ensure you don't forget to do it when it can be of use.

Healing Rotations

Now that we have looked at the synergies provided by our skills and talents, let us discuss about gameplay.
The basics are: Earth Shield is your friend precast it before any fight and keep it up on your tank, Tidal Waves is super good and you should use it as much as you can, Improved Water Shield as so nice you should never ever let your Water Shield go down.

If we refine that into "classic" situations and try to provide simple "rotations" for them (I use quotes because rotations are much more common to dpsers than healers, and these should not be considered as optimal but as guidelines).

Low Mana Cost Rotation

Riptide (6s cd) > Healing Wave (1.7s) > Healing Wave (1.7s) >
Water Shield / Lightning Bolt / Chain Heal

This ensures that you use the 2 TW buffs with fast and very low cost HW. You can then chose what you want to do during the remaining time until Riptide goes off cooldown.

High Throughput Rotation

Riptide (6s cd) > Healing Surge (1.5s) > Healing Surge (1.5s) >
Water Shield / Lightning Bolt / Chain Heal

This is the same idea, where HW is replaced by HS for burst. If you really need the healing output you can replace HS by GHW, they will provide you more reliable healing. But you should know that, under TW, HS is a better heal than GHW, both hps wise and mana wise.

In group/raid damage situations, Chain Heal and Healing Rain are your main tools. Be careful though, they cost a lot of mana, and if people aren't close enough they could be a big waste. In some occasions snipe healing with TW combos will be your best choice.

Totems

I can't say I always have the same totems, in fact I change very often, even sometimes during a single fight.
Wrath of Air is probably the only one I always have, unless there is another resto/elemental shaman in my group/raid.
I use the mana totem most of the time, though not if I can have a Blessing of Might, switching then to Healing Stream.
As for the fire totem, unless it is already provided by another character, I use the spellpower one.
My earth totem is the one that changes the most often during a fight, to use tremor for anti-fear, or even sometimes the slowing totem. On usual I use the armor or strength totem.

Movement

If you took Ancestral Switness you will both have a basic speed boost (very nice) and an instant change to your Spirit Wolf form for emergencies.
Keep your SW form change on a hotkey, and react quickly, the faster we are out of the fire, the faster we can heal again securely.

I hope this big wall of text was of some use to you. And I wish you a lot of fun with your shamans. To end this all, please all remember: "Keep your water shield up!" :)

Holy Paladin Cataclysm Build at level 85

2010-12-27T10:50:00.004+01:00

This is an update of my previous posts about Holy Paladin builds since patch 4.0.1:
Cataclysm Holy Paladin Build
Patch 4.0.1 is going live. You are not prepared!
Holy Raiding with a ToR build.
Several things have changed since, especially the launch of Cataclysm and the fact that you are probably all lvl 85 now (at least the readers interested into my previous articles for lvl 80 Holy raid healing).
So here is the update, for patch 4.0.3a with the recent change (nerf? :p) to Tower of Radiance and Light of Dawn. I have said before that LoD strength could create the opportunity for 2 different raid healing builds, but it's recent cut by 40% most probably closes this idea.

I must remind you that I'm not playing a Holy Paladin anymore and that my paladin is still 80, so this post is more for the sake of not leaving people with a 80 build, and written from the views I get both from elitist jerks holy paladin forum and the holy paladins from my guild (that are raiding now).

This post will also be limited to Holy talent tree, targeted at raiding. I will not cover itemization, this will be covered into a general healer's post that should happen later this week if I get enough time for that.

Holy Paladin Talent tree

Here I will detail the talent points at level 85, which means 41 points, 31 of which (at least) have to be into the Holy tree before you can look at the other paladin trees.
This build is a 31/3/7 it is a stricly PvE build, intended at raiding & instances. I will try to comment and justify the choices that can be done in the build. the mandatory PvE talents will not be commented upon. All comments are at the end of the talent list.

Holy Tree (31)

Protector of the Innocent (3/3) Casting a targeted heal on any target, except yourself, also heals you for 3722 to 4282.

Judgements of the Pure (3/3) Your Judgement increases your casting and melee haste by 9% for 1 min.

Clarity of Purpose (3/3) Reduces the casting time of your Holy Light and Divine Light spells by 0.5 sec.

Last Word (2/2) Gives your Word of Glory a 60% increased critical chance when used on targets with 35% or less health.

Divine Favor (1/1) Increases your spell casting haste by 20% and spell critical chance by 20% for 20 sec.

Infusion of Light (2/2) Increases the critical effect chance of your Holy Shock by 10%. In addition, your Holy Shock critical effects reduce the cast time of your next Holy Light or Divine Light by 1.50 sec.

Daybreak (2/2) Your Flash of Light, Holy Light and Divine Light have a 20% chance to make your next Holy Shock not trigger a cooldown if used within 12 sec.

Enlightened Judgements (2/2) Grants hit rating equal to 100% of any Spirit gained from items or effects, and increases the range of your Judgement by 10 yards. In addition, your Judgement instantly heals you for 2481 to 2853.

Beacon of Light (1/1) The target becomes a Beacon of Light to all members of your party or raid within a 60 yard radius. Each heal you cast on party or raid members will also heal the Beacon for 50% of the amount healed. Only one target can be the Beacon of Light at a time. Lasts 5 min.

Speed of Light (3/3) Grants 3% spell haste and reduces the cooldown of Holy Radiance by 30 sec. Casting Holy Radiance increases your movement speed by 60% for 4 sec.

Sacred Cleansing (1/1) Your Cleanse spell now also dispels 1 Magic effect.

Conviction (3/3) Gives you a 3% bonus to damage and healing for 15 sec after causing a critical effect from a weapon swing, spell, or ability. This effect stacks up to 3 times.

Aura Mastery (1/1) Causes your Concentration Aura to make all affected targets immune to Silence and Interrupt effects and improve the effect of all other auras by 100%. Lasts 6 sec.

Tower of Radiance (3/3) Healing the target of your Beacon of Light with Flash of Light or Divine Light has a 100% chance to generate a charge of Holy Power.

Light of Dawn (1/1) Consumes all Holy Power to send a wave of healing energy before you, healing up to 5 of the most injured targets in your party or raid within a 30 yard frontal cone for an amount depending on your charges of Holy Power.

Protection Tree (3)

Divinity (3/3) Increases all healing done by you and all healing effects on you by 6%.

Retribution Tree (7)

Crusade (3/3) Increases the damage of your Crusader Strike, Hammer of the Righteous, and Templar's Verdict by 30%, and the damage and healing of your Holy Shock by 30%. In addition, for 15 sec after you kill an enemy that yields experience or honor, your next Holy Light heals for an additional 300%.

Improved Judgement (2/2) Increases the range of your Judgement by 20 yards.

Pursuit of Justice (2/2) You have a 100% chance to gain a charge of Holy Power when struck by a Stun, Fear or Immobilize effect. In addition, increases your movement and mounted movement speed by 15%. This effect does not stack with other movement speed increasing effects.

Comments and possible changes

The goal of this build is both maximizing the hps and getting Pursuit of Justice. The main sacrifice done to get this talent is Eternal Glory in the protection tree.
This is a discutable choice, but with the recent nerf to Tower of Radiance, you will generate Holy Power much slower, mostly by using Holy Shock. Hence you will use Word of Glory less often, hence getting less use from Eternal Glory. Because of that I think a 15% speed increase at all times with a speed boost after using a judgement is more profitable. Especially during raids, but even in heroic instances, you will have to move a lot, and you all know that Holy Paladins aren't the best at healing in movement.
So being able to move faster and start to heal again faster after a movement will always be a nice thing for us.

There is a small leeway in the build though, in the Holy tree.

When you will be comfortable with raid encounters and know where to be at the right moment to limit damage to yourself, and/or can recast your judgement a little more often than every minute, you can drop points into Protector of the Innocent or Enlightened Judgements. To get some in:
Paragon of Virtue (2/2) Reduces the cooldown of Divine Protection by 10 sec, Hand of Sacrifice by 15 sec and Avenging Wrath by 30 sec.
If you can use Avenging Wrath on every cooldown with this talent it will result in about 2% gain of free hps. PotI is a very nice free survivability talent though, chose what you prefer.

The other debatable point is trading one point from Last Word to get:
Blessed Life (1/2) You have a 50% chance to gain a charge of Holy Power whenever you take direct damage. This effect cannot occur more than once every 8 seconds.
This talent, though not useful on every encounter, can give you some free Holy Power when you need it the most (aoe raid damage phases). And Last Word use is very situational and was more suited to LK spiky healing style. Though still nice for heroics when you can have to save an overzealous dpser, Last Word is definitely less useful in raids and unless you are strictly a tank healer this switch could be better for you.

Here is a direct link at the basic build: Holy Paladin 85 build - 31/3/7
Keep in mind the small changes discussed before and modify it according to your preferred playstyle.

I hope this article can help some of you, and as always comments will be much appreciated.

edit (12/27):
I am still waiting to get some more raid logs to analyze pondering if Tower of Radiance is worth keeping at all now that it does not affect Holy Light.
If you are purely a tank healer, you will probably use Divine Light from time to time on your Beacon target and it could still be worthwhile. But I think that any paladin not being on tank duty should ponder about dropping it completely.
Some first raid logs are showing that ToR could result in very few Holy Power gain, so low as 3 HP per boss fight. It should be clear that 3 talent points to get 3 HP in a whole fight is definitely not worth the investment, Blessed Life gives more for only one point in several encounters.

"To the "Scorched" Ground, Baby !"

2010-12-15T10:37:00.004+01:00

You'll have to pardon me the reference to this now legendary (more than epic) phrase from Ghostcrawler, adapted for Cataclysm. I read the info on MMO Champion this morning, and even though I'm not playing my Holy Pally lately, it still made me sad for all of you that are reading this blog.

Holy Paladin Nerfing 101

Stage 1 - Destruction of the ToR build/gameplay: Holy Light will not give Holy Power anymore when cast on your Beaconed target.
The ToR buile was based on generating as much Holy Power as you could for as cheap as you could to use Word of Glory as often as possible. This gave you a good amount of "free" healing as long as you kept your rotation up (HS/HL/HL/WoG ...repeat). As I said before this was a mean of mimiccing what has always been the Holy Paladin effectiveness: longevity during encounters. It was used with all our other tricks (like going to melee and hitting a boss when you could to generate mana) to try keeping your mana up during a raid. When other healing classes are based on their mana going down and then blowing big cds to get it up again, Holy Paladins are based on trying to "free heal" as much as they can to stay roughly at teh same mana level during all an encounter. We have few mana regen abilities, so if our mana goes down, it is hard to get it up again, and we want to be able to burst heal if needed, so we have to keep it as high as we can during a whole fight.
What does that mean? It means that, if shit doesn't happen during a raid, a Holy Paladin playing
correctly will stay at a very high mana level during a whole raid encounter. That is what blizzard is "reproaching" us, that paladins finish a fight with 90% mana too often ... so yes, you're just all
playing too well my friends, you whouls be clumsier with your gameplay and blizzard would then let us live :P

Stage 2 - Light of Dawn healing is reduced by 40%
They could have just halved it, but it's "only" 40%, what a joke. LoD was not strong enough before being linked to Holy Power. when they changed it they buffed it and removed the CD, not enough testing on their side clearly, but to nerf it that strongly two weeks after ... must have been a serious missjudgement on their side.

In the end what do I think of all that?

I don't bother much, mostly because I'm playing shaman now, and also because I've seen too many of these nerfs. My grin is ... you know what? Arena season 9 is starting at the same time ... and Bliz is, once again, trying to convince us that these changes are because of PvE, when I directly see them targeted as PvP nerfs.
Call me a cynic, think what you want, I hate how PvP always influence PvE balance. We've asked them for a looooong time now to separate how abilities work in PvE and PvP so that they can do whatever they want with PvP without influencing PvE balance. But they are not doing it (I accept it's hard to code especially for "world pvp") and it still pollute the PvE experience of everyone.

A Change of Heart

2010-12-08T14:08:00.003+01:00

Lich King has been a very stressful time for me as a healer. I sincerely think that it was the worst time since the beginning of the game for all healers. The reason is relatively simple, mana was nearly infinite as soon as you got your first epics. The developpers had to provide us with a challenge and as mana management wasn't one anymore, they enforced more damage spikes into the game.
Before this last expension damage was more controlled, a tank wasn't going to die in a 2s interval and none was going to die in one shot if not at full hp. People were dying when the healers were out of mana, not before, unless they made major blunders.

Wrath of the Lich King changed that and unless you're not doing what you should (and I mean by that doing content according to your gear level which means for most of us doing ICC hard mode considering how was most people gear before the launch of Cataclysm), you surely got this stressful feeling that even 1s of lag can turn your tank into a dead man and your raid to wipe.

I don't like this stress, this mandatory super fast reactive play in response to spiky strong damage. And I was having a lot of hopes for Cataclysm to bring back the "old style" when thinking was more effective than spamming and you had time to chose the right heal for the right time instead of pressing your strongest and fastest heal button as fast as you could.

It seems that it is the direction we're going to, and I'm happy of that. But Holy Paladins changed a lot too with the introduction of patch 4.0 and further. We lost a lot of our core abilities (Judgement heal, Holy Shield, Holy shield hot, several benedictions and others). We gained Holy Power and our new rotation style of play. It is fun and a lot of change from before and it surely makes the Holy paladin a very unique experience to play compared to other healers.
But sadly I don't like it.

What I want is for my choices to matter and not only for my talent spec. A rotation play is fixed, the best way to play is already written, follow your rotation, any diverging is a loss. My view on our new playstyle is that your only choice is who you heal, and even for that there is optimum and sub-optimum. I could be a bit reductive and paint it darker than it is, but that's what I feel. I don't really think that this concept of Holy Power allows for managing your mana by making the right choices, it is just a tool to allow you by using Word of Glory to duplicate very differently what paladins have always done since the beginning: being power batteries that run out after everyone else to keep up the tank as long as possible. Before we were using mana feedbacks with tools like Illumination, now were are using free heals obtained through Holy Power.

Even though it is fun to play, I like to think. So I'm going to leave my paladin behind, even if still fondly attached to her and her frostwyrm. I'm going to start Cataclysm as a Resto shaman, as I already wrote about before.
I'll still be a healer, and I'll continue to post about healing in instances, and later raids, but I will not provide specific paladins inputs anymore as I don't like to talk without facts. I'm sorry for my fellow paladins that like the blog, I promise I'll try to give you general healing inputs that can be of use to you as any other healer, like the Heling Through series that will hopefuly continue into Cataclysm.

I wish you all good times into Cataclysm, and as always, have fun. I hope to see you here again soon. And congratulations for surviving this deadly wall of text attack.

Optimizing your Holy Power Use

2010-12-07T09:41:00.003+01:00

I got a question on my ToR build post about the change of LoD and the best use of Holy Power considering it. Just quoting a part of the question "I am getting mixed input with WoG vs LoD and which to use".

Light of Dawn has changed recently from being a fixed strength heal on a 30s CD to being cast with Holy Power and without CD. One important fact to keep in consideration is that is still activate Holy Beacon (though it is not sure this will continue).
This change has two important consequences.

First LoD is not as bad as before, with a 3 HP stack and reasonable spellpower it becomes a strong aoe (cone) heal, not far from 10K / target affected. The position issue remains, and it is still a bit situational, but if you can manage to get two or more people in your cone (plus you) it is now a strong healing output ability.

Secondly, Holy Power now has two uses, Word of Glory or Light of Dawn. Obviously the uses are very different, one is a single target strong heal that can benefit from 2 talents (Eternal Glory and Rule of Law), the other is a raid healing ability that only benefits from its own glyph.

From my point of view LoD has always been very situational, but this change makes it strong enough to be valuable in situations like infest heals in a Hard Mode Lich King fight, it wasn't strong/reliable enough before. I am still using an Eternal Glory / Crusade talent template at lvl80 for the reason that I find WoG invaluable when a quick strong heal is needed, which happens to be what I'm the most useful for at the moment (I raid with resto druids and damage spikes are the only thing they can't deal with much better than me).

But I wanted to get inputs for the future, so I went to look at some parsing for good raiding guilds in the last days of the beta (when this change was pushed and before beta was turned off). Here are the results.

There seem to be two "templates" for Holy Paladins now.

The first template is a tank healer based on the TOR build & rotation for mana efficiency and spike management. You will do a little bit or raid healing with Holy Shock and Word of Glory from time to time, but most of your heal will be on your tank. LoD will only used in very specific occasions, when the raid groups up or on the melee group nearby the tank, if you use it properly with Beacon it will also be a spike heal on your tank.

The second is based on LoD "spam" for raid healing, this will require you to move often to position as efficiently as you can, your Beacon should be on the tank at all times to use LoD Beacon proc. You will use a Divinity template as you'll nearly never use Word of Glory.
Both of these templates have been used in lvl 85 raids and are efficient enough for me to mention them, the first one seem to be the most efficient, close to the output of resto druids (which are still very strong despite the various nerfs they got lately). But I think this is due to the fact that a LoD build is harder to master and requires getting used to. You'll need to move a lot and depending on your position the number of persons you will affect with a LoD will strongly change your hps. Moving speed boot enchants are advised, and don't forget you'll main HP source will still be Holy Shock on a 6s cooldown, keep crusade for that.

We'll have to wait until raids are live for more inputs, but at least this give us a choice of spec and not only one direction and gameplay to focus on, which is always good.

Where did my Insight go ?

2010-11-26T18:47:00.002+01:00

During the Lich King era mana regeneration became more and more a non issue for healers. And even since the 4.0 patch heal spam and overhealing still reign supreme in raids. The healer metagem of choice still sticks to Insightful Earthsiege Diamond though, I would dare to say more by habit and having used it for now two years.
An interesting point to not though is that there is no upgrade to this meta gem in Cataclysm. The insightful gem disappears from the scope entirely. There is a reason for that, and it is very simple. With the increase of healing spell cost from 80 to 85 and the amount of raid damage of most Cataclysm raid fights, an upgraded Insightful gem would be very very overpowered compared to the other meta for healers.
We do not have final studies at lvl 85 for metagems, because the value of each stat (int/crit/haste/...) has not yet been set for every healer class. But some people have already given it a first look and it seems even at lvl 85 the old Insightful Earthsiege Diamond could still be the best healer metagem. I find it a little silly to use an outdated metagem and usually blizzard corrects the values when something like that happens. But ask to shield using tanks, they would tell you they used a BC enchant for their shield during all the LK period.

So don't sell/drop your Insight yet, you could still use them in Cataclysm.

Nothing that great nowadays ...

2010-11-08T00:40:00.003+01:00

but I must concede I'm still quite happy of it.

It is the first time I'm able to finish the content of an extension before the next one. A big thanks to all the members of my guild, Skyre Hordalis on Dalaran EU. You all deserve a big big hug for all the nights together in the frozen halls of Icecrown Citadel.

Light of Dawn with more flashy flashy light ?

2010-11-05T12:56:00.004+01:00

Two new builds hit the beta servers this week, I'm not going to detail everything but I want to notify you a change for one of the new spells we got with 4.0.1.
For detailed infos you can look at the build 13241 on MMO Champion.

Light of Dawn now uses Holy Power instead of Mana. Now heals up to 5 targets. No longer has a cooldown - Consumes all Holy Power to send a wave of healing energy before you, healing up to 5 of the most injured targets in your party or raid within a 30 yard frontal cone for 1008.96 to 1124.15 per charge of Holy Power.

What does that changes do? Both a buff and a nerf.
No more cooldown is a buff, even if dependent on Holy Power, getting 3 stacks of HP is usually much faster than waiting 30s.
It can now only heal 5 targets, whatever the positioning of your raid. This is clearly intended as a 25-Man raid healing nerf, you will never get more than 5 people in your "aoe cone" in a 10-Man. Blizzard is nerfing most aoe healing recently, especially the paladins which seemed to do too much of their raid healing via aoes (that's a change ...) no surprise LoD finally got the shaft too.

All in all I think that it's an interesting change, at least for 10-Man raiders which will not suffer from the nerf.
Now ... Light of Dawn is a crappy situational heal as it is right now on live. Will it be strong enough with a 3 Holy Power stack to justify its use is to be verified once these changes are live.

Up to now, most paladins are just playing with their "disco ball" and getting silly giggles on vent for using it, it's pimp, it's flashy, it's also near from useless in 10-Man where you will rarely heal even only 3 people with it (but for Festergut perhaps, if you're a lucky healer and sticking to the melee range, usually not the case of a paladin in hard mode).
We'll see what it will be.

Word of Glory and Holy Power stacking

2010-11-02T10:34:00.002+01:00

Busy weekend, Halloween and all, not much sleep, not much wow time, but I found enough to do a Word of Glory testing regarding Holy Power.

The Question:

It has been said on very serious sources (like elitist jerks) that Word of Glory healing power is exponential regarding the number of stack of Holy Power you have, hence asking us to only use it with 3 stacks if you don't want to lose serious hps.
So I did two batches of tests, one with a nooby lvl 13 Holy Paladin created for the occasion, and one with my lvl 80 ilevel 264 main. Each character used WoG 5 times with each 1, 2 and 3 HP stack, and I compared the results between each other, and between character to see the influence of the spellpower coefficient part of WoG.

The Result:

WoG healing of mostly linear in the number of HP stack. Which means that a one HP stack WoG is roughly 1/3 of the healing of a 3 HP stack WoG. It seems that with more than 3K spellpower stacking is slightly more interesting, but at low level you really see WoG being linear in the number of HP stacks.

The Conclusion:

So you can use WoG with 1 or 2 Holy Power, the healing is not exponential. Though remember using WoG is a use of a global cooldown too, so a slight loss of hps in the end. But considering it is not exponential, you should not refrain from using it in emergencies when moving, even if not at full Holy Power.

Healing Balance Discussion - Part 1

2010-10-28T15:36:00.007+02:00

A new build hit the beta servers yesterday: Cataclysm Beta - Build 13221. You can read the details on MMO Champion, as always thx Boubouille.

I'm here going to discuss the major healing balance changes for all classes:

Druids - not affected yet, but GC already announced that they think druids use too much Rejuvenation and will probably see their mana regen nerfed to limit this.

Priests - mostly small buffs, priests are a little lower on raid recounts (even if Blizzard say you should look at them, they obviously do :p)

Shaman - Chain Heal now costs 20% of base mana, up from 17% of base mana. This is a mana nerf supposed limiting the use of chain heal by shamans.

Paladin - ok here comes the big stuff:

Holy Radiance's effectiveness now diminish on targets farther than x yards away.

Global nerf to our big aoe heal, this was announced because it was too strong as it can clearly be seen on the beta raid logs, holy paladin healing is crap until there is a mass aoe damage and they use this skill cleverly, then they start topping the healing meters.

Lay on Hands no longer restores mana.
Beacon of Light now lasts 5 min, up from 1 min.

Not having to re-beacon every minute is nice, it is also a slight mana gain. Not regaining mana with Lay on Hands is on the other hand a strong mana loss (especially if using the glyph of Divinity).

Divine Light base healing has been increased by 30%. From 8538-9512 to 11100-12366
Flash of Light base healing has been increased by 30%. From 5313-5961 to 6907-7750.
Holy Light base healing has been increased by 30%. From 3202-3567 to 4162-4637.
Holy Shock base healing has been increased by 30%. From 3033-3285 to 3943-4271.

Basic buff to our heals, this is supposed to balance the nerf to Holy Radiance, we'll discuss that later on.

Mastery: Illuminated Healing now absorbs 10% of the amount healed, up from 8%. Now lasts 8 sec, up from 6 sec. Each point of mastery increases the absorb amount by an additional 1.25%, up from 1%.

I'm still not convinced by our mastery, even though it's very close to the disc priest Divine Aegis which I know for being effective. It's a strong component pushing us to become raid healers, because if you're healing only one person (aka your tank) you're always "overwriting" the mastery shields.

A Global View on the Changes

If you look at all the changes on a global scale, most aoe healing is nerfed, either directly or by mana limitation (as for chain heal). Analyzing the first raid logs clearly shows that there are some massive raid damage and that aoe heals were very strong, if not dominant, because of that.
Balance seems to be the issue though as Holy Priests still are getting buffs when they already have strong group/raid healing abilities.

What about Holy Paladins ?

In our specific case, our big aoe heal Holy Radiance is nerfed, probably strongly enough for it to get more in par with other classes aoe heals, the priests being what is considered the "good balanced" reference right now.
My concern is that, looking at logs Holy Paladins healing is crap but for Holy Radiance. Our Beacon isn't strong enough, or our direct heals aren't, but clearly we're not on line with other healers on the direct heals side.

Now I'm complaining about something which as already been addressed, as you can read before all our direct heals are getting a 30% base healing buff. My question is: is this enough? My second question is: will it still be enough in tier 13 gear?

A Little Bit of Healing Theorycrafting

I'm going to explain these two questions here, and will probably do a dedicated post about healing theorycrafting later.
A heal strength can only be compared by using HPS: healing per second, which means the healing output a spell gives you per second if you're spamming it. If I take a regular direct heal, it's healing can be obtained by this formula:

base healing + (spell coefficient * spellpower) = global spell healing

You then divide that by its casting time and you get the spell HPS.

We got a buff to the base healing, which means a 30% buff to the first part of the equation. Now, if your gear improves, the only thing that makes your heals stronger is that your spellpower increases. What that means is that with better gear what you consider to decide of the strength of a heal is the spell coefficient and not the base healing.

Now you see where I want to go. Buffing the base healing is perhaps enough to get us in line with the other healers at 85 in blues, even with the nerf to Holy Radiance. But if the spell coefficients are not changed, we will again be lower when gear improves. On the other hand, the Holy Radiance nerf will affect it as strongly at high gear level than in blues, because it affects the global hps and not only the base coefficient.

Conclusion

I can understand that aoe healing could looks mindless and unskilled. And I can understand that Blizzard wants to see more dedicated healers having to target people to heal them. I have nothing against that.
My fear is that the nerf to Holy Radiance will put the paladins back down where they are right now in ICC at lvl 80. And even if I don't really like the idea that most of our hps is a single spell on a 30s cooldown, it's never fun to always be the lowest on the charts.
My second concern is that the direct heal buffs that are supposed to balance that aoe nerf are probably not right. Increasing only the base spell healing could be enough right now, but it won't last as I explained.

I understand that some could not be familiar with theorycrafting, and I'm not posting too often about it, most of the time only giving you my conclusions.
But an educated healer can better understand the problems of spell balance, and how nerfs/buffs affect it, so I will try to write a complete and more detailed / easy to understand post about spell balance later.

On a side note, my resto shaman is close to 70 now :P

Bugs & Blogs & Misc

2010-10-27T17:10:00.002+02:00

Just an update slash news post today.

As you all know we had a bug patch on live today (or yesterday if you're a US player). The description is on MMO champion (as all other sorts of goodness about Cataclysm that I won't cover), I'm just putting the bug fixes here:

Using a "/cast!" command no longer disconnects players.
Mousing over objects that generate a cogwheel should no longer cause the client to freeze or disconnect.
Guild Tabards should no longer display on characters not actually wearing the Guild Tabard.
Floating combat text should always appear.
NPC Health Bars/Nameplates are now appearing correctly.

If you still experience some bugs, like the very bothering ground spell effect texture one (try to raid Hallion when half your raid can't see the fire/shadow patches on the ground and you'll discover a new meaning for crazy), I'd advise you to go read Zinn's blog, which covers all the bugs I've encountered and gives some fixes to most of them.

On another note you have perhaps read my ranty post about the state of pally healing at the moment. Also a bit ranty but very interesting and informative is a post from Tarinae on her blog: A Healadin's Tear. You should go check out that blog, good things to read there.

That's all for today, short post, I'm still working on number analysis about holy at 85 using raid logs and videos from the beta (a bit postponed by Blizzcon), and on Word of Glory healing per stack of holy power at low level / high level / high gear level. I'll post that probably later this week.

As always, have fun, and if healing as a paladin isn't fun right now well, try leveling a rogue, they just destroy everything in bgs right now :P

Healing 5-Man after patch 4.0.1.

2010-10-24T14:49:00.005+02:00

I have already commented enough of my views about Holy in raids since patch, but I've not said much about 5-Man. And as it seems some are struggling with them, I'll try to give a few hints about how to handle a rushing instance group. And trust me, my guildies are not stopping for more than bosses ... and most of our dpsers seem to be completely suicidal to me lately, so healing 5-Man can be intense :P

First, you should have the right spec. I advise you to read my earlier posts:
Patch 4.0.1 is going live. You are not prepared!
First impressions on 4.0.1
You should have a 31/2/3 spec with an emphasis on Holy Shock and Word of Glory. The reason for that is that they will be your main tools for any 5-Man.

The ToR style is perfect for instances, it is very rare that your tank will need more than the Beacon influx added to the occasional direct heal used to get Holy Power. Perhaps more will be need if your tank is slightly low geared or if you're into heroic HoR, but on a regular basis you'll be perfectly fine with a regular ToR build.

That means that you will be doing that, with that rough priority order:
1. Beacon of Light on your tank;
2. Use Word of Glory when you have 3 Holy Power stacks (and only 3 !), repeat if you get an Eternal Glory proc;
3. Use Holy Shock on cooldown, if only your tank is hurt, use it on him, if anyone in the group is hit, and unless your tank is in critical, heal the group member (+1 Holy Power);
4. Direct heal your tank with a Holy Light if you're not in a hurry, with a Flash of Light if you're in a hurry, with a Divine Light if he's very badly hurt (+1 Holy Power);
5. Direct heal one of the group members if your HS is on cooldown and you don't have 3 stacks of Holy Power and it's urgent.

Now if you have enough crit/haste your HS/WoG + Beacon will handle 75% of your healing. I don't think you should have any mana issues with this "rotation" as WoG is free, can sometimes be used like 3 times in a row thx to Eternal Glory, and because HS is our most efficient heal per mana skill.
If your mana is going down, use Divine Plea while running between pulls, but that should really not be an issue. Don't forget to judge for speed and a bit of mana too.

If you are still not at ease, I suggest that you test this "rotation" on yourself for a little while, it's easy to maintain once you get used to it, as any dps "rotation" (yes several paladins are saying we are now pew pew dpsers ;p).

Have fun and if you ever encounter issues, don't hesitate to comment here :)

Feedback about Holy at 80, and beyond.

2010-10-20T16:43:00.005+02:00

I won't hide it, Holy right now is crap. Perhaps I'm a bit strong with this word, but that's what I feel when I look at a recount after a raiding night. Sure most of the time we're doing fine, but I'm raiding with 2 very good druids and they're doing like 85% of the healing (call me a bad healer if you want, I know what I'm doing).

Before 4.0.1 I was confident in my healing, even when I wasn't pushing the numbers. I knew that I could do it and that if it was needed I could jump into power healing mode and start keeping all our 10-Man raid up for one minute or two just spamming Holy Light like crazy with my Beacon on our tank. None would die as long as I got enough mana, and I was playing conservatively. That saved us on Lich King, and I was proud of that.

Now I'm crap on numbers, but the sad part is that I'm not better than other healers on the mana side, unless I'm just using ToR, which seriously can't keep a tank/raid up by itself. If I need to start spamming Divine Light ... well things start to go wrong. My DL cost more than a holy priest Greater Heal and heals for seriously less at equal spellpower. We don't have any raid healing tool at 80, no more Sacred Shield & hot, no more judgement healing. Light of Dawn is cute but crap and way too situational.

That can sound like whining, and it probably is. But I'm dead serious on it, I can't support my raid anymore, or at least not enough to justify a healer spot on hard modes.

What about the future for Holy Paladins?

So I'm considering going ret until Cataclsym, at least I can perhaps do enough dps to be useful. But what about the future of pally healing?
Some perhaps remember how prot paladins were during most of TBC, and how holy paladins were during half of it, after being op at start. The answer for me is simple, balance is hard to achieve and when a class get shafted it often last for several months. Be it bad design, or a producer choice to balance the number of players on that specific class, it's not a fun spot to be in.
And I don't want to be playing a useless class/spec when we rush for 85 and raiding during Cataclysm, I don't have the time needed to rush two characters, so I need to pick-up the right healing class before Cataclysm goes live.

To answer that question I looked into how holy paladins are doing during the first raids that started this weekend on the Beta test realms. You can find very good videos on MMO Champion, I'm going to advise you two of them, that are being casted by holy paladins. You can watch them on Youtube following these links:
Paragon vs Halfus Wyrmbreaker
Paragon vs Chimaeron
I also read the elitist jerks holy paladin forum (always a good source of up-to-date information).

The answer is: Holy Paladins are doing great at lvl 85. Most 25-Man raids seem to be using something like 5-6 healers, 2 of them being Holy Paladins which are most of the time topping the meters. So what? Let's rejoice?

Not so fast my friends. If you look at the recount, and the timing of the heals, the holy paladins are using a pure ToR rotation with Light of Down and Holy Radiance inserted during raid damage periods. These raid damage timings are big, often requiring the healers to top the whole raid from 5% to 100% in about 30s. and if you look at the recounts, the paladins are far behind until these huge raid damage happen. So why are they topping the meters, because of Holy Radiance, our new raid healing spell that we won't get before Cataclysm.

Yes it seems HR is too strong, but what would they be without it, because they are clearly only helping on the raid/tank with a ToR rotation beside using HR and that is not pulling the numbers.
Now let us read the last comment of Blizzard after these first raid tests:

Yes, we buffed the 5 paladin direct heals (FoL, HL, DL, HS, WoG). This is a change for both level 80 and 85. We are going to tone down Holy Radiance as I described in the other thread. It can be powerful without being 75% of paladin healing.

You can read the two blue posts about the state of Holy Paladins (look for the 18/10 post) and the hotfix deployed thanks to Boubouille blue tracker.

So the devs decided to nerf Holy Radiance, which will bring the paladins probably way lower than what you can see on the two raids I invited you to watch. The questions for me are: will the buffs to our direct heals be enough to keep us competitive at 85, and give us back a healer spot at 80 in any serious raid encounter?

I'll keep looking at raid reports/logs/videos of the beta and try to analyze the buffs comparing them to the "old number" that you can find on Ophelie's blog (thx Ophelie ^^).
I'm kind of sad to say it, but I'm seriously considering switching class for the launch of Cataclysm if Holy Paladins can't be effective healers, at least at 85.

Thanks to my readers.

2010-10-17T12:13:00.006+02:00

A short post today to say this little paladin blog breached 2K readers a day on Wednesday.
That was a huge surprise for me as you are more about 100-200 readers on usual depending on my updates.
So I just wanted to make a post to thank you all that come here, and I hope I can continue to give you useful information on paladin healing in the future.

Have fun with the ToR build, and take care people :)

Holy Raiding with a ToR build.

2010-10-15T15:02:00.004+02:00

So the build I discussed in this post has received a name on elitist jerks forums, the ToR build. ToR stands for our Tower of Radiance talent.

Tower of Radiance (rank 3) : Healing the target of your Beacon of Light with Flash of Light, Holy Light or Divine Light has a 100% chance to generate a charge of Holy Power.

The concept is simple: use Holy Shock on cooldown, use Holy Light on your beacon to gain holy power and then use Word of Glory when you reach 3 holy power. The rotations have been analysed on elitist jerks and the optimal hps seem to be: Holy Shock, Holy Light, Holy Light, Word of Glory. If you get a Daybreak proc then Holy Shock twice on your next shock, if you get en Eternal Glory proc then WoG twice (or thrice, or four times ... you get the idea).

Raiding with ToR

I have raided last night with this build. ICC 10-Man regular with achievements (makes it slightly harder on some fights, or at least it did before patch). About 2 and a half hours raiding, 10 bosses down (Sindragosa and LK left). We wiped once on ... a bug after the ship battle, we were still killed by the opponent boat after having finished the battle and reached Saurfang spot ...
Usually we 3 heal ICC, at least on some fights. Last night we 2 healed it (me and a resto druid) but for Marrowgar because we were not sure of raid healing, and Festergut because we only had 1 ranged dps and had to put 2 healers on Vile Gas range.

As always before I was dual tank healing, though my druid friend was Lifeblooming the tank not having my beacon at all times and helping me with hots. Nearly all I used all night was the ToR rotation, Daybreak is huge, and Eternal Glory "proced" 4 times in a row for me once ... crazy 5x10K free heals.
I never went under about 80% mana, and lost a tank once during the princes because he was tanking Keleseth and lost his purple balls (hey dpsers, calm down please).

Discussion and changes

They are nerfing Speed of Light today in the new beta build (see MMO champion).
Speed of Light has been revamped to only affect Holy Radiance - Speed of Light - Grants 1/2/3% spell haste and reduces the cooldown of Holy Radiance by 30 sec. Casting Holy Radiance increases your movement speed by 20/40/60% for 4 sec.
So Holy Light won't be hastened after your Holy Shock anymore, this is a slight nerf to the whole ToR idea. We'll have to see if it's enough to change it.

I had fun with Light of Dawn too, it's cute, it's ... mostly useless. It doesn't heal for enough when serious raid damage happens and the aoe is too situational / the cd is too long, for it to be really a good utility talent. Right now I'll continue to test it, but I'm wondering about skipping it in the talent tree.

Divine Light is strong, even stronger than Holy Light was before. It is an emergency heal, but with the hp pool of tanks right now, a DL crit will heal for about 50% hps of your tank.

Overall view on Holy raiding with ToR

The ToR build is fun to play, it's more reactive and dynamic than before, and we've gained a lot of mobility, which is a really nice change.
You can keep up a tank with this gameplay and a few Divine Lights tossed on your tank here and there while helping for emergency raid healing (HS & WoG).
Your global healing will be ... quite low. I was at about 1/2 to 2/3 of the effective healing of our druid last night, hot spam is still easy to achieve with the mana pool druids have right now, and their hots seem to be stronger than before.
So don't worry if you're a bit low on the meter, have fun with the new gameplay, and wait until Cata to go live to see how healer mana will be impacted by going to 85. The nice thing of this build is that about 50% of it's healing is mana free (Beacon + WoG) and another part is low mana (HL) so even at 85 it should still be very mana effective.

Now a last word ... ICC normal mode is a joke now, even relatively serious bosses like Putricide or Lanathel are going down so fast that you'll never go out of mana or anything. We're definitely going hard mode next time without any fear for mana or tanks.
Btw our tanks had nearly no problem with aggro. Took them one day to adapt to the new talents/rotations, and warrior need to be very cautious with their rage when engaging, but beside that no boss ever left them.
Dps is crazy in ICC, some classes got just shafted (fury warriors and ret paladins come to mind and are buffed today on live it seems), but most others especially casters are all around 15K+ dps when they were around 11-12K before. I tell you, bosses are going down fast.

I guess it is now time for all of us to go get our frostwyrm. I'll be happy to get it, and wasn't sure we could down hard mode LK before this patch, now I don't doubt anymore at all. It's just a matter of a few weeks at most.
I just hope we won't get burned too fast, and pre-cataclysm event will be enough to keep people on until the extension.

Have fun, go go disco paladins ... grin grin.

First impressions on 4.0.1

2010-10-14T09:03:00.009+02:00

First evening playing Holy with the 4.0.1 patch. My guild decided to only do heroics tonight, to tune and test our new specs / gear / reforging ... etc. Seeing how it was hard for our warrior tanks (my alt among them) to keep aggro, I think it was a good decision.

Several other paladins are also posting their first impressions, some have raided last night (well, on the US servs Wednesday is the second night after patch :p). I'd advise you to read Ophelie on The Bossy Pally and the Giant Spoon, there are several others you can always follow Holy pally activity on HolyPaladin.net.

I was lazy and went for the easy Holy Shock / Word of Glory build with 25 yards judgements (see my previous post about 4.0.1). You can see it below.

Learned the new abilities at the trainer, put my talent points where they should be, changed one gem to get back my meta activated (silly enough I didn't had any yellow gem anymore ... yes int gems are red now).
And then went directly into heroics with a guildies group (we had 2 5-Man groups nearly all night until 1am ... I think people liked the patch for most of it). I did about 4 heroics, 2 with a 264 geared warrior tank and 2 with a 245 geared DK tank.
First thing to say, warriors have been severely hit by the patch, they are rage deprived and if they can't charge a pack they just can't tank it at all. DKs have it much easier, Death and Decay and even more Blood Boil seem to be no-brain aggro tools.
Second thing, tanks are squishier. We'll see tonight how hard they were hit by going into hard mode ICC, but it really seemed to me they were taking more damage (at least when they could get all the mobs on them).

Now what about pally healing?

I was worried about mana ... forget it. If you go for a Holy Shock & Word of Glory spec (the one I posted) and try to abuse it, you'll never ever go under 90% mana. I'm sure it won't be true anymore at level 85 but at 80 in 251-264 gear ... it's just crazy fun. Even when doing heroic Hall of Reflections with a warrior tank my mana never fell under 90% ... and for a healer I consider this instance as entry raid level.
We don't have Flash of Light anymore (it's still in our talents but please get used to ... not use it, it's crap) and Beacon was halved, which means that when party/raid damage happens we have a harder time to get 3+ people to max life while healing the tank in less than 10s. The Holy Shock / Word of Glory works ok for that, but don't hesitate to use Light of Dawn, our new "group heal" I'm not going to say "raid heal" because it's too situational to be reliable in raids, in my opinion (will see tonight how it goes about that).

Beacon was halved and tanks are squishier (their armor was lowered among other things), that means that you will have to directly heal your tank now. Once again, abuse Word of Glory by casting a Holy Light on your tank as soon as he's not full life and you don't have an urgency anywhere else. Holy Light doesn't heal much, but it's crazy cheap and if you cast it on your Beacon, it gives you 1/3 of a Word of Glory, which means about 3K free heal in a few seconds (WoG heals for about 9K for me between regular and crits).
Use Holy Shock as soon as it's up (especially if you have a Daybreak proc). And use Wod of Glory when it's at 3 charges, you'll have about 1/3 chances of having another one free just after thanks to Eternal Glory.

I'm saying it: SPAM HEALS. Seriously do it people!

As long as you only use Holy Light / Beacon + Holy Shock / Word of Glory and Light of Dawn when needed, you'll never see your mana go seriously down, even with a nearly 0 bonus spirit on your gear, I have less than 150 bonus spirit myself (having avoided mp5 gear that was the stat changed to spirit).

I'm not sure our mana will live that easily when casting Divine Light and that will probably be necessary on tanks during raids seeing that they take more damage. Especially that now our Beacon won't heal the second tank for as much.
What does that means for us ? Well, I'll see that tonight but I think paladins aren't the best tank healers anymore (druids will perhaps be). Considering our 50% Beacon, mana efficiency when using small heals constantly instead of big heals, and our mastery (Divine Ageis is huge for raid healing), I think we'll just beacon the tank, and use the gameplay style I tested tonight in heroics on the raid/tank. We'll give a regular healing infusion to the tank, and help to keep the raid up. We're more something like an infinite mana raid support healer in that scenario. More on that later once I'll have tested raiding.

Last point ... Light of Dawn is so pimp, you're being the disco ball every 30s ... silly fun to look at. I was having everyone laugh on vent last night because as soon as my cd was up I was using it and saying "Pimp Light On" ... I tell you it's so pimp and silly I can't resist to have fun with it.

Anyway, have fun, test things and don't hesitate to post comments :P
See you later for some raid feedback.

Patch 4.0.1 is going live. You are not prepared!

2010-10-12T06:58:00.012+02:00

It's announced on MMO Champion (you can read the official announcement here) :

Extended maintenance will begin tonight at midnight, Tuesday, October 12 for the release of patch 4.0.1.

Patch 4.0.1 is going live on the US servers, it should be the same on the EU servers tomorrow. Time to work on your new talent tree if you have not yet, to get all the glyphs you can get your hands on before their price explodes (glyphs cost 3 times more ink to make after the patch), and all the jazz.
If you have not yet downloaded the 6.5Gb of prepatch data, it's probably a good idea to start now if you don't want to be out of the game for hours once the patch is live.

As one of our good friend would say "You are not prepared!" and I think he's right, I'm really not prepared for the huge change coming.

This post will be extended today with all the changes to expect for Holy Paladins: talent tree, gear, glyphs, librams ...
see you later for all of that.

Part I - Gear changes

A lot of stats change with patch 4.0.1 but the main impact for Holy Paladins is that spell power disappear and will come straight from your intellect (not that we usually lack on that), and that all your mana regen based on crits is now something of the past (I can't tell you how much I'm worried about my mana right now) and you'll be based on spirit as all other mana classes.
Intellect will probably remain our main stat, spirit will probably be second as we won't have other sources of mana, I think haste will be vastly preferred to crit now even though a "small heals" build could benefit from some crit (more on that later).
Reforging is also introduced and will allow you to change between haste/crit and mastery, even perhaps remove things like hit rating if you're using a dps weapon right now, for example.

A note on mastery.
We have three ranks as you can see on the empty Paladin talent calculator from wowtal. The three ranks will be gained simply by having 31pts in the Holy tree. The two first are fixed, the efficiency of the third one will be based on your mastery rating:
Obviously anyone having ever looked at the stats of a Disc Priest in raid knows the potency of Divine Aegis, which is roughly what our third rank of mastery does. Putting a shield on anyone we heal. I definitely like this ability.
Now if we think about our usual role in raiding, tank healing, spamming heals on the tank will not use this ability to the fullest as shields will erase each other.
If your mostly a tank healer, skip mastery, if you're raid healing, invest as much as you can into it.

So to conclude on gear and how you should use reforging:
Intellect > Spirit > Haste (tank healer) or Mastery (raid healer) > Crit

Part II - Talent Tree and Gameplay Mechanics

Talent trees change *a lot* with patch 4.0.1. They are reduced from 51pts depth to 31pts depth, and we'll roughly gain one point every 2 levels starting at 11. At level 80 (79 exactly) you'll have 36 talent points and 41 at lvl 85.
I'm not going to discuss talents points at lvl 85, because I think they will change until the release of Cataclysm, and we still have 2 months to learn to play and adapt to the probable numerous changes to come (remember the end of TBC anyone ?).
My goal is to give you inputs on a lvl 80 Holy Talent Tree and the reasons for my choices.

First thing to know is that you have to invest 31pts into a tree before being able to put any point into another. Which means we'll need 31pts at least into Holy, and hence only 5pts at most into others.

Second thing to know is that our mana regen has been Nerfed to the Ground Baby! (thx GC)
We don't get any mana back from critical heals anymore, Divine Plea has been nerfed hard from 25% to 10% of our total mana while still having the 50% heal cut nerf attached to it, and to add the last stone, Divine Favor doesn't cut heal costs by 50% it's now just a panic button to burst heals for 20s.

Third thing to know is the introduction of Holy Power. This new "resource" is similar to combo points capped to 3 that you'd get when using some abilities and that allow you to use special abilities linked to that resource.
How do you get Holy Power? You get one when using Holy Shock (so we'll shock as often as we can) and when casting a regular heal (Flash of Light, Holy Light or Divine Light) on the target of our Beacon of Light.
How will we use Holy Power? For Holy Paladins the answer is quite straightforward at lvl 80: Word of Glory. So we will now have 2 instant heals (aka usable while moving) one on a cd and one depending on our Holy Power stack.

Fourth thing to know (yes yes there are quite a lot of changes) is that all healing classes are now based on the same basic core abilities:

a fast and costly heal : Flash of Light,
a medium slow and cheap heal : Holy Light,
a strong long and costly heal : Divine Light.

Flash of Light (FoL) will probably just disappear from your cast bar, it costs too much and will mostly be replaced completely by Holy Shock / Word of Glory.
Holy Light will be our regular spam heal and Divine Light will be the "emergency" big heal that will probably not be used much before Cataclysm is out with its huge life pools (expect more than 100K hps for a tank starting raids in there).

Now that we have cleared all the general changes to the gameplay mechanics for Holy Paladins, let's look at the talents. First look at the non holy talents to decide if we want to invest 5pts out of the Holy tree. Id advise you to open another window and use wowtal to look at the talents while reading this section.

The Protection Tree
Divinity: 6% bonus to healing is good, we already had it and we liked it, if we can we'll want to get these 3 points.
Eternal Glory: 30% chance to not use your Holy Power when casting Word of Glory will be a huge boost, if you've read the section before you know we will use WoG a lot, as much as we can but most of the time only with 3 Holy Power, these 2 talent points can give us 3 free points of Holy Power 30% of the time we use WoG

The Retribution Tree
Crusade: 30% boost to the healing of Holy Shock, considering we will use it on nearly every cooldown, that is also a no-brainer talent to take.
Improved Judgement: give you an increased range for your Judgements, will be necessary to reach the distance we have right now it's a filler to get the other talents more than a necessity.
Rule of Law: 15% more crit to Word of Glory, once again WoG will be used as much as we can, 15% crit will help turn it into a strong burst heal ability.

First analysis here: it is clear reading these talents that they are very nice to get, there are a lot of synergies with the Holy Shock / Word of Glory combo that we've discussed before and that will probably be the core of our healing.
At lvl 80 we only have at most 5 points to invest into these two trees, I will definitely invest these 5 points and for me the choices are: 2 points into Eternal glory, 3 points into Crusade.

The Holy Tree
Now we know we'll have 31 points to put into the Holy Tree, and we'll want to reach the top of the tree to get our mastery and the last new ability: Light of Dawn.
I'm not going to analyze all the talents, most of them are just no-brainers. I'll list the ones that I consider as PvP talents or talents for other specs, and that should be avoided into a Holy PvE spec: Arbiter of the Light, Blazing Light, Denounce, Blessed Life.

Now I'll discuss about 3 talents:
Protector of the Innocent - Casting a targeted heal on any target, including yourself, also heals you for 1241 to 1427 / 2482 to 2854 / 3722 to 4282.
Enlightened Judgements - Grants hit rating equal to 50% / 100% of any Spirit gained from items or effects, and increases the range of your Judgement by 5 / 10 yards. In addition, your Judgement instantly heals you for 1241 to 1427 / 2481 to 2853.
Paragon of Virtue - Reduces the cooldown of your Divine Protection by 10 / 20 sec and the cooldown of your Avenging Wrath by 30 / 60 sec.

The choice here is to go PotI 3, EJ 2 or PotI 2, EJ 1, PoV 2. Most trees I have seen are going for the PotI 3, EJ 2 build. Going for 2 points into Paragon of Virtue will give change your Avenging Wrath CD from 3 minutes to 2 minutes which is about a 1.1% healing increase if you use AW on cd in both cases.
You lose mostly 5 yards range for your Judgements and gain 1% healing. The amount healed by PotI is strong with our lvl 80 health pools and having 2 or 3 points into it isn't meaningful much in PvE, 2 points will be mostly enough to keep you up in most encounters without even having to heal yourself.
The only problem is that, not having Improved Judgements from the ret tree yet at 80, we would have to get into 20 yards from a boss to judge with only one point into Enlightened Judgements.

I guess it's more a question of testing both, and choosing what you feel the more comfortable with. Just be aware that the two choices exist and I can't say right now if one is strictly better than the other, especially at 80 with short range judgements.

So here are the 2 Holy talent trees that I would advise at lvl 80, both are 31/2/3 trees.

First one is based on PotI 3, EJ 2.
Second one is based on PotI 2, EJ 1, PoV 2.

Part III - Glyphs

And we're nearly done, what a wall of text today. Last point we need to address are glyphs. With patch 4.0.1 changes to talents glyphs had to change, but even more we get 3 ranks of glyphs now instead of 2: Prime Glyphs, Major Glyphs and Minor glyphs. As their name states, they go from stronger to weaker.
I'm going to list all of the glyphs relevant for Holy and discuss them.

Prime Glyphs

Divine Favor - Increases the duration of Divine Favor by 10 sec.
Holy Shock - Increases the critical effect chance of Holy Shock by 5%.
Seal of Insight - While Seal of Insight is active, the effect of your healing spells is increased by 5%.
Word of Glory - Increases the healing done by Word of Glory by 10%.

I'm going to skip Divine Favor and go for the 3 other glyphs. SoI is obvious and HS/WoG are going to be the core of our healing "rotations".

Major Glyphs

Beacon of Light - Increases the duration of Beacon of Light by 30 sec.
Cleansing - Reduces the mana cost of your Cleanse by 20%.
Divine Plea - Your Divine Plea provides an additional 5% of your total mana.
Divinity - Your Lay on Hands grants twice as much mana as normal and also grants you as much mana as it grants your target.
Light of Dawn - Reduces the cooldown of Light of Dawn by 10 sec and the amount healed by 20%.
Hand of Salvation - Hand of Salvation no longer permanently reduces threat over time but instead reduces all threat as long as Hand of Salvation lasts.
Long Word - Your Word of Glory heals for 50% less up front, but provides an additional 50% healing over 6 sec.

Harder to chose here, as we have more choices. I'm going to skip Light of Dawn because I need to test that spell that seems very situational to me. Long Word seems to be a protection glyph to me as the hot would erase itself if you recast WoG on the same target, but once again as we discussed in the gear section, if you're a raid healer more than a tank healer, that glyph could be very strong for you (shield + hot with a single WoG that's just really huge).
I have said that I expect strong mana issues so I'll definitely go for Divinity. On the mana side, Divine Plea and Cleansing are also contenders. I would probably go for Cleansing because the mana cost of all dispel abilities has been increased. I'm not sure about Divine Plea because it is now so weak I'm wondering if we'll use it at all in a raid encounter (50% less heal for just 10% mana over 15s isn't that attractive).
Beacon of Light could be a good idea, it would save you mana, and reduce the chore of recasting it every minute.

In the end I'll go Divinity/Cleansing for sure, and perhaps Beacon third, or Light of Dawn if it's nice to use after some testing.

Minor Glyphs

Blessing of Kings - Reduces the mana cost of Blessing of Kings by 50%.
Blessing of Might - Reduces the mana cost of your Blessing of Might by 50%.
Insight - Reduces the mana cost of Seal of Insight by 50%.
Lay on Hands - Reduces the cooldown of your Lay on Hands spell by 2 min.

Lay on Hands, Insight for sure, and Kings probably as a filler for third. I hope we'll get more choices later on, the only one I really like is Lay on Hands for the combo with Divinity.

And that will be all for now. Probably long enough for a single post. You can find more info on Coriel's blog, he's also discussing talents and glyphs though we differ on some small points.

Next one will be about the changes of gameplay after I'll have experienced them on live myself. Until then if you want some inputs from the PTRs, go read the elitist jerks thread about Holy Paladins :P

Take care, have fun people.

Discussion about Raid Lock in 4.0.1

2010-10-08T12:54:00.003+02:00

The complete description of the new Flexible Raid Lock System is on MMO Champion. I wanted to give you a few thoughts about it because it can change a few things for many players, especially if you only have one main character.
To say things simply, you can now only down an ICC boss once a week, either in 10-Man or 25-Man (I'll address heroic mode later). You can move from a 10-Man to 25-Man raid or the other way as long as the raid you join has down at least all the boss of your previous tag (it can have down more).
For heroics, your tag is mostly fix as it is now, you can not join an heroic tag different from yours, though you can freely move from heroic to normal.

Only problem I can see is for smaller guilds playing mostly 10-Man (as mine). If your guild is running 10-Man with your main char, this character will be locked out of 25-Man even though he could need gear in 25-Man. That system will be perfect once the loot is the same in 10 and 25-Man but it is not yet the case and I can see groups having problems with it until Cataclysm.

I probably have too many alts to have any such problem, but not everyone has more than one 80 ...
what do you think about it ?

Yet another PTR build for patch 4.0.1

2010-10-07T06:55:00.002+02:00

I though they were finished with the patch build as the last one was tagged release., but I was wrong. A new PTR Build 13156 was announced on MMO Champion yesterday, and I want to discuss a few things about it.

First changes for Holy Paladins:

Divine Light base healing increased by 10%
Flash of Light base healing increased by 10%
Holy Light base healing increased by 10%
Holy Shock base healing increased by 10%
Walk in the Light (Passive) now increases healing by 15%, up from 10%.

What can I say, all our healing spells but Word of Glory (he free holy power heal) and our aoe heals get a slight buff. If this is a sign our heals were a little too low, that will patch it at 80, but not increasing the spellpower coefficient value will mean they will still be too low at 85 and even worse after a few tiers of raid items ... I'm a little frightened by these buffs, probably the firs time it happens to me.

Now the other part of this patch:

Righteous Fury now increases threat by 200%, up from 125%.

This threat increase is general among all tanks. They all ramp up from 125% to 200% threat bonus generation. This clearly indicates that tanks were too low on threat. Is this because they don't have mastery at 80, and hence don't have Vengeance yet? According to some blue posts I don't think that was the reason of this buff. It seems that tank threat during any sort of aoe was really too low.
Blizzard told us that tanking would not be trivial anymore, I guess it was just too hard. Will this change turn tanking into a simple gearing problem with no skill as it was during Lich King? Or will it remain harder and hence more interesting?
I'm sure that change was necessary, but it's a strong increase and I'm surprised it happens so late in the testing process. As many things (like strange talent trees with talents obviously intended for another tree which are too deep to be taken, Fury of Stormrage anyone ?) it makes me feel that this patch is far from being thoroughly tested and ready for live.
I guess we'll have 2 months to "live test" these changes before the release of Cataclysm. When the new talents came out at the end of BC they were also strongly unbalanced and a lot of nerfs/buffs happened during the early days of Wrath ... we'll probably see these times again.

Ok I'm done grumbling about these changes, in the end only good news for us so we should rejoice :P
As always, have fun raiding guys.

Cataclysm expected for December 7th!

2010-10-01T07:56:00.003+02:00

There is another build on the beta test servers, Cataclysm Beta - Build 13117. This one doesn't change much for Holy Paladins.
I was kind of sad to see the global nerf to resto druids, I hope it is a balance change and indicates they were a bit too high, as they have already been strongly nerfed by the change of most of their core talents as our mana regen has been savagely put "To The Ground Baby" ...
Retribution paladins also see the increase of Two-Handed Weapon Specialization from 10% to 20%. It is good for them, but indicates that they were probably very low on the dps charts, I'll probably go ret for questing, I hope it won't be too bad ^^

But the new build is not the big news of today. Cataclysm will hit live on the 7th of December according to MMO Champion and some clever datacrossing. Thx Boubouille, you're as always, on the top of news.

Paladin Tier 11, first Cataclysm armor set

2010-09-28T14:34:00.008+02:00

Keep in mind that as my previous posts, these are only Beta PTR versions and could be changed before coming to live (which was postponed to early/mid December it seems).

The Holy Paladin set is here (from MMO Champion):

Head - Reinforced Sapphirium Headguard

cost is one head token from raids
+281 Intellect

+512 Stamina

+228 Spirit

Meta Socket Socket Bonus: +30 Intellect

Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 168.

Shoulders - Reinforced Sapphirium Mantle

cost is one shoulder token from raids
+233 Intellect

+380 Stamina

+149 Spirit

Red Socket Socket Bonus: +10 Critical Strike Rating

Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 169.

Chest - Reinforced Sapphirium Breastplate

cost is 2200 valor points (gained in raids and probably daily heroics)
+301 Intellect

+512 Stamina

+228 Spirit

Yellow Socket Socket Bonus: +20 Intellect

Equip: Increases your mastery rating by 188.

Hands - Reinforced Sapphirium Gloves

cost is 1650 valor points (gained in raids and probably daily heroics)
+233 Intellect

+380 Stamina

+169 Spirit

Yellow Socket Socket Bonus: +10 Mastery Rating

Equip: Increases your mastery rating by 149.

Legs - Reinforced Sapphirium Greaves

cost is 2200 valor points (gained in raids and probably daily heroics)
+301 Intellect

+512 Stamina

+213 Spirit

Red Socket Socket Bonus: +20 Intellect

Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 203.

All are epic ilevel 359 plate armor items. The set bonus is:

I won't discuss costs or valor points, I have my views on the topic but it is not the day for that, and we're not yet sure about anything related to them.
The items themselves reflect the changes to spirit regen, though int will stays a very important stat as it now provides you with the equivalent of spellpower.
If you've followed my last posts about Holy Paladin talents, you know that crit does not provide us with any sort of mana regen anymore. Hence I am sad to find 3 pieces with a huge amount of crit on this set and only one with haste. I guess a lot of us will be reforging them into more haste, at least we have this option now.

About the set bonus mmm ... I'll have to see it live to decide. The crit bonus isn't bad but I wonder if Holy Light will be of much use in raids, remember that it is now our "medium" heal hence not useful for emergencies neither for big pushes on the tank.
The 4 pieces bonus seems to be a nice mana regen bonus, though Holy Radiance is both on a 1mn cooldown and consumes 40% of our base manapool to cast. Once again, has to be tested.

Not much comments from my part, but if you wanted to look at our next gear set, that's a first view of it.
See you soon for more cataclysmic news.

edit (10/13):
Patch 4.0.1 is now live. You can find the last update concerning gear, stats and reforging on this post: Patch 4.0.1 is going live. You are not prepared!
It is worth noting that Spirit is considered a secondary stat and can be reforged into. It is hence possible to change half the crit rating of an item into spirit. I'll probably do that on most of my gear.

edit (12/30):
I'd advise you to read the neat Home | Best in Slot Holy Paladin Resource. You will find there a complete list of BiS items for Holy Paladins and for each slot an alternative to our poorly itemized T11 with some greatly needed haste rating.

Build 13066 does change everything.

2010-09-26T07:07:00.006+02:00

Or Not :P
You can find all the details on MMO Champion, but for Holy Paladins here is the only change that concern you:

Spiritual Focus no longer gives you hit based on your Spirit. Renamed to Paragon of Virtue - Reduces the cooldown of your Divine Protection by 10/20 sec and the cooldown of your Avenging Wrath by 30/60 sec.
Enlightened Judgements now also grants hit rating equal to 50/100% of any Spirit gained from items or effects.

Nothing linked to PvE though Spiritual Focus can have PvE uses, they are very limited. It won't change the 31/5/5 build I gave before much, though if Enlightened Judgements grant range to our judgements as the mmo talent calculator says, then it'll replace the 2 points into the Improved Judgements ret talent. As the calculator has changed, you can find the new build here. It will be a 33/5/3 or a 31/5/5 depending on range being linked to Enlightened Judgements or not.

For another view of our new talents, you can find a Prot analysis of build 13033 on Rhidach website Righteous Defense.
If you want more analysis of Holy Talents and skills, I'd advise you to read the detailed article on Paladin Schmaladin and the healing "tips" and comments on Blessing of Kings.

See you soon hopefully patch 4.0.1 will hit live soon, for good and bad :)

Cataclysm Holy Paladin Build

2010-09-24T12:34:00.005+02:00

Good News Everyone !

I'm sorry for the lack of activity on my blog for such a time, summer job isn't easy (fewer people and often as much work to do), and summer raiding isn't either (same reasons ;p).
On the plus side, my small guild is now on Putricide hard mode in 10-Man, reason for the silly intro. I've had a lot of fun with ICC hard modes, more than normal modes from what I recall of them so many months ago ... (yes one year on a single instance is way too long Blizzard :p).

But I'm not here to discuss ICC, I guess most of people reading blogs are close to the end anyway now. A new build has been deployed on the PTR (news on MMO Champion as always). Paladin talents have been modified as always too (hybrid classes are those that give the most problems to Blizzard clearly). And as you can guess the Holy build has changed accordingly. If it wasn't completely true before, I now can say that there is a cookie cutter build for PvE Holy Paladins in this PTR Build 13033.

You can use MMO champion talent calculator to look at my 31/5/5 build, that I guess most paladins will get as soon as the patch is out (assuming talents don't change until then).
Why am I so sure it's cookie-cutter ?
The reason is very simple, it contains all +heal talents and not a single pure PvP talent like Arbiter of the Light, Blazing Light, Denounce, Blessed Life and Spiritual Focus from the Holy tree.

I'm a bit sad that Blizzard didn't keep their words saying we would have choice, but I guess it's too hard to do on an hybrid class with PvP talents required in nearly every tree.

Feel free to discuss, and as always have fun :)
Can't wait to roll a Goblin Squig Herder myself, oh sorry .. hunter :P

edit:
The talent builder has changed since this post on MMO Champion due to new patch builds. You can find the build on this link. Future builds/patches will probably break it again follow the blog updates to find the last build.

edit 2 (10/13):
Patch 4.0.1 is now live. You can find the last version of my build and a detailed discussion of the talents and gameplay on this post: Patch 4.0.1 is going live. You are not prepared!

edit 3 (12/27):
The update for Cataclysm and lvl 85 is finally up, you can find it here:
Holy Paladin Cataclysm Build at level 85

More Cataclysm Beta and news

2010-08-10T14:20:00.002+02:00

Heyla here, not posted for some time, holidays and raiding have more or less taken all my time (and did you say Starcraft 2, noooo, sure not ^^).

On the front of Paladin updates in the beta I would advise you to follow the news on Righteous Defense by Rhidach. A lot of changes happened for paladins in the last builds, and nothing is final yet (far from it). The developers decided to introduce a new mechanic for us, called Holy Power, that will stack with some abilities (up to 3) and will allow us to empower some existing abilities or use new ones. I am partly excited by this news, some change to our usual pretty lame gameplay can be fun, but I'm really not in line with some of the current builds for that, we'll see how it goes. Go visit Rhidach site for details :)

Raid news, my guild has finally downed the Lich King in 10 man first time without me (my computer having been dead for 2 weeks) and the second time with me. Nothing great now I would agree but raiding attendance during the holidays is always scarce and it is nice to have been able to keep at it and finally reach our goal: which was going into heroic ICC. The 3 first bosses are already down in heroic, we're currently working on Saurfang heroic who's a bad ass :)

I must say that heroic really has revived my interest for ICC, the normal modes until the Lich Kings were really becoming lazy farming. Heroic bosses are much much more interesting, at least for some of them. They are less forgiving to blunders, which is kind of what I like in raids.

Oh and if you are one of the few to not have played Starcraft 2 already ... it's great :P
The campaign is the best solo play for a rts game I've ever played (and I've played a lot of them). I liked the strategy aspect of the last Dawn of War campaign, but Starcraft 2 really get you into the "story" of the campaign, and even if the mission choices are kind of irrelevant, it's still nice to chose the order in which you play them.
I've not started multiplayer yet, or I won't have any time left for raiding :)

On these few words, see you, have fun, and I'll try to finish my healing through ICC articles now that I've got enough experience on the fights.

New Cataclysm Beta, New Paladin Goodness

2010-07-14T11:55:00.003+02:00

A new build of the Cataclysm beta has hit the test realms and Boubouille at MMO Champion has given us the updates on all abilities and talent trees.
You can find all the update for paladins with abilities and talent trees on this page.

Main change for Holy Paladins is the healing spells we will have at our disposal:

Holy Light ( lvl5)

Heals a friendly target for 3880.99 to 4324.07.
6% of base mana, 40 yd range, 3 sec cast

Flash of Light (lvl16)

Heals a friendly target for 4830.14 to 5419.5.
27% of base mana, 40 yd range, 1.5 sec cast

Divine Light (holy talent tier 3)

Heals a friendly target for 7761.99 to 8648.14.
30% of base mana, 40 yd range, 2.5 sec cast

Holy Shock (lvl 40)

Blasts the target with Holy energy, causing 1399.45 to 1516.07 Holy damage to an enemy, or 3938.43 to 4266.63 healing to an ally.
8% of base mana, 20/40 yd range, Instant cast, 6 sec cooldown

So Holy Paladins are now on the same model as priests, we have a medium relatively slow and mana efficient heal (Holy Light), a fast but very costly heal (Flash of Light) and a slow costly but big heal (Divine Light). We still keep our instant heal that will be the same size as a Holy Light for nearly the same price (that makes it very very valuable mana wise especially with Holy Mending that adds a 15% hot on the target of Holy Shock at lvl 80+).

These are the major changes to our gameplay that I see. Even if the holy talent tree has changed a lot the core talents are still here and the gameplay should be relatively unchanged.
As for the fears we had about BoL, it is now only duplicating Holy Light and Holy Shock ... as I see them as our two spam heals I don't think it'll be too bad.

See you later for more comments on cataclysm holy when more news come out.

Cataclysm Videos on Cynical Brit

2010-07-08T14:07:00.003+02:00

The title says everything. If you want to see numerous videos of the late Alpha / early Beta of Cataclysm, head over to The Cynical Brit. Total Biscuit has put a lot of different videos for our enjoyment on his blog. You can see there long videos of the new starting zones, the two first instances and other fun.
What I will say is that the starting zones seem good, definitely better than what they were in vanilla or BC. If you have not started a character recently, try it, you'll discover that Blizzard has also included a lot of help for beginners explaining most functions of the game while you gain access to them (battleground pvp at lvl 10, dungeon grouping at 15 ...etc).
My last comment will be about the instances. They are fun and relatively difficult. I do really think that (with the addition of a way too easy and nerfed first raid) was missing in WotLK. Most new players never got any training before coming to raids and when they have to learn the most basic things (like not stand in the fire) and also have to cope with the performance pressure that raiding is, they most of the time do very bad in one way or the other. So yes to harder instances that really teach something, and I hope Blizzard won't back up on that.

See you soon for the sequel of the Healing Through series in ICC.

Back in Business

2010-07-03T14:50:00.007+02:00

No you are not doing Violet Hold for your daily heroic and fighting Xevozz. It's just me being back in the game and the blog being alive again.
My guilds advanced while I was out, Icecrown is nearly done (they carried me through Putricide, Lanathel and Syndragosa last week) and we're on the Lich King (ouch phase 5 hurts ^^). We had fun with Halion in the Ruby Sanctum 10-man normal last Thursday with my paladin. Even though it's not very hard it requires everyone learning the fight for a few tries.

For my first post after a few months out I want to talk about :

Cataclysm for paladins

You can find the changes as they are during the closed beta build start on MMO Champion.

We'll get three new skills: Blinding Light (lvl 81), Healing Hands (lvl 83) and Guardian of Ancient Kings (lvl 85). Blinding Light looks like a fun tanking talent and Guardian of Ancient Kings, even if we'll have to see if it's really effective, will surely be neat to look at. Now for Holy paladins Healing Hands is what counts.

Healing Hands (lvl 83): Heals all friendly targets within 10 yards for 683.58 every sec. Lasts 10 sec.
40% of base mana, Instant cast.

Definitely a raid healing ability, but yet another reason for us to not move, which does not really makes me happy when I see fights like the Lich King.

Holy Mastery Passive Talent Tree Bonuses

Healing
Meditation
Critical Healing Effect

Meditation will be the mana regen ability of all healers based on spirit (yes we're going to need spirit as all other healers in Cataclysm).
Critical Healing will probably boost our crits to 175 or 200% of a non crit heal.

The other big change is that Flash of Light and Holy Light will be exchanged in therm of mana efficiency. FoL will become a fast expensive heal, and HL a longer more mana efficient one. And we should get a third very big and long heal. This brings the paladin model in line with priests, fast heals are expensive, longer ones are less.

Last but not least, Beacon of Light will change to not simply double our heals for free. The health pools are supposed to be bigger in Cataclysm, and the heals not as strong, which means less overhealing and the development team consider BoL overpowered as it is considering these changes. They have not yet announced the final decision, it could be BoL only working with FoL or doubling the cost of our heals.

You can read the complete reports on MMO Champion, I only discussed what I think are the most game changing points.

As a side-note, the blog passed 50K visitors during June, thank you all and I hope you'll continue to find useful things to read here.

Healing Through: Icecrown Citadel - Deathbringer Saurfang

2010-03-17T14:22:00.002+01:00

This one was already nearly finished, so I'll post it before I move. Have fun in ICC everyone.

Deathbringer Saurfang is the fourth boss of Icecrown Citadel and the end of the entrance part. It was considered as the second test of Icecrown, the first being the purely gear check of Marrowgar. Saurfang is a healing and dps check, if you can finish him, you should be able to try the inner halls.
For a guild at least partly in T10+ items and with the new buff Saurfang should not be a problem anymore. Your raid should still know what to expect, or you can be sure of a raid wipe.

Deathbringer Saurfang: Trash Mobs

This will be a short section, the reason being that there is not a single mob between the gunship battle and the fourth boss of Icecrown. The only opponent you'll have is waiting for npcs to finish their speech (especially if you're horde).

Boss Description

Saurfang has relatively few abilities, but they have all to be mastered by your raid to kill him.
The first mechanic is Blood Power, this will increase Saurfang damage through the fight. When his Blood Power is low, his damage will be light and healing the tanks will be easy, but it gets harder with his blood power increasing, at 100% Blood Power he hits twice as hard. You should understand that every damage taken by your raid during the encounter give Blood Power to Saurfang, hence one key of the encounter is to reduce damage and shorten the encounter as much as you can.
Pro-tip: All damage prevention abilities are extremely effective during that encounter, a discipline priest is nearly overpowered with his shields that can reduce Saurfang Blood Power influx by more than 50% in 10-Man. If you have any damage prevention ability, use it as much as you can.

The second main ability is Mark of the Fallen Champion. This ability is used each time Saurfang Blood Power reaches 100%, and resets it to 0. The target of the mark will take damage each time Saurfang hits the tank (around 4K each 2s). You have to understand that this additional damage will also give Blood Power to Saurfang, hence with each Mark he will gain more Blood Power, and will cast the next Mark faster. This ability is Saurfang "time limit" mechanism. It adds up to his enrage at 30% health which makes him hit faster, hence producing more Blood Power, especially if several Marks have already hit.
Pro-tip: Oh last thing, if anyone hit by a mark dies, never ever battle rez him, as the mark sticks through death.

Saurfang has two other abilities that will generate Blood Power for each character hit. The first is Boiling Blood and the second Blood Nova.
Blood Nova is only cast on members at range and hits the target and anyone in 12 meters. It is the reason why your raid ranged and healers should be all 12 meters apart (in 10-Man) or positioned in groups of 2 or 3 characters each 12 meters apart (in 25-Man).
Boiling Blood is a dot, you'll have to heal it nothing else to say.
Pro-tip: Boiling Blood will generate Blood Power with each tick, if you can shield the target that is a must, if you can Hand of Protection the target that will remove the dot, preventing 8 Blood Power for Saurfang, do it fast. What you should know is that Boiling Blood can be cast on the target of a Mark of the Fallen Champion. This is one of the main reasons for losing a Mark target and could be a good reason to keep your Hand of Protection.

Rune of Blood is the reason you need two tanks during the encounter. They should switch as soon as this debuff is cast on the current tank. Nothing else to say.

The last ability of Saurfang (did I say he had few abilities ... he does have some but most of them only impact healers) is Call Blood Beast. This calls for 2 beasts in 10-Man and 5 in 25-Man. These beasts need to be dpsed quickly and most of all they should *not hit anyone*. Anyone hit by a Blood Beast will give Blood Power to Saurfang. The best is to use all what you can to prevent them from reaching your dps, hunters Frost Traps are one of the best tools for that.
Pro-tip: All melee, the tanks included, should avoid any sort of aoe damage when the Blood Beasts pop. If they don't, the beasts will stay hitting them and Saurfang will gain a big amount of blood very quickly, which can cause a raid wipe a few minutes later when the marks are too numerous for the healers to endure.

If you want more details you can find very good info on Bosskillers or Tankspot.

Raid Composition

Both in 10-Man and 25-Man you need 2 tanks. This encounter being a dps-race, you need to take as few healers as you can, usually 2 in 10-Man and 5 in 25-Man.
This will put a lot of pressure on your healers, and they will need a very good mana sustainability to finish the fight.
Pro-tip: Though spellpower is obviously important for healers, this will be more an endurance fight. If you have any source of mana replenishment in your raid you should save it for your healers in this fight if they need it, an oom healer during the last 30s of the fight will seal your fate.

The rest of the raid should be dpsers, both melee (they will be 100% of the fight on Saurfang and the main source of damage to him) and ranged (they will spend a large portion of the fight dealing with the blood beasts). Don't forget the ccers for the beasts that can be slowed, rooted ... anything but completely cced (no fear, mc or anything).
If you have a shaman, keep the Heroism/Bloodlust for the last 30% of Saurfang, you can call for it as soon as he enrages.

Healing Build

As I said, expect this fight to be very very mana consuming and put a lot of stress on your shoulders. Especially until all members of your raid master it. The more blunders there will be (blood beasts staying on the melee, tanks not switching fast enough ...) the more marks you will have to deal with at the end of the fight, and the harder it will be.
Remember you'll have to heal the tank and a few raid damage at all time (nova, dot, beasts). Each time a mark is cast, that will need at least half a healer attention to keep the target alive.

The last thing that I didn't say in the boss description is that for any death in the raid, Saurfang will regain 5% health ... this obviously means that you have to keep everyone alive as much as you can, Saurfang is not a boss you can finish at the very last moment with only 2 raid members alive.

In 10-Man you won't be able to endure more than 2 marks for every long, and most probably not more than 1 death.
In 25-Man if your healers are good you can manage up to 4 or 5 marks depending on your raid composition, and you can probably win with 2 deaths. More will probably lengthen the fight too much.

Whatever your class is, aim for fast "small" heals, as much damage prevention as you can, and the best sustainability you can get.
Use your mana cds as soon as you can get the full benefit of them, and if you can't use them during a strong healing phase, before the first mark is cast.

Paladin Healing tips

Holy Paladins are among the best healers for this fight, with Discipline Priests, but for very different reasons.
A Discipline Priest can greatly reduce the amount of Blood Power gained by Saurfang through the use of Shields.
A Holy Paladin can use his Beacon of Light to heal the target of a Mark of the Fallen Champion and continue to heal the raid. He can even heal both the first and second marks by himself.

Until the first mark is cast, the healing is light. But, as a paladin, you will have much more job as soon as a mark is cast. In a 10-Man raid you will most probably be the only Holy Paladin, and the two first marks will be your job. In a 25-Man raid Holy Paladins should share between them the first marks, 2 per paladin.
Once your first designed mark is cast you'll need to cast your Beacon on it (and remember to refresh it, use your focus frame or an add-on for that) and start cast continuous heals on the raid.
Pro-tip: You can never stop healing for much more than one gcd or your beacon target will die especially if it's a clothy (mark damage is physical and reduced by armor). Remember to recast your beacon/judgement when your Holy Shock is up in case you need the speed-up healing boost.
Once your second designed mark is cast you'll need to keep your Beacon on your first target and heal the second mark regularly, keeping both alive.
Pro-tip: As soon as your mark is cast you will not be able to stop healing, or use a Divine Plea because the healing reduction will be too strong. Try to use it before your assigned mark is cast (use Deadly Boss Mod to check Saurfang Blood Power), you should be full mana when you start healing a mark.

Remember to recast your Jugement of Light on Saurfang, both to increase your casting speed, and to heal your raid.

Keep in mind that your Hand of Protection removes the Boiling Blood dot, it is your choice to use it as soon as you can in the encounter, and have the opportunity to use it again later at the end of the fight. Or to keep it to protect someone being "double hit" by a mark and the dot (this can be very hard to keep up with healing wise).

Good luck and have fun, though very chaotic at first this is a quite fun encounter once your raid will master it.

Updates and blog asleep

2010-03-10T12:11:00.003+01:00

Hello everyone,

I've not posted for a month, and will probably not post much more for the coming weeks. Real life is very busy right now. I'm in the process of moving to the US which, as you can imagine, is very time consuming to manage with work and all.

I've tried to continue raiding and helping my guildies, and I'm happy we're advancing. The introduction of the recent 5% buff seems to have been enough for us to down both Putricide and the Blood Council in 10 Man, and we've decided to move further into 25 Man by extending our schedule to two 25 Man raid nights a week. We hope that attendance will be enough for the guild to advance to the same point we have in 10 Man. Overall it's a nice progression since last November when we had a hard time having enough people once a week for a 25 Man. The guild is lively and I hope will stay like that once I'm not there anymore (this could sound a bit cocky but I was the gm after all).

I've been a bit surprised myself by how fast the "nerfing" of ICC started, considering not even one guild in the world had down the Lich King in hard mode (either 10 or 25) before its introduction. I would have liked for the original version to live a bit longer.

While I'm off from the internet, I advise you to read my fellow paladin bloggers, especially Rhidach on Righteous Defense, and Ophelie on The Bossy Pally that I both always enjoy to read.

Until next time, in some unknown future that I hope not to far.
Have fun :)
Shazalyn / Dreaming

Icecrown Citadel, Last Wing Up This Week

2010-02-02T13:01:00.002+01:00

So tomorrow (today if you're in the US) we'll have access to the last wing of Icecrown Citadel. The new Arena season should start too and we'll have to download patch 3.3.2.
You can find all the news and the patch notes on MMO-champion, on the Fall of the Lich King page. Take care huge spoilers there :P

I'll note the changes to the T10 plate tanking armors (which are receiving a little up). The new str dps Ashen Verdict rep ring. Class wise, warriors and warlocks are mostly the only ones changed.

We'll have a new boss in Wintergrasp too (sigh ... the biggest failure of all LK fmpow).

And finally we get the last wing of Icecrown with my favorite boss I can't wait to try: Valithria Dreamwalker.

I wish you all a lot of fun, we're finally coming to the end of this whole extension.

Some more raiding into ICC.

2010-01-27T07:42:00.002+01:00

My horde guild is now raiding regularly into Icecrown Citadel, we have kept up to two 10-Man raids (3 nights a week) and one 25-Man raid (one night a week) during the two last weeks, which allows everyone to step into ICC and the guild to confirm its first downs.
We have now confirmed on the 3 first bosses in 25 and need to speed up a little to down Saurfang in one raid night. We have also downed Festergut in 10-Man and are working on both Rotface and the Blood Princes.
I really like the Blood Princes fight, it's chaotic, it's intense, it's not easy, but it's a really really cool fight :)

I'll write an Healing Through on Saurfang later this week. Until then I have updated my article about Lord Marrowgar with a new tactic we're using considering raid positioning.

On a side-note some very good news for melee dps who prefer strength to agility. A new Ashen Verdict strength dps ring will appear in the next small patch (probably next week), description of the 4 levels of the new ring on MMO-Champion.

Icecrown Gating, Last Wing in 2 Weeks.

2010-01-20T07:22:00.003+01:00

No surprise to everyone, it's official on the live servers, the Lich King will wait to eat your souls in 2 weeks (unless you defeat him of course :P). The official date is February 2nd (US) and February 3rd (EU). You can read the details, as usual, on your best source of live information about WoW, MMO-Champion.
The second wing opens today (yesterday on the US servers) with 2 new bosses: the Blood Princes and Blood Queen Lana'thel. A bunch of vampires, that seem easier than Putricide as the queen has already been downed, though this can be due to the guilds having 2 more weeks of itemization in icecrown. Explanations and information about the gating system and the combined pool of limited bosses attemps can be found on MMO-champion, here.

About my games lately I finally got Saurfang down in 10-Man, on both my paladin and ma discipline priest. I tried a bit Festergut with Syrïel, we managed to keep the tanks alive (with me and two other healers) on 2 attempts (we tried it 4 times), but our raid dps wasn't high enough to pass the enrage timer. It's tricky as the tank/heal team is kind of better in the 10-Man my priest is sometimes, but the dps are way higher in my horde guild :P
On a side note a discipline priest is incredibly effective on Saurfang to limit his blood power. We killed him with 0 mark in 10-Man once I figured that if I have the mana I should just shield everyone at all time to prevent as much blood-producing damage as I could. For the first time my priest went into icecrown she started with Saurfang and had a huge amount of fun, even with her limited gear (not even 230 medium ilevel).
The fight with Saurfang is really much more about control and reactivity than pure dps and/or stuff, which I happen to like. Festergut on the other hand is nearly the whole contrary.

Why I like to heal "undergeared" tanks in 5-Man!

2010-01-13T14:24:00.005+01:00

Slightly ranty post about my views on healing in "modern" random heroics 5-Man dungeons.

Today I was taking some time to read one of my favorite blogs writer Larisa from The Pink Pigtail Inn. She is a gnome mage (best combo class in the game!) and is currently leveling a druid and had her first shots at healing in LK.
She talks about a recent topic surfacing in several blogs around arguing about more rewards for tanks & healers in random 5-Men.
My view is that more reward isn't what we need to tank or heal for you (which is what I do in this game 90% of my time), it is exactly what Larisa says:

As we separated after UK, as I had to leave for real life stuff, the leader said: “I’m sure you’ll make a fine healer at lvl 80”. It may not sound as anything special, but I tell you, for the terrified newbie healer, it meant more than any drop Gordon could have brought me. I was exhausted from the tension and strain, but my healing heart was glowing with pride.

My simple conclusion is: All you need is love.

Give me a cheer and a hug and I’ll heal my arse off for you in any instance you like. Regardless of what awards it offers.

I'm not attracted by loot, it is useful, I like when it's nice, but I don't mind at all where I am on the meters as long as I do my job right.
I think a lot of "true heart" healers and tanks are the same, we do that because we like it, not because we want more "rewards". There is some pride in the tank & healer role, and that is enough for us ... as long as other players aknowledge we're doing our best with the gear we have and that tanking or healing isn't always a happy funny time.
There is a much direct penalty for an under-performing tank or healer, lack of heals or effectiveness as a tank (survival or threat generation) shows much more than a low dps on the meters. It directly impacts the other members and can cause wipes which cost gold. That is were you can see these roles as more stressful.

That's where I'm going ... ungrateful players.
Larisa cited a post from Calli from Pew Pew Lazers tiled Angry Priest is Angry. Seeing it cited by Larisa, and the author being a discipline priest (like that :p) I went to read it.
Even if it's a bit too ranty probably to convince most, I completely agree with Calli on her point:
People asking for a vote kick of a tank not in 4 pieces T9 in a random heroic dungeon (not Halls of Reflection !) are just pure lazy bums that I don't want to play with.
When LK started tanks were at most around 24K unbuffed and healers were having a much lower spell power. I was there healing, it was harder, and all in all, it was much more fun!

So yes, I'm proud to say that "I love to heal undergeared tanks in 5-Men" !
When I say undergeared it's according to the idea people have that a tank for heroics has to have more than 40K health nowadays ... silly snobs. I've healed a warrior tank friend with my priest, in all random heroics (before 3.3) when he was still all in blues, and we were perfectly fine, he's a good player and a good tank, and if he was a bit short in life my, then T8 geared, priest was more than enough to secure him and the group 100% of the time.
Healing a slightly less geared tank is a bit more work, but it wakes me up, it's fun because there is a little challenge where most random 5-Men are not anymore. And that's what I miss now ... the fun of the challenge in 5-Man.

My pride, and what I'm happy of when I finish an instance, is a 0 death clean ride. When people die I'm not happy, even if it's completely their fault, I still feel like I failed somehow. (Yes you the dps standing in the fire, you can ruin my fun by just being silly. Not because we didn't drop loot, because you died, you idiot!)
If the tank or the group is slightly less geared, and I'm working more, it's even more fun.
I remember of my first runs of Naxramass with my priest, it was with a small guild (her guild raiding ulduar 25 at that time) whose tanks were still half in blues, and the others raid members too, me included. It was a real challenge, yes Naxramass was a challenge ... for the sole reason that we were doing it at the right level of gear.

All in all my view is that overgearing content is nice for fast runs, but tend to really turn players into snobs that don't remember what fun challenge can be, if they ever knew what challenge is.

Edit:
As sidenotes on this new LFG system, you could find some interest in reading these posts, also ranty in other ways, about what I'd consider as the way of "running with anonymous players" given to us by the cross-server LFG tool:
Dechion on WTF! Group Ninja?
Gnomeaggedon on If you’re THAT 1337, GTFO of my Random Dungeon!
TyphoonAndrew on LGD Perspectives
You could find them interesting, as I did.

Healing Through: Icecrown Citadel - Gunship Battle

2010-01-12T14:10:00.002+01:00

Healing Through: Icecrown Citadel - Gunship Battle
My 25-Man alliance raid got some motivation last Friday and we downed the 3 first bosses of Icecrown (yet again, nothing to brag about but we're a semi-casual guild with a lot of far from optimum players that we still like to play with and bring into raid :P).
So I'm going to talk today about the third "boss" that is more an event than a boss. You got it, it is the Gunship Battle.

Gunship Battle: Trash Mobs.

There are 2 alliance (or horde if you're on the wrong side) groups and one dracolich that you have to fight before reaching the ship. They probably repop at some point but don't worry the ship will be down before they do.

As a fun note, if you ever do this encounter on both sides (horde/alliance) you will fight on the other part of the balcony that you can see when fighting the dracolich. In fact if you kill the undead trash after the dracolich, you'll reach this other side, quite funny :P

Boss Description

As I said before this is not really a "boss". The Gunship Battle is a fight between your ship and the other faction ship via the gunship cannons.
You have to man your canons (2 in 10-Man, 3 in 25-Man) and fire on the deck of the other ship. The canons are easy to use, first ability makes your heat meter go up, when it's near full (without ever reaching full) you can use your second ability for max damage. The first targets for your canons are the opposing "canons" that are rocket launchers on the other side of the ship you battle (Kor'kron Rocketeer / Skybreaker Mortar Soldier). If they still have time when these are down, the second targets are the Rifemen /Axethrowers.
Each 25% of life of the opposing ship, a frost mage will be called to freeze your canons. You then have to board the opposing ship and kill the mage.
Pro-tip: To go on the opponent ship you need to get and equip rocket-packs from your own ship (the npc giving them is nearby your ship captain). But the players assigned to the ship can also take them as they can be used to avoid/kite a mob which would aggro you on the ship.

Send in half your dpsers and one high life tank. The dpsers will *only* target the frost mage and come back as soon as he is dead. The tank will only tank the opponent captain (dwarf/orc depending on your side).
The captain tank should take care that the captain gains 25% haste each time he hits, so kiting is better if possible.
Pro-tip: Take care that firemen shoot at flying targets so kiting by using your jet-pack, which is the best option can be dangerous if you take a hit before launching and then get hit by the firemen. Be cautious also that changing ship reset aggro. If you leave your ship with aggro, healers will die, if you leave the opposing ship before anyone else, he will die.

Raid composition

For 10-Man you need 2 tanks, 3 healers and 5 dpsers. One of the tank and one of the healers will go into the canons and only be active during the frozen canons phase when your team has to board the opposing ship.
In 25-Man you still only need 2 tanks. You can go with 6 to 7 healers, depending if you put one or two in the canons with the boarding tank. Rest should be dpsers, it doesn't matter much if they are melee or ranged, this isn't a very hard encounter.

Advised Build

It all depend on your assignment.
If you're the boarding tank healer (assigning 2 healers on him is more secure), you will mostly only spam big heals (Holy Lights for paladins) on him during the time he's tanking/kiting the opposing ship captain, and you'll probably mana regen in a canon when you're not boarding. Obviously a Holy Light build is better for that.
If you're on raid healing, go for a quick healing build (Flash of Light build for paladins). Your ship tank will take a lot of fast damage, but much smaller than the boarding tank. And the aggro on the adds tend to be tricky which can result in short (hopefully) spikes on the healers.

Paladin Healing Tips

Paladins in this fight are better used as healers for the opposing captain tank, three good reasons for that:

Holy Light spam is the strongest single target heal stream any healer can do;
using Divine Plea when in the canon will allow the Holy Paladin to Holy Light Spam the whole boarding phases of the encounter;
using Beacon of Light on the boarding tank will allow the paladin to *stay on your ship* and still healing the boarding tank.

This last point can seem tricky, but it works wonder, at least as Beacon of Light works in patch 3.3. Here is the reason:
The Beacon of Light target will receive in full any heal casted by the paladin on any raid member no further than 16 meters away from the beaconed tank. The Holy Paladin stays on your ship, on the border near the canons, he will target any ranged dpser boarding the opposing ship and dpsing the frost mage (this ranged dpser needs to stay on the other ship border too so that he's in range for your heals). And all the heals incoming to this ranged dpser will hit the tank (unless he's more than 60 meters away which is highly unlikely).
This allows you to not have to board the ship, not get aggro from most of the ship mobs despite your huge heals, spam heals on your boarding tank even when he's flying towards the opposing ship or back to your ship, avoid any hit on your while flying because you can't cast anything during that time it's considered casting while moving.
Pro-tip: Don't miss to cast Beacon of Light on the boarding tank before he launches to the other ship, he could be too far away for that a few seconds later. The duration of the Beacon will be more than enough for your raid to kill the frost mage and the tank to come back. Talk with your tank to be sure he doesn't leave without it :)

And that's all, congratulations for the loot, this is mostly a "Have fun with rocket packs and get some nearly free loot" reward for having downed the two first bosses.
Enjoy it because serious fights start with Deathbringer Saurfang!

I hope this small guide was useful, see you soon for the 4th boss of Icecrown and the last from the entrance section: Deathbringer Saurfang.

Icecrown Gating, Third Wing in 2 Weeks.

2010-01-06T11:45:00.003+01:00

Icecrown Gating

You can read it on MMO-Champion here, the third wing of Icecrown Citadel has been officially announced to open 2 weeks after the second one (aka the 19th of January). By the way the next arena season 8 date, which will be the last for Lich King, has also been announced to be probably on the 26th of January.
The third wing of Icecrown will be the last before Sindragosa and Arthas, so we can expect to see the Lich King live the 2nd of February if they keep with the 2 weeks gating time period. Not that I expect my guild to go that fast (we're just finishing with the entrance wing) but I'm sure all hardcore, or even semi-hardcore guilds will keep up with the pace for normal mode.

Now remember that the last bosses of each wings also have a limited number of attempts you can have on them for each week. This number has been increased from 5 attempts to 10 though, so this week everyone will have 10 attempts on Professor Putricide.

Cataclysm release date thoughts.

Now I'm sort of wondering if ICC will be enough content for players until the release of Cataclysm, even with the artificial increased time need to finish the raid that this gating system creates (pool about that topic on the right side). More than 3 months between a raid is cleaned and another appears is usually too much, but if we have the same "new talents live test period" as we had at the end of The Burning Crusade we can probably add about 2 months to this 3 months period farming ICC.
Still 5 months lifespan only bring us to early July, and I don't think now that Cataclysm will be out before the summer (though I was thinking June before). Blizzard won't release during the summer, which brings us to a fall release.
Now you can understand the announcement by Blizzard about a new raid being given to us before Cataclysm launch. I would expect just before or just after they give us the new talents trees. A new raid adds about 3 more months to the time that can go before the launch without players quitting "en masse" the game. Which brings us to the fall/late fall release that seems to be expected by most people now (preorders even give an early November release date).

What do you think about it? I'm really eager for Cataclysm myself, and would like to see it before summer, even if it probably won't happen I'd like to at least see the "new talents live test period" at this time. The global revamp of the talent trees is what I want to see the most right now, I think the "old model" has done its time.

Healing Through: Icecrown Citadel - Lady Deathwhisper

2010-01-05T12:44:00.003+01:00

As I'm getting more used to Icecrown I'll post new Healing Through. As of now I've killed the three first bosses a few times and I'm getting comfortable with healing them. As always I'm mostly raiding in 10-Man, so strats and tips will concentrate on 10-Man raids, though I'll give pointers about the change you can feel in 25-Man.

So for today Healing Through, let's discuss Lady Deathwhisper, the second boss of Icecrown Citadel. You can read all abilities description on the WowHead page, and detailed strategy on the Boss Killers guide.

Lady Deathwhisper's room: Trash Mobs.

There are 4 pulls in Deathwhisper room before you can play with her. You have to clean all of them or you can be sure of a wipe on the boss.

Kind of like Grand Widow Faerlina in Naxxramas you have two cultist packs, they can be pulled separately if you take them from the side, and if you silence/grapple the casters to avoid any aggro-link from the second cultist group. No special difficulty, just take care that the melee mobs can spike your tank hard from time to time.

Then you have the two giant Nerubar (spider like creatures) at the back of the room. Single pull, single tank & spank fights. They cast a curse on one raid member that will hurt everyone around him, stay away from each other, with an empty room it shouldn't be hard in 10-Man. In 25-Man you can alternate to the group together strategy, the one being cursed moving away from the group. That requires more reactivity, but ensure minimal damage to the raid.

Boss Description

Lady Deathwhisper fight has two very different phases. During the first one she will have a mana shield, preventing any damage to her, but any damage will reduce her mana bar. As long as she has mana she will remain stationary and invoque adds to defend her. Once you reduce her to zero mana she will activates phase 2.
Pro-tip: try to not switch her to phase2 if there are still adds in the room, wait for your raid to clean one add phase then move her to phase 2.

I will describe her abilities and what to watch for healing-wise in each phase section.

Raid composition

In a 10-Man raid you should go for 2 tanks (mandatory), 2 healers and 6 dps. Being able to keep-up with the adds spawning is the key of the fight and sufficient dps is necessary.
Moreover you'll need about half physical and half magical dpsers, like 3 melees and 3 casters (hunters can be one or the other as needed).
This is kind of a tricky fight considering raid composition and you can't pass it with an all casters raid or all melee raid.

Advised Build

Healing is very different in phase 1 and phase 2 of the encounter.
Phase 1 healing is all about fast heals and reactivity, there can be a lot of sudden damage spikes on a lot of different targets (especially the two healers). And the boss aoes can bring several characters down at the same time, everyone should be hp topped at all times.
Phase 2 healing is mostly only tank healing, with much stronger hits than phase 1.

As you can see the two phases require very different healing options, and two different builds would be necessary to perfectly fit to the fight. But after some experience, phase 2 healing isn't really very hard for one reason: phase 2 won't last for very long. If you can reach it with full mana (and you should be able to) then you'll be ok even with a fast heals / raid healing build.
My view is to go with a fast heals build for raid healing, a Holy Priest or Restoration Druid will be perfect for phase 1 (characters will be fairly dispatched in the room and a Shaman will probably not be able to use Chain Heal as well as with the first Icecrown boss).
As a paladin, a fast Flash of Light build is perfect for phase 1, and it consumes so little mana that you will easily start phase 2 with a full mana bar which will allow you to spam Holy Lights long enough for phase 2 to end.

Healing Phase 1

Encounter Description:
(extracts from wowhead)

During phase 1, Lady Deathwhisper will have a mana shield that will absorb all the damage done to her. She will attack the raid with Death and Decay and Shadow Bolts - none of which should be too dangerous. On 25-player difficulty she will also mind control a random raid member for a short amount of time - CC them and move on.

She will also summon adds regularly during phase 1. Adds will come in waves from both sides of the room - mix of Adherents and Fanatics. In the 10-player version of the raid, the waves will come from only side at a time, switching sides. In the 25-player one, adds will come from both left and right side - one add will come from the entrance of the room as well.

Fanatics (melee adds) should be kited (preferably by the tanks) and killed by spellcasters. Adherents (caster adds) should be dpsed by the melee dps of your raid. Watch out for adds casting Dark Martyrdom, it means they will come back to life Reanimated in a few seconds.

Healing Tips:

The boss attacks aren't very dangerous, her Shadow Bolts hit for 7-9K and her Death and Decay for 4,5K/s (as long as raiders aren't lame they won't take too much damage from that). D&D can be more dangerous in 25-Man because characters will be more packed, you should assign a Holy Priest and a Druid specifically for that.

The difficulty is the adds. Fanatics cleave (but there should be no melee on them!) and have several regeneration abilities, they also hit hard when transformed if they are not kited/cced correctly.
Pro-tip: Always have one healer assigned to each Fanatic tank (2 in 10-Man, 3 or 4 in 25-Man). For Paladins, having a Beacon of Light on one of them is a very good idea to anticipate any spike on him.
Adherents have strong shadowfrost attacks that can aoe when they get empowered by Lady Deathwhisper. That can result in strong damage spikes on the melee group dpsing them.
Pro-tip: Adherents also tend to focus together on one healer when they spawn, which can result in 2 (10-Man) to 4 bolts targeting the same character, be ready for fast instant healing when they spawn (a Discipline Priest shield should be used on all healers before a spawn in 25-Man).
Pro-tip: You should also watch for mind-controls of a healer/tank and for the adherents curse that puts a 15s CD on all abilities you use when afflicted by it (decursing healers is a top priority).

In the end the first phase is all about being fast and over-reactive. Your raid members can greatly help by reducing the amount of damage the raid takes with proper movement and cc of the numerous adds.

Healing Phase 2

Encounter Description:
(extracts from wowhead)

Phase 2 begins when Lady Deathwhisper's mana barrier has been drained. Try not to have any cultists alive when that happens. The boss will become active and a tank needs to pick her up quickly, as there is no threat reset. A second tank will need to be available to taunt the boss, since she will periodically debuff her current tank with a stacking threat generation reduction debuff. The two (three in 25-Man) tanks taunt off each other every 3 stacks.

Players should be mindful of the Vengeful Shades that will spawn through phase 2 and will randomly chase people - get away from them! These shades are untargetable and will die after a few seconds. Melee DPS might want to set up an interrupt rotation, since Deathwhisper's Frostbolt can cause significant damage (read nearly OS a not well geared tank). She will continue using Death and Decay (and Dominate Mind in 25-player).

Healing Tips:

Healing in phase 2 is much easier, you mostly only have to spam the tanks. All Frostbolts cast by Lady Deathwhisper should be interrupted and even if damage spiked can happen, there should be enough healers to keep the tanks up without too much of a problem.
Shades can result in significant damage, but if raid members kite them properly that shouldn't be too bad either.
The only danger is the Death and Decay, it will hurt tanks and melee several times during phase 2 and a lot of members will take damage this time. Obviously the tanks will move Deathwhisper out of them, but mages and shamans (distance interrupts) need to check-out for Frostbolts at this moment because melee interrupts won't be able to do their job. As for phase 1, assigning a Holy Priest and Resto Druid to heal D&D damage in 25-Man is the best option.

For Holy Paladin this part of the fight isn't hard, just spam Holy Lights, and if you still have the glyph you'll get D&D splash heal as well on the melee raid members.

This fight can be quite hectic, especially in 25-Man, but it's still the one I enjoy the most from the 4 first bosses of Icecrown Citadel.
Have fun with this crazy encounter, and see you for another Healing Through.

Back on the blog.

2010-01-04T10:21:00.002+01:00

Hi everyone, I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and I wish you a happy new year.
I've started to write a post about the macros I use on my paladin, it's going to be posted at some point in the week.
Expect another Healing Through too, I want to advance a little on Icecrown raid healing as the new bosses will be up soon :)

Once again, Happy New Year, wish you all the best.

Happy Holidays everyone.

2009-12-23T14:01:00.003+01:00

A short post to close the year. I'll be in my family for a few days, so no new post before next year.
I wish you a very nice end of year, and see you in 2010, cheers !

Healing Through: Icecrown Citadel - Lord Marrowgar

2009-12-23T11:50:00.017+01:00

Another Healing Through post, focusing this time on the first boss of the Icecrown Citadel raid: Lord Marrowgar.
This post addresses both the 10-Man and 25-Man version of the encounter. The heroic version is not available yet (and won't for a few more months), I will update this post later for that.

Be happy fellow Holy Paladins, this is a fight for you, Beacon of Light will shine as never during this fight.

The path to the boss: trash mobs.

Some will say the trash up to Marrowgar are harder than the boss himself. Though this could be slightly too much to say, the packs are relatively interesting and some sort of control should be used before you aoe everything to death. More precisely the undead spider creatures should be cced by priests and killed separately after the other parts of the packs are done.
Pro-tip: the spiders on the sides of the first room can be soloed by using a Death Knight Death Grip ability

Now ... there is a "fun" surprise with these packs, the 4 Giant Bonelords in the walls of the 2 rooms before Marrowgar can activate and aggro you somehow randomly. I've seen only 3 activating, sometimes the 4 of them, sometimes during the first pack, sometimes not before the last one. It seems to be completely random, but to always occur when you're already fighting. A big emote will warn you a few seconds before one activates, and you'll have to deal with it quickly, as it's damage and aoe silence can be devastating.

If you're lucky you will only have one Bonelord then the periodic aoe, that silence you if you were casting, can be easily avoided and your healers won't have problem keeping the tank up. If you have multiple Bonelords, you will have 3 tanks to heal (the 2 Bonelords tanks and the tank dealing with the pack you were fighting) and 2 aoe silence to consider. On my about 10 runs through these trashs, both in 10 and 25-Man (I've done some reputation grinding runs :p), we've only survived 2 times to a double Bonelord and never to a wonderful 3 Bonelord bash.

To sum-up, cc the spiders and always have a spare tank ready to grab the random Bonelord.
Pro-tip: Most of the time, if more than one Bonelord activate while you're still fighting mobs, try to finish your pack quickly if you can and run for the exit, unless you have very good tanks and healers more than one Bonelord while already fighting a pack means raid wipe. Once they have reset, they can be pulled separately while they patrol.

Boss Description, Abilities and Raid composition.

First of all I invite you to read the boss description on WowHead, and WowWiki. And then you can go to the strategy guide on BossKillers, and the video on Tankspot - Project Marmot. Always basic reference for raid bosses. All of that will give you a good idea of the fight if you've not already experienced it.

The 3 mains abilities from Lord Marrowgar are: Saber Lash, Coldflame and Bonespike Graveyard. You can add to them his Bone Storm which is a sort of alternate phase of the fight.
He will use the first 3 during the tanking phase, but only Coldflame when he whirlwinds during his Bone Storm.

You will need 2 tanks in 10-Man and 3 tanks in 25-Man, just to share the amount of damage done by the Saber Lash.
Pro-tip: Lord Marrowgar's damage has been reduced in 10-Man and the life of the tanks isn't as in jeopardy as before, especially after a Bone Storm, but they still should be very reactive in the use of survival cds when needed.

The fight uses 3 healers in 10-Man and around 6 in 25-Man, more healers in 25-Man makes survival easier but the amount of dps is key as quick dps anywhere in the room is needed because of the Bonespikes.

The only tricky part of the fight is the end of the Bone Storm. When Marrowgar finishes it, he resets his threat table, and he is untauntable in 25-Man. Your tanks need to be quick at grabbing him and move him back near his original position. During this time, any aggro reducing ability is very helpful for healers (Fade obviously for priests, but using a bubble at that time as a paladin is a good choice to allow you to spam heal right from the start of the phase).
Pro-tip: Keep in mind that as soon as he stops his Bone Storm, he will starts his Saber Lash again .Tanks should be quick to gather, and use survival cds is needed. All other raid members should stay more than 10 meters away from the tanks to ensure none eats a Saber Lash whiled he's moved.

Focus on Healing 10-Man.

Pro-tip: in 10-Man the number of raiders is limited, you need to pay attention to the fact that at least 3 raiders should be out of the proximity of Marrowgar and in range of Coldflames, if you have fewer Coldflame targets he will use Coldflames on your tanks.

Most of the damage of the fight comes from the Saber Lashes. But there will be high short duration damage on the victims of Bone Spikes and random medium damage on the whole raid during the Bone Storm phase.

Two healers should be dedicated to the 2 tanks, usually the Main Tank will be a shield using tank to reduce the damage as much as possible as he will be hit more often. If you have a Holy Paladin in your raid (very much advised for this raid) he can heal one tank and beacon the second one, allowing the second tank healer to help with Bone Spikes and people being lousy at dodging the Coldflames.
The third healer will be healing the raid and the victims of Bone Spikes. He should react if ever needed to heal the tanks if one of the tank healers is in a Bone Spike.

Holy Paladin point of view:
I've been using a Flash of Light build during all ToC, this build is not enough for Icecrown, at least not enough for dual tank healing on Marrowgar. I'd advise you a pure Holy Light build for this boss, especially as the Aura Mastery and Divine Guardian talents can really help your raid if used at the right times.
Pro-tip: positioning
As a Holy Paladin, healing while moving isn't your best asset. If you're assigned to tank healing, you will have to use Holy Light, which is a longer cast and will make you very bad at avoiding Coldflames. If you get close enough to Marrowgar, you will be inside the "Coldflame safe zone" where the tanks and all the melee dps should be. As long as at least 3 members of your raid are out of this zone to provide Coldflame targets to Marrowgar, this is the safest spot for you to be healing from.

In 10-Man you'll be a tank heal for sure. Ask for another healer to help you if one tank goes low, or much more importantly if you get taken into a Bone Spike. You should be able to do most of both tanks healing by yourself alternating between Holy Lights and Flash of Lights.
Pro-tip: Remember to judge Marrowgar regularly for your Judgements of the Pure, and keep your Light's Grace up too.

Take care to the tanks after a Bone Storm, remember to refresh your Beacon of Light, use your Devotion or Frost Resistance aura (depending if you have a Paladin tank or not) and you should be set for Lord Marrowgar. There isn't much else to say about the fight :)

Focus on Healing 25-Man.

The fight is not very different than it is in 10-Man. The main difference is the amount of damage, that makes every ability from Lord Marrowgar much more deadly. Notably, the Saber Lash will hit for 300% damage instead of 200%, and the Bone Spikes will kill someone in a matter of seconds if not healer.

3 Healers should be dedicated to the tanks, this is mandatory as one can very probably get Bone Spiked several times during the fight, preventing his healing for a few seconds. The 3 other raid healers should be dispatched in the room and on Bone Spikes heal duty with the random slow people on Coldflames.

Holy Paladin point of view:
You will be affected to tank healing most probably using your Beacon of Light on the main tank and healing one of the Saber Lash tanks with mostly Holy Lights. The amount of damage is superior and you will have to nearly spam Holy Lights for most of the tanking phases, especially when one of the other tank healers is in a Bone Spiked.
The difficulty then becomes mana regen. Divine Plea will be necessary, unless you have external mana regen (Inervation or very effective Replenishment with an insane amount of intellect).
Pro-tip: The ideal time to use Divine Plea is during Bone Storm, but be sure to survive. Pop an Aura Mastery to reduce the damage on the raid and about 15 seconds before the end of the whirlwind use Divine Plea. Then if up pop a Divine Shield and a Divine Guardian, trying to be sure that Divine Shield will be up for the first 5 seconds after the end of the Bone Storm, so you can bomb heal the tank without risk of pulling aggro.

Grats on your downs, and have fun with this fight, very frustrating until most of the raid is reactive enough, easy and crazy fun afterwards :P

As always, I hope this article was helpful, and I'll see you again in the next Healing Through.

Edit January 27th

We changed somehow our strategy on Marrowgar concerning the raid positioning. I guess it's probably a better strategy for more casual (read less reactive) raids that have issues with the switch on the Bonespikes.
Now we do everyone into the Coldflame safe zone, which means everyone is close to Marrowgar, slightly inside his hit box.
This has several advantages:

nobody can get both into a Bonespike and a Coldflame, which avoid strong damage on anyone that could die before being freed from the spike;
nobody has to dodge Coldflames, that helps all classes with casting times, both healing and dps;
everyone is close together so switching dps on Bonespikes is faster as all dpsers can dps the spikes, melee dps included.

That strategy will result in Coldflames being cast on your tanks, that will have to communicate to move from left to right when they get flames under them.
We experienced easier kills like that. So if you have issues with people dying on the spikes/flames or raid healing having difficulties with keeping everyone topped and then people dying during the whirlwind, try it too, it could be easier for your raid too.

Icecrown Citadel advance

2009-12-22T12:02:00.002+01:00

We're in, after a first advance last week up to the Gunship Battle, we've gone through it this week with no problem on Marrowgar or Deathwhisper, and we've been able to make our first tries on Deathbringer Saurfang after having had too much fun with the jet-packs during the Gunship battle, all of that in 10-Man.
Ok, I know a lot of others have already cleaned all of that, I know some could say it's not that hard, but we're mainly a 10-Man guild and we're not 25-Man geared for most of us. I'm relatively happy with our advance. The first week was really a revival of the Ulduar period "Oh my god raiding is hard, but it wasn't so hard in Naxxramas". But the second week and now the third have been ok with people being more serious about the raids and hence things going much much better. I blame edc normal for having been way way too easy and the hard mode so much harder that we couldn't bring enough people regularly to seriously advance in it.

Anyway, Saurfang is a baaaaad guy ^^ I'm sure it's a lot more hectic in 25-Man but in 10-Man the hard part is that you can't lose anyone until the very end (or at least the last 5%). We need everyone to heal / dps the blood beasts and dps/tank Saurfang.
We used a 2 tanks / 3 heals / 2 melee dps on Saurfang / 3 dps on beasts or Saurfang group. Once we got the positioning and dealing with the beasts ok (no hunter for traps but an elemental shaman doing all the jog with earthbind totems and push backs), we were able to grind Saurfang down.
Our best try left him at 10%, the hard part is that nobody in the group should lose his concentration until the very end. One heal missed, one blood beast not cced/dpsed fast enough, one tank doing an aoe on the blood beasts pop, everyone of these can be the cause to a lot of blood/life for Saurfang and result in a wipe.

Even if we didn't down Saurfang yet, everyone enjoyed the fight, it is a fight that requires a nearly perfect execution from the whole 10 people in the raid, which is a real change for a normal mode, and one we liked.

On a side-note, I'll try to post a Marrowgar Healing Through guide tomorrow, as we got this fight nearly perfected in 10-Man and we've tried it 2 nights now in 25-Man (we decided the raid alliance needed some 10-Man experience before we go there in 25-Man again, too many slow movers ;p).

It has been a Busy week.

2009-12-17T08:56:00.004+01:00

Sorry for the lack of post, I've got a cold, a lot of job and I'm busy trying to push through Icecrown Citadel.
I know that for most of the raiders ICC could look dull, especially if they are full ToC25 and are doing ICC10, but for my small raiding guild even ICC10 is not at all won.
We have had two wiping nights in 25 on Marrowgar with the guild we allied to to reach the 25-Man cap, people aren't reactive enough mostly. I blame Nax and ToC for having been too easy with any kind of reactivity issue.
We also wiped in 10 Sunday to finally get the right set of people/motivation to push and down Marrogar and Deathwhisper last Tuesday. But I must say that trying to organize all these raids while being sick isn't the easiest of things.
Anyway enough complains, posts will hopefully resume next week with a Healing though Marrowgar and a post about Holy Paladin healing macros that I want to write for some time.

Have a good raiding in ICC everyone.

Healing Through: Halls of Reflection

2009-12-11T11:48:00.009+01:00

This is the first post of a series I'm starting and will try to update regularly. Healing Through will compile my healing guides for instances and raid bosses. I'll try to target everything that I found hard, or when I have nice tips to give.
Healing Through will mostly be healing through an event as a paladin. I hope the tips can help other healers, I'll perhaps extend it to Discipline Priest and Druid if I find some time ^^

Healing Through: Halls of Reflection Heroic (and Normal)

After a few experiences in Halls of Reflection as a healer (3 times normal, 2 times heroic) and discussing it with a friend who did it as a dps and healer, I think this instance is going to be the next nightmare of healers (5-Man wise).
I guess some of you that tried it on heroic know what I mean. I'm going to try to point out the difficulties and what to expect/do during the different parts of this instance.

Pro-tip: during the whole instance all mobs are undead, don't forget Holy Wrath, it stuns mobs for a few seconds, can prevent a wipe, especially if your tank needs 2s to pick-up a group of mobs.

Pro-tip: Cleanse is mandatory (seriously :p) during most of the instance, so don't go into Halls of Reflection without an add-on to help you like Decursive (up-to-date on curse add-ons website).

Phase 1: The Gauntlet

The instance starts with waves of ghosts attacking you, several at a time. You have to defeat 5 waves to get the first boss, 5 more for the second boss and then you go to see the Lich King.

I think these 10 waves are the hardest part of the instance for the healer. The reason is the random aggro, the fact that your tank will have a very hard time maintaining (or even gaining) aggo on the casters/distance mobs, and the sheer amount of heal you'll have to do to keep the aggroed dpsers alive (and you).
To say things simply, don't try HoR heroic if your tank is not good at gaining aggro and keeping it on several targets at a time. A tank able to silence caster opponents is the best. I think paladin tanks shine in this instance.

How to not turn crazy during the gauntlet?
If you do it "the basic way" and your group stays in the middle of the room, it'll be hard. It can work in normal (I did it like that) but it'll certainly not work in heroic. The reason is that the ghosts will aggro the closest person, damage you or your dpsers (squishy) resulting in you healing a lot, taking aggro from several mobs and being ganked to death in like 2s.
The solution is to use "line of sight" to force the mobs, and even the casters/distance to get to your group and especially come in reach of your tank. For that you have two choices.

Positioning your group.
You can try to stay in the entrance corridor, it'll still require your tank to go out and pick-up the casters, or you to heal him get aggro and go from left to right of the corridor to use line of sight and force all distance mobs to come towards your tank (who should be between them and you).
The other solution is to hide in one of the alcoves on the side, where the two first boss ghosts are. You can have everyone hide in the side of the alcove, wait for the mobs to come, and your tank just has to pick-them up right here. It's the easiest way, just look-out for aoe casters that hurt!

What else do you have to expect?
First several mobs have debuffs, and your party will be debuffed a lot (magic/poison I'm sure, I don't know about curses they are not displayed on my decursive). It's hard to cleanse & heal all the time, I advise you to leave the debuffs and concentrate on healing when anyone goes low.
Pro-tip: *always* keep your Beacon of Light on your tank at all times, even a few seconds without healing can result in a dead tank in heroic.
Now there is a very very nasty debuff, rogue ghosts use a poison that reduces healing by 50%, if you leave that on your tank he'll die very fast even with a Beacon. So you have to cleanse the tank at all time, if you let several debuffs on him, when he'll get the poison it could require you 3 or 4 gcds to cleanse remove it, and he'll be dead by then ...
Now last but not least, the healing aggro. Ok you forgot it even existed, it'll be reminded to you the hard way here. If you use one of the los positioning techniques, the mobs will all come towards your group. It's perfect if your tank can pick-up all of them before you have to heal, but it will rarely be the case, as they won't reach your group at the exact same time. If you have to heal him before all the mobs reach your group (very probable) then you'll have the aggro when they come close. And the aggro of 3 mobs in heroic will get you "dead in 2s". In the end your life is in the hands of your tank, if he's fast and able to pick-up the mobs before they reach you you'll live, if not you'll die on each wave ... I experienced the "rez" each 2mn with a bad tank, and I swear I'll not pug that instance again XD
Pro-tip: paladin consecration is the hottest thing ever invented to protect a healer, and don't forget to use Divine Protection, Hand of Protection ...etc on yourself.

Boss 1: Falric

Now if you can manage the waves you'll be able to face the bosses. Rejoice, they are way way easier than the waves, from a healer perspective. They still hit hard and require reactive cleansing though.

Falric is the first boss, he has two nasty abilities:
Impending Despair - Causes Despair Stricken, stunning the target for 6 seconds, if not removed after 6 seconds. Magic effect.
Defiling Horror - Inflicts 2,500 (4,000 in heroic) Shadow damage every 1 second for 4 seconds.

Impending Despair only requires a cleanse, but don't forget it, if your tank or you get stunned 6s, you're asking for a wipe.

Now, and especially as a paladin without any hot or proactive healing like shields, Defiling Horror is the worse part of this boss. Every 20s or so, Falric will fear your whole group and deal strong shadow damage on everyone.
Pro-tip: remember to switch to shadow protection aura when he engages.
Your whole party will be hit for 10K (16K in heroic) shadow damage while you can't heal. If they are not full-life they could be dead before you get out of fear. And the boss then immediately resumes hitting your tank who will have suffered the same shadow damage as everyone. You then have 20s to heal everyone to full again before the next fear.
The "easy" way to survive this fight is to be sure that your tank will have a Beacon of Light when the fear ends and start casting Holy Light on your whole group one after the other. One Holy Light should be enough on each member, perhaps with a Flash of Light in heroic. If your tank is a little low at the end of the fear, start with a Holy Shock on yourself.
Pro-tip: if at any time someone goes too low during a fear, bubble and heal.

All in all Falric isn't very hard once you get the timing right.

Boss 2: Marwyn

Marwyn is the last step to be rid of the waves, so you don't want to wipe on him :P
Happily he's not very hard, even easier than Falric is you don't miss on your cleanses.

Marwyn three main abilities are:
Obliterate - Inflicts 18K (26K in heroic) Physical damage, mitigated by armor.
Shared Suffering - Inflicts 4K (6K in heroic) Shadow damage every 3 seconds for 12 seconds. If dispelled, splits the remaining damage equally between all players. Magic effect.
Corrupted Flesh - Reduces maximum health by 25% (50% in heroic) for 8 seconds.

There is a little "trick" here. If you don't cleanse the Corrupted Flesh on your tank, he could die of an Obliterate is you don't keep him full life (most tanks will be reduced to around 20K life by a Corrupted Flesh on heroic difficulty. So you have to cleanse. But there is Shared Suffering that will do about 5K damage to everyone in the group if you're fast on cleansing it.
What should you do in the end? Well, the answer is relatively easy, only cleanse your tank at all times. It could result in group damage, but as long as everyone is topped that won't be a killer. That implies you'll have to heal the target of Shared Suffering but with a Beacon of Light on your tank, this won't be a problem, healing two people at once is easy for a paladin even without hots.

As a side-note Marwyn also lands shadow zones under you from time to time, who's not used to that now, just move away (yes you too Mr.Tank ^^).

Phase 2: The Running Away from the Lich King

Now you'll killed Marwyn. Good job, you can have fun running with the Lich King and Frostmourne right behind you.
This phase is much easier for you as a healer, just be cautious that the abominations have a cleave and a frontal aoe, so stay on the sides and out of direct contact if you can. Your dpsers could get hit from time to time be quick on the heals and keep an eye for a saving Hand of Protection.

This part of the fight is much more focused on the dpsers, exactly as the first part of the instance is hard on the tank and healer.
Your dpsers have to be able to down all the mobs of a wave before the Lich King reaches you, it could seem easy during the first two waves, it's surely not as easy on waves 3 and 4.
Now, the mobs are not arriving exactly at the same time, and if any dps (or you) get the aggro on an abomination and your tank doesn't pick-it-up in time, you'll have a corpse on the ground (they nearly OS any non tank character). These big flesh puppets also cleave and have a frontal aoe ... so if the dpsers are the ones in charge of the success, your tank still needs to be very quick and aware.
Be happy, this phase should really not be so hard on you compared to the gauntlet, but it doesn't mean it'll be easier for your group.
Pro-tip: try to help your dpsers if you have some free time, paladins do have good dps abilities on undeads. Especially always use Holy Wrath as soon as it's out of cooldown and don't fear to use consecration as soon as your tank got aggro on a whole pack.

You're done?
Enjoy the cut-scene, you deserve it, especially in heroic (with good gear the normal difficulty should not pause you any problem).

See you soon for more Healing Through series.

note: There is a nice article on WoW.com about the perspective of a tank during HoR, and I think what he says about it is right on the spot and will give you an idea of all what a good tank has to do during that instance gauntlet.

Icecrown Gating, Second wing on the 5th.

2009-12-09T13:28:00.003+01:00

Thanks (as always) to Boubouille from MMO-Champion for this news, and to the player who sent it there. You can read the details here, but the basis is: the second wing of Icecrown Citadel with Rotface, Festergut, and Professor Putricide will open the 5th January. So we have 4 weeks (probably a bit less spent raiding with Christmas and New Year during that period) before the next wing is opened and more bosses are given to us.
Boubouille speculated that the next gating will probably be shorter, or we would not have Arthas before April (and hard mode can't be unlocked before you beat Arthas on normal). He's probably right, 2 to 3 weeks is probably the time we'll have to wait during the next gating periods.

Until the 5th, we can have fun with Lord Marrowgar, Lady Deathwhisper, Gunship Battle, Deathbringer Saurfang in the entrance of the Citadel raid. But don't forget the new instances, I think the bosses there will be a fun challenge even for moderately geared players.
More news about the patch when I'll have been able to play it, the servers just came up again in Europe and I won't play before tonight :)

If you're experiencing problems, look at the list of known patch issues also present here. And don't forget to update your add-ons beforehand (like when you're patching ;p).

Patch 3.3 Tomorrow ?

2009-12-08T09:02:00.003+01:00

Still nothing official but everyone would be more than surprised if it wasn't. MMO-Champion is even already announcing it today. With a complete patch list and a list of all their articles about 3.3 (with probably all you could like to know).
For paladins you can find a review of the changes on Blessing of Kings.
Let us all cross our fingers for tomorrow, because no patch tomorrow will probably mean no patch before January.
It's now official. Happy hunting in Icecrown Citadel everyone.

Are you getting ready for Icecrown, moneywise?

2009-12-04T12:31:00.003+01:00

Everyone are expecting patch 3.3 to hit the live servers next Tuesday (Wednesday in Europe). As such I guess all raiders are getting ready to jump in the new raid and have some fun with new bosses, a new instance, some welcome trash (trash gives deepness and atmosphere to a raid). We're all eager for some novelty, the end of the expansion is approaching and as such we've all maxed mostly all what we wanted, crafts, reputations, ... and most of us have too many lvl 80 to ever want to hear Barrens again before Cataclysm hits.

So the question is, what are you doing this week to be all ready to jump in Icecrown Citadel next Tuesday/Wednesday?
I made sure to have several stacks of Flasks in advance (about 20 to 30 / char), food in profusion, gems ready (at least uncut ones when I have a jeweler on the server), enchant mats stockpiled. And I'm not even trying to abuse the patch release market, I just prepared some stocks for myself, so that I don't have to pay an arm and a leg on the ah during the first week of the patch release.
As always with new major content patches, you can expect a big increase in the ah prices for a few days/weeks. Gems, enchants, glyphs, pots, food, everything needed for raiding and for new loots will be greatly needed.

What I'm a bit afraid of are the prices. They're already relatively high right now, despite the lower number of raiders (bored by the long wait for IC and the lackluster ToC). The only reason I see is the lower number of players in general farming the mats, due to ... the lower number of players as a whole.
And if prices are already high right now (like more than 50 gold for a single Frost Lotus) how high are they going to top in like one week after the patch release? Well, we'll see, even if I had to pay a good amount of money to stock my consumables, now I'm secured and I really encourage you all to do the same before next week :P

See you all in Icecrown!

The Grumpy Tarutaru Post.

2009-11-25T09:20:00.010+01:00

It's been a while since I grumbled about anything so you get a slightly ranty post today. You'll probably think all these posts and topics are kind of non related but I find a general link between them, for me :P
It's all about WoW, mmos and how things changed for me since my first big mmo experience: Final Fantasy XI Online.

I've been reading some interesting posts lately on Casual Hardcore. First a post from a few days ago about What I Really Think Is Wrong In WoW, I was sort of expecting a post about easy game or micro transactions or something like that, but got a post from Kyrilean saying that the problem for him is not the game, it's the players. I especially liked a sentence from his post: “It’s too bad that a majority of people are like water and take the path of least resistance.”
That made me think a little about my view on that, and I mostly agree with him. Though for me, the game changes sort of encouraged that "easy go lazy" behavior.
Then I read today's post A Better Class Of Player still on Casual Hardcore that discussed a very interesting post from BBB Attunements – your mileage may vary. Mostly these posts comment about the removal of attunements and how it possibly affected the "skill" of raiders and the game immersion.
I'm not sure that attunements are a "gage of skill" but they sure meant that a player had done some instancing with this character and should know his ways at least a little. Now I completely agree with the fact that immersion is lower now than it was before. Wrath of the Lich King contains some epic questlines, and on the alliance side Ulduar is introduced in a wonderful way ... if you take the time to do these quests, and if you know where they are. I agree that the content is still here, and players can still do the quests, but if you hit 80 while finishing Sholazar Bassin, are you really going to clean Storm Peaks and Icecrown quests, when you have all these Argent tournament dailies to do and these heroics to run?

It happens that I also listen to No Prisoners, No Mercy, a very entertaining podcast about all things mmo. Don't ask me why but I play most of the mmos the hosts of this show play: I'm playing wow, tried warhammer (until level cap ;p), I'm playing aion (on a cleric you can't change yourself) ... I recommend you to listen to their Show 47 with a very interesting interview of Keen from Keen and Graev's Gaming Blog.
Now how all of that is related to WoW ?
Well it is not directly related, more to a general state of the big mmos at the moment. Whether WoW or Aion, or even Warhammer, the player is guided, there is this sort of invisible hand pointing you towards what you should do now and pushing you to reach "The End Game". In these 3 mmos this end game is all you seek, in a sense the leveling part is just a few weeks grind to reach the "real game".

So what are we going to ? Well I don't know for you, but it got me thinking about what player I am, what I like in the mmos I play now, what I miss perhaps from games I played before. I took the famous Bartle Test of Gamer Psychology that I did a few years ago and found me being a SEAK:
When I started mmos I was more an EASK, so I changed to be more social than achievement driven, though I still like exploration a lot. I think I can see that in my daily play, if I still stick to WoW it is because of the people I play with, if I went to play Aion it is because some of these friends moved there. I like new games and new universes, which is why I played Warhammer, why I played Vanguard, and LOTRO and so many others. But in the end it is the community that makes me stay in a game when I've finished exploring it enough for my taste.

When I read my lines it make me think about some posts from Larisa, that I read nearly every day ^^. She's a gnome mage, and I'm still a Tarutaru white mage somewhere, I think that's how I'm linked to her liking of immersion and socialization, even though she plays the grumpy gnome so well some days, better than I do.
I miss FFXI sometimes, as I miss Vanguard (which community was killed by SOE before summer with a stupid extension patch, somehow as they already killed SWG before). These two games contained a lot to do in an open sandbox context. They were harder than WoW or Aion on the leveling side and reaching max level, or even a high level was worth of praise in these games. The time you spent leveling also made the "trip to max level" much more worthy as it was a real experience. Strangely the gameplay in both of these games didn't change a lot from say level 20 to max. You did get a few new tricks but way way less than in Aion or WoW. You just refined your gameplay, and learned to adapt to new monsters, because the whole group gameplay was rich enough to not be grasped completely before you've got hours of grouping behind you.
In a sense you - the player - learned while playing, and as a healer your level wasn't your most important asset for grouping, it was your reputation as a good healer, or a good player whichever class you played.
What I also liked in FFXI and Vanguard were the epic quests in a sandbox (read open, free to do when you want) context. FFXI missions are huge epic quests that required groups to finish and often a lot of preparation. Vanguard contain a lot of questlines from level 10 to 50 that reward you with incredible items that you will keep for 10 or more levels ... but trust me anyone that has done the complete Infineum questline nows how long and hard it is. In these games someone that see you with these items knows how hard you worked to get them. Even if they are not max level items them mean something.
I could also use LOTRO as a great example for their epic questline that tells you a real story, but the lack of sandbox and the requirement for low level players in a context where leveling goes so fast sort of ruined that for me.

I think that's what I miss ... meaning. Give some feeling to what you do, have a sense of accomplishment when you achieve something. Give us real epic questlines, with real worth for a player be it an item, a special title giving you access to some place, anything that you can be proud to show and that means "That player was able to do that, or took all the time needed to reach that, and I so much want to do it too.".
I've not played Ultima Online for a long time, but back in the days (lol) crafting really meant something. You didn't have to do it, it was a choice (sandbox idea), but reaching master level was worthy.
Give us such things then you'll have put back meaning into doing something, more than throwing food at other players around a table and getting a "achievement" for that .... :P

Icecrown Citadel raid loot for Holy Paladins

2009-11-24T12:35:00.007+01:00

From a Holy Paladin view, what will be hot loot in Icecrown Citadel Raid ? That's the question I'm trying to answer here, starting with a list of all armor (plate only) & other items from the raid loot tables we have.
Discussion will come in later once we have more loot from the PTR.

That's a first compilation of Icecrown Citadel raid loot, taken from the PTR data you can get on MMO Champion loot post from November 20th, updated on Nov 26th.

10-Man (ilevel 251)
Sword Frost Needle marrowgar-10 -- hit/haste
Plate Feet Ancient Skeletal Boots marrowgar-10 -- crit/mp5
Plate Hands Festergut's Gaseous Gloves festergut-10 -- crit/mp5
Plate Wrist Bracers of Pale Illumination gunship-10 -- haste/mp5
Plate Legs Corrupted Silverplate Leggings marrowgar-10 -- crit/haste
Plate Shoulder Emerald Saint's Spaulders valithria-10 -- crit/mp5
Finger Signet of Putrefaction festergut-10 -- haste/mp5
Neck Soulcleave Pendant saurfang-10 -- crit/haste
Trinket Sliver of Pure Ice -- spell power, mana regen

10-Man hard (ilevel 264)
Plate Wrist Bracers of Pale Illumination gunship-10-hard -- haste/mp5
Finger Signet of Putrefaction festergut-10-hard -- haste/mp5
Neck Soulcleave Pendant saurfang-10-hard --

25-Man (ilevel 264)
Mace Trauma rotface-25
Shield Bulwark of Smouldering Steel marrowgar-25 -- crit/haste
Plate Head Faceplate of the Forgotten festergut-25 -- crit/mp5
Plate Shoulder Rusted Bonespike Pauldrons marrowgar-25 -- crit/mp5
Plate Waist Waistband of Righteous Fury gunship-25 -- crit/mp5
Plate Chest Rot-Resistant Breastplate rotface-25 -- crit/haste
Plate Waist Belt of the Lonely Noble trash-25 -- crit/haste
Plate Wrist Crypt Keeper's Bracers bloodprinces-25 -- crit/haste
Plate Feet Boots of the Funeral March -- crit/mp5
Plate Hands Fallen Lord's Handguards deathwhisper-25 -- crit/haste
Finger Ring of Rapid Ascent gunship-25 -- crit/haste
Finger Marrowgar's Frigid Eye marrowgar-25 -- haste/mp5
Neck Holiday's Grace festergut-25 -- crit/mp5
Neck Bone Sentinel's Amulet marrowgar-25 -- haste/spirit
Trinket Althor's Abacus gunship-25 -- spell power additional heal

25-Man hard (ilevel 277)
Plate Waist Waistband of Righteous Fury gunship-25-hard -- crit/mp5
Finger Ring of Rapid Ascent gunship-25-hard -- crit/haste
Trinket Althor's Abacus gunship-25-hard -- spell power additional heal

Emblems (ilevel 264)
Plate Chest Chestplate of Unspoken Truths -- crit/mp5
Plate Hands Gauntlets of Overexposure -- crit/haste
Plate Waist Lich Killer's Lanyard -- crit/haste
Cloak Drape of the Violet Tower -- crit/mp5
Cloak Volde's Cloak of the Night Sky -- crit/spirit
Trinket Purified Lunar Dust -- spell power, mana regen
Libram Holy Libram of Blinding Light

As a first rough analysis you can just take into account basic Holy Paladin facts, spirit is nearly useless for us, hit is marginally useful, mp5 is a useful but weak stat, crit and haste are good (and obviously int and spell power but all the items above have them :P).
This time I chose to order the items by 10-Man, 25-Man and hard (heroic) rather than by slot. I think it's easier for people to see quickly what they can have access to depending on their guild raids. On a common basis heroic items are remake with better stats of the non heroic items and 25-Man is half a tier better than 10-Man as always.
Hence mp5 is a plus, crit and haste are big pluses on an item. More in deapth analysis once we have more boss loot.

Last Update Nov. 26th

Trial of the Grand Crusader (ToC Hard), Guides & Tips collection

2009-11-19T08:51:00.002+01:00

Trial of the Grand Crusader (ToC Hard)
Guides & Tips collection

My guilds are starting ToC 10 in hard mode, so I tried to compile a list of guides and tips from the web. I'll try to add my own inputs once I've done some progress in there, but for now here are the date I'm using to prepare my raids.

First I'll start with the collection of guides from BossKillers:
Northrend Beasts
Lord Jaraxus
Faction Champions
Twin Val'kyrs
Anub'arak

Then the video strategies from Tankspot that can be found on their forum. They are not only videos but complete guides on their own.

And now several blogs I've collected information from and found informative.

Rhidach Heroic ToC guide, this is a complete guide full of info for all the encounters, 10-Man guide but most of it can be applied to 25-Man directly.
MMO-Champion Heroic ToC forum thread, lots of infos though you could have to dig in
Nymarie's Healing Guide to ToC, this is a 10-Man Disc Priest healing guide, not specifically hard mode oriented there are lots of tips that can be used
Joanadark post on Maintankadin, this post explains how you could improve your control on the aggro from the Faction Champions, where survival is key
Stoneybaby post on Big Hit Box, a guide about positioning during the Icehowl fight, or how not to be smashed against a wall

To end this post, please have a look at Morrighan's How to wipe in Trial of the Grand Crusader Guide, it's just plain fun.
A bunch of thanks to all those that took time to produce these guides and tip collections.
If you have or if you know any other guide for ToC hard, please leave a comment.

Protadin for a weekend.

2009-11-16T08:22:00.002+01:00

Ok, some friends rerolled and are now 80, which means they are hungrily doing heroics for badges. As tanks are always so hard to find for 5-Man, I happened to jump back into my tank set, turn my Righteous Fury once again, and go take some hits with them this weekend.
I forgot how fun it is to tank too, not look at green bars all the time and have some control and understanding of what happens around me (I'm much more aware as a tank than as a healer, more time to look around at least for me).
Now it's me, and when I do something I like to document, I've not tanked for more than 6 months and I wanted to read a bit about caps and all, if it had changed. That's how I found this post on Honor's Code, on his blog. Go read Honor's Protection Paladin stat caps post, it's full of all the details you need to know to itemize a paladin properly as a tank. As I'm only in my old Nax tank gear I'm far from that but if I gear more I'll aim for what he says.
Thanks Honor for the post, and great view about the Crushing Blows cap still being meaningful for us now as a Shield Block cap, even after they disappeared. It's great to be Shield Block capped and always at least reduce the damage.

Patch 3.3 Item Avalanche, Holy Paladin view

2009-11-13T08:23:00.010+01:00

So I wrote yesterday about the beginning of Icecrown Itemization on MMO Champion, guess what ? There are a lot of news today, cheers to Boubouille !

Page 1: 5-Man loot table, normal & heroic, and Quel'Delar
Page 2: Emblems of Frost Badge Rewards
Page 3: Icecrown Citadel raid loot, 10 & 25-Man, and Tier 10 Armor sets (not many of them yet), and Ashen Verdict Reputation Rings rewards

If that's enough to make you drool, I don't know what you want. From what I've seen most items are pretty nice considering stats, we're back to the great stats allocation of Nax with ilevel 251+ items.

Just looking at the 5-Man stuff already makes me happy, there is nearly a full tanking set of ilevel 219-232 there, perfect to gear a new tank and bring him into IC 10. Also nice for my lazy ass that can't cope with raiding enough to itemize my 3 healers, especially with my loot habit :P

Now let us give a look to the Ashen Verdict rings. Healers will go for the crit/mp5 ring (Ashen Band of Wisdom) for sure, the other one having hit. But I'd have loved a haste ring, with the changes from my T7.25 (I still was using it until we started ToC 10 Hard ...) to a T8-9 combo I went from about 600 to 400 haste and I don't like that >.< But I should not complain, seeing this ring Signet of Putrefaction in Icecrown 10-Man ...

About the Emblems of Frost rewards ?

Nothing else to say, grab them ! (We'll have to wait for the tier10 to decide about the gauntlet but a haste/crit item makes me jump in my chair).

I won't start looking at the Icecrown Citadel items right now, we don't have enough of them yet and there are still some confusions between the normal and heroic mode loot. But expect a review early next week. Still I want to see my Blood Elf with that shield.

Quel'Delar: The Sister Blade

2009-11-12T11:14:00.005+01:00

This one I love, it's full of story, it's a cool long questline that brings you to all the new instances of Icecrown, and it reminds me of the old vanilla or BC questlines that were so epic (Black Temple access is one of my favorite).
So Quel'Delar is a blade, the sister blade of Quel'Serrar (which drops on Onyxia) and you can read it's story in this blue post.

The quest to get your weapon will be quite long, it starts with Reforging the Sword and finishes with The Purification of Quel'Delar which brings you to the very Sunwell on Sunwell Plateau (probably not the end of the raid itself or it would be one of the best quests ever, but make it nearly impossible to do for an unguilded player).

Once you finish the quest you'll be able to chose which incarnation of the blade you want (you can get a mace ;p) the 6 different weapons have been revealed by MMO Champion this morning, you can look at them on this post. They are all ilevel 251, which should be Icecrown Citadel 10-Man ilevel.

There is no question for me the one I'll get as a Holy Paladin is Quel'Delar, Lens of the Mind. It's a beautiful sword (I like swords) it has spell power, crit and haste, what else could you want ?
Even though a lot of Holy Paladins will have it, I can't wait to see it on my side instead of my non cool looking Onyxia blade. You can be sure you'll see a post and a picture here once I get it \o/

Icecrown itemization go go go

2009-11-12T10:56:00.004+01:00

Ok, I'm all excited because the first item lists for patch 3.3 and Icecrown are out. Items are in the last PTR files, though I don't think they started dropping yet.
Anyway you can find the first lists on MMO Champion (your best source of wow news as always):
5-Man Dungeons loot lists (normal 319 ilevel, and heroic 332 ilevel),
Icecrown Citadel first loot list (I assume 25-Man from the 364 ilevel),
you can also add the Crafted Items list published a few days ago.
I'll start a review for Holy Paladins once we start to know on which boss the items drop (what I did for Ulduar).

ps: Ok, ok, I'm really as excited as everyone about these new shinies even though I tend to pass on loot in raids. I'm just an itemization and optimization nerd, at least on paper :P

What is a "Portable Hole" ?

2009-11-09T12:37:00.003+01:00

So I happened to listen to The Instance #168 this morning (thanks Scott and Randy for entertaining me during this morning at work), and I couldn't help but grin as they joked about the new bag you can get from Haris Pilton in the World's End Tavern in Shattrath City: the Portable Hole. You can see a picture and all on MMO-Champion (as always your best source of wow information).
Ok if you're not an old Dungeons & Dragons geek you won't understand and probably laugh at the "Hole" part. But for all old table roleplayers like me, the portable hole is the best bag you can carry as a dungeon adventurer since the middle 70s.
Just another tribute of the folk at Blizzard to this ancestor of rpgs that is Dungeons & Dragons.

Circle of Healing for a Holy Paladin ?

2009-11-09T11:05:00.004+01:00

Ok no, we're not going to get a new awesome raid healing ability, sorry. It's just an interesting project launched by Miss Medicina that you can follow on this page.
She wrote a questionnaire for all healers to give some of their views about their class and healing in general in raids (mostly).
Looks like Almaster from Lux Legis tagged me and as I liked reading other healers views, I'm adding mine :)

First a short introduction to my healing team. I have 3 lvl 80 raiding healers, they have very close gear, mostly because I use badges to gear all of them more than raid loot (not that I don't like loot but I really don't run for it unless nobody wants an item).
My experience with each of them is different though, I've played Shazalyn, my Holy Paladin, since the beginning of WotLK (was prot before) and I've hours and hours of raiding with her.
My Discipline Priest, Syriel, has seen a good bit of raiding too, and she's the only one with which I've been able to finish Yogg (which I really really want to do again). But Discipline priests are rarely used as they should (and always perform poorly on recount), so I only raid with her in friends groups where I can play as I like (aka I don't end up having to raid heal as disc ...).
Velours, my Restoration Druid, is the one I have the less raiding experience with, and the one I have yet to really get used to. I'm sure I could get better at rotations and awareness with her, but druids are so strong with a spellpower built that she's more my "lazy heal" character :P

Now, my Holy Paladin is the character I've played the most, and the one I started this blog with, so I'll answer with her.

* What is the name, class, and spec of your primary healer?
Shazalyn, Holy Paladin is my main character and healer.
* What is your primary group healing environment? (i.e. raids, pvp, 5 mans)
Mostly raiding, normal 25 Man & 10 Man, a little bit of 10 Man Hard modes (I love that).
* What is your favorite healing spell for your class and why?
Holy Shock, instant, fairly strong, has lots of synergy with Flash or Holy Light if you crit with it (which is expected if you have an old crit build like me).
* What healing spell do you use least for your class and why?
Paladins don't have so many healing spells, we're not druids. I can't see a healing spell I don't use at least a few times in a boss encounter. Probably Judgment of Light if I'm not the only paladin, I'll judge wisdom and let the protection or ret paladin judge Light.
* What do you feel is the biggest strength of your healing class and why?
Endurance and healing spam. Paladins are probably the best healers to maintain a constant influx of relatively strong heals for a long time on a target, and very strong heals for a fairly good time. That's also what makes them kind of boring to play sometimes :P
* What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your healing class and why?
No raid healing spell, we can raid heal ok with the new Beacon of Light, but all our heals are single target and we're hence very limited by the gcd. Mobility is also a big issue for paladins, you have to learn the timing of fights and your positioning more than any other healing class, because the more you have to move, the less you heal.
* In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best healing assignment for you?
Paladins have always been tank healers, and still are best suited for that. Even though 3.2 made us less crappy at raid healing, which is very nice for 10-Man.
* What healing class do you enjoy healing with most and why?
That's a very hard question. Sadly Paladins don't really go well with other healers, it's more a question of raid assignment. Though I usually like to have another Holy Paladin with me, I tried a ToC10 with 3 paladins, it was really not the best thing. Have raid healers with you will be much nicer. The thing is we have very few instant heals, and even with add-ons like Incoming Heals, we still end up overstepping other healers. Only solution is to have confidence in your other healers and have good healing assignments.
* What healing class do you enjoy healing with least and why?
Any other healer when I try to raid heal. And with the 3.2 Beacon of Light we should be raid healing all the time as we heal the tank at the same time. So we end up overlapping raid healers, that are often more effective and faster than us, much overhealing and probably some frustrated druids & priests & shamans ... The thing is, if we don't spam the raid, we spam the tank. It's the same for us so it doesn't cost us any more mana, but I'm sure it annoys other healers.
* What is your worst habit as a healer?
Not keeping my judgments up enough on bosses and not using my cds enough, I'll like the T9 bonus.
* What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while healing?
Feeling powerless when people stay in the fire and die ... not that I can do anything but seeing people die and not being able to ever save them is frustrating.
* Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other healers for PvE healing?
I think that PvE healing balance is ok right now. Not that I think all healing classes are as fun to play, or as good for all fights, but overall it's ok.
* What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a healer?
Recount is fairly decent for a paladin now that Sacred Shield is a single target spell. I still advise world of logs that can cope with bubbles & absorption. All in all, if the raid worked, if your tanks didn't die too much, well you did your job ok enough.
* What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your healing class?
Holy Paladins are fairly simple, they've always been tank heals and I think that's what most people expect of them. Now few people realize how much a toolbox we are. Hands of Protection / Freedom / Salvation ... are great tools that little people think to ask for.
* What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new healers of your class to learn?
Timing. Paladins can't heal on the move, and the first heroics in GT4 or Utgarde Pinnacle are going to be real tests for a new Holy Paladin.
* If someone were to try to evaluate your performance as a healer via recount, what sort of patterns would they see (i.e. lots of overhealing, low healing output, etc)?
I try to really use all the tools I have, so I'm fairly balanced between Beacon, Flash and Shock. I try to limit my use of Holy Light now, nerfed Illumination and int makes it much harder with my "limited" gear. Overheal is high, but that's inherent to the Beacon that I maintain at all times. I have mostly an int/crit build so yes my crit will be over 45% in raids and I like it for my Holy Shocks.
* Haste or Crit and why?
Before 3.2 I would have said crit (and int) without question, until you reach about 40% unbuffed. Now crit is much less useful for mana regen and you will need some mp5 or alternate mana source (trinkets & the like). Haste is really increasing your hps, so yes, balancing both will be good.
* What healing class do you feel you understand least?
Resto shamies are the only one I've not played at 80 in a raiding environment, but I'm going to start one soon :P
* What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in healing?
Grid (and Grid_Raid_debuffs for raid frames), Decursive (cleansing tool), Classtimers (with focus frame to keep up Beacon & others at all time), Pitbull (character & target & focus & target of target frames).
* Do you strive primarily for balance between your healing stats, or do you stack some much higher than others, and why?
Spellpower to 2000+ first, then int/crit/haste/mp5. Haste being the only one that won't help for mana regen but that will partly reduce your mobility issues.

And now I have to tag two people, always hard to do when you're late in the bandwagon .. hum ... bandcircle ? Let's give tags to two people that I like to read then.
Averna @ Nerf This Druid
One of my best druid references since Resto4Life closed.
Coriel @ Blessing of Kings
A long time Paladin blogger that I always enjoy reading.

Go to the main circle page and give a look to other healer answers, that's often reassuring and interesting, if not fun ... like this way too pink one.
Have fun healing and keeping all these little green bars up :)

Lay on Hands change (again ?)

2009-11-06T08:40:00.003+01:00

In this forum post Ghostcrawler explained that they didn't intend to prevent Holy Paladins to use Lay on Hands on paladin tanks. I really think this change is pvp intended and that they didn't think about all the implications at first, though as discussed in my previous post Protection Paladins are still screwed, but they're considered as too strong right now so it was expected.
Here is the remedial change to this nerf, so that Holy Paladins don't feel like they nearly lost one of their tool (our best "oh sh*t" button) when healing a tankadin :

Sanctified Light: This talent now also has a 33/66/100% chance to prevent Lay on Hands from causing Forbearance when Lay on Hands is used on others.

Considering how many times LoH saved my tank (perhaps he would have survived with only a Holy Shock, but LoH sure is reassuring). I'm happy to not have to worry if I'm healing a warrior, or a paladin.

It seems that deep Holy will more and more be the biggest "toolbox" of any healing tree. With the changes to Sacred Shield and now Lay on Hands, more and more is pushed down there. It won't change much for us in term of gameplay, but I sort of feel it shows how much "problems" the uniqueness of the paladin class is giving Blizzard right now.

Valithria Dreamwalker

2009-11-05T09:04:00.006+01:00

The Dragon Who Loved Me.
from the memories of an Icecrown raid healer

Ok, that's a completely silly and cheesy subtitle, but I can't help. That's probably the first fight in the history of WoW that puts healers in the center of the stage. Yes, during that fight the goal is not to kill something, but to heal a captured green dragon.
My healer friends, we will have to bring back this mighty dragon from 50% life to full while our raiding brethren will protect us from the enemies assaulting us and trying to prevent our task.
Isn't that so cool to be the one that will decide on the length of the fight ? Yes you've read correctly this fight is not a DPS race, it's a ... Healing Race !

Let's come to more details. Valithria Dreamwalker is the first boss of the Frostwing Halls of Icecrown Citadel and is encountered before Sindragosa. She starts the fight at 50% life, you will need to heal her while killing the adds that will spawn to stop you. Once the dragon is back to full health she will destroy all remaining adds and teleport her (and you) out of the citadel effectively ending the fight.
During the fight players can use portals created by Valithria to switch to dreamstate, and alternate plane where dreamclouds will spawn. These clouds will regenerate your mana and greatly increase your healing for a short time, you can then get out and bomb heal Valithria before going back in there. While some healers (and a few dps as the clouds have to be destroyed to give buffs) will rotate between healing & regaining mana, the rest of the raid will have to deal with all the adds.
There are 5 kinds of adds. Glutonous Abominations will be especially dangerous as they'll spawn Rot Worms when they die (8-10 in 25-Man) that will melee their target (for about 5K) and can easily OS any character that is not a tank if they gang on him. But the key of the fight will be Suppressers, a class of adds that cast a strong debuff on Valithria reducing all heals on her by 10% and effectively making the fight longer as long as they're up. In 25-Man there is 6 Suppressers per wave when this fight was tested on the PTR.
You can find some details about the abilities on the wowwiki page, or the MMO Champion page (with a nice video of the fight).

Now about tactics, my guess will be for the Valithria healing squad to switch to dream state when a wave of adds spawn, buff and regen there until the Suppressers have been killed by the raid and come back to heal Valithria with full mana and the healing bonus while not being hindered by the Suppressers healing debuff on the dragon.
Now for the classes, I think Holy Paladins and Restoration Druids will probably be the healers assigned to Valithria if you have enough of them, while Shamans and Priests will probably stay on the raid. Why ? Because their single target spam healing is probably the best of the 4 healing specs, though very mana intensive, hence the use of the dreamstate plane. Holy Light spam and Nourish spam (whith full hots active) will be hard to best.

It really looks like a very interesting fight and I'm really eager to try it, especially in 25-man where the number of adds can turn the fight from controlled to hectic in a few seconds ^^

New Lay on Hands & PTR build 10747

2009-11-04T08:20:00.003+01:00

Patch 3.3 - PTR Build 10747 has hit on the Test Realms as you can read on this link to MMO-Champion news.
You can read the details from the Blues here. For us about the latest news that I talked about on October 28th, little remains from the first wave. Were they too quick to announce untested changes ? Were we vocal enough to make them reconsider ? I don't know, but the big nerf of Sacred Shield has been changed to a removal of the Flash of Light combined hot effect (that is now limited to deep Holy), and Lay on Hands is still usable on yourself, even if it now shares a CD with our other big lifesaver tools (so it only hurts pvp mostly).

The last changes that I discussed are now these on the last build:

Flash of Light no longer heals for an additional 100% over 12 sec if the target has the Sacred Shield effect.
Lay on Hands is now affected by Forbearance and can now be cast on self again - Heals a friendly target for an amount equal to the Paladin's maximum health and restores 1950 of their mana. Once healed, the target cannot be targeted by Divine Shield, Divine Protection, Hand of Protection, or Lay on Hands again for 2 min.
Infusion of Light now causes your Flash of Light to heal the target for an additional 50/100% over 12 sec.

I have no problem with the change to the hot effect, and very little with the slight nerf of Lay on Hands. They will nearly only affect ret pvp builds that, according to Blizzard, were too strong on the survivability side. As you know I'm a big PvE fan, for me WoW is a bad PvP game and other games around are much better suited for PvP (Warhammer or Aion anyone ?) so I don't PvP in WoW or very little. Hence yes, I'm pretty happy with this reversal.

My first Icecrown review later this week. Have fun and thank you for reading.

afg for 2 weeks

2009-11-03T09:06:00.003+01:00

Just to keep you informed I'll be away from the game for 2 weeks, as my job is sending me away until mid-November. I still have a few things to post, I'll try to find some time for them.
And for my guildies here and there, see you when I come back :)

Btw I'm very enthusiastic for IC ... can't wait to try the new bosses as for now all that I'm looking for are Ulduar hard modes (I love the Iron Council 3 levels of difficulty).
More on that soon, go take a look on MMO Champion if you want some spoilers about the first IC bosses.

Protadin ... To the Ground, Baby !

2009-10-28T10:55:00.007+01:00

Ok, who doesn't already know that fateful sentence from Ghostcrawler at whatevercon after the release of WotLK and the ret paladin OP period.
Now it's all about protection paladins, or mostly, and Lay on Hands suddenly becoming too op to live. You can find the changes in the last patch on the PTR on Mmo-champion.
To sum-up here they are :

Sacred Shield can now only occur every 30 sec. (Up from 6 sec)
Lay on Hands can no longer be cast on yourself.
Infusion of Light now also reduces the cooldown on the effect of Sacred Shield by 12/24 sec.
Aura Mastery now lasts 6 sec. (Down from 10 sec)

There is a "balance" to the Sacred Shield nerf, but only for deep Holy Paladins (read not the arena spec).

Infusion of Light: This talent now also reduces the cooldown on the effect of Sacred Shield by 12/24 seconds.

This is added to the Divine Guardian / Sacrifice nerf, as you can read on his blog, the Suicidal Zebra explains the 80% nerf of the Sacred Shield for prot paladins.

It's clear that PvE protection paladins are the most affected by the Sacred Shield & Lay on Hands nerf. Holy Paladins regen via Glyph of Divinity will also be affected when they were casting Lay on Hands on themselves.
And now all paladins can't self heal themselves in arena/bgs via Lay on Hands.

As Rhidach is saying on his blog, I can't eat this change is not mostly arena/pvp related. And it severaly screws-up protection paladins ... and all levelling paladins btw.

It's been several years since we started saying PvE & PvP abilities should just be made different (as it's already the case for potions/food/etc...) so that PvP changes aren't that hard to balance if you take PvE into account (and vice-versa). But no, this is probably too much work ... sigh. Well done Blizzard.

edit :
In this post Ghostcrawler announces they reverted the Lay on Hands change ... but he's not promising anything about them not changing it again. Stay tuned for more paladin nerfing news.
And yes it's qquing but such changes are so deep towards the PvE balance that they can't just go silently. We're learning to play a class, we're fighting for spots in raids, esp as paladins were not good at all during the end of BC, either for tanking or healing or even not that good at dpsing. So we won't let our efforts go to waste without a fight, that's all.

Down with Yogg Saron

2009-10-26T10:27:00.003+01:00

So I finally killed Yogg Saron (normal 4 watchers, no uberness here) this weekend. I'm a bit sad that it happened on my disc priest before my paladin, but I'm really happy to see the end of this epic fight. Yogg Saron is, for me, the best fight of Wrath up to now, it's 3 very different phases, there is a lot to do for everyone, and especially in 10-Man none is allowed to fumble as we can't tolerate one death or we won't get the enrage timer.

It's really hard to find enough motivated people to finish Ulduar now, but I happened to get lucky on my priest server. I got invited in a guild group extending its tag when they were on Yogg, they wiped on their first night and we wiped again all night on last Thursday. This Saturday, we went there again with nearly the exact same group, everyone knew the fight and we downed Yogg on our second attempt of the night, only our third time on Yogg phase3.
I was the healer of the brain team during phase 2 which is a lot of fun and rush (you don't have much time to think and I fumbled my first brain phases on Thursday). We barely killed him before the time limit though (only 15s remaining) and our tank had 6 adds on him at the end and survived (I love to heal good tanks).

All I can say is that I really like this encounter. It's original, well designed and it reminds me of C'thun :)

I used the BossKillers guide to prepare my raid nights, and it really helped me to not be surprised especially in phase 3 when these guardians hit to hard on the tank (thank you Pain Supression during the last seconds of the fight).

Rhidach's Heroic ToC guide

2009-10-24T09:15:00.004+02:00

Not mine, I don't have enough gear to seriously try this one, but a complete and very detailed guide. It is specially tailored for protection paladins but full of tips readily usable as a holy paladin. just go read Rhidach's blog post on How to defeat heroic 10man Trial of the Crusader.
I seriously point you to this one, there are so many tips for a paladin that I didn't think of (not playing prot enough these days) I'm ashamed of my gameplay :P

Thanks a bunch Rhidach :)

Update note 20th November: I've compiled a more complete list, including Rhidach's guide, you can find it on Trial of the Grand Crusader (ToC Hard), Guides & Tips Collection

Waiting for IC ...

2009-10-17T16:01:00.002+02:00

I don't know about you but I'm seriously waiting for Icecrown Citadel. Not that I've finished
all the content, I've yet to see Yog Sarron die, but that requires several evenings on Udluar and most people don't spend that amount of time on this raid anymore. Too much "free loot" on ToC (normal) or Onyxia or Lolaron to motivate much people about Ulduar.

I still think Ulduar is the best raid from WotLK up to now, despite it being too big, it should have been split in two raids as it was done all along BC. I still have some friends motivated by Ulduar hard modes and we're trying them from time to time, usually one or two nights a week when we are lucky enough to make our suicidal squad (Auriaya with all cats is a crazy fun mess of a fight to heal). If I find ToC hard mode mostly a "gear check", Ulduar hard modes are, at least for some of them, very entertaining.

The first news from the next raid Blizzard is giving us are starting to appear, and the first boss was tested on the PTR these last days (report on Mmo Champion). It doesn't seem super hard, as least on paper, I hope the normal/hard mode gap will be lower then ToC, and my wish is for hard modes to contain more abilities, more strategy than just be a gear check put over a normal difficulty boss.

I guess we'll all see that in IC, hopefully not too long from now, but even more hopefully nicely tested and balanced.

Raid Healing for Holy Paladins post 3.2

2009-09-30T11:00:00.004+02:00

This post ended being much much longer than I thought at first when I started it. But I was always adding new views and after a few hours it got quite gigantic. I organized the ideas so that you can pick up what you're interested in or find back some points more easily after reading the whole thing. I'll try to post better inputs on some parts of it later in separate posts if I can find some time for that.
Now let's start with the beast.

It is no news that patch 3.2 changed a lot for Holy Paladins. I have already written several posts on the topic: Patch 3.2 will change just everything ...
You can also find very good analysis of the changes on: Banana Shoulders and Holypaladin.net.

Now what did it changed for me after a few weeks of raiding? Though my experience is limited to Ulduar and Trial of the Crusader 10-Man, I think it is enough to see the big changes that 3.2 brought us.
At first I was very worried with the mana regen nerfs, and for a good reason, I was right. But in the end patch 3.2 gave us so much that I'm not complaining at all, as long as you can adapt to a new style. Let me explain my views, and then talk about gameplay changes.

What changed with 3.2 and how does it impact us?

First big mana & mana regen nerf, Divine Intellect was nerfed from 15 to 10% (about 5% total mana loss) and Illumination was nerfed from 60% to 30% regained from the mana cost of the spell that crits (second nerf it was 100% before WotLK). You can also add the small nerf to Replenishment affecting all mana users. On paper a severe nerf to our mana and regen, and in the game too. Depending on how you played, it will affect you more than others. I had an intellect & crit build so it had a strong impact on my regen and I use Holy Lights much more carefully now while I was sometimes "splash raid healing" with the glyph before, which was an obvious overshot but affordable.

Second change of Beacon of Light and addition of a hot to Sacred Shield, Beacon of Light now works with overhealing and has a 60m range, and if you cast a Flash Light on the target of your Sacred Shield it will gain a hot. The Sacred Shield hot is fine, it is not strong, but it is free, doesn't really cost you any global cooldown (though you have to recast a direct Flash Light on your tank here and there) and helps with maintaining a constant healing influx to your tank (the obvious target of your Sacred Shield). Now the real big boy here is the change to Beacon of Light. It was useful before, and helped you to do a bit of raid healing while still covering your tank. It is now very powerful and allows you to become a full (or nearly) raid healer while at the same time being as reactive as before on your tank and able to land one of these life-saving healing bombs at all time. I'm explaining more clearly that in the next paragraph.

Beacon of Light is your new best friend.

The job of a main tank healer is to always be able to react quickly and do his best to save his tank if a damage spike occurs, which you all know is very common in WotLK. Beacon of Light was created to allow you to do some healing on other members of your raid while still healing your tank, *but* you had to retarget your tank in case of damage spike as any overhealing done was not sent to the Beacon (and hence there was no way to heal your tank for 15K but to target him, unless another member of the raid was also injured for at least 15K, and in a 30m range from your tank). This meant some heavy macro building, using right click to target your focused main tank for example. Or some target change delay, and delay is bad when it's an urgency.
Now all overhealing is also transferred and the range is 60m. You don't have to retarget your tank anymore for this 15K healing bomb, and you can even do it while being too far to even be able to target him, by targeting a member of your raid between you and him.
This is such a strong change that I'd say I'm enjoying raid healing again, it's not any more complex than before (even probably easier if you're following the tips I'm giving later on) but you have much more freedom in who you heal, and it's much less frustrating in the sense you don't have to make this Cornelian dilemma of keeping the strong heals on your mt rolling or trying to help with raid healing.

New Beacon require a new gameplay.

Mostly you have to maintain 4 effects at all time now. Before patch 3.2, depending on who you were healing, the Beacon was not always mandatory, and the Sacred Shield hot didn't exist. So mostly it was only Sacred Shield on your tank & Judgement of Light/Wisdom for your raid. Now a Holy Paladin not using Beacon of Light at *all* times is just a dreadful dumb monkey :P It is just too strong to not be used at all times, unless, perhaps, you're completely sure that only the mt will take damage as in some old vanilla boss fights.

So what do you have to maintain? Beacon of Light (B) on your tank, Judgement of Light/Wisdom (J) on the main raid target (if possible each 20s for the raid heal), Sacred Shield (S) on your main healing target (not necessarily the main tank, I will give an example of that), and the Flash of Light hot (F) on your Sacred Shield target. It requires more attention than before and I strongly advise you to use an add-on to track these 4 mandatory effects that I will name the BSFJ effects.

Gameplay by examples.

As nothing is better than examples, I'll give you what I see as the two gameplay configurations we have now, depending on the boss encounter. As you could guess, I assume that as a Holy Paladin you are assigned to tank healing.
So let's take these examples, the two first beasts of the Northern Beasts trio from Trial of the Crusader.

Gormok the Impaler
This is what I call a single tank situation, it can still require tank switching but at any given time there is only one tank.
Focus you tank (use a focus macro with a shortcut to help if there is some tank switching) and keep at all time Beacon of Light and Sacred Shield on him. When the Flash of Light hot goes down, recast a Flash of Light on the tank. Keep the Jugement of Light/Wisdom up on the boss. And now all you have to do is heal the raid and keep the BSFJ effects up.

The two Jormungars
This is what I consider as a 2 tanks situation (if more than 2 tanks are required, you'll need another Paladin buddy to cover the 3rd tank and helps you on the MT), at any given time at least 2 tanks are taking strong damage, one being the MT usually taking more damage.
The idea is to heal both tanks at the same time, using the Beacon. It was possible before, but it's way more effective now. Cast the beacon on the one you are not assigned to as main healer, and the Sacred Shield on the one you will be targeting most of the time (to maximize the Flash of Light hot uptime). Then cast Judgement of Light/Wisdom on the boss and maintain a regular influx of Flash of Light on your target (with the occasional Holy Light if him or your BoL target needs it).
You're set for double tank healing, and with some training and getting used to it you can mostly heal the two tanks from this encounter alone in 10-Man.

But what about mana regen now?

If you follow the gameplay guidelines I've given earlier, you will see that your tank (which should be your main target during a raid) is receiving a strong and regular flux of healing even if you're mostly casting only Flash of Light on the raid. This is a strong change from before, and means that you should be using less Holy Lights (at least in 10-Man, the boss damage being lower).
But even with a more sporadic use of Holy Light you'll see your mana going down, especially as you should be recasting Beacon of Light for sure each 30s now (I'll have to do the math on the BoL glyph as concerning mana efficiency).
As for myself I went back to the Glyph of Seal of Wisdom (5% healing cost reduction) instead of the Glyph of Seal of Light, and I'm using strong mana regen trinkets and meta-gem. I'm still using my int/crit gear and spec, and it still do the job, I have to use mana potions much more often though, and Divine Plea for these 25% mana as often as I can.
My observation from raiding is that we still have a good lasting power, but we need to be much more cautious with our mana. With my two trinkets () and meta-gem (Insightful Earthsiege Diamond) I can regain more than 2000 mana each 50s (du to the trinkets hidden 45s cooldowns), to which I can probably add about 3000 mana each minute (?) from Divine Plea (I rarely can use it for its full duration but I try to use it each time it's out of cooldown). That's about 5 to 6K mana/minute, not bad without counting any mp5 or spirit (haha).

Minimum Mana Use and Healing Lasting Power

Let us give a look to mana costs now. Just to maintain your BSFJ effects during a minute, you have to cast (with a base mana of 4394 for a lvl 80 paladin):
2 Beacon of Light (35% of base mana),
2 Sacred Shield (12% of base mana),
5 Flash of Light (8% of base mana),
and 3 Judgement of Light (5% of base mana)
That gives you a minimum mana cost of about 6240 mana with 2 Flash of Light counted as a critical (40% crit).
So, just to keep up with the spells you need up at all time you will have a MMU per minute of 6240. Divide your total mana by that and you know how much you can last at the theoric maximum (don't be frightened but now you can see how much mana regen we need).
Now to maintain a regular Flash of Light casting, with 40% critical and 1.5s casting time you'll need to cast 20 Flash of Light per minute, which would cost you about 20 * (3/5*1+2/5*0.7) *352 = 6196 mana per minute.
Add this MMU to the FoL spam cost and you have a rough idea of your mana cost in a raid boss fight. Now calculate your mana regen as I did before, and add in your mp5 (and replenishement if you are sure to have it). Reduce your mana cost by your mana regen each minute, and divide your total mana by that. You will have a rough idea of your mana durability in a boss fight.
Ok this is not easy calculus and you don't really have to do it, but keep in mind that you'll use around 12.5K mana per minute probably half your mana if you have an average gear. Yes mana regen will hurt and you'll have to take it into account much more than before.

And for next time

In my next post I will discuss about healing macros and how they can really change your raiding experience as a Holy Paladin. Being more reactive, keeping up your multiple effects more regularly, avoiding wrong targeting when recasting Beacon of Light (which can be really deadly now) ... all of these can strongly change with macros.
Stay tuned.

If you want more inputs on healing post patch 3.2, you can read the guide on Holypaladin.net, it is full of gear & gemming information.

Holy spec: did you try Holy + Prot already?

2009-09-23T06:26:00.003+02:00

As my series on leveling is finished I'm back to talk about healing, gear and specs for patch 3.2. I'm writing an article about general gameplay in raids (that will be way too big ...) but I wanted to point you towards that article from Banana Shoulders: Bubble Spec: the New Hotness.
It's about the "new" Holy & Prot spec based on using Divine Sacrifice. Siha calls it a Bubble Spec and I like the name, it links it to Disc priests shields (and it is damage prevention), and it uses the paladin bubble to save ourselves when we use it.

Clearly, anyone can see uses for this huge raid damage prevention on bosses like XT-002, YS, Anub ... but as crit strength has gone down since patch 3.2 my previous preferred spec (51/2/15+3) has lost some of its punch, pushing the Bubble spec to our attention.

This is not news and several guilds have been using that spec already, but if you've not yet give it a try and see if it'll be the 3.2 spec for you.

Pre-raid gear in patch 3.2

2009-09-15T23:57:00.014+02:00

Last article about rolling a new paladin character to 80. This article will target gearing your paladin from fresh 80 to Ulduar raid level (at least enough to start Ulduar without shame). As I'm a healer this will obviously be more healing biased but most can apply to any paladin spec.

Wrath of the Lich King Patch 3.2 changed a lot of things for everyone, and even more for Holy Paladin. The two most impacting changes are:

changes (read mana regen nerfs, BoL buff) to the Holy Tree;
changes to the badge system in heroic and raid instances.

I'll try to look on these two changes and how it changed things for new 80 characters, and then I'll try to give tips about how to use them to your advantage. I recently leveled a Druid to 80 and got her from fresh 80 to a WoW Heroes rating of about 2246 (Ulduar 10/25 level according to WoW Heroes) in two weeks following these tips. Just so that you know my Holy Paladin has a score of 2290 and I've run nearly all of ToC 10-Man and all Ulduar but for Yog with her (but for Anub as I'm in vacation since he's up).

Holy Paladin Changes in 3.2

I've already discussed the changes to Holy in patch 3.2 in this post. If you've played a Holy Paladin in WotLK before patch 3.2, you should read it, and perhaps even this post on Elitist Jerks. If you're new to paladin healing or have not played a paladin healer since BC or before, then most of what you need to know is:

your mana is not "infinite" anymore by specing for crit rating and intellect;
you'll have to use Beacon of Light to be competitive, it is now the main tool of your healing skills and no sane Holy paladin will let it drop down.

I'll discuss more about the gameplay changes since 3.2 for me in a soon to be post, give it a look then. What matters for us here that mana will be an issue for you, intellect, mp5 should be big focuses for you in your gear, more than crit or haste, at least at the beginning (spellpower will still be your main gear focus).

Badges in 3.2

The huge change is that all raids and heroic 5-Man instances drop Emblem of Conquest (Ulduar 25-Man badges before 3.2). As you can guess, that allows you to gear in nearly full 213 and 226 gear just by doing heroics.
A lot of people, me into them, think that it is not a good thing, as a way too easy Naxramass wasn't good. This does not push people to do good to get their gear. And if you want to do high level raids (read end of extension arc raids like AQ40, Naxramass 1, Black Temple, Sunwell) gear won't be the only thing you need, and in fact it is the easiest to obtain thing. Skill on the other side needs hours of raiding and training. But I won't talk about that here, it is not the point.
I'm not going to give you the list of items you need. As I strongly incite you to raid at the same time you'll be gearing through heroics. Start with Nax10, proceed until you reach Ulduar, you'll be able to gear up from there. you can use the badges to complete what you'll get during your raids, and all your raids will give you badges too (Nax25 is the fastest source of badges if you can find a good group).

Here are a few pointers about loot lists for patch 3.2: on WoW.com, lots of different posts on The Holy Paladin.net.

Remember also that you can get 2 Emblems of Triumph (for your Tier 9 armor) per day with the daily heroic quest. And you can run the new Trial of the Champion instance in both normal and heroic mode, even normal mode will reward you with very nice items like this "you must have" trinket: Tears of the Vanquished.

Time to gear-up !

My earlier post about pre-raid gear is still useful, you can find it here.
Now how can you get as soon as possible to the gear level to pleasantly run heroic and "easy Nax"?
I'm not going to advise reputation gear, as it'll probably take you time to get these reputation high enough to get anything useful (read epic gear), reputation are useful but focus on the once you want at revered level for your head enchant (Kirin Tor for Holy, Knights of the Ebon Blade for Retribution, Argent Crusade for Protection).
I'll advise you to PvP during you last levels (78+), get the lvl 78 pvp gear and play as holy or ret as you like, your goal will be to get xp and honor points. At lvl 80 you should be able to do buy Epic arena armor and Wintergrasp gear. For that:

run Wintergrasp battle as often as you can (especially if your faction is on the attack);
run Alterac Valley as often as you can (best reward in term of xp/honor per hour).

Then once 80, get your pvp gear, complete it with Titansteel gear (head, feet, mace). You should be around half epic. Keep your lvl 78 pvp gear or crafted pve gear, gem for spellpower & intellect. Enchant your epic items (esp. your Titansteel Guardian). You should be ok for heroics and Nax 10 and Trial of the Champion (at least normal).

From there progress with badge gear, what you can get on raids, and what you'll get on the Trial of the Champion normal & heroic (you'll want that mace from the heroic version).

You can also run the dailies from the Argent Tournament, there is ilevel 200 (Nax10) epic gear to get and a lot of pets & mounts of you like them (I'm not the most patient type and never got anything from them).

Final Words

I hope you'll enjoy playing at a Paladin, especially if you joined the rank of the healers in this game :)
Your first days as a Holy Paladin won't be easy as we miss on the mobility part, you can't heal and move nicely. Try to play often with a tank you know, and that will know when to move and when to give you 10s to heal & mana regen, that will really make things easier for you, and that is really the best advice I can give you (especially for heroic timed CoT 4 or heroic Utgarde Pinnacle).

edit:
A first version of this guide can be found here, there are pointers to other good Holy paladin gearing guides.

Paladin Leveling Guide (part3, end)

2009-09-09T19:12:00.009+02:00

Second part of a guide for those that roll or reroll a paladin. The first part of the guide, addressing levels 1 to 58 can be found here: Paladin Leveling Guide (part1), second part for lvl 58 to 68 is here: Paladin Leveling Guide (part2).

This guide is more targeted for those that already have a lvl 80 and can support their alt, but most of the tips can be applied by anyone.

Paladin Leveling Guide (part 3, your time in Northrend)

The basic advises from the first guide are still valid, I'll rewriting them here because you should always keep them in mind while leveling.

The first tip, which is common to all leveling guides you'll ever find is: maximize your damage output. Don't try to gear for survival, the game isn't that hard most of the time and you'll want to down mobs fast.

The second tip is, try to get a good leveling guide if you want to. If you're new to the game, enjoying the discovery is probably the best thing to do, and using Wowhead to search when you're stuck in a quest will be enough. If you're a bit tired of the vanilla content, or want to reach 80 much faster, then leveling guides are for you. I used Jame's Leveling Guides for my 3 last characters, from 1 to 78 (last levels are not yet in the guide but really not hard to do) both on horde and alliance side, and I strongly advise them.

Ok, now let us start with paladin stuff. You can find all the paladin skills by level on Wohead here, if I'm not direct linking a skill, go there for more info.

I've written my views on leveling as a protection or holy paladin in Paladin Leveling Guide (part2). Though a dps (retribution) spec will level you faster, if you intend to tank or heal at level 80, I advise you to get the dual spec talent (that you can buy for 1000 gold) and try instancing with this spec. Retribution will be better for solo questing, but you'll find a group easier as a tank or healer, and will get used to what you want to play later on with your paladin.

The 2 weapons that will bring you to 80

When you arrive in Northrend, your first objective should be the Axe of Frozen Death, it's a @H Axe that you will probably keep until lvl 75. It is roughly equivalent to the 2H axe dropped by Prince Malchezar at the top of the Karazhan tower, which was a beauty coveted by many arms warriors.
It can be reached completely solo by horde players, you will need a group of at least 3 with a good healer to get it on the alliance side (trust me the last quest on the alliance side is suprisingly hard).
If you follow James guide, you'll get it fairly late especially if you're alliance. I'd advise you to get it earlier and get it enchanted with a +85 attack power as you'' play with it for a few levels.

When you reach lvl 75 it will be time for you to go to Zul'Drak if you're not yet there and do the Arena of Anguish series (remember the Arena of Blood in Nagrand, it's the remake) to get your De-Raged Waraxe. Once again enchant it with a +85 attack power, you'll probably keep this axe until 80.
The arena can be done with a good group of lvl 75 characters, but you will often find people helped by level 80 characters in full epics doing it, if you can find an easy spot, take it by all means, this axe will be your best friend for a long time.

If you're searching for a Holy paladin weapon, it'll not be too hard to find decent quest ones. If you want a good one, I'd advise you to befriend the Kalu'aks that have a very nice lvl 78 blue healing mace, you can also get nice healing weapons in several instances.

As for tanking weapons, the choice is much more scarce. You'll probably have to use a one handed dps weapon (at least there are some with endurance & expertise like this one) until lvl 74. At lvl 74, get one or two friends and go get the Ragemane's Flipper (elite quest lvl 74). You'll probably keep it until lvl 80.

Where to go and what to do when you arrive ?
(zones to level in)

Not considering the notes about getting your weapons before (it all depends if you're using an heirloom weapon) here is the order I'll advise you to follow in Northrend.
I'll advise using Jame's guide in that order:
Howling Fjord : lvl 68 to 70
Start with Howling Fjord questlines, until you reach quests which are lvl 71. It should be at the end of the "pirate" part of Jame's guide. Try to do the Utgarde Keep instance before leaving the zone.
Borean Tundra : lvl 70 to 71/72
Switch to Borean Tundra by Kalu'ak tortoise boat, and do all of it and the Nexus instance.
Howling Fjord : lvl 71/72 to 73
Back to the Fjord, finish the quests, do the elite ones if you can, do the Utgarde Keep instance if you've not done it before.
Dragonblight : lvl 73 to 74/75
Dragonblight is your next zone, there are two instances in the zone, you can do them whenever you find a group for them. This zone is huge, and there are several elite quests that require a group but are nicely rewarding (follow Jame's guide).
Zul'Drak : lvl 75-76/77
Zul'Drak is a good zone to level in, you have the Drak'tharonKeep (lvl 74+) and Gundrak (75+) instances into it, and the Arena of Anguish (see before).
Grizzli Hills : lvl 76-77
If you're not yet 77 then go to Grizzli Hills and grind quests until you are.
Scholazar Bassin : lvl 77-78
Do the Nessingwary quests if you want the achievement, do the Oracles/Frenzyheart quests for the faction rewards if you're not into achievements (they start with this quest).
Storm Peaks & Icecrown : lvl 78+
These zones are full of great quests, that will provide you with items still useful at lvl 80 and are very nice story wise. You will also be able to start your Son of Hodir faction grind for your shoulder enchants (with this quest).

The real new skills until 80.

The first one is Divine Plea at level 71. That will strongly change your mana regeneration, and can make leveling as protection doable (though a little slow still). This skill gives you back 25% of your mana each minute.

The second one is Shield of Righteousness at level 75. Only usable with a shield, this is another help for protection leveling, and a huge aggro boost if you're tanking.

... and now you reached 80, good job, now what to do ?
That will be part of a next article where I will try to advise the fastest path itemization-wise, to reach up-to-date raid status as soon as possible (I went from fresh lvl 80 to a gear roughly ok for Ulduar 25 in 2 weeks on my druid with the patch 3.2 token fest).

Paladin Leveling Guide (part2)

2009-08-25T10:02:00.009+02:00

Second part of a guide for those that roll or reroll a paladin. The first part of the guide, addressing levels 1 to 58 can be found here: Paladin Leveling Guide (part1).

This guide is more targeted for those that already have a lvl 80 and can support their alt, but most of the tips can be applied by anyone.
If you have a lvl 80, I can only advise you to send to your new paladin those two heirloom items:
Polished Breasplate of Valor (chest armore +10% xp)
one of these shoulder armors
Polished Spaulders of Valor (+10% xp, physical dps)
Pristine Lightforge Spaulders (+10% xp, healing shoulders)
Strengthened Stockade Pauldrons (+10%, physical dps & resilience)
As I'll advise you to continue leveling in the retribution tree as a dps paladin, I'd take the first ones but they cost emblems, and you could want to use them for your main unless you still have some old emblem of heroism. Then chose one of the second ones that can be bought in Wintergrasp for Stone Keeper's Shards.

Paladin Leveling Guide (part 2, from Outland to Northrend)

The basic advises from the first guide are still valid, I'll rewriting them here because you should always keep them in mind while leveling.

The first tip, which is common to all leveling guides you'll ever find is: maximize your damage output. Don't try to gear for survival, the game isn't that hard most of the time and you'll want to down mobs fast.

The second tip is, try to get a good leveling guide if you want to. If you're new to the game, enjoying the discovery is probably the best thing to do, and using Wowhead to search when you're stuck in a quest will be enough. If you're a bit tired of the vanilla content, or want to reach 80 much faster, then leveling guides are for you. I used Jame's Leveling Guides for my 3 last characters, from 1 to 78 (last levels are not yet in the guide but really not hard to do) both on horde and alliance side, and I strongly advise them.

Ok, now let us start with paladin stuff. You can find all the paladin skills by level on Wohead here, if I'm not direct linking a skill, go there for more info.

About protection and holy leveling

I'm strongly advocating leveling in the retribution tree. By level 60 you should have a talent tree close to this one: Retribution level 60 talent tree.
Though when arriving in Outland by lvl 58, you'll be much less lonely as you'll hit the Death Knight pack of players. I'd still advise you to level by yourself questing in Outland until lvl 60 to get as much quest item as you can, they will be major upgrades for all the slots where you still have vanilla (pre-outland) wow items. Once you feel confident, you can try tanking or healing instances in Hellfire Peninsula (Ramparts & Furnace) and then in Zangarmarsh (Slave Pens and The Underbog). Especially if you have the Heirloom chest & spaulders and even more if you have rest xp, instacing with a good group can be very effective leveling wise, and you'll easily find a group as a tank, and even more as a healer.
If you already bought the dual-specialization talent, or if you can buy it now, this is the right time to try your paladin with something else than retribution. You won't find as many players wanting to do instances before lvl 68-69 and the first Northrend ones.

First part of your Outland time, level 58-63, Hellfire Peninsula

If you want to train new skills, you'll need to go back to Azeroth, there is no class trainer in Outland. Don't jump back trough the Demon Gate, please do yourself some good and go to Shattrath once in Terrokar Forest (you can reach it going west to Zangarmarsh and then south from the Cenarion Expedition point). This trip can easily be done even at lvl 58, stay on the paths, don't venture too much and you'll be safe.
Get the flypath in Shat City once there, jump through one of the portals in the town center and teleport back to Hellfire with your stone. You can then fly to there each time you want to train.

When you first arrive in Outland, don't worry about instances (unless it's a rush for free xp) you need some Outland gear first ! Each quest reward you'll get will be a major upgrade and you'll jump in hit points especially doubling or tripling them in a few hours of questing.
Here is a list of items you can get through solo questing in Hellfire Peninsula:
healing plate chest,
healing or tanking shield,
tanking sword,
dps plate pants,
dps plate chest,
healing plate pants,
healing sword,
tanking/dps plate helm,
tanking plate pants,
free Insigna of the Alliance (to do if you don't laready have one, pvp quest)
two handed sword (best weapon unless you drop an instance one)
There are other very good blue items you can get with group quest and dungeon quests, if you can find a group for them when you have them, go for it.

Once you have your first Outland gear, and you have the first quests for the Hellfire dungeon: Weaken the Ramparts, it's time for intancing a bit. You can do Hellfire Ramparts, you'll finish this quest and get a new one on the last boss (drop). Then you'll get two new quests for Hellfire Furnace.
Both of these instances are done a lot by players arriving in Outland, and you should search for a group for them until you've finished questing in Hellfire Peninsula or reached lvl 62-63. You'll get a lot of blue items in them, several you will keep until probably level 65 or even 68 in Northrend.

Questing in Hellfire will be a bit hard at level 58, it'll get way easier with a few more levels and Outland gear. Once level 61 you should cruse through quests with haste. I'd advise you to move to Zangarmarsh once level 62 but you can stay there until you're nearly 63. Most quests will start giving less xp once you hit level 63 and mobs won't be worth much anymore.

Second part of your Outland time, level 63-65, Zangarmarsh

Once you're 63 or close by, Zangarmarsh (just west of Hellfire Peninsula) will be your leveling zone. You can up your Cenarion Expedition reputation here, for those that care about titles, it's linked to the Cenarion Guardian title.
There are a lot of quests here, most are level 60 to 64, so all the first ones will be easy if you're level 62, and you'll cruse through them as you did in Hellfire at the end.
You can find a list of all the zone quest on Wowhead, direct link here: Zangarmarsh quests.

There are two instances in Zangarmarsh: the Slaves Pens (lvl 61-63) and the Underbog (lvl 63-65). You can probably do them until you're level 66 or even 67 for the Underbog. They will also probably be the last instances you'll easily find players to do in Outland, the next one is The Aucenai Cripts in Auchindoum, Terrokar Forest, but it is a lvl 65-67 instance and most players are rushing their levels to 68 then to reach Northrend.
Remember to use the Looking for Group tool and select all the instances you want to do, as for Hellfire Peninsula, there are quests in these two instances. One can be found at the entrance of the instances, under the huge pump in the middle of Serpent's Lake, you'll have to find 4 npcs, 2 in each of the instances (look for them on Wowhead first if you don't know where they are). Two quests for the Underbog are linked to the Sporegar reputation and are very worthy, so go do some of the sporegar quests in the west of the marsh, and run an Underbog once you have them, even if you're already 66 or more, you'll like the rewards :P

Third and last part of your Outland time, level 65-68, Nagrand

I don't think Terrokar Forest is useful but for Sattrath. Once 65 I strongly advise to find a group the the Nagrand "arena", the Circle of Blood at the north of the zone. It's a group quest, you'll have to fight 5 bosses in the circle. It's hard to do without a good group, probably need a lvl 57-58 group, but it is very very often rushed by high level characters for their friends. So keep a sharp eye on your zone chat and jump in if you see anyone asking for more or offering a free run :P
These quests will give you a huge bump of xp, a nice weapon, and free potions.

Nagrand is a zone full of quests (again) mostly kill stuff quests with the return of Nesingwary (you can find his camp in the north east of the zone, near the east Zangarmarsh entrance). You'll kill beasts, ogres ...etc until you hit level 68.
Don't forget to stay in the Underbog instance Looking for Group tool, if you don't have the sporegar quests already, or if you want a bit of change from time to time. You can be teleported to the stone instance and teleport out with your stone once done. No running, no time lost. Just in case try to look for a group for the Auchenai Cripts and Mana Tombs, in case some players want to do them. They're a bit harder though.

You'll get fast levels in Nagrand and a few hours questing here will bring you to 68. And then ... it's time to move again, leave Outland and go to Northrend (through harbors in central towns such as Stormwind, Orgrimmar or Undercity).

If you're following James Leveling Guide, you'll find that I'm not really on the same levels. This is because his guides were written before the huge LK experience nerf for lvl 60-70 and before Heirlooms with xp bonuses where included into the game.
If you ever need a bit more xp, you can use his guide for Terrokar Forest (lvl 62-64) and Blade Edge Mountains (lvl 67-69).

Have fun, by these levels a retribution paladin with a good weapon is really a lot of fun to play and nearly never stops to rest ^.~

updated 11/12, changed the outland trainers section

WTB more instance servers.

2009-08-22T08:39:00.009+02:00

Additional instances cannot be launched, please try again later.

Ok, we all know this by now, or if you don't see what it is, you're really only playing solo, and never put a foot into instances for months.
Since a few patches Blizzard decided to put a limit on the number of instances up at the same time on their instance server. If the goal is reached, which is to prevent horrible lag during raids, that we experienced during the early months of Lich King and were driving us crazy on boss fights like Thaddius. The side effect is that a lot of us can't enter instances, or have to wait sometimes half an hour, mindlessly trying to enter an instance to be able to play into it.

Instances limit & patch 3.2
Some will say I'm qqing, and that Blizzard has already said they are aware of that problem and are trying to solve it. But still, I can only see it as a very bad commercial/design choice to release patch 3.2 that is obviously sending back everyone into instances, before they fixed that problem.
Nowadays I don't even try to play when I'm back from work, between 7pm and 9pm it's just too tedious to try going into an instance and I'm not really fond of going back and forth (or strafing left/right for the fast paced ones) for 15-20mn before being allowed to play.

Several computer for several game servers, but not as you could expect.
Each game server is separated onto several physical machines, Azeroth, Outland, Northrend and instances/raids are on 4 different computers, that group these world parts for several game servers (it's not clear if, for example, all the northrend parts of a whole battlegroup are on the same computer but it's the idea).
That will explain, if you didn't know it, why sometimes your world server (Northrend) is down while some of your guildies, or some of your alts can still play (in let say Azeroth).
That will also explain why it's not that easy to just "add some muscle" to the computer in charge of the instances to solve the problem. That's why Blizzard is saying it's complex and they need time.

Instance servers have a memory cap.
The problem seem obvious if you're a little into computer science. The instance server has a limit of hardware memory, when that limit is reached it has to "swap" his memory with virtual memory which is emulated on the hard-drive of the computer. The problem is that when it does that, the access time is about 100 to 1000 times slower on this "swapped memory", which is then producing server lags for the players in the affected instance. So, especially as Blizzard does not own the servers on which the game is played, the only solution they found is to limit the number of instances to avoid the memory swap problem.
They also installed a priority onto entering instances it's mostly LK raids > LK heorics > LK instances > older raids & instances. If you've tried to do a raid or vanilla instance during peak hours ... you're probably still trying :P

A temporary solution, instance queues.
What I'd like to see, as probably many people, is a queue. When you try entering an instance, you get into a queue and you're ported into your instance when it's your turn. Mostly what they did for Wintergrasp in the last patch.
This won't fix the problem, and they have to develop new code to be able to dynamically share several computer for the same "instance server" when needed. This is an obvious choice and necessity because all game servers don't have the same size, and the number of instances required by the players isn't at all the same during a day. But this type of coding is way more complex than the static allocation they are using right now, and it requires a lot more testing, what they are, I hope, doing right now.
Nevertheless, instance queues are a relatively simple to code patch that would make most of us much happier than the current situation. At least you can queue for your instance, and then go do your dailies for example instead or completely wasting your time trying to repeatedly enter the instance (because you have to do it if you ever want to play it ... which is what is driving me crazy).

You're all welcome to comment with your views and ideas on the instance cap. Not that Blizzard will ever read this blog, but I'll be curious to see if this problem is common to the US and the EU for example (as I think it is reading blogs & forums on both sides).

Rolling a paladin ? A few leveling tips.

2009-08-18T06:53:00.017+02:00

Now is probably the best time to roll and alt. It's the end of summer with its low raid activity. Patch 3.2 sent everyone into 5-man, which is a very friendly environment for new lvl 80 characters. And once you've done a few heroics with your main, and unless you're like some of my friends with already 4+ lvl 80 and are spending your whole day running heroics with all your toons, you could be wondering what to do in WoW for the rest of your daily play-time.

So I'm going to give a few tips for those who don't know yet the paladin class and want to reroll, or just roll if it's you're first character, a paladin. Several of my tips won't apply if you're new to WoW, unless you're really good at grasping the game economy and making ingame money, you'll probably not have the gold to buy what I'm advising. But the general tips on spec and itemization should still give you good ideas to follow.

Paladin Leveling Guide (part 1, your time in Azeroth from lvl 1 to 58)

The first tip, which is common to all leveling guides you'll ever find is: maximize your damage output. Don't try to gear for survival, the game isn't that hard most of the time and you'll want to down mobs fast.

The second tip is, try to get a good leveling guide if you want to. If you're new to the game, enjoying the discovery is probably the best thing to do, and using Wowhead to search when you're stuck in a quest will be enough. If you're a bit tired of the vanilla content, or want to reach 80 much faster, then leveling guides are for you. I used Jame's Leveling Guides for my 3 last characters, from 1 to 78 (last levels are not yet in the guide but really not hard to do) both on horde and alliance side, and I strongly advise them.

Ok, now let us start with paladin stuff. You can find all the paladin skills by level on Wohead here, if I'm not direct linking a skill, go there for more info.

The first levels, 1 to 10

Your first skills until level 10 will mostly be your first damage skills. Your first seal: Seal of Righteousness. Your first judgment: Judgment of Light. Your first benediction: Blessing of Might. Keep your blessing and seal up at all times, judge each time it's up. It's up to you to chose between a 2 handed weapon or a 1 handed one, the difference is very little for now.
As for survival, you'll have your first big heal: Holy Light, and your first mini-bubble: Divine Protection. Try to not run too low on mana, always having enough for a heal, and don't hesitate to use your Divine Protection each tie you get a "link" (two or more monsters at the same time). It will greatly reduce the damage you take and most probably ensure your victory.
You will also get your first aura as soon as lvl 1: Devotion Aura. As for seals and blessings, you can only have one aura at any given time (unless you're in a group with other paladins). And as for seal and blessing, you should keep your aura up at all times.
The first paladin levels are fast and smooth, good armor, good survival tools and several passive buffing abilities ensure an easy gameplay and very little deaths, even if it's your first time playing.

The early days in Azeroth, 10 to 58

"talenting" your paladin for leveling
Now you're level 10, what is going to change ? As all wow players know, lvl 10 is the time to chose a "talent spec", a way to spend points that customize your character skills to your liking. Paladins have 3 talent trees, that I'll try to roughly summarize as Holy for healing, Protection for tanking and Retribution for damage dealing. You won't be surprised, I'm going to advise you to put your points into the Retribution tree. You'll get one point per level, don't wait put it into retribution as soon as you level-up.
I'm going to give you some talent trees for leveling from 1 to 50, you'll most probably have enough experience to chose by yourself from then. I'm not saying they're the best, they are the ones I used, with the changes done to them since I did level my paladins.
level 10 to 20: Wowhead talent tree for lvl 20 paladin
level 20 to 30: Wowhead talent tree for lvl 30 paladin
level 30 to 40: Wowhead talent tree for lvl 40 paladin
level 40 to 50: Wowhead talent tree for lvl 50 paladin
I always chose flat damage increase over critical hit chances, you can pump your critical first if you like it's mostly equivalent.
Your biggest changes of playstyle from talents will be at lvl 20 with Seal of Command, that will replace any other seal you used until then and will stay as your damage dealing one until the end. Then Judgments of the Wise at level 40-42 (3 steps talent), that will hugely reduce your downtime, from then you'll very rarely sit to drink and get some mana back. And then Crusader Strike at level 50, that will add some spice to your judage & wait routine.

the daily leveling
Not much will change up to level 40, keep up your buffs, judge, kill some monsters, use your Judgment of Justice to prevent them from fleeing if needed. New skills useful for multiple monsters encounters: Retribution aura, Consecration. New "oh shit" buttons will be added to your inventory with Lay on Hands (install full heal on a long cool down timer), and Divine Shield that is our signature move and a complete damage immunity for a short time (very usefull to flee from harm). You'll also get new seals and blessings, you can play with them and try them, but I still advise you to keep Might & Righteousness/Command for leveling.
Don't forget to get your paladin horse at lvl 20 and epic horse at lvl 40 (they're so nice at blizzard these days ;p).
And keep up a stack of the best drink you can find at the vendors at all times, that will greatly help you to refresh this mana bar that always seem to be drained until you'll get Judgments of the Wise.

the weapon that will be yours
Now as you could expect a good weapon is a very effective tool for a melee damage class. As soon as you'll get Seal of Command, you should get a good 2 handed weapon and stick to that choice (of 2 handers) for all your retribution time. Free attacks hurt much more when this is a free huge 2 handed word dealing it that a puny 1 handed one :P
If you already have a lvl 80 and can get the heirloom weapon Bloodied Arcanite Reaper, or the Repurposed Lava Dredger, this is most probably a good choice. It won't be as potent as a blue weapon when you're in a x5-x9 level range (read second part of a 10 level span). But it'll avoid you to chore to camp the auction house for good blue weapons.
If you don't have a reaper, or can't get it as you don't have a lvl 80 toon already, then please use that list: blue 2 handed weapons from lvl 1 to 58. If you can get your hand on one of these, it will probably be your best friend for 5 to 10 levels, so check up the auction house, even 10 to 20 gold isn't too much for some of them, and if you don't have the money, take-up mining and make a few dozens of gold pieces in a day of mining :P
If you're rerolling and have access to enchanting, buying blue weapons and putting a Flaming Weapon and later Crusader enchant on them is the best and most effective way to level. I've used a Burning War Axe with a crusader enchant from lvl 33 to 52 myself ... and even if it was starting to get weak after 45, the crusader enchant made for it until I was able to use a Destiny.
All in all don't be shy with your weapon, it's your best friend and best tool to level fast.

but I want to play a healer / tank ...
If it's your first character, I'd strongly advise you to wait until lvl 58 and you reach Outland to chose anything else than retribution for leveling. If it's not then dual spec at lvl 40 will be your friend. Get a protection or holy spec as your second spec and use it if you're ever asked for a group as a tank or healer. But keep your retribution spec for your solo play.
Now, once you'll reach lvl 58 and time will be to go to outland, you'll have more freedom. The main reason will be that you'll hit the Death Knights bandwagon and you'll find much more people to group & play with, I can promise you healers are in huge demand in outland and later on. But keep in mind that, if a protection spec can level-up decently once this level reached, a holy healing spec will still be a dreadful time soloing.

58 it's time to move on
Once you're 58, it'll be time to move from Azertoh to Outland through the Dark Portal that is south of the Blasted Lands. With the last patch, you can reach it by a portal in Stormwind or Orgrimmar.
And then you'll have to read part 2 of the guide, that I will hopefully not take 1 month to write.

Have fun, leveling a paladin in the retribution tree is, even if the first levels are mostly sit and hack :)

edit:
You can find the other parts of the guide here:
Paladin Leveling Guide (part2)
Paladin Leveling Guide (part3, end)
end for gearing your new paladin at lvl 80
Pre-raid gear in patch 3.2
hope you'll enjoy the whole thing ^_^

Heroics all day long, is that all what you do?

2009-08-10T07:19:00.004+02:00

I like WotLK heroic dungeons, much more than I liked BC ones. They're difficulty level is good, and you can start them after a bit of gearing at 80 to get your first ilvel 200 blues (and purples if you're lucky) and start raiding. Add a few crafts & pvp into the mix and you'll be raid set in no time. In BC heroics were hard, sometimes too hard to be done before being nearly fully epic'ed from Karazhan. That was defeating their purpose and Blizzard adjusted that right in LK.
Ok, so I love heroics. But I don't like the badge change of patch 3.2 ... why? It has sent everyone (and their 3 years old sister) into heroics again! So why would I be upset of it?
The reason is simple: we nearly don't raid anymore. People don't see any interest into going in a raid to wipe a few times (at least) during the night and down at most 5 bosses (if we're lucky as it's harder and harder to get people to play, even more good people) for 10 badges and a chance to get one epic. During that same time they could run at least 5 heroics, with no wipe, no repair bill, no flasks to buy, two times the number of badges and 3 triumph ones through quests.
I'm sad, I hate it, but I can understand them ... raiding has just lost most of its gearing interest, at least until players will have all got their 2 pieces of T9 and all they can get with emblems of conquest.
If you add the fact that doing an heroic in T7.25 full gear is just way too easy and boring ... I'm not really enjoying the game these days :(
It's rerolling time, again.

Patch 3.2 is here

2009-08-05T09:39:00.004+02:00

So today (or yesterday if you're on the US servers) is patch day for patch 3.2.
I've not talked a lot about this patch before, but for the big holy paladin changes that it contains. Even if I'm not a fanboy of these changes, this patch contains much much more than classes fixes & balance. You can find everything, from new heirloom items to the new instances, as always, on MMO Champion Ptach 3.2 page.
The addition to the game of the body armor heirloom items, with their 10% xp bonus stacking with the already existing shoulders, and the changes for the mounts (normal at level 40, epic land at 40, flying mount at 60 and potentially northern flying at 68) are huge opportunities and incitations to reroll. I will try to offer a small guide for people wanting to reroll a paladin and level quickly to reach the raid level at 80.
But this patch also contains big changes for the end game, a new 5 man instance: Trial of the Champion, a new battleground: Isle of Conquest, a new raid with Tier 9 armors.
If you add to that druid animal form changes, class changes, epic gems, profession changes ... you get a huge patch even not containing a raid the size of Ulduar.

It will not surprise you that I would have prefered this aptch to hit in september, giving is one more month to finish Ulduar as I have yet to see the death of little yoggy for myself :P
But it is still a lot of content and new opportunities to revive a game sometimes becoming a bit boring. Wich is probably a good thing as september will see the dawn of yet another big mmo known by the name of Aion.

Grid & Healbot are good for you

2009-07-23T09:27:00.003+02:00

If you're considering healing seriously and don't use an alternate unit frame to the Blizzard basic UI, then rush read this post by Keeva on Tree Bark Jacket. It's an illustrated (a lot, and I mean lot of screen captures) comparison between Healbot and Grid, the two most used healers UI replacement frames.
I personally use Grid on both my paladin and priest, and I really like it. I've recently discovered all the options that you can use to check your buffs on the raid, it's really a huge help to maintain your shields & hots and other short duration buffs up. If you need help with grid configuration, I like this post by Kae on Dreambound.

In case you don't know where to find them, give a look to the curse add-on website.

Much thanks to the druid blogging community that is so active.

Patch 3.2 will change just everything ...

2009-07-13T13:26:00.007+02:00

I've told you before I was going to say what I think about the changes awaited in patch 3.2, here it is. I have waited to see if they were final, and they seem to be as they've not been changed for a few PTR updates now.

Let's rewrite here the main changes for us:

Beacon of Light: The healing amount on the Beacon of Light target is now based on the total healing done (including over-healing) instead of the effective healing done. Radius increased to 60 yards. Multiple Paladins can now have this active on the same target. Buff indicating a player is within range of the Beacon target is no longer displayed.
Divine Intellect: This talent now gives 2/4/6/8/10% increased intellect instead of 3/6/9/12/15%.
Illumination: This talent now returns 30% of the mana cost of the spell instead of 60%.

The changes to Divine Intellect & Illumination will strongly hurt our mana. It won't be possible to spam Holy Light and probably hard to outmana other healers and be this mana battery that can spam heal the tank during the last % of a boss (Patchwrek before nerfs & increase in gear comes to mind as the classic example of that).
This will be compensated by the changes to Beacon of Light that clearly turns this skill as something so strong that it will be a mandatory talent that you will have to use it at all times.

Why do I think some change is necessary ?
I've already talked about that in a previous post. Paladins generate too much overhealing, they have mostly timed casts, which result in a lot of our heals being sniped by other healers (which is, I agree, very frustrating). That result is a bad "score" on the healing meters (I have already said how much I hate the weight these have in a player "efficiency" evaluation). That is often strenghtened by our main role as tank healers.

What is our role right now, and why ?
Overall we are mostly tank healers, as we have the ability to spam Flash Light on them nearly undefinitely, what no other healer can really do. That allows for a constant flow of heals at the costs of a large overhealing. But that sort of play protects your tank from rng damage spikes and as you are giving him a lot of attention (like all your attention) you can react fast to spikes with an addition Holy Shock or switching to Holy Light.
Though this role will result in a lower score on the healing meters (that is true for any class assigned to tank healing), it is a necessary role, one healer will have to pay real strong care to the tank, or he/she will die. This is simply due to the nature of the challenge that blizzard is giving us about tank healing, that challenge being mostly rng spike damage.

Is Beacon of Light used before 3.2 ?
My answer is yes, I've already discussed it in this post. At the moment, Beacon of Light has for me 2 main possible uses: used on you, it will ensure your survival and avoid you wasting cooldowns to heal yourself; used on your tank, it will allow you to do some raid healing at the expense of some speed reaction to heal your tank (though this is absolutely necessary in some cases).

What will change ?
I have concluded earlier, and I think everyone will agree. BoL will be mandatory to use, and use on your tank as the one and only use for it. Taking that as a premice, paladins will not be tank healers anymore, simply because they won't be the most effective that way.
We are going to be raid healers, with support to the tank through BoL. Our role on the tank will be to lower the impact of the rng, by providing a "free" regular healing stream, while we are healing the raid (that makes me think that we can expect even more raid damage in the next content).

So we are going to endure a 180 degrees change in our gameplay, we're changing from tank healers with long mana survavibility to raid healers with tank support.

What I don't really like about that is that: I like to tank heal, I won't be able to react as fast on the tank if I'm asked to, just because my attention will be on the raid (as I have experienced when I am raid healing with BoL at the moment).
These changes are not the ones I hoped for, and the gameplay changes that they imply are not ones I want to play with. Hence I'm rerolling priest ...

As always, comments are welcome.

News from the web, holy paladin & disc priest

2009-07-08T11:49:00.005+02:00

A very interesting post on Banana Shoulders (up again yay !), about Epic Gems in patch 3.2. And a good post about Burnout on Causal Hardcore.

About myself, getting ready for the 3.2 patch, getting used to play priest with my dranei alt. Discipline Priest is so much more fun to play than a paladin, I've yet to really get experience in raids with her, but have played a few hours in Nax 25, done a few tries with Malygos 10 (but phase 3 kills pick-up groups that don't know it), killed Sartha 10, cleaned Nax 10. Not much ulduar but she's a bit underdressed for that.
In the end, raiding clearly reduce the number of skills you use, you tend to go for effectiveness and drop all the "fun but not optimum" skills depending on your talents.
What are the skills I use as a paladin more than one each 2mn ?
Flash Light, Holy Light, Holy Shock, Judgement, Sacred Shield, Beacon of Light.
What are the ones I use as a disc priest ?
Power Word Shield, Penance, Renew, Flash Heal, Prayer of Mending.
Surprisingly I'm using more skills on my paladin on a very regular basis. But if you look at them, only 3 are heals, one urgent, one big one "continuous". There is very little thinking to do, you just react in urgency. The Sacred Shield compared to the priest shield is near to useless from a healer point of view (even if it has a very good mitigation in the end, it does not prevent someone from dying in an urgent situation as a priest shield does, and it is limited to one target now).
I'm experiencing a much more diverse and fun healing game with a priest than with a paladin. Just because I have to think, to chose, before using a skill, what I don't do much with my paladin. It is the difference between a bazooka and a sniper rifle :P

Do you have experience with different healing classes ? Do you have opinions on them ? Please share your thoughts with me :)