Patch 4.0.1 is going live. You are not prepared!

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:

Illuminated Healing

Your healing spells also place an absorb shield on your target for x% of the amount healed lasting 6 sec. Each point of Mastery increases the absorb amount by an additional x%.

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.

Pre-raid gear in patch 3.2

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.

Holy Paladin pre-raid gear for WotLK

This isn't a super new post on the holy paladin blog community, but this a question I've been asked so I'm just using this blog to answer it. Perhaps it can be useful for someone else :)

There are several very good gearing guides that have been written by fellow paladins when Naxxramas was still new. If we're a few content patches later now, little has changed on the gearing side pre-raid, but mostly the argent tournament.
The guide I'll site mostly don't include that, so you can go there and give a look to the rewards in case some of them look cool. The Titansteel Spellblade has been added too, but is a dagger (I guess so that shadow priests can use it). The Titansteel Guardian is still the best for paladins, despite its nerf some time ago.

My best gearing guide pointer will be Banana Shoulders:
Pre-Raid Holy Gear Guide
Gemming Your Holy Paladins
(I don't completely agree with Siha as she's a spell power addict, I'm an intellect addict, so I gem for +16int gems on my yellow slots, for example. It's mostly a question of having enough mana or enough hps to keep up the tanks ^^ This is explained very well here.)
Holy Paladin Guear Enhancements
(Arcanums, all enhancement of guear from head to pants)

Now, as gear isn't all what you need, I'll advise you to read this very good (as always) article on Ferraro site Paladin Schmaladin (don't ask me how she got that name) How To: Healing Raids.

edit:
I have written an update of this post for patch 3.2 that changed so much about gearing in Wrath. You can read it here: Pre-raid gear in patch 3.2

Is Ulduar a real gear upgrade ?

Pallymar posted a very insightful article on his blog about Mana Pool vs. Crit Rate and the reason Ulduar paladin T8 is so badly itemized.
It refers to this post on the Elitist Jerks forum in the The Holy Paladin Guide for WotLK.

Reading these numbers, paladins are not far, fully raid buffed and itemized in full T7.25, from reaching the point of being able to chain cast Holy Light without pause, just using Divine Plea and our other mana reducing talents.
At 30K mana (a number some paladins are nearly if not reaching, I'm at more than 25K myself and not at all fully itemized), 56% crit is enough to reach this "chain cast" cap.

As Pallymar notes, this is the obvious reason for the crit nerf of the Holy T8 for paladins. But it doesn't mean that, with 4 pieces T7.25 and all other items from Ulduar 25 we can not reach it (see my post on Ulduar Holy Paladin loot).

Let's take the 4 pieces Valorous T7 (without the crappy chestpiece):

57 int 55 crit Valorous Gloves (blue gem)
77 int 51 crit Valorous Headpiece (met gem, red gem)
77 int 55 crit Valorous Greaves (red gem, yellow gem)
57 int 51 crit Valorous Spaulders (red gem, yellow gem)

add to that the best Ulduar gear (that we know up to now)
(I use actuel best in slot for comparison in the () they are in italic letters is considered still best in slot)

92 int 76 crit Breastplate of the Devoted (Chestguard of Bitter Charms 67 77)
42 int 36 crit Horologist's Wristguards (Bracers of Liberation 43 41)
57 int 49 crit Girdle of Unyielding Trust (Girdle of Unity 57 43)
62 int 48 crit Greaves of the Rockmender (yellow gem) (Faithful Steel Sabatons 50 43)
43 int 41 crit Frozen Tear of Elune (Life-Bender's Locket 48 35 yellow gem)
37 int 39 crit Drape of the Spellweaver (Shroud of Liminosity 43 38)
108 int Pandora's Plea (Forethought Talisman 0)
87 crit Eye of the Broodmother (Sould of the Dead 95)
42 int 46 crit Pyrelight Circle (Signed of Manifested Pain 49 46)
42 int 36 crit Ring of the Faithful Servant (Seized Beauty 43 38)

now take the shield & sword from Kel'thuzad 25
49 int 46 crit Voice of Reason
50 int 37 crit The Turning Tide

add gems, yellow as +crit gems, red as + spell power gems and blue and half +crit
you add +4*16 +8 = 56 crit

total of 912 int and 843 crit (+145 int +10 crit)
1043.05 int from gear (15% bonus to int from talent)
18.14% crit from gear (45.91 crit rating for 1% crit at lvl 80)
7.92% crit from int (0.759% / int)

final with BoK and Divine Intellect
1147.36 int from gear (+183.4 int from Ulduar gear)
26.85% crit from gear (+1.61 crit from Ulduar gear)

As you can see from the analysis of the Ulduar loot, several items will be kept from the T7 Heroic raids .... we don't have all the loot from Ulduar, but a lot items are really badly itemized for us.
The only items you will change :
Chestplate, Waist, Boots and one Trinket ... for +183.4 int and +1.61 crit
(most of that comes from Pandora's Plea, our only real target in Ulduar)