Optimizing your Holy Power Use

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.

Word of Glory and Holy Power stacking

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.

First impressions on 4.0.1

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.