Holy Raiding with a ToR build.

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

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!

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.

Discussion about Raid Lock in 4.0.1

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

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!

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

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:

• (2) Set: Increases the critical strike chance of your Holy Light spell by 5%.
• (4) Set: Whenever your Holy Radiance spell is active, you gain 1620 Spirit.

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.

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

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

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.