Pacth 3.2 is on the PTR, what about Holy Paladins ?

Hello !
After some iatus due to an internet problem and a weird configuration of my Firefox making me unable to post from my home, articles will be back.

First one, as you could expect will be about the future patch 3.2 and the promises of gameplay changes for Holy Paladins. Here is what Blizzard prepared to give us some change in 3.2.
(all the following information is on MMO Champion, my usual source of information, as for so many of us)

June 18: Paladin patch 3.2 notes

* Blessing of Sanctuary: This blessing now also increases stamina by 10%. This effect is not cumulative with Blessing of Kings.
* Charger: Can now be learned at level 40.
* Exorcism: Now has a 1.5 second cast time, but can once again be used on players.
* Hand of Reckoning: Redesigned. Now does damage only when target does not currently have the caster targeted, but damage done increased to 50% of attack power, occurring after the taunt effect is applied.
* Judgement of Light: Now heals for 2% of the attacker's maximum health instead of a variable amount based on the spell power and attack power of the judging paladin.
* Lay on Hands: The buff from this ability now reduces the physical damage taken by the target by 10/20% instead of increasing the target's armor.
* Righteous Fury: No longer has a duration or mana cost, remaining until cancelled or death. Also cancelled when a Paladin activates a different talent specialization.
* Sacred Shield: When a paladin casts Flash of Light on a target with this buff, they also now place a heal over time effect on the target, healing that target for 100% of the Flash of Light amount over 12 seconds.
* Seal of Blood: This ability has been removed.
* Seal of the Martyr: This ability has been removed.
* Seal of Vengeance and Seal of Corruption: These seals have been redesigned to deal substantially more damage. Now, once a paladin has 5 copies of the debuff from these seals on his or her target, on each swing the paladin will deal 33% weapon damage as Holy, with critical strikes dealing double damage.
* Shield of Righteousness: Now deals 100% of shield block value as damage instead of 130%.
* Warhorse: Can now be learned at level 20.
* Talents
o Holy
+ 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%.
o Protection
+ Ardent Defender: Redesigned. Currently, any damage taken by the paladin while at 35% health or below is reduced. Instead, any attack that would reduce the paladin to 35% health or below has its damage reduced. In addition, once every 2 minutes an attack that would have killed the paladin will fail to kill, and instead set the paladin's health to 10/20/30% of maximum.
o Retribution
+ Art of War: Now only applies to melee critical hits, but will make your next Flash of Light or Exorcism instant.
+ Crusader Strike: Damage reduced to 75% weapon damage to match the new 4 second cooldown.
+ Seal of Command: Redesigned. This seal now deals 36% weapon damage on every swing, and deals substantially less judgement damage.
+ Vindication: Redesigned. Now lowers target attack power, is consistent and does not stack with Demoralizing Shout.

I will not comment on these right now, I'm preparing an article specifically about my view, waiting a bit for these changes to be tested on the PTR. But as you could guess, the Illumination nerf specifically, but even the change to BoL have been the source of a lot of comments from players. I will put here the different answers from Blizzard as you can read them on MMO Champion.

June 20

None of the changes you mention were because of PvP balance.

Many Holy paladins (on these boards even) said they were weary of only using HL spam on the tank and were willing to trade their virtually unlimited mana for the ability to contribute to raid healing in other ways. As I tried to explain in the article we posted earlier, the SS change encourages more FoL use. The Beacon change encourages you to heal targets other than the tank, while still contributing to tank healing. The Beacon change (through the HL glyph) and the SS change give paladins a little more versatility in raid healing and healing on the run. The Beacon change with a nerf to mana regen would have made paladins the strongest healer in the game by almost any estimation. We figured the regen nerf was tolerable since it never even comes into play on many fights, and you still have Divine Plea.

We think healer homogenization is a very dangerous risk. We're not going to give every healer an AE heal or a hot or a shield just so they all have the same tools. We already have 5 viable healing specs for PvE, and many raids were inviting all 5. That's better than we've ever done in the history of WoW. That's not to say there weren't some problems though, which this patch hopes to address.

Out of curiousity, is the new FoL/SS HoT replacing the current +crit to FoL granted by SS? Or is it in addition? And does the size of the hot increase on crits? Or is it based on the non-crit spell size?
The crit is on the Sacred Shield tooltip and the hot is on FoL itself, so they should both work. I didn't actually try it just now, but based on the way the spells appear to work if you crit, you crit, and the hot would be larger.

Flash of Light now says "Heals a friendly target for X. If the target has the Sacred Shield effect, they heal an additional 100% over 12 sec."

Healing Cycle
When you are deciding between high throughput or high efficiency you have a choice and the better paladins can make better choices on when to use either one. When you have one spell that is the only choice no matter what the circumstances, well that is no choice at all. We think this is a major problem with the Holy paladin spec. Many players complained about that. We’re not asking you to all agree on every change before we make them, but you also have to understand that this was something several players were asking for. We discussed our options and came up with a solution that we think makes the healing style more dynamic and interesting without fundamentally changing it.

Holy mana regeneration
What Odes said. We allowed Holy paladin regen to be very high for a long time because we thought there was an okay trade-off for being so limited in scope. We expanded the scope now. Paladins will be able to contribute a lot more (almost double in ideal cases) to non-tank healing. I understand some of you are saying you did run OOM. It’s hard for us to balance around the experience of every single player. In the end we have to try and follow trends and what we are seeing in the data. Paladin mana pools were large, which exacerbated percent mana restores, and Illumination allowed HL to never be a choice and by contrast every other heal to feel paltry by decision. If down-ranking existed in the game right now, you would never need to do it.

June 22

Illumination nerf

If it matters, we changed Illumination first to correspond with the Beacon of Light changes. Then when we agreed on changing resilience (and it was a very long discussion) we knew we would have to look at healing, or at least the healing by prominent Arena specs. Resto and Disc almost certainly needed attention. We thought paladins might be okay since their mana regen had already been nerfed and Beacon isn't a huge factor in PvP.

I understand some paladins who don't like the change are trying to somehow trap us into admitting the Illumination nerf was for PvP. This strategy of questioning our motives always perplexes me, because we try to be up front about when we think something is too powerful -- we don't try to hide it. We would rather face player ire directly by stating something is getting nerfed because it was too good rather than try and sneak the nerfs in under questionable justification that smart players would see through anyway.

Illumination was nerfed for PvE reasons. Having made that nerf convinced us we didn't need additional PvP changes (for now anyway). We always consider what effect changes will have on PvP and PvE (and 5-player dungeons, soloing and the level-up experience as well). (Source)

[...] The nerf to Illumination was almost entirely because of the buff to Beacon of Light. Beacon can now provide massively more healing in some situations. If paladins still had the mana return they do currently, they would be the best healer in the game by a pretty wide margin. It is difficult to argue that point. Now you can argue that you prefer the current model (HL on the tank and nearly unlimited mana) better. But it's hard to argue the new Beacon would be balanced without other changes.

I'm going to throw out some made-up numbers. These are not from actual stats, but are hopefully typical of say a 25-player, 10-min hard fight (something like XT). Feel free to disagree but they shouldn't be off by orders of magnitude.

A Holy paladin's mana regen might look like this:

Illumination 70,000
Divine Plea 50,000
Replenishment 36,000
Other sources of mana 30,000
Mana from gear 10,000
Overhealing 60%

A Holy priest's mana regen might look like this:

Replenishment 30,000 (remember, the paladin has more mana)
Other sources of mana 40,000
Mana from gear 25,000
Overhealng 30%

See the problem? We're not talking about mana regen that is slightly off from other classes.

This situation is acceptable (somewhat) in current content because you can only do so much with such high levels of regen since you generally have to target one heal at a time. We could pretty much just make paladin spells free and the outcome wouldn't change that much. That's an exaggeration, but you get the point: paladins are generally GCD limited much more than they are mana limited. I'm not sure anyone is that mana limited in current content (though slightly more so on the hard modes), but whatever it is, paladins feel it the least.

Now we change Beacon so that the overhealing counts. Paladin healing is going to go up, probably by a lot. We can argue how much it's going to go up or how of that will be effective healing. But it will go up a lot, especially considering the glyph of HL will get more use. Considering how much higher paladin regen is than other healers, it has a long way to fall before it would even be at parity.

Remember, we are also nerfing Penance, Prayer of Healing and Lifebloom. The latter won't be felt as much in PvE, but also realize we are talking about 3.2 changes here and the current druid set bonuses (which might be slightly overpowered) won't be around.

June 23

Beacon of Light

I’ll try one more time. The following is painfully simplistic to the point of inaccurate, but I’m not sure how else to express the logic cleanly.

PvE problem: Paladin healing routine is boring.
Solution: Make Beacon usable on more targets.
New PvE problem: Paladins are too good because mana regen is too high.
Solution: Nerf Illumination (+1 for Beacon -1 for Illumination = 0).

PvP problem: Damage and healing are too high.
Solution: Change resilience and nerf healing. For paladins, the regen nerf already made above is probably sufficient for the latter.
New PvP problem: But the buff to Beacon counteracts this nerf in PvE, leaving paladins at a net higher level of power (+1 for Resilience -1 for Illumination + 1 for Beacon = 1 (when we want zero)).
Solution: None needed because Beacon isn’t a huge factor in PvP (the equation above is actually +1 for Resilience -1 for Illumination = 0).

As preliminary comments, I will direct you to two articles by fellow paladins and healers giving different views on these changes.
3.2 Holy Paladins on Blessing of Kings
Patch 3.2 Potential (oh dear lord) Paladin Changes on Casual Hardcore
They are not very enthusiastic, but I wonder if any Holy Paladin healing in raids is enthusiastic about such changes ...
Make your idea, I'll give you mine soon enough :P

The Future of Holy Paladins ?

A forum post was quoted on MMO Champion about Ghostcrawler speaking of the future of Holy Paladins. You can read the whole post here.
All in all the idea is that playing a Holy Paladin in raids isn't fun:
the gearing is really simple (spell power, int, crit, and nothing else matters),
the gameplay is simplistic (Holy Light spam, ehre you come),
the mobility & raid healing is very limited.

Though I'm playing a Holy Paladin for a good number of months now (was prot before WotLK), I do agree that, compared to a priest, the gameplay of a paladin is very limited. We are healing powerhouses, mana batteries and can outlast nearly all other healers. But we are not very fun to play ... and that's a very important issue in a game.

Quoting Ghostcrawler:

We have some plans for Holy paladins in 3.2. We'll talk more about them when we get closer and we are more confident that they are the actual changes that will go live (modulo PTR feedback).

Let's hope they're going to find a new direction for us that can bring a bit more variety to our gameplay, that would be really sweet.

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

Patch 1.1.3 has hit.

So here is a new patch day.
One thing I should say is that, either the patches are small, or the Blizzard downloader is being much faster than before. I'm coming home late, so downloading this patch at high usage hours, and it stills goes fast (1.1.3 was dled and installed in a few minutes). Not a bad surprise after a day of work :)

You can read the complete patch notes on MMO Champion, here.

About the patch itself, it's mostly a PvP/Arena tuning patch for me (once again :p). Druids are upped a little more (armor increase for some defensive talents), Paladin's hand of freedom nerfed from 10 to 6s duration (I'm not even doing arenas anymore, tired of being nerfed each patch :p). Hunter and Warrior changes seem more PvE oriented, small ups to their damage, at least for the trees that are considered under-par (the hunters of my raid certainly don't need more damage compared to the other classes).

Yet the biggest impact for my raid is the DK armor nerf:

Frost Presence: Armor bonus is now 60% down from 80%.

We've seen a real difference in the amount of damage our DK tank is taking from Kologarn last night, not being armor capped anymore. Enough for us to switch him with the druid bear and leave him the Rock Elementals adds. Last week he was fine on Kolo, this week he is not anymore (taking like 14K, 15K hits in a row and dying when he does'nt parry/evade).

I don't know if you're raiding with a DK main tank ? I'd be happy to hear from people if they have seen such a difference in their survavibility.

There is hope, we did not lose the bananas

Sorry for the pun in the title Siha, but I'm really happy to read news.
So for everyone, if you don't know yet (shame on you :p), Siha of Banana Shoulders, one of our best fellow paladin bloggers, is back online. Go post her a nice welcome message here.

Healing Ulduar - XT-002 Deconstructor

And the guides/tips for healing Ulduar as a Holy Paladin continue. You can find the first two ones here:
Healing Ulduar - Flame Leviathan & Razorscale
Healing Ulduar - Ignis The Furnace Master
And as a reminder, I also wrote some more general articles about healing in Ulduar before:
Ulduar paladin healing guides
Ulduar Paladin Healing Tips (update)

Today I'll talk about ...

XT-002 Deconstructor

You can find details about the boss on its Wowhead page, I won't detail strategies here and only focus on the healer role in this fight.
There are 2 small groups of trash mobs that were put back into the instance after the first two weeks (they were buggy at first). You can find them on the left and right side of the boss courtyard, take care to not pull the boss before having dealt with them (you will see the boss but not the trash mobs when you approach).

Now about XT, the first thing you should know is that he has been severely nerfed since the first weeks of live. The biggest nerf being his Tympanic Tantrum.The version on wowhead on this day is still the old one, when it was inflicting damage equal to 120% of their life to each raid member. You can easily guess that, if raiders were not healed, they will die. Combine that to the potential simultaneous Searing Lights and Gravity Bombs and you had regular deaths during the Tantrums. Now damage was reduced to 80% total life, which means that, if there is no external damage, none will die from a Tantrum. Light/Dark bombs can still be deadly, but it will be much easier to cope with the amount of damage today, this is why most raiders have found as the biggest nerf to XT. He's the one guarding the entrance to the core of Ulduar, and Blizzard wanted to be sure most guilds could go there.

Now that I've ranted a bit about the nerf of XT, and that I've pointed its biggest threat for healers, let see how the fight goes.
You will have 2 tanks, one main tank on XT, and one off-tank for the biggest adds that will not be dpsed. The stress on the off-tank will grow with time, having only one add is a joke, having 4 starts to be much more healing stress, he should keep his cooldowns for the end of the fight, to help with healing.

The main aspect of the fight is its two phases. Each 25% of his life, XT enters phase 2 when he goes inactive and exposes his heart. Phase 2 is also when adds pop. The main aspect is that this is a relatively low damage phase (compared to boss + Tantrums + light/dark bombs). You will be able to use cooldowns like Divine Plea without any risk during that phase, and you should regain a large amount of mana in 30s (Phase 2 lasts for 30s whatever happens, unless you break XT heart but I won't talk about the hard mode).

The MT will take heavy damage, be ready to toss some big heals from time to time, and don't worry too much about your mana if you're the MT healer. You'll have time to get some mana back during phases 2. As always, keep your Sacred Shield up on the main tank, keep your Judgement on XT (Light or Wisdom).
After a phase 2, take care when XT resumes damage on the MT, as you were probably helping with bombs damage or even dpsing (yes, dpsing :p) during phase 2.

If you are healing the off-tank, don't get lazy during the first or even second add phase, he will only have one or two adds and that could seem easy, phase 3 will be harder, and if you are in 25-Man, you'll even need 2 off-tanks as 2 big robots pop each add-phase.

Now, depending on the other healers of your raid, you could need to help during the tantrums (even if you know it was nerfed hard :p). Then simply put your Beacon on your healing target (MT/OT) and raid heal, the usual. If you're healign the MT pay attention though, damage spikes can happen.

Usually I keep my Beacon of Light on me during that fight, so that I don't have to heal me during tantrums, or on a Light/Dark bomb. I can keep a regular and steady healing stream on the main tank and I'm fealing much more secure on his survival that way.

Have fun, next week Kologarn and the Iron Council (that some people are calling the Assembly of Iron, how weird).

A simple question for you.

While I'm writing my healing guides for Ulduar and raid at the same time, as I don't like to talk about things I don't know and experience first hand, I wonder if there is a specific topic you'd like to see covered here ?

So I leave it to you, readers :)
If there is a specific topic that you'd like me to talk about, please post it in the comments for this post. I won't write about something I don't know, so it will have to be limited to paladin healing or general healing/raiding.

Not really that I lack topics to talk about. It will take me a good bit of time to finish my Ulduar healing guides, and hopefully my raid will advance at the same time, giving me more writing material. I'll perhaps try to steal a week spot in our main 10-Man raid if I can't advance enough in mine, they are on Yogg-Saron 10 now. So no worries.
But I wanted to give you the chance to tell me if you wanted something else discussed here.

It's your opportunity, have fun :)

Healing Ulduar - Ignis The Furnace Master

The sequel of my first Healing Ulduar - Flame Leviathan & Razorscale tips post, today I'll talk about Ignis The Furnace Master.

As always, Holy Paladin point of view on these fights, mostly from a 10-Man raid perspective.
About 10-Man, I don't think they are harder than 25-Man, as they were for Naxx at least at the beginning. Clearly some fights like Kologarn are much easier in 10-Man than 25-Man. But being a paladin, I do feel paladin healing being more and more pushed back to the single MT healing niche (and we are really good at that). Most Ulduar fights are really mobile, and require positioning and movement through the whole fight. You can also combine to that the amount of raid damage that can be pretty high on some bosses (XT, Kologarn, ...). From my point of view that makes a paladin the worst healer class for 10-Man, but that's still the raids I do, so you'll probably have to endure a few rants here and there, 'cause you do know I like to say when I don't like things :P

Anyway, enough with the talk, here is the Ignis guide.

On the way to Ignis, Furnace trash mobs

Your first challenge will be the trash mobs to Ignis. Don't take them lightly or you will wipe a lot on them, even though the flame tornadoes have been strongly nerfed since day one of the live.
The two giants have a stomp/silence unlimited distance aoe. If your healer are silenced, you'll wipe. So position your tanks at the limit of the pillars, and keep 2 tank healers out of line of sight from the giants. It is that simple, but don't do that and you'll never kill them.
Then you have pairs of mobs patrolling.
The constructs are fairly simple, they have a small frontal fire breath attack (turn them away from your raid), and they have a charge (it's more a glide animation which is fairly ridiculous) that will randomly hit someone for about 4-5K.
The fire elementals regularly create flame tornadoes that will target someone and push him back in the air. If you are pushed back, you will take a large amount of fire damage about 5 or 6 hits for 3K, if you were not at full life, or if you're hit by two tornadoes (or the first one send you into the second one) you will die. Only instant casts can be used while in the air, but if you have health stones, or instant heals, use them. The best here is to have as much distance as you can between the 2 elementals (pull them back to the ramp for space) to avoid double tornadoe hits, and when you see a tornado going your way, just run (or blink, or warlock circle teleport ...). As a healer, keep your instant heals for tornado victims (you if needed ;p) and still keep a close look on your tank.

Ignis the Furnace Master

For a description of Ignis abilities, you can check wowhead. I won't comment on the strat, everyone guild has sort of its own views on Ignis positioning. But one thing never change, you'll have one MT (moving Ignis around) and one OT for the adds (running between add pops and waterpools).

If you are healing the main tank, the damage is fairly regular, if you have more and avoidance tank though, when he's moving Ignis (or moving around him) after a scorch is put on the ground damage can spike a little, take care. Keep your cds for the moment several adds are up. If your add team ever miss a shatter, Ignis damage could reach +45% for a short time, which will hurt the tank. Usually when Ignis reach 10% guilds stop killing the adds too to burn him down. As he gains +15% damage for each add up, be ready for pumping out heals on the MT during these last % of Ignis.

If you are healing the off-tank, try to discuss with him and chose one pool, it will be his shatter pool to which he will bring all adds. Then find your spot so that you can always heal the OT, be out of the scorch flames, and have the least amount of movement to do (especially if you're a paladin ;p). The OT won't take too much damage at first, but he will when the add is melting (fire aoe) and if our "add buster" dps even shatter the add too soon, the OT will take the 15K explosion damage. To avoid a wipe on that losy move, always have your OT life capped when he brings the add to the water pool. Healing the OT on Ignis means switching to him at the right time to have him life capped when it can be necessary. You will be helping with slag-pot heal and potential raid damage the rest of the time.

Whole raid damage is low during this fight. But there will be slag-pot victims. Ignis will regularly take one character from the raid, never the MT, and not the OT (*if* he is hit by a non stunned or cced add at this moment). This character will be put into Ignis slag-pot and will endure 5K fire damage per second for 10s. Obviously they will require healing, quick and fast healing. A paladin is perfect for healing slag-pot targets. You also should know that you can cast spells when into the pot, you just can't target Ignis. Any class that can cast heals should heal themselves when in the slag-pot.

As a paladin, I usually use Beacon of Light on myself during this fight, I'm most of the time healing the OT & the slag-pot victim. If I ever end into the slag-pot I can just OT/MT/raid heal and that will heal myself too. I'm also always at full life in case I get add aggro when they pop, or have to move through a scorch to reach my target (the OT has to move a lot in this fight). I try to keep Sacred Shield up at all times (as always). And keep Judgement of Wisdom/Light on Ignis (not on the adds ;p) as much as I can.

XT is next in line for these small guides. I wish you fun in Ulduar, even though nerfs have really toned down everything up to the watchers, it's still much more enjoyable than Naxx.

Healing Ulduar - Flame Leviathan & Razorscale

I had this idea for some time now, but needed more raid experience to really start it. First of all, most of my experience comes from 10-Man. Guild stability is an issue lately, with the "post Naxxramass apathy" that fell upon the game, and we're having difficulties to get a regular 25-Man roster.

The idea here is to give a few tips for each boss (and the trash before sometimes). Tips will be for healers, and from my point of view, hence a healing paladin view of them. I hope they can be useful for other healers, but obviously paladins will probably find more info here :)

Most of these guides won't detail the fight themselves, and they'll be easier to read if you've already experienced the fights. But comments are here to collect any question.

So enough with the talk and here start the guides with the 2 first bosses of Ulduar.

Flame Leviathan

This is a semi-joke as most players won't have anything to do in this fight that is linked to their characters. Most of us stay in vehicles and don't even push a heal or dps button for the whole fight.
This is a sure fact for tanks, though 2 (4 in 25-Man) players will be sent on FL to shut down the towers and stun it for a little bit about 2 times during the fight. In 10-Man you'll most of the time send 2 dpsers, in 25-Man you often send 1 healer with 3 dpsers (and the healer can be you).
You have to clearly know who's going to be sent on the Leviathan, and they should be fully buffed (BoK is mandatory !). They could have to endure heavy damage is they stand on the ground a little too long after the Leviathan global shut-down, and before they are picked-up by motorcycles (motorcycle pilots can heal their passenger before giving it back to the Demolishers). Hence, the more health they have, the best chance they have to survive, and you don't want to lose them.

To sum it up, buff the people being sent on the Leviathan, heal if you are part of them.

Razorscale

From a healer point of view there are 3 different "phases" in this fight.
Phase 1 is when Razorscale is flighing.
There will be adds that your tanks will pick-up. Keep your tanks up, and watch the raid that will take heavy damage with whirlwinds and chain lightnings. You also have to watch for Razorscale Fireball and Devouring Flame. I hope for you that people won't stay too much in the blue devouring flame patches on the ground or keeping them alive could start to be difficult.
In this phase depending on raid healers I often keep my Beacon of Light on myself and heals the MT in charge of the Sentinels (one of our tanks take both Sentinels to avoid them whirlwinding the raid). That way I don't really have to watch my health and can keep my MT targeted at all times, and sometimes send Holy Shock here and there in the raid.
Flash of Light and Holy Shock should be your main tools in this phase.
Phase 2 is when Razorscale is on the ground for 30s.
If there are still adds, let them live, and heal the tanks. The whole raid should concentrate on Razorscale. When she will take flight again, she will do two things. She will flamebreath in front of her, probably killing the remaining adds and doing heavy damage to your tanks. And she will Wing Buffet, aoe knock-back interrupting your heals. The wing buffet happens a few seconds after the breath, be ready to have your tank fully healed in these few seconds. There should be very little raid damage during this part. If you have two tanks, put your Beacon on one, heal the other.
Flash of Light and Holy Shock should be your main tools in this phase, with an occasional Holy Light on a tank if too many adds were left alive.
Phase 3 is from 50% life of Razorscale to its death, when she's definitely on the ground.
Two tanks switching on Razorscale regularly, heavy damage on the tank, a bit of raid damage mostly avoidable (the Fireballs and Devouring Flames or phase 1 are back). These are the characteristics of this phase, mostly a burn-her-down and hope you make the timer (which shouldn't be too hard now ^^).
It's probably not very usefull to heal "both tanks" at the same time as only one will take damage at some time. Once again, chose how you use your beacon depending on your raid (if you're helping with raid healing or purely tank healing mostly). I often use it on myself if I'm confident in our healing, just to ensure I don't die stupidly on a double fireball while I'm casting Holy Lights on the tank. If there is need of me on raid healing, then Beacon on my tank is the way to go.
You'll most probably use Holy Light much more in this phase than the two first ones. Use your Divin Plea whenever you can during the fight to try being full mana when you start this phase. Having a Light's Grace buff stacked during this phase can help you a lot to react quickly to Razorscale tank changes.

For all fights
As always, keep Sacred Shield up at all times on your tank, and Judge often (Wisdom, or Light if you're the only paladin) to keep your Judgements of the Pure up at least (each 20s should eb your aim when you can to maintain the debuff up).

That's it for today. Ignis soon, and you can expect at least up to Freya next week. I'll keep all the posts linked in the upcoming ones.

Is Val'anyr, Hammer of Ancient Kings, good for you?

GK on Gesundlight asked me for my views on the healer epic weapon that you can get in Ulduar (well if you're in an awesome raiding guild and are raiding like crazy ;p).
This topic has already been covered extensively on MMO Champion or World of Raids when the blues gave us details on it. And I wasn't really going to talk about it but well, if it can be useful, here is my share on it.

First, how do you get Val'anyr ?
You have to collect 30 Shattered Fragments of Val'nyr. Then you'll get a quest, and you have to beat Yogg-saron in heroic difficulty with at least one of the watchers not assisting you (that is not an easy task).

Now, beside its amazing stats, we'll discuss here about its equiped effect.

Your healing spells have a chance to cause Blessing of Ancient Kings for 15 seconds allowing your heals to shield the target absorbing damage equal to 15% of the amount healed.

I will add information from blues.
The proc is 10% on any direct heal or hot tic (it is not clear yet if a Judgement of the Light proc will make it proc or not and I think it probably doesn't proc on a glyph of Holy Light splash heal) that does not result in 100% overheal (it has to heal at least 1 hp).
If the proc happens, you get a buff for 15s. During these 15s, each healing spell you cast will proc a 8 seconds duration shield on the target which will absorb up to 15% of the full value of the heal you just cast. If you cast other heals on the same target, they will renew the duration of the shield and stack up to 20000 damage absorbed.

Now that we have identified the shield effect and how it works, the big question asked is: which class would benefit the most of this effect?

We have to consider two aspects: the chance of activating the effect, the power of the shields given.

Blessing activation chance
It's a flat 10% on any direct heal or hot tick. Let us see what is means for a paladin.
A paladin roughly cast a spell each 2s, considering Holy Lights, Flash of Light and Holy Shock and movement. That's about 30 direct heals a minute, about 3 procs a minute, the blessing lasts 15s. It shows that we would be mostly 75% of the time under it's effect if we could have it proc as soon as it's down, which will not happen. We have to consider that healing while under the blessing will not proc it again.
So it's mostly the time need to proc it between each of the blessings. 10% proc chance means you need about 10 heals or hot ticks to proc it. That's 20s for a paladin, that will be nearly instant for a healing druid with hots already ticking all around.
I am assuming here that the blessing proc can't happen on Judgement of Light, or that, as a good holy paladin, you're judging wisdom if there is a protection or retribution paladin in your raid.

Shield Effectiveness
Now, how much shield can be generated in 15s ? With a full Light's Grace active and haste buffs, I'll count 1.5s casts for Holy Lights. On my wss parses, they are around 12K medium (counting crits). That will result in 120K healing with the buff, giving us a total 18K shield. Still not the 20K limit but definitely something good. Add to that the shields will have "proced" on anyone not being full life and hit by a glyph of Holy Light splash heal.
If we consider what most other healers will do in 15s it's probably less than 120K healing. Or at least not without some serious mana issues. Without cooldowns, these 10 Holy Lights cost 12740 mana. With the Libram of Renewal, it's 1130 less mana. With 50% crit and Illumination it's 3822 less mana for 7788 mana total. (I'm not taking into account things like Glpyh of Seal of Wisdom, which reduces these costs by 5% more). With a 15s duration and 20s between blessings, that's about two times this "crazy heals" by minute, hence a little more than 15K mana a minute, which is a lot even for a Holy Paladin. Using Divine Plea will be necessary for about 6K mana each minute, reducing the cost to 9K mana (though you have to continue outputing Flash heals during the off-blessing time). With our other coold down abilities, we should be able to go crazy on Val'anyr shield for 3 to 4 minutes, resulting in 6 to 8 full shields of 18K strength. I think all people on Mimiron right now can see the use of such crazy healing periods.

To resume things
A hot class or aoe healing class will have the blessing up nearly all the time, while a direct single target healing class like a paladin won't (unless Judgement of Light counts, but that would be bad style as a Holy Paladin Judgement of Light is weaker than the one of other paladins).
But a paladin will most probably outputs much bigger shields and can go crazy if needed for a few minutes resulting in nearly capping the shield potential during that time. From my rough calculations, we can expect 18K shields two times a minute for 3 to 4 minutes from a Holy Paladin. That being for a moderately itemized Holy Paladin (like myself in tier 7 raid 25 gear), and without special mana regen abilites used but the regular talent ones.
Similar analysis for druids and priests (both disc & holy) would be necessary to compare the numbers, but I feel confident in saying that Val'anyr will be more effective in the hands of a Holy Paladin.
Now, for your raid, I say: give it to your most reliable healer, the one that is in your guild for years and is always here when you need him/her :P