Grid & Healbot are good for you

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

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

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

Patch 3.2 will change just everything ...

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

Let's rewrite here the main changes for us:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As always, comments are welcome.

News from the web, holy paladin & disc priest

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

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

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

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 :)