How do Holy Paladins heal a very spread-out raid during intense damage?

[Aleksej89]

Paladins have several AoE healing spells, but all of them (even the lvl90 talents) have a limited radius of ~10 yards.

Actually the only exception is the Light of Dawn (30y range) but it requires 3 holy power, so that is not a spam-able spell.

While i am inexperienced as far as Holy paladins go, to me it seems that Holy paladins lack any proper healing tools to handle intense damage being inflicted to a very spread out raid

So my question is, how would a holy paladin heal intense damage dealt to a very spread raid (theoretical 15 yard spread between all players)?

[Iltareh]

Paladins have several AoE healing spells, but all of them (even the lvl90 talents) have a limited radius of ~10 yards.

Actually the only exception is the Light of Dawn (30y range) but it requires 3 holy power, so that is not a spam-able spell.

While i am inexperienced as far as Holy paladins go, to me it seems that Holy paladins lack any proper healing tools to handle intense damage being inflicted to a very spread out raid

So my question is, how would a holy paladin heal intense damage dealt to a very spread raid (theoretical 15 yard spread between all players)?

Give us an example.

The most likely way is popping Holy Avenger beforehand and getting EF ticks rolling on as many low-survivability players as possible, throwing out a devo when the damage starts, and LoD/holy prism wherever possible.

I can't think of a situation where intense damage is happening on the full raid where they're all spread out except for perhaps Garrosh's whirling corruption, in which case you have a reliable timer of when it's happening and tons of ways to reduce the damage - make the raid run away from garrosh to reduce the damage, devo aura, healing tide etc.

Holy paladin isn't alone in healing a raid through intense damage. Everyone has mitigation and healthstones and you have other healers in the raid who are better equipped to handle this specific situation.

[Xs]

The short answer is you don't. The long answer is mostly whats already been said, you just use cooldowns either in the form of HA being the ideal, or other cooldowns, for instance if you use Guardian you can then fairly safely start using 2 or even 1 HP EF's and the Guardian will top those people up as if you'd give them a much more substantial heal, you can also just continue as you normally would and let the other healers cover the slack that you're not able to, just avoid using LoD unless the situation is life or death. The other healers excel at spread healing, even Shaman that are usually confined to Healing Rain can and will use several cooldowns to cover your ass, at which point you just have to do what you do best, and bomb the people that are in real danger with an EF, and you can even micro your Beacon around to even out the flow of damage, like if you're talking Empowered Whirling and one of the melee is a bit slow, slap it on them for a few seconds and then slap it back on the tank.

[Aleksej89]

Thank you very much for detailed answers!
A mini-question if you fellow paladins are interested in answering:

Do you mind that Holy paladins do not have "true" spread AoE healing?
Do you consider this focus on stacked targets healing to be a boon?

[blackblade]

Thank you very much for detailed answers!
A mini-question if you fellow paladins are interested in answering:

Do you mind that Holy paladins do not have "true" spread AoE healing?
Do you consider this focus on stacked targets healing to be a boon?

What spells would you consider "True" spread AoE healing. Conceptually, most classes are weak at scattered-raid-aoe-healing, MW monks and resto druids are really the only ones who come to mind, Chain heal's only great when people are close enough together to get many jumps, and both monks/druids have toolkits that focus on area/raid healing at the expense of ST healing.

The reason why most SoO strats call for staying closely stacked is because most Healing classes today are far more efficient stacking a bunch of healing AoE's in one place than trying to triage a raid who's all 15 yards scattered.

[mcbubble]

They re-roll disc priest

[Xs]

Do you mind that Holy paladins do not have "true" spread AoE healing?
Do you consider this focus on stacked targets healing to be a boon?

We have spread AoE healing, as far as Blizzard are concerned, they just haven't balanced it correctly to allow for us to use it over EF.

[Deleted]

So my question is, how would a holy paladin heal intense damage dealt to a very spread raid (theoretical 15 yard spread between all players)?

The answer,mentioned before, is you don't. At extreme high end you either avoid getting into such a position,compensate with HA or don't use a Holy Pala at all depending on the encounter.

Thank you very much for detailed answers!
A mini-question if you fellow paladins are interested in answering:
Do you mind that Holy paladins do not have "true" spread AoE healing?
Do you consider this focus on stacked targets healing to be a boon?

Its a major weakness that has no real compensation(you don't heal more then other classes stacked up) but in the last 2 tiers at least it hasn't been that bad since the bosses that matter allowed for some stacking.

Blizzard doesn't change stuff unless something is ON FIRE usually. For example Divine Light costing 22k mana(and not generating a Holy Power without beacon) is a side effect of 4.0-4.2 Cataclysm when you had a ton more mana, aoe heals were less relevant and you spammed DL to infinity. In current raiding context DL is just a joke, since it never got revisited/changed after its 4.0-4.2 nerfs.

The same happened for Radiance. As a side effect of 4.3 infinite mana + stacking its cost was made insanely high and range was never really an issue back then. Despite nerfing the spell's output by insane amounts in MoP it never got revisited/adjusted in other ways.

[Xs]

The same happened for Radiance. As a side effect of 4.3 infinite mana + stacking its cost was made insanely high and range was never really an issue back then. Despite nerfing the spell's output by insane amounts in MoP it never got revisited/adjusted in other ways.

They completely changed the way HR worked with 5.4, from the small single target + infinite spread to what it is now.