Hey Paladins, Heres a shaman with a paladin alt looking for your advice!
I'll blunt and say that "I suck" at playing paladins, at least it feels that way. I just recently hit level 100 on my paladin, spent hours setting up my bars/clique/weakauras to give me the best visibility onto everything that is going on, and researched the numerous specs for holy paladins. AH Bought three crafted 640 pieces, grabbed a 1h weapon and offhand, and overall with random inventory items, I have 602 equipped/610 overall ilvl.
My next step, was heading over to proving grounds and queueing up as Holy.
Much to my mortifying dismay... I found out that I suck... bad. I cannot seem to even clear the last wave of Healer Bronze. Between just an onslaught of area damage coupled with the tank being squishier than I am, it just feels like I cannot seem to keep the npcs up despite my best efforts.
Currently, my spec is Sacred Shield, US, SW, HP and Beacon of Faith. I have tried both EF and SS, as well as tried both Lights Hammer and HP. While I noticed slightly better results with SS + HP, over the other combinations, I am still doing quite bad at healing.
I am just below 10k HPS in throughput... so with that said alone, I am just shaking my head, I know I shouldn't be THAT weak on healing.
My normal situation involves me keeping holy shock on cooldown, SS or EF up on the tank, and spamming flashes of light. That said, I am watching the tank consistently lose 2% hp a second despite me spamming this rotation hard. Using HP or Lights Hammer does succeed at boosting his health back up, but any time I have to switch gears to heal the rest of the group, the tank just plummets to his death (despite beacon healing). I figured under this sort of condition, I'd be running out of mana sooner than the tank would be running out of health, but that just doesn't seem to be the case.
After several tries and changes in spec, I still had yet to even complete healer bronze. Frustrated with the results, I logged off my paladin for the night.
I could use all the help I could get at this point, since it just doesn't seem to make sense to me. Am I simply just not relying on my cooldowns (Wrath, Hands, etc) enough? Or what is it that is making it so difficult to keep the group and tank up.
Any help is most certainly appreciated.
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Some brief back story on my healing experiences, I used to heal progression raids on both my shaman and holy priest, the net results of which have been very successful and I have even healed Heroic Rag solo on my shaman during many of our kills. I have not healed any in the WoD expansion, but I do have Gold Proving Grounds with both Restoration Shaman and Holy Priest. That coupled with being in Mythic progression, you can imagine my frustration at being unable to even clear bronze proving grounds as a paladin healer.