Holy Paladin Challenge Mode Guide! 8/8 Gold.

[Deleted]

Greetings. This guide is based on my gold runs and personal preference, but will hopefully help fellow holy paladins out.
This is the setup I used.

Starting with Talents
I actually used the same talents and glyphs in every dungeon, but you can mix it up a bit if you want.

• Tier 1: Speed of Light - very good for avoiding mechanics, speeding up to your tank after a quick mana break between pulls etc.
• Tier 2: Fist of Justice - 30 sec stun, the other 2 choices aren't that great in CMs. Blinding light breaks on damage.
• Tier 3: Eternal flame - A mini-HoT that creates a mini-shield on ticks. Selfless healer can save mana, but uses GCDs on judgement - which you won't have time with mostly spamming FoL and Holy Shock.
• Tier 4: Clemency - Double Sacrifice, BoP and Freedom, it's awesome.
• Tier 5: Sanctified Wrath - With Glyph of Merciful Wrath this is insane. You can almost have wings up every time you need it. This means you have 33% uptime on Avenging wrath.
• Tier 6: Holy Prism - Use on enemies to heal 5 nearby friendly players. Very good when everyone in your party takes damage.
• Tier 7: Beacon of Faith - Usually neccessary to have two beacons, one on tank and one on a melee. (Melee tends to take more damage than ranged).

Glyphs:

• Glyph of Merciful Wrath - 50% shorter CD on Avenging Wrath, and decreases the effect on it by 50%. This is mandatory.
• Glyph of Hand of Sacrifice - Hand of Sacrifice no longer redirect damage. This is also mandatory.
• Glyph of Flash of Light - Good when spamming flash of lights.

Optional:

• Glyph of Cleanse - Double cleanse but cooldown increased by 4 seconds. Good in dungeons where dispels are needed.
• Glyph of Beacon of Light - Good if you switch around your beacons alot to save mana. I had no need for this though.
• Glyph of Denounce - Reduces the cast time of denounce after casting Holy Shock by 33%. Good if you want to dps a little bit more.

Playstyle

• - Beacon on tank + melee, or someone else you expect to take damage.
• - Holy Shock on CD to get Infusion of Light-procs. You'll spend Infusion of Light-procs on Flash of Light (it boosts the healing of FoL since 6.1 (Think it was 6.1).
• - Mostly spam Flash of Light - Holy Light if party is taking low damage. If you get a Infusion of Light proc, you can use that proc on a non-beacon target to give that person a big heal and then transfer it to both the beacontargets if they are taking damage - 3 heals in 1.
• - Drink mana directly after a pack, then use Speed of Light to catch up with tank for next pack.
• - Use your stun on the most dangerous enemy, or as an interrupt if everyone has used their kicks.
• - Make use of holy prism, don't use it if only 2 people needs healing, that's a waste.
• - DPS when you can (Denounce/Hammer of Wrath).

Gearing
I used:

• Helm: Incarnadine Greathelm - Crit/Haste
• Neck: Wavesurge Choker - Crit/Spirit
• Shoulders: Blacksmithing-Shoulders, rerolled to Crit/Haste.
• Cloak: Polymorphic Cloak of Absorption - Crit/Spirit
• Chest: Wild Combatant's Scaled Chestpiece - Crit/Haste
• Wrist: Truesteel Armguards of the Fireflash - Crit/Haste
• Hands: Verdant Plate Grips - Crit/Haste
• Waist: Annihilan's Waistplate - Crit/Mastery
• Legs: Incarnadine Legplates - Crit/Haste
• Feet: Cruel Hope Crushers - Crit/Mastery
• Ring 1: Band of Growing Leaves - Crit/Spirit
• Ring 2: Firemender's Smoldering Signet - Crit/Spirit
• Trinket 1: Winged Hourglass - Int with spirit proc (This is prob BiS still for CMs)
• Trinket 2: I don't remember, but get a Int/Crit Int/Haste from HC dungeons if you can. One spirit trinket is enough.
• Weapon: Warhammer of Arrogance - Crit/Haste. Just get a weapon with Crit on it.

As you can see, I favored Crit very much due to Holy Shock. When it crits, we get Infusion of Light. Infusion of Light increases the healing of Flash of Light by 50%. Crit is really good for holy paladins in the current tier. My secondary stat is haste. Haste lowers the cooldown of Holy Shock and decreases casting time on spells.

This is my first guide I have ever written, but I hope it helps someone out. If you have any questions, my BattleTag is Criper#2471 on EU servers.

[Deleted]

Okay, this is something you could do in challenge modes, but nothing I would recommend. I went an entirely different approach on challenge modes because the healing requirements for CMs are really low. So I tried to get max DPS as Shockadin for bosses whiles sustaining the minimum Healing requirements. I'd go for a more advanced min/max version:

Talents:

T3:
Either SH or Sacred Shield. I run Sacred Shield and had it up on Tank and 2 Others all the time. SH is good as well, but Judgement is a DPS loss. Important: Not EF because I use Glyph of Harsh Words.

T5:
SW as you wrote because of 100% crit chance of HS during Wings and reduced CD. It makes AW Both, a super strong DPS cooldown and some kind of God-Mode-nobody-dies cooldown.

T6: Holy Prism is always a solid choice. But since Challenge mode is almost only about keeping the Tank alive, I took Execution Sentence for both: A strong Tankheal for big Pulls and additional singletarget boss DPS.

Glyphs:
Holy Shock - Makes Holyshock your strongest offensive ability. 100% crit during SW on top
Flash of Light - Your main Healspells almost only used on the tank
Harsh Words - 2nd strongest offensive ability, also the reason why you can't pick EF

Optional:
Denounce - Just a litte bit more DPS on top.
Beacon of Light - If more beacon swap is required

Playstyle:

- Beacon Melee(s) + maybe yourself, NOT the tank.
- Sacred Shield on Tank + 2 Others.
- Now you only have to Heal to tunnel-heal the Tank. That will build up IH on your main healing target (the Tank) and heal 2 others beside. Test a little bit which of the target need the most heal. You might find yourself beaconswapping to the Tank when the group gets a lot of damage, but usually that's not the case. Tell your DPS when to use healing tonics. You know best when they won't get any heal. Should be possible on at least every 2nd pull.
- The main reason why I baseline put a beacon on myself is because I don't use Hand of Sacrifice. Beacon swapping is a great thing in 5m Dungeons though, hence consider Glyph of Beacon of Light.
- Try to keep your 3min CD AW (No Glyph of MW) for bosses. Prepot + AW (offensive HS (every second GCD) > Harsh Words > Denounce) will give you some 20-25k DPS
- If you find you need some additional Heal on bosses and can't DPS, start with cycling offensive HS -> Flash of Light during AW. Remember offensive HS doesn't trigger IoL.
- Always try to deal as much DPS as possible and as few HPS as necessary. A blood DK will probably make this way easier.
- As Argon said, make use of your other utility. Don't forget about stunning, interrupting, Hand of Freedom, Hand of Protection. Bubble on Packs with CC/Silence etc...

Stats:

Since you can basically sit and drink after each pull, so every minute or such, you don't need spirit at all.
Mastery is a proper healing stat, but doesn't help you dealing DPS, so you might wanna avoid it, the choice is yours.
Haste is always great in Challenge modes because it reduces your GCD and there's a lot of stuff to do and spam!
Crit, because of obvious reasons.

Int > Crit > Haste (> Versatility/Mastery > Multistrike) is what I'd go. Since you can theoretically just put Crit/haste on every slot, everything else has not really to be considered if you wanna min/max.

For Trinkets I chose the alchemy stone (versatility + int proc) + candle. But not sure about those. That was the highest Int I could get it seemed to me.

edit:
You might also swap the beacon on the Tank for 10% more healing if nobody else has incoming damage or the tank gets insane Damage and he/she/you have no cooldowns left.

[Soikona]

Thanks for the guide, and yours six. I have already got my CMs but I was tanking but will be doing them again to help with my mate alts (same group of people just one of my mates alts will be tanking instead of me) as a healer. If we have a DPS issue, I will be taking into account what Six has said but I will be using what Arqon has wrote. We are only goin for gold, not server best times.

[Deleted]

Thanks for the guide, and yours six. I have already got my CMs but I was tanking but will be doing them again to help with my mate alts (same group of people just one of my mates alts will be tanking instead of me) as a healer. If we have a DPS issue, I will be taking into account what Six has said but I will be using what Arqon has wrote. We are only goin for gold, not server best times.

My build is not focused on realm best times, but absolutely enough for 3 minutes under gold times. Good luck!

[Faithh]

I've done it like this.

Tier 1; Long arm of the law.

Tier 3; Avoided Eternal flame completely (tier 7 choice will explain why). Didnt see the point of sacred shield, so I went with selfless healer instead since I was spec'ed for Long arm.

Tier 4; I went with Unbreakable spirit instead, found Clemency more just to reduce the tank's damage or to BOP someone who's about to get hit by eg the smash from the last boss in Everbloom. Weren't any of my concerns and I prefer sometimes just to eat damage up with divine protection (the lower cd allows me to do this a lot more) just to push my healing a bit up.

Tier 5; Sanc Wrath is a nobrainer combined with the class trinket from Archimonde and the 50% glyph.

Tier 7; Beacon of Insight. When executed perfectly, this is just the best choice. 40% more single target healing (and a bigger shield) while healing the Beacon of Light for 40% more is a huge healing boost. Ive had so many annoying issues with Beacon of Faith like during healing a DPS the tank spiked really low and my beacon didnt heal hm enough to prevent him from dying. Or I was just simply lacking singletarget healing, especially if the class trinket's proc isn't up etc. I just found this talent, mainly 2 target healing making far more sense than 3 target healing (beacon of faith). You mostly have 2 ranged dps who barely take damage and a melee who's more prone to take damage.

This is a really tricky talent, it requires some practice. I suggest trying it out in proving grounds. Basically, you use holy shock to let the beacon jump from a person who's on full health which will automatically jump to the most injured player and healing him either with Holy Light or Flash of Light. If the beacon is on a target who's currently the most injured and Holy Shock is ready, holy shock someone else to get the class trinket proc & Infusion of light proc and cast Holy light/Flash of Light on that target who had the beacon.

You never want the hot from EF to consume the beacon of insight, why would you? A tank at 10% HP and you're ready to cast a flash of light but the crappy hot made it jump off to someone who might be on full health. Not sure if SS causes this, if it does - avoid it. Stick to selfless healer.

Glyphs;

- 50% Wings. The 3min version was overhealing more than ever being useless.
- Flash of Light. I didn't really have to use this a lot, swapped it out for Cleanse especially for dungeons that required more dispelling like Everbloom 1st pack & the pack before the 4th boss.
- Hand of Sacrifice. Could be I swapped this glyph for Cleanse instead of Flash of Light, can't remember anymore.

Gearing & Stats;

Avoid spirit completely. You shouldn't have mana issues as holy pala unless the tank overpulled ridiculously. Only had this happening once, when the tank decided to pull 4 spiders in SMBG where we had almost no interrupts at all. With a 1 min 50% wings cd, the class trinket and beacon of Insight you'll be easily critting for around 120K with Holy Light while the tank getting 60K of that. I'd say, every slot should have Crit & Mastery (more crit than mastery in each slot). The trinket from Socrethar is amazing as well, that extra x haste is better than x more intellect you'd get from a pure int trinket like the one from Oregorger.

[Deleted]

Or I was just simply lacking singletarget healing, especially if the class trinket's proc isn't up etc.

The class trinket scales down really bad in CMs, other trinket options are much better imo. And with some spirit (winged hourglass), you can spam flash of light on the tank and you will not lack singletarget healing at all. Also the trinket from socrethar scales down really bad too.. so a spirit trinket is better than that too. (I've simcrafted this). But it might be about preference.

[Faithh]

The class trinket scales down really bad in CMs, other trinket options are much better imo. And with some spirit (winged hourglass), you can spam flash of light on the tank and you will not lack singletarget healing at all. Also the trinket from socrethar scales down really bad too.. so a spirit trinket is better than that too. (I've simcrafted this). But it might be about preference.

Still gives a 44% increase to HL/FoL, which is huge. True it's not always up, but you're not always healing either way - so I'm not really sure why a pure int trinket or a spirit trinket would be better. Increasing your healing output by a massive amount, saves a lot of mana too instead of relying on a spirit trinket and burning your mana inefficiently with flash of light spam. If your tank is taking really heavy damage and at the same time your dps too, your beacon might not cut it at all while you're flash of light spamming DPS. That happened to me so many times back pre-Highmaul, I just needed my beacon to heal the tank for a lot more. That's why I went with Beacon of Insight and the class trinket. The only reason I went with the socrethar trinket is because of the x haste, just to have a better uptime on my class trinket. Done it with a pure int trinket as well, honestly it didn't matter which one I would have used. As long as I had the class trinket.

I've never had a moment I had to flash of light spam, eg on the first boss in SMBG I've ended the fight with full mana and around 40K hps. We've had 3 channels going out I think. 2nd boss in skyreach, only spent 15K mana with 3 burst going out etc. Done it with a monk tank, not sure if they are worse or better than DK's.

[Killala]

Thank you so much for this, it's exactly what I've been looking for.