WARNING: huge wall of text..
I put this together for my guild figured I would share it and get some feedback.
resources
http://www.wowwiki.com/Paladin
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...06674973&sid=1
http://elitistjerks.com/f76/t36779-p...imple_answers/
http://www.wowwiki.com/Item_level
http://www.wowwiki.com/Spell_power_coefficient
http://elitistjerks.com/f76/t36779-p...imple_answers/
http://elitistjerks.com/f76/t64649-h...h_3_2_changes/
Now Holy pally talents and builds
Endurance build:
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?pala...yEHbpKK,,10433
has all the improved blessings extra crit goodness from the ret tree. Heart of the crusader is also good for your raids dps if you don’t have a prot or ret with it anyway. Pursuit of justice is also a handy spell to have it has saved my tail a few times. There are some points to play with here if you don’t want the PoJ or you move the points from imp conc into imp loH or divinity from the prot tree. Aura mastery is also an optional talent here depending on your role and what your guild is doing.
Hard mode build:
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?pala...CGMMydz,,10433
some points to play with here as well if you have a steady tree or prot pally that takes improved devotion you can move those points into imp HoJ, Imp Conc aura, or imp LoH. Your raid leader will thank you for Taking Divine guardian during a lot of hard modes.
holy stats:
intellect
increases mana pool by 15 per point
increases spell power by 2 per 10 points through talents
increases spell crit by %1 per 166.66 Int
Spell crit
45.91 crit rating per %1 crit
Spell power
pretty straight forward but I'll list the coefficients for spells here
Flash of light %100
Holy Light %166
Holy Shock %81
Sacred shield %75
Stamina
1 point of stam = 10 hit Points
MP5
This effects constant regen while casting it's how much mana you will regen per 5 seconds while casting. Not a huge source of mana so it shouldn’t be sought after or stacked. But doesn’t hurt so don’t avoid it either, just don’t gem for it.
Spirit
this affects how much mana you regen while not casting outside of the 5 second rule. Since paladins don’t stop casting during pve encounters this is a wasted stat
it’s pretty easy to tell here our #1 stat is easily Int. but a good mix of stats is always a good idea. Depending on your play style, which we will touch on later, you want to stack almost exclusively Int for a Holy Light build and spell power for a flash build.
Pally healing Strategies.
There are currently 3 common healing strategies for:
FoL spammers: focus more on spell power and haste. The objective is to make your foL big and fast enough to keep you tank up, also very good for raid healing.
HL spammers: focus is on largest mana pool possible, spell power is a waste because most of your heals will over heal anyway. Regen trumps throughput in every way here (mostly through int, IE: DP, replen, crit etc which is all gained through int)
Balanced healers: These are the best and brightest. They know when and how to use each spell based on the fight and incoming damage. You will want to gem and enchant mostly the same as a HL spammer because you want to be prepared for any situation, including spamming HL for several minutes if needed.
Regardless of which play style you utilize there is still one spell that must be used carefully and we will review that now.
Beacon Placement:
there are 4 basic ways to handle your Beacon of Light depending on the fight and your raid comp.
Beacon MT: this is mostly for when you are raid healing, or when you are assigned to a tank and you don’t completely trust your raid heals for the particular fight. (Also for sarth 3d zerg, and 5 mans where you are the ONLY healer). It ensures that every heal you cast also heals your MT.
Beacon OT heal MT (or visa versa): this is actually overpowered for certain fights. It allows you to basically solo heal the last 2 boss's of VoA and is extremely powerful for the first 2 boss's of northrend beasts in ToC. Should only be used in fights where you have extreme confidence in your raid heals or there is no raid damage.
Beacon self, heal the raid: This is really only used in a situation where you have 2 competent tank healers other than you in the raid and your job is to raid heal. IE: 3 pally's in a 10 man 3 healing. It makes your job of raid healing slightly easier because you automatically heal yourself as well every time you heal someone else.
#1 why does the pally stack Int?
with kings one Int gem is
22 intellect
4.4 spell power (with talents)
roughly %.33 crit (which can equals about 4 mp5 if chain casting holy light with a 1.3 second cast time)
330 mana (1.375 mp5 from divine plea if used on cool down, .825 MP5 from replen)
all math blatantly stolen from elitist jerks pally forums.
I'll use myself as an example, if I replaced 10 of my gems with other examples:
SP: 230 spell power instead of 200 int? that’s 163 more healing from holy light and 349 extra healing from flash of light at the cost of 3300 mana, roughly 60mp5 (using the math from above)
#2 why would Holy Light be your primary spell?
Simple, no other healing spell in the game has the single target output potential that holy light does. So why wouldn’t you spam it if you can?
You can't get the global cool down below 1 second, so for example my holy lights average about 12k (check the logs if you don’t believe me) my flashes average about 4800. With the judgment buff up my holy lights are about 1.46 seconds and my flashes are 1.04 seconds. So right now my flashes have potential of 4615 HPS per target (double that for beacon) and my holy lights are 8219 hps (again per target so x2 with beacon).
Given the coefficients in order to get the same HPS out of flash it take 1917 MORE spell power to equal the same HPS potential of holy light with all else being equal.
#3 so given these numbers you have shown, and the fact that you refer to your healing style as holy light spamming, does that mean you don’t cast anything else?
Hell no, a good healer of any class knows what spell to use when. And knows how to manage his mana. There are several fights we are doing as a guild now that are nearly 10 minutes long... you will NEVER be able to spam holy light non stop for 10 minutes straight simply wont happen. But the objective is to get as close as you can and recognize low/no damage situations and when to use plea and when to flash. but if you look at my logs my healing is about %80 holy light even though it's only about %45 of the spells I cast.
#4 my over healing runs about %60+ on almost every fight, isn’t that a waste? Aren’t I better off conserving mana more and using more flash?
Short answer: no, and I'll tell you why. First off pay attention to who I'm healing. None of the logs you can find for me at any point will have less than %70 of my healing directed at a tank. In todays content in order to keep a tank alive they have to be at or very near full health to survive. Ask any off them they will tell you without heals it's very possible to be 2 shot in ToC25 (or especially ToGC) once you consider all the debuffs and everything else being thrown at them. Unexpected spikes are common so being prepared is key. Aside from that if you can find or remember a true example of the last time a tank died because I went OOM I'll give you 1000 gold (and no it didn’t happen against general either =P).