/cue ephiphany music

Go read this.

It is an eloquent post detailing a healer plight-and it also explains why I've been going nuts.

It would help, I think, if there weren't those couple of fights still in Naxx 10 where we "need" 3 healers. Then we could just bring two, and not be bored, and get cranky when other healers step on our toes because they, too, are bored.

I will try to do a post of my own later, but I had to share that with you.

Raiding is 'Aspensive: Doing Dailies, Healadin Edition

So now you're 80 and raiding. Cool! But raiding means wiping, especially at first. Wiping means repair bills, and nevermind the cost of consumables (WHY is my alchemist on the wrong server?*)

So how the hell do you manage to chew through dailies?

I'm uberlazy and since I've gotten my coveted egg from the Oracles, I'm terribad about doing my dailies. The best way to see that I do them is to grab a buddy.

Even if it's another healer, you still kill things faster. I highly reccomend the Oracle dailies just for cash, by the way. They can help offset the cost of repairs and the little buddy you get is a built in helper. You can also often avoid killing things in general while doing them! The exception is the one "kill things as a kitty" quest but hey, you're a kitty. DPS doesn't matter when you're looking for sparklies.

Things I Do While Soling:
1) Ret aura kills things an eensy bit faster.
2) Sacred Shield yourself. It helps.
3) Use Seal of Righteousness.
4) Judge Wisdom. You'll be taking less damage with SS up, so this will cut down on downtime.
5) Judge every time it's up for the damage.
6) Holy shock!
7) Consecrate every so often if you make a lot of friends.
8) Die after horde find you.

*I have a flower-picking warrior on Sentinels. I r RP nub.

Leveling Healy vs Respeccing

I leveled both of my healers as a healing spec. That said, if you choose to be sane and go the other route (level as DPS, respec heals), I don't blame you (though disc is seriously underrated as far as leveling ease goes).

But which is "better"? *drum roll* It depends!

Benefits of Leveling as a Healer:
-You have an easier time getting groups
-You have the time to become familiar with your healing tools in bits and peices, rather than having them thrown at you all at once at a higher level
-Getting healing gear is easier (presumably, as the healer in the group, you have little/no competition when it drops)
-Practice makes perfect

I will sadly never be able to recreate the healing experience I had with Ambrosine. She healed 5 man and 20/40 man raids at 60. She healed leveling to 70 and did some more 10 and 25 man healing there. Then she healed her way to 80 and thrashed and flailed her way through 5 mans to 10 and 25 man content. I have healed a looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooot on that toon, in all sorts of circumstances. I had greater finesse with her at 80 than I will on my priest for a long time.

Cons of Leveling Healing:
-Soloing can suck (unless you're a disc priest. Weee holy fire!)
-If you're on a PvP server, I have one word for you: bait. Lyr can defend herself to a point, but Ambrosyne is well nigh helpless. C'mere and let me holy shock you to death!....once every six seconds!
-Soloing can suck A LOT

Pros of Leveling DPS:
-You kill things/level faster
-You can defend yourself in PvP
-Big numbers are fun!

Cons of Leveling DPS:
-It can be harder to find groups
-You get less time to hone your skills
-It can be harder to get gear for later healing (less so if you run with other kinds of healers, but you still might fight over rings and cloaks)
-You might get more irritated with trying to do things as healy specced later (dailies as heals = D: )

Yes, the list of 'cons' I have is longer, but the whole 'killing things faster' is pretty heavily weighted by most people.

If you chose to level as DPS and respec heals, there's a couple of ways to handle it:

-Respec before hitting max level. DPS to 70 and then switch and heal your way through Northrend
-Respec at 80, but throw yourself at a lot of normal instances until you get the hang of things. Reading strats just isn't the same. Progress to heroics later, when you're certain you have the gear for them. Being undergeared in heroics just makes for frustration. Even if you happen to have the gear for heroics right off the bat, they're not the place to start learning!

Lyr learned in the Nexus that if your level 72 Death Knight tank in blues and greens makes pulls as if he were on his 80 warrior in blues and epics, you die!

To Kings or Not To Kings

It's a question I hope many paladins ask as they spec: do they want to put the points in kings, or not?

Once upon a time, most holy pallys had kings, because you were tossing points into prot anyway. Hell, I used to have Sanct too. You just didn't see that many healers with points in ret. Now of course we're diving after the crit in the ret tree and I've broken my 4 year long oath against never having a point in ret, ever.

I call myself the holy paladin buffbot. Imp wis, imp might, kings...got all of 'em. I'm a favorite paladin in 10 mans, I'm sure. But is it 'worth' it for you to take kings?

Well, I'll give you the same answer here that I give to a lot of things: it depends.

-What's your raid makeup like?
If you've got another paladin who has kings who shows up to almost all of your raids, then you can spend the points elsewhere. If not, then you need to consider...

-How many others want kings? If it's a sizeable number (tanks almost always love kings and they're pretty important folk to have buffed as much as possible), then you want to consider the fact that the benefit to the raid might well outweigh the benefit of some additional crit to you (as the ret tree is normally where you take those 5 points from). There's a good number of DPS that loves it too. You can get crit elsewhere. Where else can they get kings?

If you don't raid much, then you might want to consider the following:
-Kings on the tank does make it a bit easier on you (more HP! More...er...other things tanks like!).
-Kings on yourself, if you don't need mana regen, is great.
-They'll at least shut up about you not having it.

Holy Light Glyph Nerf

The Holy Light Glyph Nerf - or Why This Paladin is Cranky

Alright, so I can, after calmly reflecting, see why this was deemed "OP". I am, none the less, exceptiontionally cranky.

I'm remembering 5 mans in which I wanted to shriek and stab things, before I got my Naxx25 gear. I remember solo healing AoE happy fights and grimly facing the reality that I can only seem to keep 3 people up at a time in situations like that.

If 20 yards was too much, then 8 yards is too few. For the love of all that is holy, I just want to be able to cope with aoe damage somewhat without giving myself a heart attack in the process.

A raid example of this is last night's 10 man OS. Our new holy priest, bless her heart, just kept going splat. It was a combination of her being new to the group and our DK being relatively new to raid tanking-I don't think he'd tanked OS at all before, and he was having tab targeting issues to boot. So, who ended up the only living healer for a good chunk of time? And early on for one of the drakes to boot? Yup. Me.

Maybe I don't want to play frantic whack a mole, Blizzard. *Makes strangling motions with her hands*

Gwuh.

Frustrated Paladin Preaches Appreciation

Today's blog fodder: A WoW Insider post about priest roles.

Dear QQing Priests,

Shut the hell up.
No, really. Quit your bitchin'.
O noes, they're nerfing CoH! O noes, we don't have clear and defined roles! We are made of suck and fail!

You want a clearly defined role? Take a paladin! There's your clearly definined role. I heal one thing really damn well. That's GREAT in raids, and I'm not even being sarcastic!

...unless most of your healers are paladins, a la last night's OS (2 pallys and one bad resto shaman who might as well have not even been there).
...unless you're healing a 5 man with aoe damage.
...unless that's all you can do.

Priests, when you look at their spells as a whole product and don't get hung up
on any one ability in particular, work great. ... Holy Priests are great
healers, and there's really no situation where they're completely
helpless. ... The fact that Holy Priests are so well-rounded means that in
situations where only one Healer is needed (such as 5-man groups), Priests are
fantastic. They have all of the tools required to excel in that format. There's
not really a single boss that can give them a lot of trouble. All of the Healing
classes have the tools required to get them through 5-man dungeons and Heroics,
but Paladins, Shaman, and Druids all have encounters that really trip them
up. Priests rarely have this problem. 5-mans are kind of their playground. They
utterly dominate.

And that, ladies and gentleman, is why I rolled a priest. Even a disc priest has the tools nessecary to cope with the varied situations that a 5 man will throw at them. My question is: how does this change in raids?

I don't think it does. In a raid, you can still AoE heal. You can still toss HoTs. You can still heal a single target pretty well. Why does this make you weak in a raid? If you have two holy paladins healing a raid, they're probably going to struggle more than if you had two priests. Now Macharious and I did great, but Mach and I are awesome, even if he is a cranky temporarily converted healadin. I imagine that some of the other healing classes are similarly limited. We can do it, but it's more difficult.

Priests bring versatility to the table. If you don't value that in a raid, you're a fool. What if your holy paladin healing the tank dies? Boom, priest can step in. What if a Shade pounces on you unawares in the middle of explaining a boss fight and half the group all is /afk? The priest is ready, despite being the only healer present and not staring at 4chan on a second monitor. What if you log on to raid and your holy paladin/reso shaman/tree isn't there? The priests can do it!

Problems start coming up when you increase the number of characters in play. Things start shifting from who has the most tools to "Who will heal the tank?" and "Who will heal the DPS?" In bigger raids. You stop looking for versatility and start looking for who's the best at what job. ... The issue is that you fill your niche roles first, and plug in the Priest(s) second.

Versitility should be valued even in a 25 man. I'd be unhappy if I didn't have a priest or two in my 25 man raids. I'd grab one just as quickly as I'd grab anything else. I don't think the problem, then, is not with the priest or with how they work. It's with how some people form raids.

I'd be okay with, as the Insider says later, giving the priests more of a niche...but please, for the love of all that is holy, don't take away their Jack of all Trade skills. Expand on the Hymns or spells like Power Infusion if you want. Those could all lead to fun, useful directions.

But I don't want a repeat of Ambrosyne's leveling process with Lyrandre, where there remain certain instances I just won't do without a lot of inner sobbing. I want to be able to walk through any instance portal and know that I gave the tools at hand to do my job-keep people alive.

Priests have a niche. I just don't think that they-or raid leaders-appreciate it enough.

Oh look, a shiny! /distracted

Most of my creative effort for the day was sucked into polishing my guild's misson statement. Why was I doing that? Because they made me recruitment officer. Yay! As recruitment officer, though, I want to have a shiny misson statement to point recruits to, and no one else had gotten around to it yet (did I mention this is NOT a new guild? Lazy!).

We tackled Naxx last night, but didn't get to Sapph, so that experiment is...still waiting. I did end up using Blessing of Sacrifice on the MT for Anub to soak some of the damage, a seldom used trick I'll have to remember more often. I honestly never used that thing except for Maiden.

I did an absolutely silly near 6k HPS on the Instructor. I also nearly went OOM, but he died (eventually...) so we win! I definitely don't have the crit for that sort of nonsense on a regular basis, though. I don't remember having that much trouble with him before, but we were also training a new OT among other things, so it wasn't an optimal night.

I'm still almost looking forward to 2-healing things. There are certain fights where I spend the entire time spinning in circles FoLing the tank, hoping the spinning makes it more interesting.

It doesn't.

Can I snap my fingers and make my priest 80 yet?

Guest blog.

I have a guest blog over at World of Matticus! I am pleased and terrified all at once.

Excuse me while I go and quiver in a corner.

/fade

In which I am vain.

I used to mock Judgement. "Plate skirt, what the hell?" But it was pretty bad ass for all of that, although Lightbringer wasn't bad. Belly baring and bananarific, but not bad.

Now I miss it. I miss it so much that I keep it in the bank, all eight lovingly gathered peices. They represent untold hours of raiding, back in the day when I had four/five other paladins in a raid to 'compete' with. I never saw tier three on my character, but didn't think much of the set back then. In BC I tried to collect the purple version of Judgement but never did manage it all, and was...not impressed with tier four.

It was...meh.

I missed t5 and t6. Now we're back at recolored t3, which is awesome for some classes and...not so awesome for others. Like, oh, power rangers. I mean paladins.

Do I care that Ambrosyne doesn't have any of her tier gear? Nooooo. I'm content with my recolored DK armor. It's not very...paladiny, but it's sure as hell better than Random Pointy Objects Jutting Out Gear.

I should totally stand around Dalaran in Judgement. Last time I did that in Stormwind, a warrior dragged out his t2 and stood next to me. Good times!

Dear Blizzard,

WTB bad ass looking paladin gear.

Kthxbai,
-healadin

Priest gear tends to look better. Like I need more incentive to play her, right?

Useful posts coming later. Researching! Gasp.

Tanks and Bubbles

It's about time that I Like Bubbles actually spent some more time on bubbles.

Once upon a time, tanks fussed about bubbles. Wrath has changed much, however, leaving a few of us in confusion. When is it okay to bubble the tank?

Paladins have a couple of bubbles. The only one we're really going to worry about here, though, is Sacred Shield.
You don't want to BoP...er...HoP?...the tank. In fact, you might want to move that button somewhere out of the way. What, me speaking from experience? Nooooooo.... *shifty eyes*

For disc priests, you have PW:S and your divine aegis proc. You can't control the latter, however, so never mind that.

When you bubble is pretty depending on what you're bubbling, so let's go down the list of tanking classes.

Warrior: Warriors are going to be your problem children. Don't bubble them before a pull. Don't bubble them if they're over geared for the instance and thus ending up rage starved. Otherwise, once in a fight I wait until I see they've got about half a rage bar before tossing one up. In a raid, keeping one up as much as possible on a boss is a good idea. This applies to both SS and PW:S.

Druids: Druids generate rage very differently than warriors. You can be a bit more liberal with the bubbles here, though I still wouldn't use one pre-pull. They generate rage from crits, and even in an instance they vastly out level (the 80 bear I had taking us through Slave Pens, for example), they don't seem to have issues with rage generation.

Death Knights: For the love of all that is holy, bubble them as much as possible. Runic power is generated solely by their attacks and they are currently plagued with some mitigation problems, so go wild. This is the one class where I bubble pre-pull every chance I get.

Paladins: Mana starvation in a tankadin seems to have gone the way of the OP warlock. With the way Sanctuary works now, bubbling seems to have a negligible effect. They start with the blue rage bar at full, so to speak, so you can get away with pre-bubbling.


Don't forget the elusive disc priest tank. They seem to appear along side unhappy frost DKs, usually after giggling and casting holy fire on an add...

GTFO Mah Tank!

The Comcast backbone we're connected to spazzed mid raid last night, halting it entirely because you can't go very far when you're missing a healer, both tanks, and a rogue. It took forever to come back up. You're costing me Sapph practice time, Comcast! Rawr. But that's not what I'm here to bitch about.

Now, I like the synergy between the our three normal healers in the 10 man runs. It's me, a holy priest, and a resto shammy. I sometimes quibble with the holy priest, though, for one simple reason:

He tries to take my damned job.

After Anub, I whisper the GM about how I hate all my heals on the MT being overheals while the OT is threatening to splat (I beacon'd him but he was often out of range). It was as much a random whine to a friend as a legitimate complaint, though it's not the first time I've had the Priest say he's healing the tank and made the O.o face. Then we came to the Widow, and the Priest pipes up with healing asignments over vent.

"Okay, I'll take Mach, OtherPriest take Zoja, Amber you get the raid."

"Wait wait wait wait wait," I spluttered over vent. The holy priests get the tanks and I get the raid? Seriously?

Macharious cut me off. Wisely? Perhaps. "Amber gets Zoja, OtherPriest gets raid."

Now, Priest isn't a bad guy. He's actually a great, generous guildie. He's certainly not a bad healer. He just has NO CLUE about the other healers he's running with. I used to do healing assignments in ZA, and to start I flat out asked the shammys what they were best at because I had no clue. Raid heals? Kay. Raid heals it was. While I know that a holy priest can keep up a tank just fine, it's pretty silly to put the aoe healer on the tank and the single target healer on the raid.

While this situation makes me grouse, it also makes me want to go read up on resto druids and shamans, so that I better understand them. All I know is tree = HoTs (and aggro magnet, it seems like), and shaman = chainhealsomg! I had a very polite tree once ask me to not top off the DPS he's HoTed if they weren't in danger, as that wastes his mana. Oops! I try reeeeally hard not to do that anymore and have turned my UI's HoTs display on. I miss that tree. :(

This should probably be the goal of every raid healer. Learning about your other healers can help you work together better. Working well together = less death! Less death = yaaaaay!

Well. I had meant to write something useful today, but I actually had to work at work. Strange!

I promise less Amber QQ in the next post. Maybe I'll even be funny! I've heard rumors that I do that on occassion.

Strengths of a Holy Paladin, or: Amber loves her some Patchwerk

I love healing Patchwerk.

You see, I spend most of my time at the bottom of the healing meters. This is fine, as it's not my job to be at the top of the meters. It's my job to keep Macharious and Zoja from telling me what flavor the floor of Naxx is tonight. But...well...see, once upon a time, I got away with raiding on my hunter. All of a sudden, I wanted the top of those meters. I blew all my cooldowns every chance I could without pulling aggro (when your tank is sitting in the chair behind you, you don't pull aggro) to do the most DPS possible. Admittedly, part of this was because my guild was chuck full of hunters so I had to go balls to the wall to even get into a raid to begin with...but part of it was just because it was fun, and a way to pat myself on the back.

So there's a part of me still that likes being on top of meters, even if healing meters are piss poor at showing actual performance. So...I love healing Patchwerk.

This is the type of fight where holy paladins shine. One target is taking a ton of damage. I am healing that one target. Wee! Toss beacon on the MT while spamming the OT and poof, I'm shitting heals everywhere. Okay, on two targets. But that's two targets that need a lot of heals. I say it again: wee! I keep Beacon and Sacred Shield up all the time on this fight...a fun little juggling act, and a mana intensive one, but I didn't go OOM. Didn't even use a pot! I know this because uh...I have the bad habit of forgetting to buy mana pots. Oops. I get healing pots all the time for drops, but when the hell do I use those!?

"So you were tossing HLs everywhere, right?"

Nope.

See the crit percentage there for FoL? Sacred Shield is glorious. I did toss a lot of HL's for one fight, but for the most part, with SS up FoL does its job nicely.

I can only speculate on how a disc priest would perform on this fight. I'm sure they'd be great, only their numbers would be lower because they prevent damage. I think they'd probably be a bit better in coping with lesser geared tanks on this fight than a holy pally.

Upon further reflection (I'm not as over the top with mp5 as I'd feared) I'm pretty happy with where I sit, stats wise. I do my job, people don't complain, people don't die, and I don't go OOM too soon.

That's raid buffed up there, of course, with a crit chicken in raid and imp wisdom up. 19k health and 21.2k mana-yummy!

Now if only healing 5 mans on her didn't suck so bad...

PvE Holy Paladin Guide for the Math Wary

Amber’s PvE Holy Paladin Guide for the Math Wary
Or, The “Just Tell Me How To Not Suck” Guide

Disclaimer: I based much of my work upon the EJ thread. It's an excellent resource, and this is merely my attempt to make it more friendly for those of us who find the math headache inducing. The thread and other sources are linked at the end of my babble.

Part One: Stats
Stamina: A dead healer is useless. Stamina is good! But I’ve noticed how many “upgrades” seem to have uh…less stamina on it than the piece I’m replacing. /headtilt, Bliz? If the gear is an upgrade in other respects, just take it. But you might want to keep around that high stam piece for ouchy fights.
Intellect: Know this stat. Love this stat. Int is boosted by Kings! Int gives you mana, crit, and spell power! Int is also your primary regen stat, as it boosts Divine Plea and Replenishment returns.
Spirit: What the fuck, no.
Spell Power: +Heal. Duh. This is obviously a very important stat, but not one I’d worry about terribly because they throw it at you on all of your gear. I believe I entered Naxx 10 with about 1200 in spellpower. SP boosts the effectiveness of your Sacred Shield.
Crit: Crit means bigger heals for less mana. It’s a great stat, especially as you get into more uber gear. Aim for at least 25% for Naxx, and shoot for 30%+ as you gear up in purples, with the exact amount depending on your play style and who you run with. I do love me a good pet crit chicken.
Haste: I consider haste to be a secondary stat. If your gear has some +spell power and int and other tasty stuff on it, as well as haste, well hey! Bonus. I wouldn’t gem or even specifically gear for it, however. If you find yourself in the position of needing to spam Holy Light (HL), then haste is your friend, but save haste for after you have good levels of crit (30%) and mp5. With luck you’d have some haste from Judgements and your local friendly shaman totem, anyhow.
Mp5: Crit is greater than mp5 these days, but do not ignore it!
I happily take it if it’s on gear that’s otherwise a massive upgrade and I don’t take much of a crit hit, but I wouldn’t gem for it unless your gear is oddly lacking in this stat. Int and crit are the better stats to gem/enchant for, int especially.
Remember, mp5 is easy to make up without gear-replenishment, totem, wisdom, flasks, etc.
If you come to a raid with crit stacked sky high and only 30 mp5, I'm going to make sad faces at you. Aim for 200 or so before wandering into Naxx. Flash gets a greater benefit from mp5 than crit and yes, you're still going to use Flash.

Part Two: Abilities
We remain largely two button healers. FoL and HL are still going to be your bosom buddies. You shouldn’t class yourself as a FoL or HL spammer, however. How about spamming whatever is required for the fight? On trash, this is likely to be FoL. On bosses, this can be FoL combined with Sacred Shield (crit boost!) or, yes, Holy Light (o hai, Patchwerk!).
If Blizzard really wanted us to spam HL all the time, why would SS work the way it does? You can compensate for Light’s Grace not being up, honest. If you need a buffer for a ‘slow’ HL to land, toss SS if it isn’t up already, toss a holy shock and an instant FoL if it crits, and then HL. I’ve macro’d an Oh Shit Button just for this (with Divine Favor to guarantee that crit).
I seem to toss more HLs around in 5 mans than I do in raids, but that’s largely because in raids I have other healers to back me up.
Learn to predict incoming damage. You can’t be perfect all the time of course, but it’s not hard to know that X boss tends to do slow steady damage/spike hard/require you to never take your eyes or heals off the tank ever. Anyway, down to specifics…

Holy Light: Yes, if set up right, we can toss quite a few of these around. If you pile on mana reducing effects then the efficiency of HL and FoL can be rather close. Be wary of overdosing on this spell on longer fights, however, because nothing sucks quite as much as being OOM when you’re needed. Except perhaps being dead.
HL can cause zomg crazy! overhealing but as long as you have the mana keep ticking, it’s not a huge deal.

Flash of Light: It’s smaller than its more lauded cousin, but quick and cheap. Love it and use it, for goodness sakes. It’s great for lulls in action, or for buying time until a bigger heal can be gotten off. It’s also great for spamming (especially with SS) when the incoming damage isn’t enough to warrant a HL.

Holy Shock: Holy shock is a handy oh shit button, or something to toss off while running away from whatever stupid thing Blizzard has us stationary healers fleeing from this time. It’s not terribly mana efficient in comparison with FoL, but damn it’s handy in a pinch. A HS crit means a quicker HL or an instant FoL if you have Infusion of Light. Once you hit 30% or more crit, this becomes more viable for more frequent use as a crit naturally means a cheaper spell cost, but I still wouldn’t use it too much. Don’t use it in place of FoL unless the instant factor is crucial.

Beacon of Light: Because somewhat better than being able to only heal one target at a time is being able to heal two. Beacon is annoying for two reasons: one, it has a short duration. Two, it isn’t cheap. I personally don’t bother with it a lot. Sometimes only the tank is taking damage and it can be such a huge mana sink.
It’s great in situations where there is aoe damage, especially in 5 mans. It’s great to toss on the OT while healing the MT. It’s also great to toss on yourself if you’re bad at watching your own green bar (I am) or when you need to stand still and eat some aoe (#^&^%& mojo puddles!) in order to be of any use. There are some simple mods out there to tell you when Beacon falls off and I recommend getting one.
Note: Over healing does not trigger beacon. Neither does trinkets with a healing effect. L

Sacred Shield: The disc priest in me was excited by this spell, though it works quite differently than any priest bubble. SS lasts for 30 seconds. The SECOND time someone takes damage with SS up, then it creates a buff that absorbs a CERTAIN AMOUNT of the damage based off a percentage of your spell power + 500. The damage absorbing buff lasts no longer than six seconds, and has a six second cool down. Also, while it is up, you have 50% more crit from FoL.
Normally, SS is used on tanks. I have not noticed any rage starvation issues with my pet warrior tank, but don’t cast it pre-pull. It’s damned nice on Patchwerk.

Avenging Wrath: Wings! Admittedly I forget about this spell most of the time and it currently has the annoying side effect of triggering forbearance. It increases healing by 20%. I’m careful using it since it deprives me of my bubble for 2 minutes, but it’s great when combined with Divine Plea to negate DP’s healing reduction.

Divine Plea: DP gives you mana back based on int, though it does reduce your healing output. I counter it with AW as mentioned above, and use it preemptively just like I used to do with mana pots. Its short cooldown means you can use it multiple times in many boss fights. Sadly, Wings has a longer cooldown, but I can still use it more than once, especially when I blow it early on.

Divine Favor: Poof! Your next heal is a crit. It’s useful to follow up with HS for an instant FoL or shortened HL.

Divine Illumination: This is another spell I’m bad about remembering, except on fights that I know are going to be HL intensive. Useful on boss fights to extend your mana pool. If you know you’re not going to need it at a certain point (after an enrage for said HL spamming) then it’s good to use it whenever it’s up.

Lay on Hands: Sure as hell isn’t what it used to be, in a good way. Use it as a last ditch oh shit button on the tank or on you for mana.

Judgements: Regularly judging can be a right pain in the ass. Sometimes you just can’t take your heals off the tank for a moment! For that reason (and healer tunnel vision) I would pick whatever judgment is the least important as far as uptime goes. Use it if you can for the mana/healing, as well as the haste buff for you, but only as often as the haste buff drops off. No need to toss out on every cooldown.
Some say that a ret paladin would be better off judging Light, and a holy paladin better off judging Wisdom, since Light scales better with AP. I’d just go with what I said above and have any meleeing paladin keep up whatever’s the most important for your group/raid.

Hand of Salvation: If you have a moment, glance over at the threat meter, see which DPS is on top, and throw this at them. It’s better to be proactive with this than reactive, since it reduces threat over time rather than immediately.

Hand of Protection: This is your “oh shit the mage already pulled agro” button. It’s also used to force tank transitions. Do not place this spell where you might hit it on accident because HoPing the tank is baaaaaad. Why yes, yes I’ve done this.

Hand of Sacrifice: As a holy paladin I forgot this existed except for Maiden in Kara. I honestly prefer other methods of deflecting damage off the tank that doesn’t put my own health at risk.

Sources: EJ’s Holy Paladin Guide (http://elitistjerks.com/f76/t35975-holy_paladin_guide_wotlk/)
World of Matticus' Recommended Requirements for Naxx (http://www.worldofmatticus.com/2009/01/05/recommended-requirements-for-naxxramas-normal-and-heroic/)

For gear, I highly recommend Banana Shoulder's list here. She also has a great list for gems. I seem to use nothing but Brilliant Autumn's Glow and Smooth Autumn's Glow, however I also don't yet have a meta gem to worry about. The Dazzling Forest Emerald was great until my gear shat mp5 at me. If I did have a meta lot, I'd probably lean towards the Insightful Earthseige Diamond. Mm, int. For gear of all classes, this is not a bad resource either.

And yes, I did actually go for nothing but int gems for my t7 chest and my belt buckle. The crit gems are awfully expensive on the AH, and I couldn't find my guildie with the pattern. And well...int is tasty.

I am working on something. Ssh.

The EJ forums are awesome. It seems that every time someone has a question, someone somewhere will thrust the link at them. But damn, wading through those posts can be a chore...oh, and by the way, I HATE MATH. I'd much rather ask someone and have them tell me "If X is the case, do Y in order to not suck."

So I'm going through all my resources, and compiling a simplified "How To Not Suck" guide to Holy Paladins end game. Will anyone read it? Prooooobably not. But if nothing else it's likely good for me, and thus my poor raiding guild, to do the research. I'll try to resist the urge to defend my 200 unbuffed mp5 again (though let me tell you, I'm sure I'll love it on Sapph, when we can survive more than a few moments).

I SWEAR I wasn't going for mp5 gear on purpose. I could get the crafted mace over my Nexus dropped epic, but...but...it just has stam on it! No int! I'll take the int and the damn mp5, thank you very much. Mumble mumble crit...

I'm currently debating on if I want to throw int or crit gems into my gear. Or both. I'd like a little more crit but I DO get it from raid buffs...and int is buffed by kings, which results in more awesome...mmm. Fuck it. Int gives me crit AND other stuff, and crit is just crit. INT IT IS.

Now tonight I go help a buddy guild of ours that's been floundering in Naxx. This does...not make saving for Lyr's eventual epic flyer easy, but I like helping people. So! I'll uh, let you know how that goes. I want to pick apart some of my recount reports anyway.

Coming later this week will also be my report on To Run Away From Blizzard During Sapph, Or Bubble and Sacred Shield and Eat It?: The Debate. BoO hasn't downed him yet so I'm sure I'll get a few stabs in to experiment. I'm leaning towards eating the damage, myself. It worked on those @%#^&%$&^ing mojo puddles.

Why I Almost Quit My Paladin

I leveled my paladin to 80 first, mainly because 1) everyone always needs healers and she was my only healer at 70 and 2) as a healer, she's the perfect compliment to the boy's warrior tank. She's also nearly always been my main, except for a brief stint of "dual maining" where my paladin got played a bunch, but my hunter Jamethera was my raiding main on Earthen Ring. Alas, no one needs a hunter.

Now, I've always been holy. Always. I solo'd/instance'd my way to 60...over the period of a year. After that I raided seriously in a guild called Unified (Judgement, I miss you!) and duo'd with another warrior to 70. My paladin did not get the experience in BC that she did in vanilla WoW- vanilla, my healing skills were tempered in MC, BWL, AQ 20 and 40 (up to C'thun) and there were some tenative jabs into old Naxx. In BC, I got into the unfortunate rut of doing Kara until I wanted to vomit. I saw Gruul's four or five times on her, and Mags uh...twice. Arranging 25 mans seemed to be a bitch on ER. It wasn't until I moved her over to our friend Steve's guild BoO on Azgalor that she saw any real action. I moved her over as a tank, because at that point-after pushing the same two buttons I've been pushing for years, in the same gods be damned instance-I had had enough. Thus I got to OT in Kara, Gruul's, and SSC (!) a little bit. YAY FOR DIFFERENT BUTTONS.

Before we'd transferred over-which is to say, before RP to PvP transfers were an option-the boy (alright, Josh) and I had rerolled to play with Steve. He had another baby warrior but I, in my disgust with Two Buttondom, had rolled a priest. It was my 6th priest or so, but dammit, I wanted one.

This was Lyrandre. And let me tell you (again) that I loved my Lyrandre.

Come 3.0, I agreed to go back to healing. Thus I was staring at green bars again for more SSC, and some playtime in BT and TK. It...wasn't terrible. It wasn't great, but the combination newer content and a couple of new buttons meant I plugged along while leveling my priest between raids.

Then came Wrath, and a new form of hatred for my paladin. Or rather, not for my paladin...but for the combination of encounter design and paladin healing limitations that resulted in me weeping in the corner. It seemed that Blizzard had in mind for some fights handy little things like...AoE heals. And sometimes shaman poison cleansing totems. I'm not sure how this fits in with "bring the player not the class" but I felt maligned for awhile. Fights went something like this:

Holy shit poisons everywhere I need to cleanse them but OH MY GOD THE TANK IS DYING heal the tank and OH MY GOD THE DPS IS DYING heal the DPS and OH MY GOD THE TANK IS DYING and there's more damn poison and I need to cl-OH MY GOD THE TANK AND EVERYONE ELSE IS DYING and and holy shit how did I end up dead?

See also: Loken's nova, whirlwinding mobs, Skadi's Hallway of Adds AND Whirlwind, Pools of Mojo, and many other things that made my single target healer self weep. Alright alright, so they gave us Beacon. Sweet, so I can heal TWO targets at once with a semi-expensive spell that only lasts a minute that I have no idea when it falls off unless I install another addon. AWESOME. Oh, and I have another somewhat expensive instant heal with cool down.

How many poeple are in a group, Blizz?

FIVE.

This resulted in 2 DPS dying on several boss fights until I got some sweet, sweet Naxx gear and learned some crazy coping methods. Three seemed to the most people I could keep alive in dicy situations, which, frankly, sucks balls. I take deaths personally, and that was a lot of guilty, failure-tinged feelings building up.

That fact that Josh and I ran Heroic UP over and over and over and over again, combined with multiple trips through Heroic VH (yet ANOTHER instance that made me emo) did not add to my sanity.

It wasn't until I got to raids where I had AoE healers to back me up that I didn't want stalk over to Blizzard and stab some dungeon developers in their sleep.

How I coped:
-Beacon. Depending on the fight, I would either beacon the tank and myself (^&!%^&!%@&! mojo pools), beacon the tank and the highest DPS and pray, or beacon the tank and the ret pally who was raping himself with martyr (I'm looking at you Steve!).
-Juggling judgements as best I could for a bit of haste...though frankly, there were fights where interrupting healing for anything was fatal. Judging Light took a bit of the sting out, though, in the melee heavy groups. I mean it's not as if I was too likely to whack the thing for mana back anyway.
-Holy shocking the DPS just enough to keep them limping along until such a time as I could be sure that the tank wouldn't die while I healed them. If I got a crit, the instant FoL would go to them too. Often related to the below:
-I'd Holy Light the tank to near full, hurridly FoL the DPS up a bit more, then rinse and repeat. This required having a good sense of incoming damage on the tank, and a tank that won't start to panic if he dips lower in health. HL is a gloriously huge heal (20k crit in Naxx once, zomg).
-Sacred Shielding the tank as often as possible where rage starvation wasn't an issue. It doesn't seem to be, by the way. Just bubble after he has aggro and some incoming rage and you're golden. Josh hasn't complained yet and trust me, he would if it was a problem! I also sacred shileding myself for the afore mentioned &!%*&!%*$%& mojo puddles, because moving and healing just didn't fly.
-Wings + Divine Plea = mana return with no healing nerf!

It also helps that I know my tank very, very well. I've been healing Josh's warrior ass since Molten Core. The 5 minute oh shit buttons help, too. Don't be shy about using those, guys!

I'm hoping that with the incoming "nerfs" to CoH and Wildgrowth, Blizzard will tone down the AoE damage some and make life a little easier on we HoT and AoE healing lacking paladins. At least Naxx makes me feel USEFUL-I'm queen of Patchwerk OT healing. /flex

tl;dr:
I almost quit my paladin because:
1) Blizzard threw in a lot of AoE damage and AoE poisons and shit.
2) Paladins don't cope well with the above.
3) I'm tired of pushing the same gods be damned buttons for four years. I'm still pushing the same two, I just have....3 more to push sometimes. Flexibility is notably lacking.

I coped by:
1) Madly flailing and pushing some buttons really really fast
2) Praying a lot
3) Bitching even more

Mp5 and Crit ramblings.

If you took a peek at my paladin's armory (and I can't link it here, alas-work is silly) you'd see that I have around 300 mp5.

While casting.

Those strictly following the current paladin trend of "omg CRIT!" would probably pull back in shock and horror at this number. Why do I have so much mp5? And only 27% crit!?!?

Well the short, lazy answer is: the shiny purples had it on there.

Since said shiny purples completely outclassed my previous gear in every other way, well, it seemed the obvious choice. I usually took slight hits in crit for each upgrade, but gained a large amount of int and +spell power. Certainly the benefits granted by the increase in those other stats was worth the hit taken in crit. A lot of people also forget that the mp5/crit debate is influenced in part by playstyle and group makeup. Is crit important? YES. Is mp5 bad? NO.

My fellow healers in 10 man raids are usually a resto shaman and a CoH priest. That's a good bit of raid healing coverage. I stay mostly on the tank, and cast Flash of Light more so than anything else. FoL benefits more from mp5 than crit-the opposite of Holy Light. I also get inflated crit from Sacred Shield, which I keep up on the tank where rage starvation isn't an issue.

Once over a certain amount of crit, then spamming Holy Light becomes viable. I believe that 30/35% crit is the current magic number. It also seems to be the number everyone is shooting for. Certaintly, being able to toss around more than one or two HLs per fight is important. It'll happen, trust me. But I argue against rushing towards that level of crit, which seems to be what I'm seeing.

Mp5 is considered the stat for "lesser geared" holy pallys. I don't fully agree with that, either. I'm not at that magical crit point yet...and honestly, I'm not worried about getting there. Unless your raid is set up in such a way that you need to be spamming HL outside of Patchwerk...why? Keep on hand some extra crit gear for Patchwerk, perhaps. Do you really need OMG CRIT all the time? ...no, not really.

Since I am light on crit, gear-wise, I chose to gem for it (though Int would be my preferred choice otherwise and I do have int gems). I'm also trying to swap over to crit trinkets, rings, and neck. I do fine in both 10 and 25 man Naxx as is, however. I do fine in 5 man situations as well, barring those clearly meant to rape all will to live from a paladin*.

I really don't understand the paladins who stack crit to the point of having only 30 mp5 casting. While I've never operated at the level of crit they also carry, I have to wonder if they're not gimping themselves. The key to being a good paladin healer is to not be a FoL or HL spammer. Both are bad. Healing is situational. Learn to adapt. As I said, mp5 is better for FoL than crit. You will, sometimes, want to be tossing around plently of FoLs. So why not balance your stats?

Mp5 isn't bad!

Balance is good!

...which is why I am going to TRY to lessen that crazy mp5 amount for some more crit. But...but the shiny purples, they have it by the metric shit ton!

*Another rant in and of itself.