Have You Hugged Your Holy Paladin Today?

So, it’s Patch 3.2. You may have many friends and guildies excited about certain aspects of this patch, but you may have noticed your Holy paladin acting a little differently. They might not be as bubbly as they used to. As everyone is excited to do heroics for Emblems of Conquest, they might just be shrugging it off. Something is bothering them.

You see, with Patch 3.2, the party’s over for Holy. Since 3.0, we’ve been able to heal with nearly unlimited amounts of mana. Oh, they tried to stop us before, with a change to Divine Plea in 3.09 that reduced healing by 50% while active. This hurt a little, but we still had mana to spare if Divine Plea was used correctly. We still laughed at the idea of mana potions. It was intellect gems all around. Innervates? Save that for the priests.

Then, with 3.2, Illumination got nerfed. Again.

You see, when Holy finally got properly itemized gear in The Burning Crusade, it became immediately obvious that paladins were the best healers. In fact, the bleeding edge raiding guilds early on in BC were only using paladins due to the fact that when they crit with a heal, they got the mana cost of the spell refunded, so stacking crit gear meant unlimited mana. So patch 2.1 nerfed the talent to refund on 60% of the mana back. We cried about it (well, I did, anyway) but we moved on and settled into our proper healing role for the rest of the expansion.

Then came 3.0 and the Era of the Big Heal. Holy Light has become the key spell for paladins in Wrath, being able to get a majority of the mana back from that big casting cost spell was a large part of our close to limitless mana. Add in a libram that reduced the cost by 113 mana (but did not affect mana refunded on a crit) and the ability to still come out ahead on mana with Divine Illumination and paladins did not really have to worry about anything until the latest patch.

Five points in Illumination now only refunds 30% of the mana cost of a healing spell crit. It’s almost not worth having. In fact, I would gladly put the points elsewhere if they weren’t required for Holy Shock. I’ve already noticed a huge impact on my mana just from doing heroics and it makes me sad.

So pass the Runic Mana Potions, hook me up with some Lustrous Majestic Zircon and yeah druids, that IS a paladin asking for an Innervate. And hug your Holy paladin today, because it will make them feel a little better about finally running out of mana.

3.1 Changes: Sacred Shield Ner…wait, what?

Oh look, some Holy Paladin nerfs changes were announced. Let’s see what we’ve got today!

Sacred Shield – Cannot be on more than one target at any time.

Wait, what? Sacred Shield could be on more than one target? Since when? Why was I not informed of this? I would actually have used this spell way more often than I do if I had known this to be the case.

Infusion of Light – No longer has a chance to reduce the casting time of Holy Light, but increases the the critical chance of your next Holy Light by 10/20% instead.

No, really: SACRED SHIELD CAN BE CAST ON MORE THAN ONE TARGET? ARE YOU KIDDING ME? THIS IS AWESOME. I AM GOING TO CAST THIS ON THE WHOLE RAID NEXT TIME AND LET SOMEONE DIE BECAUSE I WON’T BE HEALING THEM, JUST CASTING THIS SPELL. But my Flash of Light crits will be awesome.

Er, I mean, I’m torn. This is clearly a PvP change, which I hate. But it doesn’t completely suck for PvE. I’m not reliant on Holy Shock crits proccing this so my next Holy Light is uber-fast. It’s just kind of a bonus. Now it’s got an extra chance to crit for massive heals and a mana refund. Yay, I suppose.

The Neverending Mana Pool

A quick poll for my readers:

Is 25.7k mana raid buffed enough? I say no. My guild thinks I’m crazy. What say you?

I don’t normally update in the middle of a raid…

but…

Heigan the Unclean. I won’t go into any details about the fight, WoWWiki or Wowhead it.

I just three manned the last 50%. And two manned the last 12%. It was me, a prot paladin and a shadow priest. And just two paladins at the end.

I can’t just, no, I’m at a complete loss for words. That was just…oh my god.  The fight took 27 minutes.

I’m still shaking.

An Open Letter to Every Warlock Ever

Hi, this is your friendly neighborhood healer.

Look, I dig you guys a lot. You’re rocking dps, summons are always useful time savers and your soulstones and healthstones are just great.

But I do have one teeny-tiny request. It’s all I ask, really.

Buy some water and carry it around with you. Maybe even drag some to your hotbars. If there’s a mage and he pops a buffet, grab a stack or two.

And when you’re out of combat, click that button.

Please, please stop Lifetapping your mana back and then stand there and wait for me to heal you, especially while I’m drinking after combat. It happens way too much when I’m grouping with you guys, and it’s really freaking annoying. I do not heal any warlocks who do this, and I won’t change that plan if they complain about it. If we’re in the middle of combat and you tap, and I’m holding the tank up fine, then sure, I’ll toss a heal your way. But just because you can bring all your mana back without drinking doesn’t mean you should and then wait for me to use my mana to fill your health back up.

Are we cool? Okay, cool. Thanks for understanding. Now if we could just do something about those Demonology specs…

Hugs, Kisses and Heals,

Doofy & Doffy

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So I’ve decided that I need to finally get Doffy, my shaman, to 70. He’s almost all the way there, being 68. He is named Doffy because that happens to be the most common misspelling of Doofy, so when people call Doofy Doffy, I politely inform them that that is my shaman. And vice-versa.

Anyway, he’s been Enhancement all his life, from level 1 to 68. This was the logical spec for him because I already had a level 70 healer and a level 70 ranged DPS, so I needed a level 70 melee DPS.

Doffy was happily Windfurying his way through the 60’s, when the final two levels were just way too much to take. I’ve already done these quests multiple times, I couldn’t stomach some of them a third time. I’d much rather come back to them later when I was uber-geared and do them quickly for cash. Onto the LFG pool we went.

I get a tell in the Sethekk Halls LFG: “can you heal?” (note: “you” may actually have been spelled “u.”)

“Well, gee, I, uh, maybe I think I, uh, um, well, yes.”

*You have been invited to a group.

Oh, sh*t. What have I done?

“Hang on guys, need like five minutes.”

I hearth, haul ass to the Auction House, type in “physician” and buy a full set of mismatching mid-60’s armor. In rushing, I forget to look at neckpieces, cloaks and rings. I hike it to the IF shaman trainer (I could have gone to the Exodar, but man, is that place confusing.), buy a respec (1 gold! Told you I was enhancement all the way) and haphazardly throw talent points into the Restoration tree.

441 healing? Eh, that will do I guess.

I give the group the caveat that I just respecced resto for the first time ever and nobody seems to notice or care. The group gets started and here I am casting Healing Wave, Chain Heal, and completely forgetting to refresh Earth Shield on the tank and Water Shield on myself.

And I’m having the time of my life.

I initially resisted doing this, since I already had a healer, but it’s just so drastically different. Wrath of Air totem is great, Chain Heal is fun when it bounces right and Nature’s Swiftness is incredibly nifty. I’m getting better at remembering Earth Shield, too. I can’t wait to gear him up.

There were a couple of wipes in this Sethekk Halls run, but they weren’t really due to my healing as they were due to mis-pulls. A small handful of Ikiss wipes, since he sucks, but we got him eventually.

Then I went and healed Mana Tombs just for good measure. I’m hooked, and I’m 20% of the way to 70 now.

I’ve also come to the realization that Doffy (when geared a bit better, of course) can heal things Doofy can’t. Having been through heroic Magister’s Terrace a few times on Sherm, I know that as decently geared as Doofy is, I just can’t heal that thing. Especially on every boss after the first one. The entire party takes too much damage, my single target healing everyone just isn’t going to cut it. A Shaman would have a considerably smaller problem with that.

We’re up to 659 healing now, and there’s more to come. Who knew staring at health bars could be so much fun again?

Stay tuned!

While it took a mite longer than expected, the move was finally made official this weekend and internet will be hooked up at the end of the week. And then…who knows? I’m starting to get the itch to press the 8 key over and over again.

(Yes, Flash of Light is the 8 key. No, I don’t know why. I’m more of a clicker anyway. Is this a bad thing? Discuss!)

Healing DPS ftw?

I installed the Recount addon to track healing in raids, which was probably a mistake as it only goes to show me that priests and shamans just do so much more freaking healing than I can possibly do. Damn them and their stupid Chain Heal and Prayer of Mending (and Healing). I’ll just stand here spamming Flash of Light on the tank, kthxbye.

Also, it turns out the addon also has the weird side effect of tracking damage done. Who knew? Totally bizzare.

Anyway, Mechanar was the heroic daily, and a couple of folks I know were looking for one more dps for a quick steamrolling on the joint, so wanting to check out how I was doing with my new sword and off-hand, I hopped on my mage and away we went.

WARNING! EPEEN ALERT! WARNING!

1.1 million damage (and 743 DPS) later the run was complete, with me leading in damage done.

END EPEEN ALERT

I logged back on Sherm later on in the day, and Recount had saved the damage totals. I was looking at it, and something was really bugging me about it, only I couldn’t put my finger on it for a while. Then, after maybe a hour or so of staring at the screen while fishing (I was really bored that night), it hit me.

The healer didn’t do a single point of damage in the entire instance.

The damage meter was only showing me, the shadow priest, the enhancement shaman, and the protection warrior. Only 4 people did damage. Our holy paladin, with about 250 more healing than I have on Doofy, was not on the list.

The hell?

With the group we had, the place was easymode. Short of bosses, the Tempest-Forge Destroyers are the hardest thing in there that would require focused healing. Besides that, not even a single Judgement, Holy Shock or Consecration on the simpler trash pulls? This is like a holy priest not even throwing a single Shadow Word: Pain on anything. Or a resto shaman never casting a single shock on a mob. I’m new to running the whole damage meter thing, but this is just supremely weird to me. Why not put a few extra points of damage to speed up the fights?

When healing, I’m constantly throwing Holy Shock whenever it’s up and dropping Consecration whenever it won’t interfere with CC, without missing a beat. Don’t forget the Holy Hammer of DOOM! (aka Hammer of Wrath) when something is almost dead. I love that thing.

Heck, in our Karazhan raids, myself and our holy priest have dps contests on everything up to Moroes since our core 10-man group is so well geared at this point (No lie, we were 5th and 6th on the damage meters up to the point of pulling Moroes). Also, the buff that healing weapons got in regards to providing spell damage has helped a lot too. I vendored several pieces of my “solo” set because the healing gear became better with the added spell damage. The holy priest stopped carrying shadow gear around since his healing set gave him more damage.

Am I completely insane by doing some damage while healing at the same time, or was the above scenario just a little bit weird?

Progression & Purple Patterns

I’ve been so busy admiring the amount of views I’m getting (1,500, seriously, I’m amazed) that I totally forgot to mention that we got the eagle boss in ZA for the first time last week. We’ve had the bear on farm for a while, but the last two kills have come just short of beating the timer (the prisoner gets nuked in the middle of the fight).

The gauntlet on the way to the eagle boss is moderately aggravating, but we finally got past it when I figured out that I should stand in the middle or so and just start Consecrating, in an attempt to draw most of the birds to me. It seems to work, as we don’t have much trouble with that anymore.

Eagle is probably the most mana intensive fight I’ve been in. Bear isn’t as bad, even though I’m doing nothing but casting Holy Light so the bear form tank (a bear form tank) doesn’t die. In troll form I don’t have to do a whole lot so I’m not using up as much mana then. With eagle random people are taking large chunks of damage in addition to the main tank. The being launched up into the air thing is quite annoying, as well.

Anyway, through some miracle, the healers’ mana lasted just long enough for him to die on our third attempt. He’s not an exceptionally hard fight, as long as everyone collapses in on him before the storm thingy goes off. I think I used 3 Super Manas and was able to pop Divine Illumination twice during the fight. I didn’t win the healer necklace (/cry), but the progression was nice. We dabbled with the lynx boss trash (ick) and then called it a night, but not before using our sticks.

A few of these Amani Hex Stick drop during each run, and they are used on the frogs in the middle. Most of them just give boxes that contain random things like money or charms that work like the Karazhan books. We found an npc named Gunter, who happens to be a food vendor. He sells some buff food, normal food, and then a blue item called a Sealed Scroll Case. I’d ninja’d this thing off the vendor before, and got a measly Scroll of Spirit for my troubles. Yay. I nabbed it again before anyone else could, and out plops Plans: Hand of Eternity

Uh, wow. Everyone freaks out, asking where it came from, and I explained over vent. The only blacksmiths were myself and the main tank so we /roll on it and I won! Yay.

This is good because it’s an excuse to level blacksmithing. It’s just absolutely horrible to level those last 15 points. I got it to 360 with relative ease, then hit a wall as everything I could make that was orange needed Primal Fires and other sorts of expensive stuff. I finally broke down a couple of weeks ago and got up to 365, which let me use one of the felsteel plans I had in the bank, but now I’m stuck at 366. I suppose that’s one of my New Year’s Resolutions for this character.

That, and get the four freakin’ Primal Nethers the silly mace needs. Yeesh.

Downranking? What’s that?

I like to think I’m a good healer. I’m geared well, I can heal you through virtually anything as long as you’re not an idiot and know how to play your class. And as long as you’re not attempting to tank a heroic with out being defense capped and have about 10k hp unbuffed. (Which has happened to me recently. Twice. Once on the mage. I felt bad for that healer.)

But I’ll let you in on a big secret.

When healing, I press two buttons. That’s it.

If you’re unfamilar with paladins, here’s what we have at our healing disposal:

Flash of Light: Quick cast, 1.5 seconds. Ridiculously mana efficient for what it does.

Holy Light: Slow cast, 2.5 seconds. Horribly mana inefficient, but awesome in a pinch. If it has to be cast more than once in a row, the fight either calls for it (If I don’t spam it on our Bear Form tank during the Nalorakk (bear boss) fight in ZA, they’re going to die), or something is going horribly wrong.

Holy Shock: Instant cast, 15 second cooldown. Deep holy talent only. Nice coming off a heal that almost tops off your target, but typically gets thrown at a mob to help with the dps between heals if everyone’s alright for the moment.

Holy Light and Flash of Light have many, many ranks that are learned on the trek to 70. But I never use them.

Downranking? Pffft.

Truth is, I never really needed to originally. Holy paladins used to have a great talent called Illumination. With five points in it, whenever a heal crit, you got the mana refunded to you. Sweet. Blizzard finally figured out how to properly itemize paladin healing gear with Burning Crusade and it was focused on +healing and crit. Hooray! My healing was ridiculously efficient. Also, paladins also have a talent called Divine Favor, which guarantees the next healing spell cast will crit, which means it’s free. The 41-point talent is Divine Illumination, which makes all spells cost half for 15 seconds. But if a heal crit while this was in effect, you still got the full casting cost returned to you.

Holy paladins because the most mana efficient healers in the game thanks to this talent, and the way spell crit was stacked on a lot of plate healing gear. I also valued spell crit higher than anything else. For a short time, my gear was a weird mish-mash of cloth, leather, mail and plate that focused on crit over other things. Like +healing.

Anyway, downranking simply wasn’t necessary. You could just spam heal your tank with Flash of Light repeatedly, and if they got into trouble, pop Divine Illumination, Divine Favor and hit them with a 420 mana Holy Light and get back 840 mana. I’d do entire instances (and even Karazhan boss fights) with one stack of potions, and I wouldn’t have to use them.

Then patch 2.1 changed Illumination’s mana refund to 60%. Super Happy Joy Pally Healing Fun Time was over. I found myself out of mana regularly. I started having to bring industrial sized vats of Super Mana Potions along with me. I had to bug our druids for their Innervates on boss fights.

I fixed the situation somewhat by swapping a couple of crit pieces for things that had more MP5 on it, and it got a little bit better. But long fights got very iffy still. I made some adjustments to the bar and brought some lower ranked heals out of the mothballs, to see what would happen, and I never used them. I was comfortable with those two buttons. I knew how much healing to expect from my max rank heals. The lower numbers threw me off big time. I stopped using them.

What I did realize from that short-lived experiment was that I didn’t have to spam Flash of Light like a maniac. I would literally just repeatedly cast Flash of Light over and over and over again, even when the situation really didn’t call for it. Now I’ll wait and see how the tank is going to do during the fight before launching into spam heals (if needed) or if I can get away with doing something periodically. My mana has been doing much better, especially on fights like Prince Malchezzar. Still gotta pop the pots occasionally, but not as many as I used to.

So yes, I just made every theorycrafter’s head explode, but you know what? This is my blog, so deal with it.