All right, I’ve had a night in Heroic 25-man Dragon Soul. I’ve also redone some of my testing and updated some numbers and such in my 5.0.4 guide.
The first thing I did after I recovered from the addon explosion in my UI was try to do an LFR. I zoned in and died on Ultraxion trash because, oh look, my addons were still exploding. (TipTac seems to have been my primary culprit, your mileage may vary.)
Once I got that sorted, I went back into LFR and zoned in for Spine and Madness. Apart from a wee bit of lag whenever the Burning Tendons popped up, things went fairly well. However, I realized two things:
1) Holy crap, I was burning mana FAST.
2) My UI was still insanely unhelpful.
So I did the following before my real raid:
– swapped to Heartsong on my Heroic Maw
– took out my 3x 67 intellect JC-only gems, replaced them with epic reds
– since I wasn’t getting the socket bonus on my pants anyhow, I gemmed all three sockets in my pants with the 67 spirit gems
Without Heartsong active and without any external buffs, that’s 4006 mp5 in combat, according to my character sheet.
With 10 stacks of Heart of Unliving and Heartsong active, that goes up to 4698 mp5 in combat.
I figured I was good to go.
Wrong. I still felt the pinch when I healed a bit too aggressively on Heroic Hagara (frost phase) and Heroic Blackhorn, not to mention Heroic Spine. We didn’t actually kill Heroic Madness last night, although we’ll be finishing that up tomorrow, but on our longest attempt, I felt the pinch on the fourth platform and into P2.
Part of it, at least on Madness, may have been our comp. We didn’t have a disc priest in the raid, so no barrier means more overall damage done since we had fewer people with damage-reduction CDs. (We could have bothered our rets or our prot to use more Aura Mastery Devotion Aura, but I know I didn’t think of it.)
Speaking of Devotion Aura, it’s better than Aura Mastery was, although we pay for that with an extra minute on the cooldown (DA is 3m vs. AM’s 2m). Why is it better? It works on Watery Entrenchment on Hagara. It works on Hour of Twilight on Ultraxion. These are two areas where Aura Mastery did zip.
Back to the instance… I think that it was more challenging than I suspected it would be, to be constrained to 100k mana (102k with the meta gem that grants you 2% extra mana) and to be careful not to overextend myself. I found myself in trouble a number of times. Thank goodness for Hymn of Hope sticking around as well as Mana Tide Totem!
Of note, with the redesign to Blessing of Might, I think all pallies need to bear in mind that we have a crazy amount of mastery just by virtue of being fully raid-buffed now. Illuminated Healing did a LOT of healing/absorption. Part of that might also be because I was making great use of Eternal Flame, which contributes to Illuminated Healing on each tick. (Remember not to overwrite a stronger Eternal Flame with a weaker one!)
I forgot, several times, that Light of Dawn is now a circle around you, not a cone, and I still have Judgment (new spelling) on my bars, although I should throw it away at some point. I’m not sure what I’d put in its spot, though!
So those were my experiences — I loaded up on more Spirit (but maintained an intellect flask with intellect food) and had a couple of sticky situations. I would recommend people be conservative to start their regularly scheduled content until they get the “feel” of the new size of their mana pools, too.
How was your first experience raiding in 5.0.4?
Hello,
i where wondering why would you not try use mastery reforges? instead of the usual spirit and haste. since i where stalking your WoL and you did not do so good, even tho i think you should with the haste amount because it is all about sniping the heals at the current state of the raid.
Moksu – Well, to be honest, I don’t like our mastery. I never have. I did try it out but felt gimped if I did anything other than chain cast on my assigned tank. What the new Blessing of Might does is grant us a substantial amount of mastery while still allowing us to continue spirit and haste builds. Spirit is even more important right now due to the changes to mana and mana pools at the moment. So we can still have quick heals and a fair amount of regen, but the new Blessing of Might gives us the ability to benefit more from our mastery than we have in the recent past. It’s a nice bonus, but more shields aren’t going to help you wipe Searing Plasma off people on Spine of Deathwing any faster, for example.
As to my latest World of Logs reports, it’s true, I don’t look as though I did very well, but then, I never do “very well” on the meters. I’m the primary raid leader for the raid group and I mostly focus on tanks, so my healing is rarely as much as a raid healer’s healing, particularly someone like Jasyla (resto druid). That said, my assignments live, I hit my cooldowns as required and assigned and so I don’t put a lot of emphasis on blowing up my numbers. If I WANTED to, I could top healing on a few encounters, such as H Yor’sahj or H Hagara (and, in the past, H Ultraxion, when we got the blue buff regularly), but all of that would require me to ignore my primary assignment — the tanks.
Here’s me blowing up the meters on H Yor’sahj:
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-d36lc2pxywratdi7/sum/healingDone/?s=1602&e=1914
And Hagara:
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-d36lc2pxywratdi7/sum/healingDone/?s=3904&e=4085
I was able to do that while still maintaining a primary focus on the tanks, but not all encounters permit me, in my raid group, to do that. And I’m okay with that. Numbers are not everything. Succeeding in the encounter is what matters to me and my group. :)
mate, simple answer.
Spec Divine Purpose, use holy power every-time you have even one.
You can heal EVERYTHING with just holy shocks and WoG with procs ;-) or if you don’t have WoG same applies to Eternal Flame, trust me you will be at 100% mana the entire time and everybody will be topped up :D
you don’t use mana lols
Even in emergency, one holy radiance and one holy shock to raid thereafter=nomnom.
Not to mention all the coodlowns we have no! There is no question about it, Holy Paladins are in the best state for some time! Enjoy it whilst it lasts, i predict hotfixes ;-)
*forgot to mention you can use procs from Divine Purpose on LoD too which transfers 100% of that healing to tank also, mate it’s nomnom time with this spec ;D
Hello,
I just wanted to add some observarions I made of my first heroic DS since the patch. For me mana was not a problem due to my healing style which makes use of holy light very well. I did not go oom for either spine or madness on heroic did not use DM and in most cases did not need to keep rotaging through cooldowns. In general since intellect buffs spellpower so much now holy lights do enough that I hardly use divile light now, even for tanks while the eternal flame instead of wog also helps with this. Also if you were wondering I topped our healing meter on h spine (at around 22k hps) and was roughly equal top on h madness (about 29k hps). Also I agree with the dislike for mastery, I think its not a great stat although this may change further in mop.
I also felt the mana pinch, makes me wonder if I should get some spirit gems. On the subject of mastery I was trying a mastery>haste>crit build, that put mastery as my number 1 heal consitently and doing about 30% of my overall healing on nearly every fight. That’s Huge! And the result was I didn’t end up losing much in spell cast time, I think it was about .07 gained on a divine light cast. To me it was totally worth the tradeoff. The other thing is that haste pretty much only benefits spell casts now that holy radiance isn’t a hot effect.
Hey Kurn, super important question I have to ask you, but I forgot your email address.
Do Canadians call him Jay-Zed?
Hey Kurn,
Have you found an add on that tracks EF properly. I tried to use it during raid the other night but I kept feeling lost because I couldn’t get Vuhdo to track it.