Category: guide

Kurn's Holy Paladin Pre-Tier 11 Gear List (4.0.3)

Kurn / / cataclysm, gear, guide, paladins

Welcome one and all to Kurn’s Holy Paladin Pre-T11 Raid Gear List. Before we begin, let me warn you that I hate writing gear posts. I don’t do it often and I don’t know if I’ll do a BiS at T11 or T12 or anything else, but I’ve gotten a lot of people asking me about gear and rep and everything that I really felt this would be useful. The biggest reason I don’t do them is that hey, who’s to say that I’m the person who knows exactly what to wear? And also, it’s a pain to insert all the links to all the pieces. ;)

So. Here’s the caveat: These are my opinions only. Please feel free to comment with pieces you’d use instead. Please, let’s not argue about the relative stat values of crit, haste, mastery and spirit. Feel free to say that you’d want more crit, so you’d want X, Y and Z pieces, but I don’t want to moderate an argument over what secondaries are The Best. The expansion’s been out for less than a week and it’ll take a little longer than that for the community as a whole to figure out what’s “The Best”.

Here’s how I’m planning to gear pre-raid. My ideal gearset is based heavily off Vile Pickle’s BiS guide, but tweaked to my own preferences. I’m prioritizing haste and spirit over mastery and mastery over crit. I’m also ignoring anything that wastes valuable item stat points on resilience.

The first thing I did at BiS was select:

Hard Mode
Normal Mode
Available
5-Man
Other Size

That turned up a variety of items, which I then looked at in turn. Note that I didn’t edit the filters and weights, because I like BiS’s weighting intellect and spirit more than haste, which is more than crit and mastery. Basically, the default filters at BiS reflect my own gearing philosophy very well.

Also, remember, do NOT downgrade to mail! This was viable and useful in Wrath of the Lich King and I’m sure we all remember clothadins from Vanilla and BC, but in Cataclysm, you’ll lose out on your Plate Specialization bonus!

Helm: If you’re not an engineer, you may want to save 2200 Justice points for Crown of the Blazing Sun as it’s one of only two pre-raid helms that has a meta socket. It’s either the Crown (guaranteed purchase) or the Helm of Untold Stories from Lord Godfrey in heroic Shadowfang Keep.

Neck: The Quicksilver Amulet is beefy with the stats I want: spirit and haste. You get it from Steelbender in heroic Blackrock Caverns. Of course, the Celadon Pendant isn’t bad either, although it has mastery as opposed to haste, and is much more easily acquired with 1250 Justice points.

Shoulder: Harp Shell Pauldrons from Ulthok in heroic Throne of the Tides are the clear winner in this slot. Spirit, haste and a socket! A red socket! I’d dump a Brilliant cut in there anyways, and it gives me an extra 10 haste. Sweet.

I wouldn’t really use the Pauldrons of the Forlorn or the Cinnabar Shoulders. Why? The Pauldrons have spirit, a socket and crit, which is my personal least-prioritized stat at the moment. I wouldn’t use the Cinnabar Shoulders because there’s no spirit.

Cloak: Solar Wind Cloak from Rajh in heroic Halls of Origination is pretty much the be-all and end-all of cloaks at this level. Spirit and haste aplenty. It’s such a good cloak that even the regular version is, IMHO, worth using over other 346 items.

If you’re absolutely desperate for a cloak and cannot find one ANYWHERE, get the Cloak of the Dryads which is a rep reward from Hyjal at Honored. Since you’re a healer, you want to be at least revered with this faction, so this is one you can acquire pretty easily. (A note, as a human who did all of Hyjal, I got 8000 rep into Revered after doing the whole zone. Getting to Honored is not an issue if you do all of Hyjal and wearing their tabard at friendly if you don’t feel like doing the zone is a great way to build up rep.)

Chest: If you’re using the selections I did on the BiS site filter and you’re looking at chests, the third one that pops up is the Light Elementium Chestguard. Looks good, right? Pretty and purple and shiny? Well, not so much. There are no sockets, no spirit… and the crafting requires three Chaos Orbs. Right now, Chaos Orbs are BOP, so your crafter has to be the one to acquire them off the last boss of a heroic dungeon. So either prepare to pay through the nose for this or get to be buddy-buddy with a Blacksmith who’ll run with you.

A much better solution is the Peacemaker’s Breastplate from Revered with the Earthen Ring. TWO sockets, spirit and haste. Sweet deal. Don’t feel like grinding rep with Earthen Ring or doing Vashj’ir? A good alternative is the Omega Breastplate from Anraphet in heroic Halls of Origination.

Wrist: Geez, not a lot of options here. I’m going to try to grab Bracers of Umbral Mending (the regular version is also decent) from Erudax in heroic Grim Batol.

Hands: Since I went Hyjal at the start and don’t particularly want to grind Earthen Ring rep, even as a human, I’m going to forego the World Keeper’s Gauntlets in favour of the Gloves of Curious Conscience which are acquired with 1650 Justice points. Yes, there’s a lot more intellect on the WKGs, but the GoCC also have a socket and have haste. And they’re just so much easier to get.

Belt: And here’s the reason I don’t want to grind Earthen Ring rep for a piece with no haste. The Sun King’s Girdle which is an exalted Ramkahen rep reward is clearly best in slot for us pre-raid. Like, it’s not even a question. If you’re a Blacksmith or have easy access to a crafter, Light Elementium Belt (2 Chaos Orbs!) isn’t a bad choice, but I think you’re much better off grinding Ramkahen rep. If you don’t have time for a rep grind like that, Belt of Barred Clouds for 1650 Justice points is pretty good, just not as good as the SKG.

Legs: Another bunch of pretty poor choices here, which means we’re going to have to go kill Lord Godrey in heroic Shadowfang Keep again for Greaves of the Misguided.

Feet: So bearing in mind that we’re going to hit exalted with Ramkahen, the natural choice in boots for us will be the Drystone Greaves which you get at Honored. 333, yes, but better than anything else out there, honestly, at least from my gearing perspective.

Rings: Lots of choices here! So many that it’s kind of overwhelming. But basically the ones I’d probably say are easiest to get are these:

Ring of the Great Whale – a BOE drop out of heroic Throne of the Tides, meaning it should be on the AH
Diamant’s Ring of Temperance – a revered reputation reward from Therazane, with whom you need to be exalted anyways for your shoulder enchant

Trinkets: Man, I’m just drooling over some of these…

Darkmoon Card: Tsunami – The Solace of the Defeated of Cataclysm. Beauty. Unfortunately, this is a Darkmoon Card, so you have to collect the Ace, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven and Eight of Waves or a Tsunami Deck already assembled. This is NOT going to be cheap.

Tyrande’s Favorite Doll – This comes from Archaeology, so this may actually never be something you can actually craft, considering the randomness of the profession.

Okay, let’s stop dreaming. On to stuff that’s much more realistic.

Mandala of Stirring Patterns – This is an interesting trinket that comes from being exalted with your local Tol Barad faction. I’m kind of eh about it, but it’s definitely interesting.

Witching Hourglass – Ascendent Lord Obsidius in heroic Blackrock Caverns.

Rainsong – BOE zone drop from heroic Vortex Pinnacle. Pretty awesome looking, actually.

Tear of Blood – dropped from High Priestess Azil from heroic Stonecore. THIS is something I really want. But I’ve heard the horror stories about heroic Stonecore… :)

What am I going to use? I’m not sure, but one of them will likely be Figurine – Dream Owl since I’m a Jewelcrafter. You get these odd drops as a JC that push you to “restore” various figurines and this is the healer version. I have this one already and like it very much.

Since I’m an alchemist there’s also the Lifebound Alchemist Stone that I may swap in now and again just for the buff to mana potions taken and for the stam. Since World of Logs STILL hasn’t updated things, I still don’t feel I have a firm grasp on how awesome our mastery is, but I feel it’s a decent stat. Just maybe not in the trinket spot. For now, I’m using this with a 35 mastery gem as part of my ret set. (Seriously, Hand of Light -> Templar’s Verdict -> 3HP TV -> Hand of Light -> TV = win.)

Weapon: Forget the Elementium Hammer if only because of the Chaos Orb issue. Go for the Scepter of Power from Setesh in heroic Halls of Origination.

Shield: Elementium Stormshield is a great pickup. With only one Chaos Orb used to craft it, this probably won’t be too bad to get crafted or even to buy. If you can’t pick that up, 950 Justice points will get you the Shield of the Mists.

Relic: This is kind of a tie between three items:

Book of Dark Prophecies, from High Priestess Azil in heroic Stonecore, has spirit, but no haste.

Book of the Well Sung Song, from Vanessa Van Cleef in heroic Deadmines has haste, but no spirit.

Tattooed Eyeball, crafted by scribes, is likely to be much easier to acquire than the other two.

I’ll probably just go with the Tattooed Eyeball since my guild has a 525 scribe.

Other Gear Guides:

Here’s an interesting post by tuutti of Paragon: Holy Paladin 346 Gear Guide

A lot of the options we’ve picked are pretty much the same, although there are differences (and I don’t include PVP points, nor do I assume you have 4000 JP saved up).

Gortlol also linked his or her list here: Holy Paladin Pre-Raid Gear. Cataclysm.

—

So what does all this mean?

1) Get to exalted with Ramkahen & Therazane, revered with Hyjal
2) Run Halls of Origination and the Stonecore a lot on heroic
3) Check out the AH for those BOE heroic drops

Also, don’t skimp on gems and enchants for your 333/346 gear. This stuff is going to last you into raids. My guildies need to use blue gems and good quality enchants on this gear, and I recommend the same for everyone else reading.

What to gem and enchant? Well, that’s another post entirely…

If you’ll excuse me, I need to finish up Deepholm and haul ass to Uldum to start my rep with Ramkahen!

Lowbie Holy Paladin Guidance

Kurn / / cataclysm, guide, healing, paladins

After a discussion I had with Majik and Oestrus on the latest episode of Blessing of Frost, I thought I’d throw some thoughts out here with regards to lower-level paladins who are new rerolls and such. We’ll break this down into 5 sections: 1-25, 26-50, 51-75, 76-80 and 81-85. You can also refer to my 4.0.1/4.0.3 posts for advice at 80 to 85.

In each section, I’ll look at the talents available and the glyphs available. This advice is based on healing in a PVE environment, so levelling through the Dungeon Finder, primarily. You should ideally fill out the talents in the order I discuss them as I’m selecting talents that will help your overall healing output the most.

1-25

Here’s the Wowhead link: 9/0/0

Why those talents:

Tier 1:

– 3/3 Judgements of the Pure because Judgements of the Pure is awesome. Always pick talents that will increase your haste.

– 2/3 Protector of the Innocent because we need to get to Tier 2.

Tier 2:

– 3/3 Clarity of Purpose: Talent that reduces your cast time on two spells, even though you only have one of them at the moment. 3 seconds to 2.5 seconds on Holy Light? Yes, please.

– 1/2 Last Word: Useful talent. We’ll want to fill this out with our next talent point, as well.

Glyphs:

We get one Prime, Major and Minor glyph slot at 25, 50 and 75. Here we’ll go with Holy Shock, Lay on Hands and Blessing of Kings. Holy Shock because you’re using it all the time, Lay on Hands because it’s never a bad thing to reduce that cooldown and Blessing of Kings because our minor glyphs suck and that’s one of the ones that sucks least.

Tips:

– Always have a Seal up so that you can judge so you can get your Judgements of the Pure up! At level 30, use Seal of Insight and feel free to swap to the Glyph of Seal of Insight, or you can wait until level 50 for that, too.

26-50

Here’s the Wowhead link: 21/0/0

Why those talents:

Tier 2:

2/2 Last Word: Fill this out so you can get down to Tier 3.

Tier 3:

1/1 Divine Favor: A real cooldown to use that will increase haste and crit chance. Pop this when you’re in trouble.

2/2 Infusion of Light: Crit Holy Shocks lead to a much shorter cast time on Holy Light and, later, Divine Light. And this talent also gives us 10% extra crit to Holy Shock. Even if this didn’t lead to Speed of Light, this is beautiful.

2/2 Daybreak: A chance to get two Holy Shocks in a row? Yes, please!

Tier 4:

1/1 Beacon of Light: Beacon, also known as Bacon, lets you heal the tank (or another beaconed target, but typically the tank) while healing someone else. This is only 50% of the healing your target gets, mind you.

1/1 Sacred Cleansing: The ability to cleanse magic debuffs. Ecstasy!

3/3 Speed of Light: At this level, it’s just spell haste, yet again reducing the amount of time it takes to cast your heals.

Tier 5:

1/3 Conviction: This is a buff to healing based on your crits, so up to 3% extra healing based on your crits. You’ll want to fill this out with your next two talents.

Glyphs:

Prime: Seal of Insight (or put Holy Shock back in if you swapped it out at 30)

Major: Divinity (why not gain mana when you do use Lay on Hands?)

Minor: Blessing of Might (again, our minors suck.)

Tips:

– Have Seal of Insight up with the Glyph so that your healing is increased by 5%.

– Cleanse, cleanse, cleanse! You are one of two healers who can cleanse three kinds of debuffs, the other being druids. You can magic, diseases and poisons and resto druids can do magic, curses and poisons. So use your cleanse button!

– Typically beacon the tank and do not be afraid to directly heal your beaconed target.

51-75

Here’s the Wowhead link: 31/3/0

Tier 5:

3/3 Conviction: Fill out Conviction to bump up your healing done.

1/1 Aura Mastery: Ultimately, probably not the most useful talent in lower-levels, but play around with 100% extra resistance (with Resistance Aura up) or immunity to silence (with Concentration Aura up) for six seconds. Think of AOE Shadow, Frost or Fire damage. Or if a boss has an enrage and is doing physical damage, use it with Devotion Aura.

1/2 Paragon of Virtue: Divine Protection is a great button to prevent damage to yourself, Hand of Sacrifice is a great button to prevent damage to others and when you get Avenging Wrath, that’s a great button to help your output. This talent reduces the cooldowns on all these things. Pick this up at 1/2, we will definitely come back here.

Tier 6:

3/3 Tower of Radiance: Hooray, another way to generate Holy Power! This is why you shouldn’t be afraid to heal your beaconed target.

Back to Tier 5:

2/2 Paragon of Virtue: Here we go, pick up this remaining talent because it’s awesome and it can help us get down to our 31-point talent.

Back to Tier 4:

1/2 Enlightened Judgements: Now you can step back another 5 yards when keeping your judgement up. This is useful to get you the heck out of melee range.

Tier 7:

1/1 Light of Dawn: Hello, Light of Dawn! Our very own Circle of Wild Dawn! ;) This is our version of the holy priest’s Circle of Healing and the resto druid’s Wild Growth and even the shammy’s Chain Heal. Aim yourself at people. Hit the button (preferably with 3 holy power). Witness awesome group heals.

To the Protection Tree we go!

Tier 1:

3/3 Divinity: 6% increased healing. Bam, done. Eternal Glory is also an option, but mana should not be such an issue that you need the EG procs for more Word of Glory heals.

Glyphs:

Prime: Word of Glory (+healing)

Major: Light of Dawn (extra target, so up to 6)

Minor: Seal of Insight (see what I mean about our minors sucking?)

Tips:

– Get used to using Aura Mastery in various instances because it starts to get useful in BC dungeons and Wrath dungeons.

– Make sure you’re keeping Judgements of the Pure up. The extra haste is really going to come in handy in BC/Wrath dungeons.

– Make sure you’re keeping your Holy Power up and using it appropriately with Light of Dawn or Word of Glory as needed. Remember that 50% of each Light of Dawn heal will go to your beaconed target!

76-80

Here’s the Wowhead link: 31/3/2

To the Retribution Tree we go!

Tier 1:

2/3 Crusade: You’re using Holy Shock basically on cooldown. Increase its healing!

81-85

First, the Retribution tree:

3/3 Crusade: Fill this out for some awesomeness.

Back to the Protection tree:

2/2 Eternal Glory: This is where you end up learning how to use Word of Glory back-to-back when you get procs of EG.

And back to the Retribution tree:

2/2 Improved Judgement: Extra range! You now have a 35y range on your judgements, which is excellent.

So a level 85 spec looks like this:

31/5/5

Additional reading: 4.0.1 post /4.0.3 post

Hope that was useful for anyone who’s embarked upon the challenge of starting a new holy paladin!

What Holy Paladins Need to Know for 4.0.3a

Kurn / / cataclysm, guide, paladins, patch 4.0.3a

*** All content copyright © Kurn’s Corner, 2010. Reproduction of this guide in full or in part without express permission from the author (“Kurn”), represents copyright infringment and violation of copyright law. Please, if you like this guide, link to it, do not copy it. ***

4.0.3a is about to be dropped, according to Boubouille at MMO-Champion, who has done a great job of compiling the changes. With the release of 4.0.3a, among other things, paladins are getting their talents reset due to changes to the class talents. What follows is a fairly complete compilation of the various changes holy paladins can expect when 4.0.3a launches and will be updated over the first few days of 4.0.3a if anything was missed. Special thanks to my buddy Walks for proofreading and adding some suggestions, including reminding me about Infusion of Light’s change!

Edits to the post after testing on live are marked with an asterix (*).

As with my 4.0.1 post, I’ll be breaking this down into different sections: TALENTS/SPELLS, GEAR/STATS and GLYPHS. Bear in mind that there are fewer changes for 4.0.3a than there were for 4.0.1 and I’ll only be talking about ones that have changed between 4.0.1 and 4.0.3a. That means that my 4.0.1 post is still useful! All changes have been compiled at MMO-Champion.com or Wowhead.com.

TALENTS/SPELLS

1) Beacon of Light now lasts 5 minutes. I remember when I first glyphed for Beacon of Light. I did so in order to get the extra 30 second duration on it so I could stagger refreshing Sacred Shield and Beacon of Light and also save 1500 mana or so. A five-minute duration on Beacon of Light means a lot of mana savings and a lot of GCDs saved. What this tells us, though, is that our beacons are  meant to be used on one person and not meant to be switched up mid-combat. This is a “quality of life” change that basically just makes it that much easier to “set it and forget it”. Good stuff.

2) Blessed Life: the effects of this talent cannot occur more than once every 8 seconds, up from every 2 seconds. This is a clear nerf to the utility of this talent. However, it is largely a PVP talent and this change really negates any use in PVE content, particularly if it still doesn’t proc from AOE-wide raid damage. Incidentally, this no longer stacks with Pursuit of Justice, according to my buddy Walks.

3) Illuminated Healing absorb shield now absorbs 10% of the total amount healed, up from 8%. Each point of Mastery increases the effect by an additional 1.25%, up from 1%. *Additionally, the shield now lasts 8 seconds, up from 6. It’s a buff! Oh sweet Lord, it’s a buff to our mastery! The jury is still out over the usefulness of our mastery because World of Logs, for example, does not properly attribute our absorbs from our mastery. Either it’s being attributed to Power Word: Shield/Divine Aegis or it’s not being counted at all. (As an aside, please take a second to politely lobby the WoL people to get that fixed!) I reforged a lot of my crit to mastery to see if I could notice a difference and the Recount I ran last night showed Illuminated Healing to be 26.4% of my healing done in Ruby Sanctum. While Recount (and probably Skada?) are up to date, World of Logs is almost certainly attributing Illuminated Healing to priest absorbs.

So just because you don’t see your mastery in action through the parse doesn’t mean it’s not doing something. As such, this is a good thing for us.

*Note that the increase in duration was not listed in the most recent compilation of patch notes, but I’ve confirmed this on live servers. The duration is 8s, up from 6s.

4) Light of Dawn has been redesigned. It no longer has an enforced cooldown, now costs Holy Power instead of mana, and scale in direct proportion to the amount of Holy Power used. In addition it now heals the 5 most injured group targets (including self) in a 30-yard frontal cone. Goodbye, Infest healing. Hello, Circle of Wild Dawn. ;) This works very similarly to a priest’s Circle of Healing or a druid’s Wild Growth, except you don’t have to select a target. You aim yourself at them and let ‘er rip. I kind of like this. It’s a way for us to use our 31-point talent without it being completely overpowered and it’s a way for us to have a smart heal, at long last. But since it’s not something you cast on a person, it’s distinguishing itself from Circle of Healing or Wild Growth. I haven’t had much chance to use it on the Beta (and Beta testing is now done!) since this change went in, so I’m anxious to see how it works.

It should also be noted that, as of right now, Light of Dawn’s healing (and overhealing) does get transferred to the beacon, with its 50% healing reduction, of course. But that can still be a lot of healing all at once on your beacon.

*After testing this on live, you MUST be in a party in order to use Light of Dawn! If you aren’t in a party and have 1, 2 or 3 stacks of Holy Power, you get an Invalid Target error if you try to use it. I tried targetting myself and using it, no dice. Then I thought “oh, don’t tell me it IS a targetted heal now!” but I tested this out with a guildie (thanks Num!) and it remains unaffected by any target. It’s definitely still a directional, conal heal. But you need to be in a party to use it.

5) Protector of the Innocent no longer triggers from self-heals. Well, this just makes sense. If we just healed ourselves, we generally don’t need to immediately heal ourselves again, do we? At least not in PVE content. This heal also transfers to the Beacon, with the 50% reduction.

6) Crusade now also has a proc on kill to increase the healing done by the paladin’s next Holy Light by 100/200/300% for 15 seconds, in addition to its current effects. This is mostly a PVE change, but it’s more for World PVE, like questing. This addition to a key talent will be great for all specs of paladin while questing so we can save our Holy Power for something like Inquisition instead of using Word of Glory on ourselves after killing a mob or two.

7) Lay on Hands no longer gives anyone any mana at all. However, go check out the Glyphs section for an exception to this.

8) Seal of Insight still does what it normally did, but will now also return 15% of the paladin’s base mana when judging. This is fantastic. Judging to get mana back again! With an 8 second cooldown, I’m pretty sure this will get nerfed at some point, but enjoy it while it lasts! I should also mention that Seal of Insight’s 4% base health/mana gain never procced at all on judgements, unlike Seal of Wisdom which procced from judgements. That could explain why they’re making sure we get mana returns from judging.

9) Holy Radiance will suffer diminishing returns further than 8 yards from the target or when healing more than 6 players. We haven’t had the chance to enjoy Holy Radiance yet, since we get it at 83, so this is just something of which to be aware when we do get it.

10) Clarity of Purpose, rank 2, now reduces Holy Light and Divine Light cast time by .3 seconds instead of .35 seconds. This is obviously a move to ensure that people get all three ranks of Clarity of Purpose instead of just dropping two points in here. Probably a PVP-based decision, or one to help balance rets/prots since any decent holy was probably going to drop all three points in here anyways.

11) Paragon of Virtue: Reduces the cooldown of Divine Protection by 10/20 sec, Hand of Sacrifice by 15/30 sec and Avenging Wrath by 30/60 sec. The big change here is that Hand of Sacrifice has been added to this talent. I do believe I’m going to go for 1/2 Enlightened Judgements and pick up that second point in Paragon of Virtue.

12) Infusion of Light now applies to Divine Light’s cast time as well as Holy Light’s. So 1/2 points in this talent will grant you .75/1.5s off the cast time of both Divine Light and Holy Light after critting on Holy Shock. While this means we can’t do a Holy Shock (IoL proc) -> Divine Light -> Holy Light combo for 2 hasted spells, we wouldn’t have been able to do that anyways with the change to Speed of Light. And speaking of Speed of Light…

13) Speed of Light: Grants 1/2/3% spell haste and reduces the cooldown of Holy Radiance by 10/20/30 sec. Casting Holy Radiance increases your movement speed by 20/40/60% for 4 sec. This is the big holy change. Instead of gaining 30% spell haste to Flash of Light, Holy Light and Divine Light after a Holy Shock, you just now get 3% more spell haste. The other stuff stays the same. Yay for more spell haste! As mentioned in my 4.0.1 post, we still want to hold on to a 1s GCD and 3% passive spell haste just made that easier. See the Gear/Stats section to see what this means for all the haste we require.

*14) As previously noted, Holy Shock has been nerfed by about 30%. I’ve just confirmed this on live. Holy Shock was hitting for about the same as Holy Light. It’s now down from about 7k unbuffed to 5k unbuffed when I cast it.

Recommended Talent Spec: I still recommend 31/3/2 for current Wrath content, although you’ll note I recommend 1/2 Enlightened Judgements and 2/2 Paragon of Virtue, now. Also, 31/5/0 and 31/2/3 are viable, although the 31/3/2 build I first linked will probably give you the most amount of healing due to Divinity and the buff to Holy Shock from Crusade.

GEAR/STATS

1) With the addition of 3% spell haste from 3/3 Speed of Light, our haste softcap just changed again. Given 3/3 Speed of Light, plus 3/3 Judgements of the Pure and a Wrath of Air totem (or equivalent), you now only need 894 haste to reach the 1s GCD. You can check out this awesome spell haste calculator and see for yourself. It doesn’t have Speed of Light listed, but select Darkness/Netherwind Presence to add that 3% for Speed of Light and you’ll get the same result. Of course, this will change as we level once Cataclysm launches.

GLYPHS

1) Glyph of Beacon of Light (Major) now makes Beacon of Light free, instead of increasing the duration by 30 seconds. This is no longer a very useful Glyph, considering we’re really only expending 1500ish mana every five minutes. I suppose it might have its uses in PVP, but barring any kind of gimmicky fight in PVE, this is pretty sad.

2) Glyph of Lay on Hands (was Minor, now Major) now reduces the cooldown of Lay on Hands by 3 minutes, up from 2 minutes. *** This wasn’t in the patch notes, but was how the Glyph was changed on Beta. This may not be included in the 4.0.3a patch.

3) Glyph of Divinity (Major) has been redesigned. It now grants the paladin 10% of maximum mana upon use. FAN-FREAKING-TASTIC. A 7 (or 8) minute cooldown on 10% of your mana, regardless upon whom you use it, is just awesome. Rather than waste this raid-saving cooldown on yourself for extra mana, you just use it at ALL and you get mana back. This is a fantastic change. I was never a fan of glyphing this and using LoH on myself, preferring to use it on the tanks or whoever was about to die.

4) Glyph of Light of Dawn (Major) now increases the total number of most injured targets healed by 1. Yep, our version of Circle of Healing and Wild Growth. This glyph makes six targets healed by LoD.

My go-to Major Glyphs would be LoH, Divinity and LoD, although Divine Plea and even Cleansing may snag the LoH spot in the event that I find I need to Plea a lot or there’s a lot of cleansing to do. There’s also the Glyph of Divine Protection that could you may want to swap in as it may come in very handy on any fight where you take a lot of magical damage. Remember, Divine Protection no longer causes Forbearance and is only on a 1 minute cooldown, or 40 seconds if you’re specced for 2/2 Paragon of Virtue. That could be a lot of damage mitigated.

Hopefully that helps demystify the 4.0.3a changes we’re about to see. See you on the flip side of the Shattering!

*** All content copyright © Kurn’s Corner, 2010. Reproduction of this guide in full or in part without express permission from the author (“Kurn”), represents copyright infringment and violation of copyright law. Please, if you like this guide, link to it, do not copy it. ***

What Holy Paladins Need to Know for 4.0.1

Kurn / / beta, cataclysm, guide, paladins, patches, ptr

*** All content copyright © Kurn’s Corner, 2010. Reproduction of this guide in full or in part without express permission from the author (“Kurn”), represents copyright infringment and violation of copyright law. Please, if you like this guide, link to it, do not copy it. ***

*Small updates on Monday, October 18th, 2010 – Spell coefficients, a note about Enlightened Judgements vs. Paragon of Virtue*

*Update on Monday, November 22, 2010 – Glyph section somewhat out of date, links to 4.0.3a post.*

With 4.0.1 here as of Tuesday, October 12th, there are several things every single holy paladin absolutely needs to know. I’m going to try to break this down into TALENTS/SPELLS,  GEAR/STATS and GLYPHS. With regards to gemming, both Runed Cardinal Rubies and Brilliant King’s Ambers turn into Brilliant Cardinal Rubies, giving us 20 intellect. We can no longer gem for spellpower. I’m not changing out my gems quite yet, but as we gain levels, we might want to re-examine our gemming.

TALENTS/SPELLS

1) We cannot spec 31/5/5 at launch, because we only get 36 talents at 80. We are not going to be balanced for content at 80 with only 36 talents to spend. Assuming the talent trees stay the same, we have to drop 31 points into holy and then have a tough choice to make. Where do we put the remaining five talents?

Our only real choices:

0-3/3 Divinity: 0%/2%/4%/6% extra healing done to and by us. This is the same talent as the one that exists on live today, only it’s three talent points instead of five.

0-2/2 Eternal Glory: 0%/15%/30% chance for our Word of Glory not to consume Holy Power. This is an amazing talent that allows us to throw out more mana-free heals.

0-3/3 Crusade: 0%/10%/20%/30% extra healing (and damage) on Holy Shock (and lots of damage stuff by 30%). I kid you not, Holy Shock is an amazing spell in Cataclysm. 30% extra healing to it is not insignificant.

0-2/2 Improved Judgement: 0/10/20 extra yards on the range of Judgement. Combined with the extra 5/10 yards on Enlightened Judgements in the holy tree, we are looking at regaining our 40 yard range by dropping two points here.

My recommendations:

3/3 Divinity: 6% flat increase on healing. Do it.

0/2 Eternal Glory: Mana matters, but is not as huge an issue at 80 as it is at 85. The mana costs at 80 are not huge.

From a very early beta build:

Flash of Light: 1658
Holy Light: 263
Divine Light: 1842

Holy Light did get bumped to 9% of base mana sometime after I got these values, which is about 396 mana at level 80. I’m not sure if these values are even still remotely accurate. However, I know that mana wasn’t a huge problem until I hit 82-83. Bear in mind that a lot of things have changed since I was level 80 in beta and I might change my mind on this, but based on the trees right now and my beta experience so far, Eternal Glory doesn’t need our extremely precious two points. If mana is terrible, this should get consideration, but the level 80 values weren’t too bad.

2/3 Crusade: No, really, my hand to God, Holy Shock is used constantly. Holy Shock reduces cast time on FoL, HL and DL and is not an insignificant heal itself. We want Holy Shock to hit as hard as possible. Which means…

0/2 Improved Judgement: I hate that I’m not picking this up, but we’re out of freaking points and we have the base distance of 10 yards on the judgements and an extra 10 yards over in holy. Plus, there’s no more Judgement of Light or Judgement of Wisdom. Judgement is seriously JUST damage and to proc Judgements of the Pure. Judging is now a selfish thing that you do once a minute, so it’s not worth it, with so few points available to us, to drop even a single point here.

So, as of right now, my recommended spec for 4.0.1 is:

31/3/2

Bear in mind that 2/2 Enlightened Judgements can be swapped to 1/2 and you can grab 2/2 Paragon of Virtue, although I think the range is a better choice for us right now in Wrath content.

2) The Holy Power Resource. I nearly forgot to mention this, actually. Holy Power is a secondary resource, meaning it’s used alongside mana, not instead of it.

As you can see, you can have 0, 1, 2 or 3 charges of Holy Power.

For the moment, the only thing that a holy paladin can really use Holy Power for is to heal with our new heal, Word of Glory. Word of Glory with 1 charge of Holy Power heals for less than 2 charges, which heals for less than 3 charges. Word of Glory is an instant-cast heal that is basically a clone of Holy Shock, only there’s no cooldown and it doesn’t use mana. It’s solely dependent on Holy Power.

How do you generate Holy Power?

a) Crusader Strike, which is now baseline for all paladins. (This will be, admittedly, not something we probably use to generate Holy Power all that often.)

b) Using Holy Shock, which is now a passive just for picking holy as your spec. Every time you use Holy Shock, you get a charge of Holy Power.

c) Directly healing your Beacon with Flash of Light, Holy Light or Divine Light. Doing so generates one charge of Holy Power, if you’re specced for 3/3 Tower of Radiance. And you should be.

3) There is no more Flash of Light spec/style, no more Holy Light spec/style. These distinctions are gone. You cannot spam Flash of Light. It is expensive in the new Cataclysmic world. You cannot spam Divine Light, our new big heal, which is sort of equivalent to Wrath’s Holy Light. It’s also expensive. Holy Light is dirt cheap, but heals for itty bitty chunks. We need to adjust to our new heals – the potency of Holy Shock, the weakness of Holy Light, the cost of Flash of Light and the additions of Divine Light, Word of Glory and Light of Dawn. Holy Radiance only comes into play at 83, so we can ignore that for the moment. (But it’s a lot of fun.)

4) Mana matters. We have lost Illumination. Seal of Wisdom is gone, replaced with Seal of Insight, which works a bit like Seals of Light and Wisdom combined, but procs from Seal of Insight only grant us 4% of *base* mana, not *maximum* mana the way Seal of Wisdom did. Further, Divine Plea is nerfed: 10% of mana over 15 seconds, two minute cooldown, reduces healing done by 50% while active. This can be glyphed to 15% of mana back, but that’s still a huge change. We cannot rely on it the way we have throughout this entire expansion. Nor can we rely on Innervates — your druid companions will almost certainly be using this on themselves. Innervate will also only work off the casting druid’s maximum mana, so feral Innervates will be useless. Even Replenishment has been changed. Instead of 1% of maximum mana per 5 seconds, it’s 1% of maximum mana per 10 seconds. What’s that? Mana Tide Totem will still be awesome? HAH. It will now increase party members’ Spirit by 200% for 12 seconds, on a 3-minute cooldown.

I say again, mana matters.

5) Beacon of Light only heals for 50% of what you heal others for. That’s right, the OP awesomeness of our beacon is gone. Combined with the Tower of Radiance talent, it’s clear that we are no longer going to want to set a beacon on someone and just ignore that target except for refreshing beacon, as we currently do.

6) Sacred Shield is gone and its effect has been rolled into our mastery. Mastery is a new stat that all 30 specs can make use of and each spec has its own. Ours is called Illuminated Healing and it means that when we cast a heal on someone, we create a shield the size of 8% of the heal on them, which lasts for six seconds or until it’s been consumed by damage. The 8% scales up with more mastery, which is increased by getting gear with mastery rating on it. Word has it that these shields our heals create are supposed to “roll” or at least not have a smaller shield replace a bigger shield.

7) Blessings have changed. For starters, Blessing of Wisdom is gone. You can find its mana regen properties in Blessing of Might, along with the attack power bonus. Blessing of Kings now only adds 5% to various stats and adds some token resistence to magic schools. Kings does NOT stack with Mark of the Wild. They are identical. Further, these are all 60-minutes and raid-wide and require no reagents.

8) Divine Intervention is gone. Farewell, old friend.

9) Resistance auras have been merged together. So have resistance totems.

10) In case you missed it above, Judgement NO LONGER applies the Judgement of Light OR the Judgement of Wisdom debuff to mobs. Goodbye, passive healing and goodbye passive mana regen.

11) Lay on Hands cooldown reduced from 20 minutes to 10 minutes.

12) Our spell coefficients have changed. Thanks to Ophelie from The Bossy Pally and the Giant Spoon for doing all the scary math for us. Here are the new spell coefficients.

GEAR/STATS

1) In order to benefit from our armor specialization, you need to wear all plate. Wearing all plate grants us an extra 5% intellect. This is godly, since our spellpower is based on our intellect. Do it.

I’m currently wearing two mail pieces: Heroic Unclean Surgical Gloves and Earthsoul Boots. I plan to swap to Gauntlets of Overexposure from the Emblem of Frost vendor, which are identical to Fallen Lord’s Handguards from regular Lady Deathwhisper on 25m.

Ideally, Halion will drop his boots, Foreshadow Steps, (although Walks and I both know these are clearly a myth and do not actually exist). If they don’t drop for me by the time 4.0.1 drops, I will probably switch to my old 258 boots, Boots of the Courageous from Icehowl in TOGC 25, since I didn’t get the Protectors of Life crafted. The Earthsouls were better. Anyways, obviously not everyone is killing Halion with regularity, not everyone is killing Deathwhisper on 25 every week, so your options may be a bit more limited.

I would be inclined to say switch to plate however you can, but keep in mind things like haste (see point #2) as you do so.

2) The amount of haste we want is going to rise. Bear in mind that Judgements of the Pure is dropping from 15% haste to 9% haste and the 3% haste from Swift Retribution/Improved Moonkin is GONE. That means the soft cap for haste that you want to aim for just jumped up from 676 to something like 1017 haste or thereabouts for a 1s GCD, given JotP + 5% spell haste (from a variety of sources — moonkin aura, shadowform’s aura and a shaman’s Wrath of Air). *** This number changes to 894 haste in 4.0.3a ***

That’s a large number, I know. Do not panic.

Why did we want to hit a 1s GCD in Wrath of the Lich King? We had a lot of spells that we needed to cast that were instant. Things like Beacon of Light, Sacred Shield, judging regularly, using Divine Shield and Divine Sacrifice… these are all on the GCD and with 1s GCDs, we’re able to hit these and get back to healing that much faster.

With the removal of Sacred Shield, the movement of Divine Guardian way out of our reach, the fact that we only need to judge once a minute, can we afford GCDs that are longer than 1s? Maybe. Though we’re losing Sacred Shield and judging 2-3 times a minute, we are gaining Holy Shock as a useful spell, which, thanks to Speed of Light, also gives us 30% haste to our next Flash of Light, Holy Light or Divine Light.

This haste can offset the longer cast times of Holy Light (3 seconds base, 2.5 seconds with 3/3 Clarity of Purpose, no more Light’s Grace!) and Divine Light, but it means using Holy Shock pretty much on cooldown.

We also gain Word of Glory, which is essentially a clone of Holy Shock, only it’s dependent on Holy Power instead of mana. Just like Holy Shock, Word of Glory is also instant. We also have Light of Dawn as our 31-point talent, which is an instant, conal heal that doesn’t heal for a ton, but can hit a lot of people at once. So, we lose:

– Sacred Shield (1/minute)
– Frequent judgements (2-3/minute)
– Divine Sacrifice/Guardian (1-2/fight)

Our commonly-used instants are now:

– Beacon of Light (refreshing every 60-90 seconds, depending on glyph)
– Holy Shock (6s cooldown, glyph no longer lowers cooldown, more if Daybreak procs)
– Judgement (1/minute)
– Word of Glory (when 3 Holy Power is accumulated)
– Light of Dawn (situational, but up to every 30 seconds)

So is it important to maintain as close to a 1s GCD as possible? Yes, I would say so. However, the other major benefit to haste rating is the lowering of cast times on various heals and that’s where Holy Shock and Speed of Light come in very handy. That’s why you shouldn’t panic. A 1.2s GCD isn’t as optimal as a 1s GCD, obviously, but don’t panic because your casted heals after a Holy Shock are still going to be pretty snazzy.

Some early beta build numbers are below. Bear in mind that in order to proc Speed of Light, you have to cast Holy Shock before the casted spell.

With 1026 haste only:

Flash of Light: 1.14s cast
Holy Light & Divine Light: 1.68s cast

With 1026 haste and JotP:

Flash of Light: 1.05s
Holy Light & Divine Light: 1.54

With 1026 haste and Speed of Light (3/3):

Flash of Light: 0.879s
Holy Light & Divine Light: 1.29

With 1026 haste and JotP AND Speed of Light:

Flash of Light: 0.806s
Holy Light & Divine Light: 1.18s

A Speed of Light-hasted Holy Light casting in 1.18s is even a bit faster than I currently get on live.

I’m going to do my best to maintain my current haste rating of 1036, which I add to with 40 haste food. However, as previously noted, I need to replace my boots and my gloves with plate equivalents. IF I get the boots from Halion, I’ll be at 1016 haste. If I don’t, I’ll be at 1006, since I’ll drop to my TOGC 25 boots. (I ALWAYS keep everything I wore in the previous tier, just in case I need a resist set or something.)

3) Librams are now stat-sticks. That’s right, we get our very own ranged weapon slot for our relics (and many will no longer be class-specific in Cataclysm!) and they add to our stats. What this means is that, almost certainly, the higher the ilvl libram or relic you have, the better stats are on it. Pallies with the Libram of Renewal will want to get Libram of Veracity which turns into this lovely thing or, if you can spare the Emblems of Frost, the Libram of Blinding Light. (I know. I kind of died inside.) But it turns into this:

GLYPHS

*** This section is outdated for 4.0.3a, please see the 4.0.3a post for updates on some Glyphs and some Glyph choices ***

Glyphs are changing. They’re not going to be consumed any longer, but rather learned. We also have a new kind of glyph: Prime glyphs, in addition to Major and Minor.

Keeva at Tree Bark Jacket says that we’ll get 1 Prime/Major/Minor at 25, 50 and 75, so we’ll have all 9 slots at 80.

What this means for holy paladins is that we want to get all of our glyphs and we want them ASAP.

First off, what glyphs do we want?

Prime Glyphs, by the way, are supposed to be the no-brainers of the glyph world and they exist in order to let us be more choosy in terms of major glyphs, while minors are supposed to be more cosmetic.

PRIME

1) Glyph of Divine Favor. Divine Favor has changed, as you can see by the talent in the talent tree. This glyph extends the duration of Divine Favor by 10 seconds. This is lovely.

2) Glyph of Holy Shock. No longer does this reduce the cooldown of Holy Shock by 1 second. This now increases its crit by 5%.

3) Glyph of Seal of Insight. This works just like the current Glyph of Seal of Light. While you have Seal of Insight active, all your healing is increased by 5%.

4) Glyph of Word of Glory. Increases the healing done by Word of Glory by 10%. Get this.

I would start out with Holy Shock, Seal of Insight and Word of Glory and eventually get enough crit to drop Holy Shock and pick up Divine Favor.

MAJOR

1) Glyph of Beacon of Light. Unchanged from live, it makes your Beacon last 90 seconds instead of 60 seconds. Yoink!

2) Glyph of Cleansing. Reduces the cost of your Cleanse by 20%. Not something I would personally invest in.

3) Glyph of Divine Plea. This used to be for prot pallies, but this is ours, now. This allows you to get an extra 5% mana back when you use Divine Plea, so you’re getting 15% mana back every two minutes instead of 10% mana back.

4) Glyph of Divinity. Same as on live, will grant you mana back and grants double the mana it normally does to its target. Actually has a spot in my glyph book, now.

5) Glyph of Light of Dawn. Reduces the cooldown of Light of Dawn by 10 sec and the amount healed by 20%. I wouldn’t touch this. LoD already heals for such a small amount (3k or so per target) that we do not need LESS healing done more often. I don’t think, anyways. This is a situational glyph, but I’ve been glyphed for it more often than not. This is golden on Infest on the Lich King, although this spell and its glyph are both changing in 4.0.3a.

6) Glyph of the Long Word. Your Word of Glory heals for 50% less up front, but provides an 50% additional healing over 6 seconds.

So what I would take here is Glyph of Beacon of Light, Glyph of Divine Plea and Glyph of Divinity. I’m not a fan of Glyph of the Long Word.

MINOR

1) Glyph of Lay on Hands. Reduces the cooldown of Lay on Hands by 2m. Since Lay on Hands is a 10m cooldown now, this brings it to 8m. Lovely.

2) Glyph of Insight. Reduces the mana cost of Seal of Insight by 50%. Doesn’t sound like much, but at 85, that’s like, 1500 mana savings or something, since the seal costs over 3000 mana.

3) Glyph of Blessing of Kings. Reduces the mana cost of Blessing of Kings by 50%.

4) Glyph of Blessing of Might. Reduces the mana cost of Blessing of Might by 50%.

Obviously, Glyph of Lay on Hands, particularly since I recommend Glyph of Divinity. The other two are up to you, but those are the only minors a holy would find at all useful.

Also, El (of El’s Extreme Anglin’) says that there are several glyphs that will be turned into new ones.

Here’s the conversion chart.

Among them, some that affect holy paladins:

Flash of Light -> Word of Glory
Holy Light -> Divine Favor
Seal of Light -> Seal of Insight
Seal of Wisdom -> Light of Dawn (so many people will have this — make sure to replace it!)

Okay, I think that sums it up. It’s a long post, I know, but I will definitely update this post going forward, since there will undoubtedly be changes to the beta and PTR before 4.0.1 launches and probably some 4.0.1 changes that will, uh, surprise us…

And for those of you who like to tank in your spare time (or tank most of the time and heal in your spare time), here’s the Righteous Defense guide to Everything you need to know about Prot and 4.0.1 at 80.

Please bear in mind that this guide is somewhat out of date as of the launch of 4.0.3a. Please see that post for updates.

*** All content copyright © Kurn’s Corner, 2010. Reproduction of this guide in full or in part without express permission from the author (“Kurn”), represents copyright infringment and violation of copyright law. Please, if you like this guide, link to it, do not copy it. ***

Solutions to Common Problems on Heroic Sindragosa (25)

Kurn / / guide, icecrown citadel, raiding

I have now learned Heroic Sindragosa 25 with two separate guilds. I have killed her twice, both times with my previous guild. I have wiped to her a significant amount of times. Probably more times than I dare to consider. Definitely more times than I have wiped to heroic Putricide or heroic Deathwhisper, most with my previous guild.

When I left my previous guild and joined my current guild, I was aware that I would have to relearn how to do some encounters and would have to learn along with the guild how the guild was going to do the heroic versions of Dreamwalker, Lady Deathwhisper, Professor Putricide, Sindragosa and, perhaps, the Lich King as well.

Dreamwalker was rescued in the first reset I had with the new guild. Deathwhisper was two weeks later. It took much longer for Putricide to go down, but he finally did. So now our attention turns to Sindragosa.

I have noticed several issues in our attempts on her and what’s interesting to me, at least, is that the issues are the same, exact ones my previous guild dealt with. I’m not just talking about screwing up some of the mechanics, either, although that’s part of it and part of learning.

Sindragosa is a challenging encounter because of the amount of coordination it requires. Putricide on heroic is hard because everything is random — Unbound Plague targets, ooze targets, gas targets, who gets which buff in transitions. Sindragosa is not challenging for that reason. Most of the things that happen on Sindragosa are constants. There will always be three healers and three casters with Unchained Magic. Ice Tomb targets are random, but you can plan where each person goes. P3 Ice Tombs are placed with regularity on one side or the other.

The issue is coordination — you need to stop, start, move, run, start again, stop again, watch the ground, watch your debuffs, and you need to be able to rely on your fellow raiders to be doing exactly what they’re supposed to be doing as well.

So today… Solutions to Common Problems on Heroic Sindragosa (25).

1) Parries. Sindragosa parry hastes. What does this mean?

From WoWWiki:

Swing timer

After a successful parry, the defender’s “swing timer” is reduced by 40% of your weapon speed (or even reset), unless this would result in a reduction to less than 20% of your swing time remaining. This results in an average of .24 extra swings per parry; thus parry favors slower, higher damage weapons.[1] Note that with a slow weapon and fast incoming attacks, it is possible to gain multiple speed reductions. While tanks like to profit from this effect, melee damage dealers should attack from behind whenever possible, both to increase their own damage and to avoid causing unneeded damage to the tank through the enemy’s parries.

Your swing timer is always running any time you are able to parry (you can’t parry during spellcasting, stun, etc.), and since it resets on a predictable basis, there are several addons that can display it. Using such a timer and monitoring incoming events, you will note that parry affects only your current swing, and only the time remaining when the parry occurs. In order to display parry events accurately, you must know the correct swing speed (including haste effects) and the elapsed swing time.

Note: When a mob parries an attack, its swing timer also advances in the same manner. This does not apply to certain raid bosses for which parry-haste functionality has been explicitly turned off by the game designers, e.g. Brutallus.

The vast majority of ICC bosses have parry haste turned off, like Brutallus in Sunwell Plateau. The following bosses are those in T10+ content in Wrath of the Lich King who have parry haste turned ON:

Lady Deathwhisper, Sindragosa, Halion.

So three things here:

a) Tanks need to make sure they have a fair bit of expertise, even if they’re wearing frost resist gear. Maybe some Rhinolicious Wyrmsteak? For tanks, you’re almost certainly not going to be able to eliminate the parries, so your goal is to minimize them.

b) Melee need to eliminate parries, period. This is achieved by making sure you’re at the expertise soft-cap of 6.5% AND making sure you’re standing in the right place! Do not stand near the dragon’s front shoulders. Stand right near the back legs, just a bit towards her midsection. You obviously don’t want to stand in the back o f the dragon because of her tail swipe, but standing near the hindquarters should allow the game to believe you’re hitting her from an angle where you’re technically behind her.

c) If you’re a caster or a healer, don’t stand next to the dragon and auto-attack. We have pretty much no expertise and can easily cause a parry. This can happen particularly when a paladin judges from afar and then runs in close without turning off the auto-attack. While this doesn’t matter much on a Blistering Cold cast, since she’s not actively hitting the tank, be careful that you’re not beating on her with your dagger or staff or mace or even your sword.

Pro-tip: If you parse your attempts with World of Logs, you can tell who’s being parried by selecting the attempts you’d like and then going to the Expression Editor. Use this string:

(fulltype=SWING_MISSED) and targetname=”Sindragosa” and missType=MISS_PARRY

To see if this causing an issue, look at individual fights and examine your tank’s deaths. If it was due to melee attacks around 0.9-1.2 seconds apart, this is likely a parry haste.

2) Icy Grip & Blistering Cold. So many people die to Blistering Cold and it just plain isn’t necessary!

When you see by your boss mod timer that there is 5 seconds left on the Icy Grip cooldown, prepare yourself. Move very close to the dragon (making sure your auto-attack is off!) and continue casting/hitting, etc.

When she casts Icy Grip, she’ll pull you to her. Since you’re so close to her, you’re barely moving. Just turn (using your mouse) and run or strafe out 25 yards from her. The single biggest issue I see with Blistering Cold is people being way the hell away from her when she casts Icy Grip, so they spend a couple of seconds being pulled TO her and don’t have enough time to run out.

Pro tip: Tuskarr’s Vitality (or Cat’s Swiftness) is seriously the best boot enchant you can get if you don’t have a talent that increases your speed, like Pursuit of Justice. You would be shocked at how often it saves you on this fight and so many others throughout this expansion.

3) Frost Bombs. On regular, they weren’t too much of a problem. You ducked behind an Ice Tomb and if you got hit, so what? No big deal. On heroic, they one-shot you, unless you’re a bear and you pop Barkskin and Survival Instincts. ;)

The proper way to deal with the Frost Bombs is thusly:

a) Hide behind an Ice Tomb.

b) Look at the platform for the projected texture that shows you where the Frost Bomb will land. It’s a small, blue circle. This is a terrible quality screenshot, but here:

If you cannot see that little rune thing, check to make sure you have Projected Textures turned ON. If you do and you still have trouble seeing it, turn down your Particle Density. The above screenshot is with Projected Textures on and Particle Density at the lowest setting.

c) Move to make sure the Ice Tomb is blocking you ENTIRELY from the frost bomb. As my brother said the other night on regular Sindragosa 10m (his first time there), “man, you really gotta tuck in there, don’t you?” The answer to that is yes. Cling to the tomb.

d) Make sure you move to properly line up the Ice Tombs between you and the bombs for ALL FOUR BOMBS.

e) Make sure that no tombs are broken until after the last bomb drops. You then have several seconds for the tank and healers to run out to meet Sindragosa during which you can finish off the Ice Tombs. It is ideal for all Ice Tombs to be below 15% or so health by the time the last Frost Bomb hits and then finished off before anyone is asphyxiated.

4) Frost Damage. There are three main ways to help combat the persistent frost aura (which only gets worse with stacks of Mystic Buffet up). I like to use all of them.

a) bring extra healers. Like, 8.

b) Wear 1-2 pieces of frost resistance gear. I personally wear the belt. Tanks should probably wear 2 pieces (belt/boots) and should pop either version of Sindragosa’s Flawless Fang on Blistering Cold (and ONLY on Blistering Cold!) if they’re planning on eating them in order to keep Sindragosa standing still.

c) Have BOTH Frost Resistance Totem and Frost Resistance Aura up. Drop the totem near the tank, in melee range, so that when the raid runs away from the tank during Blistering Cold, the tank still has 130 Frost Resistance added, thanks to the totem.

5) Unchained Magic, Instability & Backlash. Run away from the raid. Let Instability drop when you’re 20 yards away from others. Don’t get gripped into Sindragosa with any stacks — if you do, keep casting instants every 3 seconds so that you don’t blow up the whole raid. More on dealing with Unchained Magic on heroic here. I strongly recommend not casting at ALL in P3 with Unchained Magic.

As well, the whole of the ranged contingent of the raid (casters, hunters, healers) should be clumped up together very tightly.

6) Unchained Magic, Instability, Backlash and Iceblock, Divine Shield & Dispersion. Mages, paladins and shadow priests can avoid dealing with Unchained Magic once or twice or so per attempt on Sindragosa by using their immunity effects (Iceblock and Divine Shield) or by using Dispersion. However, for mages and paladins, if you’re going to IB or bubble it off, you MUST NOT have any stacks of Instability on you when you do! If you do, this will cause your Instability to fall off immediately and hit all people within 20 yards of you. IF you have a stack or more, run out, cast to your heart’s desire, THEN bubble/IB. Otherwise, bubble or iceblock FIRST, then continue casting as normal.

Shadow Priests can stack Instability to truly ludicrous amounts if Dispersion is up, but again, just because you’re taking almost no damage doesn’t mean you should blow up the raid around you. Run. Out. Of. The. Raid.

7) Ice Tombs. Ice Tombs cause damage AND they can chain to other people. Ice Tombs cause about 10k damage and if you’re within 10y of other people getting tombed, you’ll cause 10k damage to each other. So stay 10y away from others, even if you’re given a particular location to go. Do not stand on top of others, do not stand too close to others. This can be a problem in P3 where people are running around like chickens with their heads cut off.

It’s also really important to get a shield or a hot or two up on the people who are about to get Ice Tombed, so that they’re absolutely topped off by the time Asphyxiation kicks in, if that’s an issue. Hell, I even toss a Sacred Shield and FoL on someone if I can. Make sure Frost Beacon is on your raid frames, healers, that’ll show you who’s going to get tombed.

8) Phase 3. Keep it simple. If you have Unchained Magic, don’t cast. If you get a Frost Beacon on you, telling you you’re going to be a Frost Tomb, run to the appropriate side. Drop Mystic Buffet stacks every other tomb. Give tanks a chance to reset their stacks. Run out from Blistering Cold.

Above all, keep calm. The big problem I see in P3 (or P2, if you don’t count air phase as P2) is people panicking. Quit panicking!

9) Communication. While this is not imperative during the entire fight, it’s particularly important between healers in the final phase.

My previous guild, which did not use Vent or any voice communications, came up with the idea of using macros between healers to indicate who had Unchained (and was, therefore, not healing). The macro looks like this:

/6 *** UNCHAINED MAGIC *** on Madrana!

/in 29 /6 *** Unchained Magic *** is done on Madrana!

/6 is the healer channel we used so replace that with your own channel number. What you do with this is hit it when you get Unchained Magic. UM lasts 30 seconds, so this is an approximate macro that will count 29 seconds before telling your fellow healers that you’re able to cast again. Depending on when you hit the macro after getting UM, it might be a little late in announcing you’re ready to cast, but it’s better than nothing, particularly if you don’t use voice communication or officers are calling out things like where to drop the next Ice Tomb or whatever.

I think that’s all the advice I have for Sindragosa on heroic. Just keep it simple and think through the consequences to your actions. Good luck!

Heroic Sindragosa: A Flowchart for Unchained Magic

Kurn / / guide, healers, icecrown citadel, raiding

Not being able to sleep sucks, so here’s something I’ve been meaning to post for a few days. You are free to snag this particular image, so long as it is NOT modified, and post it to your guild forums or whatever. I’d prefer it if you uploaded it to photobucket or something as well, instead of using up my bandwidth by hotlinking it. If that proves to be an issue, I’ll disable that. Obviously, click on the image for a larger version.

Flowchart for Unchained Magic on Heroic Sindragosa

Obviously, some classes (mages, paladins, shadow priests) are able to work around Unchained Magic at least once, perhaps twice throughout the encounter. This should be viewed as a general, beginner’s guide to Sindragosa’s Unchained Magic on heroic, where the Backlash caused by dropping your stacks of Instability will hit people within 20 yards of you once you drop your stacks.

Still, enjoy. Please. Spread the word.

Pretty please.

Blackrock Depths, the Shadowforge Key and You

Kurn / / dungeons, guide

Some tweeting tonight led to some nostalgia about Blackrock Depths. I freaking love that place. I know it pretty damn well, after having run it approximately eighty four zillion times back in my 50s and 60s on Kurn and Madrana and, well, the rest of my toons.

As such, I thought it was time to throw out another Classic Dungeon video! This is just a short one; how to get the key to BRD. Your fellow party members will love you if you have this key.

Beta Build 12644, Throne of the Tides

Kurn / / beta, cataclysm, dungeons, guide

Here’s a look at the new dungeon named Throne of the Tides. The random dungeon finder tool says it’s 80-82, I believe. I have run this dungeon probably about seven or eight times and only completed it once.

This is the first thing people need to know about the dungeons: they aren’t pushovers like Utgarde Keep and The Nexus. They require some forethought, some crowd control, environmental awareness and some luck.

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