Category: healing

Healing as a (low-level) Holy Paladin in Forever (Beta)

Kurn / / healing, raiding, ramblings, wow forever

Thanks to Blizz giving everyone 16 legacy point to play with, I took the 5/5 talent thingy (called Talented), which means that I start getting talent points at level 5, but do not gain extra talent points. As a result of this, I got Holy Shock at level 25.

And then I went healing Stocks. I did record it, but it was just so underwhelming and it’s not a new instance, so I won’t be putting it up on YouTube. The funniest thing about it is that my muscle memory is still there to hit Holy Shock every six seconds or thereabouts and so I was constantly being reminded by my character “I can’t cast that yet”, since the cooldown is ten seconds. Rude. That’s going to take some getting used to.

Anyway, I was looking at some comments on my YouTube channel and there was this one comment that was… well, mean. To be frank, I’ve been online for most of my 40+ years, so I’m used to the odd mean comment or three. The interesting thing about the comment is that it would have been worth discussing if I thought the commenter was actually writing earnestly about what they noticed about my gameplay and healing in Deadmines.

Among other things, the commenter said I was bad, which, okay, whatever. But they did mention that “nobody plays like that anymore”, referring to my constant healing and overhealing.

And this is where a more nuanced view of things, including a nuanced discussion, could be interesting. But the place for that is not in YouTube comments. The place for that is on my blog!

So let’s talk about it a bit.

Specific criticisms:

  • too much overhealing
  • literally zero damage
  • nobody plays like that anymore
  • why spam healing spells when they’re at full health?

Let us take these criticisms one at a time, even though a couple of them could be consolidated.

  1. Too Much Overhealing. Hi. I’m a holy paladin. That’s kind of what we do. Or at least what we have traditionally done. Why? Because we can. Flash of Light is cheap! It’s a cheap, cheap spell! At level 20, it costs 35 mana for Rank 1 Flash of Light. 35 mana! You can almost always cast Flash of Light. Rank 2 is only 50 mana. The highest rank of FoL costs 140 mana, from what I can tell, and you get that at level 58. (Theoretically. We don’t know anything for sure yet, this is still beta.) And we can afford to “waste mana” (or at least we have been able to do so) because of it. Granted, the nerf to illumination (50% of mana back on crits) may affect this a bit, but that’s what you traditionally did as a holy paladin back in the old days. And you didn’t need to step off or otherwise interrupt your cast because it cost so little and because the cast time (1.5 seconds) was so short. It was easier to just let the heals go and it wasn’t terribly inefficient either, especially if you were casting on the tank.
  2. Literally Zero Damage. Well, I’d argue the claim, but let’s assume Commenter is actually correct. Then, so long as I’m not dropping Holy Light max rank bombs on my tank, if I’m hitting the tank with Flashes of Light and I’m not out of mana, then… I’m winning? Because my tank should be taking some amount of damage, no?
  3. Nobody Plays Like That Anymore. No, they don’t. But shouldn’t they? This isn’t Classic, but it’s not retail, either. It’s a third, weird thing that is somewhere in between the two. For me, part of Beta is to get used to the functionality. I find that generally, I’m healing more like I did in Classic than I have in retail in years. And I’m pretty sure that’s a decent way to go. In a group situation, I’m likely the only one who’s going to heal anyone. If I don’t keep the tank topped off and then a mage pulls aggro, then I heal the crap out of the mage but the tank taunts and then takes a ton of damage, do we have a dead tank or a nearly dead tank? Probably! Holy Light takes 2.5 seconds to cast! With Infusion of Light, when you crit with Holy Shock or Flash of Light, you can get that down to 1.5 seconds, but that’s only with a crit from IoL or FoL, and since there’s the illumination nerf, I don’t think stacking crit is going to really be the way to go. So by the time we switch our attention to the tank, the tank could be dead halfway through our 2.5s HL cast. (Barring forcing a Divine Favor/Holy Shock to hasted Holy Light combo, but with the GCD, that’s still 2.5 seconds until your Holy Light cast has finished and you’ve only slightly healed the tank.) I find it fascinating that people are just saying things without any experience or facts to back them up. I was there when they changed things in Cataclysm to force us not to keep everyone topped off. It was a difficult change, especially coming out of Wrath when you had tanks taking 40k damage hits in raids. Chimaeron panicked me and my healers in Blackwing Descent. PANICKED us. One of the healers on the first night of attempts was like “all I use is Flash Heal and I am sad” and another was like “I need a pancake”. But lo and behold, we got used to people not being topped off all of the time. And in Mists, they added the 8s cooldown to cleanse/etc. (Well, the 5.0 patch, I guess.) But now we get to go back to a time where maybe it’s not worth it to step out of your heal, and where you might still need to be discerning about what and when you dispell, but we have a lot to learn going forward.
  4. Why Spam Healing Spells At Full Health. Again, if it’s Flash of Light, it’s currently costing me 50 mana a pop. And the tank will eventually take the damage that the next incoming heal will heal. I do need to be mindful of the 5-second rule for the first time in my life, but I have 0 spirit on anything I wear, so I don’t have a lot of mana regen anyways. So it’s still worth it for the time being. Will it continue to be? We’ll see. I don’t know what my mana pool will be like at 60. I don’t know how challenging Scholomance or Strat Undead will be or if I’ll be panicking in UBRS or laughing my way through BRD. No one knows anything yet. Including me.

So if I don’t know anything yet, why this post?

Because I’m bringing context to my actions. I’m talking about what we used to do 20+ years ago. I’m talking about why we used to do those things 20+ years ago. Priests with their Greater Heal spells? They would step off their casts all the time, but they usually had one winding up in case their tank took a huge hit. Druids would HoT up the tanks and the OTs. And paladins would generally FoL spam and then when enrages hit or what-have-you, would bomb a couple of Holy Lights, hopefully in conjunction with Divine Favor, and then maybe whack on the boss a bit to get some mana back with Seal of Wisdom.

Without more information about Forever, all I have to fall back on is my past experience. But because I knew what I was doing then and, more importantly, why I was doing what I was doing back then, I can adapt to the moment. If I end up with 12235972 spirit on my gear, I won’t be finishing my casts nearly as often to better take advantage of the 5-second rule. But that also depends on which classes I’m healing with, if I’m doing dungeons, etc, etc, etc.

Everything depends on other things. And I kind of love that about WoW and, specifically, how we don’t know most of the things about WoW Forever yet.

What to do about Holy Paladins in WoW Forever?

Kurn / / healers, healing, paladins, wow forever

I’ve been mulling things over for a while, because I think the state of the holy paladin is kind of sad in WoW Forever, but I don’t love critiquing something without bringing solutions. And then I realized, hey, if professional game designers seem to not have a good solution, I don’t need a good solution either! So I can attempt to throw some stuff at the wall and see if it sticks.

The Problem: Where to use talent points?

Back in Classic, this wasn’t a problem. A standard “all the buffs” build was something like this 33/11/7 build:

Improved Wisdom, Improved Might, Improved Devo Aura, Kings

I had been thinking that a 31/5/15 build to grab Conviction would work, but I’m remembering the Wrath of the Lich King version of the spell, which did affect spell crit. Conviction from Classic does not and so it will not in Forever.

So this leaves me wondering what the heck to do with some points. I have this build in mind:

33/7/5

But that leaves me with six unused points. And I don’t want to put those points anywhere in particular. And I have questions! If I have 3/3 Divine Precision, is it useless to grab 1 or 2 or 3 points in regular Precision in Prot?

So like… where do we go? There is nothing tempting for me in the ret tree except for Benediction (which is way more useful now than it used to be). There is nothing tempting for me in the prot tree except for Guardian’s Favor.

Ideas for Row 1 or 2 Talents in Prot/Ret for Holy

– Easiest idea first, let’s put the spell crit back into Conviction like it was in Wrath! It would be handy for every flavour of paladin, although not even fantastic for holy pallies because oh yeah ILLUMINATION WAS NERFED TO 50%. (ahem)

– How about extended range on judgement? We are ostensibly going to be judging for light and wisdom, so let us do it from 30 yards away. Maybe put this in row 2 of prot, because it would be really handy for tanks to be able to hit something from afar.

– Oooooh, how about this? Redo Redoubt in row 1 of prot to say what it usually does (increased chance to block) and also “when a shield is equipped, increase your mana regeneration by 2/4/6/8/10%”?

– Maybe something else in ret, like “when your judgement is a critical hit, your next Holy Shock or Holy Strike is free (can only occur once per minute)”?

Ideas for Deeper in the Holy Tree

– Maybe put an extended range on judgement deeper in the holy tree if you’re worried about balancing prot and ret against holy in PVP?

– Maybe instead of Consecrated Ground doing 5%/10% increased damage against the first 4 enemies in our Consecration, this deep in the holy tree, maybe it could heal instead of harm? Like maybe 0 damage to enemies and mild healing to allies, decreasing in efficacy the more people are standing in it?

Not sure what else to do here, frankly. What do you think?

Kurn’s Sunday (Monday) Brain Dump 17

Kurn / / blogging, dungeons, healing, ramblings

Not too much to talk about this week. Spent all of Monday out with my littlest nephew and am absolutely wiped out.

But, over the weekend, I did do 5 BC Timewalking dungeons on Madrana, so you might enjoy looking at that! I had one tank I thought of as “good”, one was “okay” and the others were, IMHO, bad.

What BC dungeons do you like?

Kurn’s Sunday Brain Dump 16

Kurn / / blogging, classic instances, dungeons, healing, ramblings

Not too much to say, just posted a couple of videos this week, both showing me healing Classic Timewalking Dungeons.

And then I ran the remaining four dungeons yesterday, and I also discuss tanks in general, dungeons in general, and of course probably use the phrase “back in my day” a dozen times or so…

That’s it for this week. What are you up to? Did you do any Classic timewalking? What do you think about running a dungeon solely to complete it, versus running it because you enjoy it or running it to get a specific piece of gear? I’d be interested to know.

Kurn’s Sunday (Monday) Brain Dump 1

Kurn / / cataclysm, healing, midnight, professions, ramblings

Hey there, folks! Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, in this very galaxy, I used to do answers to search terms here on my blog. I’d look up the search terms that brought people here and I’d answer them as best I could.

I don’t have those kinds of analytics these days, but I do still have a blog and a brain, so I thought I’d use the combination to brain dump on 3-5 topics every Sunday. (Who me? Starting on Monday? Yes.)

So here, for your reading enjoyment, is Kurn’s Sunday Brain Dump 1!

Topic 1: Patron Orders in Midnight

I recently hit the 1.5 million gold mark on my bank toon. Most of my characters have somewhere between 1500 and 2000 gold on them, and if it’s over that, I send the money to my bank toon. (Gone are my days of trusting anything remotely related to a “bank” to hold my cash.) When I think about what I’ve done in order to get that much money (half a million profit in three weeks), a lot of it comes down to fulfilling Patron Orders on my various toons. I have like 7 characters I regularly do orders on, plus a couple others I’m pulling into the rotation.

Here’s what I do, pretty much every day, on all of them:

I log in, check the orders and then do them in this priority sequence:

– Are all the materials provided? Do it if I know the recipe, regardless of the payment.

– If not all of the materials are provided and I know the recipe and I have the materials on-hand, do I get 2 points of knowledge? If so, do it. If not, do I get 1 point of knowledge? Check to see if other orders will reward me 2 points of knowledge instead of 1. If they don’t, then fulfill the order.

– I also prioritize first-time crafts, assuming I have the materials or they are easily obtained.

– Unless the order gives 2 points of knowledge and a nice reward, I don’t fulfill it if it requires using more than 200 concentration to get to max quality. (a rune, a thing to help craft that goes for a thousand or so gold, etc)

– After all the orders for that character’s professions are done, I send everything that’s not soulbound, in terms of rewards, to my bank toon.

I then rinse and repeat for virtually all my characters.

By the end of 15-20 minutes, I have probably gained 1-4 points of knowledge for each character, I have gained a few trade goods (ore, herbs, leather, scales, rarer trade goods too), and each character probably has earned 30-60 moxie. Most importantly, most of my characters probably have at least 800 concentration.

It is okay not to fulfill a wildly expensive order, even if it’s a first craft, even if it’s got a nice reward, if it’s going to cost you 5k to get the materials. Don’t sweat it.

* Fun fact: if you get a max-level vial as a saved reagent while crafting something alchemical, you can probably just sell that sucker by itself for a stupid amount of gold.

Topic 2: Tuesday Prep

On Monday evenings and Tuesday afternoons, I start crafting for reset day in North America. Tuesday nights are huge for selling of consumables. I will typically do the following, especially since most of my characters will have most of their concentration:

– Flask-specced alchemist (Madrana): Will craft once or twice to get 2-4 flasks (pre-multicraft). Multicraft is, of course, the way to make money on max-level flasks. Nocturnal Lotuses are still outrageously expensive, so I save them up throughout the week from farming and can sell a couple of extras for over 2000 gold each on Tuesdays.

– Potion-specced alchemist: Will craft 3-4 times to get 15-20 max-ranked potions. We’re talking mana potions, potions of recklessness and Light’s Potential, whatever I really have mats for without buying anything. Again, multicraft is excellent here.

– Enchanter: will craft 2-3 times to get some max-level Oil of Dawn or Thalassian Phoenix Oil.

If I’m feeling extra motivated, I’ll cook a bunch of food of Kurn, too, like Royal Roast or Impossibly Royal Roast.

Last Tuesday, I made over 50k in the span of like 2 hours while all this stuff sold.

Topic 3: Cleansing

I went Timewalking to heal Cataclysm dungeons this past week. Here’s a couple of videos.

Bar none, the thing I hate most about it, apart from running with randos whom I despise within three seconds of the start of the run, is that Cleanse is on an 8-second cooldown.

DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH WE HAD TO CLEANSE/DISPELL/ETC IN CATACLYSM??? It was a freaking lot more than every EIGHT SECONDS. I know, I can hear you now, prioritize, Kurn! Yeah, well I was trained for like 7 years to cleanse all the things as soon as I could unless it was……. whatever that damn warlock debuff was. Oh, right, UNSTABLE AFFLICTION. I need to be able to cleanse all the things. I was GOOD at it. And having an 8-second cooldown on CLEANSE drives me absolutely crazy.

And there you have it, folks, my first Sunday (Monday, in this case) Brain Dump.

What do you want to hear about next week?

11.0 Patch Issues & Stuff

Kurn / / alchemy, healing, professions, ramblings, the war within

My dudes (and I use that in the gender-neutral way), are things ever borked in the 11.0 patch! It’s actually kind of funny. Even funnier are the chunks of people who are like “eff this, I’m cancelling my sub” and stuff like that. Hi, is this your first patch? 😂

That said, things are kind of broken at the moment. I can’t withdraw more than like 4200 gold out of my bank’s guild bank? And Warband banks are unavailable. They’ve activated an error message that indicates someone else is using your bank and I’m like, “I assure you, that’s not the case, Blizz.”

The bank is being used by another member of your Warband.

As someone who has been playing this game, off and on, since 2005, this all amuses me. As someone who works in tech, I totally get it. Any time you’re working with databases, like “what items does this character own?” or “what transmogs does this character have access to?” and that sort of thing, you have to be super careful. Err on the side of caution. Always. This is why maintenance days are on Tuesdays — to launch things on a Thursday or Friday is just asking for overtime on the weekend.

To read some of the comments in the blue posts on the forums is to lower one’s IQ by a chunk. Someone posited that the warbanks were linked to the beta and that’s why they weren’t working. Like, my dude, no, warbanks are on an entirely different server, that is not accessible by the live servers. That’s why you have to copy your character or make a new, premade one. Never mind the fact that the servers are not likely to be hardcoded. If anything, there’s probably a database entry saying “Kurn has characters on these 18 servers, so make the Warband Bank accessible to all her characters on all those servers” and there’s probably a piece of code saying “if she creates a new character on a new server, please add that to the list”. Or something akin to that.

Then there are people saying that they’re quitting because the game is super broken at the moment. Well, okay, yes, there are bits that are broken. I can’t withdraw a lot of money from my guild bank right now. Some class/spec combos don’t have their new talent trees fully implemented. All of this, though, is going to be temporary.

I have read that some people have lost achievement progress. I guess it’s possible that I have, too? I wasn’t paying much attention to any achievements, to be honest, but I saw someone lost out on their Molten Front achievements by having them reset to 0 or whatever. THAT would suck. I hated the Molten Front dailies. So what do people have to do there? Well, if the devs can retrieve that data (and, presuming they took backups, they can), the decision is will they? Manipulating data is an extreme pain in the ass. Especially if the data’s format has changed from one point to the next point.

Actually, looking at my armory, it looks as though my progress to the loot 200,000 gold achievement has been wiped. I’m at 0/200,000. Now, to be clear, I spend most of my time making money through the auction house, so even though I make a ton of gold, I do not loot a ton, especially since I stopped raiding. But clearly, I should have more than 0 here.

And when I was logging into various toons on Tuesday, when the servers finally came up, I got “Nagrand Slam” on Madrana. So whatever character(s) of mine had different parts of that done, now has been applied to Madrana. Technically, they have to make sure we all have the right achievements applied to the right characters, too. So this becomes incredibly finicky work if something goes awry and you have to move the data from an old backup to the new format. Trust me. It’s not fun and is incredibly time-intensive, especially validating all the data.

That’s another thing, people are complaining about how nothing was tested, blah, blah, blah. Listen. Any time you mess with data, weird shit can happen, okay? I have seen SUCH weirdness occur in the tiniest edge cases possible. Regular use? No problem. 95% of cases? No problem. That last 5% is where the problems are.

I basically do technical support for a living (although not for Blizzard), and this one day, someone was complaining that a product belonging to the company I worked for at the time wasn’t working. Worked fine for me. I asked the customer what time zone they were in. They were in France, which is UTC+1 or +2, depending on the time of year. I, being in Montreal, am in UTC-4 or -5, depending on the time of the year, so I’m 6 hours back. So I messed with my settings and such and made the product think I was in France. And, sure enough, from 6pm to midnight, and only 6pm to midnight, the problem was visible to me. I switched back to my regular timezone, and there were no issues.

So please trust me when I say that this shit is hard. And that they’re working to diagnose what the problem is, then if they can fix it, then should they invest that time and money into fixing it (if they even can), and then how long the fix should take. And they’re weighing all of that. Does it matter to me if I’m at 0/200,000 gold looted? No. Does it matter to me that I can’t withdraw more than about 4200 gold from my guild bank? Yes. Does it matter to me that I can’t use the Warband Bank? Yes. So they’re going to have to do all kinds of thinking and talking about things to see if they can resolve it, and then if they should resolve it. Obviously, the Warband Bank is going to be fixed, so will the guild bank thing. Those are likely to be technical issues that can be resolved. The achievements? I would say probably, but I’m not sure how easy it’s going to be for them to do.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on 11.0.

In the meantime, I had a hilarious time healing on beta as Madrana…

There’s a lot more than just the first couple minutes, you can actually see me starting to heal stuff around the 15-16 minute mark. Watch me lose my tank instantly. Watch me battle-rez! Watch me panic! It’s pretty funny, I promise.

In other news, going back to professions, I think I’m going to keep alchemy on my warrior and drop inscription. I already have inscription on the evoker, and alchemy does have useful cooldowns, such as something called Blasphemite, which is through Thaumatergy and Gleaming… something or another. Coalescence? So I’m mostly (?) okay with having 3-4 alchemists. I’m going to have to be diligent about transmutes and stuff, though, like I was in Pandaland, where I was doing trillium bar transmutes on 3 toons every day.

So, what weirdness have you encountered? What are you up to before the pre-expansion event?

Hilarity at 4am

Kurn / / addons, dragonflight, dungeons, healing

So I was hopping on and off my various alts, trying to get them all a few extra profession points courtesy of the Darkmoon Faire, and I was like… I kind of want to heal on the paladin. So I spent a good amount of time setting up Plexus and Clique and, at 4am, decided to go heal a random dungeon. This, I might add, without ever having done any of the Dragonflight dungeons before.

So how did it go?

Well, it was not my finest hour, as I outright panicked throughout it, basically. Why? Check it out for yourself.

After sleep and such, I figured out the issue was PlexusClickSets and Clique had to have been interfering with each other. I disabled Click Sets and walked into Stocks and back out and all my settings worked properly. But I tell you, this was an intense 20 minutes or so of, first, figuring out what the hell was happening, and then what buttons are bound to what keys and then, finally, how do I keep people alive??? Only a couple (3?) deaths overall, no full wipes. Just a lot of me flailing. Enjoy!

Dragonflight: Plans & Thoughts

Kurn / / dragonflight, gold, healing, paladins, ramblings

Howdy, folks! November is always a busy month for me. I’ve spent some time attempting to write 50,000 words of a novel for National Novel Writing Month, as per usual. (Let us not discuss how close or far I am from that goal.) I’ve also spent time running Wrath Classic dungeons with my brother, Fog, and have recorded a bunch of them. (The first is my breakdown of holy paladin talents in Wrath, but the rest are all videos of me running dungeons, mostly with Fog.)

So, I made the decision to buy Dragonflight, because… dragons, hello! Not even to just be a dracthyr evoker (we all know I love my hunter and paladin too much to seriously look at another class), but to see if WoW can keep me in “present times”. I had purchased Shadowlands and promptly hated everything about it. I hadn’t even finished the starter quest on Kurn, that’s how much I hated it. Apart from anything else, the level squish — which I understand on a logical level — really pissed me off. Why? Because, excuse you, Blizzard, Kurnmogh of Eldre’Thalas had been level 60 since sometime in 2005, thank you very kindly. The thought of levelling to 60 again was just absolute crap. It’s such a psychological blow. Even though I completely understand that levelling to 130 (from level 1!) is stupid. I really do get that. Logically, I know a level squish had to happen. But for someone who spent THIRTY DAYS IN-GAME trying to get Kurn to 60 (and yes, that’s how long it took me the first time around), it really sucked to think about grinding out those 10 levels from 50-60 again. Like a LOT.

It still sucks. And so, perhaps out of nothing beyond spite (and perhaps a little greed), I have Kurn at 60, Madrana at 60 and five other alts at 60 (including a dracthyr evoker). My army of alts and I are ready to jump into Dragonflight tonight (in about three hours, as I write this), and I am ready to make ALL THE GOLD. I have skinning/LW on Kurn, JC/alch on Madrana, Herb/Inscription on the dracthyr, Herb/Mining on my shaman, Mining/Tailoring on my mage, Alch/Enchanting on the priest and, hilariously, Blacksmithing/Engineering on my warlock. In my defense, the warlock was a boosted character from like… Mists (?) whom I decided to add BS/Eng to because those were the professions I lacked. I still find it hilarious that I have a warlock with those professions, so I decided to keep them on that toon.

Levelling during this elemental invasion event has been fascinating. I didn’t tend to join groups. Rather, as healers (priest and shaman, specifically), I greatly enjoyed just dropping heals like Healing Rain, Chain Heal, Circle of Healing, etc, on the people doing damage. It was so much more fun, IMHO, than running around dropping Blizzard or Rain of Fire. Also, what the hell, soul shards are the worst. hahaha. I eventually figured out how they work, but it made me wish for the old days of soul shard bags instead of them as a secondary resource. And does life tap no longer exist for destro warlocks??? I actually ran out of mana sometimes. Too much Rain of Fire, I guess. Anyway. That was a painful, like, 18 (?) levels. Though I do have to say, even with the nerfs (and yes, they are nerfs!) to the heirlooms, I gained like 5 levels chewing through 1.5 levels worth of rested. That was disgusting and I loved it.

Madrana got boosted to 60 so I didn’t do a lot of invasion stuff with her, although I did enough to get most of the 252 gear. I also got to try out this fancy new talent tree. First, yay talent trees!!!! Second, oh god, talent trees!!! hahahaha! I had some fun reading through things. I think I have a workable talent tree at the moment. The biggest problem for me was not being able to generate enough holy power to cast Light of Dawn, because I wasn’t grouping with folks. I did enjoy that Consecrate finally heals people if talented for it, though. I’ve been wanting that since… Wrath? Cata? Maybe even BC, because I remember not being able to heal through Heroic Magister’s Terrace in TIER FIVE GEAR because I couldn’t heal more than one person at a time. That was a brutal effing dungeon for a paladin. Priest? No issues. But a paladin? At least 1 dead person, guaranteed.

Having said that, healing someone with beacon (in this case, it was me) should be enough to gain a fair amount of holy power. I also specced into Veneration, which means that my Flash of Light, Holy Light and Judgement crits reset the cooldown on Hammer of Wrath and allow it to be used regardless of the health of the mob, and Hammer of Wrath generates 1 Holy Power. I see what they’re trying to do (bearing in mind I’ve missed all of Shadowlands), in that they want paladins in melee. And, quite frankly, fuck that noise. I like standing way the hell in the back. If people like standing in melee, go ahead. I’ll just stand over here.

Also, the holy paladin mastery changed?!? It’s now “Increases healing done by up to X%, based on the proximity of your target.” Obviously, this means if you’re tank healing, you want to be in melee. Again, no thank you. I haven’t done any testing on this, but it’ll be interesting to investigate going forward. In the meantime, I’ve done some running around with the paladin during the invasions and I’m feeling okay with most of my toolkit.

Right, so my plans for Dragonflight include making a ridiculous amount of gold, particularly with Inscription, but also with the profession equipment. Between Leatherworking and Blacksmithing, I have 16 different profession thingies I can make. Then I have Engineering for another 7, JC for another 4 and Inscription for another 3. So I think I’ve got them all covered.

I’m super looking forward to more complexity regarding professions (note to self: remember this when you’re pissed off that you don’t have enough profession knowledge at some point), and am so glad that it’s going to be more interesting than going broke trying to eke out the last five points of your profession. (Having just done that in Wrath, I can’t say I was looking forward to it.)

So, what are you looking forward to in Dragonflight? Anyone healing with a dracthyr? Anyone also looking to corner markets? Tell me what you’re up to!

Raiding as a Holy Paladin in Classic

Kurn / / classic, healing, paladins, raiding

Yesterday’s post was about dungeon healing as a holy paladin in Classic. Today, we talk about raiding.

The major difference here is that you are not the sole person healing and responsible for everyone’s health. You have like, 10+ other healers with you for a 40-man raid, and probably at least 4 other people with you for a 20-man raid.

More, you are almost certainly not the only paladin!

As such, the big change here is one of coordination, as well as a subtle shift of responsibility.

Blessing Organization

PallyPower was the gold standard for blessings, back in the day. This allowed you to easily bless everyone appropriately, in coordination with other paladins in the raid, and also kept timers for those buffs. But PallyPower is: a) defunct, b) not going to work anyway because you didn’t have to target people directly to cast on them.

As such, barring any new plugins (please do let me know if any exist!), you’ll have to go old-school on this.

The low-tech way is to write down which class gets which of your buffs. Then buff yourself first and then buff your way down the list of druids, hunters, mages, priests, rogues, warlocks and warriors, as paladins have already been buffed when you buffed yourself. By buffing yourself first, you have a visible timer. When your buff is running out, that’s a great time to rebuff everyone.

The higher-tech way is to use your raid frames to show you the buffs. Whether you use the in-game frames or something like Grid, you can probably figure out how to get them to display. For myself, I’m thinking of giving a yellow border to people who have my buff, but that’ll be something I’ll explore in the future, assuming an addon doesn’t come out before then.

As to who should buff what in a raid situation: make sure if anyone has an improved buff or otherwise talented blessing that they’re casting that one. You have someone who has improved wisdom? Great, they cast that across the raid. Someone with improved might? Same. Someone with kings? Perfect, they cast that on everyone. Let the people with unimproved talents cast Salvation. I definitely suggest you have a paladin channel for pallies to organize themselves here.

What about Blessing of Light?

In a raid situation, most of your paladins are probably going to be healing. That’s sort of what paladins do in raids in this era we’re revisiting. That doesn’t mean you can’t have a prot pally as an off-tank, it doesn’t mean you can’t have a ret pally doing some damage, but, by and large, pallies are used to heal. So if you have a lot of pallies healing, yes, by all means, throw Blessing of Light on the raid, if you’ve got Salvation, Kings, Might and Wisdom covered. Whoever’s blessing Salvation can be the one to throw Light on the tanks at the very least.

Healing Organization

A good rule of thumb is one healer per group and 2-3 healers for the main tank and, if you can spare it, a couple tanks for the off-tank. This depends on the fight, of course. We always liked to have a variety of healers on the main tank — so a priest, a druid and a paladin. You had the priest with the nice, sweet Greater Heals, the druid with Rejuvenation and Regrowth spam, while the paladin would cast Flash of Light pretty much non-stop. Repeat this setup as possible for any off-tanks.

Additionally, there are lots of things to dispel in raids, so it’s a good idea to organize whole cleanses what group. Paladins can dispel all but curses with one click, so even if you have DPS paladins, assign them to a group to dispel so that the priests in the raid can keep healing. Try not to make the MT’s priest do too much dispelling. It’s a lot easier for a paladin to dispel and resume Flash of Light spam.

Speaking of dispelling, mages and druids are the only ones who can remove curses, so yes, even mages are going to need to decurse. Assign each mage or druid a group to decurse and have a backup plan for the main tank’s group in case someone eats it unexpectedly and then your main tank has two curses, a magic effect and a poison on them. ;)

Mana Management

Classic brings with it the concept of multiple potions and such while in combat. That means you can drink a mana potion every two minutes while in combat. But did you know that there are other things that can grant you mana?

  • Dark Rune: This non-bind-on-pickup item drops in Scholomance and is super useful for gaining a bit of mana while your potions are on cooldown. It shares a cooldown with healthstones, but not potions. Also, since there are no soulwells, you probably won’t even have a healthstone, so this shouldn’t be an issue.
  • Demonic Rune: This is a BOP item that drops off of virtually any demon, so it’s much easier to acquire than a Dark Rune, even though it’s BOP. While it basically does the same thing as a Dark Rune, the main difference is that a Demonic Rune can crit when it takes your health away. As such, always be aware of your health when you take it. A badly-timed use of a Demonic Rune that crits can absolutely kill you. That said, it’s shadow damage, so you might want to make sure you have Shadow Resist Aura up.

 

Of course, there are also other raid consumables. We’re talking Flask of Distilled Wisdom, Mageblood Potion and Nightfin Soup. These are pretty much the basics for a holy paladin. Also, load up on those Major Mana Potions.

There’s also downranking, but I’ll talk more about that in another post. Essentially, it’s the concept of using less-than-max-rank spells on purpose for the purpose of saving mana, particularly in periods of low raid damage. I’ll need to play around with things once I get to a decent level, but in some situations it’s perfectly okay to use, say, Rank 4 of Holy Light for only 190 mana instead of Rank 9 of Holy Light for 660 mana if you just need a small heal of 400-500 health, rather than 1600-2000 health. This really depends on your gear, though. At base levels, Rank 4 of Holy Light is equivalent to (and slightly more expensive than) max-rank Flash of Light. But if you have a lot of +healing… You can see where I’m going with this. In some cases, based on gear, you can do a lot of effective healing with lower ranks of spells.

The Five-Second Rule

Your mana doesn’t regen in combat (outside of any buffs that grant mp5, like Blessing of Wisdom) unless you haven’t spent mana for a full five seconds. One reason a lower Holy Light rank would be more useful than a max-rank Flash of Light is you can more easily interrupt a 2.5s cast than a 1.5s cast. So if your heal is no longer needed, you can hit escape or just move to prevent the cast from going through. This can enable you to hit the five seconds required to allow in-combat mana regeneration. Even a tick or two is helpful on some fights or if you’re a bit undergeared.

Aura Management

If you have at least three paladins, you want a resist aura, plus improved Devotion Aura, plus Concentration Aura and then you’re pretty much good. If you don’t need a resist aura, or there’s a large pack of mobs the tanks need to hold on to, toss up Ret aura.

Seal Management

Pick a seal to judge. Always judge that seal in the raid. You may want to double-up on wisdom and light to ensure that these are always being cast.

Divine Intervention Management

Don’t have all the pallies in your raid cast DI on the same wipe. With an hour-long cooldown, it’s best to spread out Divine Intervention. Decide who uses it in a rotation and make sure you’re clear on it before each pull. If you die before you can cast DI, call it out for the next person. This isn’t a huge deal, but if you’re deep inside Molten Core, you definitely do not want to have to run back, so DIing someone (preferably a priest or another paladin), is a good time-saver. Just don’t use all of them on the same wipe!

Questions? Bueller?

Well, that does it for this guide on how to raid as a holy paladin in Classic! Am I missing anything? Do you have any specific questions? Let me know in the comments below!