Category: paladins

Judging, Divinity and an Experiment

Kurn / / general, guide, healing, paladins, raiding, ramblings

I won’t link to it, because I think it’s a crappy article, but the WoW.com holy paladin writer, Chase Christian, is claiming that Divinity affects the healing done by a paladin’s Judgement of Light. My first thought was “that’s BS” followed quickly by “… right?”.

I just spent 95g, respeccing my prot spec to holy and then back to prot to examine this situation.

At first, I thought I could try it out with the same holy gear and just switch from holy to prot and judge light on a training dummy and see what happened.

What happened made no sense whatsoever. One of the specs I was in got 3.4% more healing from JoL. That didn’t make any sense to me, so I went and respecced. I mean, I should be getting 10% more, not something weird like 3.4%, right?

With identical 54/17/0 builds, except getting Divine Strength instead of Divinity, I ended up with:

Divinity: 454 per JoL

No Divinity: 412 per JoL

What does that mean? That means that Divinity is granting me 5% extra healing because the judgement is mine and it’s granting me 5% extra healing because I’m receiving the healing. I have 20,564 health unbuffed, so 2% of that health is about 412. Another 10% of that 412 is about 454.

So that works and means that Mr. Christian’s claim that paladins with Divinity ought to judge light exclusively makes sense, right?

Wrong.

My brother’s hunter has 21,404 health unbuffed.

I had the hunter shoot up a training dummy in IF and I judged light in the spec without Divinity in it.

My brother was getting 428 health back. That’s 2% of his health. That seems to work fine.

With Divinity, my JoL should, then, heal my brother’s hunter for an additional 21.40 (5% extra), or about 450 health per proc.

And still, my brother’s hunter was getting 428 health back per proc.

It appears to me that Divinity and Judgement of Light give the JUDGING paladin 10% extra healing, but it honestly doesn’t affect anyone else, except possibly other paladins with Divinity.

I know! I know! It doesn’t make sense! Why would you be awarded the 10% bonus with Divinity and not have that extra 5% affect others? Before you ask, no, it’s not my glyphs. While I had my prot glyphs in on the secondary non-Divinity spec, none of my glyphs affect my JoL or extra healing in any way. I wasn’t using Glyph of Seal of Light or anything.

But no matter what I did, 428 was what my brother’s procs of JoL were hitting for. So I must conclude that my initial “that’s BS!” call stands. Of course, if anyone out there has screenshots or a combat log parse to show otherwise, I’m happy to revise my assessment. :)

If there’s another paladin in my raid group, by the way, I almost always judge wisdom. Why? Because warriors, rogues and death knights have no use for mana and ret pallies, hunters and enhancement shammies have little need for the regen and the healers generally will not benefit from it, as they’re not attacking the boss. That means that if I don’t refresh my judgement three times a minute, it’s not a big deal. It means that only elemental shammies, mages, warlocks, moonkins and shadow priests will really be adversely affected if I can’t find a global to judge. Whereas any other kind of paladin, a retribution or protection paladin, will be judging on cooldown, which is WAY more than I am, which leads to WAY more uptime on their judgement.

The judgement that should, IMHO, have priority, is Light, because EVERYONE attacking the boss has a health bar and could potentially benefit from it.

So basically, Kurn, you’re saying that you fail at judging.

:P I’m saying that, as a healer, keeping our judgement up is not going to be our first priority and sometimes it’ll fall off. Sorry, but if my tank is taking 30k melee attacks, it’s not always easy to find a place to judge often enough to keep up Judgements of the Pure, much less my judgement debuff.

As an added note, I’m finding that the best time to judge on Sindragosa is when I get Instability and again when I want to drop my 4-5 stacks of it.

Holy How-To #3 – Addons and Macros and Keybinds, Oh My!

Kurn / / guide, holy how-to (wrath), paladins

Welcome to my Holy How-To for PVE Paladins. This is the third of what I hope to be a great many posts aimed at helping holy paladins succeed at PVE content. I will focus primarily on max-level talent specs, glyphs, enchants, gems and the like, including tools, tips and tricks that I use, but I hope to touch on levelling content and advice as well.

Today’s post/novel is about the various addons, macros and keybinds that will aid you in your quest to become an uber-leet holy PVE paladin. They’re not, of course, strictly necessary in order to heal. You can heal just fine using the Blizzard default UI. However, and let’s be fair here, sometimes the default UI doesn’t show us what we need to see or maybe sometimes it’s sort of clunky. So today, I’ll discuss not only the addons, macros and keybinds that I personally use (and have used), but will offer up some other popular and useful addons or macros. (Edited to add Power Auras Classic!)

Continue reading “Holy How-To #3 – Addons and Macros and Keybinds, Oh My!”

Tank healing vs. Single-target healing

Kurn / / healing, icecrown citadel, paladins, raiding

So, you all remember my rant about how the new WoW.com holy paladin columnist insists that paladins are tank healers, right? Where I was saying that no, we’re single-target healers and that tank healing is a subset of single-target healing?

Great post here at Divine Plea that tells us that we’re single-target healers.

Last night, my guild worked on Sindragosa. It was a challenging fight for a variety of reasons (my RL friend couldn’t make it due to RL issues, so we were without the healing lead and our best healer) and it was specifically challenging for me because I got beaned by Blistering Cold a few times, but having prepared myself for the fight, I had already decided to Beacon whichever tank was tanking so I could help out on the raid if needed. Why? Because although I don’t enjoy raid healing very much, it’s the best use of my beacon in the situation. Everyone is taking constant AOE frost damage, people are randomly taking melee or caster debuff damage, so there’s a LOT of raid damage going on. And, due to the placement of the tank vs. the melee, there’s not a lot of opportunity for Glyph of Holy Light to see much action.

So I did a fair amount of raid healing with my beacon on the tank. I really do much prefer to beacon the OT and heal the MT, or vice-versa, just because that way, it leaves me able to really focus on my one target, and I LIKE that. I don’t think paladin healing is boring like that. Some people do and really relish the idea of beaconing their tank and raid healing the way I did on Sindragosa last night and that’s cool. There are certainly a lot of fights where my preferred use of Beacon is how we do it in my guild and there are a few fights where we switch it up a bit.

Another example is Rotface. What we had done for our first few kills (and then refined it a bit, but now that I’m the only holy paladin in the guild, we may revert) is have me beacon the MT and heal the crap out of the people with the infection. I HAVE to drop huge heals on them because of the healing debuff on them, and those all get transferred to the tank, so it works nicely. Of course, there will be another healer on the MT specifically, but it works out okay.

Anyways, I just wanted to point out that post at Divine Plea, which I stumbled across due to Miss Medicina’s post.

Uh, wow.

Kurn / / paladins, raiding, ramblings

So the other holy paladin didn’t show up tonight. Didn’t post or anything.

My RL friend/healing lead pointed out a bit later that he’s no longer in the guild. With no gquit notation in the guild log, it looks like he ninja transferred.

Not that I’ll miss HIM particularly much… but I need a pally buddy. :(

Quick update.

Kurn / / druids, facepalm, general, healing, lfg, paladins, raiding, ramblings

First of all, I AM working on my third Holy How-To post. It’s long. There are many screenshots and links. But I am definitely working on it!

Secondly, I’ve seen some serious fail lately. The latest morons:

– An 80 fury warrior, specced with Titan’s Grip… using one 2H weapon. And nothing else in his other hand. Sadly, I’ve forgotten his name.

– Holymeatbag, an 80 holy paladin, specced 68/3/0 and STILL managed to miss out maxing out Holy Power (3/5) and Holy Guidance (1/5). I may be a little squishy yet, but dude wasn’t keeping Beacon on anyone or shielding me or anything of the sort in Heroic TOC. As such, I died on Paletress. And if I hadn’t used my abundance of cooldowns (my trinket for extra dodge, a healthstone, a healing potion, Survival Instincts, Lifeblood, Frenzied Regeneration and Barkskin!), I would have died again after the wipe. I got H TOC again as a random later in the evening and was healed just fine by the resto shammy. Highly recommend you all ignore this guy.

In positive news, for once, my guild got 25-man Blood Queen Lana’thel on Monday night. HIGHLY recommend that the RL get and use the following mod:

BloodQueen at WoWInterface

We also one-shotted Valithria and, although I dropped my stacks once, it was only once! I got a lot better at making sure I got a stack just before the portal phase ended.

In news with my druid/my brother’s hunter/our friend’s DK…

My druid has 2/5 T9 resto but still has better feral gear, haha. My brother’s hunter is practically as well-geared as Kurn is, which depresses me to no end. He’s got 4/5 T9 (232), the Crusader’s Dragonscale Breastplate and Bracers (thanks to me), the True-aim Rifle out of H TOC, the staff from regular FoS, a Darkmoon Card: Greatness (90 agi, obviously) that I made for him, the 245 ilvl badge ring… Seriously. It makes me sad. Especially because tomorrow, he’ll be giving me a primordial saronite and I’ll craft him Rock-Steady Treads. :(

Our DK buddy has 1/5 T9 (shoulders!) and a 245 sigil, which he was very happy to get, haha. His gear is still pretty low, but he’s at 540 defense and 22k health unbuffed. With some consumables and the random dungeon buff, he gets about 30-31k buffed. His dodge and parry are still pretty low, but I imagine that’ll improve as he gets his other tier pieces.

I’m getting a lot of practice on the druid, both healing and tanking. My Swipe is actually holding aggro and my mana pool and regen are sustaining me fairly well, to the point where I rarely need to drink and can even keep innervating my brother’s hunter.

I was thinking about why I like my druid, earlier tonight. I mean, it’s a tree and it’s a bear. I fit the two most sought-after roles in the game and I’m not horrible at them. I think the utility is really what I enjoy about the toon. I can tank and heal on Madrana too, of course, but I think I really enjoy bear tanking as compared to pally tanking. I think I prefer pally healing to druid healing, but there’s a certain elegance to druid healing that’s lacking on the paladin. I can brute force heal darn near anything on my pally. But I actually have to make decisions on my druid while healing that will have repercussions over the next few seconds, as the health builds up slowly.

That’s completely opposed to pally healing, where I strive to keep everyone topped off at all times, rather than letting Wild Growth heal most people up, because I don’t have much in the way of “set-it-and-forget-it” heals on the pally. I guess that druid healing challenges me a bit more than paladin healing in terms of healing intelligently. Pally healing is characterized for me by long periods of casting the same spell, followed by frantic button mashing to get buffs up, then more of the same.

Anyways. I do still have lots to say about pally stuff, so stay tuned for Holy How-To number 3. :)

… and one day, ICC raid strats. :P

The Light and How to Swing It — Kurn's Issues, Part 2

Kurn / / facepalm, healing, paladins, ramblings

Welcome to Part 2 of my issues with the current holy edition of The Light and How to Swing It, a column written by Chase Christian at WoW.com. This post will focus primarily on the three articles written thus far by Mr. Christian as well as expound on the reasons why I believe his lack of experience as a holy paladin will be detrimental to the holy paladin community as a whole. If you’d like to read the post I wrote detailing his lack of experience and the apparent false justification Mr. Adam Holisky offered to me regarding Mr. Christian’s appointment to the column, you can do so here.

Continue reading “The Light and How to Swing It — Kurn's Issues, Part 2”

The Light and How to Swing It — Kurn's Issues, Part 1

Kurn / / facepalm, healing, paladins, ramblings

Okay. I am not *generally* a bitch. But, sometimes, when properly motivated, I can be very, very good at being a bitch.

In this post, I will discuss the fact that Mr. Chase Christian, better known as the  rogue columnist at WoW.com, got the position of the Holy Paladin columnist as well. Further, I will explain how I feel that the justification used to placate me when I was intially outraged appears to be false.

Continue reading “The Light and How to Swing It — Kurn's Issues, Part 1”

Thinking about spellpower.

Kurn / / healing, icecrown citadel, paladins, raiding, ramblings

I am pretty much a die-hard Holy Light spammer. As such, I stack intellect. I’m happy with my 42k mana pool in raids.

But it means virtually nothing  on the Dreamwalker fight.

So, I’m thinking of pulling out some old gear (and getting the 251 versions of my pants and gloves, which I don’t have yet) and gemming/enchanting entirely for spellpower.

Raid-buffed, I would go from 2883 spellpower to 3205, assuming chardev.org is right. That’s a difference of 322 spellpower. I’d also drop 8000 mana… but regen is not an issue on that fight. And since the “debuff”, Emerald Vigor, means 10% more healing for each stack on you, wouldn’t that mean that every point of spellpower makes a HUGE difference? I’d keep eating haste food, lest I drop below the 1s GCD with JotP up, but I’d flask for spellpower, gem and enchant for spellpower, even using the Ember Skyflare meta for 25 spellpower and 2% intellect, instead of old faithful, the Insightful Earthsiege Diamod (21 int, 600 mana back proc).

Really, it would only require spending badges I should probably spend anyways (to get 4 of my 5 T10 pieces, if only so I can upgrade them to the 264/277 versions later) and some cash to get a bunch of Cardinal Rubies.

I’d need 10 Rubies, 3 Dragon’s Eyes, 1 new meta gem, 1 new helm enchant (+crit instead of +mp5), 1 new shoulder enchant (+crit instead of +mp5), 1 30 spellpower enchant to wrists, 1 28 spellpower enchant to gloves, 1 new spellthread for my pants… ooh, and maybe Purified Lunar Dust, too, which would bump me to 3358 spellpower. Of course, I don’t have the badges for new pants AND new gloves AND a crappy trinket I will never use except on Dreamwalker.

Hm. Maybe I’ll go do a VOA 10 on Madrana and pray T10 holy pants drop, eh? ;D

I’m not sure I’m going to do this, but at least I know I CAN do it and at least I know what it would take in order to do it.

Anyone have thoughts?

Kurn's Tale of the Level 75 Fail Paladin

Kurn / / facepalm, lfg, paladins, ramblings

As you may or may not be aware, I’ve been levelling my druid with my brother (and his hunter) and my buddy Majik (and his DK). I’m a bear/tree depending on my spec, but because Majik’s been tanking damn near everything, I’m usually healing (and using my innervate on my brother, haha!).

Last week, before I got seriously sick with the plague, Majik and I ran a Drak’Tharon Keep.

In the group: the two of us plus a mage, a shadow priest and a retribution paladin.

I don’t normally do this, because it’s just plain mean, but the fail is on-going even a week later, so I’m going to name the paladin who is the failest pally in all the world.

His name is Furtor. I’ll link his armory in a sec. But first, I took some screenshots of Furtor’s gear and such.

He was, at the time, level 75.

Way to not place your talents, buddy. That he has 59 points in ret is probably the least bad thing about him. How is that possible? Check out some of his gear.

“Wait, Kurn!” you say. “Those aren’t terrible bracers. Those are actually okay.”

Yes. You’re right. Too bad he REPLACED THEM with the Darkweb Bindings he won on the run.

And, for the grand finale…

Just inspecting him made me want to cry. And then I armoried him. 1 each in Mining and JC. 2 major glyphs that suck and 0 minor glyphs. The dude was pulling 700 DPS at most at any point in time, compared to the mage and the shadow priest, who were around his level, pulling 1200-1400 DPS. Not that numbers are everything, but in this case? They were a GREAT indication of the level of nubness going on with Furtor. He is, in all respects, an amazing example of how NOT to be a paladin… particularly because his armory now shows him in much the same gear but he’s exchanged his crappy 2H of Intellect for a 1H melee sword and a spellpower shield.

Anyways, I hope to have another Holy How-To post coming up this weekend or Monday and I definitely have another tale of what I consider to be paladin failure, which I’ll share Saturday or Sunday.

Valithria Dreamwalker

Kurn / / healers, healing, icecrown citadel, paladins, raiding, ramblings

Well, I’m back to raiding. I took Sunday night and Monday night off, then showed up on Wednesday and was feeling okay, if a little worn out. I was feeling much better on Thursday when the raid began, though. We raided for 3 full hours, killing the blood princes and then cleared to Dreamwalker (killing a sort of a miniboss in there? I got an extra Emblem of Frost from some damn mob).

I was both totally prepared and not remotely prepared for the Valithria Dreamwalker fight.

Under the Totally Prepared umbrella, we have:

– Glyph of Seal of Light (instead of my typical Glyph of Seal of Wisdom – although I brought an extra one of those, too, obviously, to reglyph back to my regularly scheduled awesomeness)

– Libram of Tolerance (instead of my typical Libram of Renewal, although I’m thinking of picking up the ilvl 226 Libram of the Resolute)

Under the Totally NOT Prepared umbrella, we have:

– no spellpower flasks or elixirs

– bad flying coordination inside the portals to stack the buff effectively

– bad timing inside the portals to ensure the buff wouldn’t fall off between portals

– had no idea how freaking often the damn portals SPAWN

– had no idea what the best way to TARGET the stupid dragon was

I realized on my first attempt (the guild has already done Dreamwalker on both 10/25, but I missed out on the 25 due to being sick and the 10 by virtue of being sick and hating 10s) that targetting the dragon was going to be a problem.

“… target the dragon with your mouse, Kurn, then spam Holy Light. WTF.”

I know. I did that for my first attempt. It was very poor. I was trying to judge mobs to keep Judgements of the Pure up (ahahahaha, forget THAT nonsense in the freaking chaos) and all the time I lost in switching targets and also in switching targets back to Dreamwalker meant I was getting frustrated as crap.

“So… use a focus, Kurn. Geez, this isn’t rocket science.”

Well, that’s exactly what I did on my second attempt. (We had 9 wipes before getting her down… up?? on the 10th.) Except that HEY, focus targets that you’re focused on in one phased area VANISH if they’re not targettable in another phase!

So not only is Dreamwalker not sitting there on my Grid, but the focus mechanic is basically useless to me, right?

Third attempt, I made a macro.

/focus Valithria Dreamwalker

Then I edited my Clique frames to include my ShadowedUF Focus frame (I use ShadowedUF) as well as my Grid frames. So all my happy Clique bindings now worked on my focus frame. I dropped my macro someplace useful on my bars and would hit that as soon as I came out of every portal phase and went back to my regular Holy Light bombing.

At that point, having gotten the mechanics of healing the great damn dragon in front of me down properly, I turned my attention to not sucking at getting green orbs.

The most stacks I had at any point was about 16, and that was twice in all of our attempts. In other words, I FAIL REAL GUD. I was getting better at getting a quick rebuff once I was back inside the portals, but if I didn’t have at LEAST 3 seconds left on the buff before zoning back into the portal, I was screwed.

And, on our final (successful) attempt of the night (yes, Apotheosis, the Infamous Last Attempt is not just a phenomenon that happens to us!), some dick ninjaed my portal from me at one point, leaving me to deal with this thing called “regular mana regen” for a full portal phase. Ugh!

I’m seriously considering buying the 251 level versions of two more pieces of tier and gemming/enchanting them with spellpower, along with chunks of T9 and other old gear, so that I basically have a spellpower set specifically for Dreamwalker. I’m going to have to sit down with my gear in my bank and figure out if that’s at all possible, but I’m thinking that it can’t be a bad thing to try to boost my spellpower for that fight.

Oh, the best part about the Dreamwalker fight? 9% overhealing.

I don’t remember the last time I saw that number. Ever.