Improved Judgements… Why?

When speaking of PVE content, one of the typical holy paladin specs is 51/5/15. Another is 51/0/20. And another is 53/0/18.

All three of these specs bring you deep into the Retribution tree to pick up Conviction (15 points) and then perhaps Sanctity of Battle (3 points).

What cheeses me off is the idiot holy paladins who pick 2/2 Improved Judgements over 2/2 Improved Blessing of Might as they spec down into the Ret tree.

Why? Honestly, why on earth would you ever pick something that lowers your Judgement cooldown?

There’s one reason I could possibly see for PVE content: do more DPS.

What the hell? You’re a holy paladin. You heal people. Your DPS is poor at best. Judgements of the Pure lasts a minute, not 8 seconds. Your global cooldowns should not be used in order to judge more often than is necessary to either:

a) Keep your judgement up (which is ~20 seconds)

b) Keep Judgements of the Pure up (which is 1 minute)

I’m lucky in that I’m rarely a paladin who must judge. We have a prot paladin and a ret paladin, both of whom are regular raiders, and I’m not always the only holy paladin in a raid, so JoL and JoW are both generally up and I don’t absolutely need to judge, most of the time, unless I want to keep Judgements of the Pure up.

You may not be as fortunate as I am, but there’s still very little excuse to lower that Judgement cooldown for any PVE reason whatsoever.

But, you may argue, what if we always have a ret paladin with improved might?

So what if you do? What if he or she is out of town for a week? Do you think your melee or raid leaders will be okay with crappy might? Is your raid really going to rely on Battle Shout? Hah!

So Improved Might wins over Improved Judgements and don’t get me started on Heart of the Crusader. That’s win, too, even if you have an elemental shaman. They can die, you know, and there goes 3% crit, unless you keep up Heart of the Crusader when you judge.  Or maybe they’re out of range, like on Thorim. I judge Light in the tunnel on every mob for the additional healing (which won’t interfere with anyone else’s judgements, as I’m the only paladin in there) and for the crit buff, and I’m especially careful to do it when we don’t have an elemental shaman in the tunnel with us. It helps us get through the tunnel faster and who knows when that ten seconds we shaved off will be the time we need to get to Thorim before Sif leaves?

So, TL;DR version:

– Improved Judgements for PVE holy paladins = bad

– Improved Might for PVE holy paladins = good if you’re going for Conviction or anything else deep into the ret tree

– Heart of the Crusader for PVE holy paladins = good, just like Improved Might