The Newcomers Healing Paladin Guide.
(For Patch 3.0.8)

This will be a brief overview of Stats, Abilities, PvE specs and some general tips for new heal paladins. I will try and keep this updated. A small note in advance: This is my first Guide and im sorry if i missed something out. feel free to point that out and I will try and change it as soon as possible.

Items and stats:

Items: You can use anything you want. Most of the leather and cloth has spirit on it so its will not be of much use. The mail has 1:1 healings stats, so you can pick that up if there is no healing shaman in the raid.

General equipment Guideline

Enchants:
Head: Dalaran Faction
Shoulders: Sons of Hodir
Chest: 10 stats
Braces: 30 spell
Hands: 28 spell
Belt: Belt buckle
Pants: 50 spell 30 stam
Boots: Icewalker

Until you have 20K mana: Socket Int gems and pick up the gem bonus.
Red: spell/int
Yellow: Int
Blue: Int/mana reg

After you get past the 20k mana unbuffed
Red: Spell
Yellow: Haste
Blue: Haste/manareg

Stats:

Int: Is v. important at entry levels as you will as the majority of you mana reg. will come from Divine Plea. The stat gives you a good balance between spell, crit and mana reg. This stat starts losing in value after you reach around 20k mana, as you won’t need the extra mana reg from Divine Plea and the spell and crit benefits are lower then if you get the respective stats.

Stam: Not very interesting in Pve environment, as this value will increase enough with gear improvement.

Spirit: Useless! Don’t ever take an item with spirit unless it provides an amazing upgrade spell power wise.

Spell power: The bread and butter of your heals. This will increase as your gear improves. At the beginning try and get a good weapon as this will most likely boost your spell power the most.
Mana per 5 sek: After the implementation of Replenishment in WotLK this has become very useless. It eats up too many item points and the benefits are minimal. Try and stay away from items with mana reg as much as possible. Again take them only if the spell upgrade is substantial.

Crit rating: An avg. stat. Crits do 50% more healing and cost 60% less mana. If you managed to dodge the crappy mana reg items you will probably have a lot, as most of the plate and mail heal items have either mana reg or crit/haste on them.

Haste: Speed is essential. The faster your casts the higher you HpS. Start stacking this as soon as you get past the 20k mana unbuffed.

Abilities:

Judgment of light: nice passive healing. Atm gets overbuffed by the retri/tankadin, because its stacks better with AP the SP. Use it to keep up the 15% haste proc.

Flash of Light: This spell is no longer a lot faster then HolyLight, but the mana cost and heal output are a lot lower. Use this for absolute low mana situation or little incoming raid dmg.

Holy Light: Bread and Butter of your healing. With Lights grace (0.5sek), JotP (15% haste) and your friendly shaman haste totem (5%) and retri aura (3%) your holy light will be around 1.5ish. This means you get a lot of HpS. In most situations it really doesn’t matter if the majority of the holy light healing goes into overhealing as long as the glyph healing heals the raid up. The most important thing to keep in mind is that a lot of speed for the HL comes from procs. The JotP is simple to keep up, as it lasts for 1 min. The Lights Grace can expire at times, when there is not raid dmg. Here it is important to point out that a full overheal HL is worth wasting just to keep the haste proc up.

Holy Shock: Has been improved, but is more of a PvP ability, as at lower gear levels this spell cost too much and with higher gear levels it simply cant keep up with HL as it only benefits from about half the spell bonus HL does. HS triggers a GCD so it has a hidden cast time of a GDC, if you are chain casting. Seeing as holy shock heals 1.5 times a flash of light, but it costs about 5 times as much, its not really something to use in static pve encounters. Its nice to pop it when you are moving, but even in extreme moving situations like Heigan you can still fire a HL if you have persuit of justice and speed procs up.

For max Heal use the following combination: Divine Favor: Holy Light, Holyshock on the end of the holy light, then cast another Holy Light. If done right the 1st holy light and the holy shock eill both crit. Then you get the 1sec reduction on your 2nd holy light.

Beacon of Light: A general misconception is that you should place this on the tank, while you heal other targets. The largest problem with this is that BoL only translates EFFECTIVE healing, that means if you are not effectively healing dmg you are not healing the tank. In addition to that it only has 40 yard range, which can be at times too little. In raids I find it useful to buff myself with BoL. This ensures that I don’t die, unless I get instagibed by some boss ability. If im healing something I can withstand most aoe dmg situations, where I would have to move Ie Saphirons blizzard.

Sacred shield: Again more of a PvP ability as the absorbed dmg is not a lot. The crit addition to FoL is good on paper, but its only active as long as the absorbing shield is up, which if place on the tank is not v. long, in addition to that you are not using FoL that much in PvE.

Avenging wrath:
Pro: you put out an insane amount of HpS when this is Up.
Con: Triggers a GDC so you only get 14 sek effective increased healing, its triggers a 30 sek CD on you bubble aka you cant use bubble to get yourself out of crappy situations :D. The general idea is that I you can use it everywhere where you don’t need the bubble, unfortunately does fights don’t rly need the extra hps :(.

Divine Plea: Keep this on cool down on healing intensive fights. The healing nerf it gives is rly something you need to take, it’s a lot worse if you run out of mana after chain casting 10 HL.

Divine Illumination: The general idea was to use this for mana intensive healing periods, the problem with that was that a lot of people find it very hard to time this effectively, as it only lasts 15 seks. My tip is pop it early then by the time you get to 20% mana or so you will have it ready . It will get you to your next devine plea and keep you from going oom.

Lay on Hands: Talented should be used for times when a boss enrages or just brings out sick dps on your tank. Quite useless if your running a feral tank as the arm buff is very small. It has a 16 min CD so you can use It a lot more now. General use it to give a last second save to your tank or simply the arm buff. A more unorthodox use of it is to give it to one of your oom healers, which need that extra bit of mana.

Specs:
51/0/21. Pick up the 8% crit and the running speed from the ret tree
51/5/15 Only if you don’t have a ret in your raid to buff kings. Drop the speed and 3% crit

General Healing tips:
1. Stay alive. Its important to understand that a dead healer isn’t healing.
2. Know how to prioritize. Allways heal the tank first, then the healers, then the supporter classes, then the pure dps.
3. Know where everybody is in your raid frame. Helps a lot with point 2
4. The most important one of all: Know your encounters. Know who will get dmg and how much it will be, so that you don’t get caught by surprise. This will help you with all of the above.

I hope this helps players new to the healing paladin. Feel free to ask questions and stuff :D

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