Pally healing

Ok so this is an in depth guide to pally healing across the board spanning from the most basic to highly complex mechanics of our classes healing and healing in general (for any class).


** Basic Advice **


* You probably already do, but make sure u have your heals (HL FoL) hotkeyed so that u just select the person u want to heal and then click say "3" or "4" to heal them with your choice of HL or FoL. My HL is bound to the number 3 and FoL number 4 just above my movement keys so everything i need to use on my keyboard is right there. Doing this saves u the time of moving ur mouse around the screen too much and wasting a huge amount of healing time and also overhealing because the person would usually already get a heal before you get yours off.



* Be AGGRESSIVE with your healing!!! As soon as you see someone in need of healing or u predict someone is about to take damage get a heal casting on them. For pallys, Holy Light IS YOUR FRIEND! USE IT. Dont just stand around spamming FoL cause we all know we can spam that forever without falling below 99% mana. When someone needs more than a 2k heal give them a HL. Our class is built around spell crit mana return and HL benefits from a much higher crit rate than FoL. Dont be scared to use your whole mana pool, Thats what its there for and your not being an effective healer if you never fall below 40% mana. If your having problems with running oom i will cover mana regen a little later.



* Learn to use your trinkets! There are many great healer trinkets out there and im sure most of u have decent ones. For pallys those Lower City prayer books are great they have a short cooldown and the mana reduction is quite a decent % of our FoL's base mana cost. The trinket from Aran is also very nice, great Int on it giving a pally more healing more mana and almost a full half % crit that equates into extra regen with the added use on it. Keeping both of these (or any) trinkets ON COOLDOWN is very important. Working them into your healing rotation is paramount for added regen extra longevity and essentially a much greater healing potential. If you find u just cant remember in the height of battle to keep using them then you can simply solve it by using some simple macros to do it for you. Here is an example, this macro with attempt to use BOTH of your trinkets every time you go to cast your FoL, assuming spam casting, this will effectively use your trinkets the second they come off cooldown every time they come off cooldown.

#showtooltip Flash of Light(Rank 7)
/use 13
/use 14
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
/cast Flash of Light(Rank 7)

The same thing can be done with Holy Light just fill in the relevant command lines with Holy Light(Rank 11) instead and of course any rank can be macro’d for effective down ranking by simply changing the rank in the macro. More complex macros will be covered later on.



* Use the right gear for each different fight. There is no one healing set that will be sufficient for all healing situations. You should ALL have many items in your bags at all times ready to switch out for any given fight. Some boss fights require you to gimp your healing and regen to acquire a certain amount of HP. Some boss fights are a huge strain for healers and a maximum + heal set is needed. Yet other fights may have a massive duration requiring you to lose a substantial amount of +heal in place or mp/5 instead. ALL healers MUST have the ability to adapt to any one of these given examples at any time. You must be working on all of these sets, enchanting certain items for one set, re-socketing others for another set, maintaining a high quality standard on ALL your sets is absolutely necessary and required, not JUST your “main” set. It may seem like quite a big job to work on so many different sets but you will be justly rewarded when you find your healing potential becomes absolutely unaffected by any situation thrown at you.

** Advanced Technique **


* Mana conservation and regen is always a big concern in end game raiding. Paladins in particular have a highly complex set of abilities and static stats that contribute and compliment each other to help us reach our maximum continued healing potential. For us there are two main things that contribute to our conservation, like all healers + mp5 gear, but also spell crit. +mp5 is really quite self-explanatory but spell crit is uniquely effective for us because of our talent Illumination. Now assuming 5/5 Illumination, which every holy spec’d raiding pally would undoubtedly have, Anytime we crit with one of our heals we receive a static 60% mana return on the BASE mana cost of that spell. This sounds quite nice and is widely regarded as just that, “quite nice” but in fact when understood and used properly this talent is profoundly more vital and effective than just “nice” ill touch on that more later.



* Mp5 vs Crit. So which is better? Well this is a highly debated subject of many theorycrafters. There are really just to many variables to take into account when doing the sums here that the figures just get lost in detail. Personally I have found that a good balanced mix of both is best. In my main healing gear (obviously in my stam, max heal or max regen sets it changes) my mp5 sits at around 192-215mp5 (while casting) and my crit at about 22-24% (28-30% for HL) with healing pushing around 2295-2320 fully raid buffed. Now this balance of a good amount of crit and mp5 but not too much of either is what ive found to be my “comfort zone” for healing. This may vary from player to player depending on play styles etc but once you find your comfort zone you should try to keep them relative. For example if I gain an extra 15mp5 from an upgrade, ill then look to gain another 1% crit or so before I add any more mp/5 and visa versa.



* Healing Coefficient and what it means for us. The healing coefficient is the amount that one of your heals is affected and increased based on a % of your characters TOTAL +heal from gear and buffs AND the given spells base cast time. The coefficient is designed to balance spells and gear for all classes. Its there to make instant cast spells not become ridiculously overpowered, using the same logic to keep the balance of other spells with short cast times contrasted to those with longer cast times. For example, Assume a pally with +2000 healing, his FoL is only actually affected by say 400 of his +healing. So instead of healing for 1000, it now heals for 1400 instead of a theoretical 3000 based on his base heal + ALL of his +healing. Yet his HL is affected by 1400 of his total + heal. So his HL goes from healing for 5000 up to 6400 instead of the theoretical 7000. This difference is the amount some heals benefit than others is based solely on the healing coefficient rules imposed by blizzard. It works based on the cast time of each spell, so a faster spell FoL 1.5sec gets a lot less benefit from +heal than a HL 2.5 sec does. This because eventually the faster heals would become more effective than the longer heals that cost more mana, which really puts every class mechanic off balance. Hence the healing coefficient (this applies to all damage casters too with their + damage gear). Soooooo with all this in mind we can conclude that because pallys only have 2 healing spells and the one we use the MOST is a short 1.5 sec cast then more so than ANY other healing class we must maintain an extremely high lvl of +healing to stay competitive in progressive healing than other healers. We should ALWAYS be sporting the highest + heals of all healers in any raid because our heals are so vastly penalized by this rule. Any spell with a 4 sec cast time or more gets the full benefit of your +heal or +damage. Anything under that is effected by the coefficient (for all classes). So even our longest casting heal is still almost half the cast time of receiving full benefit from our heal gear. Moral here, ALWAYS work to maintain a massive +heal bonus. Pallys have the most complicated heal gear to itemize. We have 3 massive attributes that have to be focused on and its difficult (+heal/mp5/crit).



* Regen enchants. Obviously there are many + mp5 and crit chants out there and depending on what u need to improve on the choice as to what u put and where is urs. One enchant that isn’t used widely enough is the weapon enchant spellsurge. Now after all this talk about healing coefficient and maxing out +heal I hear u say why would I replace my +81 healing enchant is it really better than that and the answer for a paladin is in fact no. But (there is always a but) we can however get the best of both worlds. First ill explain the benefits of spellsurge (SS). SS when it procs gives 100 mana back to all members of your party over 10 seconds, now that doesn’t sound like a lot but it stacks. So if ur in a group of 5 healers all with SS then when they all proc you will ALL get 500 mana back in 10 secs effectively meaning that every person in your group gets an extra 50mp5 every time your in combat which is huge. The thing is, SS has a 50sec internal CD so it can only proc every 50 secs. So in an ideal world you would want to have your +81 healing weapon equipped for 50 seconds then use your SS weapon until it procs and switch back to your +81 until the SS cooldown is ready again. Now that a lot of shit to be doing while ur tryin to heal. Fortunately there is a mod that has been designed to do this for you called “CasterWeaponSwapper”. I use this method of regen and mod as do a lot of the healers in our guild and it makes a huge difference to our regen without really affecting our + heal much at all. I would recommend this to every healer in end game, any class. The only thing with this mod is that it can sometimes affect your trinket using macros, its not a big deal but can result in some canceled casts every now and then which can be frustrating. If this is a major issue for you then you will either need to swap ur weapons yourself or just learn to use your trinkets manually.

**Complex Technique and Macros**


* Stopcasting macros. One thing that all of us Aussies have had to learn to put up with is lag. We deal with it cause we have no other choice, or do we? There is a way around lag and obviously this would mean that our total healing would increase greatly. Basically you can use the lag to remove the lag, I know it sounds ridiculous but its really quite simple through the use of stopcasting macros. A stop casting macro does quite simply that, stops ur cast. This is where the lag comes in. Assume you have a latency of 500ms and that that equates into it taking about .5 secs for your transmissions to travel from your computer to the server in America. Now every time you heal you have to wait that extra .5 seconds for the heal to actually go off and wait before you can start casting your next heal. Now, what stop casting macros do is on your end stops the current heal you are casting and starts casting a new one. With the lag involved though the server doesn’t get the command that you have stopped casting your first heal before it actually allows it to go off and then also starts receiving the signal that a new heal is casting before it would normally have let you start casting your next one. When used properly this method can effectively remove the lag from our game play. Obviously you need the right sort of macros to make this happen and a couple of mods to help you do it properly. It does take a fair amount of practice when u first get started but you will really notice a MASSIVE difference once you get it down. This would be the single biggest increase to your healing ability of everything ive mentioned in this post.

Personally I use a mod called “EcastingBar” for all my cast bars with a plug in called “Supercast” that clearly displays on my castbar given my current lag with the server exactly when it would be safe for me to use a stopcasting macro without actually stopping my current cast with the server. I also use a small mod called “LagInfo” which measure my “Theoretical” new latency based on how well im using my stopcast macros. My normal latency hovers around 500-800ms on any given night in any raid. Using my macros and this mod I know that im usually in fact at about 85-120ms which is a HUGE difference.

Some very basic stopcasting macro examples:

Flash of light
==============================
#showtooltip Flash of Light(Rank 7)
/stopcasting
/cast Flash of Light(Rank 7)
==============================
Holy Light
==============================
#showtooltip Holy Light(Rank 11)
/stopcasting
/cast Holy Light(Rank 11)
==============================

You could add in trinket uses, divine favour absolutely anything.



* Advanced regen. As I mentioned before the pally talent Illumination is a vital part of our healing mechanic and is also quite under rated. Another highly underrated talent is the 41 point talent in the holy tree Divine Illumination and as the name would suggest these two are designed to be used together. When used properly Divine Illumination has a very important hidden use. Though at a glance it seems it only gives u a nice reduction in mana cost of your spells it actually can allow for 15 seconds of mana regen similar to that of an innervate, not as good, but smaller cooldown and the closest thing a pally has to an on call regen ability. While DI is up all your spells are reduced to 50% mana cost, if you pop a cost reducing trinket too (like LcPB) your mana cost is reduced even more BUT the effect from your mana return via crit through your Illumination ability is given based on the ORIGINAL BASE mana cost of any spell. So if you use DI at the right time then use ur Lower city prayer book (or something similar) then the mana cost of your holy light is reduced to only 398 mana per cast instead of 840 BUT if you crit your HL you will still get the same 504 mana returned to you from Illumination. So its costing you only 398 to cast the spell and u end up getting more mana than it cost you to cast it in the first place back. You can macro this so that you use DI then you trinket then Divine Favor for a 100% chance to get your first crit and chaincast HL after that until your buff wears off. I use this method on healing intense fights where I know I can use at least 5 holy lights on the raid because so many people are taking damage and after everyone is healed up I will normally end up with more mana than I started with.

Macro example:
#showtooltip Divine Illumination
/stopcasting
/cast Divine Illumination
/use Lower City Prayerbook
/cast Divine Favor
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
/cast Holy Light(Rank 11)



* Keeping your Holy Light at 2sec cast at all times. Keeping lights grace up is a real plus so that your big heal takes only 2 seconds to cast whenever you need to cast one. Using the right macro you can easily do this by casting a low ranked HL every 15 secs or so in your FoL spam sequence. Example of a sequenced macro that will cast FoL normally and put in a low rank HL that heals as much as a FoL and costs about the same once in every 15 sec period thus keeping Lights Grace up at all times.

#showtooltip Flash of Light
/stopcasting
/castsequence reset=10 Holy Light(Rank 5), Flash of Light, Flash of Light, Flash of Light, Flash of Light, Flash of Light



* Prolonged MT Healing duty. When a pally is asked to MT heal on certain fights especially long ones with a lot of damage it is not viable for us to spam heal with Holy light for very long without going OOM. And with most fights like this our FoL simply doesn’t heal for enough. On these fights it is always better to use a downranked HL to heal with. Consider this, FoL full rank and HL rank 5 normally heal for about the same amount for almost the same cost. Add Blessing of light to a target and HL 5 heals for a lot more than FoL 7. Take into consideration that by using HL you are also using your gear better because as we know HL gets more benefit from your + heal than FoL does. Also with talents our HL has an extra 6% crit over FoL so there is a lot more chance to regen your mana using HL. Bump u the rank of your HL just one rank to HL 6 and the end heal value is alot more than Full rank FoL with a slightly increased mana cost but much higher mana regen (through more cirt). Keep bumping the ranks up until you find a nice rank that u can spam for ages and that heals for an acceptable amount. Eventually after some trailing you will find that u can spam heal just as well with a downranked HL for well over double the heal value of your max FoL and u can do it for about as long.



Undoubtedly I have missed a few things here and I will add more later when it comes to mind but I hope this helps some.

Please comment and add any of your own techniques or opinions.

Anticipation....is most valued when healing, but can't be done unless you know your team mates very well. It means raiding with them as often as you can, to learn is to watch & to listen. There is no competition with others of your class, no stats being pushed against others, over who is best or who is worse on a scale. The idea is to teach, be patient & most of all conginal to other guild members. That is what makes a great guild.
A constant is most valued, but can only be had if one sticks to being a team.
Remember: - The whole can be far greater than the sum of it's parts.
If you get that, then that team will be formidable.

Also, i think that using default blizz UI really helps my healing because it clears up the clutter and allows me to heal with a high fps on my crappy computer. Thats why i top the healing meters all the time

Touchwood wrote:Also, i think that using default blizz UI really helps my healing because it clears up the clutter and allows me to heal with a high fps on my crappy computer. Thats why i top the healing meters all the time

Oh really????? 19% to Tarly's 33% and my 32% of the healing meters and thats WITH BoL on the MT.... (we normally dont have it) .. gg?

pwnt.

wow raaki
get with the times...
that comment by Touch is a shoop
(ie edited by some forum admin so as to allow for a fitting humorous response)