Bear in mind that my healadin is not my main. As someone who doesn't live the spec night and day (yet?), I am constantly discovering more buttons I could be using! But my questions here are more general.
In BC there seemed to be arguments over whether it was generally better to focus on Holy Light or on Flash of Light as your main heal, and FoL seemed to be the more popular. Early in Wrath I thought the HL devotees had won the argument, though, and everyone was going to stack Int so they could spam those big HL's. Now the tide seems to have turned again, and there are more and more FoL devotees sticking their heads back out of the cupboard. Crit is out, but haste is in, for reasons which are easy to understand. But it is very hard to find an up-to-date summary of current thinking, or 3.3 thinking, that is not either very basic or very esoteric.
So I invite you PlusHeal gurus to attempt to answer any or all of the following questions:

1. What are the merits of a FoL setup compared with a HL setup? I can see that HL splash will be less useful in 10mans, for example, and in those you might also need to be a bit more of a jack-of-all-trades because your other 2 healers might be tank specialists or raid specialists - is FoL the build for 10-mans, HL for 25s?

2. If you choose a HL setup, is haste something you start gemming for once you reach a certain level of Int; do you need to balance the two whatever your level of gear; or do you just take the haste that comes with the gear?

3. Is there a different emphasis when gemming/enchanting for a FoL setup?

4. What is "bubblespec"? Does it just mean 17 points in Prot to get Divine Guardian?

And finally, on a different note:

5. Does Beacon of Light healing require line of sight? If so, it would be line of sight from the recipient of your direct heal, I guess.

P.S. This is my pally: http://www.wowarmory.com/character-shee ... cklemefast

1. FoL is superior if you already have a HL Paladin in the raid. The two work very well together. The merits of FoL is a very significant increase for the HoT when wearing 4pcT9 and much smoother healing and longevity due to no need for meleeing and Divine Plea usage thanks to FoL's negligible mana requirements. If you need a multi-purpose healer, the HL build is actually superior even in 10 mans, since even without SP gems and libram, your FoL is good enough to heal non-tanks, or you can simply drop a HL on them thanks to the new Beacon. The HL build is actually the "jack of all trades" and the FoL is the specialist build.

2. You never gem for anything other than Intellect as a HL build. It doesn't matter what "personal preferences" anyone has or what they say, INT will statistically be superior to any other gem stat. You CAN gem for other stats if you really feel the need to. But to be honest, the gear in T9 and T10 is so poorly itemized, you will be picking up a lot of crit, which is actually fine because HL is not affected by Haste as much as FoL. You will probably not notice any difference once you get your HL down to 1.3 or 1.35 cast time fully buffed. However, lack of Haste DOES affect your GCD greatly, so you will notice it on hard modes, where simply reapplying SS or BoL can put your tank in danger. However, in terms of just spamming HL endlessly, haste is not important at all once you get HL below 1.4 or even 1.5 speed. Don't avoid picking up Haste gear since Haste/MP5 is the "best" combination, but if you have to drop Haste as you upgrade gear, don't feel too bad about it.

3. You gem for SP, gear for Crit/Haste or Haste/MP5 (I forget), and glyph for Flash of Light and Seal of Light. Don't ignore INT, though.

4. Yes.

5. Yes. Yes.

I'm confident in the validity of most of the non-subjective responses I made, but if there were any factual mistakes I made, feel free to correct me.

TYVM, that was an impressive answer, and I don't think you left anything out (I guess it's haste/mp5, btw). I hope it's valid, as you say, because I just tattooed it on my forearm.

You've only posted twice on these forums? Hang around, we could use your input.

Thanks again.

Its a bit late, so I'm only going to answer one question right now, mostly to correct some misinformation. Beacon will totally transfer REGARDLESS of line of sight! I was doing a "lol" run through Tempest Keep for Kael the other night, and our bear tank took the engineer behind a statue to minimize the number of folks that got "toyed" and I simply would sneak a line of sight, get bacon on her, and then be in the middle of the room, (over 40yds away mind you) healing whomever else needed heals, or just spamming myself and watched her health jump, which was good, as her pally healer kept getting toyed. >.<

I will try to answer some of your other questions later when I've gotten some sleep, but I wanted to fix that one point when I saw it.

-V

i have a few questions regarding this. i've been following some discussion on the FoL pally and i'm a little curious about where people are finding them to be most useful. i've been the only healadin in my guild for almost all of ulduar through now [not to mention we had no disc priests til about 2 months ago], so i've been pretty comfortable being holy light spammer/only consistent tank healer in 25s.

at what point do those of you using FoL style do so? is it for togc25 with the 3rd single target healer being a FoL pally? or are you doing it on easier content for other reasons? i do agree with zaku that the HL pally is kind of the jack of all trades as far as pally healing goes because i find my style still works very well with less healers and in 10's, so i'm just curious. i would love to try FoL style if the situation ever presented itself, so i'm trying to get a feel for what that situation might be.

gear swapping i can get my haste before judgement to 24.55% which puts me at a 1.05 FoL [still retaining over 31k mana unbuffed]. is this a good number? i would assume from here just to get my 4/4 tier and regem a bunch for sp, swap my glyphs. feedback would be great

xD

Actually, I think BoL is affected by LoS - not necessarily between you and the tank, but between your heal target and your tank. I remember a DtK where I wasn't paying attention and stood around a corner, when my tank was inside a corridor (kinda hard to explain, but think of pulling packs of casters back outside of corridor for a typical LoS pull - that was our positioning) - and he didn't get any heals from BoL even though I was mindlessly spamming holy light on myself. Almost killed the tank there due to my carelessness! And someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the range for BoL works the same way. The target you're healing has to be within 60 yards of the tank.

Thanks, V. However, I tested this today, and there must have been something unusual happening when you did TK that day, because my BoL most definitely did need line of sight. I tried it in several situations, and LoS was definitely required for the heal to be relayed to the Beacon target. Perhaps your direct heals were on targets who themselves had LoS to the tank?

In arena, I can't beacon my warrior partner and spam heals on myself while behind the pillar. Well, I can, but not if I expect that they're going to transfer through.



Is it 60 yards from the target you're healing? Or 60 yards from you? If it's 60 yards from the target, then technically your range on beacon heals is 100 yards.

For sure, you have to be in range to your target if you wanna to put BoL on him/her. BUT once you do this, you can run back and stay at max range of someone who is at max range from your BoL target and still be able to heal thou BoL. I make this A LOT in TotC 10/25, when I BoL one tank in the other side of the room and I stay at max range of my tank in the whole other side of the coliseum.

BTW I'm a Crit Holy Paladin who use mostly use the follow spell (in order of frequency) FoL>BoL>SS>JoL>HS>HL>LoH, and I plus good Tree or Resto Shammy (raid healers) can heal without any dead most of the 10man contest pre TotC.

Code:
FoL = Flash of Light
BoL = Beacon of Light
SS = Sacred Shield
JoL = Judgment of Light
HS = Holy Shock
HL = Holy Light
LoH = Lay of Hands

Beacon does have a LoS component. The bit I can't remember is whose LoS it is - the LoS between the target you are healing and the Beacon or the LoS between YOU and the Beacon. This was changed in maybe 3.1 or 3.2 (when beacon had no LoS) and the REASON it was changed was for arena. Paladins were standing behind poles, healing themselves and the beacon target without being in LoS of the opponent. Now you can't stand behind a pole and heal yourself and have that heal transfer to the Beacon who is not in LoS of you. Thus, I'm pretty sure that it's related to LoS of you, but that who you heal and the beacon do not have to be in LoS of each other.

For some nifty anecdotal evidence, I've seen this cause issues on Auriaya during the pull. The Beacon (MT) retardedly tries to tank Auriaya while standing on the stairs, beacon doesn't transfer due to LoS, MT dies. Combatlogs proved that the heal did not transfer. Combat logs do not tell me which person was required to be in LoS.

I'm big on casting the right heal at the right time without regard to whether that heal is HL or FoL. There are situations where I cast a LOT of Holy Light and situations where I cast a LOT of FoL. I tend to change librams and trinkets for one fight or the other and choose to maintain glyphs in the Holy Light camp (since that's our "hard" content). I glyph and gem for that "hard" content, so right now, for us, that's ToGC 10 with 2 healers (me and a holy priest). Since bits of that stretch the limits of my mana - I gem for intellect.

There's a group of ToGC 25 paladins who are into haste haste haste for days and seem to be of the opinion that FoL is a worthless spell that should never/rarely be cast. The majority of those gem for intellect to offset the mana-negativity of all the haste through Div Plea and meleeing bosses for mana and replenishment regen.

There's a group of FoL paladins who either significantly overgear the content they're in, have tanks that significantly overgear the content they're in (like the druid in a guild on my server with nearly 100k health...) or have a healing team with either another paladin or another healer with big bomb heals and the 2 work in tandem to keep the tank standing - the fast and the furious + the slower big bombs.

I'm more a middle of the road person. I want to keep the tank standing. I want to make intelligent decisions about which spells to cast and don't want to be stuck with only one spell.

Hmm, my experience in TK might have been a fluke, as ppl were moving around trying to avoid the dude that "pursues" a target, they may have dipped into LoS of the bear (my bacon target) without my being able to tell for sure that they were in LoS. I have not had any other situations where I would even need to worry about LoS to test it, but having just done that LoL raid that night, it seemed like LoS did not matter. As for the 60 yard range, I always assumed that it was referring to the heal target you were directly healing and the bacon target, as obviously, we need to be w/in 40yards of whomever we're directly healing.

Gonna have to agree with this guy. There is no time as a healer when you can use a "rotation" or certain heal for every situation. Granted paladins have little in the way of choice (either Flash Heal, or Holy Light).
I am somewhat geared, so my FoL is much more useful of course, but none the less. I use Holy Light (at least once every 10 seconds to make sure the speed buff is up), From there based on the damage the tank is taking at the time, I will select either a HL or FoL spam w/ beacon on the appropriate target. Generally you don't want to use FoL while you have divine plea up (divine + FoL is pretty dam low amt) and if you are using FoL spam you should be sure to use Sacred Shield to take advantage of the extra HoT effect although generally I use this mostly at the beginning of a boss pull before any heavy healing is required.

Being sure to keep JotP up is very important, and I often re-judge early to ensure Judgment of light is active as much as possible (this contributes huge amounts of healing at times).

You will find times (such as anub arak heroic phase 3) where you absolutely need to spam as much Holy Lights as possible (and be aware of your sacrifice ability's), then you will have times when you just need to spam a few FoLs to keep the tanks at top.

One thing to note with regards to Anub arak. I am often at around 83-100% mana come phase 3 ready to use lots of Holy lights when they are needed. And yes I do still put out plenty of healing to keep the tanks up in the first 2 phases despite the low mana usage.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your healing. Stick with it, can be a lot of fun!

i use more FoL when i'm really comfortable with a fight (aside from SS hot on the tank). when i know when damage is incoming--more specifically, when more damage is NOT incoming, i will use FoL more often. i am not geared to the teeth so my FoLs don't heal for a whole ton so i really on it only when i'm comfortable that a HL or HS isn't necessary.

for people who use FoL more often, how much do they usually heal for and how geared are you (no stats, just approximation)?

I also use FoL more in fights where I know when to expect incoming dmg. My FoL heals for 4.5-13k (13 is when guardian spirit is up on the target). I'd say 40-50% of the time it's 7-8k. I tend to mix in HL about every 2-4 sec (depending on the fight). If the tank is taking only 4-8k melee swings every 2 sec and no other dmg - it's not necessary. I can always see exactly how much health my healing target is missing. I know that my non-crit flash will be at least 4.5k and my non-crit HL will be at least 12k. Thus, I pick the spell based on how many people have dmg, my healing assignment, how much health my target is missing, etc...

Thats the way all should heal. We can't heal the same way all the fights, and all the players. Each boss has different spell, behavior and dynamics, each player has his/her own way to play the game and each roll in the raid have different incomes of dmg. So yes, you have to know the Boss, know who you are gonna heal, and in base of all the environment choose the best way to heal your target in that particular fight.