Hey folks, first post here so please be gentle

I've been 80 on my paladin a few weeks and in that time have been mainly gearing up for holy by playing my ret offspec.

I've gathered quite a respectable holy set (2000sp, 500ish haste, 20% crit etc, 23k mana) and am continuing to add to it as much as I can. My guild is having some attendance issues so we're making slow progress through Ulduar. I'm specced Holy with sub-proc for DS. Due to the fact that I've been mainly attending base level raids and heroics, my healing is generally just BoL/SS the tank, JoL on the mob and then FoL group/raid damage, picking up spikes with HS. It's pretty straight forward, and I never really drop below 75% mana.

I've been a bit anxious about healing heroics up to now. The PUGs on my server are very intolerant and while playing as Ret I've seen healers be flamed to the ground if their healing isn't up to scratch. There are certain points in some heroics, like ToTC where I just know that the group would be taking too much damage spread out over different people for me to be able to cope with my current playstyle. Even with 1.1s Flashes I know that I'd lose a DPS or two. Does anyone have any tips for these situations?

Also, I see a lot of people talking that HL spam is the only way to heal. Is this just for the harder raids where the tanks get hit a lot harder, or is this something I should be trying to adopt now?

Thanks.

Hey Jolt,

I think every instance is sitational, and knowing the right moment to use your abilities is essential.

For example on the case you mentioned, i usually use aura mastery with shadow protection, and Bubble+DS, just by doing this you will find that the third stage becomes very easy to manage.

Welcome Jolt, no need to ask us to be gentle, this is a pretty helpful group of people (we're healers, after all!).

As Xaari said, each situation is a bit different. Aside from the mechanics of the fight, it also depends on the gear and skill level of your group. Just the other night in Heroic Halls of Lightning, one of my guildies commented 'I remember when this used to be challenging.' With the stats you're carrying, you shouldn't have any problem healing most heroics in terms of the size of your heals, nor from an endurance standpoint, providing people in the group can take a hit or two and don't do stupid things. As a new healer, the challenge is in reacting quickly to the damage that has come in and in anticipating what's coming next. Best thing for you is to simply practice, practice, practice.

Your server doesn't sound very pleasant; do you have good guild members or non-guild friends who are willing to let you heal for them? That can take a lot of the pressure off of you. While pugs (especially bad ones) can be great for practicing and building your skill set, a good guild group can be much better for your confidence level; I'd recommend going that route if you're not comfortable with PuGs.

As for the Holy Light spam, there are times and places where it's pretty much the way to go, and other times when it's like using a sledgehammer to put a thumbtack in the wall. You'll have to determine when it's time for that, which will come as you get a feel for the fights. There really is no 'only way to heal' short of doing whatever it takes to ensure your groups' success. Good luck and keep us posted!

For H ToC, I usually (although, not always) throw BoL on the tank, and just go with straight party heals where necessary.
You just need quick fingers and a quick eye for who's getting hit.
Unless a DPS has pulled a boss, there should be at least enough time for you to get off a 1.5 sec HL (assuming you've casted it within the recent past) which is more than enough heals. Also try to use a Judgement every time it's up. This gives you haste, and if you don't have another pally, it can heal your party members or give mana back.

Also, try to get runs with your guildies. Assuming they're geared for at least Ulduar 10, heroics should be cake for you to heal and for everyone in your group.

I'd recommend checking out this thread and the corresponding posts that were mentioned from the elitist jerks holy pally discussion: viewtopic.php?f=7&t=4305

At your gear level, I'm pretty sure holy light spam for raids is the way to go...

As far as healing heroics I'd guess you would be fine... if a DPS is dieing it's most likely their own fault because they are missing some easily avoidable mechanic. Loken's AoE comes to mind, as does the last boss in Trial of the Champion... healers who are comfortable with their class can heal through these abilities. If they can't, I'd guess in a pug the average response would be that the healer is bad and not that the DPS couldn't avoid the damage... kind of sad. I'd also recommend the above posters advice, try it out with your friends or guild mates first.

To add to this, I generally chain the two, instead of having them all up at the same time, usually starting with Bubble + DS. This does a couple of things.

You are bubbled, so don't have to worry about taking damage / healing yourself. This puts you at only having to heal 4 people. 1 of those 4 is Beaconed, so you are now down to three people to heal. Shield a third, and you can now keep them up with the occational FoL, so you are now down to two people to have to trade heals on, making this very manageable. It also takes care of the 2 GCD move early on, when people are likely at higher health, and can take a hit or two while you get it setup.

Once DSac has about a second left on it, pop Aura Mastery with Shadow Resist aura up. This should mitigate ~half of the damage coming from his AoE. Healing should now be done as necessary, being sure to keep Sacred Shield and Flash HoT up on someone, and Divine Favor -> HS -> FoL chain helps as well for some quick burst heals.

For some encounters, particularly Black Knight phase 3, let the group know up front there will be issues if it lasts too long. Tell the group, outright, people will die unless they work with you. Have them save their dps cooldowns to shorten the encounter. Have them save their survivability cooldowns as well.

Ask your group to take it slow. Some people are used to fast runs and ignoring effects because they are used to running with geared healers, dps, and/or tanks. With a "level-appropriate" healer, somebody is going to die if they let things get out of control.

I'm well overgeared for ToC5 and BKph3 can still give me some trouble, especially when undergeared people are in the group. On the one hand, paladins are suboptimal healers (to say the least) for some fights. On the other hand you can do your best, learn to use all your tricks, communicate, and use the experience to make yourself a better healer.

Thanks for your replies guys. Looks like I'm just gonna have to man up and give it a shot.

On the Holy Light issue, I still can't get my head around it I'm afraid. When I'm healing, I'm finding that I drop BoL and SS on the tank then turn my attention to healing the raid. Even at my comparatively low gear-level, Flash hits for 4k and casts in a second, so I find I can very quickly respond to drops in health from anyone in the raid. Any mega-low spikes get a HS aswell. I can cast Flash indefinitely with DPlea so I literally cast it non-stop.

I did an Onyxia 25 this evening and I found that I was top of the healing meters by a fair margin (granted, with some overheal). There was a period where I dropped DI and spammed HL for a bit and while it did feel as if the tank was safer, I know I couldn't sustain it in the same way I could Flash spam, which is a worry to me!

Straight after I did a VOA10 and on Emalon because the tank didn't move the boss all of the melee were sat in the fire for extended periods. On this fight there was so much damage going on that I had to swap to HL as FoL just wasn't cutting it for the amount of HPS required. I literally blew every cooldown and ended up on 10% mana. I knew the damage was due to the tank not doing his job in this instance, but finishing the fight with such low mana feels like a bit of a fail to me.

Am I missing the point here?

Sounds like you're doing fine. When people talk about spamming HL it's because the encounter dictates that it is, or could possibly be, necessary to keep the tank alive.

Ending at fight with 10% mana when you don't have a lot of opportunity to melee and need to stretch yourself is a good place to be. If you're covering most of the fight OK with FoL and the occasional Shock, then you may want to look at casting a HL every 13 to 15 seconds to maintain the Light's Grace buff.

As you discovered yourself already, you need to adjust to the encounter and to the gear of the group ... There is no absolute way of doing things, like spam FoL or spam HL, but rather they are situational.

A good gear tank on a heroic run can mean that you only need to FoL the ocasional party damage and you can go and have fun DPSing ... an average geared tank taking Ony can mean that you have to HL spam because he can take 2 hit chain strike + flame breath and he is dead.
Being able to understand and adjust to damage patterns is what makes a succesfull healer ... advocating for spamming an ability just takes away the fun.

Also, I have no pleasure in ending up with mana bar full ... so, if possible (depends if you PuG or not the content) and if I feel I need a challenge I usually reduce the required number of healers (try doing 25man with 4 healers or solo/heal 10man, whenever possible)

It seems like you are worried about running out of mana while you Holy Light spam. I don't know about others (either this is obvious or I am wrong) but I make sure to cast Divine Plea every time I can. I didn't see you mention this and I know when I started I worried about the healing reduction, but now I just cast Divine Plea and bomb Holy Lights. Maybe someone who runs the numbers can tell me if I am crazy to do that?

I use Talisman of Resurgence macrod to DP, it helps offset the healing deficit.

Your gear is more than enough to handle heroics.

The way that you heal is also fine too.

Just be aware in heroics, you often don't have the buffs that are available in raids, so Divine Plea increases in importance and you may need to use Holy Light a bit more.

It's hard to go wrong on heroics if you beacon the tank, ss the tank, jol the tank's target and heal everyone else.

For ToC 5 mans, before we pull the Black Knight, I remind people that they need to move away from exploding ghouls in phase 2, and I tell people to move in for phase 3 and stand on top of each other. That way when I spam holy light, they benefit from the splash heal from my glyph. This is not intuitive for ranged dps - they have years of conditioning to stand as far away from the boss as possible. The crucial part of the encounter for me, is making sure I go into phase 3 with most of my mana bar, and beacon of light up on the tank (or myself).

A pretty key change for my healing this year, was in acquiring a 5 button mouse. While I could have used more alt/shift key bindings on a 3 button mouse, I found having 5 buttons made memorization of my 'oh crap' options much easier. In particular this helped me make better use of hand of protection/sacrifice, and lay on hands.

Paladin healing is at times an act of triage. You don't have smart heals, so you have to be a smart healer instead. If a pull goes wrong and all 5 members have taken large amounts of damage, you have to prioritise heals to minimise the chance of a wipe. If some of the dps die, tough. At your gear level, if three melee dps eat whirlwinds on the UP gauntlet, you should be able to solo heal the tank through the encounter (it will take 10-12 minutes, and the tedium of waiting should act as a salutary reminder to the dps).

A few things to consider here:

* assuming you have beacon up on the tank, you first priority for heals in a crisis is yourself (you can't heal anyone else if you are dead)

* if you have too choose between healing the guy on 5% health, or one of the two guys on 50% health, heal the the two with 50% health first (reason, in attempting to heal the most hurt toon, you risk having them die before the heal lands, in which case no beacon splash to the tank, now imagine this hapening three times in a row, and you have a picture of the wipe from my last HoL run)

* in extremis, divine intervention on the tank (they will appreciate the repair saving) or someone who can rez after the mobs reset (double bonus if you have paladin or bear tanks)

* if the tank dies, and you have a DK in group, spam heals on them and hope like heck they have the presence of mind to switch into frost presence (this is how we used to kill KT back in the day)

* some dps can offheal if you die (and they notice this, I have to admit in ret mode with pugs I do keep one eye on the healer's health bar)

* some people inflict damage on themselves (warlocks/spriests) as part of their dps rotation, anticipating this and dropping a FoL on them as they do this makes you look leet

* all other things being equal, and with all toons topped up on full health, heal the best geared dps in the group, they're the ones most likely to suddenly pull aggro and drop to 20% health (yes Mr Rogue in full T9 I'm looking at you!).

I haven't macroed it, because there are times when I want to Plea but don't need to have the SP boost (ie. in Ulduar in between Mimiron's phases, it would be a waste to pop the trinket while pleaing during the transitions). But I do often use the two together. I just prefer to make the decision as to when I want to use both together.

I hate spamming HL during a fight because if I end up oom at the end, I have to eat for like....5 min straight to get my mana back. 35k mana is a lot to get back :p I can only imagine what it's like for the pallys out there that have more!

But it is a lot of fun to have more mana than most people have health :p

Hehe. I don't have quite that much mana (34K buffed) and it's always amusing when I PuG and people comment on my mana pool.

Crazy thing is that even with all the mana, I still end up going very close to oom on fights like Northrend Beasts 25 Heroic. Need to use pots, call for an innervate, and, of course, plea when it's safe to do so.

For those of you who are alchemists, there's somethign called the endless manapot. It used to be a pvp thing only and that is how I ended up ignoring it too. However it is what it says on the jar, a mana pot you can endlessly tap. I use it as just another CD to restore mana. I tend to hit it between fights together with div plea, to speed up the refilling of the mana bar, and then sit down to drink. Usually by the time you do the next boss you're well into the 2 min CD and ofc if you strictly use it ooc, you dont get into trouble with the 1 manapot per fight rule. You need to note it is smaller than regular manapots, but a free let's restore some more mana mechanism has got to be loved. V nice to for situations where you would not touch consumables normally too, such as heroics / farming.

Agreed. I never use a "real" mana pot, I use the endless as just another cooldown.