Originally I had thought that the 2 piece bonus was at the very least useful. Recently I've heard reports that the HoTs do not roll like other crit based over time effects do, making it effectively useless as a set bonus.
The next part to talk about would be our four piece set bonus. This one has gotten a bit of flak but honestly, I'm thinking its going to be a pretty useful thing although in my opinion it needs one of the ulduar trinkets to really be more effective. The one in mind is Pandora's plea, 108 intellect and a proc for 850 spell power. Specced into prot, you get a 60 second sacred shield so you can realistically refresh your sacred shield to constantly have the 850 spell power proc. With this in mind, if we keep our other stats the same, we'd be looking at 3350 spell power or 3615 damage mitigated per proc (including the +20% from talents). So that adds up to roughly 700-900 HPS compared to the 300 HPS we are looking at right now with sacred shield.
http://ptr.wowhead.com/?item=45490
Saturday, March 28, 2009
More about our cooldowns
Although I went into a good amount of detail on our spells and abilities. A few things still got left out that I'd like to cover here.
To start off, going to list all of our cooldowns available throughout a fight.
Heroism
Divine Guardian (Divine Sacrifice in 3.1)
Hand of Sacrifice
Avenging Wrath
Divine Illumination
When we're using these, generally speaking we're going to want to use them in conjunction with each other. For example, when we have heroism that is the best time to use divine illumination, divine plea and do holy light spam. The reason behind this is A) you maximize the mana returns of your divine illumination because now you have the most holy light casts per second for the fight. B) Your divine plea debuff is essentially mitigated again because of your increased cast speed, your max HPS will still be nerfed, but with machine gun holy lights we're going to see a more stable tank here.
The next 'combo' you want to use is whenever you do divine guardian (bubble), use your hand of sacrifice on the tank to mitigate a total of 60% of his damage taken. What you want to do is cast your hand of sacrifice first and divine guardian second, this way you might take a bit of damage before the bubble ends but will give other healers or yourself plenty of time to get you topped off, if you do divine guardian first then at the end of the divine guardian you run the same risk of the tank getting spiked and you being lower on health with no protection left anymore.
The next one really to mention is again hand of sacrifice and avenging wrath. If we do want to use all of our abilities on cooldown, you're going to have hand of sacrifice up with no bubble. Now the reason you want to use avenging wrath is because the avenging wrath will multiply the healing you do and then multiply again the beacon healing you do. So if I beacon my tank and hand of sacrifice him and then spam heals on myself. First of all, I am looking at 1.2x as powerful heals on myself, enough where I probably can spam FoL and make it through just fine. Then when our heals go to the tank it will get multiplied again (minus overhealing). In all actuality then, doing this will 'mitigate' or heal for 66% of the tanks incoming damage (30+1.2*30) and then more if you're taking aoe damage such as on sapphiron. When 3.1 comes out, this is going to be reversed for most fights. The reason being hand of sacrifice will be capped at how much damage it can absorb at 100% of your life. So if you beacon yourself and spam on the tank, if he takes damage you're going to do some kind of healing on him anyway, enough to heal a portion of that 100% and guarantee that you won't die via sacrifice even if you never heal your tank again. However again in 3.1 divine sacrifice will now not be linked to our bubble and instead will have a 2 minute cooldown of its own but with a cap of 150% of our total health on damage redirected to us. Since we're talking about raid damage as well we cant guarantee that our personal spike and the tank spike line up, so you're going to want to go back to beaconing your tank and spamming heals on yourself for the duration of the buff. You also can use your divine protection and divine shield during hand of sacrifice, currently there are reports of people going past the 150% mark with bubble up but that by the looks of it is a bug and will not make it past the PTR.
To start off, going to list all of our cooldowns available throughout a fight.
Heroism
Divine Guardian (Divine Sacrifice in 3.1)
Hand of Sacrifice
Avenging Wrath
Divine Illumination
When we're using these, generally speaking we're going to want to use them in conjunction with each other. For example, when we have heroism that is the best time to use divine illumination, divine plea and do holy light spam. The reason behind this is A) you maximize the mana returns of your divine illumination because now you have the most holy light casts per second for the fight. B) Your divine plea debuff is essentially mitigated again because of your increased cast speed, your max HPS will still be nerfed, but with machine gun holy lights we're going to see a more stable tank here.
The next 'combo' you want to use is whenever you do divine guardian (bubble), use your hand of sacrifice on the tank to mitigate a total of 60% of his damage taken. What you want to do is cast your hand of sacrifice first and divine guardian second, this way you might take a bit of damage before the bubble ends but will give other healers or yourself plenty of time to get you topped off, if you do divine guardian first then at the end of the divine guardian you run the same risk of the tank getting spiked and you being lower on health with no protection left anymore.
The next one really to mention is again hand of sacrifice and avenging wrath. If we do want to use all of our abilities on cooldown, you're going to have hand of sacrifice up with no bubble. Now the reason you want to use avenging wrath is because the avenging wrath will multiply the healing you do and then multiply again the beacon healing you do. So if I beacon my tank and hand of sacrifice him and then spam heals on myself. First of all, I am looking at 1.2x as powerful heals on myself, enough where I probably can spam FoL and make it through just fine. Then when our heals go to the tank it will get multiplied again (minus overhealing). In all actuality then, doing this will 'mitigate' or heal for 66% of the tanks incoming damage (30+1.2*30) and then more if you're taking aoe damage such as on sapphiron. When 3.1 comes out, this is going to be reversed for most fights. The reason being hand of sacrifice will be capped at how much damage it can absorb at 100% of your life. So if you beacon yourself and spam on the tank, if he takes damage you're going to do some kind of healing on him anyway, enough to heal a portion of that 100% and guarantee that you won't die via sacrifice even if you never heal your tank again. However again in 3.1 divine sacrifice will now not be linked to our bubble and instead will have a 2 minute cooldown of its own but with a cap of 150% of our total health on damage redirected to us. Since we're talking about raid damage as well we cant guarantee that our personal spike and the tank spike line up, so you're going to want to go back to beaconing your tank and spamming heals on yourself for the duration of the buff. You also can use your divine protection and divine shield during hand of sacrifice, currently there are reports of people going past the 150% mark with bubble up but that by the looks of it is a bug and will not make it past the PTR.
Everything about Healing
Spells
Sacred Shield
The one thing that the tooltip doesn't mention is how it scales with spell power. Each bubble that procs from your sacred shield will do (500+0.75*spell power) mitigation. So in standard gear at 2000 spell power, a low number for raid buffed, we're looking at 500+1500=2000 damage mitigated per proc or 10000 damage from the one GCD. If you're putting this on a tank taking any form of consistent damage, you're looking at the most efficient healadin spell in the game in terms of HPS and HPM because of there being no such thing as overhealing present.
Beacon of Light
Pretty obvious, your beacon target gets healed by the EFFECTIVE healing done to other people within range. Depending on your role you're going to want to put this on different people in the raid, if theres a single tank and you never stray from it, generally you put it on another healer so that they don't have to worry about healing themselves. Unless you don't have any mana problems, you want to avoid putting it on yourself because the mana back from illumination will be lost through beacon. If there are multiple tanks, you beacon the tank that isnt your assignment so you never or rarely have to stray. The only other use is if you want to hand of sacrifice the tank, you beacon yourself and keep spamming heals on the tank. Ideally we should do at least 40% of the tanks healing done, so the beacon will more than cover the damage taken by the sacrifice.
Divine Plea
With the changes to divine plea, nowadays we do have to think about when or how to use divine plea. Because of the 50% healing nerf, if we use it at the wrong time we run the risk of tank death or unnecessary spike (stress the other healers). If it is a fight with any kind of healing downtime from movement or boss abilities or just times when the tank isn't taking much damage you want to use it there. So Maexxna before web wrap, faerlina unenraged, grobbulus while you are going to drop your poisons. All are different scenarios but they give you the time to cast DP without having to nerf your healing done. Otherwise if you are on a steady DPS fight (ie patchwerk) you want to coincide your divine plea with your cooldowns or other spells. One of your divine pleas you should always coincide with heroism and divine illumination, using the three of them together you get to keep up your HPS pretty much at the exact same level it was before without costing you a ton of mana from the machine gun HLs coming out. If you are specced into divine guardian (17 prot) then your second divine plea you can use with a bubble unless it is needed for something in particular. After that, you're going to have to be more careful with your divine plea, the safest way to do it otherwise is to have a cancelaura macro ready if the tank takes a spike that needs your full healing. Then you cast divine plea and start refreshing your judgement, sacred shield, beacon of light while throwing heals in between the refreshing. If the tank takes a spike you channel your holy light and cancelaura. Easiest macro to use is just
/cancelaura Divine Plea
/cast Divine Plea
If you don't have divine plea up itll cast divine plea, if it's up itll cancel. Just get used to not spamming your divine plea button while you are trying to get it first applied.
Avenging Wrath
First thought with this spell is to use it with divine plea to mitigate the healing debuff, the problem is all healiing buffs and debuffs are multiplicative not additive. So instead of doing 50% healing you will now be doing 0.5*1.2 healing or 60% healing done. Still a huge nerf so not really that useful. The best times to save avenging wrath for are during a soft enrage for a boss, so the end of a boss fight or if it's a fight where you frequently end up using your bubble, 30 seconds after you first cast it so that you have a BoP ready to use on yourself as soon as your forbearance is up.
Divine Favor
Very simple spell, the best way to use this guy is just macro it to your holy shock. If its up itll make it an insta-crit that you can rely on for the followup holy light, if its not up you'll still cast your holy shock as normal.
/cast Divine Favor
/cast Holy Shock(Rank 7)
Judgements of the Pure
Really simple buff, but it will mess you up if you try to do calculations with it. Pretty much the way haste works is it all happens one at a time. So if you have 10% haste on your gear and 15% from judgements. That isn't 25% haste. Instead its [1-((1/1.15)/1.10)] or 20.94% haste. The same mechanic applies to shaman totems moonkin aura. So raid buffed to figure out your 'real' haste you do [1-((((1/1.15)/1.05)/1.03)/1.x)] where X is your haste from gear.
Hand of Sacrifice
Useful spell but also very dangerous, if the tank takes a lot of spikes in a row without you getting heals (Healers freaking out about tank spiking) you could very well end up dead due to lack of heals unless you have beacon on yourself or some other form of mitigation. Using it and bubble at the same time is a good idea though, on Sartharion with 3 drakes up it is almost mandatory for a paladin to be available to do that at least once because of the spikes.
Divine Sacrifice
Much like hand of sacrifice, very useful but also very dangerous. Generally speaking, you're going to want to use this only with our bubble until we get to the point where we've got a lot more stamina to soak burst damage. Pretty much any fight where you're looking at aoe burst damage, bubble+divine sacrifice will be incredibly useful. So, if we're looking at Ulduar, ignis before flame jets, deconstructor tantrum, kologarn left arm swipe to name a few examples.
Glyphs
Glyph of Seal of Wisdom vs Seal of Light
Seal of Wisdom is generally considered to be the 'best' seal to glyph. The reason being your spells 5% cheaper but your illumination returns still give the full mana back. So your holy light without glyph (or tier set / libram) costs 1274 mana. With the glyph your holy light costs 1210 but either way you get 764 mana back or 63% of your mana back from crits instead of 60%. Because our healing done is mainly limited by the mana we have, having our seal give us >5% mana efficiency means >5% healing done. Seal of Light does have its specific uses that I can get into later, but in general wisdom is better.
Glyph of Holy Light
Glyph of Holy light works in a really weird way. If your holy light is a non-crit, it will only proc off of the effective healing done, overhealing still will do nothing. If it's a crit, it will proc off of effective healing done unless 66% or more of it is overhealing in which case it will work off of everything. Really doesn't matter too much because we can't choose when to crit or non-crit, but it's worth mentioning how the mechanic works regardless.
Glyph of Divinity
This should be our third glyph generally speaking, without using it on ourselves it gives more mana than any other glyph saves and then if you really need mana, you can lay on hands yourself for nearly 8000 back. On an 11 minute cooldown, you're almost guaranteed to have this for every serious boss attempt.
Glyph of Flash of Light
Generally not very well used in PvE, unless you are a FoL spammer (more on that later) it's not worth it because ideally you want to gear yourself to the point where you rarely rely on your FoLs for healing anyway, it doesn't need more manaefficiency and the crits aren't doing that much more either way without specific gearing.
Glyph of Beacon of Light -- Increases the duration of Beacon of Light by 30 sec.
For a major glyph not really that good, the mp5 saved is minimal. Compared to the new divinity not really worth it unless you're looking at 7.5-10 minute fight (past 10 minutes you can get your LoH up again).
Glyph of Holy Shock -- Reduces the cooldown of Holy Shock by 1 sec.
More of a PvP glyph, generally we wont have to use holy shock more than once in a 6 second period anyway, for PvP Im sure it will be the bomb for healadins though because of how much we rely on holy shock for mobile uninterruptible healing.
The glyphs that I've always run with are Seal of Wisdom, Holy Light and Divinity. Seal of wisdom and holy light are pretty much no brainers with divinity being the third choice because there isnt much competition left.
Stacking Stats
Intellect
Even without casting divine plea once during a fight, intellect in terms of item level cost will always outdo every other stat for throughput (maximum potential healing in a given period of time) unless it's a fight so short that you can't burn all your mana. Generally speaking, int is always the best stat to stack unless you have a very specific purpose or scenario as a healer.
Mp5
Because of how much mana intellect is giving back to us, Mp5 isn't worth gemming for ever. This doesn't mean that we don't wear mp5 on our gear, if gear has mp5 on it thats great, but we simply focus more on intellect for our regen instead if we can.
Crit
Pretty much the same as mp5, stacking intellect will be better than stacking crit in equal item levels. Even with all our mana reductions (t7, libram and seal of wisdom) the mana back from illumination doesn't make stacking pure crit better than stacking int and getting a little bit of crit regardless on top of our mp5 back and spell power.
Spell Power
Spell power can be stacked in some scenarios but you really have to understand why. One major reason that I mentioned earlier was how well it scales with sacred shield. Because one spell power means 3.75 mitigated damage per application of our shield, stacking spell power in situations where we do use sacred shield effectively on more than a few targets can definetly be worth it. Aside from sacred shield, you will also stack spell power if you find yourself wanting to aim more for the FoL style of healing instead of the traditional HL spam. I'm going to get into that a bit later.
Haste
Haste is another stat that is worth stacking in some scenarios, in terms of cost haste is the best way to increase your HPS. If you're finding tanks dying while you are still focusing fully on them, you need more haste or they arent geared right / using their abilities right. Because of how it doesn't increase your HPM in any way, you want to stack haste only if you are finding yourself with no mana problems. If you do have problems with your mana, switching int gems out for haste will only make the problem worse.
Metagems
Insightful Earthsiege
This one is pretty much the gem to go for as a holy light spammer. It will give almost the same amount of intellect as the ember skyflare and the 600 mana proc adds up to around 60 mp5 making it pull ahead of all the other gems in terms of mana which is what makes it the most used one.
Ember Skyflare
This would generally be the gem of choice for a flash of light focused healer mainly because of the extra spell power.
Beaming Earthsiege
At first glance looks nice, but in terms of mana back it faces the same problem that the skyflare does that the intellect is more useful than the crit and the proc will outdo the mana returns and base mana that the beaming gives and then for burst healing, the ember skyflare will outdo it as well.
Revitalizing Skyflare
I haven't seen too much talk or theorycrafting on this one, generally speaking would only be useful for flash of light spammers but would only really be useful if you had higher gear levels. With more crit and more spell power on our gear from ulduar and beyond it might become worthwhile, but at the moment the extra healing is pretty negligible especially for holy light because of how much the crits already will overheal by.
How to heal
-Tank Healing
Holy Light Spamming
If you've read anywhere else you'll see that this is the most common form of healing for us right now. Pretty much what you do as a 'HL spammer' is you stack a lot of intellect and because of the mp5 we get from divine plea and replenishment, you can spam holy light for a lot of the fight with very little regard to overhealing. You pretty much spam holy light as often as you can, if it looks like you're going to run oom before the end then you try to predict when your sacred shield proc comes and cast FoL to coincide with that then go back to holy lighting. If you really are running out too fast, then you can head more towards the FoL playstyle for the remainder of that fight with a bit more emphasis on holy lighting than otherwise. If the tank takes a spike that requires burst healing that second, you finish the holy light cast followed by a holy shock and then flash of light if your short term HPS is more important than long term. Generally speaking, you react by doing holy light, holy shock and holy light again or pure holy light spam.
Flash of Light
What you do with flash of light is a bit different from holy light. First of all, you don't gear as much for intellect. In theory the intellect from gear gives you enough mana to run on anyway, you also switch out your seal of wisdom glyph for seal of light and of course switch your spare glyph to flash of light. Essentially the theory behind the way to play is you want to get your flash of light hitting hard enough where most of the time flash of light is enough to keep the tank up, if he does take a spike you holy shock and holy light to recover from the spike and then go back to flash of light spamming. So what you do is stack haste and spell power, haste you only want to stack as far as the soft cap (if you reach it) and then you focus only on spell power.
On a personal note, I tried FoL healing this weekend (march the 13th) and completely hated it, if my opinion counts for anything...had less mana overall even though I was FoL spamming and did way less HPS. Before I tried it I would have told you that it comes down to preference but now...well, I will say with as much 'authority' as I can in my position that it is in no way worth going into as a playstyle. HL as much as you can and FoL only to make sure you don't run oom, or when the tank isnt taking much damage/you have buffed healing.
Whichever playstyle you choose, what you do is keep sacred shield up on your tank as well as judging at least once a minute (if there are only two pallies in the raid once every 20 seconds to keep wisdom/light on the boss) then follow whichever healing rotation you choose. From experience in Ulduar, I'm finding it's necessary sometimes to use hand of sacrifice and our other cooldowns to keep our tank alive. If you think you can handle it, you should try and adopt beaconing yourself and hand of sacrificing the tank, but you should really only do this if there isnt any heavy raid damage coming your way (during deconstructor tantrum, you'd be one shot).
-Raid Healing
Raid healing as a holy pally is pretty easy but also pretty ineffective, every other class can do a lot better raid healing than we can unless we're in a very specific scenario. All we do is beacon a target, preferably a tank unless another paladin already is and then holy shock and flash of light members of the raid. If we're looking at larger spikes of damage (malygos) then instead of FoL we cast HL, but pretty much stays the same otherwise. Pretty much if you want to raid heal while being assigned to a tank, you will HAVE to keep your beacon of light up on the tank or else don't consider raid healing. Even if you arent assigned to a tank, it generally helps the most to put your beacon on whatever your tank target is so you can help out the other healer(s).
Specs
Currently there are really only two standard builds (with a few variations that I'll point out).
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?paladin=503501520010130531005152210000000000000000000000000005230050203000000000000000&glyph=000000000000&version=9806
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?paladin=503501520020130531005152215032013120000000000000000002000000000000000000000000&glyph=000000000000&version=9806
The first one is the more common one and generally best for heroics or easier content. By going deep into ret, you're gaining a lot of crit and manaefficiency that you wouldn't otherwise have, letting you spam holy light more and use divine plea less. Pretty much always a good idea. Your options with this build are how deep you go into ret and if you get pursuit of justice. Some paladins will argue the 2 points in PoJ should go into divinity and you should enchant tuskarrs vitality, others will say you should put 5 points in divinity and lose PoJ and sanctity of battle. Ultimately, between PoJ, divinity and sanctity of battle its more of a personal preference than which one is better because they are all arguably equal in different situations.
The second build is used more for group/raid utility at the cost of manaefficiency, by going deep into prot you allow yourself to effectively shield wall the raid at no cost every 5 minutes, in addition you also see your sacred shields lasting twice as long and mitigating more. The key in my mind however is the shield wall, there pretty much is no fight in the game where raidwide 40% less damage isnt desirable and if your guild can say that isnt too useful, I'd suggest you try bringing fewer healers to give them more of a challenge. Fights like Kologarn, ignis, deconstructor, even the pull on Auriaya all can greatly benefit from having a bubble of this sort.
With either build, you can choose between improved concentration aura, aura mastery, improved lay on hands improved blessing of wisdom and blessed hands as your filler spots. Generally speaking, I prefer lay on hands because it brings us down to our 11 minute cooldown, aura mastery because of its usefulness in pretty much any resistance fights (a theme more common in ulduar) and blessed hands because as I hinted at before, I try to use hand of sacrifice aggressively to help mitigate burst damage on the tank. Concentration aura isnt that useful because generally the regular aura will result in no pushback for casters and then people shouldnt be getting hit by counterspell type abilities anyway since they are avoidable. Blessing of wisdom is more of a choice between what buffs you bring, I'm the only paladin in my raid sometimes so I'll always be buffing kings, resulting in two wasted talents if I go wisdom. If you find yourself buffing wisdom, you might want to take points out of blessed hands, aura mastery or even infusion of light now that it doesn't increase the speed of our holy light.
Sacred Shield
The one thing that the tooltip doesn't mention is how it scales with spell power. Each bubble that procs from your sacred shield will do (500+0.75*spell power) mitigation. So in standard gear at 2000 spell power, a low number for raid buffed, we're looking at 500+1500=2000 damage mitigated per proc or 10000 damage from the one GCD. If you're putting this on a tank taking any form of consistent damage, you're looking at the most efficient healadin spell in the game in terms of HPS and HPM because of there being no such thing as overhealing present.
Beacon of Light
Pretty obvious, your beacon target gets healed by the EFFECTIVE healing done to other people within range. Depending on your role you're going to want to put this on different people in the raid, if theres a single tank and you never stray from it, generally you put it on another healer so that they don't have to worry about healing themselves. Unless you don't have any mana problems, you want to avoid putting it on yourself because the mana back from illumination will be lost through beacon. If there are multiple tanks, you beacon the tank that isnt your assignment so you never or rarely have to stray. The only other use is if you want to hand of sacrifice the tank, you beacon yourself and keep spamming heals on the tank. Ideally we should do at least 40% of the tanks healing done, so the beacon will more than cover the damage taken by the sacrifice.
Divine Plea
With the changes to divine plea, nowadays we do have to think about when or how to use divine plea. Because of the 50% healing nerf, if we use it at the wrong time we run the risk of tank death or unnecessary spike (stress the other healers). If it is a fight with any kind of healing downtime from movement or boss abilities or just times when the tank isn't taking much damage you want to use it there. So Maexxna before web wrap, faerlina unenraged, grobbulus while you are going to drop your poisons. All are different scenarios but they give you the time to cast DP without having to nerf your healing done. Otherwise if you are on a steady DPS fight (ie patchwerk) you want to coincide your divine plea with your cooldowns or other spells. One of your divine pleas you should always coincide with heroism and divine illumination, using the three of them together you get to keep up your HPS pretty much at the exact same level it was before without costing you a ton of mana from the machine gun HLs coming out. If you are specced into divine guardian (17 prot) then your second divine plea you can use with a bubble unless it is needed for something in particular. After that, you're going to have to be more careful with your divine plea, the safest way to do it otherwise is to have a cancelaura macro ready if the tank takes a spike that needs your full healing. Then you cast divine plea and start refreshing your judgement, sacred shield, beacon of light while throwing heals in between the refreshing. If the tank takes a spike you channel your holy light and cancelaura. Easiest macro to use is just
/cancelaura Divine Plea
/cast Divine Plea
If you don't have divine plea up itll cast divine plea, if it's up itll cancel. Just get used to not spamming your divine plea button while you are trying to get it first applied.
Avenging Wrath
First thought with this spell is to use it with divine plea to mitigate the healing debuff, the problem is all healiing buffs and debuffs are multiplicative not additive. So instead of doing 50% healing you will now be doing 0.5*1.2 healing or 60% healing done. Still a huge nerf so not really that useful. The best times to save avenging wrath for are during a soft enrage for a boss, so the end of a boss fight or if it's a fight where you frequently end up using your bubble, 30 seconds after you first cast it so that you have a BoP ready to use on yourself as soon as your forbearance is up.
Divine Favor
Very simple spell, the best way to use this guy is just macro it to your holy shock. If its up itll make it an insta-crit that you can rely on for the followup holy light, if its not up you'll still cast your holy shock as normal.
/cast Divine Favor
/cast Holy Shock(Rank 7)
Judgements of the Pure
Really simple buff, but it will mess you up if you try to do calculations with it. Pretty much the way haste works is it all happens one at a time. So if you have 10% haste on your gear and 15% from judgements. That isn't 25% haste. Instead its [1-((1/1.15)/1.10)] or 20.94% haste. The same mechanic applies to shaman totems moonkin aura. So raid buffed to figure out your 'real' haste you do [1-((((1/1.15)/1.05)/1.03)/1.x)] where X is your haste from gear.
Hand of Sacrifice
Useful spell but also very dangerous, if the tank takes a lot of spikes in a row without you getting heals (Healers freaking out about tank spiking) you could very well end up dead due to lack of heals unless you have beacon on yourself or some other form of mitigation. Using it and bubble at the same time is a good idea though, on Sartharion with 3 drakes up it is almost mandatory for a paladin to be available to do that at least once because of the spikes.
Divine Sacrifice
Much like hand of sacrifice, very useful but also very dangerous. Generally speaking, you're going to want to use this only with our bubble until we get to the point where we've got a lot more stamina to soak burst damage. Pretty much any fight where you're looking at aoe burst damage, bubble+divine sacrifice will be incredibly useful. So, if we're looking at Ulduar, ignis before flame jets, deconstructor tantrum, kologarn left arm swipe to name a few examples.
Glyphs
Glyph of Seal of Wisdom vs Seal of Light
Seal of Wisdom is generally considered to be the 'best' seal to glyph. The reason being your spells 5% cheaper but your illumination returns still give the full mana back. So your holy light without glyph (or tier set / libram) costs 1274 mana. With the glyph your holy light costs 1210 but either way you get 764 mana back or 63% of your mana back from crits instead of 60%. Because our healing done is mainly limited by the mana we have, having our seal give us >5% mana efficiency means >5% healing done. Seal of Light does have its specific uses that I can get into later, but in general wisdom is better.
Glyph of Holy Light
Glyph of Holy light works in a really weird way. If your holy light is a non-crit, it will only proc off of the effective healing done, overhealing still will do nothing. If it's a crit, it will proc off of effective healing done unless 66% or more of it is overhealing in which case it will work off of everything. Really doesn't matter too much because we can't choose when to crit or non-crit, but it's worth mentioning how the mechanic works regardless.
Glyph of Divinity
This should be our third glyph generally speaking, without using it on ourselves it gives more mana than any other glyph saves and then if you really need mana, you can lay on hands yourself for nearly 8000 back. On an 11 minute cooldown, you're almost guaranteed to have this for every serious boss attempt.
Glyph of Flash of Light
Generally not very well used in PvE, unless you are a FoL spammer (more on that later) it's not worth it because ideally you want to gear yourself to the point where you rarely rely on your FoLs for healing anyway, it doesn't need more manaefficiency and the crits aren't doing that much more either way without specific gearing.
Glyph of Beacon of Light -- Increases the duration of Beacon of Light by 30 sec.
For a major glyph not really that good, the mp5 saved is minimal. Compared to the new divinity not really worth it unless you're looking at 7.5-10 minute fight (past 10 minutes you can get your LoH up again).
Glyph of Holy Shock -- Reduces the cooldown of Holy Shock by 1 sec.
More of a PvP glyph, generally we wont have to use holy shock more than once in a 6 second period anyway, for PvP Im sure it will be the bomb for healadins though because of how much we rely on holy shock for mobile uninterruptible healing.
The glyphs that I've always run with are Seal of Wisdom, Holy Light and Divinity. Seal of wisdom and holy light are pretty much no brainers with divinity being the third choice because there isnt much competition left.
Stacking Stats
Intellect
Even without casting divine plea once during a fight, intellect in terms of item level cost will always outdo every other stat for throughput (maximum potential healing in a given period of time) unless it's a fight so short that you can't burn all your mana. Generally speaking, int is always the best stat to stack unless you have a very specific purpose or scenario as a healer.
Mp5
Because of how much mana intellect is giving back to us, Mp5 isn't worth gemming for ever. This doesn't mean that we don't wear mp5 on our gear, if gear has mp5 on it thats great, but we simply focus more on intellect for our regen instead if we can.
Crit
Pretty much the same as mp5, stacking intellect will be better than stacking crit in equal item levels. Even with all our mana reductions (t7, libram and seal of wisdom) the mana back from illumination doesn't make stacking pure crit better than stacking int and getting a little bit of crit regardless on top of our mp5 back and spell power.
Spell Power
Spell power can be stacked in some scenarios but you really have to understand why. One major reason that I mentioned earlier was how well it scales with sacred shield. Because one spell power means 3.75 mitigated damage per application of our shield, stacking spell power in situations where we do use sacred shield effectively on more than a few targets can definetly be worth it. Aside from sacred shield, you will also stack spell power if you find yourself wanting to aim more for the FoL style of healing instead of the traditional HL spam. I'm going to get into that a bit later.
Haste
Haste is another stat that is worth stacking in some scenarios, in terms of cost haste is the best way to increase your HPS. If you're finding tanks dying while you are still focusing fully on them, you need more haste or they arent geared right / using their abilities right. Because of how it doesn't increase your HPM in any way, you want to stack haste only if you are finding yourself with no mana problems. If you do have problems with your mana, switching int gems out for haste will only make the problem worse.
Metagems
Insightful Earthsiege
This one is pretty much the gem to go for as a holy light spammer. It will give almost the same amount of intellect as the ember skyflare and the 600 mana proc adds up to around 60 mp5 making it pull ahead of all the other gems in terms of mana which is what makes it the most used one.
Ember Skyflare
This would generally be the gem of choice for a flash of light focused healer mainly because of the extra spell power.
Beaming Earthsiege
At first glance looks nice, but in terms of mana back it faces the same problem that the skyflare does that the intellect is more useful than the crit and the proc will outdo the mana returns and base mana that the beaming gives and then for burst healing, the ember skyflare will outdo it as well.
Revitalizing Skyflare
I haven't seen too much talk or theorycrafting on this one, generally speaking would only be useful for flash of light spammers but would only really be useful if you had higher gear levels. With more crit and more spell power on our gear from ulduar and beyond it might become worthwhile, but at the moment the extra healing is pretty negligible especially for holy light because of how much the crits already will overheal by.
How to heal
-Tank Healing
Holy Light Spamming
If you've read anywhere else you'll see that this is the most common form of healing for us right now. Pretty much what you do as a 'HL spammer' is you stack a lot of intellect and because of the mp5 we get from divine plea and replenishment, you can spam holy light for a lot of the fight with very little regard to overhealing. You pretty much spam holy light as often as you can, if it looks like you're going to run oom before the end then you try to predict when your sacred shield proc comes and cast FoL to coincide with that then go back to holy lighting. If you really are running out too fast, then you can head more towards the FoL playstyle for the remainder of that fight with a bit more emphasis on holy lighting than otherwise. If the tank takes a spike that requires burst healing that second, you finish the holy light cast followed by a holy shock and then flash of light if your short term HPS is more important than long term. Generally speaking, you react by doing holy light, holy shock and holy light again or pure holy light spam.
Flash of Light
What you do with flash of light is a bit different from holy light. First of all, you don't gear as much for intellect. In theory the intellect from gear gives you enough mana to run on anyway, you also switch out your seal of wisdom glyph for seal of light and of course switch your spare glyph to flash of light. Essentially the theory behind the way to play is you want to get your flash of light hitting hard enough where most of the time flash of light is enough to keep the tank up, if he does take a spike you holy shock and holy light to recover from the spike and then go back to flash of light spamming. So what you do is stack haste and spell power, haste you only want to stack as far as the soft cap (if you reach it) and then you focus only on spell power.
On a personal note, I tried FoL healing this weekend (march the 13th) and completely hated it, if my opinion counts for anything...had less mana overall even though I was FoL spamming and did way less HPS. Before I tried it I would have told you that it comes down to preference but now...well, I will say with as much 'authority' as I can in my position that it is in no way worth going into as a playstyle. HL as much as you can and FoL only to make sure you don't run oom, or when the tank isnt taking much damage/you have buffed healing.
Whichever playstyle you choose, what you do is keep sacred shield up on your tank as well as judging at least once a minute (if there are only two pallies in the raid once every 20 seconds to keep wisdom/light on the boss) then follow whichever healing rotation you choose. From experience in Ulduar, I'm finding it's necessary sometimes to use hand of sacrifice and our other cooldowns to keep our tank alive. If you think you can handle it, you should try and adopt beaconing yourself and hand of sacrificing the tank, but you should really only do this if there isnt any heavy raid damage coming your way (during deconstructor tantrum, you'd be one shot).
-Raid Healing
Raid healing as a holy pally is pretty easy but also pretty ineffective, every other class can do a lot better raid healing than we can unless we're in a very specific scenario. All we do is beacon a target, preferably a tank unless another paladin already is and then holy shock and flash of light members of the raid. If we're looking at larger spikes of damage (malygos) then instead of FoL we cast HL, but pretty much stays the same otherwise. Pretty much if you want to raid heal while being assigned to a tank, you will HAVE to keep your beacon of light up on the tank or else don't consider raid healing. Even if you arent assigned to a tank, it generally helps the most to put your beacon on whatever your tank target is so you can help out the other healer(s).
Specs
Currently there are really only two standard builds (with a few variations that I'll point out).
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?paladin=503501520010130531005152210000000000000000000000000005230050203000000000000000&glyph=000000000000&version=9806
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?paladin=503501520020130531005152215032013120000000000000000002000000000000000000000000&glyph=000000000000&version=9806
The first one is the more common one and generally best for heroics or easier content. By going deep into ret, you're gaining a lot of crit and manaefficiency that you wouldn't otherwise have, letting you spam holy light more and use divine plea less. Pretty much always a good idea. Your options with this build are how deep you go into ret and if you get pursuit of justice. Some paladins will argue the 2 points in PoJ should go into divinity and you should enchant tuskarrs vitality, others will say you should put 5 points in divinity and lose PoJ and sanctity of battle. Ultimately, between PoJ, divinity and sanctity of battle its more of a personal preference than which one is better because they are all arguably equal in different situations.
The second build is used more for group/raid utility at the cost of manaefficiency, by going deep into prot you allow yourself to effectively shield wall the raid at no cost every 5 minutes, in addition you also see your sacred shields lasting twice as long and mitigating more. The key in my mind however is the shield wall, there pretty much is no fight in the game where raidwide 40% less damage isnt desirable and if your guild can say that isnt too useful, I'd suggest you try bringing fewer healers to give them more of a challenge. Fights like Kologarn, ignis, deconstructor, even the pull on Auriaya all can greatly benefit from having a bubble of this sort.
With either build, you can choose between improved concentration aura, aura mastery, improved lay on hands improved blessing of wisdom and blessed hands as your filler spots. Generally speaking, I prefer lay on hands because it brings us down to our 11 minute cooldown, aura mastery because of its usefulness in pretty much any resistance fights (a theme more common in ulduar) and blessed hands because as I hinted at before, I try to use hand of sacrifice aggressively to help mitigate burst damage on the tank. Concentration aura isnt that useful because generally the regular aura will result in no pushback for casters and then people shouldnt be getting hit by counterspell type abilities anyway since they are avoidable. Blessing of wisdom is more of a choice between what buffs you bring, I'm the only paladin in my raid sometimes so I'll always be buffing kings, resulting in two wasted talents if I go wisdom. If you find yourself buffing wisdom, you might want to take points out of blessed hands, aura mastery or even infusion of light now that it doesn't increase the speed of our holy light.
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