I’m only going to cover m+, can’t give you much insight on pvp. Bare with me as this may be a little long.
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For the sake of this post I’ll break down everything with the build I currently use, which consists of: crusader’s might/glimmer/divine purpose. I don’t use holy avenger.
Let’s start off with the basic understanding of M+ and how they have worked historically.
AOE damage tends to come in patterns and is usually consistent. What this means is, for the majority of the fights in m+, there are very rare occasions where you’ll have straight AOE damage hitting the group for long periods of time. You’ll get AOE damage for a few seconds at most, followed by a rest period.
Now, this doesn’t mean there won’t be any damage coming out. It just means that the damage that the group will be receiving after AOEs will usually be limited to 1-2 dots on your teammates plus the tank that will always be taking damage.
Our cooldowns are more than enough to be able to handle AOE damage.
At the base level, without any talents, we have the following (I’ve bolded any major CDs):
- Avenging Wrath
- Devotion Aura
- Blessing of Protection
- Blessing of Sacrifice
- Divine Shield
- Beacon of Light
- Lay on Hands
- Light of Dawn/Word of Glory
With talents/convenants we have:
- Crusader’s Might
- Glimmer of Light
- Holy Avenger
- Divine Purpose
- Divine Toll
Now, the #1 absolute weakness we have in any content is that we’re extremely cooldown reliant. If you go into a pack of mobs or a boss without the proper cooldowns up you’re going to have a hard time. So gaining knowledge about which packs do the most damage, as well as boss damage patterns, is more important to us moreso than any other healer.
Contrary to what some believe, using glimmer of light also requires proper setup in order to heal. It is absolutely imperative that you track glimmer of light in your party/raid frames. If you know AOE damage is about to come out, you can blanket your party with glimmer prior and gain the most benefit from the passive healing glimmer does.
Another thing to note is that by using glimmer you will always have beacon of light. This effectively means all of your heals cleave the tank as well as cleaving party members that have glimmer of light.
It is 100% ok to not have all party members topped off, you just need to make sure they don’t die. This is the hardest thing to change. I’ll give you a few examples:
If you enter unavoidable party wide damage, which means the mob is most likely channeling something, you don’t have to worry about the tank because they aren’t getting meleed by the mob. All of your heals will benefit them because of beacon. It is more imporant that you heal the lowest member of the party, make sure they get glimmer and move on to the next target.
Now, lets say, for example, the damage the party is receiving is too much for just regular triage healing. Like the big skull mobs in “de other side.” You need to use avenging wrath or a similar CD in strength for that mob.
If you use avenging wrath you need to time it so you don’t use it prematurely when they healing output doesn’t matter. If you use it too early you wasted all that potential healing.
But lets say you time it right and all your party members are at 50% health. Holy shock party member 2 to 80% health. Tank receives 50% of healing, ignore them. Crusader strike. Holy shock party member 3 (now at 40%) to 60% health. Tank receives 50% healing and party member 2 receives 5-10% healing because of glimmer. Crusader strike. Holy shock party member 4, the tank and party members 2-3 also receive healing.
Now, this scenario is also assuming you had absolutely no glimmers out on any party members. If you had 5 glimmers out you’d cleave every single for 5-10% healing every time you holy shock. Glimmer does insane healing under avenging wrath. It is more than equivalent to spamming aoe healing from other healing specs.
Divine toll is also your best friend. It’s on a 1 minute CD, use it as much as possible.
Now, let’s move into parts of the dungeon where you don’t have avenging wrath, because you won’t have the CD up everytime in every scenario.
Let’s say the scenario above happens again but avenging wrath is on CD. There are a variety of different things you can do.
- Spread glimmer as much as possible before outgoing damage. Once AOE starts going out, pop aura mastery with devotion aura for 15% reduced damage for 8 seconds. That’s huge. Odds are your party members will all be low at the end, but they all survived, that’s what matters. From there you can heal them up slowly.
- You can divine toll mid AOE damage to heal everyone up to almost full.
- You can divine shield yourself so you don’t have to worry about your HP while healing everyone else.
- If you find that you and the tank are fine, you can use blessing of sacrifice to reduce damage to a party member.
- If you decide to run holy avenger, you can use holy avenger and generate massive amounts of holy power to use on word of glory or light of dawn.
- You can lay on hands someone and ignore them while healing the rest of the team.
Now, here’s where dungeon and class knowledge come into play.
Outside of progressing high end keys, there isn’t much reason to use all your CDs at once. Yes, you’ll survive this pack but at the next when you have nothing you’ll die. Like I said before, this is our biggest weakness. If you go into a pack that deals heavy damage and don’t have CDs prepared for it, no amount of healing is going to save you. Period.
It is absolutely important that you learn when and where to use cooldowns or you will be setting yourself up for failure. You also don’t need be to afraid to USE cooldowns because there will be cases where mob packs will be harder (and hit harder) than an actual boss fight.
Another thing to note is that hard casting in m+ is a trap. Flash of light heals for very little and holy light has too long of a cast time to be able to save someone. So what do you do in these scenarios? Use light of the martyr. It’s a great tool in m+ and can save wipes if used correctly.
If someone needs a heal or they’re going to die lotm is the best option (outside of holy shock or word of glory).
The only scenarios I would hard cast would if ALL of the following were to happen:
- someone needs heals but isn’t about to die
- holy shock is on cooldown
- you don’t have enough holy power to use word of glory or light of dawn
- divine toll is on cooldown
- my holy power generators are on cooldown
Basically, I would need to have everything on cooldown and be auto attacking in order for me to even consider hard casting on someone.
While we’re on the subject on casting, light of dawn is also trash in M+. I would only ever consider using it if I were under avenging wrath. Unless your entire party is gravely injured you’re better off using word of glory to top off the lowest party member.
We need to come into the mindset that our AOE healing isn’t AOE at all. It’s triage healing. We have the ability to quickly heal up someone and move on to the next person. We have tools in place that will continue to heal those we have healed passively (glimmer and beacon).
As you start to move up the latter of m+ you’ll find that AOE damage becomes less important and it starts to become more about tank damage. That’s because AOE isn’t a constant in most scenarios while tank damage is.
But unless you get the basics of understanding your cooldowns and when to use them you’ll always find yourself behind in healing.
I suggest going over wingsisup.com (I’ll link it below) which is a website dedicated to everything holy paladin in m+ and raid. We’re really versatile healers and there’s so many things we bring to the table but we’re also a double edged sword.
We’re REALLY strong in the things we excel in but we’re also REALLY weak in the areas we lack.
If you need anything else please feel free to let me know. And thank you if you read all of this.
https://wingsisup.com/mplus-overview
EDIT: I’ll also add that with pure AOE healing you’ll always have an easier time with beacon of virtue. That’s always been the case. But with beacon of virtue you lose that “triage healing” which is something that we’ve always excelled at (even prior to glimmer). So yes, for those 8 seconds you can top the team to full, but you’ll lose the ability to cleave party members and tanks when AOE isn’t an issue and only 2 members of your party are getting damaged. You also lose the ability to dps and passively heal with glimmer.
Because people rely on beacon of virtue as a CD, it doesn’t teach the necessary basics of when to use other CDs correctly which is where I think people have a hard time. We don’t have a CD to heal a party member every 15 seconds. We need to plan accordingly. Beacon of virtue doesn’t teach you that.
