Especially in the context of Vanilla. Because in Current WOW I have played nothing but a Prot Paladin since Siege of Orgrimmar in MOP.
And I never once played a Healer in this game.
So I am just asking for tips and advice on being Holy Spec in Vanilla? How good is their healing and what not? And how much can they manage fighting monsters on their own?
Better than Ret. lol
Lvling as Holy = can kill mulitiple mobs much safer + easily… dps difference is like 2dps between holy and ret when lvling. Just use Imp 3/3 Seal of the Crusader and 0/5 righteousness when lvling.
1 of the best raid healers at end game.
I’ve leveled over 4 pallies to 60.
I leveled my paladin originally as Holy and it was a bit slow, but extremely easy. There’s no downtime at all while you can handle bad pulls and some elite quests solo.
It’s fine. Not the slowest leveler, not the fastest. You have barely any downtime, lots of “oh crap” buttons and you’re tanky in plate. However my advice is simply don’t play a Paladin in Vanilla WoW.
Your entire life will be looking at health bars. Health bars in dungeons, health bars in raids, health bars in battlegrounds. Health bars when you wake up, health bars before you go to sleep. You will look at them so much you might forget what game you’re even playing, you just fill them over and over and never do anything else. Actually I lied, you will be casting the same buffs over and over and over again. Every 5 minutes in fact, unless you buy the reagent for the 15 minute ones. You will also be required to remove debuffs from people with Cleanse. This is your reason for being severely gimped in every other aspect of the game: your heals and set and forget buffs which have zero interaction outside of casting them on the target are strong and therefore warrant weakness in other areas.
I can’t stress enough how boring and unequivocally lobotomizing playing a Paladin is in Vanilla. But hey at least the tier 2 set looks cool, pity you won’t be using it in raids though since it’s a weak(er) healing set.
I think this is the theme of Vanilla.
The Class gameplay if you are gonna Raid is unbelieveably boring.
Like all Warrior Tanks have to do is just use Sunder Armor to maintain taunt, that is it.
Yea, ur job isn’t to kill any1 as hpal… it is to anger them by not letting them kill u and ur friends.
And to bubble hearth from burning steppes to redridge if u get ganked while u are thorium farming.
My guild only had one. He was pretty good but he had to wear alot of cloth gear to get desired stats he needed. That obviously compromised his hardiness as paladins are supposed to wear plate, but in a raid scenario he wasn’t supposed to be taking a lot of damage anyway.
Probably one of, if not, the best healer in a raid environment (not RAID healer, but a raid healer). Mind you…they’re basically only spamming 1 button. So if that’s not your thing? Try a priest? As for leveling…I mean I guess you can level holy? Some swear by Consecration leveling? But why bother. Enjoy the ret while you can-won’t be doing it much once you start raiding
Boring as hell in a Raid
You spam 1 button
But then, so do warlocks, and mages, and resto shamans
An absolute blast to play in PvP as a pocket healer if you have a warrior buddy
If you’re leveling a pally, just level ret and keep a high mana set for healing. There’s nothing in holy that’s going to make or break your leveling until you can respec around lvl 50 or later.
I levelled a paladin as holy because I already had this warrior and I really just had him to heal. I can’t really recommend it unless you’re only doing dungeons because it’s pretty slow. But I’ll probably do it again anyway.
When you’re grinding in the overworld, you can be really safe and end each fight with full health and mana, but it takes a while and there’s a lot of autoswing.
Healing is basically just spam Flash of Light (extremely mana-efficient) until it looks like you’ll fall behind (or if someone takes big spike damage), then use Holy Light which is less mana-efficient but has higher throughput and can get big crits. Get into the rhythm of spamming flash, and anticipate who you’ll be putting your next couple of heals on.
Downranking really helps to save mana, especially once you get some +healing and Blessing of Light. The Illumination talent gives you mana refunds when your heals crit, so spell crit becomes the go-to regen stat, and Divine Favor allows you to force a crit heal on demand. Between holy talents and Concentration Aura, your heals are pretty much free from damage pushback.
If possible, I like to drop a Judgement of Wisdom or Light on the target (really good for passively healing pets or dps with fast attacks), or the one that keeps them from running away (Justice I think?). Be ready to use Blessing of Protection on squishy classes if they pull aggro (you can remove it by rebuffing them with Wisdom/Might/whatever). If it’s a certain wipe, use Divine Intervention on someone who can rez and be ready to remind them what’s going on because it sometimes takes people by surprise.
If you have other paladins in the group, you’ll have to coordinate who uses what blessings on whom. 5-min buffs can be a pain, but the best way to keep everyone buffed is to buff yourself first, then immediately buff each member of your party, then do this every 3-4 minutes. Your self-buff acts as a timer for the rest of the group’s buffs, so when your self-buff gets down to 1 minute or so, it’s time to rebuff the party again.
I think the toughest part about healing as a paladin is that you have to cast every heal separately and you can only heal one player at a time, so if people are spread out and everyone’s taking damage, it can get tricky. But when you really get into it and you’re feeling the rhythm of the heals, it feels pretty rewarding keeping everyone safe.