Healing Part 2: Paladins

And no I won't talk about paladins, because I am not one. So I've brought in a guest speaker who most of you are familiar with. Ladies and gents, lets give it up for Saro!

Strengths:

The strength of the paladin is above all else, endurance. They're a
nightmare to kill in PvP. They're extremely good at surviving in PvE.
And that same endurance applies to their healing. Generally speaking,
they can cast more heals, more often, more efficiently than any other
healing class. They also have the Cleanse, which will remove the widest
selection of debuffs (magic, disease -and- poison). They also have
somewhere on the order of 4-5 times (or more) armor than the cloth and
druid healers. Lastly, their heals have a built in threat reduction
that is flat out better than any classes - There is a full 50% reduction
in heal agro on all their healing abilities. This was put in place to
prevent a paladin from tanking via spiritual focus and concentration
aura (105% uninterrupted casting) and just spamming heals on themselves
to generate the hate needed for tanking.


Weaknesses:

With the exception of the long cooldowns and the very long cooldowns,
they are essentially one trick ponies. They have a flash heal and a
main heal. That's it. No HoTs. No quick cast shields.


Common talent builds:

Generally speaking, there's two main decisions with the Holy tree. One,
do you want the 41 point talent or not? It's a 15 second period where
your heal spells cost half mana. It's usable every three minutes.
There's a fair amount of debate over whether this is actually useful or
not. It's nice, but is it worth giving up the 21 point talent somewhere
else? I suspect a paladin can survive and heal quite well without it,
but for people still working on their crit gear, it certainly would add
longevity during a heal spam phase.


The second isn't in the Holy tree - it's what support tree you go for.
Do you want to serve as a five man tank or do you want some soloing
based talents in the Ret tree (Seal of Command, for example).
Generally, you will want a minimum of 34 points into Holy. Holy Shock
may be mana inefficient, but it's the only instant heal you've got.
Light's Grace will cut your cast time for your main heal down to 2
seconds if you are chain casting. These are very much staples.


Basic strategies:

The goal for paladin healing is pretty much this: Spam. If you're
working with another healer on a boss fight, you'll typically want to
slam out flash of light. On a reasonably geared paladin, that's 1200+
healing every 1.5 seconds for a rather mana efficient cast. You can
typically keep it up non-stop for 5 minutes with a modest amount of crit
(25% or so on Holy).


If you are the only healer on target, you can still get by with
spamming. You will most likely want to use a main heal to activate the
2 second cast from Light's Grace and simply recast one at some point in
that 15 seconds to reset the fast cast period. Depending on how much
damage your target is taking, you can add more main heals as needed.


If you're raid healing for some reason (not a paladin's best role), let
the amount of damage people are taking be your guide as to which heal
you use. If someone is being pounded and you know you cannot save them
in time, use your ranged taunt. Up to three mobs attacking them will
beeline for you. With the armor and HP, you can handle it until the
tanks get them under control. Blessing of Protection is another option
for melee damage - it also dumps the agro of the target while it's
active, so it can be used as another tool to help a tank get under
control.


Special abilities: The second major strength of the paladin is the
special support abilities. Divine Intervention, Lay on Hands, the auras
(get used to changing these mid-fight as often as needed!), and of
course the blessings. The blessings allow you to boost a target with
surgical precision. You know them, you love them, you can live without
them - but you'd rather not. I don't need to go into more details on
them.


Best stats:

Crit. Holy crit is far and away the most bang for the buck. With 60%
of the base cost of a spell returned to your mana pool on a crit, you
can go for quite a while. There are two talents that boost either your
holy crit or your crit with your two heals - both are mandatory. Your
gear priority should look like this: Holy Crit, Spell Crit, +heal,
Mp/5, Int, Stam. Spirit is generally worthless for a Paladin. You also
don't need to large a mana pool. 10k buffed should be plenty, assuming
you're hitting 30%+ spell crit (not that hard to do if you've geared
specifically for it as you climbed to 70). Ideally, you want around 40%
crit. It's a pain, but doable, especially since you'll pick up 11% crit
from your talents.


Final comments:

Paladins make fantastic single target healers and passable raid healers.
They shine at removing mass debuffs (ala Molten Core) and have a few
tricks to help keep someone up in an emergency via BoP and taunts.
Overall, if you want a LOT of healing over an extended period, stick a
paladin on the target and let them spam. This will allow other casters
to take advantage of the five second rule and watch other members of the
raid as needed.