Dungeon Playstyle
Before we go too far in depth with cooldown usage and rotations, I want to briefly explain how to use Crusader Strike correctly as this is generally one of the biggest mistakes people make when trying to maximize damage or healing throughput. For the Glimmer build, Crusader Strike is one of the most important abilities we have, second only to Holy Shock, and knowing how to properly use it is an essential part to mastering Glimmer Holy Paladin. People tend to think of Crusader Strike as a "filler" ability, so they often use it incorrectly. The first thing you need to do is change your mindset on the ability itself: the entire purpose of the ability is to reset Holy Shock's cooldown. If it helps, just pretend like Crusader Strike doesn't do any damage but it still resets Holy Shock's cooldown by 1.5 seconds at the cost of 1 GCD. Having that mindset will help you not waste Crusader Strike's when you won't get the benefit out of the Holy Shock cooldown reset.
One of the questions I get asked the most is "Do I want to use Wings and Holy Avenger together or separately?". The answer, unfortunately, is not black and white. Grouping your cooldowns will always result in the highest overall damage/healing, but there are definitely circumstances when separating them is the better play. The general rule is that if you know you can keep your group alive for the 60 seconds after your cooldowns are over, it's always better to group Wings and HA together.
For bosses, the only thing I stagger my cooldowns for is Galvazz in Temple of Sethraliss, but if you're pugging with mediocre players or your groups damage is on the low end, you may also want to stagger your cooldowns on the following bosses: Sisters (Triad) and Lord/Lady (Waycrest), Sand Queen and Overseer Korgus (Tol Dagor), Avatar of Sethraliss (Temple), Vol'kaal (Atal'Dazar), Cragmaw (Underrot), and The Golden Serpent (King's Rest).
For trash, the logic is fairly similar to bosses: always group your cooldowns if you're playing with a solid group. If you're pugging with a weaker group, you'll want to try and know what the general pathing you're doing is so you can be aware of any spots with 2 dangerous trash packs in a row, and then stagger Wings and HA in those areas. See a full breakdown of all the dangerous mob packs in each dungeon in the Dungeons section.
Before I get into our playstyle outside of our main cooldowns, let's first talk about how and when to use them. With the reduced cooldown of Wings from Visions proc and the increased duration of Wings from Light's Decree / Sanctified Wrath, our wings uptime has never been higher. Newer players tend to be hesitent to use these cooldowns at will, because they're concerned about needing it for emergencies, but these cooldowns are the only things keeping us viable in the current meta, and holding them like that is a complete waste.
The majority of your cooldown window should actually be used for damage, especially with the way glimmer works. Unlike in raid, there's no reason for us to heal someone who is topped (except for a few very specific encounters - see the Dungeons section), and especially not during your cooldowns. In Mythic+ our healing style is that of a spot healer, which is part of the reason we stack crit: so that we can get infusion procs and use that to spot heal, rather then having to constantly blanket the group with glimmer.
During your cooldowns, you'll quickly realize just how strong your healing is. Provided no one gets one shot, there's pretty much nothing in the game that you can't heal through with Wings and HA up. This is why we can pour so much of our cooldowns into damage, because if someone does take damage you can throw them one holy shock and they'll be instantly topped. The only player you want to generally keep a Glimmer on is the tank. Between that and beacon, you shouldn't have to focus them much unless they're really getting trucked.
Let's look at an example of how I use my cooldowns on the first trash pack in Atal'Dazar.The first thing you'll notice is that I pop Holy Avenger before Wings, this is always the order you should activate your cooldowns in when grouping them in Mythic+ as it gives you the most use out of your Wings. Second, notice how I maximize my glimmer output on enemies by tab targeting. The AoE damage rotation is very straight forward:
Going a little bit more in depth on the AoE damage rotation, the idea is to spread as many glimmers as possible on every enemy, then once you have all your glimmers out, focus your damage into the priority target. Just like our healing rotation in raid, we have a limited number of crusader's strikes so any time crusader's is not up, you want to use the two GCDs you have in between Holy Shocks to reapply Consecrate and use Judgement. Make sure at some point early in your rotation you throw a Holy Shock on the tank so they always have glimmer healing going on them. The general rule I have for whether or not to throw another Holy Shock at the tank is if they're below 60% hp. Anywhere above 60% and they should be fine (especially if you're playing with a Prot Warrior, as they have very high mitigation). Obviously that percentage is just a general rule and changes based on what pull you're doing, and if you're pugging or don't trust your tank maybe keep it closer to 70-80%.
If you really want to Min/Max your damage, use Divine Steed right before popping Holy Avenger into Wings so you don't lose uptime running into melee. You should also be using your pre combat potion right after you press wings before your first actual attack.
This is the most important part of the guide, as the majority of our performance in Mythic+ revolves around how you play without your main two cooldowns. If you're grouping Wings and HA, that means you'll have about 35 seconds of god mode healing and damage, and then roughly 60 seconds of limited healing. However, just because we don't have Wings or Holy Avenger does NOT mean we don't have any cooldowns. We have a large pool of other cooldowns and utility that will help us through these areas.
The most important thing to remember is that you should rarely use any of your other cooldowns while your Wings/HA is up. During Wings/HA you should have way more then enough healing to handle whatever is being thrown at you, and if you use devo, sac, bubble or lay on hands during that same window you're going to feel extremely weak as soon as your cooldowns are over.
For single target healing, make sure you're stacking crit so you can get as many Infusion of Light procs as possible. This is your general priority for any healing outside of cooldowns:
Whether or not you use Crusader's Strike (CS) to try and reset your Holy Shock is dependant on how badly the target needs to be healed. For example, if you Holy Shock and don't get an Infusion proc, you have two options: If the person is not in immediate danger, you can reset your Holy Shock with CS charges OR if the person is in immediate danger, spam Light of the Martyr (LotM) on them. LotM is basically your emergency instant heal that you use to bail you out of bad procs in a pinch. Don't worry much about the health cost of LotM as you have so much to help keep yourself alive (divine protection, health pots/stone, azerite inner traits, leech, etc), that it shouldn't be much of a factor. If the person you need to heal isn't in dire need of a heal immediately and there's no movement, use an unbuffed flash (no infusion proc) over LotM. Finally, make sure you use Sac if the player is taking heavy damage (this should be used often on the tank during pulls without your cooldowns).
AoE healing outside your main cooldowns revolves around intelligent use of your two slightly longer cooldowns: Devotion Aura and Divine Shield. Because you should be managing your cooldowns well and having them up for most of the dangerous areas in the dungeon (see dungeon specific advice in the Dungeons section), you shouldn't have to do a ton of AoE healing without Wings or HA. But there will definitely be times in every dungeon when this happens, and when it does you should be prepared to use either Devo or Bubble. A good example of this is Waycrest Manor: The hallways by Raal have lots of Maggots that spit on everyone and deal a ton of damage. The first big pull with Maggots you may have Wings/HA up for, but the next pull you won't, and for that one you'll need to use some of your other cooldowns to survive. Let's say 5 maggot spits go out, 2 on one player, 2 on you, and 1 on another player. In this situation you'd want to Bubble and then Sac the other person with 2 spits (you don't take damage from Sac when in Bubble so they're often used together for AoE healing). This way you'll prevent most of the damage going out instantly without even having to heal anyone. If you don't have bubble or the spits are out on other players, Devo is a much better choice as it will prevent more of the incoming damage.
The best way to keep your group alive is to prevent the damage from ever coming out in the first place! The better players you run with, the more you'll notice how much of high end Mythic+ is all about preventing damage from happening. This is mainly done through interrupts, which unfortunately we no longer have, but that doesn't mean we're helpless. We have two major ways of preventing damage: Hammer of Justice (HoJ) and Blinding Light. If your tank is getting stomped by a mob that hits really hard, stunning that mob with HoJ will do more for your tank's survivability then any healing ability you have. Keep in mind there are some circumstances when you do not want to stun a mob (ie, if a dps is focusing on interrupting that target and they don't want it stun DR'd), but in general it is a very strong ability that a lot of paladins overlook. For example, on Rezan, if a raptor spawns, when the tank gets the bleed you should stun the raptor since the bleed increases the physical damage the tank takes by a ton. Stunning this mob at that time will prevent a massive amount of damage from going out on the tank.
The other main utility we have to prevent dangerous casts or abilities from going off is Blinding Light. This is essentially an AoE blind that can be used to stop any dangerous casts. There are certain mobs in dungeons that this is ridiculously helpful for (Fetid Maggot spray in Underrot, Ironhull Apprentice AoE stun in Shrine, and much more). Check out the Dungeon Specifics section for more detailed information on where Blinding Light is particularly important.
Other then the tank, the worst person to die during any pull is yourself. It's easy to get caught up with healing everyone else that you forget to take care of your own health pool. Our passive armor from being a plate wearer with a shield already makes us more survivable then most other healers. Couple that with Bubble and Divine Protection and we have too much survivability to let ourselves die during keys. Keep in mind with Unbreakable Spirit, Divine Protection (our 20% personal damage reduction) is on a 42 second cooldown, which is ridiculously short. The best Mythic+ players in the world are the ones that utilize their personal defensives to the fullest extent. NEWBIE TIP: Macro your Divine Protection to Blessing of Sacrifice to mitigate the transferred damage.
The Formless Void build I created at the start of season 4 is a build that requires a lot of practice with Holy Paladin healing in dungeons before it should be tried. It also generally requires a coordinated group that is solid at not taking lots of avoidable damage, as this build is essentially sacrificing healing for damage. Finally, it also requires one party member to be running Iris and one party member to be running Blood of the Enemy in order for it to be played at its full potential. The build consists of running Formless Void major, Conflict & Strife minor, Vision of Perfection minor, and Crucible or Spirit of Preservation minor (dependant on if you need more single target healing or not).
As long as you have one player running Blood and another running Beam you'll now have access to immense single target burst damage and even bigger AoE damage, but it comes at the cost of channel times and lack of vision procs so you can't rely on rng to save you outside of your cooldowns anymore. I don't recommend anyone run this build unless they, and their group, meets all of the criteria I listed above and has both essences to steal from. If you do run it, you want to steal Blood whenever you have Wings on a single target or two target encounter. Otherwise, you want to steal beam on any AoE packs.
You'll often see me pre steal beam before a big pull and then pop holy avenger and wings while running into the pack. This is because once you steal an essence you have access to it for 15 seconds so you have a decently large window to channel it in without losing any uptime. What this allows me to do is on huge pulls where I may have to heal at any second, I can pre pop all my CDs and have the essence prepd so I walk into the pull, get consecrate rolling and judgment/holy shock on CD, then channel the beam and immediately out of it I'm in wings with Holy Shock up ready to heal anything. This makes it significantly safer then if i were to try and steal the beam mid pull outside of my CDs, which would force me to spend almost 4 seconds channeling and not healing during a large aoe pack when wings is down.
Make sure if you're new to the build that you focus on healing as much as possible until you get more used to how to safely use the essence without putting anyones lives at risk. Remember we're healers first.. it's easy to forget that sometimes!
