Dungeon Playstyle
For a quick breakdown of what your rotational priority should look like in raid, use the following cheat sheet:
1. Holy Shock on cooldown. 2. Light's Hammer on cooldown. 3. Barrier of Faith on cooldown. 4. Spend infusions on Flash of Light (Holy Light if you have Divine Favor available). 5. Spend Holy Power on Light of Dawn or Word of Glory when you have at least 1 stack of Dawn. 6. Judgment whenever you do not have Infusion procs and HS is on cooldown. 7. DO NOT USE CS or HoW unless you have no higher priority buttons to press.
For a quick breakdown of what your playstyle should look like in Mythic+, use the following cheat sheet:
1. Keep your Consecration down at all times. 2. Holy Prism for AoE or Spot Healing on CD. 3. Holy Shock on cooldown. 4. Spend Holy Power on SotR for damage or WoG for extra spot healing. 5. Spend infusions on Flash of Light if spot healing is needed. 6. Judgment on cooldown. 7. Hammer of Wrath when available. 8. Crusader Strike to generate Holy Power.
Before we get too in depth, let's first talk about how and when to use your cooldowns. This patch we have more cooldowns then ever before, with most meta builds running 5 different throughput cooldowns: Wings, Divine Toll, Daybreak, Hand of Divinity and Tyr's Deliverance. Many of these cooldowns should typically be grouped, for example: Wings/DT/Daybreak will often be cast reasonably close to each other as you want to capitalize on the burst power of DT/Daybreak. Additionally, you should always cast Hand of Divinity right before Tyr's Deliverance so once Tyr's is active you can send two empowered Holy Lights and instantly extend the duration of Tyr's. In addition to our throughput cooldowns, we also still have Aura Mastery and Bubble/Sac, both of which should be frequently used to mitigate incoming AoE damage. If you stagger these cooldowns effectively, you should always have a major cooldown available to you.
- Wings (Avenging Wrath) -
Wings has historically been Holy Paladins strongest cooldown, but this patch has been watered down to the point where it isn't something you want to be holding for healing. With access to so many other healing throughput cooldowns, wings should now be treated more as a rotational cooldown, especially when you run Awakening so you have significant wings uptime. Generally speaking you should use Wings on cooldown, especially with buttons like Divine Toll or Daybreak to increase their burst power.
- Divine Toll -
Divine Toll is such a versatile cooldown that sometimes it can be difficult to know exactly how to use it. The truth is there are a number of ways you can make the most out of Divine Toll and because of its such a short cooldown you should rarely sit on it for more then 15-20 seconds for any reason. You should only hold your Divine Toll if you know big AoE damage is incoming soon and you need it for healing, otherwise just use it on cooldown. Keep in mind Divine Toll can be cast on an ally or an enemy and will prioritize those types of targets in range. This means if you target an enemy with Divine Toll, it will cast one holy shock on that target + 4 other random enemies within 40 yards. If you target an ally, it will cast one holy shock on that ally, plus 4 other allies within 40 yards. If there are ever not enough valid targets within range, it will spend the rest of the Holy Shocks on the opposite. This means if you're fighting a boss with no adds and use Divine Toll on the boss, the leftover 4 holy shocks will automatically go on your allies.
- Daybreak -
Daybreak is definitely the cooldown that will yield the most results with min/maxing its usage. How you use this cooldown will be the main source of skill expression for this iteration of Holy Paladin so make sure you study and practice all the different uses. Remember that Glimmer is one of our biggest sources of healing, damage and dr between all the talents we run, and Glimmer's throughput is split amongst its targets. This means if you're trying to do boss damage but you have 4 Glimmers out on allies, you'll only be doing 1/5th of the damage you would normally do with Glimmer. This also works the opposite way, where the healing is reduced significantly if you have lots of enemy Glimmers out. Between this and the talent Light's Protection, min/maxing who your Glimmers are on (especially allies) is a major part of Holy Paladin throughput min/maxing, and the biggest way you can control this is with Daybreak as it clears all your active Glimmers and allows you to prio your Glimmer damage/healing into specific targets. While it seems like the best use of Daybreak would be BEFORE Divine Toll so your Glimmer damage/healing is maximized with the triple Holy Shock glimmer procs from Rising Sunlight, remember that Divine Toll randomly applies Holy Shocks so it's almost always better to use daybreak AFTER Divine Toll so you can clear the random Holy Shocks, get the maximum pop from Daybreak, and then funnel all your glimmer throughput into the targets you want with Rising Sunlight. Remember during high damage encounters that require a lot of healing, you'll often want to stagger your Diving toll and your daybreak, so you'll Divine Toll one damage event and then 15 seconds later when the next occurs you can pop all of your DT Glimmers with daybreak and then use Rising Sunlight for massive spot healing. These 3 healing events should cover at least 30 seconds of large incoming damage.
- Hand of Divinity / Tyr's Deliverance -
The combo of Hand of Divinity and Tyr's Deliverance has proved to be very strong. Because of how much uptime you can have on Tyr's Deliverance by capitalizing on its capstone (Boundless Salvation) with Hand of Divinity Holy Light's, you should almost always be using these on cooldown. Make sure you always cast HoD before Tyr's so once Tyr's is active you can immediately extend it with your two empowered Holy Lights. Keep in mind in raid you'll only get the extension if you cast your Holy Lights on players with the Tyr's Deliverance buff, so make sure you're tracking that (spell ID of the buff you want to track is 200654).
- Aura Mastery / Bubble / Sac -
Sac should be used almost every pack either on your tank or on a dps that takes heavy damage from a single target ability. It's a 40% dr on a 1 minute cooldown (with talents), which makes it by far the best external in the game, heavy usage of this will make a huge difference in your groups survivability. Aura Mastery on the other hand is only a 12% DR for your group so while it is a valuable button to press, it's never worth the GCD in a reactionary moment so only use this before major damage events hit.
Most of Mythic+ damage comes down to pressing the following buttons: Judgment, Consecration, Shield of the Righteous and Holy Shock. First and foremost, ALWAYS keep your personal consecration down. Remember that the Consecrates you proc from Judgment don't count towards your Consecrate so make sure you have full uptime on your personal Consecrate is vital to maximizing your damage contributions. It only costs 1 global every 12 seconds so there's no reason you shouldn't be able to have it down at all times. Your second most priority button when dealing AoE damage now is Judgment because of the talent Righteous Judgment which gives it a 50% chance to drop an additional Consecrate. This is such a priority in AoE dps that you shouldn't even worry about overcapping Holy Power unless you need healing. If you're purely focused on AoE damage, Judgment should always be your highest priority global outside of keeping full uptime on your Consecrate.
The biggest difference you'll see between Holy Paladins comes from how they can min/max their Glimmer damage and their Shield of the Righteous damage. With all the healing cooldowns we have currently, it's easier then ever to be spending Holy Power on Shield of the Righteous, especially now that it's our most mana efficient button, reduces the cooldown of Crusader Strike, and gives us free WoGs with the Shining Righteousness talent. Any time there isn't significant damage that has to be healed you should be using SotR, even on Single Target as Shining Righteousness makes it a great single target damage button as well as AoE. As for Glimmer damage, remember that its throughput is split amongst all targets with Glimmer, including allies, so the more ally Glimmers you have out the less damage you'll do with it. Using Daybreak to clear ally Glimmers when you don't need them and knowing when to press Divine Toll or when not to is the core behind min/maxing your Glimmer dps. For example, if you're fighting a boss and there's no healing needed, you might think that using Divine Toll for the Holy Power would be good, but because it'll put 4 ally glimmers out when you press it, it's actually a huge damage loss unless you can Daybreak right after to clear them and funnel your Glimmer damage back into the boss.
Holy Paladin Beacons are a core part of our healing and who you place it on matters significantly. In raid you should either Beacon the tanks or squishy ranged players like hunters, priests and mages. A good general rule to follow is early on in the tier when everyone is undergeared, keep your Beacons on the tanks, but once players are more geared later in the tier you should swap them to the squishies instead. In Mythic+, you should prioritize ranged dps as most tanks this day and age have a huge amount of self sustain and simply don't need Beacon healing (except brewmasters lol). Generally speaking the best ranged dps targets for Beacon are evokers, hunters, priests and mages.
A quick tip for finding the best beacon target for your raid on any given fight is to check the warcraftlogs for your current pulls and sort by Damage Taken, then EHRPS (a tab above the graph) and look for the top 2 non tanks. Those will pretty much always be your best Beacon targets.
If you want to create a macro for all seasons of Blessings of Seasons, simply use /cast Blessing of Summer. It will auto rotate.
Choosing which targets to use your blessings on may seem confusing but it's actually pretty straight forward. Before I get into which specs to prioritize which buffs on, the most important part of this talent is that you USE IT ON COOLDOWN. That's because the majority of the talents value comes from Blessing of Summer, so the more casts of that you get, the more valuable the talent is.
For Blessing of Summer you want to prioritize any dps spec that has cooldowns available and isn't a pet class. I highly suggest using this weakaura which will automatically choose the best summer targets in your group for you and fire whenever they press their cooldowns and summer is available. It's very important to not use Blessing of Summer on any spec that uses pets or clones (windwalkers) as they cannot proc Summer damage, only direct abilities from the player can proc it.
For Blessing of Autumn, your best targets will be Mages, Windwalker Monks, Evokers and Warlocks who make very good use of CDR. That being said the CDR is pretty minor so you can pretty much throw it on whoever you want (including yourself).
For Blessing of Winter, you always use it on yourself in Mythic+ but in raid you'll probably want to throw it on Priests or any healer that uses mana more heavily then we do (since we have chilled clarity potions).
Finally, Blessing of Spring should always be used on yourself for healing. If you play with a Blood DK or VDH you could potentially throw it on them if there's no group damage as they self heal a ton, but otherwise just send it on yourself on cooldown.
When running Virtue it's important to know how to get the most out of your casts and which damage events you need to hold it for. The first thing to note is that you should be using Virtue pretty much on cooldown since it's only a 15 second cd. This means any time more then one person is injured you should press it unless you're waiting for a specific damage event happening in a few seconds. When you're outside of Virtue you want to be "pooling / prepping" for Virtue, meaning generating Holy Power, and when a big damage event is about to occur, press Virtue and immediately start spending.
Make sure all your single target heals during the Virtue window are going into the one player that doesn't have Beacon of Virtue on them. Use this weakaura to highlight the frame of the player who didn't get virtue whenever you cast it in M+. Your biggest burst healing combo when you press virtue will be Word of Glory -> Holy Prism (ally) -> Word of Glory -> Holy Shock -> Word of Glory.
*Please note that "pre-casting" Holy Light / Flash of Light before pressing Virtue only works if casting it on a player other then yourself.
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 fortunately we once again have access to! Make sure you know which spells are most dangerous in which dungeons so you can help with interrupts on them. We have two other major ways of preventing dangerous mob casts: 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 stopping 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.
Blinding Light is very strong for preventing multiple dangerous casts or abilities from going off at once. There are certain mobs in dungeons that this is ridiculously helpful for so make sure you read up on what can be disrupted. Check out the Dungeon Specifics section for more detailed information on where Blinding Light and HoJ are particularly important.
Other than 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 than 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.
