Paladin talent choices

[LavCat]

Please pardon the homage to Swirly's recent thread but my concerns did not seem to fit there.

I have recently started playing Tribade, my main, after a couple of years of not doing much. She is a holy paladin and always has been. Healing is her thing. Until last week she did not even have one HK, but now she wants to heal in battlegrounds. She also has to be able to solo quest and defend herself those few times when someone wants to kill her. Her gear is not good. All her purples are pre-BC. The hunter she killed last night was an accident.

At the moment her build is:
Tribade's Current Build

She has two more talent points to spend, and is considering placing them in Divine Illumination, Deflection, Eye for an Eye, or Crusade. She might also respec to give up Seal of Command since she never uses it. My thoughts are that Divine Illumination sounds nice but not useful for PvP. Deflection is always good but the points might be better spent. More points in Crusade would be useful, even though the percent damage increase is small. Eye for an Eye is more of an unknown. Does anyone have first hand experience with using it?

Any other talent related constructive critcism would be welcome. Thanks. Oh, and I would not mind general advice for healing in BG!

[Artega]

Standard shock jock build is here.

If your gear isn't so hot, you're probably better off using a standard cookiecutter Holy/Prot build until you get geared up.

Seal of Command is based on physical DPS stats; you have zero reason to use it over Seal of Righteousness if you're wearing Lamellar gear, and if you're using Scaled gear, you might as well be a full Retribution build.

[LavCat]

Standard shock jock build is here.

If your gear isn't so hot, you're probably better off using a standard cookiecutter Holy/Prot build until you get geared up.

Seal of Command is based on physical DPS stats; you have zero reason to use it over Seal of Righteousness if you're wearing Lamellar gear, and if you're using Scaled gear, you might as well be a full Retribution build.

I would not consider going full Retribution to be a healer. The Holy/Protection build looked tempting, but I am unwilling to give up Pursuit of Justice. Though I must say Stoicism, Improved HoJ, and Improved Concentration Aura look nice. The "shock jock" build did not seem to be built for PvP, other than picking up Unyielding Faith and Eye for an Eye.

I did however rethink things and took three points out of Holy to come up with something similar:
40/0/21

The idea being that Tribade is still primarily a healer, but one who can grind a little easier with Sanctity. I agree with you completely about Seal of Command. I am still hoping that someone can offer first hand Eye for an Eye experience before the respec.

[Artega]

For now, Pursuit of Justice is not worth the talent points; a Minor Speed or Boar's Speed enchant on your boots gives you an identical speed boost without consuming two precious talent points. It's really up to you, though; 2% Parry may or may not make a difference in how you play, but for me I know it's more useful than a redundant talent that won't stack with my Boar's Speed enchant.

I'm surprised you're even considering calling yourself a healer without Light's Grace; it's a key talent to Holy Pally healing, and is the prime reason Holy Light 4 is such a wonderful spell. Granted, you won't have the extra 6% crit from Sanctified Light if you're a shock jock, but you can still use HL4 to keep Light's Grace running and still heal for a little bit more than Flash of Light, thanks to Blessing of Light.

And if you're going to go Holy/Ret, you should pick up Improved Seal of Righteousness; the entire purpose of Holy/Ret is giving up some defensive talents (namely Stoicism and Guardian's Favor) out of Protection to give yourself the ability to defend yourself effectively if you're attacked. With 750 or more spellpower, it's entirely possible to drop well over 7000 damage in 2-4 seconds. If you don't take Improved Seal of Righteousness, you're going to be down to around 5000 or so; that's a major, major loss of burst capability for talents that aren't worth it to begin with (Pure of Heart and Purifying Power.)

[LavCat]

For now, Pursuit of Justice is not worth the talent points; a Minor Speed or Boar's Speed enchant on your boots gives you an identical speed boost without consuming two precious talent points. It's really up to you, though; 2% Parry may or may not make a difference in how you play, but for me I know it's more useful than a redundant talent that won't stack with my Boar's Speed enchant.

I'm surprised you're even considering calling yourself a healer without Light's Grace; it's a key talent to Holy Pally healing, and is the prime reason Holy Light 4 is such a wonderful spell. Granted, you won't have the extra 6% crit from Sanctified Light if you're a shock jock, but you can still use HL4 to keep Light's Grace running and still heal for a little bit more than Flash of Light, thanks to Blessing of Light.

And if you're going to go Holy/Ret, you should pick up Improved Seal of Righteousness; the entire purpose of Holy/Ret is giving up some defensive talents (namely Stoicism and Guardian's Favor) out of Protection to give yourself the ability to defend yourself effectively if you're attacked. With 750 or more spellpower, it's entirely possible to drop well over 7000 damage in 2-4 seconds. If you don't take Improved Seal of Righteousness, you're going to be down to around 5000 or so; that's a major, major loss of burst capability for talents that aren't worth it to begin with (Pure of Heart and Purifying Power.)

You and I never did agree about much. I'll take Pursuit of Justice even as it is. The changes planned for 2.3 are that much nicer. For a boot enchant I would prefer Surefooted, though from a practical standpoint I know no one who can enchant either Surefooted or Boar's Speed and Tribade has no boots worth enchanting. However what I might do is take two points out of Improved SoC and put them into Deflection.

Even with Light's Grace, Holy Light is still slower than Flash of Light, and I still think Flash of Light is as mana efficient. Tribade seldom uses Holy Light.

For soloing Seal of Vengeance seems much better to me than Improved Seal of Righteousness and does not use up five talent points. Pure of Heart can perhaps be regarded as a filler, but Purifying Power is not. Grinding demons is a favoite pastime, and possibly you have seen a demon in a battleground.

[Skandranon]

Even with Light's Grace, Holy Light is still slower than Flash of Light, and I still think Flash of Light is as mana efficient. Tribade seldom uses Holy Light.

I agree with Artega. My experiences as a paladin healing in PvP suggest to me that Light's Grace is very crucial; Flash of Light simply doesn't sustain the HPS that PvP demands, unless you're talking about healing tanks in AV. My paladin's arena healing is almost solely max-rank Holy Lights. Granted, battlegrounds and Arena are a different thing, but even in WSG and AB, I find that Holy Light is my heal of choice. Smaller-scale situations tend to be where Flash is more useful, but my own experience is that it has to scale down to something like a 2v2 situation for Flash to become the backbone of healing. In larger situations, mana efficiency doesn't matter as much; you're merely trying to stall long enough to help your allies inflict the first death on the other team.

I would strongly recommend dropping all your points in Deflection, however. Game mechanics do not permit you to parry while casting, and you'll likely be casting constantly, either chain Flashes or chain Holy Lights, in battlegrounds.

[Tal]

You and I never did agree about much. I'll take Pursuit of Justice even as it is. The changes planned for 2.3 are that much nicer. For a boot enchant I would prefer Surefooted, though from a practical standpoint I know no one who can enchant either Surefooted or Boar's Speed and Tribade has no boots worth enchanting. However what I might do is take two points out of Improved SoC and put them into Deflection.

Even with Light's Grace, Holy Light is still slower than Flash of Light, and I still think Flash of Light is as mana efficient. Tribade seldom uses Holy Light.

For soloing Seal of Vengeance seems much better to me than Improved Seal of Righteousness and does not use up five talent points. Pure of Heart can perhaps be regarded as a filler, but Purifying Power is not. Grinding demons is a favoite pastime, and possibly you have seen a demon in a battleground.

Just to add in with what Skan said above - Sharanna's sole source of progression right now as a character is in PvP as a healing paladin. I find that flash of light's efficiency still cannot keep up with the output that the enemies put out. Light's Grace will help your holy lights keep up with the influx of damage.

As far as enchants and pursuit of justice. I prefer to load up on stamina because with all of the movement impairing effects in bgs I'm not ever going to be in the position of running someone down to kill them (not that I could put out that level of burst dps without help anyway) and I'm not going to outrun anyone either. I load up on stamina for the most part and stay towards the back healing the dps. If the horde are smart (and a lot of horde in Ruin ARE that smart) I'll need the extra health to have a chance at survival. A typical battle plan with a premade will go "Okay the warrior will charge in. I'll heal him once and get destroyed while you guys take them out." >.>

[Artega]

If you're spending mana and cooldowns trying to kill Warlock pets, then, well...

The small reduction in Cleanse cost is probably nice, especially since it can often take more than one Cleanse to cure a debuff, but there's still literally no reason to skip Improved Seal of Righteousness if you're taking Retribution as your second tree. The entire purpose of Holy/Ret is to be able to burst down targets when necessary and provide solid healing in the interim.

If you want to grind efficiently, you need to be Retribution or Protection. If you want to quest or grind as Holy, you need to find a partner.

[LavCat]

I agree with Artega. My experiences as a paladin healing in PvP suggest to me that Light's Grace is very crucial; Flash of Light simply doesn't sustain the HPS that PvP demands, unless you're talking about healing tanks in AV. My paladin's arena healing is almost solely max-rank Holy Lights. Granted, battlegrounds and Arena are a different thing, but even in WSG and AB, I find that Holy Light is my heal of choice. Smaller-scale situations tend to be where Flash is more useful, but my own experience is that it has to scale down to something like a 2v2 situation for Flash to become the backbone of healing. In larger situations, mana efficiency doesn't matter as much; you're merely trying to stall long enough to help your allies inflict the first death on the other team.

I would strongly recommend dropping all your points in Deflection, however. Game mechanics do not permit you to parry while casting, and you'll likely be casting constantly, either chain Flashes or chain Holy Lights, in battlegrounds.

Tribade's experience with battlegrounds is limited to a dozen or two AV's. And, yes, most of the healing has been healing folks being beaten upon by bosses. In that brief experience it seems easier to keep someone alive being attacked by horde than by the NPC's. Spamming Flash of Light Tribade found she could keep a warrior alive essentially indefinately tanking Louis Phillips. But since they had no way of damaging Philips eventually a bunch of Horde came along and killed them both. In another AV she could not keep a rogue up who was tanking Philips. I don't know if Holy Light would have made a difference with the rogue. I think the rogue would have been dead waiting for the Holy Light to land. At least the rogue was able to do a bit more damage to Philips than the warrior.

I did not know one could not parry while casting. Does the same apply to blocking? Nontheless in AV at least there are plenty of times when she is not healing, i.e. sitting alone in a cold stone tower waiting for someone to come and kill her.

I will revisit Holy Light and see how it goes.

[Kevin]

I did not know one could not parry while casting. Does the same apply to blocking?

You can not parry or block while casting because you do not have your weapons/shield out while casting. You can dodge while casting though. But yeah, parry and block don't really help casters all that much if they are casting a lot. The shield becomes as much of a stat stick as an offhand is for a mage, it just happens to have a ton of armor on it that can really help you survive.

[LavCat]

Just to add in with what Skan said above - Sharanna's sole source of progression right now as a character is in PvP as a healing paladin. I find that flash of light's efficiency still cannot keep up with the output that the enemies put out. Light's Grace will help your holy lights keep up with the influx of damage.

As far as enchants and pursuit of justice. I prefer to load up on stamina because with all of the movement impairing effects in bgs I'm not ever going to be in the position of running someone down to kill them (not that I could put out that level of burst dps without help anyway) and I'm not going to outrun anyone either. I load up on stamina for the most part and stay towards the back healing the dps. If the horde are smart (and a lot of horde in Ruin ARE that smart) I'll need the extra health to have a chance at survival. A typical battle plan with a premade will go "Okay the warrior will charge in. I'll heal him once and get destroyed while you guys take them out." >.>

I agree with you about stamina. Unfortunately Tribade has zero resillience and not much stamina. Of her pieces only her sword and shield are worth enchanting. I guess I will play with the talent calculator a bit more. I still would love to hear someone's experience with Eye for an Eye.

[LavCat]

If you're spending mana and cooldowns trying to kill Warlock pets, then, well...

The small reduction in Cleanse cost is probably nice, especially since it can often take more than one Cleanse to cure a debuff, but there's still literally no reason to skip Improved Seal of Righteousness if you're taking Retribution as your second tree. The entire purpose of Holy/Ret is to be able to burst down targets when necessary and provide solid healing in the interim.

If you want to grind efficiently, you need to be Retribution or Protection. If you want to quest or grind as Holy, you need to find a partner.

In my experience SoV out performs SoR. Does Improved SoR really out perform SoV? True, SoV takes a little more management.

[Artega]

You can not parry or block while casting because you do not have your weapons/shield out while casting. You can dodge while casting though. But yeah, parry and block don't really help casters all that much if they are casting a lot. The shield becomes as much of a stat stick as an offhand is for a mage, it just happens to have a ton of armor on it that can really help you survive.

I believe they did something about not being able to block while casting, since Judgement is a spell and it would cause Paladin tanks to be vulnerable to crushing blows while judging. I don't know what they specifically did; they may have just made your block chance count towards uncrushable without actually allowing you to block.

[Artega]

I agree with you about stamina. Unfortunately Tribade has zero resillience and not much stamina. Of her pieces only her sword and shield are worth enchanting. I guess I will play with the talent calculator a bit more. I still would love to hear someone's experience with Eye for an Eye.

I've never gotten a kill from Eye from an Eye, but I've seen Mages eat upwards of 500-700 damage for a Fireball or Frostbolt crit. I don't know if Sanctity Aura affects it or not; if it does, it's probably why there's the HP clause in the talent.

Resilience and Stamina need to be the focal points for your pally if you're going to be doing extensive PvP, particularly Arenas. If you have less than 9000 HP, that needs to be fixed before you work on anything else; it doesn't matter if you have 1500 Healing and 300 MP5, because a well-geared Warrior or Rogue will clobber a Pally with 8000 HP and 65 Resilience in seconds. Prepare to do a lot of dying and crying to get the gear you need to get.

I'd shoot for about 9500-11000 base HP, 250-450 Resilience, and 1000-1300 Healpower if you're going Holy/Prot. If you go Holy/Ret, you're going to want the same HP and Resilience values, and either 750-1000 Spellpower in Spellpower gear or the same amount of Healpower in Healing gear.

It's up to you whether or not you mix and match Ornamented and Lamellar sets for the extra 70 Resilience; if you're Holy/Prot with Improved Hammer of Justice, it might not be a bad idea, since it'll give you a little bit of extra spellpower to defend yourself with. If you're Holy/Ret, I'd probably prefer the 50 second HoJ to an extra 35 Resilience.

You're probably going to want to use Steady Talasite (4 Resilience and 6 Stamina) and Solid Star of Elune to help reach your HP and Resilience goals, and then Runed or Teardrop Living Rubies for your Spellpower or Healpower goals.

And referencing toons in the third person is always confusing and slightly awkward;)

[Skandranon]

I believe they did something about not being able to block while casting, since Judgement is a spell and it would cause Paladin tanks to be vulnerable to crushing blows while judging. I don't know what they specifically did; they may have just made your block chance count towards uncrushable without actually allowing you to block.

What they changed was that your normal standing position (with your shield on your back) and instant casts, where your shield goes on your back for a split second, no longer count as "casting". As you mention, a number of instant-cast spells like Judgment and Consecration, as well as the activation animation of some trinkets, were causing shields to appear on the player's back for a second, opening up small windows of crush vulnerability. That's what was fixed.

Actual spells with a cast or channel time still prevent parries and blocks, although due to latency, if you get attacked while starting a cast, the parry and block animation may sometimes still play during the cast. That doesn't mean that you actually parried or blocked while casting, only that the server saw the attack on you before your cast command reached it. Your client has already gone into the casting animation by the time the server sends back the message that you've parried or blocked, and the animations play slightly out of order. In any case, paladin healers should really forget Deflection in terms of talent spec: sure, it works when you're not casting, but unless you intend to just stand there and get beat to death, after the first attack on you, you are almost certainly casting something, and 1 talent point for a 1% chance to parry only the first attack made on you from the front doesn't strike me as a particularly wise investment.

[Artega]

Unfortunately, there's a bit of a dearth of quality talent choices to move down to the meatier talents in the Retribution tree. You could pick up Improved Blessing of Might for your DPS-oriented buddies, but that's only going to benefit you when you're around them, since you yourself will be using Blessing of Wisdom.

A shock jock will probably spend some time fighting back instead of just chain-healing himself in any case, which is why I take 5/5 Deflection. Generally speaking, if some idiot Warrior or Rogue comes after me when I'm off on the back lines doing my thing, I stop healing for a few seconds, kick the offending Warrior or Rogue's face in, and then go back to healing normally.

If you're Holy/Ret and you just sit there and chain-heal yourself while waiting on your buddies to kill the Warrior or Rogue for you, you should be Holy/Prot so you can take advantage of Stoicism, Guardian's Favor, and Improved Hammer of Justice; Holy/Ret is for Pallies wearing spellpower gear that want to occasionally obliterate some hapless n00b.

[LavCat]

Now that 2.3 is live Tribade has respeced. Unfortunately the talent calculators have not been updated yet to link. Here is the question:

Is it better to take the last 8 points and put them into Redoubt (5) and Precision (3) -- or to pick up Deflection (2), Eye for an Eye (2), Crusade (3), and Sanctity Aura (1)? She is primarily a healer who does PvP, and needs to defend herself while questing and mining.

She has had Eye for an Eye for a while now and it does proc, but the choice is primarily between extra damage or increased chance to hit.

[Kevin]

Wowhead had the calcs updated on Tuesday. Go here: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=s select paladin.

[Artega]

Now that 2.3 is live Tribade has respeced. Unfortunately the talent calculators have not been updated yet to link. Here is the question:

Is it better to take the last 8 points and put them into Redoubt (5) and Precision (3) -- or to pick up Deflection (2), Eye for an Eye (2), Crusade (3), and Sanctity Aura (1)? She is primarily a healer who does PvP, and needs to defend herself while questing and mining.

She has had Eye for an Eye for a while now and it does proc, but the choice is primarily between extra damage or increased chance to hit.

40/21 Holy/Ret is the build my Paladin uses for PvP most frequently. Simply defined, the shock jock build is the Paladin's answer to the Three Minute Mage™. You're a support healer for the most part (lacking a couple of talents in Holy and all of the Protection talents that the normal cookiecutter Holy/Prot healbot builds have), and burst DPS when you need to. Once you break 1000 spellpower (which is somewhat difficult to do; you'll only have around 800-900 base through arena gear), you can quite easily burst 7,000-9,000 Holy damage in a few seconds with Avenging Wrath going and Judgement of the Crusader on your target; this is against a target with light Resilience, though. You could probably break 12,000 with the battleground Berserker buff as well.

I wouldn't recommend Deflection; before the buff to Improved Seal of the Crusader and Vindication, I grabbed it because I felt the 5% extra avoidance while soloing and between bursts while fighting in melee was better than the alternatives. Now that Vindication's gotten one hell of a buff, though, I can't see putting anything into Deflection since you can't avoid attacks while casting.

[LavCat]

40/21 Holy/Ret is the build my Paladin uses for PvP most frequently. Simply defined, the shock jock build is the Paladin's answer to the Three Minute Mage™. You're a support healer for the most part (lacking a couple of talents in Holy and all of the Protection talents that the normal cookiecutter Holy/Prot healbot builds have), and burst DPS when you need to. Once you break 1000 spellpower (which is somewhat difficult to do; you'll only have around 800-900 base through arena gear), you can quite easily burst 7,000-9,000 Holy damage in a few seconds with Avenging Wrath going and Judgement of the Crusader on your target; this is against a target with light Resilience, though. You could probably break 12,000 with the battleground Berserker buff as well.

I wouldn't recommend Deflection; before the buff to Improved Seal of the Crusader and Vindication, I grabbed it because I felt the 5% extra avoidance while soloing and between bursts while fighting in melee was better than the alternatives. Now that Vindication's gotten one hell of a buff, though, I can't see putting anything into Deflection since you can't avoid attacks while casting.

Since your paladin does not have Precision, is there a good way of making up for the lack of +spell hit? I had not noticed the buff to Vindication. It does look good. My paladin had Vindication a long time ago and I recall it proced often.

Anyone else have suggestions?