Healdin 101; Utility cont.

Today we finish our discussion of the various utility spells available to the paladin class. Yesterday I went over the auras, judgements and blessings briefly. Today we take a look at the wide varity of seals and the touchy-feely “Hand” spells.

Healadin 101: Utility

So, the original conception of the paladin in Vanilla WoW was a utility class. We couldn’t tank, we could barely dps, we were mediocre healers. What were we good for? Utility. We could buff the shit out of any class, with BoK being almost required for any paladin. We had our auras, our touchy-feely hands, our judgements. We were a support class in it’s truest form, while the warriors did the tanking and the priests did the healing. We ran around with giant +str +int +heal 2hnad maces, whacking things in the head while throwing out an occasional heal or three.

There are 4 types of spells available to us, which I consider to be utility spells. These are; Auras, Judgements, Hands and Blessings. Now, some could say there is a 5th category (seals) which I will discuss in this post, simply because I don’t know where else to talk about them, however I don’t consider them as true utility spells because they do not affect the group at all.

Healadin 101; The spells

So, last class we covered the very basics of healing. Today we will cover the basic spells in a healadins reprtoire. (Note. the links in this post are all intended to go to Wowhead. However, blogs do tend to be a target of phishers, so as always, check the destination before you click a link.)

First off, you’ve got the big guy. Holy Light. This is the heavy hitter that kind of defines a holy paladin. This thing hits like a truck. The tooltip says rank 13 hits for 4k-5k. But throw in your bonus SP, your looking at a heal that hits for 10-15k in all reality. My non crits hit for an average of 12-13k and my crits have hit for as high as 18k. You can heal a dpser from “omghelp” to full in a isngle hit. However, this thing chews up alot of mana and has a pretty long cast time if you don’t have a good amount of haste. That’s why HL-healadins prefer stacking Int (I’ve covered the concept of HL vs Flash builds before, but I’ll cover it again a bit more in depth later in my healadin 101 series). Without a very large mana pool, Holy Light is not the kind of spell you want to be spamming. Even with a large pool, HL isn’t designed to be spammed. It’s purpose is to drop a lot of points into a green bar in a short time (compared to other classes).

Healadin 101; part 1

Good morning everyone, quiet down, let’s get this started. Now, I am professor Llothan, this is healadin 101. Hopefully you are all here because you want to learn how to be an awesome healer or because you have a paladin friend who needs some help but has not the resources to do the research on their own. If you’re taking this as an elective or just trying to fill credits, get out.

Well, now that the rabble have left, let’s start with some basics shall we?

Healadin 101: an Intro.

So, after finishing off ToC10 for the first time ever, we finished our weekend by bringing in some new faces for an Ulduar run on Sat/Sun nights. V.V

Admittedly, I suck at tanking Razorscale. We wiped on the old bitch 4 times, mostly because I and my pali co-tank kept getting overwhelmed with adds (idiot on turrets and overeager dps dont help). At our best, we can get upto Thorim and Hodir easily, but we still struggle with Freya and have only tried Mimi once. This weekend we got down FL, XT, Razor, Kolo and Auriaya. 5 bosses compared to our usual 9. Bleh.

So, one of our issues (not including Razorscale, because that fight the healers were not the problem) was bad heals. Saturday was fine. We had our bo0mkin hero healing and our usual Shamy-raid healer on…well…raid heals. But we had a new healadin come in. First off his spec was messy. It was all over the place. My spec-OCD kicked in, and anytime I see more than 55-56 points in a single tree I get woozy. This thing was 63/8/0. BLEH. To make it worse, in the first tier, he put 5 points into ImprovedSealsofDPS, and 0 points in YouCanHitMeButMyHealWillStillGetOff. /facepalm. His Recount(tm) activity sheet looked like this: Holy Light: <10, Flash of Light: 2. That was it. A two-button healer, and only like 12 casts total. Sunday we had failadin and two other totally different healers and the only boss we got was Auriaya. Everyone else just roflstomped us for 2 hours.

Anyways, as a very confident healadin, I have made it my mission to help him. So, as I go through the process of crafting him into a winadin instead of a failadin, I will be posting several entries in a “Healadin 101″ format, to help all aspiring winadins out there on the intertoobs.