A Holy Pally Spec-tacular!

I'm not going to go into a lot of details here -- many others have already said it, and said it better than I would. But, if you want to EXCEL at pally healing -- and give your raid the best chance at succeeding, you need to do some spec research.

If you do, you will find there are basically three approaches to healing:

• Focus on haste
• Focus on crit
• Focus on damage mitigation

Pretty much across the board, you will find that the haste approach -- which is really more of an enchant/gem/stat choice than talent differentiation -- is used while leveling and early (10-man Naxx) raiding, and the other two specs are what are being used by the top pallies (as determined by wow-heroes ranking). Yes, you can argue that a high gear ranking doesn't guarantee that they know what they're doing. Realistically, that's a failed argument for three reasons:

1. You don't get multiple, best-in-slot pieces without knowing what you're doing
2. These guys/gals are in the top raiding guilds, where they generally wouldn't survive if they didn't have skill
3. Many other information sources agree with their spec choices

Relying on haste just won't enable you to take on the levels of damage that many higher-level raid fights produce: Ignis, once he has several stacks, Hodir during Frozen Blows, Magnataur in TotC with Impales... and you can forget about Ulduar hard modes like XT during Tantrum and heroic TotC. During the first boss fight in heroic TotC last week, the three healers were doing a total of 11k HPS -- 5.5k of which was from the pally -- and they were being overcome with damage. And no haste spec can put out 5.5k HPS. It can't keep up because the health-per-second of Flash of Light is WAY lower than that of Holy Light. If a haste pally is in a raid that succeeds in those fights, it's because the other healers picked up the slack, putting their responsibilities in jeopardy.

Which brings me to the point: do the research. If you don't want to rely on what the top pallies are doing, then DO THE RESEARCH. There is a great article on wowwiki.com that compares the HPS output of all the heal spells (of all classes) as well as the mana burn rates of each. There are many blogs and sites out there that talk about why certain specs and talents are better than others. Here's just a few:

• http://www.holypaladin.net/index.php/holy-paladin-gear-haste-or-crit
• http://www.holypaladin.net/index.php/patch-31-pve-holy-paladin-talents
• http://www.wowpopular.com/Holy/Paladin/Talents

The primary objective is to really understand how certain talents benefit you in keeping the raid standing. There are certain talents that just aren't worth getting when you look at what benefits you could be getting from other talents. To know that, you need to really understand how all of the talents work, and how they work together. You need to understand how often you're going to be in certain situations while raiding, and if the amount of time a talent would be useful is worth it on the whole. That comes with experience. If you don't have that, then ask someone who does.