How to play a Healadin

So you want to be everyone's knight in shining armor and save the day?   Well, you’ve come to the right place.  This guide will walk you through the basics of playing a holy based Paladin, or Healadin as they are commonly called. 

Playing a Healadin can be a lot of fun if you are into being a support player. Be prepared for the role though as many players just can not sit back and not be directly involved in combat or damage dealing. As with playing a Priest, or any other healing class, you need to understand that while you rarely do anything to the enemy, you allow or enable your group to survive to do damage. This is not something everyone can cope with, so be warned.

If you are a support player, Healadins have a lot to offer. Paladins can throw some pretty big heals around, have great group buffs and can take a quite a few hits if they accidentally draw aggro. These are not your cloth or leather healers that cringe when a MOB heads there way and starts yelling for help. A Paladin can heal effectively while being beaten on by a MOB and survive long enough for the group to finish off a MOB and then come and deal with the one on you.

Paladins do have less healing options though, no heal over times, and have relatively long casting times. All that means though is that you need to watch closely and be prepared. Know your healing priorities and you should be just fine.

As a healadin, you will be spending the majority of your talent points in the holy tree. You need to do this gain some serious healing ability, including the level 31 talent Holy Shock. This little gem gives you your only instant healing spell. It comes at a high mana price but can give you enough time if used correctly to get a big heal off right after it, instead of chain casting smaller heals.

The critical talents in the Holy tree for a Healadin are Spiritual focus (70% chance to not lose casting time when hit), Illumination (critical heals are return 60% of the mana spent on them), and Divine favor (next heal is a critical one, 2 minute cool down). There are many other that are important, such as increased intelligence, increased critical chance on holy spells, and a reduction to cast time, but the first 3 are your core.

This is the Healadin Build I use when speccing holy - Healadin Build.  It has proven itself over and over again in the level 70 instances, where with nothing more than blue Burning Crusade instance and reward loot I was able to reach over +1000 healing unbuffed.

To find other holy based paladin builds or to submit your own, visit our wiki in the paladin build section.

Ok, you have the gear, you have specced holy, now what?  Head out there and find a group to adventure with, what else! As a holy based paladin you should be spending most of your time in a group since your solo effectiveness will be way down from a retribution or protection based build. Once in a group and adventuring though the most important thing to understand is healing priority and mana management. This is something that ALL healers regardless of class need to learn and what truly separates the good healers from the bad. The two things can sometimes be viewed individually, but are best thought of as a pair at all times. Ok, so what are they?

Now that you know what they are, how do you use that knowledge? The first part is establishing your healing priority and sticking to it. In a standard 5 man instance group you will have something like this for group composition: Tank, Healer, AOE DPS, DPS, Misc. In most cases, this list is also your healing priority list. Usually your tank is the most important person to keep up with yourself being immediately next in line, it then rolls down to AOE DPS or DPS depending on the instance and then the miscellaneous person in the group. This will change based on individual situations but is the general rule.

The last part of healing priority is making sure that you know when to keep people up, and when to let them die. This is basically exceptions to the above order. There are situations such as the Mage or Warlock are doing mass AOE against a group that needs to die, or a single MOB being left at low health and a last heal being available for the tank or DPS (where DPS would be more likely to be able to kill them), or any number of other specialized situations. While it is important to stick to the priority as much as possible, you should learn to recognize when exceptions to it are important as well.

Mana management is managing the amount you heal in a fight. Sure it's possible to heal everyone as soon as they take damage and even to keep everyone at 100% health, but why and for how long? If the tank is taking most of the damage and everyone else is just taking collateral damage from things, why heal them at all, unless they are below 50% health? If players are pulling aggro just because they know you will heal them, stop, make them learn aggro management. If everyone is above 80% why cast small heals, wait a while and regenerate some mana.

Part of mana management is also worrying about how big of a heal is needed and how much mana that heal will cost. Is it better to cast many small heals, or wait until the player is lower in life and cast one big heal? Since big heals are generally more mana efficient, it is generally better to wait and cast a bigger heal. This is not always practical though, so you need to learn to judge.

The other part of mana management is to look at how far down the healing priority list to actually heal, and by how much. At times someone way down that list will be at 30% health and you could get them to full health with a big heal or 60% health with a small heal at less than 1/2 the cost and 1/2 the time. You need to learn to manage those situations and realize that full health is not always needed (despite everyone being damaged always calling for a full heal).

Now that you know the order you should heal, how to you make sure you have mana for everything? Which heals should you use when and why?

Holy Shock - This is your instant heal, but it is very mana inefficient and has a 30 second cool down. At level 60 it heals 380 health for 380 at a healing rate of 1 health per mana. Because of the low amount that it heals, its high mana cost and its cool down you should only use it as a last resort to save someone, even then it probably won't be enough.

Flash of Light - 1.5 second cast meaning it is fairly fast spell but does not heal much. At level 60 it heals 360 health for 140 mana or 240 healing per second at a healing rate of 2.6 health per mana. It is very efficient but because it heals so little it is not always usable. It will probably be your first choice as a healing spell unless you are being out damaged.

Holy Light - Long heal at 2.5 seconds that heals lots of health. At level 60 it heals 1300 health for 580 mana or 525 healing per second at a healing rate of 2.3 health per mana. It is slightly less efficient than flash of light but heals a lot more. This is the spell you will be using to heal bosses that are out damaging your flash of light heals or to catch up on heals so that you can revert to flash of light.

Lay of Hands - Varies (consumes all of your mana whether you have 0 or 6000)

The above is just a base look at healing efficiency though. There are many factors that change and enhance your healing, for example Flash of Light only benefits from 43% of your +healing while Holy Light gets 71% of it. Blessing of Light will also effect these numbers as it adds a lot to your +healing stat on that target. In most cases you will not need it on anyone other than the tank though. Use of divine favor and illumination increase the effectiveness of all of your heals as does holy power. Even when everything is added up though FoL is more mana efficient than Holy Light, but will need to be mixed with Holy Light to keep up on big damage MOBs.

Gear for a healadin is a fairly easy when compared to many of the other Paladin build types.  You're main concerns should be +Healing, Intelligence, Stamina, Spell Crit and +mana per 5 seconds (+mp5). Luckily all of these come in at least pairs on most healing items you will find.

Intelligence and +Healing are by far the most important stats as they will allow you to cast more effective heals over a longer time that the other stats. To be truly effective you should aim to have at least a mana pool of 6000 and +400 healing by level 60 and 9000 mana and +1000 healing by level 70. If you focus on these stats you will also gain enough of the other stats as they are common on all the gear that has the other stats. While stamina is important so that you can take a hit, you will likely get enough while focusing on the other abilities that you will not have to hunt it out on your own.. While stats will vary from player to player due to individual preferences, the following is a minimum that I would aim for before attempting to heal either heroics or the early bosses (pre Curator) in Karazhan.

I have compiled a suggested gear list of items available pre-Heroic to get you close to those numbers. There are several pieces that are better, that could be added but are very difficult to get or create, but this list will get you ready for heroics and / or Karazhan and you can then fine tune with other gear to get raid ready. An excellent option once attuned to heroics is to collect the badges that drop from heroic bosses and the heroic daily quest to turn in for the amazing badge reward items. Several of the reward items are some of the best per slot items you can get short of the very hardest Burning Crusade raids.

Heroic Gear Prep List

Gems and enchants will play an important part in getting you to the numbers you need to heal heroics.

Starting with the easier topic of gems. In general you should be putting the +18 Healing gem in every red socket you have. Yellow slots should be filled either +8 intelligence or +8 spell crit, depending on the strength of the item. Blue slots should be filled with the purple hybrid gems that mix healing with intelligence, spell crit or even +mana per 5 seconds.

Now onto the more difficult topic of enchants on your gear. Proper enchants can add a ton of stats to your already good gear. The most critical one will really be your weapon enchant to provide a huge boost to your +healing numbers, so you have almost no choice but to get the +81 healing enchant on your weapon. For the rest of the enchants I have included a table to outline the ones that are best on each slot.

There are several consumables that you should while healing. They are:

Superior Mana Oil - Grants +14 mana per 5 seconds for 1 hour.

Golden Fish Sticks - Grants +44 healing and +20 spirit for 30 minutes. This is the default food buff.

Blackened Sporefish - Grants +20 Stamina and +8 mana per 5 seconds for 30 minutes. If I don't need the +healing from the Basilisk, or need the +mp5 or the stamina, use this.

Elixir of Healing Power - Increases your healing done by 50 for 1 hour.

Adept's Elixir - Increases spell damage and spell crit by 24 for 1 hour.

Flask of Distilled Wisdom - Increases your maximum mana by 2000 for two hours.

Super Mana and Healing Potions - Bring at least 10 of each, just in case...

There are several very common macros that every Healadin should use (assuming they haven't started already) to simplify their life. The most common are:

Downgraded Healing

This macro is used to replace your normal Holy Light heal button. By doing so you can prevent having a rank 1 and max rank Holy Light button on your toolbar. All you need to do is click the button to cast a max rank Holy Light, or hold down the control key while clicking to cast the rank 1 version. You can use a similar macro for any other spell you want by just replace the spell name in the macro.

Taunt

This macro can be used to turn your Righteous Defense taunt into a more warrior like taunt. Even though you are healer sometimes it is better for the MOB to be beating on you rather than a caster in cloth until the tank can pick it up. To use the macro simply click on the MOB you wish to taunt and the macro will target their target for you and cast Righteous Defense.

Bubble Save

While a very similar macro is used as a tankadin to save your allies as a backup taunt, a healadin uses it as a pure protection measure. While healing a MOB that is attacking players I tend to target the MOB and then heal its target. Doing this allows you to use this macro to bubble the targets target without clicking over.

Bubble to Break Fear

Sometimes you get feared and need to get out of it and back into combat quickly. This happens in fights such as Nightbane when you do not have enough priests for a full fear ward rotation. While the macro shown uses divine shield you can make a similar macro with Blessing of Protection.

• Stick to healing priority no matter how much some players complain, explain what you are doing and why and ask them to manage their aggro better so that they will not need heals.
• You can not keep anyone one up if you are dead, ensure you watch your own health bar too.
• Never shield a tank since it will cause them to drop aggro!
• Use Lay of Hands only as a final resort or if you are completely out of mana.
• It is critical to keep buffs up on everyone in the group
• You can wear any armour. Never be too proud to wear cloth if it has a much better healing bonus, just don't wear too much or you will not be able to take a hit.
• You are a Healer, a critical member of a group. You don't need to put up with crap, if the group is bad or bossy, leave.

For general Paladin information, check out our complete Paladin Guide.

Comments or questions? Email me (Messiah@TenTonHammer.com) or post in our Paladin forums!