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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 can not just 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. It is a critical role though and one that a group can not be without, it just takes a special kind of player to be able to fill the role.

If you are a support style player, Healadins have a lot to offer. Paladins can throw some of the biggest 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 an enemy heads their way and starts yelling for help. A Paladin can heal effectively while being beaten on by an enemy and survive long enough for the group to finish off a different foe and then come and deal with the one on you.

Paladins do have less healing options than other healers though. They have no heal over times, only a single instant heal, no AOE heal, 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.

Talents and Glyphs

As a healadin, you will be spending the majority of your talent points in the Holy tree. You need to do this to 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.

Probably the most important talent is the 51 point talent Beacon of Light, which turns the target into a beacon for all healing that the Paladin does within 60 yards of him. This means that any time you heal anyone you heal within 60 yards of the beacon, the beacon also receives the full effect of the heal. This provides you with a solid multi-target heal, especially when the beaconed target is the tank.

There are several other critical talents in the Holy tree for a Healadin such as Spiritual Focus (70% chance to not lose casting time when hit), Illumination (critical heals return 30% of the base mana cost of the spell), and Divine Favor (next heal is a critical one, 2 minute cool down). There are also many others 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 80 instances and raids. It dips into the protection tree to pick up even more healing power with Divinity (+5% healing) and a situationally awesome ability called Divine Sacrifice. Divine Sacrifice allows you to absorb some of the damage incoming to the group and transfer it to you.

While there are a number of decent Glyphs for a Holy Paladin the ones I suggest are based on raid usefulness. Therefore the greater glyphs I believe you should use are:

Glyph of Seal of Wisdom - Reduces all of your healing spells' mana cost by 5%. This is a can not go without glyph as it allows you to cast more heals over time. 5% may not sound like a lot, but it sure adds up.

Glyph of Beacon of Light - Increases Beacon of Light's duration by 30 seconds to 90 seconds. Having to cast this spell less often means less chance that it will not be up when you need it.

Glyph of Holy Shock - Reduces cooldown by 1 second. This may not sound like a whole ton but it takes it from 6 to 5 seconds, which can make a a big difference on certain fights when you need it.

Stats and Gear

Gear for a Healadin is a fairly easy when compared to many of the other Paladin build types.  Your main concerns should be Spell Power, Intelligence, Haste, Spell Crit, and Mana per 5 seconds (MP5). Luckily all of these come in at least pairs on most healing items you will find.

Spell Power and Intelligence are by far the most important stats as they will allow you to cast more effective heals over a longer time than the other stats. Spell Power provides extra healing to each spell that you cast in an amount based on the spell cast. For example Flash of Light gains 112% of spell power, while Holy Light gains 188% of spell power. Intellect provides a lot of extra mana which allows more spell casts. At level 80 raid buffed, 100 Intellect will provide almost 2000 extra mana to work with which is huge. Intellect also provides significant boosts to MP5, Spell Power, and Spell Crit. They are not as much as simply focusing on those stats obviously, but significant enough to mention.

Spell Crit and Haste are next in usefulness as a Holy Paladin. Spell Crit is huge since when you do crit your heal will hit for 50% more than normal and through talents return 30% of the base cost of the healing spell used. The extra health healed allows you to potentially cast fewer heals to do the job, and the mana returned allows you to cast more heals before you run out of mana. Spell Crit scales amazingly well as you gear up, vastly expanding your effective mana pool. Haste is important as most of a Holy Paladin's spells have long cast times. Haste allows you to cast these spells quicker, however they heal for the same amount and use the same amount of mana. This means that the more you stack haste the more you can heal per second, but you will run out of mana sooner.

The last useful stat is MP5, and it's usefulness depends greatly on your style. Many Holy Paladins prefer to simply focus on crit rating to generate mana back through it, however you should get at least a little MP5 so that if you do ever run out of mana you have a way to generate some back.You should get enough of this while focusing on the other stats simply because a lot of gear will come with it.

Gems and Enchants

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

We'll start with the easier topic of gems. In general you should be putting a +19 or +23 spell power gem in every socket you have, red or not. When the socket bonus is worth following you can fill the other coloured sockets as follows. Yellow slots should be filled +12 spell power / +10 intellect orange gems. Blue slots should be filled with the purple hybrid gems that mix spell power with mp5 or stamina.

As for Meta Gems while there are several options your best one is the Insightful Earthsiege Diamond. This gem gives you 21 Intellect and a chance to restore mana on each spell cast. This gem grants 600 mana every 5% of spell casts. When you run the math it works out to roughly 75 MP5 which is a big amount. for this slot.

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 spell power numbers, so you have almost no choice but to get the biggest +spell power enchant on your weapon that you can. For the rest of the enchants I have included a table to outline the ones that are best on each slot.

Healing Priority and Mana Management

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 is 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 doing mass AOE against a group that needs to die, or a single enemy 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, how quickly it is needed, if the target will die before a big slow heal, 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 your small heals are more efficient they should get priority, however big heals are sometimes needed so the target gets enough health back to take another hit.

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).

Mana Efficiency

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 only instant heal, but it is very mana inefficient and has a 6 second cool down. Because of the low amount that it heals, its high mana cost and its cooldown you should only use it as a last resort to save someone, even then it probably won't be enough. It is also the only heal you can cast while moving, so any time you need to move or readjust in a fight it is a good time to throw one of these at the tank.

Flash of Light - At a 1.5 second cast time this is a fairly fast spell but does not heal much. It is a very mana efficient spell but because it is a small heal it is not always usable. It will still probably be your first choice as a healing spell unless you are being out damaged.

Holy Light - This is a long cast time heal at 2.5 seconds that heals lots of health. It is slightly less efficient than Flash of Light but heals for a lot more. This is the spell you will be using to heal your tank when bosses are out damaging your Flash of Light heals or to catch up on heals so that you can revert to Flash of Light.

Beacon of Light - This ability effectively doubles your healing since it will heal the beaconed target for the same amount cast at any friendly target within 60 yards. This makes healing a group much easier since you can Beacon the tank and heal the group. Even over heal is transferred to the tank so you can heal a fully healed group member and still heal the tank.

Sacred Shield - This is a damage prevention ability rather than a healing ability. It does, however, allow you to heal slightly less and provides a boost to healing when needed. When cast on a target it places a 30 second buff that will spawn another buff once they are hit. The second buff lasts up to 6 seconds and absorbs some incoming damage and then expires. While it is active though you gain a 50% crit rate boost to your FoL spells.

Divine Plea - While this is another spell that is not a healing spell it does give back a huge amount of mana, and therefore should be mixed in anytime you are down to between 30 and 50% mana. Do not wait until you are out of mana to use it as you then have to wait for it's cooldown to expire to use it again.

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 112% of your Spell Power while Holy Light gets 188% of it. The HOT portion of Flash of Light also increases its effectiveness even more, as does its synergy with Sacred Shield. Use of Divine favor and Illumination increase the effectiveness of all of your heals as does the use of proper glyphs. 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.

Healing Rotations

There are of course a huge number of variables when healing, so there is no one specific rotation. Who and what you heal is largely based on your assignment in a raid, or healing priority in a group, or on just who is taking damage and why. After reading the Healing Priority section above you likely have a very good idea of who to heal and why.

There are several things to keep in mind while healing though as follows:

• Keep your Beacon of Light and Sacred Shield up on the Tank unless someone else is likely to be taking more damage - for example the off-tank in certain fights.
• Cast a Flash of Light on the tank every 14 seconds to keep the HOT portion of it active.
• Heal other players the rest of the time to effectively double the amount you are healing due to Beacon of Light .
• Heal using Flash of Light as much as possible, however watch for stronger incoming damage and use Holy Light if needed.

Consumables

While items and gear are required for any raid, obviously, you also really should bring along all the consumables that will help you maximize your healing ability. The ones that every Healadin should bring to a group or raid are:

• Flask of Frost Wyrm - Increases your spell power by 125 for an hour. This is the best flask you can get as a Holy Paladin.
• Flask of Pure Mojo - Increases your mana regeneration by 45 MP5. This is a decent flask, but not as good as Frost Wyrm, since 45 MP5 is not that significant a number at max level.
• Firecracker Salmon - Increases your mana regen by 45 MP5 and stamina by 40.
• Imperial Manta Steak - Increases your haste by 40 and stamina by 40.
• Runic Mana and Healing potions - Bring a stack of each just in case.

Macros

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:

Divine Favor / Holy Shock Macro

This macro allows you to cast Divine Favor and then Holy Shock right after critical hits. This will allow your next Flash of Light to be an instant cast as well. This combination puts out a lot of healing really quickly.

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 I tend to target the enemy and then heal its target. If you heal this way, or even the normal method of healing a target this macro allows you to use the bubble on your target or the target's 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 any fight with an AOE fear and not enough fear wards or tremor totems to go around. While the macro shown uses divine shield you can make a similar macro with Blessing of Protection.

Things to Remember

• 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, so ensure that you're watching your own health bar too.
• 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 armor. 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, so if the group is bad or bossy, leave.

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

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