How To Improve As Holy Paladin — The War Within (11.0.5)

Holy Paladins have a couple of powerful short cooldown spells — spells with cooldowns shorter than 30 seconds — and several that can be added through talent choices. They are given cooldowns because they are powerful, inexpensive, or both, and it is essential for your performance to use them as often as they are available and will not overheal.

By far, the most important example of such a spell for Holy Paladins is Holy Shock. It is a powerful and inexpensive spell on a short cooldown. Holy Shock is the bread and butter of Holy Paladin, and how often you cast it plays a large role in your overall performance. It not only makes up the largest percentage of our overall healing, but it also contributes Holy Power for Light of Dawn and Word of Glory. Holy Shock critical strikes grant the Paladin the Infusion of Light buff, which empowers your next Holy Light, Flash of Light, or Judgment.

Like your short cooldown spells, it is equally important to use your larger healing cooldowns, such as Avenging Wrath, as often as possible, as long as there is healing to be done. Healers regularly make the mistake of "saving" their cooldowns for when they are needed — a time that often never comes. It is much better to get some benefit from their use than for your cooldowns to go unused for minutes at a time while you wait for the perfect opportunity.

If you know you will need one or more of your cooldowns for a specific event sooner than they would be available again, then saving them is acceptable. However, you should identify when this will be before or during an encounter to avoid leaving these powerful abilities unused for too long.

Holy Paladins are heavily reliant on making quick decisions and making those decisions as fast as possible. Every second, you need to be deciding whether you should be using Holy Shock, spending Holy Power, or even consuming an Infusion of Light proc. In many cases, what is the best spell to cast at any second is bound to change. It is key to understand the priority to help with this, but you should also be aiming to just cast as many spells as possible during a fight. Even if you make slight mistakes and press the wrong ability, it is still infinitely better than pressing no ability.

It is largely unquestioned that Holy Paladins are tank healers. However, how this works in practice is often misunderstood. A large portion of a Holy Paladin's overall healing comes from Beacon of Light. The extra healing transferred by Beacon of Light does not occur if you directly heal your Beacon target. Therefore, if you are trying to maximize your healing and efficiency, you want to avoid healing your Beacon target(s) unless they are in significant danger. Otherwise, you should allow the other healers to do so and let your Beacon support the tank's self-healing and mitigation abilities while you focus on others.

Knowing how to balance your desire to heal others with your need to heal your Beacon of Light target(s) is a sign of an experienced and skilled Holy Paladin.

Holy Paladins have three main reasons why their positioning is very important to their performance. First, their Mastery Mastery: Lightbringer increases their healing based on distance from the person being healed. Second, their main AoE healing spell, Light of Dawn is a cone that heals players in front of the Paladin. Finally, Holy Paladins do a significant portion of their damage with Crusader Strike. This last reason is even more crucial than in Legion with the introduction of Avenging Crusader as a talent.

Fortunately for Holy Paladins, all three of these reasons encourage the Paladin to be positioned with the melee DPS players. Doing so will reduce your distance from a large portion of your group or raid, increasing the effectiveness of your Mastery. In addition, it will ensure that your Light of Dawn casts will hit as many injured targets as possible, and you will be in range to do damage to the boss should there be little healing required.

There are times when it is not possible to be in melee range for portions of, or even an entire encounter. Perhaps a boss' ability targets you, or you need to be in range to heal specific ranged DPS targets. Maybe the tanks are split apart, and both need healing. However, these should be exceptions and not how you position yourself to maximize healing in a regular encounter.

When it comes to identifying and improving your mistakes, we strongly recommend the website WoWAnalyzer — it will analyze your logs and give you a report detailing how you did on the problems above and more.