A Tankadin's Guide to Healing Gear

Aedan, not really. The blue-PVP gear is decent as a starter and MAYBE to help in early Kara, but it will not cut it at all past Maiden (which is more of a dispel fight anyways).

The OP hit the nail on the head. #1 stat for a protection healer is Mana/5. Get it above 100 mp/5. Learn it, love it. The more you have, the longer you can go.

Once you get past Kara, there are three nice pieces from Zul Aman also (Chest from Eagle, Belt from Hex Lord and Shoulders from Lynx). You will often be the only pally on ZA runs so these should be goals as well.

Thanks a bunch Trueth. It's a bit up in the air who'll wind up being the true "MT" between me and our warrior GM, but I know any fight where there's any off-tanking whatsoever needed I'll be it, and I'll likely wind up MT'ing at least half of Kara, just from the way things tend to work out in our guild. I just decided I'd try to not be totally useless in fights like Maiden (if I'm not tanking) or Aran. I'd already picked up that set just to have something to use at this point, but got lucky and started grabbing some good boe's from random runs, so things are looking up. Our guild is pretty set for healers though, at least for just starting kara/za - we literally have one of each - so I don't see it as being toooo much of an issue, or at least as much of a priority.
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Zodijackyl - Caelestrasz

Also take a look at the "Dungeon-blues" set primarily from Heroics. The helm and chest are easy to obtain in SL and SV, and they will last you a LONG time. Make sure to also put on mana/5 enchants over healing enchants on any "Healadin" item. Also use a mana oil on your healing weapon.

Here is a link to the Dungeon-blues (note I did not filter out the spell crit items...probably should have...):

http://www.wowhead.com/items=4.4&filter=qu=3;minle=112;maxle=115;cr=119:92;crs=1:2;crv=0:0

I didn't think there were any gems left in the WoW forums, but sometimes it's nice to be wrong.

Holy Paladin Guide to Pre-Kara gear
All of the recommendations in the Opening Post is included, but also some alternatives.
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Are you down with OPPaly ?

I've been taking Kara for a few weeks with my guild, as OT and MT, depending on who wants to switch in etc.

I've collected quite a few pieces of Kara healing gear and have around +900 healing with no enchants on the items, and only one of them socketed. I use my heal suit during fights like Shade of Aran, and Maiden if we have a warrior tank.

I don't have all my items in a list, but I haven't been a healing paladin since level 40 or so, so consider me new to it. How much +healing bonus is typical for a healing set for a protection spec'd paladin?

Also should I be enchanting/gemming for +healing, or a bit of mp5 as well?

With a decent heal suit, how much should I be getting for just a regular Flash of Light? Should I expect a flash of light for 1500 when I have a full heal suit?

Thanks!
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http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Turalyon&n=Laslord

First of all, it depends what your goals are. If you are interested in gathering a real healing set that will help your raid progress on fights where you are not tanking, then you should enchant and gem your healing items properly, just like you would with tanking gear. Use consumables such as Golden Fish Sticks and mp5 oil on fights where your job will be healing.

As far as the numbers go, I was around +800 healing when I started to seriously build a healing set. Nowadays, my healing set is around 1920 healing when holy speced (41/20/0), and around 1790 when prot speced. The difference comes from the intellect -> healing conversion talent. All the items are Kara/heroic/arena/PvP/rep gear, and my cloak is still a blue one from the first SV boss. Nice thing about being a paladin is that you are more likely to be the only person who can use a plate healing drop, so you'll naturally acquire quite a few of them. Make sure you have enough items with gem slots to satisfy the requirements for the healing meta (+12 intel/chance to restore mana), that gem is huge for mana regen.

As far as gemming priorities go, +healing > +mp5 > intellect/spell crit. If you match socket colors (I suggest you do), there actually isn't much choice - it's either +healing or +healing/+mp5 or +healing/+intellect. +healing/+spell crit heroic gem works well too.

Talk to your raid leader in advance about the role they want you to play in a raid. Your guild will appreciate you more if you can do both tanking and healing well, as this gives more flexibility with raid composition.

About how much FoL will hit for, you can multiply your own +healing number by the coefficient from http://www.wowwiki.com/Spell_Damage_Coefficients and add it to the base FoL value from the spell tooltip.

-- Edited for typos.
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While healadins do get a bonus to +healing, the biggest difference between them and tankadins is mana regen through crit and illumination. For that reason, I focus on mana/5 enchant, gems and gear over +healing gear. Plus, there are fights where your main role is not to heal, but rather to Cleanse (if you are not tanking). Especially in those fights, mana/5 if WAY more valuable than +healing.

I gem this way on my tankadin: Mana/5 > Healing > Intellect. Crit is next to worthless since we only get unreliable bigger heals from crit. And haste is not too smart unless you are very deep into endgame content...because you do not have the mana longevity to keep up with faster healing.

Without blowing epic gems, I only use two gems, Royal Nightseye (9 heal, 2 mana/5) and Dazzling Talasite (4 int, 2 mana/5). I find them pretty equal in quality and like to split pretty evenly, but Dazzling Talasites are a TON cheaper on my server... Oh, and save that +22 healing gem from MgT until you have an item worthy to put it in!

Take a look at the awesome Paladin Healer spreadsheet out there. Set your talents then look at the values for each stat. Mana/5 is BY FAR the most valuable stat for us. I would recommend having mana/5 in every gem slot not used by an epic gem.

Trueth, I'm curious about your healing style as a prot.

I do agree that lack of illumination devalues spell crit for prot healing - I use the heroic +healing/+spell crit gem anyway because I don't feel like regemming one particular slot every time I respec.

But the answer to +healing vs. +mp5 depends on how often one uses HL as opposed to FoL when prot speced.

When I'm holy, I use HL9 and HL11 a great deal in addition to the regular max rank FoL, these cover damage spikes very nicely and reliably.

However, when I'm prot, the absence of Light Grace talent discourages me from using HL at all, so I just spam FoL on main tank and switch to spot heal the raid when it takes damage (some of our healers don't react too quickly to raid damage, so I act as a safety buffer there as well.)
Given this, I don't see a point in valuing mp5 over +healing when healing as a prot. Of course, some minimum mp5 from gear and enchants (chest, feet, shoulders) is always nice, but when you add 300 mana back from the healing meta and mana regen from BoW and SA (I let others heal myself unless I'm spiking low), these are enough to spam max rank FoL pretty much indefinitely, in which case extra mp5 will not provide any tangible benefit.

Hopefully, this explains why I prioritize +healing over +mp5.

If you see yourself using HL as prot, the story is obviously different, but I'm skeptical about HL viability when prot speced, it's just too slow and inefficient.
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Gothic, good question!

When I am a prot healer, my goal is to spam FOL and Cleanse with as few HL's as possible. How that works out depends on the size of the raid. In a 25man, I can almost always get away with this. In a 10man, I have to be more flexible.

As a prot healer, I actually see my main role as a cleanser/light damager, not a healer. Since my heals are sub-par at around +1580 healing, I focus my attention on letting everyone else heal rather than decurse. Spamming cleanse saps my mana way faster than FOL, so mana/5 becomes more important.

I am running T4 content with about 135 mana/5 pre-wisdom, but I do not have a meta slot. And I rarely count on SA, since I should be taking too much damage.


Final thought for everyone, if you have the option to avoid straight healing, do it. When I am not tanking, my preferred role is to provide ultimate utility. I throw on hybrid spell damage/healing gear for equipment. I then run into melee, judge wisdom for the raid, consecrate, exorcise (when applicable), seal/judge vengeance or righteousness, cleanse as needed, bubble someone as needed, and FOL as needed. Typically, the raid does not need you as a full time healer, so you might as well provide some light dps instead of standing around. Plus, JoW is a huge mana benefit for your raid.

Trueth,
thanks for your insight!

I think we agree that the role of a prot healer is quite situational depending on the fight.

- When healing gets tight, we can save healers' GCDs by cleansing ourselves (e.g., Maiden). Another useful option is dropping SoL, it helps stabilize the health of dual wielding melee DPS.
- When the fight is long and sustained DPS is important, help hunters and mages with their mana regen by dropping SoW.
- When the whole raid takes damage (e.g., unlucky shatter on Gruul), keep the "real" healers alive to heal the rest of the raid.

So yes, just like with tanking, gearing depends on the role.

If you cleanse and rarely heal, I agree that mp5 is more important than anything else, and those shaman pieces work great.

If you FoL a lot, +healing will start pulling ahead once mana regen is reasonable.

If you are being directly hit, such as in the Priestess fight in heroic MrT, then PvP healing gear is great for its stamina and resilience.

I have another tip for folks in healing roles - if a fight involves the paladin taking damage, keep improved RF up, it'll mitigate some damage, and it's very unlikely to pull aggro from the proper tank.

By the way, does anyone know if Cleanse has any threat associated with it? When I tank, I like helping my healers by cleansing myself, and I wonder if that spell adds any threat as well. WowWiki and EJ topics on threat don't really cover this.
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cleanse causing threat hmmm trying to find a way to test this:

Assume a friend bodypulls a mob and pops a dreamless sleep potion.
You cleanse and see if the mob runs for you.
Make sure there's no energy gains involved, the pot needs to be cleansed before your mate gets hit.
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Should this new breastplate be included as a potential candidate for Chest? It's fairly easy to get as running Heroic Magister's Terrace is not incredibly difficult, especially with an ideal group of 2 Mages, 1 Warlock, Paladin Tank, and Priest healer.

Breastplate of Fierce Survival
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http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Turalyon&n=Laslord

Going back to the original thread.

I often get side benched to allow for other tanks to take over the MTin of a boss - fine by me really because I know 1 tank doing his share of semi capable healing is better than 1 tank trying to very average dps dps.

It has been said Mp5 is great for prot healers, as crit is largely useless so no regen.
But no one has really covered how useful haste is.

I am talking from an end game perspective here, on fights such as RoS where haste reduces the GCD on Cleanse, and allows steady 1.4k heals to be landed in just over 1.3 second casts.
Seems very useful to me.

The reason I don't use HL is because you often take raid dmg and as we don't have the reduced HL cast time from talents you find yourself getting longer and longer casts with all the interupts.

Anyone got anything else to say about this?
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http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Emeriss&n=Tieran