Dungeon & Raid Playstyle
Before we get too in depth, let's first talk about how and when to use your cooldowns. With the rework coming into The War Within, we scaled back some of our cooldown bloat from previous expansions, leaving us with a smaller but very powerful arsenal to play with: Wings, Divine Toll, Aura Mastery and Bubble/Sac. Grouping Wings and Divine Toll is your best way to maximize throughput as it will result in a huge burst of damage or healing plus insane Holy Power generation, but make sure you don't need to stagger them for another damage event coming soon that you may not have anything for.
- Wings (Avenging Wrath) -
Wings was stripped of a lot of baseline power over the past few years, but with the introduction of Hero Talents in The War Within, a lot of power is being returned via our Hero Talent capstones. Herald will bring you heavy burst AoE healing from Sun's Avatar, while Lightsmith has Blessing of the Forge which amplifies your spot healing in Wings by echoing your Holy Power spenders. This means that Wings will once again be one of your main throughput cooldowns both for damage and healing. That being said, the biggest mistake I see Holy Paladins make is being too afraid to send cooldowns and holding onto Wings until an emergency. With access to so many other cooldowns and emergency buttons, Wings needs to be aggressively used for both damage and healing, especially since every build runs Awakening so you never have to be without Wings for too long. If there's one thing you take away from this guide, let it be to PLEASE not sit on your throughput cooldowns for multiple minutes. The longest I ever hold wings for is ~30 seconds and even that feels bad.
- Divine Toll -
Divine Toll is such a versatile cooldown that sometimes it can be difficult to know exactly how to use it. When talented, it is only a 45 second cooldown which means you'll want to use it very frequently. You should only hold your Divine Toll if you know big AoE damage is incoming soon and you need it for healing, otherwise just use it on cooldown for damage, Holy Power generation, and Rising Sunlight. Keep in mind Divine Toll can be cast on an ally or an enemy and will prioritize those types of targets in range. This means if you target an enemy with Divine Toll, it will cast one holy shock on that target + 4 other random enemies within 40 yards. If you target an ally, it will cast one holy shock on that ally, plus 4 other allies within 40 yards. If there are ever not enough valid targets within range, it will spend the rest of the Holy Shocks on the opposite. This means if you're fighting a boss with no adds and use Divine Toll on the boss, the leftover 4 holy shocks will automatically go on your allies.
- Aura Mastery / Bubble / Sac -
Sac should be used frequently, either as a way to help your teammates mitigate heavy damage from single target damage patterns, or combined with Bubble to handle big AoE damage. It's a 42% dr for 12 seconds + 15% dr for 8 seconds, which makes it one of the strongest external in the game, so smart usage of this will make a big difference in your groups survivability. Aura Mastery on the other hand is only a 12% DR for your group so while it is a valuable button to press, it's never worth the GCD in a reactionary moment so only use this before major damage events hit.
Herald of the Sun feels like a passion project of a designer that lived and breathed Paladin. It absolutely nails the class fantasy aspect, brought back a beloved ability (Eternal Flame), and returned Wings to the powerful feeling cooldown it was always meant to be. Playing Herald of the Sun Holy Paladin is some of the most fun I've had playing this game in a decade. That's not to say it's very overpowered, but more to say that the playstyle feels incredibly rewarding and satisfying in almost every way. Visually the beams of light from Sun's Avatar that slam damage and healing into everything they pass through is super cool and makes Wings feel really fun to press. Healing power is better than ever with Herald, giving you tons of burst AoE healing, consistant spot healing, and just a lot of agency over your healing profiles in general. The weak points of Herald are that its damage is a bit lacking, and the Holy Prism / Barrier of Faith Dawnlight interactions can be a little awkward to get used to.
So much of Heralds power comes from Wings that you really have to make great use of your cooldowns to get the most out of these talents. Pressing Holy Prism / Barrier of Faith on cooldown is also very important as your next two Holy Power abilities after using them will place Dawnlights on the target, which means you should generally place some extra value on where these dawnlights go. Keep in mind that if you use one of these empowered Eternal Flames on yourself during Wings, Sun's Avatar won't create a beam, but you'll still be radiating damage to all nearby allies and enemies.
While it's tempting to track things like Morning Star, Blessing of An'she, Solar Grace, and Sun Sear, none of these should affect your rotation or target selection so I would highly suggest not tracking them and just enjoying the free throughput! To get the most out of your Sun's Avatar healing you'll want to make sure and aim your beams of light and remember that the more stacked your group is the more value you'll get from intersecting beams so the value of this will vary a lot based on group comp, positioning, and fight mechanics.
I was hesitant about Lightsmith when it was first announced but was pleasently surprised with the design shifts they made during beta. That being said, it still has a ways to go before it feels anywhere close to being as engaging as Herald of the Sun. The talent tree itself leaves a lot to be desired with 4 talents alone that are basically completely useless in PvE. There are still some benefits to Lightsmith in niche content: Damage wise it is definitely better than Herald of the Sun which means cutting edge players may try to take the massive healing profile hit to gain some damage, but in general you just feel significantly weaker as Lightsmith compared to Herald. It also brings a massive amount of tank and personal survivability, plus some nice effective health increases for your allies via shielding, but this all comes at the cost of the heavy burst AoE healing and consistant spot healing that Herald brings.
When playing Lightsmith you can be pretty carefree with who gets your Sacred Weapon as it doesn't scale with player damage or have any unique interactions with specs (it does not proc more for some specs compared to others). The Armament you have to care about targeting specific players for is Holy Bulwark which should always go on the player that will need the most healing attention over the next 20 seconds. During trash this is often the tank unless you're fighting mobs that deal a heavy amount of group damage. Any time AoE damage is relavent you should be targeting your squishiest dps (remember that you always gain the Armament as well when it goes out).
Your Divine Inspiration weapons will be random so make sure you track who has weapons so when you throw out your manual one you don't give it to someone who already has one. You may be tempted to hold your manual cast of Sacred Weapon until the one from your Wings goes away, but even though you lose some uptime on your personal weapon, having multiple Sacred Weapons out during wings will yield much stronger results because of Blessing of the Forge. I always recommend saving a Sacred Weapon cast for Wings if you can, the more you have out during that burst window the stronger it will be.
One of the most underutilized aspects of Lightsmith is how often you can use Lay on Hands because of the Laying Down Arms talent. This reduces Lay on Hands to a roughly 2 minute cooldown, meaning you can get upwards of 15 casts in a dungeon if you were to use it on cooldown. This doesn't mean you should toss it out at the first sign of damage but you should definitely be far less reserved with your usage of Lay on Hands, especially since Lightsmith lacks a lot of spot healing.
Most of Mythic+ damage comes down to pressing the following buttons: Judgment, Consecration, Shield of the Righteous and Holy Shock. First and foremost, ALWAYS keep your personal consecration down. Remember that the Consecrations you proc from Judgment don't count towards your Consecration, so making sure you have full uptime on your personal Consecrate is vital to maximizing your damage contributions. It only costs 1 global every 12 seconds so there's no reason you shouldn't be able to have it down at all times. Your second most priority button when dealing AoE damage now is Judgment because of the talent Righteous Judgment which gives it a 50% chance to drop an additional Consecration.
The biggest difference you'll see between Holy Paladins comes from how aggressively they use Holy Shock and Shield of the Righteous. With all the spot healing power we have currently, it's easier then ever to be spending Holy Power on Shield of the Righteous, especially since it's our most mana efficient button, reduces the cooldown of Crusader Strike, and gives us free WoGs with the Shining Righteousness talent. Any time there isn't significant damage that has to be healed you should be using SotR, even on Single Target as Shining Righteousness makes it a great single target damage button as well.
The final key to maximizing your damage in Mythic+ is using your cooldowns a lot. Wings is our main source of damage due to the Hero Talent interactions: Herald providing beams of light you'll need to aim through enemies and Lightsmith sending more weapons and echoing your Shield of the Righteous casts. The more you press your cooldowns, the higher numbers you'll pull. Knowing when you can be aggressive with cooldown usage and when you need to hold is the biggest difference between good healer damage vs great healer damage.
Holy Paladin Beacons are a core part of our healing and who you place it on matters significantly. In raid you should either Beacon the tanks or squishy ranged players like hunters, priests and mages. A good general rule to follow is early on in the tier when everyone is undergeared, keep your Beacons on the tanks, but once players are more geared later in the tier you should swap them to the squishies instead. In Mythic+, you should prioritize ranged dps as most tanks this day and age have a huge amount of self sustain and simply don't need Beacon healing (except brewmasters lol). Generally speaking the best ranged dps targets for Beacon are evokers, hunters, priests and mages.
A quick tip for finding the best beacon target for your raid on any given fight is to check the warcraftlogs for your current pulls and sort by Damage Taken, then EHRPS (a tab above the graph) and look for the top 2 non tanks. Those will pretty much always be your best Beacon targets.
When running Virtue it's important to know how to get the most out of your casts and which damage events you need to hold it for. The first thing to note is that you should be using Virtue pretty much on cooldown since it's only a 15 second cd. This means any time more then one person is injured you should press it unless you're waiting for a specific damage event happening in a few seconds. When you're outside of Virtue you want to be "pooling / prepping" for Virtue, meaning generating Holy Power, and when a big damage event is about to occur, press Virtue and immediately start spending.
Your biggest burst healing combo when you press virtue will be Word of Glory -> Holy Shock -> Word of Glory. Divine Toll and Holy Prism are also fine to pair with Virtue as long as you don't need to stagger them if the damage event is longer than Virtue.
*Please note that "pre-casting" Holy Light / Flash of Light before pressing Virtue only works if casting it on a player other then yourself.
If you want to create a macro for all seasons of Blessings of Seasons, simply use /cast Blessing of Summer. It will auto rotate.
Choosing which targets to use your blessings on may seem confusing but it's actually pretty straight forward once you realize 90% of the time you are your best target. The most important part of this talent is that you use Autumn/Winter/Spring on cooldown, especially now that it's off the GCD. That's because the majority of the talents value comes from Blessing of Summer, so the more casts of that you get, the more valuable the talent is. Use this weakaura to help with making sure you use Autumn/Winter/Spring on cooldown
Blessing of Summer has changed dramatically since Dragonflight and now is cast on yourself, rather than a dps player. This is because the most value from Summer now comes from converting healing to damage, similar to Nature's Vigil for Resto Druid. It's important to keep in mind that Summer DOES work with overhealing (but not shields) so knowing how to get the most out of the cooldown can be a bit tricky. First of all remember that Avenging Crusader does not actually do overhealing if everyone is full health, so if you're running AC Summer will be particularly weak for you. In general if there's heavy AoE damage going out during Summer you don't have to worry about min/maxing anything, just heal and Summer will convert it to damage! The tricky part comes when you're trying to get the most out of Summer's damage when there isn't group damage happening and your group is topped: If you're running Beacon of Faith, you want to use all your Holy Shocks healing a non beaconed target, and all your holy power on WoG (or LoD if your group is stacked). If you're running Beacon of Virtue you'll only want to use Holy Shock / WoG for healing when Virtue is active because outside of the Virtue window you'll get more damage using SotR and Holy Shock offensively. Summer is also a single target damaging ability, so your best uses of it will be on mini bosses or bosses that deal lots of damage so you are getting extra value from your Beacon transfers. If you're running Herald, keep in mind that Eternal Flame heals you for extra so if the group is topped your Eternal Flame target should always be yourself.
For Blessing of Autumn, your best targets will be yourself or a dps that can make good use of the CDR. That being said, unless you're trying to get cooldowns up slightly earlier to counter a specific fight mechanic, the CDR is pretty minor so you can just throw it on whoever you want.
For Blessing of Winter, you always use it on yourself as it's one of our main sources of mana regeneration.
Finally, Blessing of Spring should always be used on yourself for healing unless the only damage going out is tank damage and you're playing with a high self healing tank like Blood DK or VDH.
The best way to keep your group alive is to prevent the damage from ever coming out in the first place! The better players you run with, the more you'll notice how much of high end Mythic+ is all about preventing damage from happening. This is mainly done through interrupts, which fortunately we once again have access to! Make sure you know which spells are most dangerous in which dungeons so you can help with interrupts on them. We have two other major ways of preventing dangerous mob casts: Hammer of Justice (HoJ) and Blinding Light. If your tank is getting stomped by a mob that hits really hard, stunning that mob with HoJ will do more for your tank's survivability then any healing ability you have.
Since the changes to AoE stops in Mythic+, HoJ has become more important than ever since mobs will recast most of their abilities when temporarily stopped. Check out the Dungeon Specifics section for more detailed information on where Blinding Light and HoJ are particularly important.
Other than the tank, the worst person to die during any pull is yourself. It's easy to get caught up with healing everyone else that you forget to take care of your own health pool. Our passive armor from being a plate wearer with a shield already makes us more survivable than most other healers. Couple that with Bubble and Divine Protection and we have too much survivability to let ourselves die during keys. Keep in mind with Unbreakable Spirit, Divine Protection (our 20% personal damage reduction) is on a 42 second cooldown, which is ridiculously short. The best Mythic+ players in the world are the ones that utilize their personal defensives to the fullest extent.
