The Light and How to Swing It: Dealing with healing caps

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered, or catch me weekly on the Matticast.

If you've ever played a DPS class, you're familiar with working with stats with caps. You have to worry about hit and expertise caps, and there have even been haste and crit caps, too. While playing the min-max game with these stats can be entertaining, healers rarely have to worry about stat caps. Our primary stats, intellect and spirit, don't have any caps to speak of. We do have a few haste breakpoints where we get bonus Holy Radiance ticks, but haste and mastery don't have any hard caps that we can reach. We can pick up any healing stat without worrying about having too much of any given stat.

Instead of dealing with stat caps, healers deal with spell caps. DPS classes have an optimal system or rotation that they follow, but healers have several spell options they can choose from. Each spell has its own limitations, and knowing when to use what spell is a key part of playing a healer successfully. Holy paladins are especially familiar with these issues, as our spells tend to be in flux nearly even patch. Learning how to work around each spell's strengths and weaknesses will ensure that you always use the right tool for the job.

Reaching the HPS cap

Every time a tank dies, a holy paladin learns a little more about himself. I tend to view every tank death as a personal failure. The most common cause of tank death, in my experience, is doing too little healing per second. I'll get complacent while using my cheaper heals, and before I can react to a change, the tank gets smashed.

When you're healing a tank, you're essentially playing tug-of-war with the boss. The boss is doing a certain amount of DPS to your tank, and you need to do a certain amount of HPS to counter that. The boss might change his DPS values up and down at different times to try to throw you off balance, so you need to counter with the proper HPS choices quickly. The tank's life becomes a buffer, giving you a few precious seconds to react to the boss' latest attacks.

If the boss is doing more DPS than you're doing HPS, you have three choices: lower the boss' DPS, increase your personal HPS, or ask for some help. Asking for help should be our last resort, so let's focus on the first two options.

In order to reduce the boss' DPS, the tank (or raid) can use some of their cooldowns to mitigate some of the damage. Every tank has a couple of cooldowns at his disposal that help drop incoming DPS, and so you should coordinate with your tank to use those cooldowns if you're finding that you don't have the HPS to keep up. We can also use our defensive cooldowns, like Aura Mastery and Hand of Sacrifice, to reduce the damage that our targets take. Finally, you can also use CC or interrupts to knock down your enemies' damage, where applicable.

Defense isn't everything

Cooldowns are nice, but they're not always the answer. Sometimes, regardless of what cooldowns are active, spamming Holy Light with every global cooldown won't keep someone up. If you find yourself without enough GCDs, you might just need to use a bigger spell. While Holy Shock and Holy Light are great for saving mana, their HPS won't keep up a tank that's under pressure. There are situations where you just need to start dropping Divine Lights if you're going to keep someone alive through heavy damage. Avoid using Flash of Light if you can, as it takes the HPS/HPM balance too far and will rip through your mana way too quickly. When it comes to holy paladin spell selection, the real choice comes down to Holy Light vs. Divine Light.

The key to choosing between Divine Light and the other, cheaper heals is knowing how much damage your tank is going to take. If it's just a short period of burst, a few Divine Lights won't break your mana bank. If it's going to be a sustained session of spamming DL, you need to make sure you have the mana for it.

On a fight like heroic Halfus, where spamming Divine Light is really the only option, we have to use every trick in our book to prevent ourselves from simply running out of mana. Every gear upgrade we gets goes towards increasing the number of DLs we can cast per fight. DLs are typically the limiting factor of any mana pool, and so you want to spend the ones you can afford wisely. If you do have to spam Divine Light, you can mitigate the amount of mana you spend by utilizing Beacon of Light and Tower of Radiance. If you just have a single target getting slammed, you can toss Beacon on them, and then use your ToR holy power points on free Words of Glory. I use this strategy on several heroic encounters, as the free WoG every few seconds comes in handy for reducing my total mana expenditure.

The final way to increase your HPS is to use an offensive cooldown to boost your healing output. Avenging Wrath and Divine Favor both boost our healing significantly, and our Guardian of the Ancient Kings assists with this, too. Between our defensive and offensive cooldown options, we can tweak the DPS/HPS balance in our favor.

Defensive cooldowns tend to be the most potent when the tank is getting hit for huge amounts, while offensive cooldowns work best when the tank's life is descending smoothly. How much less do you have to heal when a tank has Shield Wall up? You'll never know until you try, so you need to test the potency of each cooldown to know when to use them.

Hitting the mana wall

While it's easy to tell you to just use Divine Light more often if your tank is dying, you also can't sustain a 100% Divine Light cycle. We simply don't have the mana to spam our biggest heal like we did in Wrath. Without careful use of our cheaper heals, we'll run out of mana before an encounter is over. We have to be as efficient as we can without letting anyone die.

Riding the line between doing enough HPS but yet reserving enough mana is one of the major difficulties of playing a healer. In Cataclysm, we don't always have to top everyone off. I see a lot of newer holy paladins pulling out their big heals on every pull, when they can usually get by with far less.

For example, against Bloodlord Mandokir, we don't have really heal anyone besides the tank. Mandokir's debuff, Ritual of Bloodletting, won't kill a player as long as they have a few hundred life, and his power move, Devastating Slam, kills on impact. There's no reason to spend the time or globals on healing the group, since they're in no real danger.

Similarly, when facing Cho'gall, your raid won't take much damage during phase 1. While they'll get blasted during the Shadow's Orders phases, you have a ton of time to heal everyone up. You don't need to be in a rush; you can use Holy Light to get everyone back up to full before the next Shadow's Orders phase. While Divine Light might heal twice as fast as Holy Light does, Holy Light can do it for a fraction of the mana. Lean on Holy Light and Holy Shock whenever someone isn't in any immediate danger of dying.

If you find yourself running out of mana, you should approach it from two directions. First, try to get more mana by using Divine Plea and Judgement as often as you can. Second, try to use cheaper heals whenever you can.

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The Light and How to Swing It: Exploring the ramifications of the 4.2 Holy Shield change

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Protection specialist Matt Walsh spends most of his time receiving concussions for the benefit of 24 other people, obsessing over his hair (a blood elf racial!), and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense.

Blizzard fired off the latest salvo in the Battle of Blockcap, this time making a seriously substantive change to one of our signature, foundational abilities:

Holy Shield has been redesigned. This talent is now an activated ability off the global cooldown. It grants 20% increased block amount to a paladin's shield blocks for 10 seconds, with a 30-second cooldown.
This of course set off a firestorm of commentary across Twitter, the official forums, Maintankadin, and blogs of all stripes. Many have approached the change with skepticism -- if not outright hostility -- and I must protest that they are doing so at their own peril. While many are terming this the Holy Shield nerf, I, dear reader, humbly submit this is a Holy Shield buff.

I'll explain why.

The idea, from the looks of it, behind this change is that Blizzard's saying, "We're not sure how to fix block capping, so the best we can do for now is reduce how powerful it is to do so." At least, that's my reading. I've been known to read Blizzard's motives poorly before. 4.2 is still a ways away, and there still could be a nerf to our block chance on the horizon. I cling to hope, regardless, that perhaps this is the harkening of a new -- sanctioned -- block capping era.

Holy Shield and total damage reduction

That said, let's actually talk about the meat of the change, yes?

The single biggest benefit of the new Holy Shield is this: It's extra damage reduction when you want it, with a very short cooldown. This comes at the expense of more damage across the board and, thus, diminished total damage reduction (TDR) -- but honestly that is more than fair.

When it comes to cooldowns, the most beneficial way to handle them to pop them preventively when you're about to take a serious hit. Sloughing a large percentage of some tank-killer is infinitely better than eating the full brunt of the hit and then popping a cooldown immediately following to make it easier for the healers to scramble to pour mana into your near-corpse.

The easiest way to make your healers go OOM is to take large amounts of unnecessary damage so that they panic and immediately remedy with cooldowns of their own and high-cost spells, before a followup attack from the boss smears your congealed remains across the floor. (Meloree explores this concept more in depth at Sacred Duty; do pay him a visit, as he explores the relationship between TDR and healing in a way better than I could within the confines of this particular post.)

So what's the trade-off here? I've seen some folks bandy about the number 6.67% average block value from the new Holy Shield, as if you could quantify the ability through an average value. If you're subscribing to that interpretation, I really need you to abandon it, because that mode of thinking is completely inimical to the optimal exploitation of this ability. Forget about TDR, forget about average block values -- the most important number here is 20%.

Treat it like a cooldown

That is, whenever you activate the new Holy Shield, you're bestowed an immediate boost of 20% block value, putting you at an amazing 50% block value for a short period of time. Thus, you're moving from a model in which you enjoyed a constant damage reduction boost to a model in which you can push out a massive wall of damage reduction to eat away at a major source of incoming pain.

We must remove ourselves from the old Holy Shield and the idea of having a constant block value boost, though, as the pursuit of that could encourage suboptimal play. Instead, this is not the kind of ability you want to macro to Crusader Strike. You want to be very particular when it is activated, to get the most optimal boost from it.

Consider for example, the Nefarian add tank. The single most dangerous part of the single most dangerous phase of the fight for that noble soul isn't when he or she is dragging a flotilla of skeletons around the chamber, eating the regular melees of the adds. Rather, it's in that moment when Electrocute strikes and the tank is looking at a massive spike on top of all that regular damage.

The best way to survive those adds isn't to pop your cooldowns like clockwork as you circle the track, hoping for a low average damage intake; rather, it's to time them for those spikiest moments, when your survival is most in doubt. The premise of coupling a boost to your physical damage reduction via this iteration of Holy Shield with a boost to your magical damage reduction via a glyphed Divine Protection is incredibly powerful.

For anyone who tanked at the start of Wrath, you'll probably intimately recall the derision that was poured upon death knights for how overpowered there were when tanking three-drake Sartharion. Why were they so potent against that hard mode fight, to the point that it was considerd just about impossible unless done with a death knight? Because of cooldowns! They had a cooldown for every spikey moment across the entire duration of the encounter, something no other tank could boast, and they could time them to never have any moments of imminent doom. Their cooldowns made it a cakewalk.

Seriously, it's a buff

As paladins, we are rapidbly approaching a future when we will be the new cooldown tank. When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. When all you have is a wonderfully diverse tool belt of cooldowns, every boss ability looks like an afterthought. That, my friends, is the path to once again being considered the most OP tank. Prepare yourself for it.

Granted, I do understand the unease over losing a constant 10% block value. At first look, that does seem like a substantial nerf. However, if my ranting over these last, many paragraphs has conveyed anything, it's that I strongly believe any trade in damage reduction of non-generally life-threatening damage for increased reduction of scary time-to-die damage is beyond a fair trade.

Likewise, this loss of consistent, smaller damage reduction will not make us a spikier tank, as I've seen asserted in several places. Since Cataclysm began, we've been the tank with the smoothest incoming damage levels, even before block capping (though, obviously, even more after). The only spikes we can expect is for lower damage intake on those bigger, life-threatening hits -- basically, a good kind of spikiness that endears us to healers even more than usual.

If there's one takeaway from this whole thing that I would like to emphasize the most, it's this: The best tank is one who uses cooldowns intelligently when needed to best reduce the most deadly, incoming damage. This change facilitates this playstyle in spades. That alone is why the proposed 4.2 Holy Shield change is, above all, a buff. Do not fear it. The Light and How to Swing It tries to help paladins cope with the dark times brought by Cataclysm. Check out our protection 101 guide and our suggestions for protection paladin addons.

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