- A typical tank healer with big heals for everybody should they need it or not
Introduction
Holy paladins are known for their excellent tank healing abilities. There are mainly two different schools of paladin healing where one side favours the big heals with Holy Light and the other rely more on chain spamming Flash of Light. This is a brief introduction to paladin healing which is meant to provide information to those not familiar with this way of healing.
Holy paladin spells
Paladins have far less actively used actual healing spells than any other class. They do, however, have quite a few accessories to up their healing done and efficiency without actually using those abilities to heal specific people. This may all sound a bit confusing so below there is a short presentation of the most used healing related abilities which a holy paladin is likely to use. All the spells linked to are the ranks used at level 80.
Beacon of Light – When the beacon is placed on a target, that target will be healed for the same amount that you heal others. This is particularly great for when two tanks are both taking a lot of damage due to cleave abilities for example.
Holy Shock – A talented, instant cast heal which greatly benefits from a nice amount of crit. This is very often used when available due to it being both instant cast and doesn’t cost stupid amounts of mana.
Holy Light - A very powerful heal suited for massive damage which is often taken by the tank. Other players will also take significant amounts of damage at times in different encounters as well and this heal is just as good for that. If you choose to use Glyph of Holy Light you will also heal 5 nearby players when you use Holy Light.
Flash of Light – A smaller heal which is quick to cast and great for just topping up players in the raid when need be. Some paladins prefer spamming this heal as their main healing ability.
Judgement of Light – Although this is not a castable heal as such, it can help provide some excellent healing of melee players. Judge the boss the melee are beating on with Judgement of Light and you will give raid healers an easier job as this judgement will heal the melee as they hit the judged mob.
Lay on Hands – An instant cast heal which heals a target for the paladins full health (unless of course when it crits, then it heals for a lot more). It is great for when you desperately need a fast heal to save the day or when you’re in need of some mana back yourself for example. It has a considerable cooldown, so needs to be used with care.
Hand of Protection – Ok, so it doesn’t heal anybody, but it’s pretty good at preventing a player from taking melee damage for a few seconds! It also has a great comedy value when you HoP a target and they cannot figure out why they can’t hit their target 
. Careful using it on the tank though…
Avenging Wrath – This is a great ability to increase your healing done for a short while. However, make sure you have no imminent need for your Divine Shield because both of these apply the same debuff preventing you from using either ability for two minutes.
Divine Shield - Makes the paladin immune to taking damage for 12 seconds. It has a shared debuff with Avenging Wrath (forbearance).
Divine Illumination - It is great being able to halve the mana cost of Holy Light when you need to spam it due to heavy tank damage for example. It cannot be used very often, however, as it’s got a three minute cooldown.
Divine Favor – Great for those times when a critical Holy Light heal would be perfect. As it has a two minute cooldown it requires a bit of timing.
Sacred Shield – It absorbs damage on hit, but not a particularly significant amount. It is great for a the paladins who favour Flash of Light because of the increased critical chance.
Gear stats
Unlike the other healers you want a fairly solid focus on stacking intellect. Intellect will increase your mana pool as well as both your spell power and crit, which means it’s only haste you have to keep an eye on getting a healthy amount of yourself on gear. This doesn’t mean spell power and crit on their own are bad, you are just likely to benefit more from intellect for gems and such. Spirit is not good for you (yet, I think it will take a very long time to try to get used to wanting spirit as a holy paladin in Cataclysm *shudder*). Many paladins prefer items with both crit and haste instead of mp5, but this is difficult to obtain as quite a lot of plate healing gear does indeed have MP5 on it.
One of the items you may find most difficult to get a hold of is a shield, simply because they don’t drop everywhere. Then again you generally won’t have many to roll against when it does drop. You may find yourself repeated jealous of other classes and want to try to get a hold of their gear; mail in particular with both crit and haste (as opposed to some of your MP5 gear).
Mana regen
Divine Plea is a great ability for regenerating mana as it restores 25% of your mana unless you end up having to cut it short by dispelling it. This is because it gimps your healing and when the tanks in particular are getting their faces pounded repeatedly having half sized heals is not really an option.
Seal of Wisdom is great as it means you can hit mobs in order to get some mana back. Additionally if you use the Glyph of Seal of Wisdom your healing spells cost less mana. If this isn’t enough, and certainly if there are two paladins in the group, try to use Judgement of Wisdom as well for some additional mana regen on melee hits. Simply stand close enough to auto attack the mob in between heals and you’ll soon notice what it does for your mana regen!
Strengths and weaknesses
A holy paladin can produce some massive tank healing without greater difficulty. In fact they can throw big heals all around. Although movement is not great for a paladin, most learn to time their heals well when they are able to stand still. Experience is the key here. Additionally they have high survivability by being a healer in a can with a shield on top of it and a nifty bubble that makes the paladin unbreakable for a few seconds.
Due to the lack of AoE heals, raid healing is generally not something a holy paladin will excel at. Although Glyph of Holy Light does provide some AoE healing, it is far from as powerful as actual AoE healing spells other classes got. It is, however, worth noticing that the quick casts of direct heals as well as the instant cast Holy Shock ability does prove for some quite useful random raid healing while a tank would be the getting the same heals through the Beacon of Light.
Levelling
Protection, retribution and holy are the three different specs you can choose from as a paladin. As here are no caster paladin specs (no, shockadin is not a caster spec 
), you may find it much more difficult to try to level as a holy paladin. Both levelling as tank or melee are good options. AS a tank you would likely pull several mobs in one go and grind them down, while as a retridin you could bonk their noggins swiftly as you run past. Personally I chose levelling as protection until levelling past level 70 where I changed to levelling as retri to speed things up a bit.
Obtaining healing gear for a paladin is difficult if you intend to use the armour type meant for your class as most mail gear until level 40 and then plate gear will have melee or tanking stats slapped on them. However, as you can wear whatever armour type available, you can easily snatch up some cloth from quest rewards at least to use for healing. This is not gear if you want to level as holy, though, as the additional armour would have been great as you’re likely to be hit on quite a lot.
As there are a few things that counts against choosing to level as holy, it can be difficult to get instance experience as you level up. This is where the dual spec comes in particularly handy. Levelling up using a dps or tank spec while having an additional spec as holy you could swap to when doing some random dungeons could grant you much of the experience you need while levelling up.
Useful websites
Here is a list of links to some sites with useful information about holy paladins
If you know of other sites you’d like to recommend in regards to paladin healing, feel free to leave links in a comment to this post.
Summary
A holy paladin is nearly always put on tank healing duty because of the lack of AoE heals and because the few actual heals available are few, but of a significant size. Although they have very few proper healing buttons they have plenty other abilities need to be carefully timed due to their cooldowns. Their abilities are very useful in regards to mana as well as increase their healing. Although it can be easy to heal as a paladin due to having less abilities to keep track of, grasping all the little things can prove much more difficult.
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Ok, so the introductions are done, next week there’ll be a post on levelling and then one on gearing up.
[...] Holy paladin [...]
“Avenging Wrath – However, make sure you have no imminent need for your Divine Shield because both of these apply the same debuff preventing you from using either ability for two minutes.”
Probably should be noted that AW no longer applies Forbearance, although it does have a shared 30 sec lockout with those Forbearance applying abilities when used on yourself.