A Glimmer of Hope for Holy Paladins in BFA

I have to come clean to all of you; I’ve been playing my Mistweaver Monk this entire expansion. I had a strong suspicion that Holy Paladins were going to be weaker than usual coming into BFA, but the main reason for swapping is that Holy Paladins just don’t feel very fun right now. Luckily, there’s a fairly new build that capitalizes on the strength of the Glimmer of Light Azerite trait that was introduced in patch 8.1, so I wanted to showcase how to play it for those of you who might want a change of pace.

Before we get into the build itself, I want to give credit to other people because I did not come up with this in any way. The buzz began when a player by the name of Shockwater on Kil’Jaeden-US played a prototype of this build during the first week of Mythic Battle for Dazar’alor. The build was then tested and refined by a few players from the Hammer of Wrath discord server until Holypalaswe on Draenor-EU released a video using the build to it’s full potential, and it’s currently the number one healing parse on Mythic Jaina.

The Glimmer of Light Build

This build utilizes three Glimmer of Light Azerite traits with Crusader’s Might, Holy Avenger, Sanctified Wrath, and Divine Purpose as talents and as much haste as you can get. The core focus is to use as many Holy Shocks as possible to maximize the number of Glimmer of Light buffs on the raid.

Glimmer heals for 1587 at ilvl 400 and 1826 at ilvl 415 per trait. Multiplied by 3 and increased by the hidden 40% increase that all healers received in BFA, each Glimmer buff heals for between 6665 and 7669 as a base. It’s also affected by crit, mastery, and versatility, so you can expect to see numbers from 7k to 9k during most of the encounter and up to as much as 30k during cooldowns! When Holy Avenger and Avenging Wrath are active, it’s possible to have up to 14 or 15 buffs of Glimmer on the raid. Even without the major cooldowns, you’ll still have roughly 5 or 6 buffs out at all times. Plus, each glimmer is transferred to your Beacon of Light (though at the reduced AoE rate).

Reading the Color of Your Aura in Battle for Azeroth

Hello again, friends!

I’m dusting off the old blog to talk about the level 60 talent row of Auras for Holy Paladins in Battle for Azeroth. Aura of Sacrifice has changed drastically, Devotion Aura had some minor tweaks, and Aura of Mercy remains pretty much the same, but do these changes mean there is any choice between the three? Unfortunately, probably not. Devotion Aura seems to reign supreme in Battle for Azeroth. Let’s take a closer look at the changes (with lots of graphs!) to see how they compare. Feel free to skip to the end if that sounds too boring.

Devotion Aura

For the most part, Devotion Aura’s function is the same. It’s still a passive damage reduction that is shared between all players within 10 yards, and the Aura Mastery effect is still 20% damage reduction for all allies within 40 yards. The only real difference is that the passive damage reduction was lowered to 10% (from 20%), but it’s no longer split evenly between allies. In Legion, when you were by yourself, you received the full 20% damage reduction. With one ally in 10 yards, you both received 10%. When split between four players, everyone received 5% damage reduction and so on. In Battle for Azeroth, you’ll only have 10% damage reduction when you’re by yourself, but instead of splitting evenly when shared, the shared value scales down at a slower rate.

From the graph, you should see that Devotion Aura in Legion was clearly superior up to about five players within the aura (you plus four allies), but in Battle for Azeroth, the damage reduction will be larger overall once you’re within range of at least five other players (six total) and is increasingly better the more allies there are near you.

The newer version of Devotion Aura’s passive effect outshines the older version by a huge margin when we’re able to stack with the entire raid. Realistically, if we’re standing in melee, we’ll likely only have between five and ten allies within ten yards, but there will definitely be fights in Battle for Azeroth where a large part of the encounter is spent stacked with the whole raid group. In either scenario, the new passive for Devotion Aura is stronger than it was before.

The Aura Mastery effect for Devotion Aura is completely unchanged and will be just as strong at mitigating large raid-wide damage mechanics. We’ll go over the Aura Mastery effect for Devotion Aura when we compare the other auras later in this post.

Callin’ it Quits

Sorry friends, I’m retiring. Well, I’ve already retired from raiding a few weeks ago, but I’m also not going to be updating the spreadsheet or any guides in the future. This isn’t a reflection of whether or not I agree or disagree with any changes to the game, it’s just gotten old for me. I’ve been playing for eleven and a half years (with a few breaks), and most aspects of the game aren’t as much fun anymore, so I’m moving on.

You should still be in good hands though. Pelinel from Alacrity is taking over the Wowhead guide and Zerotorescue from the Paladin Discord channel is making his own spreadsheet that will likely be better than mine ever was.

That also means I probably won’t be writing here on Sacred Shielding anymore. I’m not entirely shutting it down, but I won’t be making any updates either.

Thanks for reading and good luck in the rest of Legion!

The Joy of Spreadsheeting

This is not gonna be a fun post for me because, well, I goofed. I made some seemingly innocuous changes to the spreadsheet a while ago that caused it to be less accurate than it normally is (which, for the record, has never been anywhere near 100%), and it’s taken me a while to figure out that there was a problem and then finally fix it.

The short answer is that the spreadsheet has been overvaluing crit since 7.1 was released. In this updated version, you’ll see stat weights that look way off. Specifically, crit is much lower and haste is much higher; this is due to several reasons. The first is the previously mentioned changes that caused crit to be inflated. Second, I had been manually reducing the weight of haste by 10% because of its adverse relationship with mana; I’m no longer doing that. Last, stat weights are going back to what appear to be much more reasonable values, but everyone has been under the impression that crit was so powerful, so they have gravitated toward gear with lots and lots of crit. This makes crit look weaker than you would expect simply by virtue of having so much of it and so little of everything else. By comparison, the other stats will be higher than expected until stat distribution evens out a little more.

The Artifact Power Grind

There’s been a lot of talk lately on twitter and on the WoW forums about Mythic raiders being burned out by having to endlessly grind Mythic+ dungeons for Artifact Power (AP). There are other factors that have led to the feeling of burnout for several veteran raiders, but the specific problem of feeling like you have to spend your available time getting more AP for more Artifact Traits is what is complained about the most, so I’m going to talk about that.

I should preface by saying that my perspective is of a semi-hardcore Mythic raider, and that I’m absolutely in favor of an uncapped system for acquiring AP. I think that if a cap was added to AP there would still be people who feel like the cap is either too high or too low, and the cap would just be moving the problem to a different set of people. I also think the expectation for how quickly you acquire AP should be set by you or your raiding group and not by Blizzard.

Setting a Cap on Artifact Power

I’ve been playing WoW since 2005 and have seen multiple different systems for capped and uncapped resources. From uncapped Honor grinding in Vanilla to seemingly uncapped Badges of Justice in Burning Crusade to the weekly Valor cap in Mists of Pandaria. The Badge system in Burning Crusade was capped in the sense that there were only a set number of dungeons and raids you could do per day/week, but that cap was so high that it was almost never achieved every day; very few people did all 16 Heroic dungeons in a single day.

Regardless of my opinions on the systems themselves, I was always in favor of an uncapped system because a cap was either too high for me to care about or too low and made me not care about the content. Obviously this is specific to my own determination, but that’s also my point: it’s virtually impossible for the arbitrary cap to be exactly how much content you want to participate in.

Updates for 7.1

Hello!

Sorry it took me a little while to update the guide for 7.1. There were several things I wanted to change/update on the spreadsheet, so I made sure to get that squared away first. As a side note, there are a lot more people using the spreadsheet, which is great, but I want to write a post giving some context to what the spreadsheet is and is not good for. I also want to try to make at least some form of documentation for it, but I’ll try to do that when I get back from Blizzcon.

There weren’t too many changes from 7.1, but I’ll give a quick recap for people who don’t want to have to go back through the entire guide to find what changed.

The official changes from the patch notes:

• Flash of Light now heals for 450% of spell power (was 425%) and costs 18% of base mana (was 16%)
• The Rule of Law talent now increases the radius of Tyr’s Deliverance by 50% (up to 22.5 yards).
• Light’s Hammer now costs 35% of base mana (was 40%).
• Sanctified Wrath now extends Avenging Wrath by 5 seconds (was 10 seconds).
• The Tier 19 2-piece bonus increases Holy Shock’s critical chance by 10% (was 15%).

The buff to Flash of Light won’t change our gameplay in any meaningful way, but it does further increase the value of critical strike due to even larger Infusion-of-Light-buffed Flash of Lights.

The Rule of Law and Light’s Hammer buffs aren’t really very noteworthy except to say that Light’s Hammer still has issues beyond mana cost that make it a little weaker than Bestow Faith and Crusader’s Might, but this does help some.

The nerf to Sanctified Wrath isn’t too bad. It will still be good to use in burst healing situations and still the best talent for Dungeons. Several Paladins had already started making the switch from Sanctified Wrath to Judgment of Light (especially with the legendary ring), so this change doesn’t have a huge effect on talent selection. Judgment of Light is chosen for most fights and Sanctified Wrath for fights where you need better cooldowns or burst healing.

The change to the T19 2-piece set bonus is understandable. We’re already fairly close to being crit capped for Holy Shock even without the bonus. This does change the crit softcap with Tier 19 to 45% instead of 42.5%. Again, the crit softcap is never something you need to reach, it’s just the point where crit loses a lot of value.

The last significant change from 7.1 is the re-introduction of the new Mythic Dungeon, Karazhan. The 2nd boss of the dungeon, the Maiden of Virtue, drops the Drape of Shame, a cloak that increases the healing of all crit heals by 10%. This is an absurdly powerful cloak and will be best-in-slot at any item level.

(Nov. 7, 2016 Edit: The cloak’s passive is half of what I previously thought. The key difference is that it increases the effect of crit healing, not the crit healing itself. Don’t worry, it’s still really good and better than anything we can currently get.)

Holy Paladin Guide for Legion

Alright, alright, it’s finally done! We’ve finished the Holy Paladin guide for the Legion launch. You can get started by clicking here or by going through the menu at the top of the page.

As a fair warning: it’s long. We wanted to be able to provide lots of information, but if that’s not your speed, you can check out the Wowhead guide that has similar information but with much fewer words.

Also, you should check out the Paladin Discord #Hammer of Wrath where Jeathebelle and I can answer any additional questions you might have.

Legion Pre-patch

Hello, everyone!

I’m sorry to say that we won’t have our Legion guide ready by the time the pre-patch hits the live servers; however, you should be excited that our guide is going to have considerably more information in it than normal. Maybe that scares some of you, but TOO BAD!

For now, you can check out the wowhead guide for Holy Paladins in Legion and check back later for our full guide.

Hpal Log Analysis 101

Who You Gonna Believe, Warcraft Logs or Your Own Lying Memory?

When you drove home today, how many times was the traffic light green? Last time you wrote an email, how often did you need to backspace due to a typing error? In your last raid, how many holy shocks did you miss?

Your memory is a manipulative, self-centered prima donna. It’ll color over mistakes, bury things that made you feel bad, disregard the routine as not worth dwelling on. You are the hero in the story you are constantly telling yourself about yourself, and your memory will unabashedly lie to you to support that story.

This is especially true in activities like driving, typing, and raiding in World of Warcraft. All of these bypass the conscious-thinking-observer in you. Your conscious thinker is simply too slow to effectively decide “and next I’ll type w, and then i, and then n, and bam now I WIN.” Instead, the vast majority of decisions you make in these activities are are reflexive, based on pre-programmed responses. You pre- and post-think, consciously deciding how to respond to a situation; then practice until your chosen response in that situation is ingrained by repetition (this is why you eventually stopped wiping on Mannoroth!)

This has many implications for thoughtful raiding, one of which (today’s topic!) is that you generally won’t remember small, mechanical mistakes you made during the raid. (You also won’t remember big mistakes, often blaming the effects on others, but that’s a topic for another time). Since you won’t remember them, you won’t think about them, you won’t fix them, and you’ll certainly repeat them. One of the best ways to improve your gameplay is to identify mistakes you’ve made. Then you can practice ways to avoid that mistake outside of a raid encounter, taking the time to program your reflexes to correctly respond to the scenario that previously caused you to err.

There is no better tool for identifying mistakes than Warcraft Logs. Bypass all of your cognitive biases and look at actual data.

And You Thought The First Part of This Post Was Long: What to Look For In Your Holy Paladin Logs

My favorite fight for looking at Holy Paladin fundamentals is High Council. Long enough for mistakes to develop, minimal movement, mostly a turret-and-heal fight. Of course there is value to looking at high-movement fights as well, to see how well you handle movement while maximizing casting, but for now I’ll focus on casting fundamentals.

1. Look at what you cast, not how much you healed.

So pull up your Council log and look at your healing.

What are you doing!? Not the healing tab. Who cares how much healing you did compared to the other healers? That’s completely irrelevant. We’re doing this to find mistakes, not to let our story-telling ego lie to us even more. Looking at your own healing-done breakdown is just as useless. Especially for a Holy Paladin, how much healing you have from Illuminated Healing, Beacon, and direct heals will vary wildly depending more on the encounter and your raid comp than on your own mistakes and successes.

By far the best, most useful information is in the casts tab. Almost every mechanical error in Holy Paladin play is best identified by this information.

First, you can run some basic numbers. Multiply the minutes the fight took by 60 and add the remaining seconds to get how many total seconds the encounter lasted. Then you can figure your average cooldown on Holy Shock, as well as how many times you could have cast Holy Prism and Avenging Wrath.

An Update

Hello, everyone! I’m sorry it’s been so long since we’ve posted anything. Each new Alpha build comes along at a quick pace (usually once per week) and with it comes a lot of changes. I’ve been keeping my Legion version of the spreadsheet up to date, but because it’s changing so frequently, I haven’t really wanted to share it yet. I’ve also been working on making some additions to the overall functionality of the spreadsheet, but they’ve been mostly underwhelming so far.

Part of the problem with using Google Sheets is that most (if not all) of the calculations are done on the server, so they start to get really slow when you add more. I think I’m starting to get to the point where I might have to make an internal Excel Spreadsheet for some of the more nuanced calculations or just bite the bullet and make an actual program. For now, I like that most of what I do can be seen by everyone.

I have a few thoughts on some of the philosophies of healing in general and Holy Paladins in Legion that I may try to write soon, but I’ve been fairly busy with life stuff, so I’m not sure if I’ll ever actually get around to it while it’s still relevant. Either way, I wanted to let everyone know that we haven’t died or quit updating, there’s just been too many changes to give any updates to Legion that wouldn’t quickly become outdated and I’ve kept most of my thoughts on the official Alpha Forums’ feedback threads. For the time being, you can look at some of my Warcraft Logs from various dungeons and raid testing on the Legion Alpha.

Oh, and Jeath somehow still doesn’t have access to Alpha, so that sucks. #BequeathTheJeath