Holy Paladin Raid Guide

Welcome to the Holy Paladin Raid guide for the World of Warcraft patch 11.0! This guide covers everything you need to know to understand your character! Are you starting out and leveling up from 70? Check out the leveling guide!

Holy PaladinRaid

Overall Healing

Strong

Cooldown Strength

Strong

Utility

Average

Survivability

Strong

Mobility

Average

• Herald of the Sun focuses on healing and Cooldown strength, while Lightsmith focuses on survivability and damage done.
• In a Raid environment Herald of the Sun outperforms Lightsmith in any scenario. Therefore this Guide focuses solely on the better option.

Tier Set

• 2-Set: Holy Shock healing is increased by 10% and its cooldown is reduced by 10%
• 4-Set: Holy Shock increases the initial healing of your next Word of Glory or Light of Dawn by 8%, stacking up to 4 times

This set further empowers your core gameplay of building Holy Power mostly with Holy Shock and spending it on Eternal Flame and Light of Dawn.

Priority List

• DO NOT overcap Holy Power. Your spenders are really strong, even if there isn't much to heal you can always use Shield of the Righteous.
• Cast Holy Shock as much as possible. It is the bread and butter of Holy Paladin.

Cooldowns

Avenging Wrath

• An iconic paladin cooldown which now is very strong on its own thanks toHerald of the Sun. You want to pair it up with other smaller cooldowns like Divine Toll and Holy Prism to increase their power.

Divine Toll

• Your main cooldown that should be used every minute with Awakening proc and every 2 minutes with Avenging Wrath. It also procs Rising Sunlight, which makes it even burstier.

Tyr's Deliverance

• Going into TWW, Tyr's Deliverance has been nerfed significantly, making it a very weak cooldown that you only use to gain access to Relentless Inquisitor. Use it on cooldown whenever you anticipate incoming damage and then forget about it.

Aura Mastery

• Mostly used with Devotion Aura to provide one of the raid-wide damage reduction cooldowns. It's not as strong as it used to be but can still be a game changer against some mechanics. Make sure to use it proactively before damage events happen; otherwise, it might be a waste of a global cooldown.

Cooldown Management

• Maximizing your Holy Paladin's potential involves properly combining your cooldowns. Thanks to Awakening talent, you should aim to never use a Divine Toll alone. When your Avenging Wrath is on cooldown, combine Divine Toll and Holy Prism with a Awakening proc. This results in very strong 2 minutes windows where you combine all cooldowns and weaker but still good 1 minute pops.

Managing Dawnlight and Sun's Avatar

• Dawnlight HoT gets applied to nearby allies preferring injured ones on activation of Avenging Wrath ( 4 HoTs ) and Awakening (1 HoT). On top of that you spread 2 extra Dawnlight HoTs with your Holy Power spenders after Holy Prism cast. During Avenging Wrath all targets with Dawnlight are linked to you creating Sun's Avatar beams that heal you, all linked allies and the ones passing through them.
• This means that you can only fully control 2 Dawnlight HoTs every time. In order to do it use Eternal Flame on allies without the HoT already, preferring players stacked with others.
• This way you can maximize the amount of Sun's Avatar beams and Dawnlight healing from radiation.
• The amount of Dawnlight targets depends on your pop:
  • 2min pop + Awakening - 7 targets
  • 2min pop - 6 targets
  • 1min pop - 3 targets
  • 30 pop - 2 targets
• You need to properly track Dawnlight on raid frames in order to not overlap it !!
• Disclaimer! Avenging Crusader applies only 2 Dawnlight HoTs.

Optimizing spenders

• Do not overthink it. Eternal Flame is almost always the best choice unless you would overheal with it. It is much easier to cover AoE healing in a raid, but a strong spot heal on someone who is low or close to dying is always going to be more valuable than Light of Dawn on random injured targets. You are in the raid to keep players alive, not to pad the meters!

Optimizing Blessing of Summer

• To get the most out of Blessing of Summer in a raid, you want to use it offensively on yourself or another healer right before cooldowns pop. This way, you get a very good amount of passive damage even while healing the raid.
• Blessing of Autumn is best used on a DPS that relies on short cooldowns to use them more often. You might also consider throwing it on yourself during a hard healing check fight to make your cooldowns cycle quicker.
• Blessing of Winter should always be used on yourself to help with mana.
• You mostly use Blessing of Spring on yourself to buff your healing, but at times it's better to buff another healer during their cooldowns as it might allow them to solo heal a certain boss mechanic.

Understanding Mechanics

Rotational min-maxing is just one aspect of mastering a specialization, but there are numerous other key mechanics that influence your performance. Use the following guides to improve them.

• Pandemic
• Spell Queue Window
• Stat Diminishing Returns

The following tips are mainly applicable to Heroic Bosses. Mythic tips will be released after our progression finishes.

← Scroll for more Bosses →

Understand your secondary stat priority and the tertiary stats needed for optimal performance during Raid boss fights as a Holy Paladins. For more detailed information, visit the Stats and Attributes guide.

• Blizzard introduced Stat drs, which you should be aware of. To get to know what those are and why you have to care about them click here to get to our detailed stat DR resource post!

Tertiary

• Avoidance - Reduces damage taken from AoE effects.
• Leech - Returns a portion of your damage and healing done as healing to you. (Excludes self healing)
• Speed - increases movement speed. (Does stack with other movement speed abilities)

The only time you should think about picking a lower item level is if it has Leech or Avoidance. Speed is nice to have, but you shouldn't consider this stat when choosing between two items.

• Here is a showcase of how powerful Leech is for a Healer: Breakdown of Mythic Fyrakk

Trinkets

Below you can find active and passive alternatives to our recommended trinkets. Do note that some trinkets are better than others depending on the scenario.

Active Trinket alternatives

• Spymaster's Web
  • A strong On-Use Trinket that rewards precise planning. It takes 4 minutes to reach max stacks, so make sure to tie it to the important damage events instead of just using it on cooldown!

Passive Trinket alternatives

• Empowering Crystal of Anub'ikkaj
  • A very strong stat stick, granting you a huge random secondary stat proc.
• Ovi'nax's Mercurial Egg
  • Very interesting Trinket, that gives you a mix of main stat and your highest secondary. Use it when moving to the next pull to keep a good distribution.

Embellishments

• Dawnthread Lining 2x
  • Increases your crit by a small amount, while above 80% HP.

Remaining Sparks

• Crafted items are 636 item level and regular items are 639 on max item level, therefore, it's not beneficial to equip crafted items outside of your 2x embellishments unless you don't have access to other high item level gear on that slot.

• Phials
  • Flask of Tempered Aggression or Flask of Tempered Mastery -- Depends on your current stats
• Food
  • Feast of the Divine Day
• Combat Potion
  • Algari Mana Potion -- Recommended
  • Potion Bomb of Recovery
• Health Potion
  • Algari Healing Potion
• Weapon Oil
  • Algari Mana Oil
• Augment Rune
  • Crystallized Augment Rune
• Sockets
  • Deadly Onyx
  • Culminating Blasphemite -- Unique, use one of each gem colour to enhance your Blasphemite.
    • Masterful Ruby
    • Masterful Sapphire
    • Masterful Emerald

Enchantments

For min-maxing a Holy Paladin in Mythic Raiding, different racial traits can provide a tremendous benefit to your characters. If this is not your top goal, picking a race that fits your style works just as well.

• Stoneform -- Dwarf
  • Extra Bleed/Magic dispel comes clutch on some fights
• Arcane Torrent -- Blood Elf
  • Historically aoe purge from Arcane Torrent was very strong at times

Recommendation:

It is recommended to play a Dwarf! The combination of Might of the Mountain and Stoneform makes it a very strong race overall. Extra personal dispel from Stoneform makes fights like The Silken Court way easier.

Discover recommended macros for Holy Paladin during Raid encounters and watch a quick video guide on creating simple macros for your character.

Macro Import Guide Video

Mouseover Macros

All spells in this Holy Paladin Raid guide are available as mouseover macros for your convenience!

Holy Shock

#showtooltip
/cast [@mouseover,help,nodead] Holy Shock; [harm] Holy Shock ; Holy shock

Flash of Light

/cast [@mouseover,help,nodead] Flash of Light ; Flash of Light

Holy Light

/cast [@mouseover,help,nodead] Holy Light ; Holy Light

Word of Glory

/cast [@mouseover,help,nodead] Word of Glory ; Word of Glory

Blessing of Protection

/cast [@mouseover,help,nodead] Blessing of Protection ; Blessing of Protection

Blessing of Freedom

/cast [@mouseover,help,nodead] Blessing of Freedom ; Blessing of Freedom

Blessing of Sacrifice

/cast [@mouseover,help,nodead] Blessing of Sacrifice ; Blessing of Sacrifice

Lay on Hands

/cast [@mouseover,help,nodead] Lay on Hands ; Lay on Hands

Cleanse

/cast [@mouseover,help,nodead] Cleanse ; Cleanse

Holy Prism

/cast [@mouseover,help,nodead] Holy Prism; [harm] Holy Prism ; Holy Prism

Divine Toll

/cast [@mouseover,help,nodead] Divine Toll; [harm] Divine Toll ; Divine Toll

Intercession

/cast [@mouseover,help] Intercession 

Redemption

/cast [@mouseover,help] Redemption

Beacon of Light + Beacon of Virtue

/cast [@mouseover,help,nodead] Beacon of Light ; Beacon of Light
/cast [@mouseover,help,nodead] Beacon of Virtue ; Beacon of Virtue

Beacon of Faith

/cast [@mouseover,help,nodead] Beacon of Faith ; Beacon of Faith

Recommended Macros

If you don't want to mouseover every buff you can assign who buffs will go to before combat. Simply put the character name instead of the word person# in the macro.

#showtooltip 
/use [@person4] Blessing of Autumn
/use [@person2] Blessing of Winter
/use [@person3] Blessing of Spring
/use [@person1] Blessing of Summer

With this macro, you never die when trying to use your immunity mid cast.

#showtooltip
/stopcasting
/cast Divine Shield

Sometimes you might have to cancel your immunity early.

/cancelaura Divine Shield
/cancelaura Blessing of Protection

Below, you see a screenshot of the author's User Interface for their Holy Paladin, outlining which addons are used and how they are utilized in Raids to make your life easier.

Addons

• Echo Raid Tools -- Raid CD Tracker
  • Addon to track your raid members' Cooldowns
• Grid2 --- Party/Raidframe Addon
  • Addon to replace your party/raid frames with a bunch of options. Takes quite some time to configure but there are plenty of pre-done profiles that you can easily import and check out.
  • Alternatively, you can also use BetterBlizzFrames if you want to not spend hours configuring this.
• WeakAuras -- Jack of all trades
  • WeakAura allows players to create and customize graphical displays of game information. These displays, known as "auras" can show various aspects such as buffs, debuffs, cooldowns, health, and other important events.
• Shadow Unit Frames --- Player/Target/Boss frames
  • Addon to replace your unit frames with a bunch of options to customize it.
• Plater -- Nameplate Addon
  • Plater is a nameplate addon with an extraordinary amount of settings, out of the box debuff tracking, threat coloring, and support for scripting similar to WeakAuras + the WeakAuras-Companion for Mod/Script/Profile updates.
• Details -- Damage Meter
  • Shows you Damage/Healing throughout the dungeon

WeakAuras

These WeakAuras are recommended for optimal performance in raids as a Holy Paladin.

Raid buffs tracker

Shows an icon when you don't have Devotion Aura up

Patch 11.0.1

Paladin

• All talent trees have had many talents move locations or have had their pathing updated.
  • Multiple applications of Greater Judgment may overlap. This also functions with Retribution's multiple stack application.
  • The following talents have been removed:
    • Crusader's Reprieve
    • Retribution Aura

Holy

• New Talent: Bestow Light – Light of the Martyr's health threshold is reduced to 70% and increases Holy Shock's healing by an additional 5% for every 5 seconds Light of the Martyr is active, stacking up to 3 times. While below 70% health, the light urgently heals you every 1 second.
  • • New Talent: Extrication – Word of Glory and Light of Dawn gain up to 30% additional chance to critically strike, based on their target’s current health. Lower health targets are more likely to be critically struck.
    • New Talent: Truth Prevails – Judgment heals you and its mana cost is reduced by 30%. 50% of overhealing from this effect is transferred onto 2 allies within 40 yards.
    • Glistening Radiance has been redesigned – Spending Holy Power has a 25% chance to trigger Saved by the Light’s absorb effect at 30% effectiveness without activating its cooldown.
    • Light’s Protection has been redesigned – Allies with Beacon of Light receive 5% less damage.
    • Rising Sunlight has been redesigned – After casting Avenging Wrath, your next 2 Holy Shocks cast 2 additional times. After casting Divine Toll, your next 2 Holy Shocks cast 2 additional times.
    • Light of the Martyr has been redesigned – While above 80% health, Holy Shock's healing is increased 20%, but creates a heal absorb on you for 30% of the amount healed that prevents Beacon of Light from healing you until it has dissipated.
    • Blessing of Summer has been redesigned – Bless an ally for 30 seconds, causing 20% of all healing to be converted into damage onto a nearby enemy and 10% of all damage to be converted into healing onto an injured ally within 40 yards.
    • The following talents have been removed:
      • Daybreak
      • Glimmer of Light
      • Light`s Hammer

Patch 11.0.2

Paladin

• Lightforged Blessing now affects 2 additional allies (was 4).
• Flash of Light healing increased by 20%.
• Seal of the Crusader healing increased by 50%.
• Shield of the Righteous increases your Armor by 160% of your Strength (was 170%).
• The Dusk buff from Of Dusk and Dawn reduces your damage taken by 4% (was 5%).
• Sanctified Plates’ armor increase no longer applies to bonus armor from Shield of the Righteous.

Holy

• Holy Light healing decreased by 28%.
• Holy Shock healing decreased by 18% and damage decreased by 10%.
• Word of Glory healing decreased by 5%.
• Light of Dawn healing decreased by 5%.
• Flash of Light healing decreased by 5%.
• Hammer of Wrath damage decreased by 10%.
• Crusader Strike damage increased by 75%.
• Shield of the Righteous damage increased by 25%.
• Liberation effect increased by 50%.
• Judgment damage decreased by 10%.
• Consecration damage decreased by 10%.
• Holy Prism healing and damage decreased by 10%.
• Barrier of Faith initial healing decreased by 10%.
• Truth Prevails healing decreased by 10%.
• Merciful Auras healing decreased by 10%.
• Touch of Light healing decreased by 10%.
• Judgment of Light healing decreased by 10%.
• Imbued Infusions now reduces the cooldown of Holy Shock by 1 second (was 2 seconds).
• Righteous Judgment now has a 50% chance to create a Consecration (was 30%).
• Blessing of Dawn now increases the damage and healing of holy power spenders by 5% per stack (was 20%).
• Blessing of Summer now transfers 12% of healing into damage (was 20%) and transfers 12% of damage into healing (was 10%).
• Fading Light and Seal of Order now increase Blessing of Dawn's effect by an additional 5% (was 10%).
• Hammer of Wrath damage increased by 50%, but its cooldown has been increased by 15 seconds (was 12 seconds).
• Awakening now requires 15 stacks to activate (was 12) and increases the damage of Judgment by 40% (was 30%).
• Tyr's Deliverance healing increased by 17% and now increases healing taken by 12% (was 10%).
• Crusader's Might now reduces the cooldown of Judgment and Holy Shock by 2 seconds (was 1.5 seconds).
• Sanctified Wrath now decreases the cooldown of Holy Shock by 50% for its duration (was 20%).
• Overflowing Light now converts 30% of Holy Shock's healing into an absorb shield (was 15%).
• Strength of Conviction now increases the healing and damage of holy power spenders by 5/10% (was 10/20%).
• Moment of Compassion now increases the healing of Flash of Light by 50% (was 15%). Does not apply in PvP combat.
• Saved by the Light now activates when an ally drops below 50% health (was 30%). Does not apply in PvP combat.
• Power of the Silver Hand now increases the healing of your next Holy Shock by 20% of all damage and effective healing done (was 10%).
• Blessing of Summer, Autumn, Winter, and Spring are now off of the global cooldown.
• Fixed an issue that caused Versatility to increase the absorb amount of Light of the Martyr.
• A few talents have changed locations.
• Holy Infusion has been removed.

Q: Why do I keep dying?

A: Watch for your health when Blessing of Sacrifice is up or combine it with Divine Shield.

Q: Why do I keep running out of mana?

A: You are using Holy Light too often.

Credits

Written By: Thaner

Reviewed By: Zhatzi