Finally came up with gear guides to prepare yourselves for raids.

All three specs are here:

Holy Gear Guide

Protection Gear Guide

I excluded some items either they are deemed too low level or restricted to selected people. For example Sonic Booster is excluded due to the fact you have to be an Engineer to be able to use it. It does not cater to the majority so I will not put it in the list.

If you feel I have left out some items feel free to comment or email me.

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!

Spent the better part of last few weeks healing in heroics and raids, I miss Retribution so much.

Initially I dismissed Sacred Shield as a crappy spell, but found it a very useful all-round spell. Before any pulls, Beacon of Light on your tank and cast Sacred Shield on both tank and a melee DPS that tends to get hit as well. Tank get hits, some damage reduction through Sacred Shield and your Flash of Light has a 50% chance to crit. Melee DPS gets hit, cast Flash of Light on him. With the shield up, tFlash of Light tends to crit more. Not only you heal the melee DPS but also the tank. Crit heals, Tank coverage and mana efficiency, awesome.

Retribution and Protection paladins can also use Sacred Shield as well, it should not be restricted to just for healing. Cast it on yourself and you can absorb some of the Seal of Blood feedback damage or reduce damage taken. Some people would say this would reduce mana gain through Spiritual Attunement, but the option to use Sacred Shield is there, you could use it to remove some burden off your healers.

Regarding Holy spec, I’m somewhat disappointed. Sure it works, but our healing arsenal are insufficient compared to other classes.

Regarding multiple heals, Priests have Prayer of Mending, Druids have Wild Growth and Shamans Chain Heal. Beacon of Light does not provide such healing to cover a whole party and that is our first weakness.

With the new talent tree, Keeping Beacon of Light up andJudging have become an important part in healing. The problem with this is that when the spell expires, you are going to be in deep shit.

I wiped a heroic when the Beacon of Light on the tank expired just as I cast a crit Holy Light on another party member. Tank did not receive the heal and dies. Another time the haste buff from Judgements of the Pure expired and I did not refresh it, my heals actually became slow to reach the tank. These talents, integral to our healing mechanism, are both beneficial and dangerous. These spells need to have a longer duration and also, when we are doing intense healing we are going to have problem refreshing the spells. This is our another weakness.

Hopefully there are more changes coming to fix these issues, but we are somewhat fine for now. Just keep an eye on those spells and be more alert.