The Holy Tree

Last post I noted that I would talk about each tree and how to utilize all of them.  I will start by moving left to right in the talents panel, so lets bring on the heals!


Here is my Holy Spec.  It is one that you could say is cookie cutter, but each talent point is placed so that it will maximize my output as a healer.  I will have a rundown of each of my talent choices just the ones that I think are important and every holy pally needs, and a rundown on the talents I have decided to omit from my spec.


In the first line go for Spiritual Focus and forget Seals of the Pure.  You don't need the extra damage and reducing the knockback from incoming attacks increases your throughput.  Throughput is a very important aspect to healing.  Much like DPS you want to put out as much Healing per second as possible. HPS and throughput are interchangeable phrases.  They both mean the same, how many heals can you place upon your target in a given amount of time.


In the next line grab the first two offered, both are increases to throughput, and ignore Unyielding Faith.  There aren't enough fights in any of the raids or dungeons to make it viable to pick up Unyielding Faith in a PvE setting.  It is a PvP talent and that is the only case in which you should pick it up.


The next line there is one must have talent, the key talent for Pally mana regen, Illumination, and two filler talents.  Now you could use Aura Mastery, the increase to a Devotion Aura or even your own Concentration Aura make it viable, but the Improved Lay on Hands is vitally important for any tank healer, our pigeon-holed role.  Imagine this scenario, you are tank healing Festergut, the tanks are about to switch and he has inhaled the gas for the third time.  He is now hitting like a truck full of dynamite.  The tank has already used his cooldown and now has to eat anything Festergut throws at him.  But you still have your Lay on Hands. Throw a Lay on Hands on the tank and the tank now has 20% damage mitigation for another 15 seconds! That is almost the entirety of the third gas phase and between your Lay on Hands and the tanks cooldowns you have reduced the amount of damage taken by at least 20% for most, if not all of it.  That is why I have it selected.


The next tier of talents is another tricky one.  I took Improved Blessing of Wisdom for the raid utility of it.  The extra 20% mana regen means more heals from you, more damage from casters, and far less downtime from using mana regen spells/potions.  Improved Concentration Aura is also viable if you take points out of Divinity from Protection, but wont help enough to miss out talents in Retribution or even farther down this tree.


Moving down, Pure of Heart can be skipped unless if you are going for PvP. The other two talents, Divine Favor and Sanctified Light, are so crit-tatsic you cannot pass them up.


The next line is another line where there is a PvP talent and a crit talent, Purifying Power and Holy Power.  Again go with the crit, Holy Power, and leave the PvP talent behind.


Finally, after 30 talents points spent we have our only instant heal, Holy Shock.  We want to pick up this talent along with Light's Grace.  We pick up Light's Grace because it allows us to cut down the cast time of our next Holy Light.  So when Light's Grace procs, cast Divine Favor, then another Holy Light and you have 30k+ in heals in less than 4 seconds. Talk about a wonderful "Oh, Crap!" button.


Moving on to the next line we have Holy Guidance as the only talent selected.  This talent is the reason you see holy pallies stack Intellect.  The more intellect you have, the more spell power you have, turns into more throughput, which in turn keeps your target alive that much longer.  The other talent is a PvP talent that is wasteful in a raid setting, except for special encounters.


The next tier of choices you want to take both Divine Illumination and Judegments of the Pure.  Divine Illumination is a mana managing cooldown.  If you know you are going to have to chain cast Holy Light for a bit, pop this and they won't cost as much, meaning you can cast more of them and make it through the encounter.  

• Another strategy is to use Divine Illumination along with Divine Plea. In all scenarios you will have to cast while Divine Plea is active, so you might as well try to maximize the mana regen by cutting the mana cost by whatever you can in half. How you use it is up to you, but those are a couple scenarios that you can intelligently use Divine Illumination.

Judgements of the Pure is needed for the haste factor.  Again it goes right back to throughput, while this buff is active, you can push out more heals.  There is no reason why this shouldn't be active whenever you are healing, and if it has ticked off, make sure to judge something quickly, even the bugs you see running around dungeons cause this to go off.


The next tier again forces you to take both talents.  Infusion of Light is great not only for casting a HoT on your Sacred Shield target, but it also gives a nice proc.  And it doesn't only proc off of a healing Holy Shock, it also procs on a damaging Holy Shock spell, one reason I try to keep Holy Shock on cooldown as much as possible. You never know when you are going to need that instant Flash of Light or half the cast time on that Holy Light.  Enlightened Judgements helps keep you at range from the boss, making Judgements of the Pure easier to keep up, and you not having to worry so much about getting hit by the boss.


and finally we are at our 51 point talent, Beacon of Light.  This is one 51 point talent you cannot miss.  You can either throw it on yourself and heal the tank and you heal yourself keeping both you and the tank alive, crucial to any good raid/dungeon.  Or throw it on the tank or off-tank allowing all the heals you throw out to raid members heal the tank as well.  My strategy for dungeons is to put it on the tank making it easier to heal everyone, and then for raids put it on the off-tank so all of your heals keep up the off-tank as well as the one you have control over.


Moving over a tab I have 5 points in Divinity.  Is it needed, probably not, I have seen many specs where it is in fact ignored.  But I like to have it because it increases my throughput and to me, makes it seem like the tank is going to last a bit longer.


In the Ret tree I have placed 15 points.  I placed the first 5 in Benediction.  Any way to cut mana costs, especially on spells you use often, on Judgements and Holy Shocks makes this worth it.  I then put points into Improved Blessing of Might and Heart of the Crusader.  This goes back to raid utility.  If you can improve another one of your buffs to increase the output of your melee DPS, why not pick it up?  Add to that the 3% crit chance that Heart of the Crusader brings, you should always put points in both of these talents.


And for my last 5 points I placed them all in Conviction.  This is another talent that improves your crit chance.  If you read through all of this you know why this is important for pallies and I don't have to repeat myself.


So there you have it, my build with reasons behind each choice.  I'll go through my glyphs at another time, but for right now this is the most important part, glyphs are helpful but something you can play around with and see what works best for you.  As for the next post, look for my Prot spec, and find out why I think it is the best for a pally tank.