~chron

EDIT: There’s an ongoing thread on AJ about small-bracket holy paladin glyphs. SoL is surprisingly popular!

Since I’m on a PvP Holy buzz at the moment, here’s a rundown on the various glyping options available. I’ll discuss which ones I’m actually using at the end.

Glyph of Cleansing

This glyph reduces the mana cost of Cleanse, which in a lot of matches is going to be your most frequently cast spell by a fair margin (hi deadly brew, hi winter’s chill, the list goes on). That makes it sound good, but Cleanse is not a hugely expensive spell to begin with (6% of base, which is around 264) and mana efficiency is already a paladin strength, which mitigates its value somewhat.

Glyph of Hammer of Justice

The HoJ glyph increases the range from 10 yards to 15. Hammer is an important CC in any paladin comp and being able to control your position better when using this spell is huge. It also allows your to more comfortably hit priests without putting yourself in range of a Psychic Scream – although PS is only 8 yards, latency and movement can still make it tricky.

Glyph of Flash of Light

Now that the abortive attempt to turn the primary paladin heal into a long HoT is behind us, this glyph is very solid. It’s a flat 5% increase to your FoL crit which is fantastic for both throughput and mana efficiency (via Illumination). It just about lets your FoL crit catch up to your other spells which are increased by Sanctified Light.

Glyph of Holy Light

This glyph adds a small aoe component to your HL. It’s more or less worthless for 2s, but in 3s and 5s (especially in a melee or pet-heavy comp) its a good way to negate aoe damage. Paladins in large-bracket are great single-target healers but (beacon notwithstanding) they can get into trouble when several targets get low at once – this is a nice way to prevent that situation. It’s also still pretty overpowered in PvE.

Glyph of Judgement

This one gives you a 10% damage increase on your judgements. Unless you’re able to use holy shock offensively (which you will often need to for kill attempts) judgement is your primary source of damage. If you have Judgements of the Pure they stack multiplicatively. Although the paladin is by far the most defensive healing class, well-timed burst damage is an important part of your arsenal.

Glyph of Seal of Light

This glyph gives you 5% more healing, which is a really strong bonus, but the cost is that you have to have Seal of Light up all the time. It’s not a useful seal since it doesn’t do damage (Righteousness), doesn’t give you mana (Wisdom), won’t keep rogues from destealthing (Vengeance) and can’t be used to break crowd control (Martyr). For small-bracket I would stay away from it, but possibly in 5s where mana is not an issue, you’re not needed to help out on damage, and pure healing throughput is your priority.

Glyph of Seal of Wisdom

This is in a similar vein to the SoL glyph, this time a 5% cost reduction on all your spells. The main difference is that Wisdom is a useful seal if you have a pet handy to melee for mana (good players will not put their pets on you, however). By using Wisdom over Righteousness you lose not only the seal damage but also some judgement damage, which to me is still a hard sell.

Glyph of Turn Evil

This glyph makes your Turn Evil spell instant cast, but adds an 8 second cooldown to it. In practice, the cooldown is not really an issue since due to DR you won’t really be fearing that frequently. I think this glyph is amazing because although Turn Evil is a 1.5 second cast there are no talents that give it pushback protection, and because it allows you to fear a felhunter without exposing yourself to school lock – or fear a gargoyle without putting yourself in LOS of its damage.

Glyph of Exorcism

Honorable mention to this one – while it’s worthless at the moment, the list of potential 3.1 changes includes a change to exorcism to make it usable on all targets. If that change goes live I’d expect them to change the glyph – another instant damage spell that doubles as a 30 yard earthshock on a 15 second cooldown would be absolutely amazing!

So…

Currently on Theory I’m using FoL, HoJ, and Turn Evil – I find that to be the strongest combination for 2s. I have considered swapping one of them for the judgement damage glyph but probably not unless I respec back to JotP. I’m not sure which one I’d replace, anyway.

chronic Arena, Paladin

The last patch saw the healing penalty on Divine Plea increased to 50% from 20% (when ret paladins were begging for a mortal strike effect, I don’t think this is what they had in mind) which makes using it a lot more difficult. It’s a good change, I think – there’s nothing terribly exciting about pushing a button every minute, pillar humping a bit, and never going OOM.

With the change, though, I expect a lot more holy paladins to try out the hybrid JotW build in an attempt to alleviate some mana issues. I thought I’d do a quick overview on what I consider competitive holy paladin PvP builds. Note that these are the versions I play, and YMMV as always. I’ll try and point out any talent choices that might be controversial.

Note that all of my builds take 4/5 Spiritual Focus – if you have 3/3 Improved Concentration Aura that’s all you need to get full pushback reduction on your heals. I’m in conc probably 95% of the time – I basically only switch to ret aura when there’s no chance I’ll be casting (rogue on me) or to crusader if I’m kiting mounted at the start of a match. Although 1/5 Seals of the Pure doesn’t sound like much, I do use Seal of Righteousness as my primary seal, so additional damage on it is welcome.

51/20 Divine Guardian Holy [link]

This build is the most popular for 3s/5s – Divine Guardian + BoSac is an amazing way to reduce pressure, you get a 30 second hammer, and you get all of the important throughput talents in holy. Beacon, despite its vulnerability to offensive dispel, can situationally be a very strong healing talent. You also get stoicism (dispel resist) which can be pretty clutch. Finally, kings, though they’ve mentioned making this baseline in 3.1.

Of course, without going into the ret tree at all, you miss out on a lot of holy crit as well as some of the nicer utility there.

49/0/22 Divine Purpose Holy [link]

This is the canonical 2s spec. Beacon is worthless in that format, and going 22 points into ret gives you access to Divine Purpose to remove stuns from you or your partner. This is mainly strong against rogue teams, although ret paladins have a lot of covering debuffs to prevent you from dispelling HoJ and it’s also occasionally useful versus DKs (Gnaw) or druids (Bash, but not Maim, sigh). The strongest aspect of the talent is that you can use it on yourself, while stunned, to remove the stun.

Your choice of ret filler can vary, but vindication and Imp Might are both nice (the latter depending on your partner). You still get the great holy stuff, and the absurd crit levels combine with Infusion of Light to make you a fairly mobile healer. The fact you can both judge and shock from 40 yards makes proper positioning a lot easier than in the past.

37/0/34 Repentance + JotW Holy [link]

This is the spec I’m currently playing. You throw out a lot of the really nice talents in deep holy – Judgements of the Pure, Divine Illumination, and the 40y judgement talent. You lose holy guidance so your spell damage will suffer a bit.

You end up taking a few weak talents in ret, too – imp ret aura and sanctified retribution are situational but not amazing, but once you get down to 30 in ret you’re in the money – repentance gives you a second (ranged) crowd control on a one minute cooldown, and JotW gives you incredible mana regen with the caveat that you have to actually be within 15y of your target to judge them.

A lot of the filler choices come down to personal preference. Whether Unyielding Faith or Aura Mastery are important talents to you depends a lot on your playstyle.

chronic Arena, Paladin

Briefly; the old (hand-crafted!) blog didn’t survive the migration to a new shared host very well. I haven’t really had the time or inclination to do much coding outside of work these days, so I figured it’d be more useful to put up some pre-packaged blog software. Hey, nobody complained when stefan did it!

The other side of that decision was that Wordpress supports some features I’d probably never be bothered to include in my own code (pingbacks and whatnot) and is significantly less exploitable (oh hello arbitrary javascript in comments) in ways which I feel like I ought to be more concerned with. I still have the articles and comments from the previous iteration so I’ll look at getting those imported across at some point.

So I’ll try and get back into my regular rhythms of rogue talent speculation, class balance whining, and arena statistics ad nauseum. RSS/Atom feeds at the bottom if you’re into that sort of thing!

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