12.0.5 changes
- Holy Shock healing increased by 10%.
- Word of Glory healing increased by 20%.
- Eternal Flame healing increased by 20%.
- Light of Dawn healing increased by 20%.
- Greater Judgment absorb increased by 250%.
- Beacon of the Savior (Rank 3) now causes Flash of Light and Holy Light to move Beacon of the Savior to their target once per 5 seconds.
- Herald of the Sun
- Walk Into Light has been redesigned – Now increases the chance for Infusion of Light to occur by 100% during Avenging Wrath.
- Lightsmith
- Holy Armaments now generate 3 Holy Power.
The change to [Beacon of The Savior] is largely negative, as it moving will not apply the healing increase to your cast, but also won't transfer healing on the cast that moves it.
More control with where the beacon moves is nice, but not in this way.
Greater Judgment change enables Judgment related builds, though with them not scaling with mastery, it likely ends up being a preference thing.
Holy Armaments granting 3 holy power is something the paladin community at large has been asking for for a while now, it's just a nice change. It'll finally feel like pressing the button does something.
Overall these changes are very positive, and along with the nerfs to MW and Disc means we'll likely end up somewhere in the bottom-middle of the pack.
Nebulous Voidcore
in 12.0.5 we get the Nebulous Voidcore which is a bonus roll for raids and mythic plus.
Raid encounters take 2 voidcores and m+ dungeons require a single. Once you've acquired an item through this system, it is completely locked out until you get all items on the loot table, so no duplicates.
To find out where to use your Nebulous Voidcore, run a QE Live upgrade finder and look for your biggest upgrade.
I would strongly suggest aiming for rare items, with strong competition that can be hard to farm. This can mean Alleria for Ribbon, Vaelgor and Ezzorak for Final Stare or Midnight Falls for the Eye of Midnight.
The nebulous voidforge also comes with the Nilhammer system, which is our good old mid-season ilvl increase, allowing you to give your items extra upgrade tracks.
Raid Guide
Holy paladin is a relatively simple, fast-paced healer where the majority of your skill expression comes down to snappy decision-making.
The gameplay is primarily a builder-spender playstyle focused on building Holy Power through casting Holy Shock and Flash of Light while spending them on Light of Dawn and Eternal Flame/Word of Glory.
Priority system
Holy paladin doesn't follow a strict rotation, instead you'll be looking at a priority list of what spells will generally do more healing.
- Your foremost priority is to not overcap holy power
Your spenders are your strongest heals, wasting holy power means favoring weaker heals and losing out on potential strong heals. A double edged sword of inefficiency.
In raids you will primarily spend holy power on Light of Dawn since that will do the most healing.
As healer your job is to keep people alive, so obviously if someone is about to die spend the holy power on an Eternal Flame and save them.
- Use your Divine Toll on cooldown
Make sure you're at or below 2 holy power and don't currently have a Divine Purpose proc ready.
Divine Toll is a massive source of Holy Power which - as explained above - is your most efficient source of healing. At the same time they allow you to put out Dawnlight on people which is a great little heal over time that along with Sun's Avatar does a good amount of healing.
- Cast Holy Light as much as your mana allows.
Holy light is an incredibly strong spell, but it also eats your mana so hard you can notice each cast on logs.
Try to cast as many as you can afford, but don't overdo it. Rather have mana at the end of the fight than spend 2-3 minutes without any.
- Spend your Infusion of Light procs.
You will mostly be spending these on Flash of Light, though if no one needs healing you can spend them on Judgment instead.
- Cast Holy Shock
This is just a decent way of generating more Holy Power.
If none of the above are possible, you can freely choose to generate more holy power with unbuffed Flash of Light casts and spending Holy Power on Light of Dawn
Stat priority
Generally all our stats are good, and very close to each other. My best suggestion is to use Questionably Epic to sim your character and find out what upgrades to wear.
Before giving a straight list, I think it's important to know what each stat does for you.
Intellect Increases all healing and damage done.
Haste increases your spell-casting speed and lowers the cooldown of all hasted spells.
Mastery increases healing done the closer targets are to you - with Beacon of the Lightbringer your beacons also count as you
Critical Strike has a chance to make all your heals do 200% of normal effect
Versatility increases your healing and damage done, and reduces the damage you take
For both Lightsmith and Herald of the Sun, my general recommendation is:
Intellect > Mastery > Haste = Crit > Versatility
Generally itemlevel will be king, and you only really worry about this when you're at a high level and looking at sidegrades.
Talent build
The way the current trees are set up, is that I would recommend you get comfortable with your tree, read all your abilities and get a good feel for what you want to play with.
Green are my general setup, red I would strongly suggest avoiding in raid and blue comes with a caveat.
For 12.0.5 this is an option - the big difference is you spend your infusions on Judgment instead of Flash of Light
In the class tree, our first caveat is echoing blessings/unbound freedom. Most scenarios I would suggest Echoing Blessings because of the extra usefulness of cooldowns like Blessing of Protection turning it into a DR even if you don't have physical damage to reduce.
However, if you have bosses like Queen Ansurek in season 1 of Dragonflight where you get high value of out your freedom hitting yourself and someone else, looking into Unbound Freedom is very useful.
Sacrifice of the Just is a useful talent on occasions where you know ahead of time that you will be giving DRs to a single person very often. On the flipside, Recompense is not very useful, the increased damage or healing is low, accounting for less than 1% of your healing, and generally won't be very useful.
Divine Purpose is an always-include talent, but you must avoid Sacred Strength as it's far far weaker than the counterpart.
Blessing of Dawn and Lightbearer I consider to be interchangable. Both will do negligible amounts of throughput, but I consider the damage reduction from Blessing of Dawn to be marginally more useful.
Crafting
In Midnight crafting is just as efficient as upgrading items, this means there's no loss to choosing to craft mythic items early in the season.
Initially you will want to craft a one-handed weapon such as the Magister's Mana Sword with the embellishment Darkmoon Sigil: Hunt as this will be your biggest upgrade early on.
Secondarily getting a shield Spellbreaker's Rebuke with Arcanoweave Lining
After that you can replace any low item level piece.
In the long run you will want to replace your crafted sword with a regular myth track one, which is when you can put the arcanoweave lining on one of your off-pieces.
Trinkets
As with regular gear, I would suggest using QELive to decide which trinket to wear, you can also see a general list of all trinkets on the QE Live Trinket List.
With current tuning our top 3 are:
Gaze and Locus Walker's are two very strong passive trinkets you just equip and ignore, while Vaelgor's Final Stare is a strong on-use to pair with your Avenging Wrath