In most cases, Mastery is the way to go. With the way itemization costs worth, you get more bang for your buck with mastery, plus having those invisible bubbles on people mitigate damage a lot. (If you want to look at it from a competitive perspective, every point of damage you prevent is a point of healing you’re stealing from your co-healers!)

There is some discussion, though, about going with haste or even crit if you’re healing with a strong Disc Priest. Disc Priest bubbles are reeeeeeaally powerful right now and our Mastery can’t compete. This is mostly for 10m paladin-disc priest healing combos though, and has less effect on 25m.

If you want, I can take a look at your logs and your technique. You can email me bossypally at gmail dot com, or DM it to me on twitter if we follow each other.

This is content for another post, but essentially there are 3 aspects to paladin healing:

1- Beacon usage
2- Holy Power usage
3- Cooldown usage.

Sounds like you’ve got Beacon down. There are different ways to go about it depending on fights – if two tanks are taking simultaneous damage, then beacon one, heal the other. If it’s a tank switch fight, glyph Beacon and keep Beacon on whoever happens to be the active tank. You can get creative with Beacon too, if you want.

Holy Power allows for some personalization but lately my strategy is to keep a 3 HP Eternal Flame on each tank, and 1-3 HP Eternal Flames on as many people as possible. On 10 man, it’s easy to keep the entire raid with EF, on 25, I would expect to see 5-9 people with EF running on them. These EFs transfer through Beacon, AND put Mastery bubbles on the players AND refresh those Mastery bubbles on each tick. If I have time before a pull, I might even use EF on key players (usually tanks) to make sure they start the fight with a maximum Mastery bubble. A lot of high high end players use the PvP set 4p to get more EFs out. I use the Tier 4p to get more Holy Shocks along with the Divine Purpose talent.

Light of Dawn is good in certain situations, notably raid-wide minimal damage (and despite the target limit, it seems to be most effective in 25m, possibly because there are more likely to be 6 players who aren’t at full health). In most of the logs I read, holy paladins tend to gravitate toward Eternal Flame. But you’ll still see some who top the charts with Light of Dawn. From what I can tell, these paladins are mostly raid healing. If you’re assigned to tank healing, Eternal Flame is far safer than rolling your face in Light of Dawns.

As for cooldowns, USE THEM USE THEM USE THEM. I know they’re easy to forget, especially on farm fights, but they have been central to Paladin healing since at least Wrath. Unless you are waiting for a specific moment to use a specific CD, they should all be kept on cooldown. Hand of Sacrifice on a tank whenever you can (unless they tell you they want it at certain times), buffs with short CDs like Divine Favor and Avenging Wrath can be use whenever they come up (remember! Bigger heals mean less mana needed AND bigger Mastery bubbles. In competitive terms, bigger Mastery bubbles mean less healing credited your teammates), long CD spells like Guardian of Ancient Kings or Lay on Hands can be used twice on a long fight, or kept for an emergency on a shorter fight. Whenever you do, NEVER end a fight with Guardian of Ancient Kings off CD. (I make a point to use it at 5-10% if no emergency came up during the fight)

Hope that helps!

Context: I’m back at raiding after 2 years of absence and regardless of the fac that the raid leader and most of the raid group are very cool, for some of my co-healers it’s all about the meter. I got a “learn to heal” yesterday form a moronic Monk after being 5% behind the other holy paly in recount’s meter (I’m behind in pretty much every fight).

I definetly must be doing something wrong to be that far behind constantly. The other paly is 10 item lvl higher than I am both I assumed i can’t justify a 5% difference when there’s 6 healers around.

I first went for mastery before reforging to haste because my numbers seemed worst, and now I’m wondering if it should go back to back to Mastery – if it would help my numbers. I use Eternal Flame. Which I cast on tanks with 3 powers and using LoD as a power spender while EFs’ are up. I cast Holy Prism on every cooldown. I spam holy light on a tank while the other is beaconed. Cast HS on every cool down, and Divine Light on the beacon tanks when needed to generate a power. Same with Holy Radiance, casted to generate power and for raid heal.

I just can’t figure out what’s wrong – beside my choice for haste instead of mastery. Can this be only it ?

But I do agree that if you’re not using Word of Glory/Eternal Flame because all your Holy Power goes to LOD, then Sacred Shield is the clear winner there.

As for Sacred Shield, you have to remember that to evaluate its usefulness, you have to add the healing of Sacred Shield AND Light of Dawn. While it seems that most of us, even us 25m raiders, have gravitated toward Eternal Flame blanketing, I still come across some very strong logs of (25m) Holy Paladins using a lot of Light of Dawn. If you’re not going to touch Word of Glory on a given fight, you’re wasting a talent level by picking Eternal Flame.

Loved the Eternal Flame story XD. I love how eternal Eternal Flame is. Unless you’re really trying to wipe that is, haha.

Also, Eternal Flame is far better than Sacred Shield for Holy, period. Even on a single target. It transfers via Beacon, it stacks your mastery on the target, and it lasts 30 seconds! I’ve run a few parses using both and frankly Sacred Shield just doesn’t stack up. Though, for Prot, I believe Sacred Shield *does* scale with Vengeance, which makes it crazy awesome.

I too end up using Divine Purpose. I already have enough cooldowns that I don’t use as efficiently as I should. Adding another won’t help, whereas I treat Divine Purpose as a long-term mana conservation tool rather than throughput. Over a 5 minute fight, it goes off often enough to make an impact on my mana usage.

Funny story about Eternal Flame, though. We were practicing on Feng and I had called a wipe because the tanks whiffed all of their interrupts and the healers we’re OOM. Anyhow, the main tank gets a little irritated and tells people that when I call a wipe to stop healing so we can get going on the next attempt. Well, turns out that was actually just my Eternal Flame HoT that I had cast 15 seconds prior XD. I, the raid leader, apologized to the tank and said sorry, can’t really control that, it’s kinda eternal.