Been thinkin about tweaking around with galza a bit. I got this crafty idea looking at some of the PVP armor.. taking note that the belts, boots and bracers do not count towards a set.. and it got my gears turning.. because I do like the idea of being something of a "healer with some bite" .. in anycase.. I'm kind of stuck on the fence as far as either the toughness talent (armor value) or the anticpation talent (defense skill) .. I'm not totally sure which one would be better to go with.. or if there's a big difference between the two.

I have to admit though.. the final skill in holy spec is a lil lame.. I'm not totally sure if it's worth going that deep for currently. I'd much rather put those points in some melee skills.

Anyway.. input would be greatly appericated.

Galza - the paladin man!

Warrior trees have a similar pairing of talents: 1 "+ defense", 1 "+% to armor".

general consensus (after a ton of # grinding) was that they were pretty much the same for tanking purposes.

that having been said: that was for warriors, and focusing on PvE ;)

It sounds like you want a little Holy for healing ... but you don't want to go full-bore endgame raid Healadin.

I don't know if you want to be more Retribution or Protection, it kinda sounds like Protection since you are talking about Toughness vs Anticipation.

Anyway, here's my opinion on the bare minimum levels for Holy for Pally healing:

1.  You want to just do some PvP healing in Battlegrounds.

Key Talent = Spiritual Focus (+70% reduction to healing interrupt).
You could get away with only 10 points in Holy to get 5/5 in Spiritual Focus.  It always seemed prudent to me to go another 3 points into Healing Light for the +12% additional healing.  So there's 13 points in Holy, plenty left over for other trees.

2.  You want to do light dungeon healing (non-heroics) or be a decent backup healer.

Key Talent = Illumination like Mkeyai said.  It takes 20 points to go 5/5 in that.
So i'd go 5/5 Divine Intellect, 5/5 Spiritual Healing, 3/3 Healing Light, 2 points somewhere and 5/5 Illumination.

Illumination gives you 60% of your spell mana back when you critical heal.  It's what gives Paladins the ability to spam Flash of Light nearly forever with decent gear.


Either way ... still gives you 41 points or more to put into Retribution or Protection.



Other than that, it seems like you really need to go to at least 40 points in Holy to be a great single-target raid healer or arena paladin.  You might as well put 1 more point to get the top-tier talent if you are that deep.


Anticipation vs Toughness?  I don't know ...  It's debatable which is better by itself.  Probably about the same.  The key difference I think would be filling in gaps in your gear.  I believe Tankadins (and warrior tanks) have a magic number of +Def skill they want to get to in order to be un-crushable or something like that.  Isn't 490 Defense?  Anyway, I would take Anticipation over Tougness until I hit my +Def goals.  If I had the gear with bonuses already on them to get there, then I would take Toughness instead.

The anticpation talent is the way to go if you're thinking of tanking... although much of the PvP set is geared more towards PvP battles and not PvE unfortunately for tanks. Lots of fun to be had in both environments and enough cross over to get you some good gear sets started up.

Good luck with your Paladin and I'd love to discuss this further if you have tankadin questions.

Well I'm not really interested in straight tanking persay .. I just like having a well rounded character to work with. If I have to suffer a few blows or if I have to DPS a little bit, I'd rather be able to hold my ground somewhat rather than be totally at a loss.

Healing is probably gonna remain my thing anyway. I don't think I'm gonna respec. Atleast not until blizzard forces me to XD.. it's a pretty simple job anyway.. keeping people from dying. =)

Just to throw out some ideas, what about a talent template like this?:

Hybrid AOE Grinder, Off-Tank and Decent Healer
28 Holy / 33 Protectionhttp://www.wowhead.com/?talent=sVxu...VGkhx0zxTo

Holy (28 points)
    5/5 Divine Intellect
    5/5 Spiritual Focus
    3/3 Healing Light
    1/1 Aura Mastery
    2/2 Unyielding Faith
    5/5 Illumination
    1/1 Divine Favor
    3/3 Sanctified Light
    3/5 Holy Power

Protection (33 points)
    5/5 Redoubt
    3/3 Precision
    2/2 Guardian's Favor
    1/5 Toughness
    1/1 Blessing of Kings
    3/3 Improved Righteous Fury
    5/5 Anticipation
    1/1 Blessing of Sanctuary
    5/5 Reckoning
    4/5 One-Handed Weapon Specialization
    2/2 Improved Holy Shield
    1/1 Holy Shield

This can create some good DPS solo.  I kill mobs quick enough.  It will be tough pumping out DPS in a group though unless you get mobs beating on you.  The DPS is all reactive.  I'll post a Retribution version in a followup.

I have a horde paladin who is level 63 I play now and then.  The template above is the one I am using for leveling/questing.  It also works very nice in dungeons because with a gear swap I can tank or heal nicely.  It's fantastic for rounding up a pile of mobs and grinding them down for quests or cash.  I feel nearly invincible.

Obviously it isn't quite as strong in one are or the other compared to another pally who goes deep and highly specializes in one role.  It also doesn't have the survival talents you'd want to be a hardcore pvp healer.  The strength I think is the flexibility to be a passable healer or tank, and still be able to farm cash and mats.

The key to that IMO is gear.

My Tanking/Grinding Gear:
1.  Lot's of +def and stamina
2.  +Spell Damage when available (+Healing ok too since it also gives some +Dam).
3.  +Int is nice if you can get it too.

I don't find that the pure warrior tanking gear is as good for me -- the ones with lots of strength on it.  Agility is pretty worthless as far as item stats budget go.  I'd much rather get more +Int.  +Defense seems to help a lot.  The stuff with +Dodge and +Parry seem to have too many other quirky stats that aren't as desireable.

My Healing Gear:
1.  Lot's of +Healing
2.  +Spell Crit Rating (want lots of Illumination procs)
3.  +Int and MP/5


Anyway .... just some more ideas to throw out there for you.

***********************************
Some more talent ideas to throw around
***********************************

This gets you 5/5 Illumination from Holy.  I think you really need a gear swap to switch into truly effective healing, but would work as decent backup without a gear swap.

It also gets you 41 points in Retribtion picking up most or all of the key PVE DPS talents along the way.

Retribution for DPS and decent backup healer:
20 Holy / 41 Retributionhttp://www.wowhead.com/?talent=sgxh...fht0cuVcot

Holy (20 points)
    5/5 Divine Strength
    2/5 Divine Intellect
    5/5 Spiritual Focus
    3/3 Healing Light
    5/5 Illumination

Retribution (41 points)
    5/5 Improved Blessing of Might
    2/2 Improved Judgement
    3/3 Improved Seal of the Crusader
    3/5 Deflection
    5/5 Conviction
    1/1 Seal of Command
    3/3 Crusade
    3/3 Two-Handed Weapon Specialization
    1/1 Sanctity Aura
    5/5 Vengeance
    3/3 Sanctified Seals
    1/1 Repentance
    5/5 Fanaticism
    1/1 Crusader Strike

Galza's current set up

Holy
Divine Intellect - 5
Spiritual focus - 5
Healing Light 3
Improved LOH 2
Illumination - 5
Improved Wisdom - 2
Divine Favor - 1
Sanctified Light - 3
Holy Power - 5
Lights Grace - 3
Holy Shock (I can't tell you how much I love this handy thing) 1
Holy Guidance - 5
Divine Illumination - 1

Protection

Improved Devoution Aura - 5
Redoubt - 5
Guardian's Favor - 2
Toughness - 2
Blessing of Kings - 1
Shield Spec - 3
Improved Hammer of Justice - 2

It looks like your Holy talents are solid. There are some filler points here and there thay people have different opinions and value differently. You have all the critical stuff.

I think your protection talents are a little more scattered and confused. That's just my view. I'd throw out the following ideas and comments:

1. Get rid of Improved Devotion Aura. It takes 5 precious points. That is a LOT of talent points. It returns only 430 more armor. That is about a 4% increase in your armor for 5 talent points. Sure, it effects party members, that is kinda nice. I think this talent takes way too many points though for what it delivers.

2. Take points out of Shield Specialization and put them into Anticipation. The +defense works much more often than blocking a few extra points if and when you shield block.

3. Improved Righteous Fury is one of the best talents for the points. It reduces damage by 6% from *ALL* sources (spells and melee) while active. That is a much bigger bonus for 3 talent points than more devotion aura or shield block.

Improved Righteous Fury is also *THE* protection talent that allows you to tank if you need to. I dramatically boost aggro.

4. Check out Precision. It helps a lot for spell and melee hits.

Sounds good. I'll give it a shot =)

Curious how this has played. I'm pushing the Survivadin build until I hit 70... then not so where to go.

Survivadin should do well as an off tank... might have a tad bit of a problem holding aggro though.

Alderman,

Something to think about....

In lvl-70 5 mans, there are the following slots:
Main Tank
Healer
DPS
DPS (+CC helpful)
DPS+CC

If you want to play "oh crap!" off-tank-of-the-moment that's fine, but you must be able to fill a DPS or healer role the rest of the time. I've seen other non-standard group build-outs work (and i've been in some good ones), but most lvl-70 dungeons have at least one boss with a nasty "you must have at least X total DPS to continue" criteria, so if the DPS is lacking, the run is over. If you aren't going to be the healer or tank, make sure you have solid DPS (multiple sets of gear help)....

In 10 mans, there are typically the following slots:
Main Tank
Off Tank/DPS
Healer
Healer
Healer/DPS
DPS
DPS
DPS
DPS (+CC helpful)
DPS+CC

Again, notice that good DPS is critical in an offtank (Curator anyone? the OT gets to change gear 1st). Two full-protection warriors in a Kara run = some DPSer had best be insane (better if a couple are).

I don't know what it takes to tank as a warrior. My impression is that warriors don't have to spend nearly as many points in protection in order to be a passable off-tank. Not as much compared to paladins. Both can make a big gear switch to change roles, but paladins really need to go really deep into their protection tree to pick up important tanking talents.

If nothing else, Improved Righteous Fury (our bread n butter aggro talent) is at least 13 points. Holy Shield requires 31 talent points. Paladins can do fine in a role, but it seems they need to go REALLY deep into a talent tree before they can compete with other non-hybrid classes. Going 31 points into Protection to tank means there's no way to get enough Retribution talents to do decent DPS. Healing might be ok still with 30 points. You could make an ok healer with 30 points in Holy.

Retribution is all or nothing IMO. In order to have any chance of competing DPS-wise, you gotta go heavy with that.

Sabre has 15 points in Protection and does fine off-tanking (and even tanking in 5-mans, although it keeps me very busy). With 13, a warrior can do a pretty solid Off-Tanking job (obviously using stam/defense/block gear instead of str/crit gear) because 13 gets you 3/3 Defiance (+15% threat when in defensive stance), and threat generation i the primary "job" of a tank.

Tref, your comments on pally-trees make sense. It explains why when I group w/ pallies they're so often either the tank or the healer (I have yet to see a DPS'er) -- a heavy ret spec hurts their group-ability, and they can't successfully crank out the high #s if they aren't heavy ret.

grrrr. Now i'm trying to fight off my respec addiction.

I wonder if I could find a configuration to do decent 5-man healing with enough in Ret to make questing easy....

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info...lents.html

It's a funky 31/0/30 build that MIGHT work, but I couldn't say how well really. Definitely need two good sets of gear, most likely a heavy cloth healing set and your lolret set.

I like the idea of the Ret tree, big powerful holy warrior smashing faces, although Mkeyai abhors it, wishing that the third pally tree was a Diablo2 style Aura buff machine to support the party.

Razzafrazza can't edit *mumble*
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info...3102300000

Holy Paladin with Ret for Questing

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=sExh0xzhestZxf0t

Holy (45 points)
    5/5 Divine Strength
    5/5 Divine Intellect
    5/5 Spiritual Focus
    3/3 Healing Light
    5/5 Illumination
    1/1 Divine Favor
    3/3 Sanctified Light
    5/5 Holy Power
    3/3 Light's Grace
    1/1 Holy Shock
    3/3 Blessed Life
    5/5 Holy Guidance
    1/1 Divine Illumination
Retribution (16 points)
    5/5 Improved Blessing of Might
    2/2 Improved Judgement
    3/3 Improved Seal of the Crusader
    5/5 Conviction
    1/1 Seal of Command


Hear that?  It's the sounds of more gold being sucked from my pockets... lol.

I'm gonna give this a try.  It's definately a solid healing build.  I'm hoping with quest items from outlands (beefy warrior DPS gear) I will be able to do enough single-target damage to quest still.  My BE paladin is level 64, so i'm going to chop out 6 points from the bottom of the Holy tree (Holy Guidance 5/5 + Divine Illumination 1/1) to make it work for my level.

Right now i'm deep 41 Protection with rest in Holy.  It's nice being invincible, but I honestly don't like tanking in instance dungeons.  I never have liked it.  AE questing was fun in Hellfire, but Zangramarsh has been tough.  Lot's of casters or mobs with ranged and special abilities.

I kept thinking about going deeper in Retribution, but there's too big of a jump in the middle talents.  You can grab some good DPS talents in the beginning of Ret, but then you have to jump deep down to 25 points or more to start getting the rest of the really good DPS talents (Vengence, Sanctified Seals, etc.).

I just can't handle not being good for a role in dungeons, even if I hardly ever run them on my pally while leveling up.  I end up with maxed our rested XP all the time because I only play him now and then.  Now in Outlands, I often think I mights as well just do dungeon runs to level up.  It would save all the quests for juicy lvl 70 gold questing.