Holy Paladin Healing Rotation, Cooldowns, and Abilities — Midnight Pre-Patch (12.0)

Regardless of build choice, your primary focus will be casting as many Holy Shocks as possible, as well as spending as much Holy Power as possible through one of: Light of Dawn, Word of Glory (or Eternal Flame), or Shield of the Righteous. When you can do none of the above, you will be rotating between casting Holy Shock and Judgment.

Holy Paladin is one of the more fast paced classes and the most important thing you can do rotationally is ensure that you are always casting something. At times you will need to make split second decisions as to which ability is best to use, simply choosing one will always be better than hesitating slightly, missing a cast, and then choosing. You should aim to cast as many spells as possible, as fast as possible. Once you are able to properly execute a fast rotation, you can then aim to optimize the specific buttons you are casting and when.

When you select a desired build, you will be given much more detailed priority lists that explain how and when to use each ability.

This is a standard raiding build focused on maximizing Holy Power generation and spending on Light of Dawn. Despite Herald of the Sun focusing on Eternal Flame. You will want to maximize Light of Dawn casts due to the current power discrepancies between the abilities. Further increased by talents such as: Breaking Dawn and Second Sunrise. The rotation will be described below:

• Keep Divine Toll on cooldown as much as possible.
• Never waste Holy Power.
• Cast Holy Shock as much as possible.
• Cast Judgment as much as possible.
• Spend Holy Power on Light of Dawn.
• Cast Flash of Light when you cannot do any of the above.

Flash of Light remains our best "filler" ability due to it being extremely mana efficient and providing a reliable source of Holy Power. While Holy Light offers a massive amount of healing, especially when picking talents such as Divine Overload or Resplendent Light, it has an extremely high mana cost. You should only ever cast Holy Light when extra mana allows or you have Innervate. If you find yourself having the ability to cast this ability often, you may want to make slight adjustments to your talents such as changing Righteous Judgment for Resplendent Light. Some talents such as Divine Overload are unable to really ever be selected since they go against extremely competitive choices and it is not worth selecting them.

Keep in mind that it is incredibly important that you are casting Divine Toll as much as possible. This ability allows you to apply Dawnlight to players as well as providing a massive boost in Holy Power specifically. The healing it does is of course powerful, but the main benefit is a massive amount of Holy Power to minimize the amount of Flash of Lights you need to cast.

Avenging Crusader builds play very similar to Avenging Wrath builds, but they differ largely in the abilities being pressed while in your cooldown. Below we will discuss the standard rotation you will be following as well as the rotation you will be using while Avenging Crusader is active.

• Keep Sacred Weapon on cooldown as much as possible.
• Never waste Holy Power.
• Cast Judgment as much as possible.
• Cast Holy Shock as much as possible.
• Spend Holy Power on Light of Dawn.
• Cast Flash of Light when you cannot do any of the above.

When you use Avenging Crusader, the cooldown will be replaced by Crusader Strike during the duration. This ability will work similarly to Judgment in the sense that the damage it deals will transfer to healing. Your priority will look something like this:

• Never waste Holy Power.
• Keep Judgment on cooldown.
• Keep Crusader Strike on cooldown.
• Spend Holy Power on Light of Dawn.
• Cast Holy Shock when you cannot do any of the above.

Many of the priorities you would use in raiding content will stay the same in Mythic+. The main exception to this is the increased importance of Consecration, Judgment, and Shield of the Righteous in order to output extra damage because no healing is needed.

• Keep Divine Toll on cooldown as much as possible.
• Never waste Holy Power.
• Cast Holy Shock as much as possible.
• Cast Judgment as much as possible.
• Spend Holy Power on Eternal Flame.
• Cast Flash of Light when you cannot do any of the above.
• When no healing is needed, spend Holy Power on Shield of the Righteous.

Keep in mind that damage may occur in Mythic+ settings that you did not expect. If you are constantly spending Holy Power whenever possible, you may not have Holy Power available when healing is needed. For this reason, it can often be wise as a beginner player to only cast Shield of the Righteous when you have 4-5 Holy Power; that way, you can quickly generate extra Holy Power when healing is needed unexpectedly.

Added in Patch 11.1.7, the combat assistant is a one-button ability intended to cast your rotational abilities. Unfortunately for healer specs, this does not function well. As a Holy Paladin, the combat assistant will not cast healing spells, it will not cast Holy Shock, and it will not spend Holy Power. This makes it fairly unusable. The only situation in which you could use it is when focused entirely on dealing damage, and even then you would still need to cast your other abilities on your own.

Infusion of Light is a core passive for Holy Paladin. This effect has a 10% chance to be triggered whenever you cast Holy Shock. There are two different ways that you can utilize this buff:

• Flash of Light
  When cast with Infusion of Light, this ability becomes instant cast and the healing is increased by a significant margin.
• Judgment
  When cast with Infusion of Light, the Greater Judgment effect is increased by a large margin and generates 1 additional Holy Power.

Regardless of content or build choice, you will want to be consuming Infusion of Light with Judgment. Holy Power spending abilities ( Light of Dawn and Word of Glory) are incredibly powerful and your goal should be to always maximize the amount of times you can cast them. Judgment doing a similar amount of healing and also providing an additional Holy Power means that it is going to be the best choice. There is one exception to this rule: if a player is in danger of dying. If you have no other high priority abilities and a player is in significant danger, you should instead cast Flash of Light on them to prevent the death.

This ability will not become active until the release of Midnight.

Beacon of the Savior is the new Apex Talent added in Midnight. This will give you a new Beacon that will automatically be placed on the lowest health ally. Once the target is healed beyond their maximum HP or another target drops below 50%, the Beacon will move. There are a few interactions to keep in mind with this Beacon:

• This ability benefits from all talents that your typical Beacon of Light does. This includes Commanding Light, Saved by the Light, and any other Beacon-related talent.
• While you will still transfer healing to Beacon of the Savior like any other Beacon, you will also do additional healing to the target who has your Beacon of the Savior.
• Every 8 seconds, or when Beacon of the Savior is applied to a new target, a small shield will be placed on the target and they will also take reduced damage for the next 15 seconds.

Despite Beacon of the Savior targets receiving more healing, you will not want to continuously heal them directly. You should aim to heal them when they are in danger just like you would with any other raid/party member. The reason that the healing increase exists in the first place is to make it less punishing towards your healing to cast spells on your Beacon target. Due to the fact the target with your Beacon of the Savior is likely to be the lowest health member, you don't want to miss out on potential healing by directly heal them. The healing increase counteracts this, meaning that you should simply aim to heal the players most in danger.

Mastery: Lightbringer is the Holy Paladin mastery. This increases the healing done by your spells based on your proximity from the target. Beacon of the Lightbringer increases this effect further by adding your Beacons to the equation. The increase to healing will be calculated based on whoever is closer between yourself and players with your Beacons. In the past, it has been common to cast Beacon of Light and Beacon of Faith on tank players as they will always be taking damage. This is no longer true and you will want to place your Beacons on ranged players who have lower survivability. This will allow you to get good value from your Beacons while also providing you with increased Mastery values as they will be closer to ranged while you will be closer to melee. Below we will list out a few good choices for your Beacon of Light and Beacon of Faith targets. Of course if you are playing Beacon of Virtue this is not relevant.

• Balance Druid
• Shadow Priest
• Devastation Evoker
• Any Hunter spec
• If you have none of the above, place it on any remaining ranged.
• In small group settings with no ranged, you can often choose the tank and the melee DPS taking the most damage consistently.

Avenging Wrath is our main cooldown. This ability has a 2-minute cooldown by default and increases your damage, healing, and critical strike. You will want to use this cooldown as often as possible while ideally lining it up with longer duration damage windows due to it lasting 30 seconds by default. When active, you will want to follow your standard rotation, you will just be doing more healing!

Aura Mastery will only be used on Devotion Aura, meaning that you should have Devotion Aura selected from your Aura bar before using (you should always keep it on by default). When pressed, you will provide all allies with a 12% damage reduction. In a raid setting, this cooldown is likely to be assigned to a heavy-hitting mechanic by whoever is responsible for organizing your healing cooldowns. When you are on your own, you should prioritize using this ability anytime your party is likely to be in danger, ideally right before large damage happens.

Avenging Crusader replaces Avenging Wrath and grants different bonuses as well as having a much shorter cooldown. When cast, this ability will transform into Crusader Strike for the duration. While active, your Judgment and Crusader Strike abilities will now heal nearby allies when they deal damage. This means that your rotation will change slightly and you will be wanting to press as much Judgment and Crusader Strike as possible when the cooldown is active, while still prioritizing spending Holy Power when you are near capping.

Divine Toll and Holy Prism share a choice node in The War Within. When playing Lightsmith, you will have these replaces by Holy Armaments. Regardless of your ability choice, these are short-cooldowns which you will want to make frequent use of. When playing Herald of the Sun, pressing these abilities is what gives you access to Dawnlight, making them incredibly important.

Divine Toll casts 5 Holy Shocks when pressed. The important part of this cooldown is in who you are targetting when you use it. If you are targetting an enemy, then it will prioritize casting the 5 Holy Shocks on enemies. If there aren't enough enemies then it will cast the remaining number of Holy Shocks on allies. This means that when your goal is to do healing, you need to make sure that you are casting the ability at an ally, otherwise you will be wasting a ton of healing. As previously mentioned, your goal should be to cast this ability as much as possible when playing Herald of the Sun to proc Dawnlight.

Holy Prism functions very similarly to Divine Toll in the sense that it functions differently depending on if you cast it on an ally or an enemy. When cast on an ally, it will deal large single-target healing and AoE damage to enemies around you. If cast on an enemy, it will deal large single-target damage, and do AoE healing to nearby allies. You will generally prioritize casting this on enemies, in order to trigger the AoE healing effect. Additionally, you want to cast this ability as much as possible when playing Herald of the Sun to proc Dawnlight.