Well my very first bit of advice is to cast your Judgement as much as you possibly can. Not only does it give you mana back but it will also, if you have the correct talent, heal yourself and the tank at the same time through beacon.

Next up, get your in combat mana regen above 2500. Mine is sitting around 2800 right now when I eat 60 spirit food and pop a spirit elixir and I'm only now getting to the point where I can be a little overboard with my divine light heal. I also suggest working towards getting haste and spirit on every single piece of gear, it'll make a difference. Mastery is just barely better than crit imo.

This takes me into your spell selection. You probably already know this but holy shock is something you should be casting every single time it's off of cooldown. I usually opt to always cast it on a DPS that needs a heal, usually the one with the lowest health unless I can see they will be safe for at least a few seconds. Between that and word of glory you can keep the DPS healed in damn near every heroic boss fight. Also, holy light is something you need to learn to get comfortable casting in high pressure situations. You may feel like you need to top that DPS who's at half health off with a divine light but in most situations all you end up doing is wasting mana. And of course divine light on the tank when he needs a direct heal. Holy radiance has become very useful to me now that I've gotten used to it. It may be situational but the healing output is pretty nice if you use it correctly.

Be sure and use your cooldowns liberally and I also suggest selecting trinkets with some type of mana regen proc or use ability. Hand of Sacrifice should be something you know when to cast on the tank because he's going to need it more often than you may be used to. Also don't forget to use your divine protection since the 40 second cooldown means it will be back up fast.

Last but not least, I find flash of light to be damn near worthless. I have yet to be in a situation where I thought flash of light would work better than divine light.

 

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A lot of good advice there. the best of it for me was the combat regen. I hadn't thought about my spirit levels and when I looked, I was at 1700 combat regen. After some retooling and an upgrade in my trinket spot after the last run, I am sitting at 2300 combat regen. That made a huge difference.

I also use Holy Shock every chance it's up, I just wish there was a way to get daybreak to proc more

Flash of light has been off all my bars since mid 60's

One thing I do differently, and it's something I have done from the start, so not sure I can change because I am set in my ways on that.... is I beacon of light an off-tank/dps. That is the closest I can get to having a HoT on a pali. Since most of the time you are spamming heals on the tank, it's a good way to keep a second person up. So one heal will heal the tank, me the healer, and 1 dps.

Ret does okay at the higher gear levels from what I've seen and kept an eye on. It's heroic and pre-heroic that's difficult right now. For example, I struggle to pull off 4k DPS on trash or on boss fights where you change targets every 10-20 seconds. A perfect rotation and I can get 7k DPS on a boss. If everything procs just right I'll pull between 8k and 10k DPS. That's a wide range of what kind of DPS I can do depending on the situation. And for such a strict rotation, it's really really random. The buffs should help both problems a little bit.

 

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Cataclysm changed the way beacon works too drastically to cling to the old way of things. The ability to build your holy power by healing the beacon and the fact that the beacon still triggers when you heal them means holy paladins make a less effective two tank healer but making them amazing at keeping one tank alive while allowing you to raid heal as well.

 

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Strange, I am hitting 13-15k on several bosses. I'm not well geared in my ret set either.

 

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I actually like all 3 roles, depends on how I am feeling.

Tanking is something that I like when I really feel like being a control freak or the center of attention.

DPS is something I do when I don't really feel like doing anything, as you really can just eff around as DPS and as long as your Recount Numbers are great, nobody cares (and you don't stand in the sh**).

I like healing when I am focused and want to really challenge myself.

 

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Yea, I actually saw what you meant this past week - I made it into heroics and ran five or six. Compared to my rogue my ret pally is a lot of work for mediocre gains in the entry-to-mid ilvl range. Not the spam until you win class it used to be. I can see why a lot of old heads were turned off to the mechanic changes. I still have way too little experience to give a solid opinion on whether they were ultimately beneficial or not.

And I probably never will, just canceled my account barely a week past trial. The game just doesn't grab me any longer. If healing was still fun I would have easily renewed. But even at level 75 my healer (holy priest) is boring as sin now, I don't want to see what it's like when mana management and PUG DPS in heroics comes into play. I'll just download a few games on PSN and Steam and put the WoW chapter(s) of my life behind me.

 

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I prefer tanking or healing, but my guild has plenty of both so I have rerolled a hunter. I miss tanking/healing but this is a nice change, what does bother me is when the tank is clueless, and I try to drop hints on how to improve, but it's hard because no one wants to take advice now days.

 

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