Need sanity check for my new team

Back in early BC when I was still single-boxing, I had a spelldmg Ret pally that I just loved. Or at least I did until Blizzard decided to retroactively reitemize all the spelldmg plate gear out there. So when I saw the new Cata talent trees for Holy, I just had to try something. Denounce and Enlightened Judgements just spoke to me, and I decided to roll up 3x Holy DPS pallys.

To begin with, leveling through Exorcism spam was wonderful for questing and PvP, but complete trash for instancing due to the mana cost. All that changed once I reached Denounce though, and that's when I started queueing for randoms to do most of my leveling. At the beginning, DPS felt really good, but now that I'm about 15 levels further in I really can't see that the DPS has improved that much. I'm doing at best 300dps on each pally in standard instances, but put me into a mostly Undead instance and that jumps to 500+ quickly because of the Exorcism auto-crit.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...ytricks/simple

I suspect that part of the problem I'm having with Exorcism has to do with the formula on Wowhead to calculate its damage. It appears to scale at 34.4% of your AP or your Spell Power, whichever is greater. What this means is that even with full caster gear and a spelldmg heirloom 1h mace, lately my AP has been greater just because of the fact that 1 Str = 2 AP. At the moment, I see no time that this will change until Lvl 77 when I can equip Cata-level weapons with roughly 1000 SP. This has me greatly concerned with continuing on this path.

So am I just dreaming at the possibility of a spelldmg Pally?...




On the bright side, the healing that I can do passively with this pack is nothing short of amazing. Thinking of my pallys as a circle, I have macros for Beacon which have them buff each other in one direction, and macros for Word of Glory which cast in the other direction. This results in healing a target which is not the Beacon, causing the Beacon to be healed for 50%, as well as triggering Protector of the Innocent on the caster, which then also triggers Beacon for 50% of that heal. Throw in the self-healing from Enlightened Judgements for even more Beacon procs.

As an example, last night I ran ZF with a Warrior tank and Priest heals. Using 3x Beacon on the tank, I was generating so much passive healing through Beacon that the Priest actually switched specs to Shadow before killing any bosses. With the exception of healing the Priest through Holy Shock, and maybe once or twice using Holy Shock on the Warrior, we cut through the entire instance with nothing but Beacon healing on the tank. I used Judgement every cooldown, Holy Shock every cooldown to build Holy Power, Word of Glory on the pallys at 3 HP, and Exorcism to fill in.

Note that the Priest as Shadow was pulling between 50% and 75% more DPS than my Pallys were when using the rotation above. But then I expected much worse as I was spending GCDs to heal with, so maybe I'm just imagining my DPS problems?

I don't have anything useful to add, but that sounds like a lot of fun... why 3 and not 4 pallies, though?

3 simply so I could queue for randoms as DPS, letting others worry about tank and heals, and so I could 3v3 arena with them in the future.

But you're probably on to something that I should have done 4 pallys. My son recently picked up his pally tank again, and if I had 4 I could have been doing 5v5 arena with only him...

Having fun with your pallies? I have five myself and its just a fun fest whenever I play them. They used to be retribution up until late wotlk when they nerfed cleanse and the other various cata changes. I switched them to holy, bought them some welfare pvp epics, and then just laughed as I could keep entire raids busy trying to kill me. Yes, it was very much flavor of the month but it was oh so great while it lasted.

I did most of the heroics (with one prot spec), and was able to beat them with ease, although given how late it was in the expansion it really wasn't a suprise. DPS is kind of lacking, compared to my other team, a mixed caster group, but the coordination is there. I swam over to throne of the tides and cleared my way to the first boss on release night, but couldn't get her down below 20% before wiping. Hopefully with a complete cata-level gearset then these bosses should be doable on normal mode with some practice.

For pvp I do have a lot of fun out in the world, but don't expect to get very far in arenas without good CC and burst. Hopefully some with more pvp experience can chime in here and give you some tip on what you can try to be competitive.