Healing As Ret

Yeah I know, I just posted like ten minutes ago. I forgot to comment on Ret Healing. I was reminded when I visited BoK's page to get my daily does of Coriel.It reminded me that whether it was intentional or not, there is combat healing in the game for Paladins. I was doing it earlier yesterday actually in Blasted Lands. Here is the story.

So I was Scourge hunting early Tuesday morning on my own. I was happily clearing Scourge out when I saw a Hunter show up. I asked him if he need to kill the Shades, and indeed he did. So an invite went out to him, he accepted and we cleared out Scourge until the crystal broke. From there, we were trying to come up with a strategy. Now at first he had a level 70 wasp with him. The plan was that I would gain aggro, tank and heal myself and he would pew pew. We managed to get the Shade to 15% before I died. New strategy, have the wasp tank, I heal and dps a little, and he pew pews. I couldn't keep the wasp up though. I needed more mana, and the wasp was taking to big of hits.

The Hunter suggested that he get his level 68 gorilla out and have that tank. Sounded good to me. But the heal situation had me concerned a little. The Hunter said he would be back in 15 minutes, so I stayed and took some time figuring out how to regen mana faster to keep chain spamming FoL and do some DPS so I could keep AoW up as much as possible.

So this is what I came up with:
-Buff with Blessing of Wisdom
-Keep Ret Aura up for the haste and to help with the gorillas threat (or whatever tank you happen to have)
-Keep Seal of Wisdom up
-Judge with Judgement of Wisdom
-Crusader Strike when possible
-Do not stop auto attacking

I think most of you probably see how this would work. If not, here is the gist of it. Blessing of Wisdom is straight regen. You would lose some spell power by not using Blessing of Might, but mana regen is the most important thing here. Ret Aura will speed up your heals and you will be well in range of the tank so he can get the threat from the reflective damage. Seal of Wisdom will proc off of auto-attacks, Crusader Strike, and Divine Storm. Also, each attack you do has a chance to restore mana if you are Judging Wisdom.

As far as attacks go, you probably want to avoid DS since its so expensive. CS is fairly cheap though, so it is more feasible to use that. The other thing is that you need to crit with CS, DS, or Judgement to get the AoW procs, which is why you want to try and sneak some Crusader Strikes in.

The reason you need to get AoW procs is to help deal with spike damage. Of course, FoL crits will help a bit too since they will put the Sheathe HoT on your target. Relying on crits is obviously not the best healing strategy, a little too RNG based. Standing behind the mob while healing is generally not the best strategy either, but as a Ret Paladin, that is all you have.

Now why, might you ask, is this relevant to anything? Just get a real healer right? There a few places where the ability to heal as a Ret Paladin might be useful. Obviously, healing someone to take down an elite world mob is something that you could do. You would also probably be able to heal a regular instance without to many issues. How many times have you been stuck in group waiting for a healer to join? It happens, and being comfortable with healing in Ret could mean the difference between standing around for another 1 hour or gemming and enchanting your new gear that dropped off the last boss in Utgard Keep. I would think that Heroics and beyond would be out of the question.

Then again, with the advent of the dual spec system, most of this info will be largely irrelevant since a gear and spec swap could have you healing much better. But, for those looking for a "combat healer" there is one. I can guarantee though, not many people will be looking for Ret heals.

One other thing to take away from this useless post is that a slightly modified regen strategy is perfectly viable for Ret DPS. If mana drops to or below 10%, hit Seal of Wisdom and Judgement of Wisdom (if you aren't using that currently), and drop DS out of the rotation. This will skyrocket your mana in no time at the cost of DPS. Once your back to 90% or so, go back to normal rotation and SoComm or SoM/SoB and Judge what you would normally Judge, be it Light or Wisdom or Justice. Personally, I have just been Judging Wisdom all the time for the mana regen.