Cataclysm Item Drop Locations for Holy Paladins

The main site now has drop locations for all gear minus a few odd items here and there.  This includes raid gear.  The new battle.net has drop locations for all of the raid gear listed, so we now know what bosses drop the goods!  I've also added several items lower than ilvl 333 since the non-85 normal dungeons have lower level items than that.  I'll continue to add these as I find them (I have most of them I think).

Impressions of Cataclysm holy paladin healing

I'd like to reflect on the holy paladin healing I managed to do in beta. I didn't do raids there, but I did do a decent amount of dungeons and I've seen most of the raid boss videos.  At first I pugged a couple of normal modes in full blue heroic gear and the damage/health ratios feel... scary at first.  That's the only word I can use to explain it.  You will struggle with normal modes, especially if you haven't seen them yet.  Our heals at 85 literally do the same amount of healing that they do at 80.  The only thing really boosting their effectiveness is spellpower itself, not new ranks or anything like that.  Everyone has a lot of health, floating around 60-90k I believe.  Damage has scaled up, especially AOE damage. Most of the time during a fight people are at deficit health.  In starter gear this will be even more true.  Holy radiance is a key spell in our new arsenal.  It will save your group.  A lot.  Don't be afraid to use it.

Later on I did some heroics in the fully epic premades for the heck of it to see how gear scales.  Heroics are still decently challenging in full epic raid gear which is refreshing.  With full heroic blue gear heroics are challenging.  With starter 85 gear they will be quite brutal.  With full epics I was able to compensate for mistakes my group made and recover after situations that I wouldn't be able to handle in early blues.  I simply would have run out of mana in that other gear.  This is as it should be.

Mana is back.  Even at 80 with 4.0.3 mana isn't an issue.  We can use spells like Flash of Light over and over again, albeit we do see mana dip if we use Flash a lot at 80.  At 85 you'll have to change.  You will switch from using Flash of Light because even using 3-5 of them in a fight will sap your mana pool.  HS+HL+WoG/LoD and Holy Radiance will be your best friends and FoL/DL will be second class in your toolbox.  Divine Sacrifice will be your best friend for saving damage on the tank and transferring it to the free healing on yourself.  Cooldowns will be your best friend again (AW+Divine Favor are incredible at getting a group back on its feet with Holy Radiance).  Divine Light will be a strict backup spell, and now that Infusion of Light works to speed it up it's a great spell to heal someone from a very bad deficit.  It still costs an arm and a leg though.

You'll have to take my word for it that 80 healing, even with 4.0.3, is nothing like Cataclysm.  It's just a totally different environment due to health pools, spell cost, spell potency, and encounters in general.

Best In Slot Holy Paladin 4.0.3 updates, major glyphs

Last night I switched the main site over to show Cataclysm items by default.  If you don't want to see Cata items on this list you can filter out the "Not Available" items and see WOTLK items.

I also updated the glyphs page to reflect the 4.0.3 glyph updates.  Major glyphs are much harder to select now.  The swing glyphs (to me) seem to be Cleanse, Light of Dawn, and Beacon.  The two standby glyphs I'd use for raiding in Cata are Beacon and Divine Plea.  Cleanse depends on the fight for how useful it is and Light of Dawn depends on what size group you're healing.  If you're healing a large group (10 or 25) that requires Light of Dawn, need lots of cleansing, but you don't need to change your beacon target at all, then Divine Plea + LoD + Cleanse seem to be the best.  So there are a few major glyph combos that I think I'll probably use depending on the encounter/raid size:

10/25 man standby: Divine Plea + Beacon + LoD
10/25 man single beacon, cleanse heavy, aoe damage: Divine Plea + Cleanse + LoD
10/25 man tank/beacon swapping, cleanse heavy, little aoe damage: Divine Plea + Beacon + Cleanse
5 man: Divine Plea + Divinity + Cleanse

Why choose beacon as a standby?  Well, swapping beacons is an easy way to put a "hot"-like effect on someone and I can see it being useful in Cata to swap it for free, especially for any fight with over 1 tank (most likely a lot).  If you're doing primarily 5 mans then the beacon glyph probably isn't something you want to use.  I'd go with the Divine Plea + Divinity + Cleanse route if you're pounding 5 mans (LoD is also useless there).

As for Lay on Hands glyphs... using up two majors to buff one 8 minute cooldown spell seems silly.  Divnity is free mana though and is good for 5 mans.

I think there is too much situational glyph swapping in major glyphs.  I guess that's what Blizzard is going for, but in some encounters glyphs are going to be clearly useless.

Cataclysm Raid Loot

I would say almost all of the Cataclysm raid loot is in the main site now.  If you filter by 4.0.3 you can view all of it on the different gear pages.

One thing to note is the new random enchantment gear is not listed.  There's not an easy way to list this out since they're... random and don't have any stats on the stat websites.

October Site Updates

I have been doing weekly updates to the Cataclysm gear listing on the site (accessible by filtering for patch 4.0.3).  One of the trickiest pages is Trinkets.  There are an obscene amount of trinkets in Cataclysm and I'm sure there are even more healer ones yet to be discovered.  There are also the epic heroic mode raid trinkets which will be added at a much much later date (probably post-Cata, I doubt they'll beta test heroics... who knows).

There is a lot of Cataclysm gear in the site now.  I have the goal of listing everything ilvl 333+ on the slot pages so you know what is what.  Ranks right now are based on the weights from a few posts ago.  I've unfortunately had to rely on this heavily since there has been such a large amount of items.  The best items according to this are int/spi/haste ones.

I have also had to add in some of the pre-4.0.1 spirit items from ICC that we didn't use before.  This includes the Marrowgar neckpiece, Sindragosa ring, and Deathbringer cloak.  These are some of the best items now.

Cataclysm & 4.0.1 Holy Paladin Glyphs

I have added a new glyphs page to the main website. This page lists the new Cataclysm holy paladin glyphs in the order you're most likely to use them. There are a few interesting choices and a few boring choices.

This page is also valid for 4.0.1 holy paladins since glyphs will be updated.

In addition, I've updated the methodology page for 4.0.1 and beyond. This should give some insight on how gear is ranked for the next expansion. Since things are still likely to change this page is also subject to change.

Stat Weights for Cataclysm

Even though Cataclysm is a few months off and stats may end up changing in value, I've entered a set of default values for 4.0.1. The only thing that will change for Cata is the value of a socket since you'll be able to fit 40 stat points into a socket instead of 20. Sockets are at 100 for 4.0.1, if you want to see 4.0.3 values bump it up to 200.

The values largely come from stat discussion in beta at EJ where Zaroua (Premonition) and DiamondTear (Paragon) are discussing the value of each stat. Still subject to tweaking of course. It's somewhat depressing that mastery is such an unattractive stat for us since it has the potential to be good... it's just that the current implementation is quite bad.

Here are the weights:
Spellpower (weapon only): 1.5
INT: 5.0
SPI: 5.0
Haste: 4.0
Mastery: 2.5
Crit: 2.5
Socket (4.0.1 value): 100.0