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YOU TOO CAN DO YOUR DAILIES AS A HOLY PALADIN WITH THIS ONE WEIRD BUILD DISCOVERED BY A HEALER

Okay, some folks were asking about how I managed to get to 90/do dailies as holy/shockadin on Twitter, so I thought it would be easier to put this here. Those of you following for the art stuff, move along. 😉

My GM christened this my “Not Mad, Just Disappointed” spec, because you basically scold people to death with it.

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Glyphs:

Majors:

Holy Shock – buffs the damage of HS

Denounce – occasional reduced cast time; handy, you’ll be spamming it a lot

Harsh Words – turns Word of Glory into an offensive spell when used on a hostile target

Minors:

Luminous Charger forMAXIMUM SPARKLE, Fire from the Heavens for maximum KILL IT WITH PILLARS OF FLAME. I kid, they’re cosmetic, do what you want. Falling Avenger would probably have some utility for the slowfall for those, erm, special ‘oops I walked off a cliff’ moments but I haven’t seen it on our AH yet.

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Talents:

Speed of Light – good for bravely running away

Fist of Justice – reduced cooldown on one of your interrupts

Sacred Shield — mostly because Selfless Healer doesn’t have any utility in the field and Eternal Flame doesn’t work with the Harsh Words glyph and besides, EVERYBODY LOVES BUBBLES.

Unbreakable Spirit — reduces cooldown on your DS/LoH/DP, but honestly, I think any of the talents in this tier would probably be useful. Go with your preference.

Divine Purpose — when it procs, you can basically spam the equivalent of 3-HP Harsh Words at no cost. I’d usually get about 2 casts off of this, but sometimes 3 or even 4. Holy Avenger would probably work in a similar way, but for questing I like Divine Purpose because it was passive; one less CD to think about.

Light’s Hammer — nice bit of aoe.

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“Rotation”:

Judge on cooldown.

Holy Shock to build HP; as with most paladin specs, use your HP-sensitive spell (Harsh Words) at 3. Sometimes, if I was going in for a mini-boss, I’d try to build up 5 charges by healing myself or killing a less powerful mob and hope for a Divine Purpose proc.

Spam Denounce when you can’t do anything else.

Hammer of Wrath when applicable.

You can obviously use Crusader Strike to build HP as well, but bear in mind it will hit like a wet noodle.

I basically tried to save Avenging Wrath for when Divine Purpose procced and I had a buffer of ‘regular’ HP left. Surprisingly bursty, I was able to 2 or 3 shot things at times. Use your other cooldowns as you normally would.

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Caveats:

Sadly, creating a raid-viable shockadin build isn’t possible; the Divine Purpose proc is far too unreliable and the toolkit just isn’t big enough.

However, this build got me all the way to 90 (not having any real aoe was admittedly a pain), and if it hadn’t been four in the morning when I dinged, I could have leapt into heroics right there and then. I died fewer times than I can count on my hand (mostly because I wasn’t really paying attention), so it has great survivability.

I should note I leveled in the Dread Wastes, so it worked against level 90 mobs, for those of you grinding Black Prince rep.

YMMV, salt to taste — but it worked well enough for me! Hope it helps, don’t use it to heal 5s.

(written Sep 30 2012)

Best screenshot ever, dadjeans!