WoW: Forever
Holy Paladin
Plate-wearing single-target healer with the best buff kit in the game — and Forever finally gives it an area-healing answer through the new Light's Vigil capstone.
Is Holy worth levelling?
Viable but slow, and its usual escape hatch is closed. You will be nearly unkillable and you will kill nothing quickly. Worse for this spec specifically: Forever cut dungeon experience hard, raising only dungeon quest experience, so "just level in dungeons" is largely gone.
Blunt version: solo-questing Holy from 1 to 30 is a poor choice. It makes sense if you intend to group, and only then.
Your talent points
Level 20 — 11/0/0. Two published builds agree exactly.
Divine Intellect, 5 pointsHealing Light, 3 pointsSpiritual Focus, 2 points — interchangeable withImproved SealshereReverence, 1 point
Note that Healing Light's Holy Shock component is dead weight at the current level-20 cap — Holy Shock is exactly level 30, so it comes online when the cap rises.
Level 30 — 21/0/0, reaching Holy Shock: Divine Intellect 5, Healing Light 3, Spiritual Focus 2, Reverence 3, Purifying Power 2, Infusion of Light 2, Divine Favor 1, Illumination 2, Holy Shock 1.
Rotation
Healing:
- Flash of Light as your primary heal — cheap and fast
- Holy Light only with mana to spare, on someone in real danger
- Lay on Hands as the emergency — it heals for your full health and consumes all your mana, so you are finished healing for that fight
- Maintain Blessing of Might on the party, plus Devotion Aura or Retribution Aura
While soloing, your damage rotation is Retribution's minus Seal of Command — keep a seal up, and press Holy Strike and Judgement on cooldown. Saying that plainly rather than repeating it.
Multi-target: there effectively is none below 30. Light's Vigil is a 31-point capstone and Consecration is expensive, so area healing is spreading Flash of Light around.
Stat priority
Healing Power, then Intellect, MP5, critical strike, Haste, Spirit.
If you are not planning to heal seriously, gear Weapon Damage, Hit and critical strike instead and play the Holy-damage path.
What defines Holy
| Talent | Earliest level | What it does |
|---|---|---|
Reverence | 20 | A share of your mana regeneration continues while casting — the mana-stability talent, and now Illumination's prerequisite |
Infusion of Light | 25 | Holy Shock and Flash of Light crits cut your next Holy Light cast by half a second |
| Holy Shock | exactly 30 | Moved down from tier 7, and the gate for the Holy-damage "Shockadin" path |
Light's Vigil | 40 | The new capstone, and Holy's answer to area healing: your next Holy Shock on the target triggers no cooldown and heals their whole party. It replaced Holy Shock as the capstone |
What Forever changed for Holy
- Seven new talents, including
Voice of Truth(6 seconds of silence and interrupt immunity),Reverence,Purifying Power,Infusion of Light,Divine Precision, and theLight's Vigilcapstone. Improved SealsreplacesImproved Seal of Righteousness— it now buffs all seals and Judgements, but was cut from 5 ranks to 3.- The tree was re-laid-out. Holy Shock moved from tier 7 to tier 5;
Divine Favormoved up and no longer needsIllumination;Illuminationnow requiresReverence, and its proc refunds 50% of the spell's base cost rather than all of it — on a 20% chance per rank, so 40% at the two points this build spends. - Consecration left the tree entirely to become baseline at 20 for every spec.
At level 60
Unknown, including whether Light's Vigil behaves as expected — one guide calls its per-party, cooldown-resetting behaviour "the expectation" rather than a tested fact — and whether the Holy-damage path is a real raid specialisation at all.