Crymoar’s Guide to
Holy Paladin Addons and Macros
There is a lot going on there.
It may be daunting at first, but you are actually only really concerned with a very small portion of this picture.
That would be this part (top right hand corner in my case)
Grid
Grid is a replacement for your raid frames. It is a complete and overwhelmingly detailed addon that provides you, as a healer, a ton of information that is going to make your job easier.
So let’s look at some of the things grid is telling us in this picture:
1) Liontooth has almost a full rage bar. (deep red bar on the right)
2) Xarrgg is out of rage (bright red bar on the right)
3) Morsoul has more mana than the other two healers (Morai and Crymoar) (dark blue bar on the right)
4) Sarok has the least mana of any caster
5) Tuefel is a Rogue or Cat druid who is low on energy. (yellow bar on the right)
6) Xarrgg has aggro. (small red square top left corner and red hi-lighted box)
So why are these things important?
Pallies must be predictive healers due the fact that all our heals are direct heals with a casting time. We must start casting a heal before the damage is done in a sense.
The little red square in the top left corner and the red outline around the “Xarrgg” box shows us that he is the one who currently has aggro. There will be times when there are several little red boxes so it’s important to know who needs heals and who may just be a warlock lifetapping or spriest shadow-word-deathing.
(glad you asked).
Here are a few examples:
In the first image above. Crymoar is pretty badly hurt, looks like he’s lost a little more than half his health. In fact we know he’s lost 5.5k hp as evidenced by the (-5.5k) and the low shaded green area representing his health.
In the second image we see that Crymoar has another problem. He clearly has aggro (small red square) and has been poisoned (looks like a slowing poison), The icon in the center not only tells you that he has been poisoned but the type of poison it is. The small green square opposite the red “aggro” square represents a state of poisoning.
In the third image we see something very similar to the poisoned image except this time Crymoar is diseased. Without spending too much time thinking about HOW he got that way, it's just good to know he has that problem.
*Important*
Grid can and should be configured to only show you the effects that you can do anything about. In the case of paladins, we can cleanse both poisons and diseases. If Crymoar were cursed, he’s have a small purple square where the green or orange one is and no icon in the center as paladins can not cleanse a curse.
Grid can also show you who and who is not in range of your heals and should be configured that way.
Why Every Healer Using Grid in Your Raid is Awesome:
A picture can tells a thousand words..
Here’s that picture:
The small green square in the bottom left tells me SOMEBODY is healing Crymoar. It might be me, it may be Morsoul, or Morai. We all use grid so we all now know a heal is incoming on Crymoar.
But wait! There’s more! We also have a general idea of HOW MUCH healing is incoming. Shown here by the shaded green area above his remaining health bar.
This prevents overhealing in raids and also allows you to more effectively ensure that the right people are being healed at the right time.
Grid DOES Looks Awesome! What Do I Do Next?!
You heal. You use your handy three, four, or even five button mouse and heal your raid/party, which brings us to the next must have addon for paladins:
Clique
(or why it’s actually good to be a clicker)
Clique is an addon that easily maps macros and actions to your mouse buttons. You can configure clique to ONLY BE ACTIVE IN SPECIFIC FRAMES. This is important so that a right or left clique in the grid raid frame does not interfere with other actions you would typically use left and right mouse clicks for in game (opening bags, or player dialogues etc., etc.).
Let’s take a look.
Clique adds a fifth tab to your spell book. It looks like a little mouse with a wizard hat on it (no, I don’t know why).
I have configured clique to use my 5-button mouse to do almost everything I need to do in a raid healing situation. In some cases I have mapped macros or scripts to a mouse button (right and left) and in other cases just direct actions (middle, four, and five).
So with just moving my mouse and moving across the relatively small real-estate of the grid raid frame I am able to accomplish a lot with very little effort. Hopefully making myself a better and more efficient healer.
Direct spell cast
set-up with clique:
Clique Macro
Interface (Flash of Light):
As you can see in the above images, you can configure a lot more that just heals and macros with clique. Even with a 2 button mouse you could, as a paladin do most of what we tend to do during a raid and cast max rank FoL’s and HLs as required.
It is possible of course to just use the macro interface that WoW provides to accomplish similar things. If you choose to do so you’ll likely be binding your macros to keys as opposed to mouse clicks.
Here is one of my favorites. It’s my “OH SH*T” macro and I save it for moments when a raid or group member is moments from death (ie: down 90% or more hp).
This is bound to my ‘V’ key which is very close to the keys I usually have my fingers resting on. It is a 3-4k instant heal on your target using our Holy Shock spell, a +heals trinket and our Divine Favor guaranteed crit ability.
You can only cast this once every three minutes or so due to cooldowns so a boss fight will rarely see you using it more than once or twice (hopefully). Holy shock is so mana taxing you wouldn’t want it as part of your regular healing rotation.
Pally-Power
Pally-Power is a very simple pally buff organizer that allows all the paladins in a raid to coordinate buffing without overwriting each others blessings and allowing 2 button casting of both greater and lesser blessings for entire classes.
This is what pally-power typically looks like during your raid. You can scale it up or down as needed so it takes up as little space as you need it to.
The raid/group leader or an assist will assign all blessings for every class at the beginning of the raid. Usually this is set up by the paladin CL.
This window shows the breakdown of my assignments during this raid.
-The class
-The assigned buff
-The time remaining on that buff.
In this case everybody is getting greater blessings, but there’s always some rebel or fury warrior that wants to be different. You can fine-tune that kind of granularity into your addon. Left mouse button click in the class window casts the greater blessing and right mouse button any lesser blessings on ‘Mr. Non-conformist’.
This is what the assignment window looks like. Each paladin will be shown in the bottom half of the options window and you can toggle the buff assignment just by clicking under each class until the buffing you want to assign appears. Pally-power is much more feature rich than I am going to cover here, but suffice it to say if you are raiding with multiple paladins w/o pally-power you are going to be wasting a lot more time buffing.
Libram Management
Paladins can switch out their librams even while in combat. This allows us to maximize our heals and mp/5 through the situational swapping out of out librams.
Libram Meister allows you to con the fly switch out your librams based on what heal you are casting and what buff your target has on them.
Ie: It checks for Blessing of Light and will use your Libram of Souls Redeemed while casting Holy Lights and then switch it out for your Blessed Book of Nagrand for your usual FoL spamming.
Using a macro to occasionally (ie every 15 seconds of so), cast a lower rank Holy Light to activate your Libram of Mending, and to keep up Lights Grace is also extremely useful for maintaining mp5 during long fights.
I hope this was helpful to you and not too overwhelming. I’d be happy to answer any questions you have if I can,
Happy healing.
Crymoar.