The Inevitable Paladin Shop Talk

     Today on one of his dungeon runs Laen hit level 45. I've been kind of excited for this because I've been debating with myself for a while which of the level 45 talents I was going to pick for Holy spec. I'd ruled out Sacred Shield pretty early on. It's the talent Rim has for level 45 and I try to keep it up on him for extra mitigation as a tank, but for a healer it just didn't seem very exciting to me. But that still left me two choices I was pretty torn between.
     Seish has Selfless Healer. I don't know whether or not that's an odd talent pic for a ret pally. Divi uses Sacred Shield, but I picked Selfless Healer on Seish originally because he quests to level with SprYte's warrior Roz and it gave Seish one more button to keep his warrior companion alive with. Then I got to max level and realized just how awesome it was for soloing stuff. It's not quite as super a heal as a self heal, but that free, instant surge of health has saved Seish's life more times than I can count. It's also saved the occasional tank on the Horseman when the healer forgot to heal, or hapless person in LFR when I happened to notice it was up in between smashing face. Still I think Seish has ended up using it more on himself than anyone else. So in his case maybe it should be called Selfish Healer.
     I seriously considered Selfless Healer for Laen. Thought it might be kind of fun, and useful, and I may still talent into it at some point to try it out. But for his current leveling purposes I finally went with Eternal Flame. Putting a HoT on the tank occasionally sounds nice, and it'll give me a chance to try it out in the field. I've got a good idea of how Selfless Healer works already, at least on a ret paladin, but I haven't really tried Eternal Flame. So we'll see.

     Halfway through the talent tree. 45 more levels to go. He's slowly catching up to my Alliance Paladin. I promise not to blog every talent choice he makes, but this one was one I'd been looking forward to. I'm excited about this. Thanks to Tai giving me some much needed healer confidence I'm thoroughly enjoying my little holy paladin. He still doesn't feel quite as awesome as a Mistweaver, but I do like the fact that when things inevitably decide to hit Laen because he's the healer he's got plate and a shield between him and going squish. And Pursuit of Justice is almost as good for keeping up with super fast tanks as roll.