The Basics – Part 1: Spells

Well, for starters i spec/glyph and gear for, what i believe, will bring higher raid utility and performance. You may agree/disagree with my choices and i am open to any suggestions. 

That being said lets start with some knowledge of the class, i assume that mostly have leveled as any spec but Holy (cause that would be really slow) and you need to get used to the tools you have to offer around. 

Heals: 

Holy Light: This is the first holy spell that you get, although is a mana dump for lower levels. Has a long casting time but, with the ammount of haste gained on most items in  T9+ content, it should drop the cast time to 1.4-1.3 secs. It scales perfectly with your Spell Power (188.5%) and its your tank saviour most of the times. With a proper gemming and glyphing you can make this your primary heal for 25-mans or 10-mans heroic. 

 

Flash of Light: This is your bread-and-butter spell for healing during 5-mans, heroics and a lot of the current 10-man content, it scales decently with your spell power (113%). Also with the haste gained on late gear its cast time should drop to 1 sec. Even with FoL specs this spell wont cut sometimes on heavy single target damage (Gornoc in ToGC or Marrowgar on ICC). 

Holy Shock: Our 31-point talent and oh-shit heal, this spell causes mixed feelings on the paladin community, you can love it or hate it, but in my humble opinion is a great tool to heal on-the-move (one of our weaknesses), decent scale with spell power ( 90.5%)  and procs a buff on crits. 

Sacred Shield: Our mitigation spell, if properly spec’d into holy and prot talents will grant a decent absorption per 6 secs, it can only be casted on 1 target, so always get your tank with this, also the healing over time (hot) granted with FoL ticks every second. With the proper gear it can provide 40k absorption in 1 min. 

Beacon of Light: The 51-point Holy talent, this kind of ability was waited since BC. It gives us great flexibility to help raid healing or single-handed heal 2 targets at the same time. All your direct heals will transfer to your beacon target while he/she is at least 60 yards in range of the person that is healed. Also note that your Beacon target must be in line of sight. Spells that wont heal the beacon are: Holy Light Glyph, Judgement of Light and the HoT portion of your Flash of Light. It is the healing spell with longer range in WoW, so if a tank runs out of your healing spells range he might be still on beacon range, so you can beacon him and heal everyone around. All overhealing goes to the beacon target (that makes it so powerful). 

Lay oh Hands: The o-crap heal, due to his long Cooldown it is adviced to saved it for moments in the fight when a target gets really low and a Holy Shock wont fit. Anyways it should be up for every boss fight so i always use it once per boss.

The Hands:
Temporal spells that makes us unique on a raid enviorment, use them wisely! 

Hand of Sacrifice: Our heavy single-target damage reduction ability, but be careful, depending on the fight mechanic it can kill you. A good practice is to have a macro set like:

#showtooltip Divine Shield
/cast Divine Shield
/cast Hand of Sacrifice

That way you prevent damage transfered by your target to you and still provide a solid damage reduction (or you can simply Beacon that target and heal yourself). 

Hand of Freedom: A helpful spell that will free a target for almost every root/slow effect in game, short cooldown and mana cost makes it priceless. 

Hand of Salvation: A great tool to reduce, gradually, the targets threat. Handy when some trigger-happy DPS starts to go all out while the tank is pulling  

Hand of Protection: Oh boy the memories with this one, it can be a life saver or can produce a wipe (when you accidentally BoP a tank…/whistle), grants total protection vs physical attacks only, also removes any bleed effect ongoing on a target (impales in ToC the most recent) 

Blessings:
These are the 10-min/30 min buffs you bring to a raid, all of them are powerful tools, so master them. (Note: if you are a raiding paladin you NEED to have a blessing manager addon like pally power or Zomgbuffs, it makes your life easier) 

Blessing of Kings: This is the buff that everyone will ask for in a raid, arguably the most powerful buff in the game, scales with your gear so… when in doubt about on which buff asign to an specific class just kings them and they will be happy. (To be honest i die a little inside when i am with my shaman and with 5 pallies in raid i see people asking for kings) 

Blessing of Might: Your melee will love you for this one, great direct AP buff, if you are running with a ret he would most likely have the imp version, or if you are into a Holy/Ret spec then you can pick it for utility purposes. 

Blessing of Wisdom: A solid buff on regen for mana-users, if you run with more than 1 pally in raid you can pick the imp version on your holy talents. 

Now these are all your basic tools for starting to heal, master them!