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Player Spotlight: Protek, Holy Paladin of Ensidia
Protek is one of the top PVE paladins in the game and one of the newest members of <Ensidia> of Tarren Mill-EU, being recruited only days after the completion of this interview. He was the healing assignment coordinator for more than a year with <Method> of Sylvanas-EU who have been at the cutting edge of progression for years.
He’s the second player to be featured in our new segment, the World of Raids Player Spotlight. Mouse over Protek’s name to view his PVE highlights.
[*]Player name: Protek
[*]Class: Paladin
[*]Guild: <Ensidia> of Tarren Mill-EU
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Main PvE Spec:
In terms of raiding and progression I play 51/20/0. Divine sacrifice is just too good for certain situations, and the buffed sacred shield shouldn’t be underestimated. The mana loss in comparison to the other available crit specs 51/5/15 and 51/0/20 is non existent because of the duration increase for the sacred shield. Improved Righteous Fury is useful for a lot of encounters as well; it is a good boost for your survivability and shouldn’t be skipped on the way down to divine sacrifice. Improved Devotion Aura is very useful for us, mainly because of the reason that we sometimes only have one restoration druid in the raid.
Why did you choose paladin and why do you continue to play the class?
Back in vanilla WoW I played a horde rogue. With the release of TBC and all those unnecessary wipes due to healer fail in my very first guild, I thought that it can’t be so hard to heal and decided to play a healer. I rerolled to the alliance (since the server best guilds where alliance) and started to raid a bit more hardcore.
The class is perfect. I love to be responsible for the tank healing rather than the raid heal. All the changes this class has received were just fine PvE wise and the beacon of light is a masterpiece (in my eyes also overpowered).
If you could make one change to the paladin class what would it be?
Mana regeneration. It’s not really a challenge to play with an infinite mana pool. Stack for full intellect, get the best gear possible to minimize the usage of divine plea, and gain the ability to spam your Holy Light. My opinion is that we should receive a lot more nerfs in this area. The external mana resources are too good, revitalize, replenishment and innervate added to our own resources will overcome any challenge in Icecrown with ease. I really hope for another nerf to either our class or the external resources.
Your most memorable PVE moment:
The 10-man Ulduar speed run against Ensidia at the Battle of the Best tournament. This was the most intense raid I ever had. The feeling when fighting all those bosses at a very high pace against one of the best guilds in the world was so great and frightening at the same time. This and the pleasure of getting a high-ranked kill are the things that I enjoy the most!
Biggest challenges for paladins:
Multitasking and managing all of your abilities. It is really important to find the perfect situations to use your Sacrifice and Divine Sacrifice, either to absorb a lot of raid/tank damage, or to able to use your mana resources like seal of wisdom or divine plea. Using your taunt abilities at the right moment can save your raid members as well. You need to have a lot of bindings as a paladin. In my case I use over 45 single bindings together with my bar switching, single buffs and group buffs are also bound to avoid any unnecessary mouse movement away from my raid frames.
Tunnel-visioning the raid frames is not enough. You have to keep track of the movements of all the raid members around you and predict what could happen so that you can react before it happens, either with pre-emptive healing or the use of Blessing of Protection.
With the current Beacon of Light and its 1.5 seconds reaction time, the paladin is able to perform some nice but very mana intensive Beacon switches. A good trick is to not cast Beacon on tank one and then heal tank two. Instead you heal tank two and right after it hit, you spam your beacon button on tank one so that he gets instantly healed without the 1.5 seconds delay.
I already gave an example of perfect timing or timing tricks above. Predicting the incoming boss damage with perfect knowledge of the boss swing timers and the avoidance on your tank are also important information. The more you know, the easier your jobs are done and you can assist more on other tasks, like raid healing.
Your 2 Most indispensible mods:
Grid comes first. It is the best raid frame addon for healers in WoW. Adding new unknown debuffs/buffs on progression is a must. Grid is easy to use and its configuration possibilities together with its visual aspects are just amazingly well programmed. The customization you gain by using this will fit into anyone’s interface.
Classtimer is also important. You can use your grid to keep track of your abilities like Beacon or Sacred Shield, but to know the exact duration to recast it perfectly you’ll need Classtimer. Procs like Val’anyr, trinkets or the duration of active cooldowns like Avenging Wrath are perfectly shown and are easy to keep track of with this addon.
You use two different gear sets for Trial of the Crusader. In one set you don’t even use more than one piece of tier gear and they’re both gemmed completely differently. Please tell us about how you use these different gear sets.
The set which I always log out with is my current raiding gear for the first four boss fights of TotC. My second set of gear is fully spell power gemmed, glyphed and enchanted, together with four-piece Tier 8 for the strongest possible sacred shield. This second set is used solely for Anub’Arak and his third phase. With this compilation you can easily flash the tanks fulltime without getting into mana issues, and you have a very good holy shock on the penetrating cold targets [at the start of phase 3]. And don’t forget about the sacred shield and its extra absorption due to the high spell power. The FoL HOT effect is also being kept up on all three tanks in this fight.
Val’anyr, Hammer of the Ancient Kings. How satisfied are you with the mace overall, what strengths do you see in using it as a paladin vs. other classes, and do you think you’ll be using it in Icecrown?
Overall I must say that this mace is really great. You can do a lot of things with the proc like using it to compensate your Divine Plea uptime, track the internal cooldown and use the proc to pre shield specific raid members or just for the added safety when healing the tank and or raid. The proc of this mace is also one of my tools for handling my heal and cooldown timings together with the right spell choice.
From my experience I’d say the best classes to have this mace are the holy priest, paladin and restoration shaman. The paladin may also be the most effective class for this mace, due to his high and fast direct heals. The tanks are the most important players in a raid to survive and the paladin’s job should always be to have at least Beacon on a tank to get the shield up (since transferred Beacon heals also proc the shield). A good example for perfect usage of this proc on a holy paladin would be on Twin Val’kyr. Either you choose to have one paladin to have the proc on both tanks with the help of beacon or you use two paladins -- each using beacon on one tank and healing the raid. The glyph of holy light is also applying the shield effect of the mace which is a strong feature.
You chose the +30 intellect enchant on your mace over the +63 spell power enchant. Explain to our readers why you feel the +30 intellect is more valuable for a paladin.
My goal is to gain the best possible longevity for my mana pool. From my point of view it doesn’t matter if you have 300 spell power more or less on an encounter as a paladin. Every bit of additional mana regen also allows the paladin to use their divine plea less and make the glyph of holy light more viable. It is better to have someone keeping a steady HPS on their respective targets instead of a meleeing holy paladin who stop casts every second holy light and uses plea more often with less profit, remember that this decision is based on the fact that you are making use of the glyph of holy light. Of course every player can choose for themselves on what to use, it also depends on the play style of the individual.
Tell us a little about your life away from WoW. I know you’re working on your college degree. How are you able to balance this with a busy progression schedule?
Currently I am studying environmental computer technology / applied sciences. In my case, I’m able to do a lot of my studying at home. The only crucial time for progression would be the week where I have my exams. So overall I have enough time to play. I will enter the phase soon where I need to write my bachelor work. Don’t know what will be waiting for me there but I will try to find the time to play for sure! And after all that there is still the master’s degree.
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