I want to Spec Holy, but.....Follow

I specced from ret to holy at 58. I had very little spell damage/healing gear (other than some crappy cloth). I then leveled all the way from 58 to 70 as holy spec, but I wouldn't recommend doing it, especially if you're complaining about drinking. As holy grinding I ended up drinking MORE than when I was ret spec. It also took me longer to kill the average mob. However on the plus side, with the right seals/judgments I could last a long time and do much better against elite mobs. If I had to do it over again though, I would have stayed ret or maybe gone prot.

+spell damage is not worthless. Investing in a suit with high spell damage makes for great soloing due to the increase it gives to SoR, Holy Shock (a holy paladin's main source of dps), and Consecrate. It also makes you a competent healer before you can load up on +healing gear. You can heal ramparts, blood furnace, underbog, and slavepens fine as a holy paladin with all spell damage gear. I had about 400 bonus spell damage at the time from buying sorcerer gear and just questing and did fine as an MH and soloed very quickly.

So far the only viable leveling build i see is Protection paladin (sounds funny) see play AOE on the wow forums.

As to holy i can tell ya +dmg is good but I would not recomend leveling as holy unless u are ALWAYS in the group.

As ret i would take agi and str, crit is ur bread and butter. Str affects both ur melee attacks and the proc so both stats give u double of what they give other ppl. U only get up to 43% of the spell damage and u dont have mana to spam judgement so much for that +dmg to make a diference, u do the math 400 spell Dmg so ur soc judges for 180 Dmg more as spell dmg has no affect on the proc.
If u get agi (u need 20 @ 70 for 1% crit) it will give u avoidance and double dmg and it affects both soc and melee and ur vengence will stay on u at all times. U can get ur paly to 25% crit no problem and with imp Judgement of crusade ur soc get another 15% crit with a slow 2-hander and 2 stuns u can provide some MAD burst dmg not to mention crudader strike (i count it as a free insta attack on a 3.5 speed weapon is nice),

As to smart guy listing all the things +dmg affects
u listed all the judgements u DONT use in PVE as ret. u lvl as ret using Conce?? rite, the exorcism and holy warth is useless as they are mana drainers and on CD, holy light is GARBAGE only used for pulls, the only skill that does use it Crusader strike 43% of it so every 10 sec u will do extra 180 Dmg ..... so in one minute u will do 1K extra, compare to extra 10% crit in the same 1 min u will have 2 extra crits from melle attacks alone without using sok or crusader strike that 10 % crit will do double or tripple dmg of +400 Dmg (which is alot).

Sorry for grammar my subject is math.

P.S. make sure to collect all the healing gear cause u will not be ret once u hit 70.

Edited, Apr 5th 2007 12:40pm by zayjka

I am Holy and my advice is to not spe Holy unless you want to be a healbot, then you would only need +healing gear, no need of +spell/healing gear.

+spell/healing gear looks good for a holy paladin for some, because it increases the poor damage of holy shock and seal of rightneousness, but in truth when you choose +spell damage items, you don't choose the +Attack Power items that gives more DPS, so you lose DPS, or in the case of Holy paladins, you lose the pure +healing gears that generally gives more bonuses to healing than +spell/healing items.

In short, you would probably have better to stay the spec you are if you want not to be a pure healbot, or if you care not, look for the + healing items. You don't NEED however + healing items, that's okay it's a plus, but you can function without them. Again, people say a Holy paladin need +spell damage gear, because Holy Shock is simply a poor spell, and when it gets +damage, it looks great on the paper, but it's not counting on the gear that you have sacrified in order to make it better.