Healing in 3.2: Divine Sacrifice
Divine Sacrifice is the main reason why Holy Paladin's spec into the protection tree. If used correctly, it is one of the most potent damage prevention spell that is available for a raid since it prevents damage raid wide, instead of only damage to a single target. If you're a Holy Paladin and you're not using Divine Sacrifice in your raids, you're letting your raid down big time.
Cost to cast: None.
Cool Down: 2 Minute cool down.
Divine Sacrifice is a spell that redirects 30% of all damage taken by party or raid members within 30 yards, redirecting that damage to the paladin, up to 150% of the paladin's health. It lasts for 10 seconds.
The second part of this is 2 points in Divine Guardian. This is a talent which you should take if you're even going to consider using Divine Sacrifice. It increases the redirection to 40% instead of 30%. It also has an added benefit of improving your Sacred Shields by 20% and increasing the duration by 100%.
On first glance, these spells and talents seem mediocre at best, preventing a little over 50% of your health doesn't seem that crash hot. That is, until you add another spell into the mix. Divine Shield aka Bubble.
Bubble turns this into a winning combination. It switches Divine Sacrifice from only being able to redirect up to 150% of your maximum health, to being able to redirect an unlimited amount of damage, so it lasts the entire spell.
Not sold yet?
Ok, consider this. You're on a boss that does massive damage at a particular time. Take XT in Ulduar for example. When he does tantrum, everyone takes a significant amount of damage. If you cast Bubble and Divine Sacrifice, 40% of that damage gets redirected to you, and then bubble makes you immune to the damage. That reduces the healing load by 40% making the healing a lot less stressful.
Just be sure to cast bubble before you cast Divine Sacrifice. First, bubble lasts 12 seconds where Divine Sacrifice lasts only 10. Second, if you cast Divine Sacrifice, it's rumoured to be the reason it caps out at 150% of your health, even while bubble is active.
Something interesting about Divine Sacrifice is the fact that the damage keeps its characteristics. Frost Damage is still frost damage, psysical damage is still physical damage.
While you can use Hand of Protection to bring the damage to zero, you need to be very, very careful. If any of the damage isn't physical damage, you may quickly fall down dead, often without warning.
Problems with Divine Sacrifce:
I have heard reports that Divine Sacrifice is a little buggy. Some people have said that their Divine Sacrifice has stopped working when the damage soaked up has his 150% of your life.
I have yet to be able to have this happen, so if it does happen to you, chalk it up as bad luck.
Divine Sacrifice does NOT stack with other redirection abilities. Having two Divine Sacrifices up at the same time does nothing extra. Same with Hand of Sacrifice.
Macro for Divine Sacrifice:
#showtooltip Divine Sacrifice
/cast Divine Sacrifice
/ra Divine Sacrifice active (Damage Soak)
/in 10 /ra Divine Sacrifice Over
/in 120 /w [YOURNAME] Divine Sacrifice is ready
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
What about Bubble in your macro?
I leave bubble off my macro for this. I cast bubble with a separate macro. I suggest you do the same too.
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