Flash of Light vs Holy Light

Essentially, a paladin is granted two healing spells. These two spells will essentially encompass everything we do as healers. (Except for Holy Shock and Lay on Hands.)

The first is Holy Light. This is a big heal spell that costs a decent chunk of mana.

The second is Flash of Light. This is a small heal spell that costs a little bit of mana.

Which do you use? To quote BRK, it depends.

Let me back up a bit. I’ve said this on other posts, but I feel it needs reiteration for this one. As healers, our gear is not optimized for regen through spirit. In fact, none of it has spirit. This should tell you one thing: spirit is not a statistic worthy of consideration for healing paladins. We gain only a little more mana over time not casting than we do actually casting. In other words, we might as well just be casting the whole time.

You know what is on paladin healing gear? Boat-loads of spell crit and mana per 5. Mana per 5 is obvious, since they’re not giving us spirit, but why spell crit? Do other healers receive spell crit on their gear? Not really (with the exception of some shaman healing gear). They get what they can from intellect (something like 1% spell crit per 60 int) and that’s it. Some of them get a bit from talents. But not their gear. Paladins get spell crit from talent points and gear. Besides occasional burst healing, which often isn’t necessary, such a stat must be useful for something.

Illumination! This talent in the holy tree refunds 60% of the base mana cost of a healing spell when it crits.

Healing during an instance is dependent on longevity more than anything else. You need to be able to keep people alive for long enough that they can do what they need to do so that those mobs die before killing your group. Thus regen is important, and since we don’t get it through spirit…we have to rely on mana per 5 and spell crit for that purpose. A larger mana pool will not be nearly as effective as in-combat regen capabilities.

Ok with that out of the way…so you’re not getting anything through spirit really. You rely on spell crit and mp5 and you have two spells:

Flash of Light: Really cheap, quick, heals little
Holy Light: Really expensive, a bit slower, heals a lot

Which do you use? Again, it depends. Mostly on the damage your tank is taking.

However, in most cases, provided the tank has enough avoidance to render it feasible, you should be ok to just use Flash of Light over and over again, saving Holy Light for those occasions when you need to top off the health bar or catch up after a big hit on said tank. It is in my opinion what we were built to do as healers.

Why? For the reasons mentioned above concerning paladin mana regen via gear stats and talents, it makes sense. If you were using Holy Light instead on the idea that it heals for more, then you would be standing around waiting for your 5SR mana regen to kick in between heals (it heals enough that you should have time between casts). However, because Holy Light does not heal for nearly as much as a big heal cast by other classes, and since you don’t have the Heal-over-Time spell capabilities possessed by priests and druids to dampen damage to the tank, you end up having to cast it more often to keep up with the healing required of you and not benefitting as much from spirit. And so you’re using a very expensive healing spell over and over, running through your mana pool very quickly.

The major benefit to the FoL-spam-style of healing is that there is less waiting for mana regen. It happens while you cast. In fact, because of Illumination, it happens because you cast. As well, there is less waiting between casts in the first place. Since the heal you are using most often does so little, you cast it very often, trying to keep pace with the damage taken. Again, less waiting.

The downside is that you really have to pay attention to those healthbars. Paying attention to the world outside of those healthbars becomes more difficult and you have to practice to get better at it. But you’ll definitely have a lot of your focus on that side of the screen.

More info:
Macro for maintaining the Light’s Grace buff