Holy Paladin doesn't have the same wall of maintenance HoTs as a druid or shaman, which makes it easy to assume uptime doesn't matter as much for the spec. It matters for one buff in particular. Here's what Healper actually checks in a Holy Paladin log, and why.
What top Holy Paladins actually did
Measured from 400 logs of top-performing Holy Paladins at keystone level 11 in Midnight Season 2 (Curse of Ula'tek), across 8 dungeons. These are measurements of what that cohort did, not targets anyone set - and the middle-half column matters more than the median, because it shows how much honest variation there is between good runs.
| What | Median | Middle half | Logs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Beacon Of Light uptime | 100.0% | 100.0-100.0% | 400 |
| Average mana through the run | 91.0% | 83.1-94.8% | 400 |
| Overhealing | 44.3% | 39.5-48.7% | 400 |
11 of those 400 runs had the healer bottom out on mana at some point (2.8%). Running dry is not rare at this level, and the spread in the mana column is why: the middle half of this cohort is a wide band, not a target.
The same corpus broken down per dungeon, with the cooldowns this spec actually pressed, is on the Holy Paladin benchmarks page. Mythic+ only: the raid brackets carry no per-log data in any season, so nothing here describes raid.
Beacon of Light uptime is the one that can't drop
Beacon of Light is tracked the same way HoT uptime is tracked for other healer specs: the percentage of active combat time the beacon is active on at least one target, measured during combat only (gaps over 3 seconds between events don't count against you). Beacon underpins a meaningful share of your passive throughput, so a beacon that drops mid-pull - usually from a beacon target dying or a late reapplication after a swap - is a bigger loss than it looks like on the surface, because you lose the healing it would have generated for the rest of that window, not just the moment it dropped.
Mana: average, OOM, and efficiency
Same three checks as every other spec: your average mana % across the fight, whether you went fully OOM at any point, and mana efficiency (effective healing per point of mana spent). Going OOM is scored as a distinct failure on top of a low average-mana reading, since it's a strong signal your rotation or cast selection isn't sustainable at the pace of that key.
Overhealing
Overheal % - the share of your total raw healing that exceeded targets' missing health - is compared against benchmark logs from top Holy Paladins at your bracket rather than a fixed number. A high overheal rate relative to those benchmarks is usually a sign of casting reactively into already-topped targets instead of triaging incoming damage.
Cooldown usage
Healper also tracks how often you used your major healing cooldowns (anything on a 60-second or longer cooldown) relative to how many times the fight duration would have allowed, reported as a usage-efficiency percentage. Sitting on a major cooldown through avoidable damage - and finishing the key having used it far fewer times than the fight length allowed - is one of the more common gaps between an average log and a strong one.
Boss mechanics: position and respond before the damage lands
Separately from uptime and mana, Healper checks whether you used the right tool before a dungeon's known dangerous mechanics hit, compared against what top Holy Paladins actually did on the same pull - not a generic checklist, but the specific response pattern that shows up in top logs for that mechanic.
Want the exact scoring breakdown and percentile math behind all of this? See how we calculate your score.