Specially for the ones who refuse or are too scared to dps.
No I'm not telling you to dps, calm down. And if you already dps with cleric up, good job, keep it up.
Do you stoneskin everyone at the start of the dungeon?
Do you stoneskin everyone before a boss fight?
Do you even take the effort to stoneskin before a major pull?
Then save your MP for something else because:
(actually you should still stoneskin tank busters and the tank before a large pull)
Holy can and should be used defensively!
If you're scared of screwing up with cleric stance swaps, but still worry enough about mitigation, don't worry this is for you! As you don't need to turn cleric on at all to stun trash.
7 seconds worth of stun on 3 casts are the same as a 7 second hallowed ground and roughly better than most of the tank cooldowns currently in every tank disposition.
Let's compare holy stuns with one of the best tank cooldowns, sentinel (40% mitigation, 10 seconds).
Imagine a group of 10 trash mobs each doing 1000 dps for 10 seconds (a bit ridiculous I know), that's 100k damage dealt. Sentinel blocks 40% of it so when the tank is tanking the mobs, that tank will take 60k dmg instead 100k with sentinel blocking 40k of the dmg being thrown out.
Now Holy blocks 7 seconds of all the dmg of the 10 seconds which means only 3 seconds of the 10 will come as damage and so from the 100k dmg, the tank will only receive 30k.
If sentinel has a 40% mitigation rate, over the same 15 seconds 3 casts of holy will have a mitigation rate of roughly 70%.
Even a single swiftcast holy (4 second stun), will have the exact same mitigation power as rampart/shadowskin (20%, 20 seconds duration)
Considering Stoneskin uses half the mp cost of holy and only covers 10% of total hp of the target (lets imagine a tank with 25k hp), that's 2.5k mitigated which would instantly vaporize on the example i gave earlier.
As mentioned on the thread, think of the dark knights

Originally Posted by
Alex_W
While a good tip here, do not forget your tank's cooldowns. Specifically DRK. DRK's blood price allows them to recover mana for each hit they take. Since Holy stops all incoming damage, blood price is really hindered by Holy. Best suggestion is to wait until blood price is close to dropping, then cast Holy.