Years ago I believe it was on this forum that I saw a comparison between raw Mana / 5 and Spell Crit for paladins. I've been looking for it but was unable to dig it up, too bad.

Now first off, some observations:
Mana per 5 always regens, five second rule or not
Spell Crit regen thru Illumination by its very nature only works INSIDE the five second rule: your heals need to crit in order to regen mana.
As for some numbers; mana per 5 while casting is 54, spell crit rating on holy light is roughly 25% (11 from talents).
You can tell that even tho I'm still running around in a bunch of shitty blues and greens from leveling up I've been focusing mostly on spellcrit.
What does this mean in combat: with about 9k mana i can in theory cast the highest rank of holy light 10 times (spell costs 840 mana). Thanks to lights grace I can do this in as few as 20,5 seconds, providing no casting lag.
Assuming every 4th spell crits I'm 'guaranteed' 2 crits, or 840x2 mana back. Thats 1680 mana regenned after casting for 20,5 seconds.


Here's my questions (because i'm to stupid to figure it out myself):
1) how much mana/5 would I need to have similar mana regen, it seriously cannot be 409 mana /5, thats virtually impossible maintaining the same level of gear.
2) and this is the most important one: how much mana /5 would equate to 1% spell crit (at 70)


disclaimer: all of the above obviously only applies to paladins, and only those with Illumination and Sanctified Light, and yes, there may be serious flaws in the logic :p

This belongs best in the class specific forums.

EDIT: Well holy shit, in the time it took me to write this, it was moved. Ignore the now-useless post please.

You can think of the mana gained as a percentage increase in your total mana. This includes all mana regenned or gained from potions. Mana per 5 is static regen. Also keep in mind there are other benefits and disadvantages to gearing for spellcrit, such as improved healing throughput, chances for strings of crits or strings of noncrits, and often increased overheal. When you take all of those things into consideration you can see the picture gets fairly complicated. I've been too lazy to attempt to create a model for stat comparison with all those aspects taken into consideration; maybe someone else is more motivated.

There's a discussion about this going on in the Paladin thread at the moment.

On another note, I'm not sure if "overheal" really applies to Paladin crits. Overhealing is a measure of mana efficiency, and when the heal is free, that measure is not valid.

Spell crit, + heal and mana/5sec are all valuable you want to hit a solid minimum value for all 3 if you want a well rounded set of gear useful on all encounters.

Considering my flash of light right now lands for about 1.5k non crit im not worried about my HPS, that isnt the issue here, what I am asking for is basicly if someone can provide me/us with a good way to compare static regen (mp/5) and active regen (spell crit). Simply so I have some sort of basic guideline to go by when it comes to gear selection.
Which is better over a 2 minute fight: a ring with 18sta/18int/45 healing/20 spell crit rating or one with 18sta/18int/45 healing/6 mp5 ? And over a 5 minute one? Thats the question I want to be able to answer.

Sooo, if we could get back on topic, instead of turning this into a 'basic healing guide for paladins', I'm sure that will be stickied sometime on the wow forums.


Agreed, alot of it is encounter dependant, long drawn out fights benefit more from static regen, spike damage fights from high spell crit, we know that, where is the breakpoint tho, is what I want to find out (and lack the math skills to do so).

1% spell crit is easily worth 10 MP/5 in the most generous situations, and in extreme spamming situations it's worth over 20 MP/5. Your initial calculation of needing several hundred MP/5 to equal a reasonable crit rate is actually quite correct.

Question: if the spell is cast and it crits, does it put you in the FSR since all mana is returned?

You actually have to pay normal manacost to cast the spell and gain it back later, so my guess is that you'd be still in the fsr.

Nadagast, you're ignoring blessing of wisdom, shadow priests in the group, and all forms of consumables in that analysis. Leaving out other forms of mana regen will naturally reduce the total amount of heals cast, and make spell crit look less valuable than it is. You also left out (of the math, though you alluded to it later) the fact that the more you crit, the more mana you have, the more you can cast - the more you can crit. Take those into account and you'll see a very different picture.

I admit I can't be hassled to do the thorough math, but with full consumables (the other extreme) + a shadow priest (I always have one), my mana regen in 2 minutes is more like...

11k base manapool.
50 mana/5 from gear, 49 from BoW, 70 from flask, 16 from mageblood, shadow priest does about 800 dps which is transmuted into 64 mana/second for paladin, or 324 mana/5 (huge). My crit rate with holy light is about 29%.

So 509 mana/5. In a 2 minute fight, I'll regen 12216 mana. That's 23216 mana to work with. Try your math with that number, and try increasing crit from 29% to 30% instead of from 0% to 1% or whatnot. It's a more realistic analysis really, given how much base crit on holy light is floating around. 24% -> 25% might be more fair though.

Oh, and if we really wanna push it overboard, a fel mana potion every 2 minutes is an extra 3200 mana, or 133 mana/5. So 642 mana/5 is quite realizable - and when you factor in crits increasing your effective mana/5 as well, you start hovering around the break point for even that first point of crit according to your post.

Well think about how much of the time you'll be chaincasting top rank Holy Light. What you need to put in for mps is your average mana used per second over the course of the fight. The fight wouldn't be very long if you're using 2.1k mana per 5 seconds. But yeah spell crit is better in that circumstance.

The same holds true for mp5. There is an increasing value of crit as your crit % increases, but not for the exact reason you mention.
Each % of crit gives you a larger reduction in average mana cost as your crit% goes up. My formula assumed you have 0% crit, it calculated the mana saved from that point of view. But think about if you had 98% crit. If you add 1% crit to that, your mana cost reduction is 50%. It goes from 2% per heal to 1% per heal.
The 2nd revision can include this:
[((%crit/(1-crit%)) * (mps*5)) = mp5]

Ok so total mp5 = 509 mp5
5 minute fight:
11000 + 30540 = 41540
mps = 41540 / 300 = 138
mps*5 = 692
1% crit in terms of mp5 for this:
[((.01/(1-.29)) * 692)] = 9.7 mp5
So crit is just slightly better than mp5.

Didn't see this til after I did the above ^.
Lets try 2 minutes.
23216 mana
mps*5 = 967
[((.01/(1-.24)) * 967)] = 12.7 mp5
But how many times are you going to be fully flasked, etc, for a 2 minute fight?

Yes but this is pretty much the ideal situation for crit. If you remove even just the shadow priest, mp5 would probably win in most reasonable situations.

Lets find the mps rate you need for crit to be better than mp5... with a 24% -> 25% critrate
[((.01/(1-.24)) * x)]

[top] 9.2 mp5
x

about 700 mps*5
or about 140 mana per second, average over the course of the whole fight.