Bastion of Light with an 11heal, 2 mp5 gem is very nice, you only end up losing 5 mp5 overall but gain alot of healing and stats. Felstone Bulwark is the one I use and prefer though simply because my main heal in BT is Holy Light (rank 7 or 11) and forgetting the theorycrafting completely I much prefer the extra crit, and like Spades said that also means bigger heals as well.

Personally I would use both shields over the Karazhan one, if you prefer mp5 go for the Bastion of Light, if you like your crit go for Felstone Bulwark.

I currently have 1879 + heal // 20.73% crit // 179 mp5s (ooc) unbuffed. I find that with a max rank FoL I am able to use this as my main heal without dropping below 45% mana on a 8-10 min fight (like VR). I have an excellent healing team in my guild and find that when we are all working together and staggering our heals, nobody really needs to live in bigger heals. I am wondering if this is a factor in any of these calculations.


I currently am using Demonic Bulwark of the Physician, replacing my Triptych Shield of the Ancients, and am wondering what peoples feelings are on it.

It's really hard to determine how good stats are when the fight is going well and healing is plentiful and easy. If you ended the fight with 45% mana and 0 people dead and a good position on amount of healing done the fight was probably not a good place to test your healing capability for obviuos reasons - it's an easy fight and you could've done it either way, so saying something worked is quite pointless.

The math goes for a worst case scenario where you will be using as much mana as possible on as many heals as possible. The only thing not taken into account is burst which is quite impossible to do as for burst healing the only thing that matters is +healing and nothing else.

Did you write this calculator yourself?
I would like to know how it values crit - does it assume that all crit heals overheal or not? (would be nice if you could set what % of the crit heals only caused overhealing)
Does the crit value assume you spam your heals regardless of if you go oom or not or does it do a more sophisticated calculation for how many heals you can cast with your mana + the mana you'd get from a part of those heals critting?
I would add a "shadowpriest DPS" input as it makes a huge difference to your regen, as well a # of mana tide totems used (preferably taking into account the mana lost from not having mana spring for the duration).
Is divine illumination and divine favor assumed to be used on-cooldown to full effect? As you can't always use them that way... It's not like a DPS trinket that you pop whenever the cooldown is up and you know you have 20s to pump DPS - heals might not be needed for some of that time regardless of how well you plan it (although you can minimize it).

I hope my comments are in place let me know if I'm missing anything please.

Sorry to necro, but this is the most on-topic thread to what I was looking for.

I've been trying to balance Mp5/Crit in a fair balance and looked up all the theorycrafting. Obviously, it comes down to situations and one is better than the other depending on certain circumstances. But, it seems a lot easier with end game itemization to get crit than mp5 (aside from T6 pieces). Furthermore, usually we have the blessing of having 2-3 shadow priests in the raid, thus allowing the paladins/healers to get one in most cases.

In those cases, with a shadow a priest, it seems like Mp5 kind of loses out as being redundant and I would be better of just focusing on crit. For example, I am currently banking the gloves off Vashj since they have no MP5 but do have a whee bit more crit than T5.

Also, I can't help but feel people's math on mp5/crit is overvaluing or too "on paper". As it were, you aren't always casting nor are you always sitting around; thus I would need to see some WWS/empirical data to be assured.

I was looking at the following upgrades
but I am unsure about
Any thoughts?

On of the troubles with theorycrafting paladin healing is that the spells we use (and the benefit we get from various stats) can vary a lot depending on the fight. Also, different people here obvious use different tactics in terms of FoL/HL and downranking, and that too will effect stat utility.

In general, Flash of Light (and HoL 4) sees more benefit from stacking mana regen, and Holy Light from spellcrit, because the mana saved from critting is much larger on HL, thanks to its much higher mana cost.

My approach to healing has been to concentrate on FoL, saving HL and cooldowns for recovery from burst damage. As such, I've stacked mana regen and healing. In a situations where FoL simply doesn't have sufficient healing output, I'd want to concentrate more on spellcrit, and this is probably reflected in the differences in tier itemization (although as I haven't gotten past more than KZ/Maulgar, I'm not in a position to say).

So, when I say T4 is mostly poorly itemized for healing, I mean that it generally gives spellcrit over mana regen, and that's not what I currently want. It may be that, down the line, I'll grab all the spellcrit I can get my hands on, if I'm having to rely on HL rather than FoL, and then T4 will rock.

In my experience (up to Vashj) I've been stacking as much mp5 as I can. I actually did not roll my paladin until post-illum. nerf so i was doing a lot of research on gear while leveling up to raid.

(Not to brag) But I am up to 150 mp5 1650 healing and 17% to crit. This is what everyone was thinking about shooting for once the illumination nerf started circulating.

In my experience healing I can chain cast Flash of Light for a ridiculously long time. But as the previous poster said it really does not have the throughput for some bosses. I find myself trying to keep throwing out a low rank Holy Light to maintain light's grace so that I can pull out the clutch rank 11 Holy light on a wounded friend. Whenever I do end up using Holy Light it literally eats my mana alive, since I have low crit.


I think now I want to try and balance out my crit and mp5 a bit more because honestly I do have to cast Holy Light a lot.



As for itemization, try to aim for whatever you can get as it drops. Generally items with mp5 AND crit are better than items with JUST crit or JUST mp5.(and healing of course). The Shield off Supremus is most certainly better than the Triptych, just obviously biased for crit. Things like tier 5 legs, tier 5 gloves with BOTH crit and mp5 are going to be better than any of the off-set stuff with ONLY crit.

Looking at that hydross fight:

It lasted 10 minutes, so every point of mp5 gave you 120 mana.
You regained 16,047 mana with a 43% crit rate using (basically) only HL.
So, every 1% crit gained you 373 mana.

So, for this particular fight, it only takes 3.1 mp5 to equal the regen of 1% crit.

Is there something completely wrong with my math? I have been doing this for all my recent fights, and mp5 wins hands down every time.

Looks sound to me. I did the same calculation for our recent Gruul kill and came out with about the same value (7 minute, 14 second fight, ~28% HL crit rate, 7128 mana restored).

It seems pretty clear to me that per itemization point mp5 beats crit bigtime no matter what, but the real question is what do you do when they items don't have an equal item value - it's easy to see that in some situations those 3 mp5 would be worth 1% crit, in others a lot more and maybe in other situations worth less.

I suppose it would be impossible to theorycraft the exact balance between stats until we can actually agree on what spells are being cast and how much in every fight, which is pretty damn hard to agree on.

After all, you *will* run into items that have crit, and will need to compare then to items that have a lot less crit but a little more mp5 for example.

It is definitely important to not stack one stat to the detriment of all others. Don't neglect +heal and +crit just so you can have a huge amount of mp5. I am currently sitting at 1803 +heal, 20.69% holy crit and 128 mp5 (while casting). My guild has killed everything up to ( but not including) Kael. I find I spend 90% of my time casting FoL, and use HL rank 11 only in "oh shit" moments, or when there is a very large amount of damage going out.

Someone mentioned that anything over around 1500 +heal was wasted, but the more you have the harder those FoLs hit. Fully raid buffed, mine will hit for over 1700 and crit for over 2500 on a target with light. This alone makes me feel that stopping at 1500 +heal would be a mistake.

Raid healing on an individual level is pretty much all about raw throughput. In this vein, +healing and +crit will improve your throughput, more the former than the latter. It just happens the latter also helps with your longevity game as a paladin.

MP5 as a stat is nice, but don't forget that longevity issues can typically be very easily solved by chain-chugging mana potions. No consumable equivalent exists for completely solving the throughput problem however.

Regardless, everything comes down to style of the paladin, and ultimately the healing backbones in your raid. FoL spamming paladins likely have resto druids rolling hots on their MTs; HL-focused paladins on the MT, probably do not have two+ resto druids, or the paladins might be on raid healing. In the end, you'll want to gear with whatever style you're using for that particular fight. In all honesty though, you'll probably be fine regardless, so long as you have good +healing and are using mana potions like they're going out of style.

Maybe the mana regen provided from mp5 can be better than the crit one but crit spell boost also your heals. So at the end of a 10 min fight u have healed more with mp5 or crit spell?

The spreadsheets in [Paladin] Healing Efficiency work off how much healing done at the end of the fight based on your stats, mana pool, time, etc. Mp5 still wins usually, but is also the easiest to supplement with buffs, pots, and grouping.

I was thinking about this recently and it strikes me that this is actually incorrect. Your crit comes from four sources:

1. base crit %
2. crit gained from int
3. crit gained from talents
4. crit gained from gear

Of these four, the only one that should be entering into this calculation is the last one, since the others are (relatively) static; we're trying to judge whether an item with X stam/Y int/Z healing/W mp5 is better than an item with X/Y/Z/V crit. This also makes more sense from an itemization perspective--with the previous formula, you have blue rep items (e.g. Honor Hold ring) beating something like the exalted dmg/crit ring from Karazhan. Or the Mask of Penance looking just as good as the engineering helm. Or the Breastplate of Many Graces on par with the S2 chest. This seems a bit ridiculous.

Does my intuition here seem right? With the revised formula, 1% crit from gear comes out to about 8 or 9 mp5, which sounds much better.

In the end mp5 is just far more versatile than everything else, you're getting the full return out of it as long as you're not at 100% mana regardless what ranks you're using or if you're casting at all. Crit and +heal both scale (down) with rank and depend on you casting spells. But it's style too; an FoL spammer won't know what to do with 180 unbuffed mp5, might as well go for +heal.


The engineering helm is clearly better - you can fit the insightful meta into it which is good for 10-15 mp5 conservatively.

e: The paladin arena healing gear never struck me as all that good either, it's good for arena - stam and resilience but that's it. Shamans have it the same way.

Mp5 vs crit is really a case of "depends what fight" with T4/5. Hyjal bosses besides kaz really aren't endurance or throughput, and BT bosses tend to be a bit of both endurance/throughput.

I generally gear for balance. For fights where you need more through put, ranking up and chugging pots generally covers it, and you'll probably be fine with good use of cooldowns on more endurance focused fights.

I really only get an Spriest on najentus if I'm solo healing a group, and bloodboil, so I can't neglect mp5 that much.

The stats depend quite a bit on healing style that the fight/role is requiring. Both FoL spam and HL spam *will* make you run out of mana according to the spreadsheet otherwise you would not gain anything from more mana when using FoL. So obviously if none of your FoLs overheal you will get the most output by spamming FoL - but the question is can you really spam FoL without overhealing and overcoming spikes? If you can, FoL is your heal, but if with both healing styles you find yourself not casting much (and/or canceling a lot) some of the time and then suddenly spamming as fast as you can and afterwards get back to not casting much (and/or canceling a lot), to the point where FoL just doesn't heal enough for that duration *and* you end up with too much mana in your hands, HL is the heal for you.

With FoL spam situations it's easy, go by a good spreadsheet and you can't go wrong, and you'll probably get mana stats coming to some degree ahead of +healing stats* the way blizzard is itemizing things. The difficult thing is when you need to heal in "bursts", which is what's probably happening more often than not in real raid encounters. To me it seems that for the realistic, bursty fights it's quite impossible to just calculate with a spreadsheet (at least not with a simple one), as you want to maximize your maximum heal/sec while not running out of mana before the fight is over.

Based on that, what probably needs to be checked is how much healing/sec is actaully required in a fight, and how much mana is needed to maintain those heals, and make sure you fit both requirements. Once those requirements are met, anything more just helps you when things mess up (and if we wouldn't ever mess up we would've *all* finished the game long ago, wouldn't we?) - more +healing would help when more burst damage was taken and more mana would help when additional healing is needed but doesn't have to be healed that fast.

Bottom line is pure efficiency, while easy to calculate, just doesn't match reality as (I think) pretty much all top raiders here can agree, and I really wish I would find a way to really place stat value with accurate ratios of X +heal = Y mp5 etc. As for finding the actual required stats for a fight, that wouldn't be *too* hard using WWS, but then again it seems like the minimum stats are pretty easy to achieve anyway (as after all, lots of people cleared the game without fully analizing this meaning they cleared it with probably sub-optimal setups). It's really about what stats would help you make up for mistakes better, which I guess should be leaning more toawrds +heal than mana stats based on my current understanding of boss fight mechanics.

*Also I think that blizzard itemizes items like that *because* +healing really does give more messup-recovery than mana as both stats increase your heal over time but only +heal really increases the HP/s over a short time period, hence they made mana cheaper on items for endurance purposes.

Here is my question. I'm a Holy Paladin that is about to get into Hyjal/Temple with my guild. I've been doing a LOT of research about other pallys from BT/MH guilds and most of them have decided to not even bother with stacking a higher than 100Mp5 while casting unbuffed of course and just stack all +healing and crit. Now from all the theory crafting I've seen its shown Mp5 to be better for overall endurance than spell crit. So is there something I'm missing here? Is +healing and +spell crit better for MH/BT for some reason? Or is it really just a personal preference?

Thanks for any light you can shed on the subject for me.

The pallies who tend to not have above 100 mp5 usually have a shadow priest. I do not normally, and I like to sit anywhere between 125-135 mp5 unbuffed while casting. Other things to take into account include moonkin, shaman, etc. I usually am stuck with a warlock and 3 tanks, and hence do not have the luxury of any real group buffs. However, I still do fairly well on healing considering this, because I've adopted my healing style to suit my situations. I'll edit this post with a WWS later.

Also, those paladins tend to use primarily downranked holy lights, which is getting severely nerfed in 2.3. My personal view is that we are being forced to shift to a higher +healing/reduced crit setup compared to what we have now. Spamming HL4/5 is no longer viable, you are going to have to adopt a more cast-canceling model if you choose to continue using Holy Light.

I don't see how the nerf affects the value of crit for low ranks of holy light though, crit's mana regen scales up when you use more mana aka high ranks of holy light consistently. If you use a low rank of holy light or a max rank flash of light I really don't see much difference in the effect of crit.
Bottom line is I don't see why the patch nerfing low rank HL would make you change anything regarding how you look at crit.

Because crit is best when you are spamming a spell, hence get more crits/time and then more mana returned. Being forced to use higher ranks means more canceling, and a diminished value of crit as compared to +healing (and if you don't have a shadow priest, mp5). For those using FoL, I agree entirely on the nerf not affecting crits, but I doubt anyone will regularly use low ranks of HL after this nerf.

Hypothetically, wouldn't more canceling simply reduce the effectiveness of all healing-specific stats equally, i.e. you cast less thus you crit less and heal less? It seems to me like reducing the number of casts you make wouldn't necessarily reduce the effectiveness of one healing-specific bonus more than another healing-specific bonus (forgive my naivete should it end up being as such, I'm relatively new to the "making-my-own-theorycrafting" scene.)

The balance in terms of crit versus mp5 would shift in mp5's favor, I would think, but by just casting less, one's simply lowering the overall effectiveness of both healing and crit while keeping mp5 the same (however, it could be argued that fewer casts renders mp5 less useful due to less mana consumption dependent on the situation, I suppose.)

I think I can see where you're coming from though, you want the few heals you do to hit harder and the less reliability from crit makes crit less appealing, right?