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.

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.

Something completly disregarded by many when it comes to this subject is the increased healing output from crits. FoL crits are almost never overheal unless you're topping -1k people off which you shouldn't. On fights where I the tank gets hit hard I'm often getting full crit HLs without any overhealing in.
I'm running 31.5% base crit and 1750 healing.

Just seeing crit as mana return isn't looking at the whole picture.

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?

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.