Yea, that's pretty much it.

The thing is crit doesn't return X mana per cast, it returns X mana per mana used. If you cast a lot of cheap heals (low rank HL or FoL) or a few expensive heals (high rank HL), your benefit from crit is the same, or at least similar.

The less mana you spend the less mp5 equivalent you get from crit, yes, but I don't see the huge difference in mana spending between spamming FoL, spamming low rank HL, and cast-cancel high rank HL. Granted it's probably not the *same* mana useage, but I really don't see a difference that would make or break the usefullness of crit.

IMO it's not that 2.3 makes crits less useful - it's that crits were never that useful. For HP/s you get much greater benefits from pure +healing, for efficiency you get bigger benefits from mp5, and for mixing hp/s and efficiency you get bigger benefits from mixing mp5/+healing (like using items that lose a little healing but gain a lot of mp5 while keeping those that don't have such alternatives) than from stacking crit.

The only benefit I see from crit is when the item is just that much better due to its Ilvl, or when you want to max HP/s and get a socket bonus with a yellow socket using a crit gem from BT/hyjal and even then you're probably much better off using a heal/int gem. And of course fights where you just spam max rank HL where crit obviously scales by quite a bit, but that didn't change in 2.3 either.

Actually Galz, my view on crit has been that it was a secondary stat, parallel to mp5. Those of us who are lucky enough to consistantly have a shadow priest would hold little value to mp5, when you could simply get much higher throughput with crit. As such, HL spamming would be more tailored to this kind of setup. A shadow priest is around, I don't know, at least 200 mp5. Once you have one, there is really no need to get mp5 in gear. And lets face it, its not really possible to just stack +healing, you really do need SOME secondary stat with which to pick gear. For those of us (such as me) who rarely get a shadow priest, mp5 holds much greater value as we are forced to use more efficient heals to extend our output over the course of a long fight (along with chain-chugging of mana pots).

But you are right, crit hasn't really changed at all in value. However, the spells it affected the most have diminished in value (to me, at least) and hence the stat has lost some of its appeal to me. That being said, I'm still a firm supporter of at least a somewhat balanced stat setup, and I still feel that crit has its purpose in any gear or heal style setup.

Two things:
1) Part of the reason you see lots of crit and less mp5 on T6 paladins has to do with the items that are available. There is *tons* of crit on all of the non-haste items. The spreadhseet I made with my upgrades from T6 have me adding 52 crit rating to my gear and losing 5 mp5-and that is with using no crit gems and actively looking for Mp5 pieces. It's not finalized etc-but by and large T6 gear forces you to add crit and makes you work for any Mp5 gains.

2) The other reason 2.3 impacts the valuation between Crit and Mp5 is because we have 6 additional percent chance to crit from HL through talents. We can all agree that the days of a paladin using HL all the time through downranking (and thus taking full advantage of that additional 6% [or roughly 122 spell crit rating] crit) are over. So all of that wonderful, essentially free bonus just got significantly diluted with lower critting Flash of Lights. Cast/Cancelling rank 10/11 HL (and using zero flash) is a viable option on very few fights and something I'd argue one should not base thier entire build around.

Mana return through Illumination or Mp5 is only valuable if it allows you to cast *more* spells. There is no benefit for maintaining 90% mana at the end of the fight. So if the fight is X length, you can only cast y spells. After you have enough mana to do so, the only stats that matter are +healing and to a lesser extent crit. If you're using flash*, the mana overhead is pretty low and allows for a nonspriest softcap around 120 mp5 or so (unbuffed). After that, pile on the crit and +heal to your hearts content and bring plenty of mana pots.


*"Using flash" from my perspective is around an 80/20 split of Flash to high rank HL. ymmv

This is likely user error, however, it appears as though the spreadsheet, when calculating the total hp healed, does not use the "duration of the fight" modifier to adjust the number of spells cast. Instead, it appears to use the available mana pool.

For example, with a fight duration of 60 seconds, barring spell haste, you should only get 40 casts of FoL... in the spreadsheet, it uses your mana pool instead and returns an arbitrarily high value. (Easy way to test is to set your mana pool value to 4,000...)

Which spreadsheet are you using? Are you using the gear sheet that I've been working on, and honestly been slacking due to RL issues coming up..., cause I'm trying to redo half of it and make more of it correct.

The gear sheet is on the Healadin thread. I told Zurm that I would have it finished by yesterday, but between leading raids and going over our WWS with a fine-tooth comb, it's been leaving me little time.

This week Zurm, I promise!!!