I posted this on the official boards, but I think I'll probably get better input here so I'm going to repost it. I'm sure a lot of you won't need the introduction so you can skip it if you want and just give me your thoughts...
I think one of the major things that people overlook when looking at Paladins and their healing efficiency is the efficiency of Flash of Light. This isn't because of Illumination (well partially but mostly not) it's because all that matters for a particular direct heal's mana efficiency is the base amount of mana per second it uses (in the limit of large amounts of +heal).
This is because you can think of +heal as adding a direct amount of Healing per second to your heals, and your mana cost will be HPS/MPS. The lower MPS is the more efficiently the heal will scale with gear. People like to say that faster heals and faster nukes get less benefit from +dmg or +heal but it's not true at all.
In the case of Flash of Light we have a spell with 180 mana cost and a 1.5 second cast time, so we get 120 mana used per second. This is the reason Flash of Light scales so well. No matter what heal you're spamming (unless it has a cast time reducing talent like GHeal) you'll be getting the same amount of +heal per second.
Flash of Light lets you use 100% of your +Heal for a mere 120 mana per second (less if you include Illumination but it doesn't matter).
Holy Light with Light's Grace lets you use 125% of your +Heal for 420 mana per second. This is why Holy Light is so mana inefficient compared to Flash of Light even though Holy Light actually starts off more mana efficient (2.76 hpm vs 2.64 hpm).
The problem is that healing efficiency scales (disregarding talents) like +heal/(mana/sec) and the only thing that the spell contributes to this is the mana/sec. So the slope of the hpm vs +heal curve goes like 1/(mana/sec), up to a constant coefficient and obviously talents.
I think this picture shows it much better than I ever could with words:
http://img406.imageshack.us/my.php?i...ciency2uc9.jpg
I left out talents (other than Illumination where indicated, and I included the -15% mana cost on GHeal). This is a graph that shows efficiency as a function of +heal for the 2 main Pally/Priest heals, with and without Illumination. For Illumination I have a 30% critrate with the nerfed Illumination.
By nerfing Illumination Blizzard is missing the point entirely. The efficiency of Paladins healing isn't due to Illumination (although it's an amazing ability) it's due to the ridiculously efficient scaling of Flash of Light.
I wonder if Blizzard has anyone doing the math like this, it's a pretty obvious problem with the way +healing works, and it's the exact reason downranking was so powerful before the nerf (not to say it isn't useful now). By downranking you were decreasing your mana/sec usage and still unloading all of your +heal hps.
As far as I can tell this is one of the biggest problems with Priest PvE healing, we have no well scaling heal. All of our heals have a high mps cost.
It's unbelievably powerful for Paladins to have a heal that scales the same as our Flash Heal and yet costs about 1/3 the mana. I don't want Paladins to get nerfed, it would just be nice if Blizzard gave every healer a heal this useful. (IE Priests, and Druids and Shamans to a lesser extent)
It seems to me like Blizzard does the math at 0 +heal and then doesn't check to see if it holds as +heal increases. At 0 +heal the values seem to make sense, but as +heal increases, the system goes downhill.
These are the values of M/S for heals if anyone cares (again after -15% GHeal talent, no Illumination)
Flash of Light 120mps
Holy Light 420 mps
Flash Heal 313.3 mps
Greater Heal 280.5 mps
That was the post, and, I'd like to add for this forum that I think this problem will just continue to grow as gear gets better. Flash of Light will just keep becoming more and more efficient and other heals just don't scale HPM-wise nearly as fast. Do you see this as a problem or not? If so, what do you think could be done to solve it? If not, why not?