Ok, so I was having a debate earlier with a paladin of wether paladins could spam holy light for a good amount of time so I did some quick sketchy research and found this thread in class mechanics forums.

Paladin healing in 2.1, theorycraft

so here's what im thinking. Could a paladin spam holy light if he was completely buffed, with a flask / elixir's / food with a shadow priest and a shaman for mana tide/mana spring in his group maintain 588 mp/5. The paladin would also have to chain mana pots, and use his trinkets on CD.

any idea's on this?

Thats what i thought, but this paladin just kept calling me a idiot and roll a paladin and l2p..

Cove how long is it possible for a paladin to do holy light spam given all the factors? like pretty much for any boss fight (15-20 min) ?

Well if you're actually firing off a holy light every two seconds you'd be hard pressed to sustain that for more than a minute but illumination and SA are worth ~250mp5 with a shadowpriest. On our last Hydross kill, Neux, one of our paladins gained a staggering 74198 mana on top of his mp5.

Rank 11 Holy Light is overkill for most encounters you wouldn't spam it every 2sec... Most of the time you don't need more than Rank 7, 8 or 9 if you are chain casting and the other heals are doing a decent job (hot's, earthshield etc). R11 is like double the mana cost of R7.

However, with high enough spell crit you could probably cast R11 near infinitely (which is why they are nerfing us in 2.1). Sadly they are nerfing the wrong thing imo, instead of changing the scaling of crit rating and the amount of crit rating on gear (ratings were supposed to stop crit %'s getting out of control) they are nerfing a core talent that's been in the game for 2 years. The change will hurt all paladins with 20 points holy instead of the problem high crit % paladins.

w/ 50% spell crit rate which is possible in the game if you stack crit to the extreme at the expense of all other stats and after/with all buffs (boomkin, flasks/etc) it would take a very very long time to go oom, give a paladin with 50% crit a shadow priest and mana tide and I can see them not running out at all.

So your suggestion is to nerf spell crit rating for mages, priests, warlocks, elemental shamans because a paladin talent is out of whack?

The purpose of rating was too enable more sensible items to be designed without having to do parry for example in 20 item point chunks, as well as scaling % abilities with level.

The purpose of the change to rating was so that you wouldn't eventually end up with 100% crit due to continually increasing item budget, not to stop you from stacking a given stat.

Please Ignore.

The paladin is right, according to both my experience and the spreadsheet numbers.

According to the pally spreadsheet from these forums, which has seemed fairly accurate to me since I started using it, a pally with a 10k mana pool, effectively 588 mp/5, and around 20% crit to Holy Light is going to run oom spamming Holy Light Rank 11 in 65 seconds. That's PRE-nerf. Post-nerf he will last 55 seconds.

Downranking to rank 9 and still spamming, that same pally would last 1.8 minutes pre-nerf, and 1.4 minutes post-nerf.

Post-nerf, with those stats, FoL rank 7 could be spammed indefinitely, as could Holy Light rank 5. Rank 6 is pretty close, and would last 15.6 minutes. Even these are pretty extreme numbers, though; I really doubt most pallies are going to have a sustained 588 mp/5 in most raid encounters.

That's not to say pallies with good gear and some great regen sources can't use Holy Light, even quite a bit, especially with downranking. But you can't truly spam it for a long period of time in the vast majority of raid situations.

I remember having a similar kind of discussion with someone in my guild on our first couple of Prince attempts, when they wanted me to just spam Holy Light for the entire 60%-30% burn phase and ignore overhealing, figuring I would never run oom because there was a shadowpriest there. I humored them to show them that, in fact, pallies do run oom even with a shadowpriest if they sit there and spam HL.

Spellcheck is your friend.

I don't see how this change promotes any thinking involved on our part anyways - all it does is force you to equip exclusively MP5, and spam FOL with high amounts of +heal to make up for the lost HP/S. With how few healers (6, 7 max) most 25 mans have, cast/cancelling at the current end game WILL get your tank killed. The burst/crush damage is just too high in most situations. I end up usually at 40% or more overheal at the end of a fight, so post 2.1 I'll be forced to rotate FOL x 5 and R6 HL (to maintain LG incase of a burst) and since FOL has such low HP/S there is no point in cancelling, and downranking HL seems fruitless to me as well as FOL has MUCH better HP/M (the entire point of downranking yes?) than HL will ever come close to reaching.

I really think Paladin healing will be stagnant post 2.1, not that it is terribly exciting now, but at least at the moment I have the holy shock bug to take into account, but post 2.1 its going to take alot of empirical evidence which I have not seen yet presented in any form to convince me that anything over 25 points Holy is even worthwhile in any raiding environment considering the scope of our abilities and the new shift in itemization away from crit (sucks to be a resto shaman since they got all the MP5 gear, Paladins will be snagging that left and right.).