The difference is that stacking more +int as a Paladin also provide me with more crit which in turn provides mana regen. That's why +int is so valuable as a Paladin. You will have 3 passive benefits from it, well the crit can be argued as passive or not but you get the idea.

Flask = 25mp5
Food = 8mp5
Oil = 14mp5

So there's the 47.

I wouldn't say that potions are 100mp5 (or 140mp5 if you have an alchemists stone) as you almost never chain chug them (or at least I don't anyway).

You can also buff up +heal, with the +50 elixir, +44 food, and using brilliant mana oil to get an additional 25.

Anyway, I find the argument that you should focus only on +heal, mp5, int, spirit, whatever, as a little bit foolish. Heal will only ever be useless if you are overhealing with every single heal, mp5 will only ever be useless if you are never below 99% mana (ie: a resto shaman can regen 1406 mp5, which is what you use when spam casting max rank HW).

Whether you focus more on mp5, +heal, or stats depends on your class, build, play style, and current gear.

Generally, I'd say that if you aren't having mana problems (without a shadowpriest) then focus a little more on +heal, otherwise look at mp5 more (subsituting in int/spirit/crit depending on classes). In other words, look at your stat allocation in a more balanced approach, rather than a tunnel vision "one stat" viewpoint.

The fact that you choose not to fully utilize consumables does not reduce the benefit they would give if you did. Obviously, you should gear for how you use them, but claiming that potions aren't worth 100 mp5 because you don't chain-chug them makes about as much sense as claiming that flasks don't give 25mp5 because you don't use them.

They can be "worth" 100mp5 assuming you chain chug them as soon as the cooldown is up. Of course, if you're at (or almost at) full mana, you wouldn't bother using another pot would you?

If you are consistently at or near full mana, then regen isn't an issue, and you'd be better off with less mp5 and more of any other stat (even if that means you have to chug pots to maintain that mana).

The "mana regen vs +heal" question definitely comes down to play style. However from a min/max perspective, I believe you will be better off taking less mp5 on your gear and making it up with consumables when necessary. If you don't like massive consumable use, stack more mp5.

If you're at full mana for a meaningful amount of time, +healing vs. mp5 should be a really, really easy choice. From a purely min-max standpoint, any fight where you don't have to chain-chug pots you had "wasted" regen, and would have been better off with more +healing. Realistically, the joy of gold farming as a healer means that hurting your maximum healing potential to save some gold may be nessesary -- just realize that you are doing that.

I still don't buy having leftover mana as being completely wasted. If your +heal and raid execution are enough to keep everyone up comfortably when all goes well, that leftover mana is a buffer that can save you when things are less than ideal. Do people gear with the assumption that everything in a boss fight will be executed perfectly? Things can and will go wrong sometimes. If dps classes die you'll be needing more mana to last that much longer (at least when there isn't an enrage timer), and if healers die you'll probably need both extra +heal and mana to hold up. It's a situational problem, and knowing your raid's tendencies and what is likely to happen in an encounter lets you adjust what you wear if you're keeping both kinds of gear.

If we're talking about how to gear for fights where everyone is going to be perfect and you have that kind of mana to spare, putting on excess +heal and regen are equally wasted once you reach the point where you can swap a healer for dps. That's the goal if you're really min/maxing.

Not all fights allow more healing for simply having more mana, or healers would find themselves oom a lot more often than we see. Having high +heal though will almost always increase how much you can heal in a fight. Of course on many fights regen and +heal are interchangeable, but if you're spamming heals whenever anyone takes damage and still don't go oom, more +heal would make you heal those people faster while more mana would only allow you to repeat the process more often, which you are already able to repeat.

At the end it's all about "max HP healed over time by how much mana equals how much +heal" (based on your gear/spec/buffs/consumeables/fight length) on some fights, and max +heal with minimal regen on others.

Some extreme examples could be netherspite, where if you don't have the raw +healing that crazy mage can't stay in the blue beam for the whole phase, but your mana should never really run out as the fight is quite easy. An extreme example the other way around could be magtheridon (or nefarian back in the days...), which is a very long fight where the boss deals a lot less damage than your healers are capable of "burst healing", and going oom is the only thing that makes your tank die - in which case both +heal for needed to spend less mana as well as regen to have more mana in the firstplace help and are interchangeable, at a rate i already kinda explained how to calculate.

The real issue is fights that are more middle-ground where it's hard to tell if you really need that max hp/s vs max hp healed over a long fight with the mana you have.

This is a commonly stated point, but it's one I'd like to examine in more depth.

Having "high" +heal: what does this mean? First off, any geared end-game raiding healer is going to have a *minimum* of 1400 +heal. So let's assume, just for sake of argument, that high is 1600. That's above average (for Karazhan raiders), and quite low for T5-T6 instance raiders.

How does increasing this value affect my ability to do my job? Let's examine my HPS on a commonly used spell, GH:7. 2396-2784 base value, affected by talents (note: this evaluation is roughly equivalent to any other class' direct healing highest HPS spell, single target -- HT, HL, or HW). I'll assume a 21/40/0 build (for 5/5 Emp Healing).

(2590 + 1600*3/3.5 + 1600*0.2*3/3.5)*1.1 = 4659 average GH:7 heal (works out to 1863 HPS).

Now, if I increase my +heal by 200, I end up gaining 91 HPS.

This *will* affect how much HPS I can put out. But realistically, my HPS is a very, very small indicator of how much healing I can do over a fight. The largest possible modifier to how much healing I can do in a fight is how much mana I have. More mana = more spells = more healing. More +heal is only going to effect how much HPS I can do, not how much HPfight. The only fights in TBC that are faster than 5 minutes are in Karazhan; any 25-man raid fight is based around a 10-minute+ enrage timer, and often can go longer (Morogrim usually takes us 10.5 minutes, give or take).

On any fight where even moderate use of spells means I will run out of mana, regen > +heal.

This basically only applies if you have a situation where the amount of damage being taken by multiple people exceeds the value of your largest possible heal. Otherwise, you just pick a rank of heal that *will* top someone up to full, and use that on them.

Note that this perspective is highly priest biased. More +heal *does* directly influence how well a HoT-based druid can top up a raid using only HoTs, since every point of +heal makes HoTs scale really really well. This also helps paladins largely, because they *can* spam FoL over and over, and +heal is the only effective way for them to increase HPS with their *cheap* spells.

I suspect this is why so many paladins are currently putting +18 Healing gems in everything, and pushing 2100+ healing. FoL spam, when FoL crits for 3500+, is *very* sexy for topping up the raid, or even smoothing tank spikes.

Conclusion:
- paladins who do raid healing should stack +heal as much as they can, in order to push FoL higher (scales very poorly, though, with the 1.5 cast time)
- druids who use primarily HoTs should stack spirit and +heal as much as they can
- priests need a balance, either between +heal and Mp5, or +heal and spirit (depending on focus)
- shamans ... I'm not qualified to comment, as I've only recently been able to observe a resto shaman in a raid situation. From what I've seen, they need very similar gearings to paladins -- +heal and enough Mp5 to maintain their mana pool for spammage.

+heal increases your HP/fight just like MP5, it's just the ratios that need to be calculated. Higher +heal means either your max heal that didn't top the person off will now heal for more, or that your downranked heal will now be enough to top the person off (or if it almost topped him off, now it will top him off). This isn't rocket science but it's enough to explain how +heal directly affects the healing done over a fight. Of course having more mana also affects this by allowing you to cast more heals, hence they're interchangeable - the only thing missing here is the ratios which need to be calculated based on gear, spec, buffs, consumeables and the length of the fight.

However sometimes you want pure burst HP/s, in which case mana isn't doing you any good. when the tank is going down having a bigger heal is the only thing that can do anything to save him, having more mana won't. This isn't true for every fight, as on many fights mana is far from a non-factor, but you have to take into account that sometimes more +heal will help where mana will not, while sometimes they're simply interchangeable.

See, the problem here is that in each of these statements you made +healing the priority. The argument that people are having is that regen comes first. I agree that you only need enough regen to keep you up to the next mana pot. But theres people that want enough regen so they don't have to manage their heals. Borderline mindless spamming, if you will.

It's not just that (although being able to run 40%+ overheal on Malchezzar/Maulgar when you outgear the fight is good for your sanity). The idea of focusing regen over healing is that you assume that your limiting factor is either your actual amount of mana, or whatever you're doing to conserve mana, rather than your actual healing output. I've seen wipes due to a bad heal cancel. If you have higher regen, maybe you don't cancel that heal at all, since you're pretty sure the next autoattack/spike attack du jour is coming very soon. And maybe when the fight goes N+1 minutes instead of N minutes, you have mana to last through it, rather than sitting on your hands watching your potion timer tick down.

No one's going to argue that +healing is meaningless. Much more so than pre-BC, it's possible to not have enough throughput; even if they hadn't nerfed Heal 2 people wouldn't be using it as much, because it simply doesn't heal for enough. But you get +healing without really trying; I broke 1800 in Karazhan level gear as a non-tailor looking for regen.