Yilona

This is basically the way I've gone, and I've found I haven't had to sacrifice too much (though that's more because of unlucky drops than anything else).

I use 2 rings, the cloak from Illidan, and the crafted bracers. We've never had the haste belt drop, but I wouldn't use it over [Girdle of Hope] because the girdle is just so much better. We've also never had the bracers drop off of Winterchill, so that's made my choice of which bracer to use very easy. Total, I have 120 haste, which gets me to about 1.61s HL.

I also have about +2100 healing and 20% base crit (so 31% HL crit) and haven't had any problems with putting out the healing/s or staying good on mana.

As we continue farming Hyjal/BT, however, I will definitely pick up the crit items as they drop. When T6 is on rot (which actually won't take that long), I'll also pick that up. When I get T6 4-piece, I'll swap over to the crit gear on some fights. The haste+4-piece T5 is invaluable to keep around, however, for those fights where you need some really powerful raid healing.

As I mentioned earlier, I will probably always keep one Karabor ring simply because they're so good.

 

• goss

I notice you use the Al'ar trinket - this is a little OT, but is it actually worthwhile? We've been just /rolling for them since they seem pretty mediocre on the surface.

 

Deth

I have a semi off topic question related to Paladin healing efficiency. In the raids you guys run, how are the Paladin's set up in terms of assigned targets? With the highly efficient healing throughput shown in this thread, is it better to utilize that on a set of main tanks? or as raid wide spot healing until other classes can land their longer casts?

I lead the raids for my guild currently and i'm trying to figure out how to increase the general healing efficiency of our healing core. I also assume that as we progress further into SSC and TK almost every healer will be chain casting a heal, so effects which increase mp regen out of the 5 second rule are pointless. If I assume everyone is using the best spell selection for maximum healing efficiency, how do I go about making sure the targets see this and I am not just doubling up heals on someone thats already being healed by a heal over time etc.

"Death is only the Ultimate Excuse"

 

Renew

It procs on cooldown, I think it is worth using over everything save maybe the Illidan Trinket.

It really depends on the fight. Generally putting a druid and a Paladin on the MT, Shaman on the raid, and then going from there depending on the fight is what I delegate. It's very situational though.

Confidence is not Arrogance.

 

jusion

We usually have paladins on the MTs and/or OT(s) with a priest, and the shamans on the raid. When we had a druid he would HoT up the MT and help with the raid.

 

Natural

A paladin healing the MT with druids keeping lifebloom ticking is my standard for almost every fight. Some fights have extra paladin MT healers (Shahraz, Illidan, and everyone heals on Archimonde due to fear/fire mechanics). In heavy AOE damage situations (HWN, Teron Gorefiend) I usually have at least one T5/haste paladin healing the raid with 1.6 second HL because the focused target healing-per-second is amazing.

 

• Mongoe

Comes down to what classes you have available to you and how many of each you have. As someone else said, your core shoud be 1 druid and 1 pally on the MT and a shaman on the raid. After that, assignments become a byproduct of the fight and who is there. We generally do not have 2 shaman on every night, so I really like having a paladin on the raid for direct healing. Our typical assignments are: 2 paladins/1 Holy Priest for crit buff/1 Tree Druid on the Tank(s) and 1 Paladin/1 Shaman/1 Balance-resto Druid on Raid. Gives us a nice balance of healing types and a lot of healing power on the tank. Ideally, I'd probably prefer another shaman to the balance/resto druid-but we don't have one and both of our resto druids are really excellent players.

As to your other question-if you're asking how to choose your healing targets to not override HoT's that are already applied-Grid has a slew of addons that will allow you to see Renew, Rejuv etc on your raid.

 

Tiffara

I would like to note a couple of things. First off, I went and checked a few things last night[1]. The benefits of Blessing of Light are not impacted by downranking, and they do gain the benefit of Healing Light. At level 70, the downranking penalty is a straight multiple to your healing bonus of (spell_level + 11) / 70 (spell_level being the level the spell is learned at, and obviously spells learned at level 60 and higher are not affected by this).

That being said, your spreadsheet has some flaws. One, it uses a downranking penalty of (spell_level + 5) / 70, which is incorrect.

Two, your values for min and max healing are those when you first learned the spell. However, this is no longer a valid assumption - those values creep up as you level, reaching a fixed value once you learn the next rank of the spell. As such, the only correct min and max healing numbers in the spreadsheet are for Holy Light (Rank 11), which is learned at level 70.

Three, while you do take into account the mana restored by the Insightful Earthstorm Diamond, you completely fail to take into account mana restored by mana regen. When looking at mana efficiency of spells, I think one should look at the average effect per average mana loss. As spells take time to cast, mana regen does restore mana over the casting time, and this should be taken into account.

Four, there was a typo on the mana cost for Holy Light (Rank 7), which should be 465 (rather than 464).

I've made a modified version of your spreadsheet taking these things into account. It also allows the base casting times to be specified, as well as the amount of mana regen. (Unfortunately, it's possible it's not exactly the same as the original, as I used Solaris Office rather than Excel.) It can be found at

Pally_Healing_Efficiency_2.xls - FileFront.com

I note that you're not giving the effect from Healing Light to the benefit to Blessing of Light from Libram of Souls Redeemed. I can't test this (not having that Libram), but as Blessing of Light does get that effect, I rather suspect the Libram's bonus to BoL also gets that effect. I didn't modify that on the spreadsheet, though, as it's just supposition on my part.

[1] For anyone interested in how to quickly calculate such effects, I recommend using result ranges, rather than average results. That is to say, if a spell has a possible result range (like 150-158), it takes many fewer casting to find the complete range with fair accuracy, as opposed to trying to find the average result with any kind of accuracy.

 

Jessie

On most fights, we give the shadowpriests to dps groups. Most of the time that means one in the hunter group and one in the mage group. However, I've started playing around with using shadow priests when I'm focusing on spamming hasted HLs. Last night was a bit of an extreme example, but I tossed myself into the 2x SPriest 2x resto shaman group for Teron Gorefiend and pretty much spammed HL 11 the entire fight. With effective use of cooldowns, I pretty much amounted to a non-stop 5k HoT on the tank ticking every 1.6 seconds.

Usually, I'm in the MT group for Devotion, but considering our other paladins are more the FoL/mp5 type, I might start ninjaing Shadow Priests more often.

 

◊ EllTrain

I see this mentality a lot -- the idea that people who use HL more often should favor crit, and those who use FoL more should favor mp5.

Does anyone have any WWS parses up where crit was actually worth more than mp5? Even looking at fights with t6 geared paladins who use 90% HL, I can't find any where mp5 was not a more valuable stat.

 

Tiffara

Well, you're not going to be seeing me in T6 anytime soon (if ever). So, I'll just have to look at the math, since there's no way I can produce raw data (as preferable as that might be).

As HL 9 gets 100% of +heal, I'm going to assume it's being used in preference to HL 10 or 11. The base mana cost of HL 9 is 660. Crits thus give 396 mana. Casting time is 2s as long as Light's Grace is in effect. Chain casting with no lag therefore yields the equivalent of 990 mp5 with a 100% crit rate, or 9.9 mp5 per +1% crit. Switching now to item value, crit gives 1 mp5 per 2.23 and mana regen 1 mp5 per 2.5. Thus, if you're casting HL 9 over 89% of the available casting time, spellcrit gives as or more mana than an equivalent amount of mana regen. And if you have, for example, 4pc T5 or spellhaste (and using the shorter casting time to cast more HLs), or are casting HL 10 or 11, this weighs things even more in favor of spellcrit.

Of course, that's not the only effect spellcrit has. In situations where the extra healing from a crit is not solely overheal, you can also be getting some amount of extra healing, up to 50%. Potentially, this could let you use downranked HLs (thus further lowering mana costs), or let you heal through a situation you might normally not have been able to.

I'm not saying spellcrit is the best stat or anything. I'm just saying that I can see that it might become more useful to stack than mp5, depending on the situation. Personally, I stack mana regen as much as I can and go with FoL spam with the occasional HLs. And that works great for KZ/Maulgar, which is as far as I've gotten.

 

Putsout

To the original poster, I tend to use HL rank 4 not as a targeted spot heal but in place of my constant flashes of light on an MT to keep lights grace buffed. For example healing the tank who is on the paladin in Illidari council, precasting flashes is a must due to the many possible sources of damage the tank can take but at the same lights grace needs to be up at all times. Even if the tank isn't getting meleed they can be taking consecrate damage, poison, flamestrike etc so small heals need to be incoming every second. So what I tend to to do is pre-cast a rank 4 HL every 10 seconds or so in place of a flash to make sure the buff never falls off. It heals for roughly the same amount, has a 6 percent higher built in crit rate than flash (due to talents) and keeps the grace buff up. I wouldn't support using the rank 4 on general raid spot healing whatsoever as many people in this thread have concluded, but I try to keep them cycled in so that I can react to the larger spikes.

 

Xav

Well, the middleish of this thread got pretty horrible and almost unbearable. That discussion and huge tangent on various T6 setups and the 'amazing value' of stamina and intellect and finally Saviour's Grasp... Help.

Anyway, this is basically what has been established, but I'll just say it again incase some people are just really not understanding it:

If you are in a shadow priest group as a paladin, it doesn't matter what gear you have or your healing strategy is, because you have infinite mana.

_any_ level 70 holy paladin in Tier 3 (yes, 3) has the baseline spells to put out enough throughput (HP/S) for any fight in the game so far. That's because the highest ranks of Holy Light on a BOL target are just absurdly huge heals and in the vast majority of cases are going to be overheal and wildly inefficient.

Semi related to the above point; I can only see spell haste ever being useful if you were always given a shadow priest, and thus, wanted to utilize any stat you could to throw away your mana quicker.

At the extreme upper echelons of spell crit percentages, Holy Light is the most efficient MT heal that combines both HP/S and longevity. (It has the most talents, coefficients, and other modifiers, this can't be disputed). By extreme I mean when you WILL be sitting at 50% holy light crit raid buffed. There is a wide range of valid HL ranks and they will be from a standard 3000 range to the 8000 range. There is no need to ever go larger, currently. (Or anywhere even above 5k)

Also, with reliably high HL crit percentages (50%), you can count on your 'heals of choice' being quite a bit larger than their noncrit heal value. If your HL is healing for 3k noncrit but it's a 50% crit, you may as well assume you're casting a ~3700 heal each time and not just a 3k, 4.5k, 3k, 4.5k...

Comparatively, if you somehow achieved 50% Flash of Light crit, even using your max rank flash with the ~2200 healing you'd have (not possible and still have 50% flash crit, but for the sake of theory lets assume so), you're still capped at your HP/S because flash is inherently small.

The closer you get to a 100% spell crit rate, the closer you are to almost never running out of mana. For this to be true, though, you have to account for the baseline MP5 that is on all of the best gear out there, which gives you a very nice pool regardless of how else you gear up. This is because spell crit gives the best average mana regenerative boost per itemization point spent on it compared to the alternatives. Compare 10 spell crit gems to 4 MOT, assuming HL, etc. Tiffara actually mentions this, it isn't even a hard concept to grasp.

+Healing is a statistic that diminished as you use lower ranks of spells, or Flash of Light. If you are trying to maximize your healing statistic gain on your gear per itemization point (say, a socket), why would you choose something that is already going to be fractionalized several times? Both MP5 and +spell crit rating do not diminish and will be constant benefits.

I don't do much special thinking or formulaic research when I gear up, I just look at in the above cases. And this is me:

I never get a shadow priest, by choice. Also, the other paladins rarely get shadow priests.
I always have an MT type healing role.
I never find myself wishing for more gain from my lower ranks of HL, or my Flash, to want more +heal. If I ever find that situation arising, I can use a higher rank.

Also, for whatever it's worth, I don't HL exclusively on every fight ever, or something. I flash on Illidan p1 and P3+ for example, but HL P2. I MT and raid heal on Council and use a mix of both, etc.

And to mention it one more time: If you always have a shadow priest, throw all of this out the window, and just get spell haste and +heal, and spam anything. It wont matter

 

◊ EllTrain

I just don't see this. Do you have a WWS parse up where your crit was worth more than mp5?

Seems to me that a 4mp5 gem will beat a 10 crit gem in terms of pure regen power in all cases.

 

• Neux

There is not an encounter in the game right now where you need to have the regen gained from straight mp5 gems (or hybrid ones). Between flasks/elixirs, and mana oils (and food for that matter), you gain enough passive regen that even without group support I can not see it possible to actually run out of mana. That combined with using mana potions on each cooldown means that having extra throughput on your heals to be that much more important.

The only times that I see myself even drop below 25% mana is during Gurtogg where I wear full spell haste gear (Dawnsteel Shoulders and bracers, Belt from teron, and 4pc Tier 5) and that is only right after a fel rage phase when my mana gets instantly refilled via bloodboil healing, or when I lay on hands during Mother or other fights when I have timers up just to make further healing that much easier.

 

galzohar

On one hand people claim they have enough mana, on the other hand people claim they have enough +heal... What takes? I am not accepting either argument by itself as a viable reason to stack the other stat (more mana vs more output via whatever stats) for this reason.
If you're good enough for a fight, it's kinda hard to tell how you can do better. However I find it better if you look at the effective HP healed with your mana supply. over a period of time rather than the mana efficiency or amount of mana you regen, and then also take pure HP/s into consideration, ignoring mana. Possibly even create 2 sets, 1 for each situation, and swap according to the need of the fight (low healing requirement with burst parts would lean to pure +heal while a consistant damage taken fight would lean towards maximizing your effective HP healed with your mana supply).

 

Paragon

Extra mana can always be converted to extra healing by upranking, at least until we can chain cast R11 indefinitely. I heal much the same way Yilona does with 4 pc T5, spell haste, and Libram of Absolute Truth. I try to do as much healing as possible with my hyper efficient R4, then when I need more HPS and/or can afford the mana I cast R11 (sometimes canceling, sometimes not, depending on the encounter and my current mana). For a random 7 min encounter without a shadow priest my ratio is about 85% R4 and 15% R11. Thats going through about 50k mana over 7 mins with my base mana, super mana pots, bow, shaman totems, mp5, etc (not counting illumination - I factor that in to the average mana cost of a spell for my calculations). The more mana regen I have access to translates into more healing because I can cast a larger percent of R11. Of course R11 has a greater chance of overhealing, but other than that it is very easy to model which stat yields more raw healing over a set amount of time given various ratios of R4 to R11.

For my gear at 90% R4 / 10% R11 mp5 gives the most raw healing over 7 minutes. Spell crit passes mp5 (factoring in both the mana gained and the extra healing from crits) at about 70% R4 / 30% R11. And +healing finally passes mp5 at around 30% R4 / 70% R11, though it is the +healing that is making the other two stats so good. At 0% R4 / 100% R11 spell crit is just ungodly which makes sense because you're multiplying a bigger heal and gaining huge chunks of mana back every time you crit. The 100% R11 actually occurs in raiding in a few encounters like P3 Reliquary and P2 Illidan (after which there is a lot of downtime and low healing time which you easily can get you back to full mana).

But all this raw healing talk isn't everything when concerned with MT healing. Getting your spammed heal as high HPS as possible also does wonders for tank safety, because you can't automatically uprank your healing mid cast. The stats that effect R4's HPS in order of importance are spell haste, +healing, and lastly spell crit.

So for most encounters, my gear setup, and being in the MT group (meaning I usually get a shaman and not a shadow priest), ranking the stats in raw healing over 7 minutes puts mp5 well ahead, followed by spell crit, followed by +healing. Ranking the stats for tank saftey vs burst damage I go with spell haste, +healing, followed by spell crit.

With the level of heal redundancy you have to have for MT healing, the raw healing is almost never an issue. Because of this, I place a huge importance on spell haste. Being able to land your big heal 1/2 a second faster saves many a MT. I'm even thinking about replacing Girdle of Hope with Girdle of Lordaeron's Fallen after the spell haste patch goes live. Dunno, will have to see how it goes.

 

• Karakas

I think the ideal gear set for MT healing in almost all situations would be to wear 4-piece Crystalforge, but if a Paladin does not have access to it, their healing options become a lot more muddled.


With 4-piece T5 and a Libram of Absolute Truth, R4 Holy Light on a BoL target surpasses the HPS and efficiency of R7 FoL. However, without those 2 bonuses, any situation that would call for R4 healing can easily be replaced just by Flash spam for an increase in output with a slight decrease in efficiency. This is one of the reasons why I personally utilize FoL a lot more in my healing, and just cast a R4 every 15 seconds in order to keep Light's Grace up. It's also why I do not value Spell Haste that high, since it's returns on pure Flash spam are almost negligible with proper use of /stopcasting.

Even in Black Temple and Hyjal, there are a lot of opportunities where FoL spam is appropriate. A lot of what Tpyo said resonates with what I've experienced as well, and that is if everyone upranks to a max rank "big heal" most likely the person with the least latency will land their heal and everyone else will overheal. In my previous guild, I've always assigned a few people as dedicated small heal spammers (usually 1 Paladin and maybe 1 Shaman for AC buff) and have others utilize larger heals and cancel them halfway through if the tank hasn't taken damage and immediately start a new one. While this style of healing isn't applicable in all BT/Hyjal situations, it is still useful in some fights where the MT damage taken comes in predictable spikes (Azgalor comes specifically to mind).

On other fights with more constant damage though, I typically use R7 Holy Light provided that FoL does not output enough healing to cover the needs of the encounter, with upranking to R9 spam in situations where mana isn't as big of an issue, swapping to max rank as needed for short bursts of added healing. This may change once I get the 4-piece Lightbringer bonus to Flash of Light, but I definitely think that for a Paladin without the 4-piece T5 bonus, R4 is no where near as efficient for output or mana usage as proper use of FoL and higher ranks of Holy Light.

 

Nehael

Hi Tiffara,

you said :

Sorry to upset but your downranking penalty is also incorrect...

and you use : ((spell lvl) + 11)/(player lvl))

source : WoW Forums -> Change to Coefficient Bonuses on Spells

So unless what this Bliz guy says is wrong or not up to date... All your calculation that derides from this formula is incorrect :s

Neha.

 

Egel

((spell level)+6)/(player level) is wrong. The correct formula is

(next spell level + 5) / player level

which might in this case equal ((spell lvl) + 11)/(player lvl). WoWWiki is your friend.

Neha.

 

Nehael

Like I said, "unless this bliz guy is wrong", and he turned out to be so indeed.
Greeeeeeeeeeeat, you just cannot trust official sources any longer .

thx for the advice, I ll look on wow wiki from now on.

Neha.

PS : btw neha is my nick hey ^^

 

Tiffara

Sadly, WoWwiki is not my friend. I used to use that formula, but after testing it for myself, I found it to be incorrect. According to my results, (spell_level+11)/70 is the correct formula for a level 70 character. I'll post the data when I get home. I tested with all ranks of FoL and HL (although HL 1-3 also gets the under 20 penalty, WoWwiki's formula for that worked for HL 2-3; HL 1 was just off).

 

Egel

You seem to be right! I only tested rank 6 FoL but it really seems to get a penalty!( My rank 7 FoL did 1805-1866 without any buffs and rank 6 did 1672-1717. I might not have gotten all the end points but it seems pretty close to your 69/70 penalty AFAICT.

If you are using next spell levels instead of just spell levels (since if you get your last rank at level 1 you won't get penalized with a (1+11)/70 multiplier) the formula becomes

( next spell level + 3 ) / player level

However, didn't someone actually test the WoWWiki formula on spells with ranks 6 levels apart and found it correct? Then the formula becomes

(next spell level + 11 - ( next spell level - spell level ) ) / player level

equaling your

( spell level + 11 ) / player level

or 1 when there is no higher spell rank. Or maybe they are just using ad hoc lookup tables.

 

Tiffara

I don't have the raw data, as I didn't save a log. However, I do have the ranges I found for all ranks of Flash of Light and Holy Light, and I'll display those along with the calculated ranges (I use ranges as it's much quicker to get a significant result as compared to averages).

This was all done as a level 70 paladin with 3/3 in Healing Light, 1631 +heal to Flash of Light, and 1552 +heal to Holy Light. Crits were ignored, I'm just looking at the range of non-crit results. Base healing ranges were taken from tooltips, as they change as one levels (thottbot and wowwiki only list ranges at the level they were learned). Healing bonuses to sub-20 spells are assumed to take a 3.75% penalty per level under 20 (as per WoWwiki). Calculated values are (base heal + (level + 11) / 70 * coeff * heal_bonus * sub_20_penalty ) * 1.12.

In summary, other than Holy Light (Rank 1), the results are very close to expected. A couple of off by one mismatches showed up, probably caused by rounding in the actual algorithm. A difference as little as level+10 vs level+11 would be very noticeable, given the large healing bonus, and can be ruled out completely. Also, as the level spacing is not uniform, any formula such as (level of next spell + X) can be ruled out.

Flash of Light (Rank 1)
level 20
base 67-77
calculated 421.74-432.94
found 422-433

Flash of Light (Rank 2)
level 26
base 102-117
calculated 528.05-544.85
found 528-543

Flash of Light (Rank 3)
level 34
base 153-171
calculated 674.64-694.80
found 676-696 <- high end out of range by 1

Flash of Light (Rank 4)
level 42
base 206-231
calculated 823.47-851.47
found 824-851

Flash of Light (Rank 5)
level 50
base 278-310
calculated 993.58-1029.42
found 995-1030

Flash of Light (Rank 6)
level 58
base 356-396
calculated 1170.42-1215.22
found 1172-1215

Flash of Light (Rank 7)
level 66
base 458-513
calculated 1295.84-1357.44
found 1298-1357

Holy Light (Rank 1)
level 1
base 42-51
calculated 108.23-118.31
found 103-112 <- Mismatch! Not sure what's up.

Holy Light (Rank 2)
level 6
base 81-96
calculated 233.95-250.75
found 234-250

Holy Light (Rank 3)
level 14
base 167-196
calculated 530.70-563.18
found 530-561

Holy Light (Rank 4)
level 22
base 322-368
calculated 945.97-997.49
found 945-995

Holy Light (Rank 5)
level 30
base 506-569
calculated 1293.94-1263.50
found 1293-1362

Holy Light (Rank 6)
level 38
base 717-799
calculated 1672.16-1764.00
found 1672-1764

Holy Light (Rank 7)
level 46
base 968-1076
calculated 2095.18-2216.14
found 2094-2214 <- low end out of range by 1

Holy Light (Rank 8)
level 54
base 1272-1414
calculated 2577.55-2736.59
found 2580-2736

Holy Light (Rank 9)
level 60
base 1619-1799
calculated 3054.88-3256.48
found 3056-3255

Holy Light (Rank 10)
level 62
base 1773-1971
calculated 3227.36-3449.12
found 3231-3449

Holy Light (Rank 11)
level 70
base 2196-2446
calculated 3701.12-3981.12
found 3702-3978

 

Tiffara

Just for anyone curious about this, I got the [Libram of Souls Redeemed] just the other night. It turns out to behave exactly as a straight bonus to Blessing of Light, in that the bonus healing is not affected by the casting time coefficient or the downranking penalty, and it does get the benefit of the 3/3 Healing Light talent.