Ya, Renew, I ninja edited my post on you after it was clear that people were misunderstanding my point about stamina. =)

I don't go out of my way to stack stamina on my gear. But, as an example, I hated to lose the stamina going from [Boots of Valiance] to [Boots of Courage Unending]. The increase in other stats, however, is so nice that I did it anyway. The end answer, of course, is to just get [Pearl Inlaid Boots] that trump the other two.

It is something I make sure I'm not forgetting, however. Of a list of things I compare when looking at items, it's last of about 5-6 things.

Just wanted to comment on this. I've really found that this is just not true (personel wise we have been running with just 1 shaman 4 paladins and and 1 tree and 1 Holy priest and the Holy Priest is just not a good raid healer-so we've had to use Pallys on the raid and been pretty impressed with the results). I will say that we will almost never match chealing shaman for raid healing power-The ability to spam 1500+ direct heals quickly for the entirety of a fight is not something to disparage. Not going to splash epeen wws around-but PM me if you like and I can show you some very effective examples of Paladins raid healing. Disclaimer being it will be on SSC/TKish content (Vashj, A'lar, even Mag) - we haven't entered Hyjal yet.

It always seemed to me our gear provides us with more than average amounts of stam as it is, and never really feel like I needed more on any of those high raid damage fights that were listed previously. Im pretty sure I already have more life than most other healers in the raid (even the taurens), spriests and mages of course as well. Improved Right. Fury adds a bit of a buffer too, and can be used on most fights.

As far as gemming...originally I was all about the + heal gems, but I have started to alter my choices recently especially as I get more t6 and none of the 5 set pieces actually having a red socket (I think?), for the most part I have been matching the socket colours since most of the socket bonuses seem worth it now.

Perhaps its just my guild and our reliance on paladins, but I've found a number of varying roles for paladin healing with the acquisition of 4pc T5. We usually run 1 Tree/1-2 Holy Priests/3-4 Paladins/1 Shaman for healers. I sort of see paladin as the leatherman of healers, not an ideal tool for any particular situation, but pretty good at all of them. Rather than having 4pc paladins tank heal (I don't exclude them from that certainly), I'll often have them raid heal, especially in any situation where timely raid healing is paramount (p2 Vashj). A series of high rank 1.75s HL's can repair forked lightning / tainted combos faster than any other healer (barring lucked out targeting for PoH). A 4pc Crystalforge paladin with an spriest is incredibly potent for sustained hp/s, and I can't see dropping the bonus until I have full Lightbringer available.

Edit: On a related note, I'm planning on retaining Crystalforge set pieces and going for haste rating to drop Holy Light to just over 1.5 seconds, thus basically eliminating Flash from my raid healing repertoire. This will sacrifice a bit of spellcrit/mp5 along the way (since I'll need belt, bracers or shoulders, double ring). Any thoughts on this gear path?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.