[Paladin] Holy raid itemization for best performance
 

Introduction:
After a long time of the other paladin thread's main post not updating, and same questions popping up over and over again without anyone actually making up anything new, I figured I'd some up what I came to theorycrafting on paladin healing, based on my and other EJ posters' experiences - figuring out a way for putting it all into numbers, giving stats an actual quantitive value.

I will not go into actual formulas. I'm assuming everyone know how to calculate healing done by a spell, mana costs, mana regened in a fight etc. And besides, I'm hoping to get some community help here to get a user-friendly working spreadsheet, as while I know what I'd like to be in there, I don't have the excel background to make anything beyond some clumsy non-user-friendly sheet that is based on my own stats and needs major updating when my stats are changing.

Note that all this is about how a small change in stats will make a small change in your healing. Comments like "but you cannot heal without crit" or "you need 120 mp5 or you go oom" need not apply, as they're completely irrelevent. I'd probably even drop my mp5 and crit all the way to 0 if I could get 5k +healing... However I'm talking about realistic tradeoffs and their effects, and how to calculate them based on your current stats. Therefore comments like "my mp5 is low so I think I need more" or "I'm good on +healing" need not apply either - the "lowness" of your mp5 or anything of that sort is already modeled in this post and will hopefully be included in the spreadsheet if I receive the appropriate help.

What I'm actually trying to do:
As a healer there are actually 2 things that are important, and mathematically each is actually served differently by the different stats. At first I'll actually look at each one seperately:
1. Maximizing your burst healing ability to minimize possibility of deaths due to excessive damage taken.
2. Maximizing the amount of healing you can do in a given fight, utilizing all your mana.
Both of these need to take many assumptions, however all of these assumptions are not too hard to measure in game or estimate based on the fight you know you're going to do and your group composition.

I'll start with the first one - not becuase I think it's any more important, but because it's simpler to explain for a starter:

-Healing
Bigger heals make it less likely for someone to die, obviously. Doesn't matter if you're spamming FoL, HL or spamming FoL and HLing on emergency, or whatever. Healing will always increase your ability to prevent deaths. FoL and HL scale slightly differently with healing, although it's not something particularly hard to calculate.

Haste
Faster heals are always nice. Even neglecting the "faster reaction" you gain from haste, and even if you're a FoL spammer, if you ever cast HLs on real emergencies, haste will be a benefit to your burst you would use when said player needs to be saved from a death. Granted if you're not spamming HLs or sitting there waiting for HL to be needed, which is rarely the case, your FoLs will not gain from the haste, however haste will still be a big benefit as you ARE going to HL on an emergency right after your next FoL lands, which means even a FoL+HL combo is boosted by haste - and in fact if you do the numbers you'll see it's a significant increase. Basically multiply the healing done by HL by your haste and add the FoL healing to see how much your burst potential increases if you're "spamming FoL and HL on emergency".

Crit
This actually doesn't help at all here. Yes crit increases your healing done etc, however when someone is going to die, you don't want to rely on a crit. Just like the tank doesn't want to rely on a dodge if the next hit is going to kill him. Fact is even if you have some insane crit chance of 80%, still 20% of the times you will lose the player you were trying to save if your base heal isn't big enough, and if he dies it doesn't really matter how much your crit saved him earlier. Having a big/fast enough heal can actually get to the point where it saves him every time. Crit will never get you there unless you somehow reach 100% crit. Crit has other benefits, though, but not for this purpose.

Intelect
A small increase to +healing, and that's about as far as it goes.

-Anything regarding mana - not going to save anyone as when a person dies he doesn't care how much mana you have left, really. If you couldn't heal because you went oom, though, keep reading the rest of the thread, as maximizing HPS to save people is probably far from your main problem.

Calculations
Decide what burst is most important to you (as in, which one you actually use in the fight you're optimizing yourself for), and calculate how much each stat (healing and haste) increases those. It's easiest to look at a relative increase - as in how much haste rating you need to increase it by 1% and how much healing you need to increase it by 1%. Another way to look at it is by "healing equivalence points" - how much healing you would need to increase your burst by the same amount 1 haste rating would.

Part 2 - the more complicated calculation - how to maximize your healing done when using all your mana.

This part is based on several assumptions, which over a few months after I posted them the first time in the other thread had not gotten any concrete evidence for being incorrect:

-You cannot just spam FoL. If you could, it would've been the most mana efficient way to heal, to the point where you would be unable to run oom in certain setups. I assume that if you stick to FoL spamming as your only way of healing, people will die. For now I use %mana to HL VS % mana to FoL as a comparison since that's how the original spreadsheet worked, although it'd probably be more useful to look at it in terms of %time spent casting HL VS %time spent casting FoL, or %healing done by... Of course at the end I just look at what a certain mana distribution gives in with the other "measurements", although if someone with excel knoledge fells like editing the spreadsheet this is one of the things that oculd use a change.

-Since you only cast high rank HL at times when you would risk losing a player if you would've used FoL/downrankedHL due to FoL/downrankedHL's lower HPS, having additional HPS reduces your need for high rank HL and allow you to be more efficient and do more healing with the same mana. This gives an additional benefit to +healing, and even gives haste a (very small) efficiency gain as it still boosts the HPS of the HLs you cast and thus allows you to FoL/downrank more and use maxHL less. To figure out how much effective mana regen you gain from HPS, you will need to take your HL:FoL/downrankedHL ratio (explained above), your current stats, and calculate how much +healing you would need for FoL/downrankedHL to match maxHL's HPS. Then calculate how much extra +healing you would need to have the same burst if you drop a certain amount of FoL/downrankedHLs in favor of HLs, and then calculate how much mp5 you would need to actually do the same total healing (which will obviously be more than before, as maxHL is less efficient than FoL/downrankedHL). The easiest way to do it is see how much healing is needed to make FoL/downrankedHL match HL's HPS. While this is a huge number, the amount of MP5 you will need to make maxHL do the same healing in the same fight you would've done with FoL/downrankedHL is also pretty big. Divide the +healing needed by the mp5 needed and you get the healing/mp5 value of additional HPS. Note that converting max rank HL to lower rank HL and then lower rank HL to lower rank HL etc and then to FoL will mathematically yield the same results as just converting your maxHL to the most efficient spell you use (generally FoL), which is quite easier to calculate.

To explain how I calculate things, I will first explain how the old, simplified spreadsheet works:

1. Calculate available mana. This is based on your stats, consumeables and group/party buffs. Of course some of those could use tweaking but I just put the stuff that are implemented improperly as simple +healing, mp5 or extra mana pots used. At the end it doesn't matter how you put it in there as long as it's taken into account. You can even add spiritual attunement mana if you actually have an idea how much you will get in a fight. This is before crits!

2. Calculate mana after crits. Since every cast on average returns 0.6*crit of its mana cost, and then that mana can be used to cast more spells which will then return (0.6*crit)^2 mana, etc etc you get 1+0.6*crit+(0.6*crit)^2+(0.6*crit)^3+...=1/(1-0.6*crit) multiplier to your mana (yes this infinite coloumn EQUALS it). The spreadhseet is actually slightly more accurate since HL has a little more crit than FoL, but the basic idea remains.

3. Calculate healing done. Basically the amount of mana you got divided by the mana cost multiplied by the healing done by the spell, distributed properly for HL and FoL.

4. Calculate extra healing done by crits. Note that since crits often overheal, you will have to manually lower your crit value from 150%. Something like 120% is probably more realistic, however I have yet to find a way to just take a WWS and calculate how much your crits actually overheal. This is actually very complicated, so for now I'm settling with a rough estimation. Note that even if I set crits to never overheal, though, it still ends up weaker than healing (even if comparing epic crit gems to non-epic healing gems). Bottom line is just estimate it and look at the effect it has on results.

The original spreadsheet had already been doing 1 through 4. However the spreadsheet was ignoring efficiency benefits from having higher HPS! Assuming your inputted spell distribution between HL and FoL is based on what you currently do, however, the HPS->efficiency only takes effect when you further improve your gear. The points from now on only refer when comparing upgrades and do not apply when calculating how much healing you can do with your current gear with current spell distribution. Note that this will have different results than just changing your stats and seeing how they'd affect your healing, as what I'm doing here is also considering the change to spell distribution as a result of the change to HPS:

Healing
in addition to what the spreadsheet would give you as extra healing done from having higher +healing, each point of healing will also give 1/(healing/mp5 mp5 (healing/mp5 calculation explained earlier)! Add this mp5 value as additional mp5 on your gear to really see how much extra healing you would do when increasing your +healing by said amount. This mp5 value can then be added to see how much actual healing is gained.

Crit
After modifying the crit value, the old spreadsheet takes care of everything already. Only thing not taken into account is the extra HPS provided by crit. Granted at the "burst" section I ignored crit, but that was becuase crit doesn't help saving people. The effective healing of crit defintiely does help your efficiency, as it does more healing. Because of that, the added HPS of crits, while unreliable, still helps you HL less and FoL more some of the time, which results in additional efficiency. Figure out how much healing (X) is needed to increase HPS the same as 1 crit rating (also based on your spell distribution) and calculate X/(healing/mp5) - this is how much additional mp5 you get per 1 point of crit rating, on top of what the spreadsheet tells you crit is worth. That mp5 value can then be added to see how much actual healing is gained.

Haste
While the effect of haste on efficiency is very small, and haste items will generally be terrible for efficiency, I figured I'd include it just for the sake of completeness. Haste increases HPS (granted only of HL so greatly depends on your spell distribution) and thus reduces the need for HL and allows more efficient casting of FoLs, so can be translated into +healing in terms of HPS and then into mp5 by the healing/mp5 value. Since this is a small correction in relation to how stats actually increase your efficiency, though, haste will result as a very low efficiency increase for any paladin I can think of. But the added efficiency is there.

Int
while the spreadhseet properly takes the +healing, +crit and mana value of int, it ignores the small benefit it provides by giving extra mp5 via HPS that comes from both the crit and +healing int gives. These get added manually based on the calculations above.

The hardest part - Balancing #1 and #2
This is actually the most complicated part, as it's quite impossible to actually calculate and depends on what your raid actually needs. If you never go oom, additional efficiency (#2) will do nothing for you. If you always heal everyone to full before any other heal lands on them and before they have any chance to get killed, additional HPS (#1) will do nothing for you. Notice that it's much harder to satisfy #1 and make additional HPS useless while satisfying #2 is far from impossible. In fact, if it wasn't possible guilds would've not been clearing the game yet...

Note that even if your efficiency is too low for your taste, additional HPS might not be useless in certain fights. For example if the healing is easy most of the time and intensive in certain parts, you could safely "slack" on the easy parts to have the mana for the "hard" parts and actually have high HPS on them too. You will do less healing on the healing meter, but depending on the fight you might actually be more useful. And in other fights HPS might be completely useless if your efficiency is lacking (mostly in fights that require more "consistent" healing).

Then there's that middle point - you have "enough" efficiency to last through the fight, however you feel you're not going all out with your mana and still trying to conserve. This can actually be true at any level of "efficiency gear" as you will never realisticly have the mana to spam HL for a full length fight, however there's a limit to how much healing people can take due to the limit to the damage they're taking.

At the end you just need to think what you need more - to do more healing when using all your mana, or screw mana and go for higher HPS to preven deaths during bursty moments. My advice is to look at every upgrade and see how much it increases/decreases your efficiency and how much it increases/decreases your burst ability, preferably in a relative sense (as in "this item is 1% more efficiency 1% more HPS, the other item is 2% more efficiency 0.25% more HPS).


Last section: Modifications I made to the spreadsheet and how you could make them more useful and user-friendly.

Note: Anything edited in spell data needs to be edited twice as the spreadsheet seems to have a "copy" of iteslef if you scroll right, and this does affect results.

-Fixed healing values. Spreadsheet assumed healing values for spells as if you've just trainted them, although at 70 they would actually heal for more as spells scale with your level until a new rank is available.
-Downrank penalty for BoL - used the spreadsheet's old downrank penalty for BoL as well - not sure this is accurate though, worth testing and fixing if it's not right.
-Adjustable crit value - added a box where you can set crit value (generally should be between 100% and 150%) that will be then used to determining how effective your crits are for all calculations.
-HPS from crits - calculating how much effective +healing in terms of HPS is gained from adding more crit rating, so that this can be used later to find the additional mp5 value of extra crit.
-HPS/mp5 calculation - while I would love this calculation to be dynamic based on your stats, I don't have the excel knoledge to do it, so I just put in the results I got by playing with it and figuring it out for my own stats.
-Healing equivalent points with/without shadowpriest+shaman - again these were calculated by using the item comparison boxes adding the mp5 value gained from additional HPS. I would love this to be dynamic and update based on your stats but do not have the excel knoledge to do so.
-Stat comparison boxes - unfortunately I don't know how to edit the spreadsheet to take the hps->mp5 benefit into account so I just add mp5 based on how much healing/int/crit I put in there. I would love those benefits to be already included so you can just compare stats in a simple manner.


The modified spreadsheet link: Paladin healing spreadsheet (rough)
Obviously this is the incomplete version - use at your own risk, this is mostly up here so people with better excel knoledge [i]or the original author i/i]to implement the theory in the spreadsheet and make it correct and user-friendly.
EDIT: Found the original author, Darion. Paladin Healing Calculator | World of Warcraft Tools | Curse is the link to his latest spreadsheet version.

Hope I can get some feedback here and possibly edit if I have anything wrong, and mostly hoping someone will implement those adjustments in the spreadsheet to make it easy to use.

Paladin Healing Calculator is the link to the author and his current version on curse.

To realistically get this to work I think you'll actually have to program in the hits your tank takes or some form of modeling based upon that (hps numbers or something more complicated). Sadly I've gone to an equivalence point system (based around the same ideas) due to my complete lack of excel skill.

I don't really see the point of this, any healing you do is based on the damage being dealt to whoever you are assigned to heal. Do you need a spreadsheet to magically tell you "stack more mp5 for a bit less healing oh and you could use a bit more crit pal"? Every fight you are healing different people for different amounts of damage over the length of the battle. If you go out of mana a lot on a fight, oddly enough more mp5 or crit helps, having a shadowpriest helps, chugging pots on the cooldown helps!

Forget haste really, that one time it could save a tank from dying thing is bollocks, someone else could be halfway through a heal before you start casting, if you let light's grace drop off you've already shot yourself in the foot and we even have LoH for situations like this. If you regularly see a tank die from lack of heals/taking a lot of damage all of a sudden, your first thought should not be "egads I need more haste gear, I could have saved him!"

If you're looking to "Maximize your burst healing ability to minimize possibility of deaths due to excessive damage taken" stack shitloads of crit and spam slightly downranked HLs, max rank when the shit hits the fan.

If you want to "Maximize the amount of healing you can do in a given fight, utilizing all your mana" on some fights that crit becomes much less useful and you can switch to more mp5 gear or a bit more +healing to increase your efficiency and healing from FoL.

We have two fucking heals, really, how hard can it be to decide what gear you need?

What is good is to have different paladins in your guild gear up slightly differently - one guy can stack that crit up and be the "I'm just going to stand here and spam downranked HLs until the big thing hitting Dave dies" another can gear for efficient FoL use and pretend he's still in Molten Core. And both of those chappies can have some alternative pieces of gear to switch around on certain fights depending on how much damage flies around and on who they are assigned to heal.

1) As posted in the op healing also improves regen by allowing you to use more mana efficient spells(FoL) more often.

2)It depends what haste allows you to do, if it allows you to more confidently use fol over trying to chain cancel high rank HL's it is worth its weight in gold.

3) Generally crit is weak for burst healing as haste and generally healing add more HPS.

4)The amount of spells used doesn't really make it any easier to make decisions. The complexity of what is being trying to be done should be telling you that.

5) Having a quality spreadsheet working would allow them to all be in the correct gear for each encounter.

Please back up what you're saying with anything other than "hey, I tried it, it works".

As for stacking crit so tank doesn't die when shit hits the fan, hey guess what next time your heal will not crit and he'll die anyway, regardless of how much crit you stack. It's like telling the tank to stack more dodge instead of that silly stamina if he dies too much...

And no, going oom does not mean you need more mp5. Running oom means you need to do more healing using all your mana in the same fight, which could be achieved by +healing as well as crit just as well - it all depends how much. So giving up +healing/crit for mp5 just because you went oom once is not very wise without having math to back that up.

The reason I don't take into account the tank's damage taken, is that I assume it has some kind of fluctuation over time that will mean sometimes he takes more and sometimes less. This means you will sometimes be forced to use HL to make up for it and sometimes you won't. This also means that the more HPS you have the less often you will have to HL.

Unless you have a better system for evaluating stats, or show how this sytem is fundamentally flawed, please keep your "I stack crit and it works" comments to yourselves. People cleared this game in T3 gear, it doesn't mean it's the right/best/easiest way to do things.

I read my healadin thread daily, and I haven't seen any real information to update the post about. All I see it continuing arguing regarding how to best gear... and the same things keep being said... depends on the situation, playstyle, etc. In short, there is no right answer, so I also do not see the purpose of this thread. There is no "perfect" set for any healer...even factors as simple as ping or reaction time can affect gear priorities.

I also have 3 holy paladins from end-game guilds who regularly read the thread and who've I asked to keep me posted if they feel it deserves an update. None have felt the need to update the post since I asked them, which is when I went retribution about 2.5 months ago.

Just the fact it's dependant on a lot of things, doesn't mean you should just ignore everything and go with what feels right.

I'd rather have the "plug the stats in the spreadsheet and see what wins for what you need" than the repeated pointless arguments about which item is better. Of course it depends on a lot of things, but you could just take those things into account and then decide what's better for every situation you consider important, instead of randomly picking stuff becuase they're cool.

The reason I was suggesting this was an attempt to make the +healing --> Less HL's conversion more dynamically expressed, as was suggested as an improvement in the op. As noted I lack the excel skill to put this into place.

galzohar's comment above states my reason's for wanting this to go ahead. I really don't understand how you can use a spreadsheet for ret while thinking that it is not needed for holy.

Also the burstiness of the damage you need to heal already gets expressed in the HL:FoL ratio you're supposed to input as a given. Actually calculating it would be very difficult, though, but estimating it is not that hard, and the actual ratio doesn't have a large effect on the value of stats anyway.
More HPS means there will be those few "borderline" cases where FoL was "almost enough" and those will turn into FoL from HL, providing slightly more efficiency. Note I didn't take downranking into account either, as it seems from calculating that taking downranking into account will give very similar results as if you simply assume HL11s turn into FoLs - mostly because you turn HL11s into 9 etc, and then the lowest rank into FoL, effectively replacing HL11s with FoLs anyway. Taking downranking into account is not exactly the same as ignoring it for the HPS->mp5 model, but it hardly makes a difference.

I guess I should clarify. I'm saying you aren't gonna get one overarching statement or gearset that is ideal. However, having a thread devoted to creating a spreadsheet is another matter all together.

I would say that we do continually go round in circles in both the healdin thread, and this one for two reasons:

There is no right answer, it all comes down to experience, the encounter, what other classes are on the tank with you, and whether you have a spriest/sham/boomkin etc in your group.

And

We have nothing else to discuss :)

The whole point isn't "this is the best gearset, use this!".
The point is "given this and that kind of need and group setup, this is how you figure out what the best gear is for that". You can say it depends on the encounter, your raid etc etc, but at the end you can take all those variables into consideration and for a given situation know what the best gear would be - which exists, since there is only 1 best way to handle a situation, as if it isn't the best, there must be a better one. Granted it won't be best for all situations, but you can just take the different situation into account and see what the best gear for that would be, etc etc.

Instead of claiming there is no answer becuase of certain variables, you can just determine those variables for you and work with them to find the best gear setup. This can change between fights but at least you have an answer for which gear would be best for every fight, so at the end you can pick what you think will help you the most. For example, given your group composition you CAN tell if an item will be a big upgrade for illidan but only a small upgrade on council while the other item is a downgrade for illidan but a big upgrade for whatever other fight... Then decide based on that. In reality the difference between the different fights isn't THAT big anyway, but instead of going with what looks cool you can go with what would help you the most when you need the most help.

Unfortunately I don't have the excel knoledge to get this thing to be easily calculated for the general public but I did explain how you can use the non-user-friendly version of the spreadsheet to figure things out for your needs until someone comes and actually makes it into a user-friendly version.

I have a good degree of excel knowledge and would be willing to help, but unfortunately I simply do not have the time (nor will I in the near future) to develop a spreadsheet. I'd certainly be willing to help with odds and ends if anyone else would like to take a stab at it.

Since I don't know how to actually do it I can't actually tell how much work it would be, but the linked spreadsheet already has a lot of the work covered, it's just the "adjustments" I listed that need to be done to make it take everything into account. But since I don't even know how to make such a speradsheet (as in, the original version) I also don't know how to modify it other than my "brute-force" system.

Different paladins will see gear in different ways. I personally prefer to stack crit over any other stat, I down rank to HL5 or HL6 and spam around the raid. From talents we get an additional 5% Holy crit, 6% Holy Light crit, and from our 2 piece T6 we get another 5%. For those bad at math, thats 16% spell crit, added to the crit we gain from intellect(T6 level gear should be between 8% and 10%) ~24%-26%. Adding in spell crit rating(which is all over gear T5 and up), raid buffs, and consumables you should be over 40% Holy Light crit. Seeing this I prefer my HL spam, using max rank along with Divine Illumination when the, "Shit hits the fan."

On the other hand some paladins are still running MC spamming their cleanse and FoL until everything is dead. Stacking Mp5 and +Healing is the best way to go with this style, although you are ignoring the benefits gained from 3-4 key talents in a paladins Holy tree(Illumination, Divine Favor, Lights Grace, Sanctified Light...). At the end of the fight the HL style paladin has chugged afew pots and is running low on mana, his over-healing is substantial, while yours is low and your at 80% mana(YAY!!!!!). The only thing is that he/she did about 1.5 times the effective healing you did and actually kept people alive in the "oh shit!" situations while you made sure that the Druid HoT's, Priest CoH/PoH, and Shaman Chain Heals, were all a big waste of mana.

We used to be the premier raid healers because of FoL being quick and just the right size to top someone off. With all the improvements to AoE healing and HoTs over the past year, and the addition to shaman to Alliance raids we are no longer the best raid healers. We have to fall back on what we are best at: Mana efficiency and single target healing, which with as hard as most things hit in end game raids requires that we favor HL above FoL.