You may want to add Divine Plea to the list of cooldowns along with something about the usage.

It seems to me that with the reduced mana returns (10% or 15% glyphed), increased cooldown and still very large 50% heal reduction for 15sec Divine plea's usefulness is likely very situational now.

A lot of people here are advocating crit or mastery as a preferrable secondary stat. I think it's time to end this insanity.

Pros of crit are: more healing per mana / holy power if not overhealing and more IoL procs on average.
Cons of crit: unreliability. This is exactly what you try to avoid in PvE: a bad luck streak can (and will) render your stat useless.

Pros of mastery are: bigger shields on targets of your direct heals / LoD.
Cons of mastery: mostly useless outside tank spamming with HLs/DLs. Doesn't proc off beacon which usually accounts for most of your tank healing. Most of shields on raid members are wasted. Also, World of Logs doesn't account for Illuminated Healing.

Pros of haste: lesser GCD and cast time on all spells, more HPS/HPM on Holy Radiance (bigger increase than crit). More maximum throughput (bigger increase than crit).
Cons of haste: increases maximum mana consumption without increasing HPM (except for Holy Radiance).


The hint is that Blizzard didn't really deliver the healing environment where you can let people drop lower to heal more efficiently and allow your crit to kick in. Right now you're struggling to keep people alive while conserving mana. During low damage periods you want to top people off with weak heals. Сriticals would result in overheal, but haste helps. Also, you need to judge as often as possible, and haste helps not pushing back your judge / holy shock. And finally when things get tougher, you need throughput to use mana-efficient spells as much as possible. Crit doesn't always have more HPM, and haste has indirect effects on mana efficiency which you should keep in mind (and a very direct effect on HR).

While healing is more of a subjective discipline than DPS, it's still best if our theorycrafting has some grounding in reality. If you're going to make assertions about stat values, please do it on the basis of logs of actual raid combat rather than on purely speculative situations.

As for Holy Radiance being up to 40% of our total healing done... uh. Maybe if the only spell you ever use outside of HR cooldowns is Holy Light, that could happen. In reality, HR is typically 10-15% of our healing done (at least the way I play, anyway), and since Holy Priests are by far superior 'blanket' healers than a Paladin can ever be, I see absolutely no reason to consider this aspect of our class as important. Sure, Holy Radiance is a nice spell which provides a solid boost to our throughput - but it is not a staple spell the way PoH is for a Priest.

On topic of Crit being random... this is kind of like claiming, "Crit is RNG so it's a bad DPS stat", or "avoidance is RNG so it's a bad tanking stat". On a large enough sample size, over a course of a boss fight, you'll get roughly the amount of Crit % your charsheet shows; and with the way raid damage / healing / health pools currently are, even Divine Light Crits rarely overheal if you target them correctly. In my full Crit gear and with DL as my primary heal, I average perhaps 30% overhealing total, most of which comes from PotI, Beacon of Light, and ironically, Holy Radiance. The point I'm trying to make, I don't view Crit as a pure throughput stat - rather a mana efficiency stat that also helps my throughput. I guess it's fairly silly trying to argue this any further since people advocating Haste seem very much set in their opinions, with the numbers of calculations to back it up, but I just feel people arguing against Crit so strongly are being somewhat misleading, as it is most certainly a valid and effective playstyle, and I'm convinced it'll remain so at the very least until full T11/heroic gear levels where mana efficiency might become somewhat less important.

Bottomline, you can't just boil down every aspect of healing to numbers and claim that since X is higher HPS, it is a better stat; it's about as misleading as counting on Divine Plea being used every 2 minutes for full duration - that just doesn't happen in an actual raid.

The problem with crit is that it's unreliable. If you're stacking crit over haste (with regards to gearing/reforging choices - I'm not implying that people are gemming full crit), you're hoping that RNG doesn't screw you over when you need more throughput and your heals suddenly don't crit for ten seconds. Haste is always going to be there. Even if the averaged out throughput, point-for-point was identical, haste is simply reliable.

As a DPS, reliability over a ten second interval isn't generally important (don't take this too out of context - I know about having to burn down adds quickly or something along those lines); it's how things average out that matters the most. The problem with healing is that our throughput is something that matters on very short time intervals, and that's not a situation that I feel comfortable relying on RNG for. It's why most healers hate throughput procs and love regen procs, but why at the same time controllable abilities like DF and AW are still so strong.

Edited for destroying the English language in a couple of places.

Holy Radiance being 40% of healing done is a bit too much, but on any fight with heavy AoE, 30% is not unrealistic. It's not about "being a blanket healer," it's the fact that at the moment, NO class has particularly powerful AoE healing abilities. Holy Radiance is quite strong, and should be used very frequently, and works very well in conjunction with Divine Favor and AW. If you're seeing 10-15%, you're likely not using it enough or your haste is fairly low.

In addition, we've shifted quickly to being the new raid healers--or at least the most efficient raid healers, mana-wise. No class at the moment has the same ability to spot heal the way we do with WoG and LoD.

Crit isn't bad. No one is arguing that crit is "bad". It is, however, a "bad" choice to make OVER haste. Whether it works out on paper or not, you need to be able to judge how much you can heal at a given point in time in order to appropriately decide who to heal. I agree that crits aren't wasted, but being able to cast divine light .1 seconds faster helps me understand when to use the spell, how effective it will be, who to use it on, and what followup I need to make. Having 1% crit instead leaves me in the exact same position, but with a slower spell that will 1/100 times be more effective than I'm gauging it to be.

This isn't anecdotal, it's healing's playstyle. Crit is an awesome way to conserve mana, but as a stat, it is unreliable and can not be guaranteed when you need it most, while haste can. You compared us to DPS, but that's radically unfair. If a DPS is relying on crits to increase their DPS, they'll simply do less DPS. If a healer is relying on crits to heal a tank, they're going to run into streaks that allow the tank to dip dangerously low.

In addition, haste increases your ability to Judge, emergency heal, and even Crusader Strike by freeing up time that would otherwise be spent casting.

I agree, but we need to have the foresight to control what we can.

In regards to Holy Radiance, I just used the range that I saw from the parses of bosses. Some even had shaman with 75%+ from Healing Rains + Earth-living. We need to know how HR diminishes with extra players to determine the maximum power. We also need to determine the effect range has on the returns to find the average effectiveness. Here are some numbers on a 6 target Holy Radiance, with 5500 spell-power, 1000 haste rating, and buffs, bringing it to ~27%. Crit and mastery are not factored, crit will be a linear increase to everything, baring IoL procs. I also calculated the effective% of the healing that mastery would boost.

Healing to 6 Targets


Single Target


Spirit is more valuable then Haste for single target encounters where you can upgrade from HL to DL with extra mana. Haste will still be a larger increase to HL HPS per point then spirit from using DL, but at a cost of extra mana, this is a rough estimate though. I will check the multi target balance later, when I finish adding mastery and crit into the picture, as well as some more adding to the first post soon, but I have to head out right now.

It was shown that int gem is superior to spirit one even in terms of (effective) mana regeneration. Not to mention SP and crit gains.
The Way of the Light: Holy in Cataclysm

One thing that could be added to the guide is how much spirit to aim for. This would help new Holy Paladins determine how much spirit is "enough". After which, one could reforge the excess Spirit into something more beneficial (Haste or Mastery*) in order to give a better increase in your overall healing effectiveness.

*Assuming you find the absorption shield helpful to your healing.

Int provides larger heals, which leads to greater mana efficiency through HL spam becoming more viable. Also provides more mana regeneration through Divine Plea.

Also i cant think of any situation where getting a hybrid would outweigh the benefits of the 40 int gem, no socket bonus would be worth it from what i have seen so far.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't a healing rotation that prioritizes Divine Light, Holy Shock and Crusader Strike have a higher throughput versus one that prioritizes spamming Holy Light and Holy Shock on cooldown (at the cost of mana efficiency)?


Does your spreadsheet calculate the 15% base mana restoration every 8 seconds from judging Seal of Insight, or an estimated amount of SoI ppm (I can't really be exact since I don't know the PPM of SoI, but I would roughly [roughly] estimate that you'd see on average about 3-4 procs per 20 seconds, turning out to be 9-12 per minute, or around 8903-11,871 mana per minute)? If it doesn't, I think this would help to "normalize" the Divine Light HPM.