I was thinking about this myself if I should use 4pc T6 and gloves (once I get t6 chest) or 5pc T6, and decided to do some math on it. I assume that:

• Spamming FoL 100% of the time. Which is optimal for Glad Gloves.
• Socket T6 with 22 healing.
• You cast FoL every 1.6sec, due to lag and the occasional stop cast.
• For sake of throughput the crit heal is all effective. I normally find my OH for crit and non crit FoL are similar.

Healing Throughput
T6
Gained Healing * Coefficient * Healing Light = Additonal healing per cast
38 Healing * (1.5/3.5) * 1.1 = 18 Healing

Glad
Average Heal * Crit Coef * Gained Crit = Average Additional healing per cast
2200 * .5 * .0327 = 36 Healing
(I get average 2200 FoL on tanks with BoL with my current gear, missing 2 pieces of Illidian gear, but will change slightly with gear level)

Mana Usage
T6
12mp5

Glad
Mana returned per crit * Casts per 5 secs * Increased crit rate = Average mp5
(180*.6) * (5 / 1.6) * .0327 = 11mp5

In this case I would use Gladiator. But it is rarely the case the you use 100% FoL. Normally you are using HL5 to keep up LG and also throwing in those HLs when the extra healing is needed.

You get 6mp5 from the extra crit on Glad while chaining Holy Light. I find that 15-25% of the time I am using Holy Light depending on the fight. Which puts the mp5 on the glad gloves in the range for 9.5mp5, and drop the gained healing to 28-30.

This would tip the scales to T6 for me. Since this is ideal circumstances and a lot of times there are breaks in fights (ports on Shaz, Silences, etc) that you still get the mana from T6, but not from Glad. It is pretty close though so either should be fine. I have both so I will probably switch in Glad for fights where I mostly just spam FoL, but normally use T6.

But, I have also been more in favor of mp5 over small healing increases because, I am normally in a tank group and it leaves me more mana that when you really need to push out the burst healing you have the mana for spamming a few Holy Lights. Like I prefer [Girdle of Stromgarde's Hope] over [Girdle of Hope].

On that note I am extremely surprised when I see Paladins dropping [Insightful Earthstorm Diamond] for [Bracing Earthstorm Diamond]. IED is an insane amount of mp5, I have gotten up to 50mp5 (WWS) on it some fights, with it averaging 35-45mp5 (WWS) on most fights. Which I don't think is anywhere near worth 26 healing.

I'm also curious how well [Glorious Gauntlets of Crestfall] will fit into the 4pc Tier6 mix. With +22 heal gems they're the best raw healing gloves and they provide spell crit to all spells over the T6's 12mp/5.

Just some quick estimations in my head and it's a case of ~20+ healing and ~1.25% crit vs. 12mp/5. I like the crestfall gauntlets in my head. I swear this came up in an earlier post with the same conclusion.

They are around same for T6 depending on your mana usage. It is pretty much like +20 heal per FoL and 4mp5 vs 12mp5. I would probably use Crestfall if I had a shadow priest. But, they aren't that great to try to actively run Vashj for people who didn't see them (or win them) back when they were doing Vashj.

I tried it and I'm not really a fan of the double hot trinket set up. I prefer to have the +healing at all times than when the proc decides to go. They lack the "on demand" feature of real hots in that you can't reliably renew them going into a silence etc.

[Memento of Tyrande] really blows away all the other trinkets anyway, which would break the setup.

Thanks for the math on the S3/T6 gloves, Endoscient. I've been wondering a lot about that as we approach Azgalor.

I also wanted to reinforce the power of the IED. I have also measured between 35-40mp5 from the gem, sometimes up to 45-50mp5 depending on my FoL/HL ratio. It's an easy choice over any other meta.

Regarding the season 3 gloves, another thing to consider is that, unless you always raid with 4+ paladins, most of the raid isn't going to have BoL, so if you ever toss flashes on the raid (which I know I do a lot even when MT healing) that's going to change the results even more in favour of the t6 gloves.

Speaking of T6, what do you guys think the optimal gear set is while retaining 4pc bonus? I am actually considering going for the cloth legs from Archimonde, but there might be another item I've overlooked.

6mp5 is better by a gigantic amount. 6 stats give you like 2 healing and ~100 mana. 6mp5 is 360 mana over a 5 minute fight.

Pretty much on the money here. The only other possibilities are a different helm or different gloves, both of which end up with small gains at best. The shoulders and chest have no relevant competition. I still personally feel that vast amounts of healing and mp5 on [Leggings of Eternity] allow it to pull ahead of the competition for the non set slot.

Helm [Helm of Soothing Currents]
Gloves [Gloves of Unfailing Faith] /[Worldstorm Gauntlets] /[Glorious Gauntlets of Crestfall]/[Vengeful Gladiator's Ornamented Gloves]

You're missing the [Crown of Empowered Fate]

Essentially by choosing [Crown of Empowered Fate] you are trading the following (stats for Intellect are done with a standard holy build and kings).
15int (17.25 int),1 healing for 10 spell crit rating->7healing 259 mana for 0.237% spell crit.
Which is realistically stronger for Tier 6 (note that by ignoring socket bonuses and going [Teardrop Crimson Spinel]in both you are further tipping it in Tier 6's favor).


Additionally I still use [Insightful Earthstorm Diamond] as I find the large amounts of mana regen to be much more useful than the alternatives. As such [Lightbringer Greathelm]'s yellow socket is very very useful as it ends up as a neutral socket while still proving a yellow for my meta needs.



I also missed [Guise of the Tidal Lurker] in the off set summary as well.

I've always been a fan of pairing 4P T6 with [Crystalforge Greathelm]. [Lightbringer Greathelm] is horribly lackluster in comparison to T5, as is the [Crown of Empowered Fate].

once you don't run out of mana on any fight the only thing you should be concerned about is hps, which means spell crit and raw healing, (+22's).

Since we're semi talking about helms, i recently picked up [Mask of Introspection]

How does that compare to TX helms? You lose the meta but gain an extra socket for healing.

Though as someone mentioned above, IED is ~30-55mp5, that kinda puts any helm w/ meta over this one.


On top of that, it looks hideous on a Belf female model =(

Yes, assuming you place any value whatsoever on mp5, any helm without a meta is worthless.

I don't really like this line of reasoning. Say if you do a fight and everything goes pretty well. With your gear setup you do a lot of healing and by the end you have like 1000 mana left. I would say that you need more mp5/crit for that fight. Imagine if something went not so well and, the fight lasted a few mins longer or one of the other healers on your tank died so you need to HL more. You probably will not have the mana to do the healing you need to do it. It is normally the situations where things aren't easy and you can't FoL spam that your gearing makes the difference.

If you are ending the most healing intensive fight with close to full mana you can drop some regen for meager healing upgrades. You should also think about Sunwell, just because you can do all of BT/Hyjal with just 22 healings doesn't mean you will have the mana to do it for the more intensive fights in Sunwell. Which is what you are ultimately gearing up for, not to farm BT/Hyjal easier.

I tried this setup a couple months ago in Hyjal and first part of BT. The healing typically from piston ended up being about 1% of my total healing done. The Ashtongue trinket ended up being even less than 1% so I just removed them.

I'm using the Ashtongue trinket instead of my ribbon, it's not amazing but i do think that it works out better. I've only been using it for a week now, and havn't seen enough wws parses of it yet, but here's the info from Gorefiend a few days ago (I didn't have to do the ghosts):

FoL 91hits, 29% crit, 59% overheal
HL 19hits, 34%crit, 51%overheal
Enduring Light healed for 5130, 1% of my overall healing, 5% overheal

If you do the math on that,
Ribbon gives +73heal, for FoL, 73*0.43*65Normal hits = 2040.35, 73*0.43*1.5*26Critical hits = 1224.21
For HL, assuming HL11 (even though i downranked a bit), 73*0.71*13Normal hits = 984.77, 73*0.71*1.5*6Critical hits = 466.47

So the ribbon of sacrifice would have given: 2040.35+1224.21+984.77+466.47 = 4715.8
That works out as less than the Ashtongue trinket.

This is for only one encounter, but I do think it shows that the BT trinket is slightly better if you are after raw healing and the majority of your heals are FoL. I am sure that is not as good if a larger proportion of your heals are HL, but then you would probably be using 2 mp5 trinkets instead anyway.

hmm ribon helps other healers too? If you're gonna do math, do all of it.

I'll try and be more precise, yes i chose to do the calculations for [Ribbon of Sacrifice] instead of [Essence of the Martyr], because ribon has less +heal. I am not a fan of /use trinkets that give +healing, but i had a look at the number of ticks of the BT trinket, and it turned out the buff was only up for 34% of the fight :/

A /use trinket such as ribbon would be up for 30seconds once every 2mins (althought it takes 7.5-10sec of those 30 to get 5stacks up), thats 25% of the fight. Plus you can also situationally use this if you know you need some extra burst, such as on Teron another MT healer gets the debuff.

So because of this I really should have calculated the /use as well.

I'll pick HL to spam during the ribon buff, and say that there are 3 other paladins on the MT doing the same, for sake of the math. This is worst case however, because if I need to spam HL for the full length of the buff, then it's more likely that I am using an mp5 trinket instead of this one. (But that depends if i have a spriest or not)

So 20s of 150heal for 4paladins + 10s of 30/60/90/120/150heal
Each palading will get off 1heal at +30, 1heal at +60, 1heal at +90, 1heal at +120, 10heals at +150

1 at +30: normal hit: 0.71*30=21.3, critical hit: 0.71*30*1.5=31.95, Average inc %crit = 24.9hp
1 at +60: normal hit: 0.71*60=42.6, critical hit: 0.71*60*1.5=63.90, Average inc %crit = 49.8hp
1 at +90: normal hit: 0.71*90=63.9, critical hit: 0.71*90*1.5=95.85, Average inc %crit = 74.8hp
1 at +120: normal hit: 0.71*120=85.2, critical hit: 0.71*120*1.5=127.8, Average inc %crit = 99.7hp
10 at +150: normal hit: 0.71*150*10=1065, critical hit: 0.71*150*1.5*10=1597.5, Average inc %crit = 1246.1hp

That's 1495.3hp * 4paladins = 5981.2hp per use of the trinket. Added to the 4715.8hp from passive that i worked out in the previous post.

A quick check of Essence of the Martyr to get the /use from that (I won't bore people with the math this time),
It gives: 2467.2hp per use with HL.

To cut a long story short, and because it's a little depressing, the BT trinket with the figures I've looked at is not that amazing, I would strongly recommend it if I could keep the buff up close to 100% of the time (15%proc chance, takes 6.67FoL casts to proc it, thats 10seconds, the buff lasts 12seconds), which in theory should be possible given that it can proc even while the buff is already active, unlike the VR trinket.

Anyway, I am going to go and get a wws parse of some encounters where I use FoL 100% of the time (and where I don't use mp5 trinkets), and check what % of the fight which the buff stays up.

Well, that is probably not true. Remember HOTs don't tick if the target is at full health. Also if you have problems remembering to use Essence of the Martyr I would suggest macro'ing it to your FoL cast.

Good point, that would explain the low overheal.

If you don't like "use" effects you'd definitely HATE "proc" effects. While it's hard to time a "use" effect well (to the point where good timing would require a huge effective cooldown increase making it hardly better than just using randomly), "proc" effects have absolutely no control so they can proc where you definitely wouldn't have clicked your "use" trinket and thus are generally a bit worse than "use". Not to mention there are situations where "use" is actually good (like that divine favor HL on that guy that is going to die, I have it macroed with my trinket, or any fights where some moments are simply more healing intensive than others). At the end though the ribbon is probably better for MT healing.