What does it matter what it does directly? What matters is what you can do with what you gain from the stat. More mana as of itself is meaningless. What you can do with that extra mana is what really matters.

As for the crit, as said above, it's unreliable, and therefore cannot be relied on to save someone, so it doesn't increase your "reliable max burst". It will, however, increase your effective healing done by a certain amount, which will depend on how much mana you have available to multiply, and multiply again depending on how often you actually heal targets that would not get overhealed by a crit. (as in, how often you cast a 3k heal on a target with 4.5k deficit VS just casting a 4.5k heal).

I personally spam rank 8 (certainly not to the extent that FoL is "spammed" but I play with 400-600ms so cancel casting often gets me in more trouble then its worth). HL11 for whenever tanks taken any damage really or when mana isn't an issue. Make sure you’re using Librum of Absolute Truth (not 100% how the badge one stands up if SSC wasn’t kind to you).

You may want to be nice to the raid leader for a shadow priest while trying it out, just for the extra margin for error, possibly grab a moonkin if ones available. I’m always in the MT group, so keeping JoW/SoW up (especially with a WF totum) can have very meaningful returns and is a lot easier to maintain since your usually not spamming quite as hard as with FoL.

Good luck and I hope it works out well for you.

Related to that, I wonder how much healing potential we could gain by having as much unfocused gear as possible, with budget distributed freely between healing, spell crit, mp5, spell hate and sockets, instead of having for example just spell crit and healing (or just spell haste and healing). Net gain from that should be quite significant.

Like [Girdle of Stromgarde's Hope] from ZA, a very strong item for it's item level because it spreads the item budget over crit, heal and m/5.

Well, if you start matching socket bonuses you can get some interesting results. Take for example the 5 pieces of Tier 6.

As a baseline the set has 522 healing, 42 Mp5, and 116 spell crit rating.

If you put a [Teardrop Crimson Spinel] in every socket (ignoring the fact that you need some other gems for your [Insightful Earthstorm Diamond] in the meta slot) you're now looking at 698 healing on the set, with nothing extra added to either of the other stats.

If you match the socket colors with [Gleaming Lionseye] in yellow sockets and [Royal Shadowsong Amethyst] in the blues you now have (counting socket bonuses) 586 healing, 52 Mp5, and 158 spell crit rating.

So for matching sockets in that method you lose 112 healing but gain 10 Mp5 and 42 spell crit rating. What does that mean?

112 healing will increase your FoL by ~48 before talents.
10 Mp5 will refund 1200 mana over 10 minutes.
42 spell crit rating is ~2% more crit.

Thats of course just on those pieces of gear. There are so many socketing choices to make as well; for example you might be violently opposed to crit but still want the socket bonus so you put [Luminous Pyrestone]s in all the yellow sockets. Its just food for thought though, you have to decide for yourself if the extra 48 on your FoL is worth the loss of 1200 mana and 2% crit.

Your numbers are somewhat misleading as there are only 2 fights that exist at that gear level that are 10 minutes long or greater (Council and Illidan). Also, why not take talents into account...? Obviously everybody raiding as holy has them. That being said, I did gem to match the socket bonuses in exactly the way you describe, and its perfectly viable, though mostly enforced by a lack of spinels in my case.

An important point to keep in mind when gemming or considering stat value is where you can achieve other sources for that effect. You can buff +healing in a few ways, WoA, Healing Elixir, food, and old-school mana oils. You can get spellcrit from Moonkin, Ele Shaman, food, and adepts (the first two are pretty unlikely to occur). Mp5 on the other hand, can come from totems, BoW, elixirs or flasks, mana oil, food, shadowpriests, spellsurge swaps (stacking!), pots (don't forget fel mana and alchemists stones), spiritual attunement (this is incredibly undervalued - paladins simply do not have to pot on something like Bloodboil if you take advantage of this), and demonic/dark runes. So the summary of that is, there are way more external sources for mana regen than healing or spellcrit, so it often make sense to push your gear towards +healing (which generally has a better return than spellcrit) because you can continue to up your mp5 with consumables and group comp.

Then again if you're going to average boss fight lengths I wouldn't count fights like rage winterchill in your averaging

As for pot saving, in a 10 minute fight you will need 15 mp5 per every pvp pot you want to save... Not to mention this isn't even looking at the mana saved by having higher +healing or whatever other stats you got in place of mp5.

The list of mana sources I put forth mentioned numerous other sources than pots (I actually use < 5 pots per T6 clear these days, for what its worth). More relevant though - I don't really think "being cheap" is a particularly good justification of a stat distribution in any discussion of endgame raiding.

And if you look at my last line goss, I said its just me. I do perfectly fine with my gear setup and I'm able to save myself a little money, which is important to me. I'm not trying to justify it to you or anyone else.

Mp5 viability discussion aside, though...

Assuming 2.4 brings GCD changes the to spell haste, there is really no reason to not have more items built along the lines of [Girdle of Stromgarde's Hope] - but with spell haste added (or replacing mp5). Current spell haste itemization suffers exactly from being too focused - items with spell haste usually lack spell crit and sockets. It got its positive sides (it's easier for people that like to test new stats to stack them), but it's far from being optimal with current item budgeting formula.

I reminds me situation with early +spell hit gear introduction (rare tailoring sets from ZG with high spell hit values and barely anything else).

Well, spell haste gems have been added into the mix,

+8 spell haste gems from dawnstones.

If +10 spell haste epic gems are made available, I might resocket my yellow slots for this purpose.

Some shadow priest thread came up with a calculation finding 1 spell haste was equal to 1 spell damage.

I wonder what 1 spell haste means in terms of +heal.

First I would like to say that I've been reading this thread for quite sometime and have been greatly impressed with level of thought and detail put into the theorycrafting of paladin healing. But, as all forum lurkers must eventually do, I have to pose some questions given the situations I have experienced...more specifically MH/BT main tank healing.

As most end game pallys know all too well, MT spike damage is a difficult and stressful situation to have to deal with. Now I have raid healed many times and know that raid damage can be stressful to heal through as well, however when a tank can literally take upwards of 20k damage in the course of 3-4 seconds (randomly, I might add), there is little room for error. At least with raid healing, there is somewhat of a gameplan you can formulate in terms of prioritizing heal targets and responding with a proper size heal. MT healing is must less 'transparent' in the sense that you never really know how much damage you'll have to deal with and how much time you'll have to react.

This being said, it is a no-brainier that the MT needs to be topped off AS OFTEN AS POSSIBLE as even a 10% dip in health can expose a MT to being 2-shotted (Mother/Council/Bloodboil comes to mind). Now, how does this relate to gemming and gearing...well, from my experience in MT healing, over-healing is a necessity and depending on the other MT healing classes you're paired with, non-stop FoLs EVEN when the tank is @ 100% is necessary to pad yourself with enough time to land a HL when the tank takes some serious spike damage. 40-60% overheal is really not uncommon when doing this...now there are pally healers that use cancel-casting HLs (and I have tried this myself), but I feel that 1 miss-timed cancel could literately be the difference between a MT living and a wipe.

So, in addressing the spam FoL method (and occasional spike damage HL cast), I find that at least half of my FoLs heals are landing on the tank when at 100% and therefore would suspect CRIT as a more beneficial stat than +heal for this type of strategy...since I'm typically overhealing with FoLs ANYWAY, at least I could get additional mana back w/ illumination whereas just stacking +heal would yield no return on an overhealed FoL. Granted, I wouldn't be able to 'reliably' heal for as much when casting HLs after a massive hit, but I've found that generally when this happens, the accompanying MT healers are also winding up their big heals and the difference between a 5000 and 5500 (+crit vs. +heal stack) non-crit HL makes little difference as the tank will likely be hit with AT LEAST 1K in overheal anyway.

So, with that situation going on, I would guess that given a 50-60% FoL overheal strat, stacking crit is going to yield more mana return and longevity, not to mention occasionally healing for massive amounts in tight situations.

I realize that it's extremely hard to quantify the benefits of stacking crit vs. +heal, especially since every pally has their own techniques and healing roles, but given the situation that I'm often faced with in terms of MT healing, I 'feel' that crit has superior rewards when assuming about half of your healing will be overheal anyway.

On a side note, I'd also like to open the floor to other successful end game MT healing strategies and their respective gear/gem/stat stacking support.

I think it's been gone through enough for why overhealing is not an argument that works against stacking +healing. When you cast a FoL on a tank with full HP is becuase you think the tank may take damage by the time the FoL lands, or else you wouldn't be doing it. Not canceling is just an added safety as due to latency+reaction time you simply reduce the tank's buffer by cast-canceling (although sometimes at least for some classes this will be nescessary to not go oom it usually doesn't apply to FoL spaming). Adding more +healing means when the tank does take that hit your FoL will do a bigger portion of the healing he needs to get back to full, and will reduce the amount of healing other healers need to do to top the tank back off. Then when things get really rough and he does take that 20k damage in 4 seconds your slightly bigger HL might just be big enough to save the day. Having more crit will increase the chance for it to "be enough to save the day" regardless of your +healing but you will always have a significant chance of not critting at that critical time.

Increasing +healing can and will increase the amount of burst damage that is required to have the potential to kill your tank, and so will haste. Crit will not change the amount of damage needed it'll just increase the chance that when that does happen it won't kill him, but will still keep a major chance for him to die.

Not to mention if you do come to completely ignore any healing increasing effects claiming they go to overhealing (which I disagree with, or else we'd all be running with 0 +heal or defintiely under 2k), you'll be better off stacking mp5 as even if you use ALL your mana, mp5 will return more mana per itemization point than crit would.

You are forgetting the flip side of this, when your FoL's land on an already topped off tank then yes crit is more useful for the mana back. If the tank takes some spike damage and for that boss you are one of the few small healers/hotters, then you will continue spamming FoL while other healers bring the big heals. This is where you want to be stacking healing as it gives more throughput and is more reliable than crit for FoL. I wouldn't even attempt to justify stacking crit just for the mana returns, as an FoL spammer throughput is far more important.

2.4:

Libram of Souls Redeemed: The bonus for Flash of Light has been decreased and the bonus for Holy Light has been increased.

Libram of Absolute Truth: The Holy Light mana discount has been increased.

They try to fix paladins going purely back on FoLs after T5 changes it seems.

Assuming you go from 2000 healing (Crit/Royal gemming) to 2400 healing (Crimson Spinel ninja), your average FoL will increase by about 203 on a non-lighted target (including Healing Light and 4p T6 bonus, but not including crit), or ~135 HPS. I wouldn't especially call it gamebreaking to do one or the other in the situations you describe. If the extra 135 HPS makes or breaks your raid look into having a Druid roll a Lifebloom on the tank.

As for the librams (specifically Souls Redeemed), I don't see it as a nerf, more as a bringing the libram into line with the actual effect of BoL. BoL is supposed to affect HL more than FoL, so it only makes sense that the libram do the same. This could also simply be a change in order to make the libram less valuable so its not as much of a pain to use something else for your typical spambot. We'll see when the PTR comes up though.

Just saying that some gear change "won't be gamebreaking" isn't really a viable arguement, as it could be used equally well if not better against any other gear changes. So basically using this argument is like saying "you'll be fine with whatever gear and dont worry about it" which may "work", but won't be "best".

Think about if you assume that during that 4 second spike you'd get at least 1 FoL on your target. ~400 more healing is like ~200 more tank HP. Not huge but it adds up and is going to add more to his reliable survivability than adding any other non-haste stat. If you assume you'll get a HL in too then +healing is even more of an effective HP increase. It's hard to give a numerical measurement for how valueable this is, but since you can only stack healing/haste to increase it and it only matters if you're not going oom (becuase frankly, what does it matter how many HPs your tank has if you don't have the efficiency to outheal the long-term incoming damage?), there isn't an extreme need to evaluate it numerically.

Regarding the libram changes, if anything it'll probably make souls redeemed even more of a "just use this" libram, becuase it'll probably still be the best FoL libram and now be even more HPS addition to HL over what it used to be. But the actual usefullness will depend how much they actually change the values.

You're right Galz, but I'm just saying that in the situation that was presented gemming exclusively for healing isn't a huge difference than not. When you're talking about 1 damage spike your 200 more healing won't matter. Its just as with Blessing of Sanctuary, on each attack its a very small reduction, but over the course of a fight it can be a large difference.

This is why I really don't like paper healing theorycraft.

I noticed another Pally nerfs in the patch note, IED would not proc extra times on Illumination gains.


It seems they want more Pallies to cast HL, since the libram affecting it will be buffed as well as the Kara libram.

I would like to know if you are referring to "Divine Illumination: The mana energize from this talent no longer has a chance to set off other triggered effects.". In my understanding, this line of the Patch Notes refers to the 41-talent in the holy tree, which should then no longer proc trinkets like Pendant of the Violet Eye. I did not find any evidence in the notes regarding changes to IED or Illumination.

I have a bad feeling that 'Divine Ilumination' is a typo (it wouldn't be the first time in patch notes), since it is not a 'mana energize' and they are refering to the 16-talent Illumination (60% of mana back from crits). If that is the case it would be quite a significant nerf to the IED - essentially ~20% reduction in mana gain from it.

Thanks for making this guide, its really helpful. I do have a few questions, though.

I used to be on raid heals, but due to recent events, I am in the transition of becoming the main MT healer in our SSC guild. From what I've read, it looks like the main heals I should be using is a constant spam of HL4/9, depending on how hard the tank is taking a beating, with the occasional HL11 and FoL7 thrown into the mix. Is this what I should be doing?

Also, one more thing. What is a good +Healing & Spell Crit ratio? Fully raid buffed and flasked, I believe I'm at ~1950-2K +Healing, 22% Holy crit, and ~350 MP5.

Thanks in advence for your input, and sorry for being a bit off topic....