I’ve been thinking about the whole spellhaste versus + heal issue and crunching some numbers. This was partially covered before, but the discussion ended quickly. Please fix my math if you notice something wrong. I am not an excel spreadsheet master so I can’t make charts etc but here it goes:

Lets use 10% spellhaste for an example. To get it you need 16 gems worth of stat points (10 haste gems). If you get red gems then it’s a total of 352 healing (22 + heal x 16 gems).
So it boils down to 160 spellhaste vs. 352 healing.
For flash of light, it gives us +150 per flash and for holy we get +251 per holy light.

For Holy Light using an 18 second interval.
You will cast 9 unhasted spells with an extra + 251 healing on each HL, giving you an extra 2259 healing done (9 x 251).
You will cast 10 hasted spells with an extra +0 healing, giving you about 4800 healing done. This healing is simply the healing from the extra spell gained through haste.

For Flash of light using a 13.5 second interval
You will cast 9 unhasted spells with an extra +150 healing on each FL, giving you an extra 1350 healing done (9 x 150).
You will cast 10 hasted spells with an extra +0 healing, giving you about 2000 healing done. This healing is simply the healing from the extra spell gained through haste.

Haste seems to win hands down over + healing. The main issue is mana, which I do not believe is as big a deal in sunwell for the following reasons:
1. Tier 6 gear and above has enough regen and crit to maintain decent mana.
2. With mana potions on cooldown + oils the mana problem is further reduced.
3. Every single sunwell fight to date has such a large amount of AOE damage going out, making our regen even higher.
4. With proper downranking of holy light, the mana issue is even further reduced. I don’t see a situation where you will be spamming max rank holy light for the entire duration of a 6 minute fight.

Problems / Concerns:
1. Im not a math genius so I don’t know how to factor in crit between the different setups. My guess is that both setups will be affected similarly by crit, so it shouldn’t be an issue.
2. Spellsurge / libram swapping: I already run into problems where every now and then they activate a gcd, making me lose valuable healing time. With haste gear, the margin for the mod to properly equip the libram or spellsurge weapon goes down. (This is something I will have to do some testing on)
3. Socket bonuses: Things get tricky when figuring out whether or not to completely ignore all socket bonuses and go for full spellhaste. To be honest, most of our socket bonuses suck with +1 or +2 mp5 on a good amount of the sunwell items. Put a spinel in the bracers or put a lionseye??

Haste % is NOT equal to a static cast percentage reduction. It is how many more spells you can cast in a given time frame, not how much faster your spells are cast. You can find cast time reduction with the formula (cast time/(1+spellhaste%))=modified cast time.

Basically that means your examples would have to be based around 10 spells being cast, i.e. multiplying your +heal bonus by 10 instead of 9.

There is a flow in haste arguments that Galg and End mentioned. If you consider HL or FoL spam then yes, haste is the best stat to stack. But if you try to look, how much you can heal with your mana, then +healing wins since it allows you to cast more HL over FoL. However, we are not robots to know how much HL we could exactly cast and when I should cast HL to go close to oom at the end of the fight. For me, it's easier to achieve higher HPS using some haste, since it won't break my usual spell rotations. While +heal indeed allows me to cast more HL, nothing save some crazy intuition could tell me how to utilize it in such a way that I use HL as much more as extra +healing allows me. At the end it always comes down to scenario like this:

if (tank HP>treshhold1) then cast 'lowest' spell (FoL-HL7-HL9 depending on the fight)
elseif (treshhold1 > tank HP > treshhold2) cast 'middle' spell
else cast HL11

To utilize +healing to it's best you should tune you threshholds depending on your +healing, while +haste allows you to heal like you usually do. Thats why I rate +haste a tad more than +healing (though not much).

If mana is not an issue, then you don't heal for your fully potential and there is no need to get more haste or healing. If you want to compare how good things are, you should assume you use full mana. After all, there is no fight yet where you can spam HL11 non stop. And as soon as you mix HL and FoL, haste will force you to cast more fol and less HL to not go oom till the end of the fight, while heal will help you to up HPS by casting more HL, compared to haste gear.

Haste is better than healing (it's my subjective opinion) since it's easier to utilize it, and not since it gives more hps during 19sec.

You forgot the account for Healing Light (+12% to all spells) and 4pc T6 (+5% to FoL). It would make it +177 to FoL, and +281 to Holy Light.

Its not that you will run out of mana with haste, it is that you won't be able to cast as many HLs with haste as you can without. Since any extra mana can directly be turned into extra healing by casting a Holy Light over a Flash of Light. Anytime you have more mana then you can use your gear doesn't matter.

Haste does not work well with libram swapping since it does not lower the GCD incurred from swapping gear. So you lose HPS doing it with a decent amount of haste.

Yes, except that the more mana I have, considering my regen and what cooldowns I have up, I will increase the threshold at which I cast different spells. This leads to higher chances of my target living.

Why HL8, if you don't mind me asking? It's the highest rank of HL that has a downranking penalty, and even without the penalty it's got much lower HPM than HL9.

Unless there's something unusual about Brut's damage pattern or your tank is regularly dropping below 400 health, a 1:1 rotation of HL7 and HL9 would surely be far better? You'd save more than 6k mana over the fight duration and see an increase in healing done.

Well our tanks are regularly dropping to 0 health so I'll stick with HL11 for the moment :P

I have been stuck with a question for quite a while; as a holy paladin is it worth it to have certain BoE tailoring items crafted (such as the two whitemend pieces or the boots/belt of the long road)?

I hope anyone can assist me on this matter, because I would feel pretty bad if I spent 3000g on it and it turned out to be useless.

Thank you in advance.

With the new badge items and such I hardly doubt it'd be worth it to get tailoring gear made, not to mention theres definitely some nice stuff in Kara/ZA that would be as good if not better, and wouldn't make you look like a clown :P

While looks definitely shouldn't be a priority over performance, someone has to draw the line somewhere

Of those four items, only the Belt of the Long Road is BOE. All the others are BOP. The Belt isn't awful for a Paladin, but both the mail and plate badge belts are infinitely better, as is the belt from heroic Rokmar.

Generally speaking, healer items in cloth and leather tend to have a large chunk of Spirit on them. Spirit is useless for Paladins. This is why whenever a Pali healer wears cloth, God kills a kitten.

Bleh ... you're absolutely right, I was. Whitemend wastes a lot of itempoints on Spirit, though, so you shouldn't be wearing it anyway. And the point about Palis in cloth turning deities felicidal still stands.

But if the tailoring gear is not worth it, where do I start getting my gear from? Instances don't appear to drop any gear that doesn't have spirit as far as healing goes. This still leaves me without a clue.

5 Mans, Quests, badges!
Normal magister's definitely has a decent chunk of gear you can use, Karazhan, BoE blues, and some PvP items are definitely up there.
i.e. season3 ring, neck, bracers are all a nice start.
Theres a group quest in Netherstorm that gives decent healing pants, but theres a decent amount of healing gear you can just get from quests/AH that should set you up to at least start up Karazhan, and you can work your way from there. Karazhan definitely has a few nice pieces that you can keep, plus tons of badges. I geared up my paladin starting as ret and I've got alright healing gear now :P Though I did get carried because I fail at ret :P

You probably won't see "paladin" specific healing gear till you hit the level 70 5 mans, Shadow Labs and Steamvaults have some decent pieces, normal magisters, BM has a trinket, and so forth. You can look up blue plate healing gear on wowhead.com or wowdb and what you can't replace in 5 mans you can PvP for

Thats definitely(IMO) the easiest way to start gearing, PvP has nice rewards for solo/semi casual players

Use the PvP Ornamented set (just get honored with the major factions). You can use cloth greens, of the Physician or of Healing, or random quest rewards.

Work on Thrallmar rep to get the good ring + helm enchant.

Work on SSO rep for the outstanding necklace + fair healing weapon if you don't have a better by Revered.

Goto MrT, the healing blues there are outstanding in normal mode, however Normal is almost as tough as Heroic instances.

The PvP gloves, boots, ring, and bracers are great for PvE too.


Work on getting 150 badges, the Gavel Naaru Blessing is 553 healing (with enchant + talents).

I think the best advice here would be for you to look for a unit frame mod to your liking (PitBull at least used to be very popular) and display target hp missing. You'll grow accustomed to how much your downranks heal for fairly quickly, hitting the right rank will be reflexive. Also, if you still have your target frame at top left I suggest you browse the UI thread for a better placement, it'll be sort of weird at first when you put them below, but trust me it's better that way in the end.

Starcaller's are better, unless you use Blue gems in the Plated Legguards. The difference is small, about 15 points in my rating (using 1=+1 Healing/1.9=1 mp5/1.7=1 crit etc). Note there is around 27 stamina on the Leggings.

However, Void Slayer is likely the best upgrade from what one what have at that time, stamina is important at that level of gearing.

Hey, for my Rawr Healadin module I need to base stats of other races besides Blood Elfs for it to be accurate. So if any of you human, dwarf or dranei paladins can help me out.

You need to take off all of your gear and cancel any buffs and record what your, strength, int, stamina, spirit, agility, health and mana are. Also say if you have any talents like Divine Illumination that increase your base stats.

Thanks in advance!

Just a quick question, I saw that it was included in the original post that spell hast can reduce the GCD down to 1 sec... and yet since that remark everything says that spell haste is wasted on FoL because the GCM is 1.5 sec... Am I wrong to use all this new shiny za spellhaste gear on FoL, because according to what I've read the GCM is reduced by the same amount that FoL is reduced by... down to a minimum of 1 sec cast time... seems to me that if spell haste reduces the GCM then it would be beneficial to FoL as well seeing as that is the only limitation on quicker FoL spams.

It was changed in 2.4 that it can reduce the GCD, so you are probably reading outdated posts.

I believe Warcrafter can create a level 70 Paladin of different races. Alternatively, CTProfiles should be able to do this as well.

Exactly. I socketed mine with the two purple +11 heal gems from heroics.