Just the fact that you're not reaching your limits of efficiency doesn't mean it's unlimited. But when you look at how gear affects your efficiency you look at the most extreme case of using all of it - why would you look at how an increase to your efficiency help when you're only using 1/2 of it? That's why efficiency calculations should be based on using all your mana, as it's prediciting what's the maximum healing intensiveness you can handle. Not what you're actually going to be doing.

There's a big difference between burst HPS and <healing done>/<fight duration>. I mean I find dividing the healing done by fight duration quite pointless as it has the exact same meaning as simply the total healing done. That's why I only use the term "HPS" for "burst" or "how much healing/sec I can put up during a short emergency".

The reason I talk a lot about efficiency is actually not because I find it more important than burst, in fact on most fights I've done I've also felt that my burst was noticeably more important although efficiency wasn't of a nil value either. It's more because efficiency is simply harder to calculate - for burst HPS all you have to do is take the max heal and divide by casting time...

For the efficiency calculation with crit of course you need to also multiply by the effective healing of crits, I figured that would've been obvious I just wanted to stress out that the maximum mana you can use due to crit depends on how much mana you have and not how much you used. Note that the effective healing of crits though is naturally lower than +50% per crit since we generally don't heal people assuming that we crit but rather assume we don't crit and a crit would overheal. Of course crits don't heal for +0% either as often enough we also heal people that could use more than the full heal and there crits wouldn't overheal. Finding a way to figure out or even roughly estimate the effective healing done by crits is something I'm still not sure how to do, but it's definitely noticeably lower than +50% per crit and higher than 0%.

The reason crit doesn't do anything effective for burst healing is the same as dodge doesn't do anything for burst survival. It has the chance to save you but it also has the chance not to. On average it'll help your efficiency (like dodge helps reduce the overall damage taken over the fight), but when bad luck hits, bad luck hits, and you don't crit nor does the tank dodge. No matter how much you reduce its chance to happen it'll still happen and burst gearing is gearing to handle that situation the best way possible when it does happen.

For burst HPS stats haste is quite noticeably better than +healing for any realistic gear level, however the efficiency loss is quite noticeable as well. If you really think you should just focus on total max burst and nothing else, haste all the way. Otherwise +healing is a great balance of efficiency and burst. The speradsheets would generally tell you to stack mp5 as they calculate max efficiency, and without massive mana support (shadow priest mostly) mp5 is clearly the best efficiency stat if that's what you actually want.


To sum it up I agree the main role for paladins is burst on the tank (if they wanted efficiency they'd take shamans/priests and keep paladins outside the instance to buff to be honest). Therefore haste or hit gemming depending on how desperate you are for HPS at the cost of efficiency is the best way to gem. mp5 is only a real option if you actually play a role where your efficiency is more important than your burst (possibly for a long najentus fight with low # of healers for example) then mp5 is the best stat, but this kind of situation is more of the exception rather than the rule it seems.


A bit about theory VS practice
The reason even the best paladins seem to gear completely randomly (and no, they don't all mix crit/haste gems, if you look at top raiding paladins you'll see each one with totally different rules that seem to follow pure intuition and often even having clear self-contracdiction!) is that you simply can't measure anything accurately enough to actually prove any theory. Even when you go to the side of the DPSers you simply can't prove one spec is better than another on WWS if only for statistical error not counting other things that affect your measurements. That's why you see people constantly bringing up specs that are theoretically proven to be pointless and back them up with their WWS as "proof". The fact is very little theorycrafting in this game is proven, simply becuase you can't prove it due to measuring the effect of stats and specs being impossible. Therefore people in this game are going to argue forever and the only way to actually decide on a way to gear is pure theory. In practice you will never know if that theory was true or not but you can at least use your knoledge of basic game mechanics to tell if you were at least going in the right direction to make yourself the best player possible. At the end your gear is the last thing to change the outcome of a fight, but it's still another brick that makes the wall.


EDIT: To answer the question "do I need more efficiency? How badly?" you answer by answering "how likely am I to need all my mana?" and not by "do I have mana left at the end of the fight?"
This should solve a lot of the people thinking that calculations based on using all your mana are wrong because of safety reasons, while the calculations are fine - it's when they're relevent that you need to reconsider. They're relevent even if you're not using all your mana as long as there's a chance for you to need to use all your mana. But the calculations should still be based on using all your mana as if you have no chance to use all your mana it means you have way more than enough and do not need any more efficiency.

I've found it extremely useful. Since we don't really have any panic instant heals except holy shock which costs tons of mana, heals for little and triggers gcd which makes it pretty useless in general witha few exceptions. The trinket however does not trigger gcd, and you can stack it up before pulling. That plus the 15mp/5 makes me very happy about this trinket.

Hello everyone

I've been reading the EJ forums for some info on new Paladin healing tactics, and appart some weird threads about how spell haste doesn't really help healing, seems many players noticed some changes for the Paladin. I'm asking myself the same questions and i just did a bit of practising with Spell Haste gear so best is to tell you about it :

Once upon a time ...

Usually the paladin is stuck to his spot trying to give constant healing to whoever is tanking, so most of the time it meant spamming FoL, and if tank didn't get enough heals we just asked to another Paladin to help, best FoL spam fight is Illidan with the Demon form, 2 paladins can keep it alive and 3 makes him safe.
A few other situations needs some higher heals, like when healing the Mage tank on illidari council, just watch the Arcane Bolts inc and start casting HL.
Most of the time, healing was about keeping my group alive and sending around some FoL, Mage gets aggro on trash ?, give him 2 more FoL and forget about him, he's gonna get 40k healing from the whole raid in a sec.

SO even if i had my HL Rank 4-9-11 binded and ready to use :

- I couldn't really use them for a long period due to mana consumption.
- I didn't need to use them 90% of the time.

I had to be reactive on trash, constant on bosses, Paladins wasn't meant for group healing, FoL was the only way to be !


But seems things just changed ..

After healing a few MgT heroics i noticed that my FoL couldn't stand the burst dmg some bosses do (in fact every boss in MgT can remove 2/3 of your group HP in a eyeblink, exept the PvP team if they don't aim the same guy), and my Holy Light was so slow i couldn't save everyone. So i just putted up some tactics where i didn't heal the hunter and kept everyone else alive ... Ah no , i switched my gear to get some Spell Haste.
- HL talent always up.
- Can keep the same amount of low healings on everyone with HL4-5
- If any burst dmg happens i can swith to higher heals and save the hunter

Same happened on Kalecgos, after many wipes where we brought him to almost dead , something was missing, my FoL could help on keeping the tank alive, but i couldn't spare a second for that hunter in my grp who just lost 6k, and the grp healer was already focusing on : 1-Keeping the 3 other members up / 2-Helping me to heal the tank / 3- He missed the portal so he could keep healing the other tank / 4-Whatever.
Tried to use some HL, but 2.44 cast time on the emergency heals just don't save anyone.
Back to my Spell Haste Gear.
- HL talent always up.
- Can keep the same amount of low healings on everyone with HL4-5
- Can keep a constant 6k heals on the tank ( HL9 )
- I feel safe to help the grp healer
- The grp healer don't need to focus on tank
- If any burst dmg happens i can swith to higher heals and save the hunter

Same happens on Brutallus, all of the paladins have to keep a constant flow of healing on the tank + Burst healings when needed ( -Stomp / -Healer gets burned / -Tank switching ), we had no problem on keeping the tank alive when nothing happens , but on every special event the tank dies .... Guid master started to point out something = Paladins failed ...
So just putted on my old Spell Haste Gear (whistle an old cow boy song).
- HL talent always up.
- Can keep the same amount of low healings on everyone with HL4-5
- Can keep a constant 6k heals on the tank ( HL9 )
- Can throw some high heals when needed ( HL11 )
- The grp healer don't need to focus on tank
- I don't have to save the hunter here


Simple Maths :

I can't make a full scale simulation of the paladins healing, and i won't even try, i'm just giving my feelings about how i handle my motorbike, and with SWP Blizz just made Paladin healing much more fun, have to be reactive and powerfull on healings, stop being a constant bandage stuck to the back of your tank, Heal and forget, the FoL can't handle the dmg your raid gets, so give some Holy Light, and give them fast !

At the moment i have 197 Spell haste rating, that makes my Holy Light cast at :
- 2.22 sec unbuffed (1% of the time)
- 1.78 sec with talent up (89% of the time)
- 1.52 sec with trinket, wich procs about 10% of the time (scarab of the infinite Cycle)

The gear set is far from perfect , but i still have 11k mana and 2450+ buffed healing with it (still missing a cloak / belt and mace to have all the spell haste pre 2.4)
I've been gathering spell haste gear since the first day i saw it on a item, for me it was the best way to upgrade the paladin's skills, didn't know if it could become usefull, and the 1.5sec GCD didn't help. So after a few tries i just switched back my T6 gear and sticked to it (At that moment i was aiming for +Healing and a freind of mine decided to go for +crit, tbh we didn't notice any huge difference, Paladins was stuck at 9-11% healing of the raid and couldn't match the 16-18% of the Shammies/ Droods / Priest- So whatever our choice, paladins in our guild was already maxed out).

But with the 2.4 patch, the new Spell Haste items, the GCD reduced to 1 sec, the fast and outrageous dmg u get ... Spell Haste is really the best thing that could happen, i didn't get 100% accurate feedback about it yet , but i won't be surprised to see paladins back on the top of the charts soon.

There are many other things i didn't investigate and i'm really curious about (like how the hell i was able to spam HL9 all the fight without running out of mana ). But i think my post is long enough and i just sayd what i thought about Spell Haste.

I hope this helped you a bit, sorry for my bad english, c u hf.

Pandel

What forces you to use HL4 over FoL with your spell haste? I mean if light's grace is about to fall off you can always do your HL rank of choice instead of a FoL to get it back up and go back to FoL until a HL is needed.

Nothing changed, you still FoL when you can and HL when more is needed.

And haste was never bad. There's a difference between saying "it does nothing for your efficiency" (and even that is only 90% true), to saying "it does nothing for healing" (which is completely not true unless your main issue is your mana efficiency which is usually not the case).

By definition if you can spam FoL through a whole fight it's just a too easy one. If you have to spam HL through it it's too hard and even impossible (unless it's very, very short). On a real fight that's challenging but possible you will need to FoL as your bread&butter heal while keeping light's grace up so you can toss that HL (or 5 of them) in time. There's no reason to cast HL when FoL is getting the job done (safely!) and there's no reason to FoL when it would cause people to die becuase they took more damage than you were healing.

At the end nothing really changed for healing except itemization went a bit more towards HPS and less towards efficiency by having more haste available for / put into it. Alongside came the 2.4 GCD changes which gave a slight buff to haste (I say slight becuase it's only an HPS increase to FoL which isn't really a bonus to your burst ability but only a small boost to your efficiency due to having to HL slightly less often). The role as a healer in general and paladin in specific remained quite the same even once you actually have enough of the new itemization.

Haste has no special favoring for HL (although you generally gear it to increase HL HPS rather than FoL as you don't use FoL for its HPS). Having haste doesn't mean you shouldn't FoL as your bread&butter heal. Not having haste never meant you can let light's grace fall off and fell good about it, and it's still the case.

I think one thing that is really missing in a lot of the discussion on if you have mana issues with 22 heal/10 haste gems is the regularity that you get a shadow priest. I am normally in the tank group for devotion, so I can't go full out +healing/haste I find.

Wow Web Stats, is our parse from killing Brutallus with 7 healers. I was tanking healing, in the tank group (with a resto shaman also though) for devotion aura. I was extremely OOM at the end, to the point of waiting for regen for FoL, went OOM like 5-10 seconds before he died. I had around 2500 healing, 230mp5, 25% holy crit, with an alchemist stone (old one, should be getting new one this week).

I think for people rarely in shadow priest groups need to get the most regen out of a few slots, but not really stack like 4mp5 gems, or even 11heal/2mp5. Some notable things are:
-[Insightful Earthstorm Diamond]: Even with change to illumination it is amazingly good. On the kill I got 58mp5! from it. I don't know who would think that is worth 26 healing, unless you are permanently in a shadow priest group.
-[Redeemer's Alchemist Stone]: 40mp5+ on average if chain potting, while having the highest heal of any trinket. Can't go wrong. If you aren't an alchemist I would say it is worth it to level it for it.
-[Drums of Restoration]: Inline with alchemist stone, 25mp5 for everyone in your group while losing nothing. The resto shaman in my group had these, but they do stack. Can also use [Drums of Battle] when mana is not needed. I am thinking about dropping Enchanting (once I make sure there are no more rings in Sunwell I want) and picking up leatherworking.
-Smarter Gearing: For example using [Girdle of Stromgarde's Hope] (with a royal/teardrop) over [Girdle of Hope] (with 2 teardrops). You lose little healing, but gain a fair amount of mp5 in return. 8 healing for 8mp5 is a good trade off in my book.

In that fight I gained a total of around 75,000 mana without a shadow priest (including illumination).

Uh, FoL does more HPS then HL4, and for most gear setup HL5. While also using less mana. You can get the same effect of of 100% LG uptime if you just do FoLx8 then HL5, if a higher rank of Holy Light isn't needed in that time. Not being able to watch LG timer is not a good reason to use HL4/5 over FoL. On that note, I find ClassTimers a really good mod to easily see your Light's Grace timer.

For fights like Azgalor where your HL5 might get interrupted just be smarter about it, knew you need to refresh it with like 5-6 seconds left instead of 1-2. Still get the benefit of FoL over HL4/5 most of the time.

FoL does more HPS and is more efficient than HL4. If you have the time for HL4 spamming you also have the time to toss in a HL4 (or any HL for that matter) in between your FoL spams. No reason to waste mana on constant less efficient less HPS heals just to keep LG up. There are people that swear by mid-rank HL for higher HPS but to be honest you don't really need that higher HPS for bread&butter healing and you might not even be able to keep up the mana cost (no matter how much crit you stack FoL will still be more efficient - and the truth is mp5 is going to return more mana anyway no matter what spell you're using, assuming the fact you actually need mana is independant of spell usage). To sum it up rank 4-5 HL provide equal to lower HPS than FoL for lower efficiency and aren't worth it. HL7-8 are generally not needed for consistent healing, and more importantly burn a lot more mana for not a lot extra HPS. HL9-11 will burn mana at a rate that you cannot afford to actually keep it up, but they're pretty awesome when people are simply taking more damage than normal (anything from tank burst to najentus' bubble bursting and multiple vashj's forked lightnings in a row on the same side).

FoL as an emergency is horrible. You're already about to lose the person in an emergency so he's already low, giving a small heal that will likely not even be enough to make him survive the next hit is not a good idea. Better to spend an extra 0.5s and drop a heal that's (more or less) 2-3X the size for 4-5X the mana cost to make sure he doesn't die. Repeat until nobody is in danger of dying, and after that you can go back to normal healing.


Speed of heals (keeping HPS and efficiency constant.
To add to it all we all know a 1.5s heal is nicer to heal with than a 2s heal, as your heals are coming in higher frequency and you don't have to cancel as much (as in, target doesn't need to have as large of a health deficit for your heals to not overheal).

Keeping HPS and HPM/mp5/etc constant, I actually hadn't figured out yet the actual numerical efficiency benefits of having smaller heals (as smaller heals = less overhealing), as well as the actual increase to tank survivability. While having faster smaller heals (again keeping HPS/HPM/mp5/etc constant!) is an obvious benefit, I'm not sure how much additional value, on top of the HPS/efficiency benefits mentioned above, haste brings. While we know the 1.5s of FoL is quite a clear advantage over even an equal HPS equal efficiency (hypothetical) rank of HL, how important is, say, reudcing FoL from 1.5 to 1.45 and HL from 2 to 1.93? I really can't tell wether that benefit is neglicible (as in, would have such a small effect on the equivalence points of haste compared efficiency as well as the equivalence points for HPS), or actually a significant one that makes haste better than theorycrafted so far. Estimating the value of that aspect of haste, though, will require evaluating (and giving it an actual equivalence value of +healing for efficiency and another for HPS or whatever) having faster spells VS slower spells while keeping everything else (currently calculated HSP and efficiency) constant.

Note again that this is only looking at the benefit of faster spells, ignoring the added HPS of faster spells as we already know the benefits of the added burst HPS - what I'm looking at is the benefit of having an equal HPS equal efficiency but lower cast time spell - for example a 1s cast 1k FoL VS a 1.5s cast 1.5k FoL. While the 1k FoL is obviously better (ignoring GCD minimum for haste), how much better is it and what would we be willing to sacrifice to get it? Same goes for the big emergency heals. Answer that and you will sort of know if haste actually has a noticeable additional value by reducing the cast time or that this effect is simply too small to matter when choosing your gear.

This section I've quoted above has spurred a question. Now Pandel, you're in tier 6 gear and it seems like you have trouble healing heroic MgT. How is a paladin in my gear (1950 +Healing, tier 4/5), or a paladin in the "intended" level of gear (kara/heroic gear) supposed to be able to heal this dungeon? I mean, I outgear the "intended" gear level of the dungeon by a good margin, yet I have a rough time even with decent crowd control. Am I the only one struggling here? Or are paladins just not fit to heal this dungeon without massive regearing?

MgT Heroic is far from hard to heal...

Not as easy as other heroics, but not hard, and im far from 4/5 T6...

Probably people that stack wrong stats are having problems with it... or thats my guess.

I wouldnt even look that far. I gem full healing/haste (I'm in crap ret gear atm though) and have no issues at all healing heroic MGT.

Having a good tank who knows how to minimise group damage and a group who simply.. knows how to play helps alot of course.

I guess this is what I was getting at. In order to heal a heroic instance I should get a set of haste gear, much of which drops in instances above said heroic, or is crafted using BT reagents? I digress; most of the fights aren't bad if the group knows what they are doing, but there are some combinations of the Delrissa adds, for example, that I have a really tough time with.