Depends on your usual group setup, bosses and healing style. I think in SWP haste should be of more use. But on other hand you get enough haste on SWP items per se. I have 3 crit and 1 haste gems at the moment, but will socket haste mostly in SWP items yellow slots. Just to test if my calculations about downranking are valid in real situations where I don't spam just one spell non stop.

There is one case when crit is definitely better - if you have some problems with mana, like to smach 2 buttons (chaincast fol/reactive hl11) and don't like to downrank HL.

If you never have mana problems - haste is way to go since it increases hps more than crit and +healing. I usually use Zul'Jin mail chest with 40 haste on Kalec/Felmyst encounters and T6 with crit gems on Brut/Twins (lock tank healing). If I would ever have to do raid healing on twins I would use haste though.

Thanks for the reply, I think I am just gonna stick to spell crit, until i can make a decent spell haste set.

Thanks for the reply!

hey guys my guild is attempting m'uru so i was looking for some advice as to the gear that works for certain assignments.

have any of you been assigned to heal sentinel tank or the main door adds tank? our guild strat is a 6 healer one that has a feral tanking the maindoor adds without cc, and a warrior on the sentinels. the sentinel tank is by and large quite manageable but my attempts on solo healing the feral failed quite miserably, initially due to going oom and later on double flurry gibbing.

what are your experiences healing on m'uru, what assignments did you feel comfortable with, and what are the levels of haste/heal/crit/spriest did you push past phase1 with?

No cc at door adds at all? So druid(!) get flurried or even double flurried? Tbh it's either disarm asap/stunlock or wipe sooner or later. From my experience (not killed yet) balanced haste/crit gear rocks on door tank healing.

Hello everyone,

I know it's a change of subject but i would like your opinions about spellhaste. You probably already discussed it but i still have some questions.
What's so good about a lot of spellhaste? I cannot understand it when i see someone wearing Lightbringer Chestpiece, wich has three sockets, with 3 +10 spellhaste gems. I even see some holy paladins in the armory with only spellhaste gems in their gear.
So there must be some use for it.. i also tried it but i struggled with my casting and cooldowns. So i changed it back to healing gems and spellcrit.
At the moment i am farming Black Temple with my guild. Would it be good to use spellhaste there or is it of better use in SWP, wich we didn't start yet.
All info and all your opinions are appreciated

This only works if you have the latency that allows you to reactively cast anything.

With an oceanic latency the following strategies exist:
1. Find the max rank you can spam and not go oom.
2. Mix in lower ranks and uprank when you know there is going to be a spike (eg brutallus).
3. Follow a strict spell rotation.

Most healers I've seen in an oceanic environment tend towards 2. This is the reason you recruit healers who are raid aware. They monitor their environment and know what the other healers are doing. They will realise that they are suddenly solo healing a tank and will uprank and start dropping big heals on a tank. They will be aware of when there are lots of heals incoming on the tank and slow down appropriately. I've yet to meet a healer who can reliably cast reactive heals on tanks for the vast majority of boss fights.

Paladins don't cast reactive heals, period. Allowing for latency and human reaction time, the only heal we ever want to react with takes 2.5s to land even with Light's Grace up. In that time, the boss has swung again at least once.

If you want reactive healing, grab a Druid and order him to keep Rejuv on the tank on pain of death.

Light's Grace actually lowers the cast time to 2.0s base and can be dropped to 1.75s or lower relatively easily.

Definitely. My HL is down to 1.84 with LG up(which every pally should always have up) and at that point, reactive healing is certainly possible. I usually do probably 35% FoL, 65% HL. I usually use HL4 to keep LG up if I'm not already doing mostly HL and I use a lot of HL9 and the occasional HL11 if I need a big heal. And if anything, if you have rough latency, the spell haste can help counter-act some of that.

On the subject of reacting to tank health to adjust spell usage/cancel cast, I strongly recommend Instant Health Updates to counteract the unitframe lag on health updates. I don't think it's been linked here before, but it really is an enormous difference. It's also superb for arena and clutch LoHs.

Note that it may still be messing up SCT/recount overhealing numbers, but honestly the effect is more valuable than knowing your overheal.

If you also add that after unpredicted spike you cast HL 11 that would be exactly what I said . Chaincast mix of low-rank spells and then cast HL11 when needed (be it pre-cast or reactive healing after a spike).


I would partially disagree. Paladins don't rely on reactive healing of course. But till the moment you can spam HL11 non stop, you would cast it only in 2 cases:

1. There is timed boss ability and you precast HL11 (or chaincast for some time, like during stomp).
2. While chaincasting FoL or lower rank HL tank got unlucky hit strike and you cast HL11 to cover it. This is a reactive cast.

Also I assume that tank always have druid rolling full stack of hots and few LBs on him. Druid+pala combo is really powerfull. It allows you to use safely 'chaincast low HPS spell / reactive cast HL11'. Also by low HPs spell I don't mean just FoL. It may be even HL7-9 if you have a SP and figth is short.

Look, seems many guys here are confused by the words 'reactive HL11', that I used. I don't mean that paladin looks on tank HP and then choose what to cast every time he gets hitted. That of course is bad. But since you can't cast HL11 all the time, what you usually do - cast some lower rank non stop, say HL7 and if tank gets unpredictable spike you cast bigger rank. And this casting of a bigger rank after unpredicted spike is what I call reactive HL cast.

If it makes understanding easier, paladins react reactively (lol) on what spells to use while chain-casting. So it is not reactive healing per se (healing only after hit), but reactive spell sequence adjustement.

It's either that, chaincasting HL11 or just random casts.

For future reference, this is typically referred to as downranking or upranking in healer nomenclature.

You are not understanding. 2.0s is the time from you starting the cast to it landing. It is not the time from the damage being dealt to the reactive heal landing.

Reactive healing means precisely that - you have to react to the damage being dealt. Normal human response time is 0.2-0.25s, so you must add that amount onto the base cast time when reactive healing. Further, you can't even begin to react until your client registers a drop in the target's health for you to observe. That costs yet more time.

Your reaction time and latency will vary, of course, but you will never land a reactive Holy Light 2.0s after the damage was dealt. It literally isn't possible.

Hm, I though of downranking as a more general concept. But I guess you are right and one can rephrase healing rule:

1. Chaincast FoL/lower HL ranks.
2. Uprank HL when needed (spike occured or incoming) and then return to 1. when tank is safe and no definite spikes incoming.


This different naming still doesn't change the fact - as soon as you more or less chaincast, haste is good both for spike HPS and effectiveness (due to using more efficient lower rank spells more often). In SWP it is the case, preSWP - usually not (depends on healing style though).

There is a contradiction: if in usual situation (no increased damage) at the end spamming HL11 saves the tank, it means that he needed to be healed by HL11 all the time to save him through ecnounter. Or it means you hitted enrage that for Brut/Fel/Muru/Twins is not healable. And for Kalec enrage is part of the encounter so it's when 'big spikes incoming'. Also, initial big heal on tank is covering incoming first spike (first hit) as well.


This is also a part 'big spikes incoming'. Look, main epmhasis is on part 1. - chaincast low mana spells. Part 2. - uprank when needed is just logical step to complete the tactics. Many paladins on these forums ask about healing tactics and they do, in fact, use reactive healing or completely fixed single rank spamming (look about 5 pages ago). And I just posted simplified tactics, that is way better than single rank spamming and reactive healing.

Big spikes incoming as well. Like when tank is stomped or gets corrosion.

Why? I mean if there is no need and no spikes or increased damage incoming, why cast upranked spells just because you haven't casted it lately?

Here you are right. I fully support you in this statement.


Heh, you miss the point. You cast more spells, but you cast more efficient spells. Thus for same HPS you use less mana at the end. Also your fact (need of SP) doesn't mean that haste is bad. It just means that it is used badly. Math don't lie. Just math doesn't say HOW you should adapt your healing patter to have same HPS with more lower rank spells.

You know why many healers use haste in non efficient way? Because they use about the same FoL/HL ratio and overheal more. They just use the same ranks as they would use without haste, thus increasing their HPS. While 'haste = efficiency' when you keep the HPS constant by casting more hasted lowe rank spells. Only if you keep HPS constant haste becomes efficient stat. If you use haste to increase your HPs overall, not just for spikes, it's antiefficiency stat.

There is the same idea in 'haste=efficiency' as it was in '+healing=efficiency' in the first dozen of pages in this topic.
'+healing=efficiency' was based on the fact, that +healing allows to cast more FoL and less HL (while keeping averaged HPS constant) thus saving mana. But exactly the same reasoning is true for '+haste=efficiency'. Cast higher efficient spell (HPS of which is upped by haste instead of +healing) more often and thus save mana, while keep averaged HPS constant. In both cases math shows that you indeed save some mana. However, haste efficiency depends on your current healing stats a lot. Good geared paladin would benefit much more, since his lower rank spells are more effective compared to HL11 HPM.

If you're chaincasting in BT, then you're chaincasting Flashes interspersed with downranked HLs - typically HL8 - reserving HL11 for emergencies. You always have room to wiggle upwards, and the amount of haste required to wiggle down is prohibitive.

The argument that one of the prime needs for haste is efficiency (and thus effectively a bigger mana pool) is I think flawed. Yes you may be able to cast downranked spells thus saving mana, but with more crit instead of the haste, you gain more mana and so there is no inherent benefit from having stacked haste over crit.

Crit also has the added bonus of getting bigger heals more often which occaisionally will mean a tank is topped off rather than just saved whereas even with a high amount of haste you will still need a minimum of 1s to get another heal in to top the tank off.

The only real benefits of haste then are:

Reactive healing rather than in mana benefits.

A potentially more stable flow of healing as you will have smaller but more regular heals with less crits.

I usually use fh in BT, however, I found that mana was always limited when I use HL8-HL11. my haste rating is about 150. so I perfer HL7 than HL8...

Read previous page more carefull. I didn't write that prime needs for haste is efficiency. There was a question - will using haste and downranking save your mana by keeping HPS constant? The answer is yes, it will. There was also a question - what will save more mana: going crit and keep casting HL11 or going haste and cast HL10. The answer is that for fully T6 geared paladin (see stats above) haste will save more mana than equivalent crit, assuming (and thats important) that you want to have the same HPS for HL11 with extra crit and HL10 with extra haste.

For me haste-imbued HL11 is much better than crit-imbued HL11. Since I will have (a) quite higher averaged HPS with haste than crit and (b) more constant flow of heals.

Last benefit of haste that you listed is very good actually. All in all that more stable flow of heals will also have more HPS than less regular flow with more crits even taking into account that extra crit healing.