The aldor proc is quite nice indeed. the scryer one is not worth much. So if you are Scryer i'd go for a different necklace, like the PvP haste one or badge/kara one.

Am I wrong in disagreeing with this? Faster spells do mean more mana returned, but it also means more mana spent. The ratio of mana spent : mana returned will stay the same (and in fact, gearing for haste generally means sacrificing crit, so it will go down if you're replacing crit to get the haste). As I understand it, haste scales with crit in terms of HPS (ie X haste will give a larger HPS increase with Y healing and 2Z crit than it will with Y healing and Z crit), but I don't currently see how it has any effect on HPM.

That said, I love haste, and after mucking around with various bits and pieces, I'm planning to spend about 200 BoJ trying to push past 200 haste as soon as the servers come back up. I'm simply questioning whether the "faster/bigger heals = more mana returned" thing is a bad way of looking at it.

Hi Zerodym,

Yes I know ring is crap for me and Ive been trying to get ring from Mgt but no luck so far and I think its also pain to heal for pallies. Maybe I should consider doing some pvp instead.

Each point of haste haste increases your raw mana consumption concomitantly with increased casting speed, assuming chain casting, zero latency, and cast time > 1.0 seconds.

Similarly, each point of haste increases the raw returns from illumination-induced Mp5 concomitantly with increased casting speed, assuming crit stays constant and all the other mumbo jumbo previously listed. So haste produces a raw Mp5 gain, assuming constant crit.

Haste has no effect on your passive Mp5.

Of course, you are correct that the mana consumption from haste will outstrip the illumination mana gain, but not by as much as a very simple model would assume. In short, thinking that haste --> more mana is indeed a bad way of considering things, but it is proper to consider the extra critical heals generated by haste. The easiest way to take this into account is to simply adjust the mana cost of your spells by subtracting the average mana return from illumination and then calculating your hasted mana consumption based upon that.

The problem with the, "Haste = more benefit from crit" argument is that currently on a lot of gear you have to drop crit in order to gain haste. Sure, you may get "more" out of your current crit percentage with a theoretical amount of haste, however you will most likely NOT have the same crit % when wearing a haste suit. At what point does it even out? What about other important stats you're losing?

It's been a while since I did theorycrafting for Brutallus healing, however when I was messing with certain sets I found that with about 15% haste I lost about 10% of my pure + healing, not to mention about 2.5% crit and 20-30mp5. My total mana pool remained about the same. That's a huge hit to my HPM! All of my healing gear, including my haste gear is T6 quality, so I wasn't going from T6 quality gear to T5 quality haste gear or anything.

Some people love haste because they say that faster heals = better chance to get a heal off before someone dies. Well, the same principles apply to the extra healing gained from crit really. You can't count on it. You could just as easily OH more often because of your increased speed (getting the heal off BEFORE the mob even hits), and although your 2nd heal will land faster than it would otherwise, you will be healing for 10% less than you would otherwise. You then may not have enough time to get another heal off before the tank dies, thus haste wouldn't have helped you there at all. Sure it's a crappy situation to be in either way, but wasn't that haste supposed to have saved your butt? The same can be said about slower heals, so IMO it's practically a wash as far as that argument goes.

All in all, you need to not only look at the gains you obtain from stacking haste, but also the losses you incur from doing so. Haste is definitely a very cool stat, you just have to be careful when calculating your benefits.

I agree with most aspects of your post but I did want to point out that while you might have to sacrifice some crit in order to stack higher levels of haste, in so doing you can slowly revert to using more and more Holy Lights. Assuming you have the two-piece T6 bonus, the extra 5% HL crit gain should offset any loss of crit percentage for spell haste. Unless, for some reason, you're trying to increase your spell haste to the 200+ and beyond levels.

That said, I do agree with your main points. Obviously you don't want to sacrifice every single stat for as much spell haste as you can gather (considering that the overall gains from spell haste lessen as the overall number increases). Nevertheless, you should be able to accumulate 100+ spell haste relatively easily without giving up too much in other areas. I myself am at about 100 spell haste and haven't noticed any significant losses in other areas contributing to an overall downgrade in performance.

If you're just starting out Kara, your main concerns would be MP and +Heal. Besides that keeping atleast around a 60-70 mp5 while casting. After Kara then things change up a bit.

Generally you wont have a lot of choice. Look for a good blue in each slot with +healing or +healing and mp5 and gems slots. The blue pvp peices from rep vendors will probably be a clear upgrade on any pre-70 gear. Their is a lot of great gear in normal MGT but unfortunately its not the most friendly place to Holy Paladins.

Edit posted before I was finished. You will be doing a lot of fol spam in Kara. If you have friends who pvp the S2 Mace from honor and S4 Gloves from arena are both peices that you could be using for months.

To kind of switch the subject, there was a bit of drama (if you'd want to call it that) in the WoW Pally forums about [Luminous Pyrestone] in yellow sockets. Reading that and going about actually doing the proper max/min math is leading me to resocket them to [Gleaming Lionseye], but there's a number of different schools of thought as to which socket bonuses to go for. At the moment, just to clarify, I'm tossing stacking haste out of the equation, as I'm needless to say not in SWP quite yet. (5/5 6/9 with the two lootbags that are Mother/Council expected to die within the week)

Needless to say that the PVP pieces that are viable won't have socket bonuses you won't really want to consider, normally being stamina or resilience, what are worthwhile socket bonuses to try and shoot for? Being from the school of thought that "if it isn't +healing, don't bother unless you need your meta," there are a lot of the easy one-socket pieces such as [Lightbringer Gloves] or [Crystalforge Leggings] that up until now, I've normally just been ignoring and tossing Spinels into. Is the answer really just based on gear level at the time, or should we always be going for healing-relevant set bonuses, presuming the use of epic gems appropriate to the color slot?

As a point of reference, some math is given here that helps find HPS with and without the inclusion of spellcrit, but also gives a rough equation of 3.61% Spellcrit to 45 mp5. Is that just done through a spreadsheet (don't say Rawr Paladin model)?

The season 4 (guardian's) necklace is better than the SSO necklace (stability>proc) for healing, and having more stamina is never a bad thing.

Get the spell haste version instead, since one day you will start wanting more spell haste.

Short answer: Generally for starting Kara, I'd go for the following:

+Heal
+Int
+Mp5

Avoid healing gear with +spirit, people will laugh at you. Don't worry about spell-crit for right now, focus on Heal, Int and Mp5. 1 point of Mp5 is worth a LOT. I'd gladly drop 200 gold to re-gem some gear to get 1 more Mp5. Get enough +heal so that chain-casting FoL keeps the tank alive most of the time.


The entry-level Paladin healing strategy is continuously casting max-rank FoL, while weaving in a (possibly downranked) HL every 6-10 casts to maintain Lights Grace. Reactively cast a max-rank HL if/when the tank takes a damage spike. That's about it. The trick to it is knowing when to start spamming HL.

Healing in a raid is much like healing in regular 5-player instances, it's just the margin for error is less.

Long answer: Read the first page of this thread. Twice.

Generally speaking,

1000-1200 heals, 80-100 mp/5, 8000-9000 mana, 15-20% holy crit will get you through most encounters.

Towards the end of gearing up with Kara + badge loot, you should hope to achieve:

1900+ Healing
10,000 Mana
25% Holy crit
150 MP/5 while casting

Non-raid gear that will last you a long time:

[Vindicator's Pendant of Salvation] Or [Guardian's Pendant of Salvation]
[Vindicator's Ornamented Bracers] Or [Guardian's Ornamented Bracers]
[Brutal Gladiator's Ornamented Gloves]
[Blessed Book of Nagrand]
[Lower City Prayerbook]

1. Council and Illidan are already fights where you could benefit from haste. Not because increased HPS (that is nice too), but rather because you have to move a lot and casting a bit faster after you finished movement could make or break the day. Also, your first Council kill would be in more than 10 min and first illidan kill - more than 20, thus mp5 > crit in this situation (assuming you don't have good support group).

2. From my experience int, mp5 and +healing socket bonuses quite often are worth it, crit socket - so-so. Though I am in the school 'get all healing relevant bonuses' and thus always try to socket items to get my bonus. Gear is more balanced then and if I need some stats more for specific encounter, I usually swap around shield(offhand)/trinkets. I don't want to end like some of our applicants - over +2100 healing in gear socketed with only +heal gems, around 85 mp5 during the fight and 17-18% crit. It worked for T5/low T6 perfectly, but hardly in high-end T6.

3. Socketing spinels was mainly justified by the fact that gem per se is better than other gems. Though almost no one compared spinel VS other gem PLUS gem bonus. Also, socketing can and will depend on your healing style and content that you have to learn.

4. That 3.61% crit = 45 mp5 is, well, bullshit even if it is 'justified' by spreadsheets. Point is, that it depends on encounter length and support a lot. For example - when I was in MT group on Brutallus my estimated crit to mp5 conversion was 1% crit = 5 mp5. While for SK gaming paladin with 2 SP in his group it was 1% = 15 mp5. So you can see that it differs in 3 times even for same encounter and fixed (more or less) encounter length.

Put it this way - if spreadsheet or your last 300 WWS say that 1% crit is worth from 1 to 51 mp5, it doesn't allow you to say that crit is roughly equivalent to 26 mp6. It is equivalent from 1 to 51 mp5 depending on encounter, full stop. If someone says that x crit = y mp5 without saying what encounter and support he assumes, you can just ignore that numbers, since for you it could be completely different.

I do have a minor bit of haste already, but longer fights like Council/Illidan were (so I thought) fights that you would want to mostly stay away from Shaste, as it would increase the HPS while costing yourself some longevity, and those are longevity-based fights if my understanding is correct. That and I was normally going for the mp5/healing socket bonuses, ignoring the Scrit. The only piece I was having some second thoughts about was [Crystalforge Chestpiece], thinking I may just slam Spinels in that too instead of simply replacing the Pyrestones with Lionseyes. I can understand the point about not wanting to have gimped regen stats, but I'm thinking ~125mp5 casting and ~35.5% HL Scrit is enough to start just loading up +heal (needless to say not including the meta/Redeemer's stone "hidden"mp5 values).

I will start SWP with my guild soon and i understand that spell haste is a good thing to use in there.
But can anyone give me some information or help me with downranking my Holy Light and Flash of Light?
I really don't know wich rank to use at different amounts of spell haste.
I focused on +healing and crit so far but i might change the gems in my gear.
Here is a link for my character sheet on the armory.

The World of Warcraft Armory

Any information and help on how to use downranking in combination with spell haste is welcome since i don't know how to do it proper.
Thanks in advance.

Well, starting from Council and till Kill'Jaeden SA would be worth a lot. In council fight, usually, mana is fine assuming that people dodge AoE fine (otherwise no mana will help you). In Illidan, as soon as you pass P2 succesfully, mana won't be a problem too. And even in P2, if you are not solo healing, you are pretty fine due to all that damage on you that means more mana via SA (and if you get dark barrage you get an 'evocation', usually it restores your mana to full). Of course haste trades some longevity vs HPS. But since we have no HoTs and instant casts (usually 15y on holy shock is not enough for your assignement due to spreading), each encounter where you move a lot benefits from haste. Nothing will suck more than cancelling your cast to move away from AoE and see your tank ganked meanwhile while your heal is about to land.

To be honest, your mp5 and crit sounds OK enough to experiment with any stat, be it +heal or haste stacking. The more balanced gear set you have, the more free space to improvise and try out different stuff. And, finally, find what suits you most.

1. Never ever downrank FoL.

2. Try to not think about FoL as viable spell in SWP at start. It is viable in some situations, of course, but you should break the mindset 'paladin healing is FoL spam with occasional HL' that is common pre-Sunwell.

3. Different people use different ranks. I use HL9 and HL11 mostly, many prefer 7-9-11, some use 5-7-9-10-11. The key point is to 'feel' the encounter. You will be assigned to tank healing (unless you run with like 4-5 holy paladins). And good thing about SWP is that fights have more or less fixed length. You shouldn't expect to kill Brutallus faster than 5.50-6min any time soon. As well as you sholdn't expect to kill Felmyst in 3 P1/P2 cycles. Thus you could 'plan' your mana usage a bit and see if you should or shouldn't be oom till the end of the fight. Main rule is as follow - if you see that you would end the fight with a big chunk of mana then do less downrank. You could 'save' mana for 'oh, shit' moments, but specifics of SWP is that this moment also means tank death in 90% cases.

Another key point is to know the encounter and boss abilities. If you are the only tank healer in Kalecgos encounter in given realm, you wouldn't want to cast some low rank spell or FoL. With 2 healers you could downrank in shadow realm unless tank is stunned and in dragon realm if tank doesn't have many debuffs yet.

For Brutallus fight you should spam HL11 right before and during stomp and on taunt, in other moments you could downrank. FoL is not recommended on Brutallus though many paladins use it as a filler - you want to desync with other tank healers so your heals don't land at the same time. This fight is a big 'teacher' how to squeeze maximum of available resources.

On Felmyst you don't downrank when tank gets corrosion debuff or there is incapsulate damage incoming. Downrank is OK otherwise. P2 is mostly FoL here and there.

EWhen you reach Twins you would be skilled enough in downranking to deal with your assignement.

I have to agree that barrage won't restore your mana if you are dry. But usually I am not, since it would mean that my tank die. It restores around 3k mana and that is good enough to fill my mana bar.

I also agree that stacking haste or not depends on playing style, support and many other factors. I have different haste in my 'SP' and 'no SP' sets. But you also should agree, that having a lot of haste opens a whole lot more possibilities for skilled healer as well as makes encounters like M'uru much more comfortable from healer PoV. There are different options for getting haste, not just gems. For example me, as well as many other paladins, use off-hand from Twins over BT and M'uru shields. I believe, that last SWP bosses were balanced around healers with some haste. And I really have a gut feeling, that without counting on lucky strike of crits having 0 haste on M'uru will be like tossing a coin. At least my relatively small amount of haste (around 160 with PvP trink) definitely saved us from a few wipes.

And last but not least, if you don't react on environment changes fast enough, I doubt you would be learning M'uru/KJ anyway. Unless guild has no recruitment pool to replace underperforming players. SWP requires fast reaction and I know a few nice and friendly people (good geared) who were banned from raiding because they are slow and could do nothing about it.

These are good starting-KZ ballpark numbers. 2 things to add:

1.) Don't worry too much about your Hit Points. The baseline stamina from healing gear that you get should be enough to keep you alive. Just don't stand in fire, and use your Divine Shield wisely.

2.) What the healer needs will vary wildly depending on the rest of the raid's makeup. If the rest of your raid is geared with T4-T5 gear, it might be possible to heal it even with the gear you currently have. I remember a late-night badge-farm session where I was healing along side a newly-recruited lvl 68 paladin with around 600 +heal. We made it through much of the instance without any real trouble. Keep in mind, one undergeared healer puts stress of the other healer(s), so don't go around asking for 'run-through' of Karazhan. But if your guild is looking for 1 more healer for a Kara raid, don't decline because you are not at 1000 +heal just yet.

Thanks a lot for the usefull information.
Though still one question, if u look at my gear, should i replace some healing gems with spell haste or leave it like this and wait for the haste items that drop in SWP? I also have the 40 spell haste trinket from the badge vendor wich is very usefull in my opinion.
But if i replace some gems, is it very important to keep the socket bonus or isn't it? I really like those bonuses.

As of today the gem vendor finally opened on al akir and i can finally get the gems i want.. The only problem is that i dont know what gems to use atm. especially the blue and yellow slots. I dont know how much haste i should stack instead of crit, if any at all, and if i should use blue gems(11+heal and 2mp5 for the bonus) or simply just use +heal gems in the slots. I have acces to most gear in the game and my stats atm unbuffed are:

2475+heal
153 haste
27.85% critt
539 intellect
113mp5

Before sunwell i pretty much stacked crit and +heal since i would always have acces to a shadowpriest, but in sunwell that kinda went byebye since you need more dps instead of those shadows.

I personally would drop all of your +spell crit gems and instead replace them with +10 spell haste. Perhaps even drop the +18 healing gem in your chestpiece for another haste gem. Another possibility is getting [Battlemaster's Alacrity] and using that instead of [Essence of the Martyr]. You already have a nice chunk of spell haste already so it shouldn't be difficult at all to get over the 200 benchmark.

Doing that, along with the gems, should put you well over 200+, at which point I don't think you need to go any higher. You'll lose a percent or two of spell crit and some +healing, but I personally view those sacrifices as worthwhile. I myself am aiming for about 175 and then will probably review my performances to see if I should maintain that level of spell haste or go a bit higher. Either way, your crit chance is already quite high and I think you'll derive more benefit from putting spell haste gems in those yellow sockets instead of crit gems.