With not being able to use rank 5 to keep LG up, I do see haste as being valuable still for those clutch HL's you need to get off. Blizz really hooked us up though with the free 15% haste whether people wanna complain about lack of an aoe heal or not. When you are able to cast ~1-1.15 second fol's I dont see how its much different from a hot thats yes going to do slightly more but take a few ticks to come to fruition and also not be any more spammable.

The HL glyph still adds +10% HL healing to your main target, I believe, which makes it definitely worth taking.

It does indeed. I noticed that tonight when I cast a HL on the tank while nobody else was in range of the splash.

This isnt STRICTLY accurate. The HL Glyph adds 10% of your effective heal to your main target - if your usually 10k HL only heals your target for 100, the Glyph will only add 10. It's still worth taking, however - especially given the lack of any other useful holy glyphs.

Hello,

I play a holy pve paladin and at the moment I have 140 haste rating, and about 20% crit with 1200 bonus healing (with the new 3.0.2 stats).

I was wondering if I should go for more haste or start get some more crit

My guild is at the moment on Felmyst in sunwell.

I started building haste before 3.0.2 when we were starting sunwell but with the recent "nerf" or the regeneration of mana points from Shadow Priest, and all the haste improving talents of the paladins, I'm wondering if I shouldn't replace all my haste gems with crit gems :s.

Anyone one could help me out ?

I can't see the logical flaw in your argument, but from playtesting experience on beta I've found that I haven't had to change my chain-casting style in the slightest. Personal experience tells me it is still viable. So you'll excuse me if I don't join you in proclaiming that chain-casting is dead.

You can argue your point till you're blue in the face but unless theory matches experience it is next to useless.

It's worth noting also that there's a small delay between the HL and the Glyph heal. If the target takes more damage in that time, they'll get the splash even if the original HL overhealed.

Andrast - I agree that empirical evidence trumps anecdotal, but you don't have enough experience to contradict the theory. The T7 raids are meant to be introductory - they're tuned to be easy. It's not all that hard to work out a scenario where our required mana consumption will exhaust us if we try spamming. Blizzard have said how they want things to be; if things are not yet that way, then tuning is not finished. I'll stand by that claim until something proves it wrong or right, but there's no real point to arguing it further until we do know more. Let's rest it for now.

Agree with Malleus. There was a blue post stating that they won't tolerate chaincasting anymore and that it wasn't intended playstyle. I am pretty sure: as soon as progress raid healers will use chaincasting it will be beaten by blizzard till it's not viable, like upping the damage till FoL won't be good enough, etc.

Also, T7 raids were stupidly easy on PTR. Unusually easy even for entry content. I am pretty sure, either their difficulty will by increased or T8 content will be much harder. If Blizzard cares about raiders at all and not only casual players.

Malleus asked to let it rest but my point remains:

Until such a time as reality matches your theories they hold zero weight. Currently there is no content either at 70 or at 80 in which a paladin is best served by pure reactive healing. Chain-casting has been and remains the order of the day and while I respect the logic of your statements they do not currently match my experiences.

It is extremely easy for everyone to imagine a hypothetical that backs their argument. As Malleus said there is little point discussing this until such.

However, giving out gemming advice based on conjecture that doesn't match reality is a little dishonest and the reason I decided to post. Haste gems may, indeed, be the best assuming chain-casting is dead. This is not the case, so you'll need to come up with a new argument for all that haste.

I am actually running oom quickly, the only part where i can regen is the flight part :s

Has anyone else been trying a deep ret healing build? I'm currently using this build: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft and it has been pretty nice. With Judgements of the Wise giving back around 1k mana up front plus proccing replenishment every 8 seconds, I never run out unless I'm just chain spamming Holy Light. Then, Sheath of Light not only gives nice hots to any target I crit on, but increases my spell damage by ~100 just from Blessing of Might. Plus you get some of the nice extras in ret like Repentance and Pursuit of Justice. Not to mention +8% crit to spells.

It's essentially just a ret build, but when using healing gear with it, it really seems to excel. I was planning on then using this build at 80: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

I've tried Beacon of Light, and between it only counting effective healing, and it's minute duration, I've found that I don't like using it. Using a ret build I haven't missed it yet. I have healed Karazhan, Zul'aman, SSC, and TK with this build and although I don't have any WWS to show I've felt that I'm contributing more then I was before the patch. Maybe some other people could try it out and see how they feel about it.

Didnt had mana problems in any fight so far in sunwell , however did use holy light quite often but not as often as before , and had holy shock almost every cd up and runing.
Did use beacon build ( love bacon ) , usualy i do fol, fol, holy shock, if crits = holy light , if not keep fol fol , holy shock etc. Found it more then effective.

Well, let's look closer when haste is good:

1. You are healing reactively.

2. You aren't running out of mana.

To be honest, after clearing SWP last week every fight is either 1. or 2. As we obviously can't chaincast holy light rank 11, the usual non-reactive tactics now is to chain-cast FoL-HS with occasional reactive HL11. Chaincasting FoL isn't mana demanding at all. In fact I REGEN mana while more or less chaincasting FoL in non haste gear in raids. So haste is nice to increase the HPS of your FoL (it's the best HPS increase per itemization point). At the same time haste decreases the cast time of your reactive HL11. Pure win.

Long story short - haste is bad or not really good ONLY if you have to cast HL11 too often and run out of mana before the fight ends. Do you know any of such fights in post 3.0 lvl 70 content? I don't. Brutallus would be the closest case but he hits for nothing now and fight is less than 3-4min. For the first time I haven't used a single potion on that fight and tank was never really in danger.

So, Andrast, can you name a fight where haste is inferior to other stats? All fights are doable with FoL/HS spam now with rare HL and haste is the best stat for increasing the HPS.

The real question is can I name a fight where a paladin is chain casting and running out of mana. Depending on your raid setup this can easily be M'uru. Healing a door-side tank can be tough as you're healing alone, and the fight can last long enough that mana is a real issue. I know of at least one guild where this is the case post 3.0.

But the reality is my argument wasn't that haste is bad. But rather you shouldn't try to say haste is best because you can't chain-cast anymore. You're doing yourself a disservice by advocating a gemming strategy when your theoretical model doesn't match reality.

If it matters at all I am personally against gemming for haste due to my Oceanic location. The benefits of haste are reduced when your latency can vary between 200-600. The ping can easily eat up all that haste you've gemmed and it is much more difficult to cancel-cast effectively. This means regen-stats such as crit, int would be more of a priority for me.

I'm probably missing something - but how does your latency affect haste? Given that with the removal of downranking, LG's uptime is drastically reduced, haste is a reactionary stat rather than a throughput stat. Bottom line - your heals will still cast faster when you press/click "heal", irrespective of your latency. With cast queueing and quartz, you can also keep chaincast-throughput going, again irrespective of latency.

I'm not convinced that cancel-casting will all that useful - even with the increase to mana cost on FoL, it would be just as useful to cast a FoL rather trying to cancel-cast to keep a half-cast HL ready to land.

With my latency which varies between 200-600 the portion of my cast time that is affected by haste is smaller than for a US player. Haste only affects the 2.5 seconds of Holy Light or the 1.5 seconds of FoL but I have an addition up to half a second added on top of that depending on my latency. This additional latency isn't affected by haste in the slightest. Furthermore since cast-cancelling is inherently less effective for people with higher pings we are unable to reactively heal nearly as easily as someone with a US ping. This means we must focus on regen stats to a much greater extent.

In short: reactive healing is much harder when you're playing up to half a second behind the server. This reduces the effectiveness of haste for Oceanic players.

I am not sure how much more haste from gear is needed. With Judgements of the Pure, Swift Retribution and Wrath of Air totem you are looking at 23% passive haste. Which gives you 2.03 sec Holy Lights, and 1.22 sec Flash of Lights. At that point I would much rather have the extra mana so I can be more liberal with my Holy Lights.

To be honest, even if you gem all your gear purely with mp5 or int it won't make a big impact on your ability to cast HL. 1-2 more HL in the post 3.0 fight, not more.

Let's say you gem 100 Int - five slots' worth of WOTLK green-quality gems. After Kings, that's worth 1650 mana and an approximate 248 MP60 from Replenishment. At lvl80 Holy Light costs 1275 mana; for the ease of calculation, let's say you have 36% crit for an effective cost of 1000 after factoring in Illumination return.

The first "liberally cast" HL reduces your buffer to 650 mana. After that, it takes 1m25s worth of Replenishment to get your second; thereafter, a further four minutes for each additional HL. Your best case scenario assuming 100% Replenishment uptime - which you will not get, BTW - is three extra HLs in a five minute fight, and you don't get a fourth unless the fight hits nine minutes.

By filling those same five slots with 8 MP5 gems, I would get 480 MP60. That's an extra Holy Light every two minutes, with no dependent variables. I shouldn't have to tell you that gemming for MP5 is awful - but when it comes to doing what you say you want to do, it is still strictly better than gemming for Int once the fight duration reaches seven minutes. If Replenishment drops to 80% uptime, which based on WWS reports I've looked at seems a realistic average, then MP5 becomes a better regen stat than Int at 5m30s.

You got some of your numbers about Int wrong, and you left some benefits of it out.

100 int with BoK and Divine Intellect becomes 126.5 which becomes 1897 mana. Which gives you 23.7mp5 from Replinishment and 4.7mp5 from Arcane Torrent. Over a 6 minute fight it gives you a tad less then 4000 mana overall, with Holy Lights that cost an average of 1000 mana (with 36% crit) that is 4 extra Holy Lights.

It also gives you 25.3 spell power and 0.825% crit chance which you didn't mention at all.

All of that for 5 gem slots seems much better to me then you made it out to be.

You're right, I did forget Divine Intellect. However, you can't rely on having more than 80% uptime on Replenishment, which brings it down to 228 MP60. You're thus only getting an average 3263 mana in six minutes, with a potential maximum of ~3600.

Arcane Torrent I ignored because it's a Blood Elf racial. If we were to get deep into the theorycrafting it should be footnoted, but it doesn't belong in a general approximation.

The additional spell power and crit I omitted for simplicity's sake. I compensated by rounding favourably for Int where appropriate.

Int might not be as good for Alliance paladins, but I am not going to ignore Arcane Torrent for myself since I am a Blood Elf. I broke it up in the calculations so if you didn't have it you'll know Int is 4.7mp5 worse for you in this example.

Where are you getting that you are only going to have 80% uptime on replenishment? I don't see why it wouldn't be close to 100% if you have the correct amount of replenishment givers (1 for a 10man, 2 for 25man).

You can't just ignore spell power and crit for simplicity, that is a lot of the power of Intellect. Since it provides half as much crit as crit rating does, while doing all this other stuff. Rounding favorably for Int is no where near close to making all of your healing spells cost 0.5% less mana and heal for 0.4% more on average.