The crit, healing and mana from int are far from trivial, however I do agree it's too low to make int the "stack that!" stat. Healing still gives better returns per point of itemization, but you can't just ignore int when comparing items, as it does have a significant value. Granted 8 int is only (with kings and talents) 144 mana, 3.36 +healing and ~0.12% crit (~2.65 crit rating), which even added together is kinda less valueable than 18 +heal or 9heal2mp5, but it's not that much less if you look at the spreadsheets.

Also remember that if you go by the spreadsheet, you'll probably socket everything with 9heal2mp5 gems except for yellow sockets with a good (anything that helps healing/mana) socket bonus where you socket 4 int 2 mp5. If you go with my theory that more +healing means you can FoL more and HL less, though, then +healing is by far the most valueable stat to stack, and rarely will you socket something other than 18 healing gems in items. Of course my theory isn't totally complete yet as there are things I should still check (as I assumed you use nothing but max rank HL and FoL and ignored lower ranks of HL such as rank 9), as well as if anyone comes up with a good reason for why my theory is flawed.

Note that this is nothing new in 2.3. If you weren't using 4/5 T5 hasted low rank HL build your playstyle will be almost completely unaffected by the patch.

Bah long post, logged me out because I'm on my laptop and I lost it all.

Anyway - essentially even considering the extra stats given by int you are going to lose about 50% of your iLevel points to the +mana (the calculations came out to right around 4 points of "value" added on by the +healing and crit, whereas int is 1 iLevel points per point of int) That is the main reason I primarily focus on other stats other than intellect. I was also perhaps not clear that I was talking about looking for clear upgrades and the "best" pcs of armor available pre-raiding. In the case of a side grade the int values do need to be factored in, but when the iLevel is going to be changing by a significant amount chances are the +int on an item is going to remain about the same if not increase while you also upgrade the stats I listed that I look for first.

You did lose me at the theory part tho - I did do the calculations in relation to the Libram of Absolute Truth (LoAT) with diff ranks of HL. My final conclusions:

1. Currently it is more efficient to use HL4 if you have LoAT and your target has BoL active on them.

2. If your target does not have BoL active, leave LoAT in your pack and use FoL 7 if you are looking for efficient heals.

3. After Patch 2.3 (Tuesday) it will be more efficient to use HL4 if -
a. Your target has BoL active
b. You have less than 1360 +healing

4. After 2.3 it will be more efficient to use FoL 7 if -
a. Your target does not have BoL active
and/or
b. You have more than 1360 +healing

Higher ranks of HL past rank 4 did not benefit enough from the 27 less mana cost to make a large enough difference in their efficiency. Therefore I have left HL5-11 out of the comparison.

In general FoL 7 will be the most efficient heal you have available (Healed/Mana) while HL11 will be the most powerful heal you have (Healed/Second).

With macros to swap out your Librams based on the heal cast aren't [Libram of Mending], [Libram of Absolute Truth] still worth hanging on to? Free mana is free mana, right?

Librameister is an addon which will switch librams (or any item really, but it's made with librams in mind) based on some conditions: If you cast Holy Light, If you cast Flash of Light, If your target has Blessing of Light (or GBoL)

Because spell bonuses aren't calculated until the spell is done you can now get full benefit from all your healing librams. The switching won't incur any extra global cooldowns either, since it overlaps with the cooldown from your spells!

Librameister | World of Warcraft @ Curse

I already manage to simulate this behavior by adding a line of: "/equip Blessed Book of Nagrand" at the end of my FoL stopcasting macro, and a similar "/equip Libram of the Lightbringer" at the end my HL stopcasting macro.

I expect I'll change the Lightbringer to a Mending come Tuesday.

I could be wrong, but doesn't libram switching cause a GCD while in combat? This would make it kinda dumb to use in actual raid situations.

The GCD I incur when switching the libram in combat is concurrent with the GCD I incur from casting my FoL/HL, since they can occur simultaneously, so there's nothing to lose.

Yes it would be worth it to hang onto those Librams in order to switch them out. However Libram of Mending would be more valuable than Libram of Absolute Truth in most cases. Libram of Absolute Truth's bonus would be better if you needed to spam HL, but if you aren't going to be casting HL more than once every 5 seconds or so LoM would benefit you more.

In terms of sheer efficiency it would be best to have LoM up for the first HL, and then have a conditional /equip script. Once you knew the name of the buff a simple script could tell you it was active (by simple I mean copy and paste from WoWWiki) in which case an algorithm for the macro/script would look something like this

/cast Holy Light (Rank 11)
/script if(LibramOfMendingBuff is Active) /equip Libram of Absolute Truth else(/equip Libram of Mending)

bah nevermind castsequence wont work. What a waste :-(

Foeresh, there's currently no way to actively check for buffs in macro commands while in combat as far as I know.

The closest you could probably get would be along the lines of:

/cast Holy Light
/castsequence reset=10 Libram of Mending, Libram of Absolute Truth

That would cause you to equip the Mending for your first cast, then equip the AT for every subsequent cast for the next 10 seconds, at which point you would equip the Mending again for the extra buff.

I was mostly looking for pre-raid gear to shoot for. Either overall numbers that should be sought after before trying heroics/kara, or actual gear. The problem with Kaliban's is that it only lists paladin healing gear that is specific for paladins, but that might not be optimal and only takes into account drops/quests. lootzor is better, but I'm not quite sure what actual values I should be looking for. And that's the real key here.

Ideally, I'd like the same kind of targets that you need for tanking. For instance, I know that for tanking I need 490 def and a total of 102.4% avoidance. What kind of +healing/mp5/crit should you shoot for for pre-kara?

See with tanking it's easy because that's a special breakpoint where you become immune to crushes with holy shield up and immue to crits in any situation. In healing it doesn't work like that, as the better you and your group are, the less you need. Even if one would figure out a minimum value you would want much more due to people (and you) screwing up. Just get the best there is pre-raid and you should be safe, as if it's the best there is it can't be too poor can it?
Just as a side note I healed ramparts at lvl55 as a ret spec with 140 +healing (with VT support of course). The tank was actually a llv60 nub on top of it. So as you can see the minimum required stats for an instance is far lower than most people think - it's just that in the higher end instances the performance requirement will be extreme when you go with minimum required gear. And besides, a lot of the pre-raid gear is actually not very easy to upgrade in raids, might as well get it.

Since there is no conclusive agreement on the stat values to put on lootzor (or even a way to figure them out using a spreadsheet) it's impossible to give you those values and even more impossible to make a gear rankings list. What I'm going to do is to use the spreadsheet that tells you how much healing you can do with your gear, and value each 4 healing as 1 mp5 on top of what the spreadsheet suggests and create an AEP kind of system, rank up the gear by it and choose appropriately. Of course you could just go by the plain spreadsheet, which will result in a lot more heal/mp5 balance rather than the massive +healing which I support until convinced otherwise (since 1 EXTRA mp5 per 4 +heal makes a huge difference).

Please look at the spreadsheets and my posts it should answer a lot of your questions...

And I'll say it again, since we can't completely agree on which stats are best, we can't really agree which gear is best, either, and thus cannot form any list except for items that are obviously better which you should be able to see for yourself with a quick wowhead sweep or even use made-up guestimated values on lootzor.

Kalbear, there is no right answer to the "what stats should I have at X point" question... the priest thread's seems fairly arbitrary and is simply the author's stats at that point... but since we can't say "stat X is better than stat Y" for our class (as a very large part depends on playstyle, group makeup, etc) then you really are just going to have to figure it out for yourself. I've seen paladins succeed stacking healing, mp5, or crit, and I've seen them succeed with a massive variation in balance. It's up to you

TBH I would put the "goal" level for Kara at like 800 +healing. Kara is cake to heal as long as you know how to play a paladin in a healing role and you are specced appropriately. The quotes from the priest thread - um no. If you need 1400 +healing to enter Kara you are more than likely doing something wrong.

800 +healing should be easy enough to get just keying for Kara let alone working on reputations ect and shouldn't waste too much of your time going after a certain peice that you may end up replacing your first trip in anyway. It is also going to be powerful enough that especially for the first encounters you will have plenty of +healing. I say this with confidence as I just healed Nightbane with 940 +healing and finished 5k total healing back from the only other healer in our group.

P.S. I understand that Kaliban's does not list anything other than plate gear when it comes to healing. It also doesnt list the Veteran's Lamellar Bracers which are easy to get and by far better than the green bracers which are the only option other than heroic drops. However it does give you a good idea of what to get before you go into Kara. I would shoot for gear from that list, and if you happen to find mail that is an upgrade on a run, consider it. But in the end there is a lot of utility having a healer that is wearing plate and a shield so keep that in mind as well.

Prinsea: Is that how /castsequence works? I was under the impression the reset timer was more of a time-out feature and would reset to the full 10 seconds each time you pressed the button, and that it would go back to the beginning after the list was completed no matter how long it had been. Granted I havent looked too much into macros since 2.0 :-O

I think the lack of ability to actually decide which stats are best is less due to group makeup/playstyle/etc, and more due to not being able to agree on one way to choose gear given a specific fight, heck can't even agree on a playstyle.

I keep mentioning that I think after no HL downrank there's no other way than FoL spamming and HL when you need more HP/S, and that additional HP/S gives higher efficiency due to FoLing a little more and HLing a little less, resulting in each 4 healing being equal to 1 more mp5 (so if 18 healing is equal 4 mp5 on your spreadsheet with your stats and fight, it's actually equal to 18/4+4=8.5 mp5). Since I don't see all paladins stacking massive +healing, they obviously disagree, yet fail to come up with why it would favor +healing more than you really should nor any ways to improve the accuracy of this model.

Not to mention the crit->+healing conversion is totally unknown, some would claim it's pure HPS increase (1% crit = 0.5% HPS) and some would claim it would nearly always overheal. To me it seems like it would add to your HPS but not even close to 0.5% per 1% crit due to crits *often* overhealing as you heal your target to full anyway. Someone here claimed with his +healing gear that 10 crit rating is equal 1 +healing in terms of HPS, yet I fail to see how he took into account the fact that his normal heals overheal sometimes too - if you overheal 50% and 50% of the crit portion of your healing was overhealing, crit was obviously giving you the full HPS benefit. I don't think such numbers are realistic to have though, but I also couldn't find a way to take those (or other) numbers (not to mention a way to measure them properly on a WWS), and turn them into "your 25% crit increased your HPS by X%".

IMO the lack of solid paladin (and healer) theorycrafters is the main reason you see such huge variances in gear choices, saying it's because it changes based on group comp/style/etc is kinda trying to escape figuring out what's really the best thing to do - even if it's situation specific there should be "in this situation X is better, in the other Y is better", rather than "do what you feel is best".

a good site that i found for healing paladins is Paladin - Healing Gear Progression Guide | Tanzoa. Its a good list of easy to get stuff and it adds on more then just plate. Gives a nice run down as well as his thoughts on the gear. I used it to get my pre kara gear. I didn't exactly get them all but I had a guild that could carry me through kara.

Thats the thing tho Galzohar healing is much more of an art than a science. With DPS and tanking there are set rotations that WILL maximize DPS. However when you are healing you arent simply looking to maximize HPS you are looking to maximize EHPS and EHPM (Effective).

Fact of the matter is a main tank should be kept topped off as much as possible, and as quickly as possible. The rest of the raid should ideally be kept at full health as well but of course the priorities change. This means we cant simply stack +healing similar to how DPS classes stack +damage and go for the most powerful throughput. At somepoint our heals will start becoming more powerful than they need to be - and with illumination builds (hopefully every holy build in otherwords) crit chance will only compound this. When your heals are more powerful than they need to be in a fight you run into two situations.

A) Keep healing as if the heals were proper size and consistantly overheal.
B) Wait a little longer to allow the full heal to hit since you know it will be a larger heal.

Option B obviously has the most possible negative outcomes, crit streak on the tank, unlucky spell cast, special attack crit, ect. Many of which would end up in a dead tank, and more than likely a wipe. So while on farm content it may be ok... in general Id say we can throw that option out the window.

Now looking at A there dont seem to be any disadvantages initially. Ok so you have the potential to heal more with your heals, but youre still spending the same amount of mana and that extra bit helps if a crit or special comes through. But when it comes down to it if you are healing more than you need to be with FoL then every 1.5 seconds you are wasting iLevel points on +healing that could have been spent on regen.

It is for that reason that I believe in a "soft cap" for +healing. I believe that the "soft cap" changes depending on your normal tank's level of gear, the encounters you are working on, how fast you put out dps, and even what kinds of healers are in your group. Determining the "soft cap" is something that cant be done with a simple formula or spreadsheet as it does need to take into account all 25 - or as the case when I developed this style on my druid, 40 - players in the raid, or at least an educated estimate based on average observances over many raids.

On a positive note however - once you determine how much healing you need to do, and from there determine how much +healing you need it becomes very easy to make gear decisions. Stack +healing til you hit your magic number, then stack regen but not at the expense of +healing :-)

I agree theres no clearcut answer with the T5 nerf. I'm currently sitting on mostly T5 quality gear with 1920heal, 24%crit, 105mp5. My playstyle is mostly FoL spam, with some HL precasting/spam depending on the situation. I rarely go oom in boss fights, if i do it's because i switch to HL spam towards the end of the fight to burn off some mana.

Because of this i decided to use the values from the spreadsheet to get some "AEP" values based on raw healing, ie. equating int and crit to +heal. I set the illumination to 0talent points to try and get the true value of crit if u ignore the mana back. I also worked out the amount of healing u get from 1int. This is what i got:

1heal = 2.6int = 1.23crit, giving "AEP"values of:

1heal
0.385int
0.81crit

saying this, i don't completely ignore the mp5 and mana back from crit, but right now given my current healing style, i'm pushing towards more +healing. I ofc also switch around my trinkets depending on spriest/encounter.

I have to disagree with this. Take my situation, for example. I rarely get a shadow priest, as I have volunteered to be the pally who gets the joy of the aura bitch role. As such, I can't gear myself the same way as a paladin who gets a shadow priest; I *NEED* mp5 desperately. Most other healing classes have a much easier situation, as we have three PRIMARY stats to worry about, where other healers can at least make a choice and narrow it down to two (a choice between mp5 and spirit, even for priests and druids). Also, while high HP output demands require HL spam, for regular situations some pallies will still prefer to use high ranks of holy light and cancel as needed, while others will still prefer FoL spam. What if someone is in a fight that requires high HPS output but doesn't have a shadow priest? You still expect them to gear and react the same way as a paladin who has one? Of course not, they have to use primarily FoL, chug mana pots, and rely and trust the other healers to do their job. All of these require different gear setups.

I think a major point I continue to disagree with you on is that you genuinely feel in a given situation there is only one right set of heals to use, given your gear. I disagree, and because we don't have multiple types of heals, but are limited to only direct heals, we can use various ranks and styles based on preference.

If you can prove to me in a given situation there is one right answer, I will personally take the time to put my statistics coursework to the test and spend hours trying to optimize this. Hell, I can prove YOU wrong by pointing to any spreadsheet that models our heals. It's not like a priest where you can say "if its an AoE fight, spam PoM and CoH/PoH", or "use PoM a lot, its extremely efficient". We are constantly in a battle of trading HPS for efficiency, and the balance here depends entirely upon individual situations and fights. Also, I feel you assume too often that our role is purely MT healing, which is not accurate for many paladins (although I spend most of my time healing MTs).

Again though, being that this is the EJ boards, I implore you to prove otherwise to me. I'm open minded, just need to show me the way

EDIT:

I do agree more work needs to be done. For example, I bet the majority of paladins did not know that we have an innate threat reduction to our heals, approximately 60% of the untalented/modified value compared to other healers, per point. It has been this way since beta, but yet even though I am a new paladin (a blood elf), I bet 90% of the raiding paladins on alliance don't even know this (I should probably add this to the main post too...). If you don't believe me, try it out with a priest friend in between one of their respecs on any mob in the world. However, I still disagree with your generalizations, Galz.

More proof, actually: (SOURCE: WoWWiki)

I never said that having a shadow priest or not having one is the same. It's a completely different world. What I'm saying is that GIVEN the fact of shadowpriest: yes/no, it should be possible to determine which stats are best.

The reason there is only 1 best way to do things, is that, well, which way should you use? Basically unless both healing styles are EQUAL (which is practically impossible), 1 has to be better for a given situation, at least statistically. While there are a lot of factors that change, there can't be more than 1 best way to handle a given situation.

Since most experienced paladins that are posting here seem to be FoL spamming with HL needed (not counting HL/haste/T5 downrankers as those will be gone come 2.3 and basically go back to FoL spamming with HL as needed), I based my theory on that. Which means that the more HP/S you do, the less HL you'll have to cast, and then even if you don't include a shadowpriest on the spreadsheet, +healing still comes out on top due to the mana saved by using more FoL and less HL. While saying this is inaccurate is correct, finding a way to make it more accurate is what I'm looking for, not why is this inaccurate. I'm looking for what else needs to be taken into account to make the model closer to the actual game.

For cast-canceling of course you need a completely different model, which would be based on how much you would be overhealing at most (what tank HP deficit will you let the heal land VS how much it heals for) and how often he actaully reaches that deficit (as in, how often he doesn't get topped off by someone else before that happens). Since most paladins posting here seem to not be using this method anyway I kinda avoided modeling it, at least for now. Looking at the tank "avoidance VS mitigation" thread and the WWS linked there it's still hard to tell. Cast-canceling HL can really save a tank on 1 hand, while on the other hand the tank will be topped off less which negates the benefit of cast-canceling.

Bottom line is I know my model is completely pointless for cast-canceling (as you never cast FoL anyway...), however for raid healing the only difference is that you uncheck the BoL on the spreadsheet, as you're still FoLing primarily and HLing only when needed, which doesn't hurt the base assumptions of my model.

So unless your healing differently than FoL spamming with HLs when a big heal is needed, I don't see anything here that is more accurate than my model, although it can obviously still be improved as it's pretty rough atm (considering only max ranks and not considering the fact your FoL:HL ratio on the spreadsheet changes slightlyas a result of extra HPS, althoguh that I think is just a second order correction which should be rather neglicible*).

*The reason I say it's neglicible is that a small increase of HPS leads to a small change of FOL:HL ratio which then leads to an even smaller change of spreadsheet values, hence it's a very small difference (the effect of the effect is << the effect).

(Emphasis added. Some portions cut for response.)

The underlined sections are where I disagree. The bolded portion shows why.

A) Boss fights are parsable--determining how much dps a mob puts out pre-mitigation/avoidance is easily discernible to a fair degree of precision.
B) Healing output is exactly parsable--resists don't occur, and all the variables are known.

I think that, in the end, if we were to make a concerted effort to parse these raid encounters, or at least just the main NPC's dps, we would go a long way to figuring out how much hps we need to be able to pump out on the tank just to keep him alive, and adjust our mana regen accordingly to sustain that hps.