In any problem where there is perfect information (as is the case in WoW), there will always be an optimal solution.

Adding to my above post:

1. We know how much DPS the MT is sustaining, even pre-mitigation with some easy math.
1a. We know how much HPS we would need to maintain on the MT as a result.
1b. We know how much minimum mana regeneration, regardless of source (mp5, pots, Shadow Priest), we would need to sustain that HPS.

How you get to 1a and 1b is customizable, but what they are is immutable for any particular encounter. Thereby, as long as your Character->Spells screen says +XXXX healing and +YYY mana regeneration, you'll be fine. That is the context that gear evaluation tools, like spreadsheets or conversion values, are useful for--situations like "Since I'm not at my needed +XXXX and +YYY values yet, what are their relative values?"

The again what would you define better - having the HPS but not the mana to sustain it or having the mana to sustain but not enough HPS? Both are bad, of course, but that's why I'm saying it's more of an "AEP" system forming rather than "have this and that +healing, then stack regen".
The soft cap on +healing imo would only be when spamming FoL results in them topping the tank off every single time, 100% of the fight. Unfortunately, I don't think that is reachable. If you're needing to ever HL to increase your HPS, extra HPS stats (+healing, mostly) will also give you more mana by being able to FoL more and HL less. And while you guys keep saying you disagree, you fail to give any reasonable explanation to why this would be a wrong model, as I think most people here agree that FoL alone will pretty much never supply enough HPS in any fight (assuming you're not extremely overgearing it, of course).

Also same question can be asked "since I'm already at my needed +XXXX and +YYY values values, what would the relative value of increasing these stats would be to make the fight safer/easier?" as after all if you have *exactly* what is required for a fight, you're probably going to lose 0.1s somewhere and wipe ;p so even if you're at the requirements there would still be *best* relative values for the stats to make the fight easier/safer.

Grr.. another good post deleted by my hand brushing the touch pad.

Anyone long story short - parsing the NPC's dps will not be hard. If you would like you can keep a record from SWStats not only of NPC dps, but of incoming DPS on the tank if you are more interested in single target needs. What will be hard is making sure that value is constant - or getting a large enough sample from the raiding base to give a relatively accurate number for NEW tanks encountering NEW bosses.

What will be difficult is converting that incoming DPS into the value needed as far as +healing goes. It is then that you have to start considering raid composition, group make-up (talking the 5 man sections here), player skill, gear, buffs, level of inebriation, ect, ect. You dont have to figure that out for just yourself, you have to figure that out for AT LEAST all the tanks and healers, and to a certain degree to all the DPS since you need to know how long you need to maintain your HPS.

If you would like to take on that project more power to you. I stand by my affirmation that it will not be a simple formula or spreadsheet you need to come up with to get this number, but if it will help people and you have the time have at it :-P Personally Ive used my experience based "am I too high or too low? How high or low am I?" process since it is a lot quicker for me and takes no extra time other than time Im already spending staring at health bars anyway :-P

The way I use FoL spam - and the way I hope most use it - is that I gear it so that MOST of the time FoL is all I need. Now when a tank is wearing avoidance gear, and takes a string of crits, or when we are on new content and our gear is being tested anyway, yes HL is needed to deal with the spikes. But that is just it they are SPIKES in damage. What good is the AVERAGE DPS over a 15 minute fight such as the emps when your tanks are taking spikes like they did with Unbalancing Strike?

There will ALWAYS be times when you NEED Holy Light. Even if you are in a normal instance with T6 there is the possibility that a Holy Light will be needed. From where healing IS a reactive role, and from where not ALL abilities are on a completely constant timer it is not possible to find the perfect healing rotation for a boss. I mean you could have one day where your tank avoided all but a few hits just on sheer luck. But then the very next day he could go in and be smacked down in 10 seconds. You could of course try to find the "perfect" rotation for the fight and only use that until it ended up working, but the raid's repair bill may lead to you not coming on very many more raids :-/

We have access to perfect information for a single possible instance out of probably millions of possible instances just for a single boss kill. TK only has 4 bosses, but how many different possible outcomes do you think thered be? How do you suggest a level of gear to someone going into there without knowing about the group they raid with first? Is it not easier to simply tell the player to learn how to play a healer and then go observe (1) themselves?

It's not as if the players asking for advice are giving the Paladin theorycrafters anything to work with when they ask for help. If they came and said they needed to heal roughly 600 dps not including spikes and that they were barely downing VR before enrage, then yes we would have enough information to help. Then again the ones that know those values can usually tell if their heals are hitting for too much or for too little. And with a class like a paladin where especially now it makes no sense to use downranked heals rather than spam max rank FoL, it is very easy to go from how hard you are hitting to whether or not you need to concentrate on +healing or regen stats.

I'm pretty sure that no system, even the one you just presented, will be perfect across every possible scenario. After all, certain baselines are grasped at least in a rough form, even without data. It is not possible to succeed as the main healer for Kara with 0 mp5 and +0 healing. A baseline is predicated even in the sample advice you offered as an alternative.

I think that's what we're after here, is the baseline.

Those individuals seeking assistance at least give the context of "my guild just reached kara, what do I...," or "What do I need for heroic instances at least as a minimum?" For these there is an optimal solution of: well, here's the bare minimum you need for the easiest instance, and here's what you need for the hardest raid run on [whoever].

I think the hardest aspect of this endeavor takes care of itself anyway. At the point where someone knows enough to ask the question, "we just wiped to XXX endgame boss, despite the fact that my +healing as at 1900 and my mp5 was at 130, what do we do now?" has the knowledgebase to answer his own question anyway, or at least, the understanding that any of these tools s/he uses have a margin of error equal to the variations between encounters.

The point I'm trying to make here is that there is an optimal spectrum of "right answers," and we can pinpoint that range using these tools--but never will if we don't try.

Ok I can understand where youre coming from now. But to be honest it still sounds like a lot of work for nothing. There are already plenty of resources out there for gear upgrades. The Armory even has an upgrade tool that actually works pretty well and shows you where it drops. I'm not going to argue with you if you really want to make arbitrary baseline values to enter Kara. But I will suggest to anyone who is requesting those values that once you have the values you still need to find the gear - so why not just skip a step and gear up as best as you can? Honestly the quickest way to find out if you can heal Kara and your group is geared enough to do it is simply to try it :-/

If you want an easier assessment - reflect on how much work it takes to heal a normal instance. If its easy to heal a normal instance think about how hard it is to heal a heroic instance. Heroic instances and Kara are real similar in difficulty as far as healing goes and how much gear you need. So if you are having problems healing normal instances - you need better gear or you need to learn to cast FoL more. If you can heal normal fine but heroics give you difficulty its a toss-up and you may want to get a few more upgrades before you head into Kara.

Don't forget that the DPS your group is taking and the time the fight lasts is very dependant on your whole raid, so it's near impossible to call out minimum values, as in a raid one player CAN make up for the slack of another. How much is required to pull your own weight? TBH it doesn't really matter - get the best stuff you can until your group can move on to something harder...
This also means that no matter where you are in the game, you're probably not going to be able to keep the tank up by yourself. You always need help, however the more healing you can do the less help you need - and THAT is what improving gear should be shooting for - doing more for the raid. This can pretty much always be upgraded until you can solo heal the instance which will probably never happen in a raid instance that actually has an interest to you.

The real discussion should be "what is best?" and not "how much should I have?"...

Anyway while everyone keep saying it's not possible to tell what's best etc etc, I've yet to see claims that make my theory of saying that the spreadsheets overvalue mana due to HPS also having a direct effect on your mana efficiency, beyond simply having the more HP/mana (which is modeled on the sheet). And the closest way to evalueate the extra mana from HP/s is saying that more HP/s means you don't have to HL as often.

Of course you will always have to HL, but with higher HPS (even with 0 efficinecy increase for either heal) I think we can all agree you'll be able to HL less and FoL more without people dying, thus saving mana even though your effeciency increase was 0.
Since the spreadsheet, for example, values 2 mp5 not much more than 9 healing and values 9 healing as quite more than 1 mp5, due to the HPS increase 9 healing seems to be beating 2 mp5 by quite a bit which makes 18 heailng gems the best, as well as changing quite a few gear choices.

Bottom line is that if you disagree with me saying that the HPS portion of 4 +healing is worth 1 mp5 due to FoLing slightly more and HLing slightly less, on top of the spreadsheet value of 4 +healing, at least give a reason why and how would you not get this benefit and how you would value HPS otherwise to compare it with other stats.

We all agree that given enough mp5 we'd be willing to drop a certain amount of healing and given enough +healing we'd be willing to give up a certain amount of mp5 (with these ratios obviously changing as you change stats, although with small stat changes those ratios would not change a lot). What needs to be done is deciding how the hell to find these ratios/breakpoints.

Also any possible (real) scenario I can think of where my theory+spreadsheet would not be true still favors +healing... Says your tank gets bursted every once in a while and just needs that HUGE HL that could never be big enough, then you may never have the +healing to FoL instead (well you could, with extra 800 +healing +whatever needed to make it big enough :P), but this situation still favors +healing...
And again remember stuff like shadow priest and buffs are taken into account on the spreadsheet (while I couldn't find a place for SP DPS you can just add him as more MP5, 200 for 1000 DPS etc).

Excuse me if this was discussed already but a quick couple searches provided no real answer; what I would like to know before I spend my badges on Libram of Mending if it is a seperate mana tick from your base mp5 from gear/buffs so that spamming HL on a target will overwrite the buff and never grant any additional mana or whether it works in conjunction with your current regen and HL spam would provide a constant 22mp5 on my target.

While I don't see this being particularly useful in a raid setting, where even raid healing I think it would be a pretty minor benefit across an entire raid, I think it will be a particularly nice addition to my 5v5 gear setup as we are 4/5 casters and 3x Spellsurge has already saved us several games and I rarely if ever cast FoL to maintain my critrate.

I think the 22 mp5 is to yourself... My guess is it would tick at the same time as your gear and not work like a DoT/HoT although you never know until you try.

You get the buff yourself. It works on rank 1 holy light as well.

Your "clicking early" is basically doing what /stopcasting had been doing forever, just that now you can do it without actually "/stopcasting", and can actually spam the button (while before, spamming with /stopcasting would result in everything being canceled). I don't know of any "added delay" to casts that wasn't already there due to your latency. Even 200ms is something that's hard to ignore.

Even after using /stopcasting for over 2 years to my estimation, I still cast faster with the new patch. Since with /stopcasting you'd have to take a "safety measure" to not cancel your heals while with the new patch I can just spam, greatly reducing the time lost between casts. If you weren't using /stopcasting the benefit of the patch is even greater.

I actually think people will use FoL even more as everyone should be seeing an overall HPS increase with the new patch.

For your macros someone already stated that you cannot check for buffs/debuffs so it's not doable, then again I have absolute 0 experience about mod making. In the meanwhile I'd settle for a /cast /equip macro for every heal and if you want 2 librams for the same heal make 2 macros.

Hrmm thats weird I notice once or twice spam clicking not working. I would spam click and it wouldnt let me cast even though i wasnt casting. I think some red message came up (i.e. another action in progress or something), I wasn't focus on the messages but on keeping the tank alive.

Pre-patch I used rank 4 holy light to replace flash(on BoL targets) but more often than not, I used rank 5 all the time to be able to sustain decent hps on all targets. I found that strategy made it easy enough to keep up with tank HP loss and maintain my scaling with the raid at a respectable level.

With the loss of haste from t5 and the BoL 'fix' I am finding that I am unable to sustain the same hps effectivly and I am really noticing the loss of 6% crit from talents. My current heal rotation is flash flash until lights grace is nearly out and then a rank 5 holy light to refresh lights grace. I am finding this approach does not sustain a tank very well. My FoL is hitting for around 1550 (before hlr4 was almost 1800 and rank 5 was about 2100)
My question is has anyone else found a heal rotation that they are happy with post-patch?

If feasible, try cast cancelling. I know it's a different approach, but it worked for me pre-patch, and it still works just as well post-patch.

(By cast-cancelling I mean, starting the cast time on HL whether the tank needs it or not, and then determining whether to complete the cast halfway through or so based on the tank's HP.)

I fall under the exact same boat as you, Arfea. I have also switched to a FoL spam mode with HL5 to keep LG up, and have come to the conclusion that the nerf was exactly that... unless you wish to spend an unreasonable amount of more mana, you really have to continue this method, switching to HL9 or HL11 if the tank gets below 70% or so hp. My guild raids with a significant number of druids, so usually I have one resto druid on the tank with me which helps a ton. In fights where the "sit down and accept it" solution isn't enough, like for Illidari Council, there is pretty much only one option: a shadow priest. It allows me to drop tons of HL11s on the main tank (the one tanking the ret pally) and in that way I do a very large amount of healing...(WWS parse, I was on the MT with Kogumai and Deep).

I guess what I'm trying to say is, you have to accept the fact that we have been nerfed in terms of our HPS output. Unless you want to spent an unreasonable amount of mana, you have to control yourself as much as possible and put a little more faith in your other healers.

Does anyone have experience with keeping judgements up as a holy paladin? I was looking at a WWS this morning, and I saw that there were two holy paladins keeping JoW and JoL on bosses. I can see it being less effective, or even unfeasible, in some situations, but I'm wondering how many people actually do it regularly, and the factors they take into consideration before deciding whether judgements are worth hanging out in melee range.

I generally will keep a judgment up unless staying in melee range will cause excess damage to myself or other melee. (eg. Gruul, Void Reaver, human Leotheras) I even went and specced for imp. Crusader, as we generally have 3-4 holy paladins. I think the real deciding factor on how often judgments are kept up is how much the ranged dpsers whine, though

With the new improved crusader being easy to get the melee are gonna cry too... That is unless they don't know what's behind the tooltip as the 3% extra crit isn't listed there (along with the 2% damage from sanctity aura).


Is anyone even trying to come up with a reasonable way to compare stats? Because other than the system I suggested which got very little construvtive responses/criticism, I don't see anyone suggesting anything else to even look at... Eventually for a given fight for a given setup there IS a breakpoint between stats and thus there is a way to figure it out. I know a lot of people like to go with the "but this works nicely" (especially in the healer departement as there is no descessive math currently to show them otherwise), but I was expecting more of these forums.

And again to all those who disagree with my HPS = more FoL less HL conversion I challenge you to find a better way to compare HPS with regen. And my base assumptions can't be wrong as I never heard anyone complain that "on so and so fight spamming HL doesn't do enough HPS" and never heared anyone complain that his FoL does too much HPS, which means HL will always be higher than you need while FoL will often not be enough (within a given fight), increasing FoL thus reduces the cases in which it is not enough and makes you able to HL less, saving mana in the process just for the fact you do more HPS, on top of the fact that if that HPS came from +healing, for example, you also got more HP/mana healed with your FoLs and HLs.
And if you're in a desperate HPS situation where even HL just doesn't cut it, you're stacking +healing, which is the same as you would do by my model anyway.
As for buffs, group makeup etc, as long as it doesn't change how you actually play (FoL when possible and HL when FoL doesn't cut it), they're all taken into account as my model is based on the spreadsheet.

I'd really like to see more responses and progress in modeling paladin healing (in fact, all healing classes...)

I think the problem in truly trying to attain definite gearing values for a healer lies in the fact that healing changes from encounter to encounter, potentially very much. You can't say the same for dps, at least not to an appreciable extent (yes, armor penetration is going to be slightly better on a low armor boss vs. the high armor boss, yes, crit is a little better than hit on pure aoe fights). Your values won't change so super dramatically that having 200 more crit rating and 150 less spell damage is going to be a good trade in one case and a horrendous one in another.

But healing is hugely dynamic. A paladin stuck healing the priest tank on Karathress when he first sees him is going to need a lot of regen- he won't realistically have enough +healing to keep up the tank, interrupter, and himself with just FoL. To the contrary, mp5 would be the best choice so he can throw out more HLs. On another fight, the same paladin would have no mana problems, and maximizing HPS through +healing would be better.

And the problem then becomes that gear and gems aren't liquid enough to maximize yourself for every fight. Instead, you want to have the best average capability for each fight, is the next logical step. But the problem is that you have hard constraints. If you're going to run OOM on one fight unless you socket and gear for enough mp5, you personally are essentially "failing" that fight. Then, as a consequence of gearing yourself to not "fail" that fight, you begin to perform suboptimally on the other fights where you'll have superfluous mana, which makes the min/maxing theorycrafter in you want to cry.

You also have the problem of how much healing someone has to cover in their raidgroup, and of what sort, depending on the class composition of your other healers. If you're running with 3 resto druids, the MT isn't going to need a ton of FoL on him, you'd be better off cast-canceling to keep him safe. That will presumably skew your gearing goals from those of pure FoL spam.

Almost every facet of healing can be changed so radically between different fights for a single paladin, and between different paladins who have different "normal" environs (i.e. healer comp, spriest), and even between the same fight for the same paladin due to changing environments (larger raiding pool and consequent variation in group compositions), that I really don't believe a spreadsheet or simulator can completely model a healer's gear needs.

Yes, you can say that wearing your mp5 trinket is better on naj'entus than eye of gruul, or that a mageblood elixir would be better than a draenic wisdom, and you can make that change. But most paladins wont' have access to a full "regen" set and "throughput" set to vary between on every fight where it will maximize their role. What I'm trying to say is You can't assign static values to the shifting nature of healing, because a healer's optimal strategy, and consequently gearing, can change so much.

I'm not challenging your assumptions, because I agree that you can be set up optimally for a specific fight, under specific circumstances. I am arguing that those circumstances are likely to rarely or never repeat themselves, making those static derived values largely pointless. You might potentially be able to find typical average values, but I would imagine them very tentative, and ultimately not much more helpful than the current "+healing is really sweet" or "crit scales exponentially" sort of philosophies that go around now, because your values would similarly be rather vague (due to their averaged nature over many different fights), and still run the risk of "failing" on some outlier type fights, and perhaps more crucially, unlikely to ever be performing truly optimally for a specific fight (which I believe is what you want to find values for).

Really, will finding the aforementioned average values help anyone? I know this argument will be countered with the "is it really worth it for your tank to use rare quality gems?" argument, but can you honestly foresee the case where having a paladin socket to one extreme or another will cause success in one situation while not potentially failing in another (that 2 more healing could've saved the tank vs. 5 more mana could have saved the tank)? Will having the averagely optimal stat distribution (which will be chiefly sockets or trinkets, gear choices are almost completely straight cut now that haste has been nerfed), likely make a difference in more cases than another?

It's possible I suppose, but it would take a huge amount of effort to make a sophisticated enough model (there ARE more variables to healing than dps) that makes intelligent strategy decisions, and I believe, ultimately, provide very little or no benefit. Most healer's stats simply aren't different enough that they can't succeed with a slightly lower mp5 or healing than another of the same class in the same role (simply due to there not being that much you can change in your gear setup), because healing is a value you have to achieve, not one that you have to maximize (maximizing healing is good and all, but miniscule socketing differences will NOT allow you to get rid of a healer for another dps).

Maximizing your raid with respect to minimum healing can happen through class balance, healer skill, and raid skill at avoiding damage, but almost certainly not due to slight socketing changes for your paladins.

What I'd like to know is, what do you think knowing decimal values to the 3 place for stat weightings will tell us that we don't already know? It wont' change the distribution of stats on gear besides sockets (which I have said I don't think can impact raid survivability much, if at all), and really is unlikely to change your gearing, because most healing upgrades are rather direct.

You've done some math that seems to show +healing is probably the best stat to stack. I agree with this (and I ought to regem), but it wont' be the best for every situation. E.G. As many paladins have noted, it can suck on Naj'entus if you do so and don't have a spriest.

Ultimately, I don't see any value to determining those dubiously useful stats in the first place, and I suspect a similar feeling may explain why you've gotten so few responses.

Cast-canceling - That's actually the easiest to gear... you're already assuming there's enough healing on the MT and are trying to prevent spike deaths, obviuosly you're not going to be healing much but when you do you want that to be a big heal (at least by your 3 druid on the MT example).

Healing the priest on karathress - Are you really really casting absolutely zero flash of light due to HPS problem? If you ever cast FoL because it gives enough HPS at the moment, it probably means having more HPS will allow slightly more FoL and a little less HL. If FoL is that low that you're never going to cast it on your given fight, then granted you have to redo the calculation of HPS->efficiency based on whatever ranks of HL you're swapping (say, less rank 11 and more rank 9). But I'll ask this again - do you ever go in to a fight where you cast abolustely zero flash of lights because you can't without someone dying as a result? If the answer is yes then I agree on those fights a different model is nescessary, and the stats it'll favor will depend on which ranks of holy light you're using, if you're even using more than1 different rank. Assuming of course HL is still more than enough HPS otherwise you're going back to "you need more +healing (or haste) or the person will die" and thus ignoring regen in an even more severe fashion.

Lack of shadow priest - easily shown by the spreadsheet what difference it would make on your stat choices, just like any other gear/buff change. Again if your problem is "I can't cast FoL at all" then I already related to it in the above paragraph. If you ever cast FoL, then my model should work fine.

Of course I assume the bursts are rather random and not "very low DPS... Very high DPS... very low DPS again" and never anything in between. If your fight has such "phases" then you need a different model, but then again once you decide how important each phase is to you, you will reach a good starting point for making a good model with the tools we already possess (spreadsheet + HPS->efficiency conversion).

Since some gear obviously cannot be changed, what you should be doing is go by the either the average, or if you know which situations are problematic, by worst case scenario. For example if every fight you get a shadow priest is easy, and the hard fights are the ones where you're left without one, calculate for no shadowpriest... If the opposite is true assume you have a shadowpriest, the no-shadowpriest fights are easy anyway. This is just an example of course and you have to define what is "hard" and what is "easy" and which scenarios are "important".

Spearking shadowpriest-specific for a moment, with my model taking resonable stats with no shadowpriest already showed +healing being by far the superior stat per itemization point. If you add any more mana you're just increasing the effectiveness of +healing making it even more significantly better than anything else. Bottom line is that when you don't have a shadow priest, assuming you ever cast FoL etc etc (see above), +healing still ends up to be the superior stat in all examples shown so far. Unless there's some rediculessly huge flaw in my model that nobody pointed out yet (at least not with a good example that shows it's wrong), the stacking value of added efficiency to all heals AND HPS increase causing you to be able to save even more mana mathematically just adds to be too good compared to anything else you can get in its place.

Why is this important?
1. To make life easier. No matter how far you are in the game, there is (or will be) an encounter you hadn't downed yet, and want it to be as easy as possible.
2. It feels silly to pay 50g on a gem when there's a gem that costs exactly the same that's simply better. Not to mention if it's cheaper I'd really feel like an idiot (vendor gems over green gems anyone? ). Anyway the point here is to maximize, and you don't do it by saying "hmm this looks cool I'll take that".
3. Every item choice in this game is a small difference (almost). Even upgrading exalted sha'tar to S2 weapon will probably not increase your output by more than a few %s. Of course a few %s on these forums is treated as a lot - and for a good reason - it is very hard to upgrade gear to give an increase of a few %s. Eventually it adds up, even if it's *only* gem choices (and it's really not, there are a few slots at least at some points in the game when you do have a choice), the gems from your helm, shoudlers etc etc add up to a difference you'd actually notice. Heck if you don't agree there's a (practical) difference between a 9heal2mp5 gem to 18 heal gem I can say you might as well socket a 13 heal gem, maybe 4 healing is better than 2 mp5? (in fact, off the top of my head it ends up being pretty close by my model with the gear I was looking at) You could just use green gems and be fine. But we're not trying to be "fine", we're trying to be the best we can be. At least I am.

Also if you're looking for a definition of "what is best?", I think the best way to definie it would be is that 1. Your assignment doesn't die and 2. you're requiring minimum help from others. This standard of "best" means no matter how good your gear is it can always be better, which settles with reality pretty well imo

Another thing to note is that if I would say "hmm by this model 18 heal gems are slightly better than on the spreadsheet" I wouldn't make such a big deal out of it. But what I am getting is that 18 healing gems are worth much much more than 9 heal 2 mp5 gems (aka 9 heal worth a lot more than 2 mp5 since it also gives 2.25 mp5 on top of what the spreadsheet tells you it's worth). This is a big difference that completely changes any concept people have on socketing their gear, and even often sends you to ignore +healing socket bonuses just to socket +healing gems...

Remember this is about maximizing healing done with your mana, meaning "going oom" is already taken into account, and the result of my model is that you will do more healing with +healing than other stats even when mana is an issue, as lowering +healing and increasing mp5 will actually increase your mana consumption by more than the mana you gained by making the swap.

But you're arguing exactly what I said you would (especially the vendor gems bit), when I explained why I think those arguments hold no water. You said yourself you thought that "you can find the optimal stat distribution for a given fight," and that it was getting as much +healing as possible for your specific example. I argued that the same would not hold true for absolutely every fight, because as on my karathress example, and the more severe naj'entus example, the additional +healing efficiency won't be enough to counteract the value of mp5, because, in my own experience, I've run oom NOT stacking MP5, but rather healing, on those very fights.

Let me explain the Naj'entus example further. Every healer is busy keeping up targets-I have to assume my heal is the only heal that will hit, and that my heal will be the one that has to get my target to full in time. If a target is down 3k, I want to cast my 3k HL, and top them off in 2 seconds, instead of spending 3 seconds healing 3.5k. Yes, I throw FoLs, of course I do, but I can't guarantee they will heal the right amount in the right amount of time, which is absolutely necessary in the situation (tank healing IS different from this, because you aren't probably the only one throwing the heal), and you're using enough HL to take a shitload of mana, which requires MP5, not slightly more efficient FoLs, because your throughput is the fact that you're using HL. When you need a lot of mana to do a lot of HL, because HL is so far superior to FoL in the situation, your model does not work.

And that's what I'm getting at- your model can't work in every (or even most) situations, and so it's values aren't absolute, and you are NOT maximizing yourself in every situation, because you can fail due to your gearing. Are you truly making yourself the best, and making everything the easiest for yourself, if you can run OOM or fail to put enough throughput in any fight, when a slightly more regen heavy gearing attitude could potentially perform sufficiently for both?

That last point is what I was getting at through the whole post, and is the meat of the discussion. What is min/maxing more? Being the best you possibly can on most content, and potentially unable to keep up in a few situations (which pure +healing will result in from my experience), or slightly worse on most content, but able to do all jobs (because healing is a required number, not something that must always be maximized-my earlier point which you mistook as not maximizing at all)? Personally, I think you need to be "fine" at everything before being "better" at some of it, and not "fine" in other parts. If your gearing model achieves just that (which my experience points to not being the case 100% of the time), then it is without a doubt correct, hell, maybe I just suck.

I never argued for using the worse alternative because it was "fine", I argued for using the slightly worse alternative in one situation where it detracted from being "best" so I could be fine everywhere. In fact, your understanding of best agrees with this point: that your assignment can never die. Please don't attempt to paint me as an ignorant slacker who isn't trying to maximize himself because I think you need to succeed everywhere instead of slightly surpassing the healing assignments on a specific fight.

Edit: I must also apologize for miswording my criticism of your model. I do not believe it is inaccurate, but rather that it cannot make +healing the superior choice in every raiding situation. However, it would please me infinitely if this were the case, and you were able to prove it by analyzing several WWS parses of various paladins for pretty much every fight.