GHL still won't be a super aoe heal simply because it targets completely random people. Include those that are at full HP. Next time you wipe, try healing the tanks up when everyone is bunched up for buffs. You'll see it bounce to full and less than full targets all the same.

Divine Plea doesn't get changed to % of base mana with next patch?

How does compare INT to other stats with that change?

Is Hand of Sac pre-mitigation (like old BoSanc) or post mitigation (like the old version was).

As in, a 50k flame breath that is 75% resisted (12500 dmg) hits my HoSac tank, am I going to get 3750 dmg or 15k dmg on my ass

From my knowledge, that's not a change happening nor will most likely ever happen. Scaling it with base mana would be a major nerf to Holy Paladins as our mana pool is much larger than the other 2 specs. The static regen from that will be fairly weak and continue to do so as we get more gear and get larger mana pools. Reasons why stacking int so popular now because of DP's current state.

30% of the damage your target takes will get transferred to you after midigation so you will be getting the 3750 dmg. If you read the tooltip, it's clearly stated. Hand of Sacrifice - Spell - World of Warcraft

I'm with you there m8. I haven't socketed just int but a lot of SP since I don't need the crit (I've gotten the extra 8% from the retribution tree). I'm also a JC so I have two +27 int sockets (prismatic) and the rest are SP gems.
I feel like socketing SP gives me more use of FoL (I really like the spell along with the crit from SS) and I crit my FoL's for just under 6k atm.
The reason why I socket SP isn't that I haven't got mana issues but simply that I try to smart heal as much as I can. I don't want to be standing and spamming HL while keeping DP up on every bossfight, just when I know it's necessary.


Spaming HL's makes me feel like I'm only depending on the attributes of my class and not on my own skill.

While this is fine, this isnt a valid argrument on a theorycraft forum. We aim to maximise the performance of our chars here, even if that means reverting to single spamming a skill (steadyshot macro, the old shadowbolt 0/21/40 spec, ffb spam, etc).

I'm not sure if people dying or going lower than they should will appreciate that argrument either.

Great that you're having fun of course

The reason I like for stacking int, though this may be more from a raid leaders point of view, is that while none of the current content REQUIRES HL spam, if a Pally can maintain it then it could be possible to drop a healer for another DPS, speeding the fight up. The example that comes to mine (mainly since I've spent the last week on it) is Sartharion with 2-3 Drakes up, I'm usually the only on healing the tank sometimes with a druid keeping HoTs up (if we have a druid online) which I don't believe would be nessicarily possible if you were FoL spamming, partially due to the sheer throughput required for situations like Flamebreath till Shadron goes down, but also with FoL spam you're actually alot less mobile because it will take you more casts to get the tank back up to full, and if a flamewave is coming that could easily spell a wipe. So by HL spamming I'm removing the need for another healer on the tank, freeing up either another DPS slot or easing the crunch on other healers mana since there are more healers for the other healing jobs.

EDIT: I'm referring to 25 man Sartharion, although I believe 10 man would be more healing intensive and only futher my point.

I agree with ozball. If you want smooth healing on a tank taking real damage - damage you don't experience without doing multiple drakes because things are so easy - you'll keep up HL on the MT the entire time. His/her life is not allowed to dip below 30k for more then the cast time of the flame breath or you fail as a tank healer. (slight exaggeration - but the tank dipping will distract other healers who have their hands full already). FoL is just too weak right now. I wish the new glyph boosted its HPS more then the 5% crit, or more consistently at least. I would take a larger mana cost/lower crit rate at the expensive of a 25-30% increase in HPS at this point.... wtb medium sized heal plz.

That isn't enough to spam HL (that means you are spending 1100ish mana every ~2 seconds) for five minutes, you would need more Mana, which means you need Int gems.

If your raiders want achievements, many of them come from having more dps which means 5 Healers or 2 Healers for 25/10 is ideal. I cannot do 5 healers using a lot of Flash of light, it is too weak.


A lot of classes now spam one button with a few other buttons a few times, BM spams Steady (with Master's Call and Bestial Wrath), Rogues spam Eviscerate (the good ones that use HaT), Mages spam FFB (with the Fire DoT and Pyroblasts), and Holy Pallies spam Holy Light (with a few Flashes and SS) and so on.

My point is though, that I can sustain my Mana pool just as long as you can while I gem for SP + Crit and you gem for Int. I can see why you mention that you can spare a healer if a pala can just spam HL but I claim that I can do it with my gear as well without gemming for Int at all. In addition I'm pretty sure that the point where gemming for Int becomes useless is reached pretty early in the game, and I have yet to encounter a boss (even Sarth with 3 drakes 10 man) where I need more mana which I could get by gemming for Int.

To me it seems that SP is the best stat you can get because compared to TBC the coefficient has changed a lot, for both FoL and HL. Crit is pretty easy to get, since it's on all good plate healing items. I don't see haste as valuable either because it's really easy to get haste from raid buffs nowadays. MP5 isn't even worth mentioning. My conclusion is that if DP remains unchanged the best choice to socket your gear will be SP in the long run.

Int is a good stat, but it's just like with hit for other classes. As soon as you reach the point where you never run out of mana or as caster never miss, you don't need to stack that stat anymore.

I've said this a couple of times now. If you can sustain your mana pool without gemming for int, and "they" can sustain their throughput without gemming for SP/Crit, then why are you both gemming for stats you don't need?

Your job is not to finish fights on 100% mana, nor to win the overhealing meter. Your job is to keep people alive, and once both your mana regen and throughput are sufficient to do that, haste remains the only stat with any effect whatsoever.

I am not sure why some of you are 'afraid' about HL being the primary healing spell. It's really the defining Paladin heal at this point much like Chain Heal. Also, if you never Holy Shock then it's likely that you aren't making the best use of GCDs/IoL procs.

Where FoL fits into this paradigm is indeed questionable, but it has its uses. That said, I for one believe that FoL needs a buff - not in sheer numbers but some kind of utility. Flash of Light could perhaps automatically come with the HoT component and really open up Paladin healing - with the kind of HP pools raids have now, it just begs the question why FoL when you can HL.. and if you can afford to just FoL, let Shamans/Druids/Priest handle it. You should be focusing on those who need HL bombs.

A note of interest to pallies who heal from the front, and who cast enough instants to occasionally autoattack a mob:

According to MMOchampion, waaaay down the page under "Retribution" changes, it says that JoW is changing from restoring 1% of _max_ mana per attack to 2% of _base_ mana per attack. Clearly this is a buff to retribution paladins, but how great will the effect be on holy pallies?

Does judging a mob affected by JoW (say, cast by another pally in the raid) return mana to you, the judger/attacker? I believe it is supposed to work off of ranged casting now, but I am not certain that it has been tested and verified, and I am unable to test it at the moment. If JoW mana return does trigger from casting, and assuming you judge only so much as to keep JoTP up, this change will have negligible effect. Instead of gaining ~250 mana per minute (~20.5 mp5) you will instead gain ~90 mana per minute (~7.5 mp5). As I said -- nearly unnoticeable in a pool of 25k mana.

If you like to stand close to the mob/boss and heal (as I have done on many occasions) then this may have a much more significant effect. Especially as a retribution paladin leveling up -- who healed the odd instance along the way -- I found that an occasional autoattack on a JoW-affected-boss made mana less of an issue. Assuming my healing duties let me hit the boss 10 times per minute, and assuming a 20K mana pool (reasonable for a retadin in off-spec healing gear), the change is more like a loss of 1100 mana per minute, or not quite 100 mp5. Perversely, the change will be worse as gear improves.

Overall I imagine that this is a welcome change for true retribution paladins, but for holy pallies (or even retribution/prot pallies in holy gear) who like to heal from the front, this change will mean either a slight or quite significant loss of mana regen from autoattacks on JoW targets.

Paladins who always stand in the back with glowing hands will neither, in all likelihood, notice nor care.

A few misunderstandings here:

When we say we "spam" HL, we don't litterally mean sitting there and casting one spell over and over for 6 minutes with no thought involved. There's still upkeep spells to the tune of 10 GCDs every 2 minutes. There's Hand Spells for every situation, there's SS to keep up and throw around with free GCD. What gemming/enchanting for int allows you is the ability, if required, to chain cast HL for massive HPS without worrying about not being able to finish the fight. Additionally, this increased HPS isn't dependent on luck (crit - which, by the by, is also an efficiency stat primarily - so saying you stack crit/SP is like saying you stack int/SP really) and is superior to any amount of SP-stacked FoL that can be realistically achieved.

As a side note, while both FoL and HL have great SP scaling when compared to other healing spells (because Blessing of Light was folded into the spells):

1) HL still scales much better than FoL with SP.
2) Scaling is not nearly as good as you might think, because SP is also twice as expensive on items as +healing power was.
3) The lion's share of the SP you carry grows baseline with gear upgrades. At most, a paladin in end game gear gemming int compared to one gemming SP would display what? A 10% difference in total SP? Less than that? Assuming 15 sockets (on the high side) we'd be looking at 285SP vs. 303int (240 * 1.15 * 1.1) + 61SP + some crit. So a 225SP difference on somewhere around 2500 total SP. Yes, your FoL would be hitting for 225 more or 340 on crits... but the extra int would mean 228 more int per divine plea tick, 1140 more mana every minute. That's an extra HL (1274 mana baseline, minus 5% for seal, minus 5% from 4 piece T7, minus 113 from libram) or 10k HP healed. To me the answer as to which is best to gem for seems like a no brainer. Int allows more flexibility. It can also allow for more free GCD but maximize your burst healing, not forcing you chain cast in lower HPS situations.

To those who say they already can sustain their tank assignment without need for extra int: keep in mind that you most likely aren't running the same raid setup as some of us int stackers are. Taking 3-4 healers to 10 mans and 7-8 to 25s isn't a situation where anything but FoL is likely to be required. If, however, your raid group tends to like running short on healers and heavy on DPS, the extra throughput you can sustain becomes invaluable.

Claiming no fight in current content requires HL spam is ignoring some obvious examples: Patchwerk, Sarth + drakes in 10s (and less so in 25s) or even Saffiron (e.g. if you want to forgo FR). Endoscient is correct, of course, in saying that current content is very trivial. 25 man content can be cleared in 1 week once you have the numbers and most encounters have very few 'gotcha' mechanics.

Finally, I don't see the problem with HL spam as a play style... No one apparently had a problem with FoL spam when it was a paladin's modus operandi in early TBC content. If anything WOTLK's paladin, even while spamming one spell, plays a lot more versatile then the TBC version of the class ever did.

Regarding JoW change: as long as they don't touch SoW I won't worry about it too much. It's more mana regen from meleing than JoW was in situations where I could make use of it and I keep it up for 5% mana savings in any case. It's cheaper to keep up via glyphing as well. The ones more affected by this change are going to be ranged casters, hunters and enhancement shammies.

Last, regarding haste gemming: yes it increases throughput, but it also suffers some serous diminishing returns and, strictly from gear and JotP I'm already down to a 1.5 HL, going below 1.4 is going to be prohibitively expensive rating wise and I won't be attempting it through gemming.

As the main benefit for standing at melee range is from Seal of Wisdom rather than JoW, this does not worry me. It is a small nerf to a situational benefit.

It doesn't have any DR, haste scales linearly. Gaining 1% haste, no matter how much initial haste you have, always means you cast 1% more spells in a given time period.

I am still going to be gemming for Int, since you won't run into DR on item budget. But I am trying to get pieces on it that have a good amount of haste on them though. If you use Haste food/elixir you should be able to get very close to the Haste soft cap (1 sec GCD) without gemming for it.

Yes, I was commenting on the fact that people expect better scaling because of the 100%, 165% coefficient values in WOTLK compared to TBC, when in fact the scaling is simply slightly better compared to situations without blessing of light, or nearly identical to situations in which Blessing of Light was present. Or at least, that was the intent. The new form scales much better of course.

Regarding my diminishing returns on haste comment: diminishing returns in the sense that there exists 1s cap on GCDs which creates, in my mind anyways, a diminishing return situation on haste (I believe that 1s GCD can be reached with haste stacking at this level of gear with raid buffs factored in, I may be wrong there).

Moreover, diminishing returns in the sense that I'm getting fewer seconds gained on a cast per %haste gained the more haste I have. So in that sense, faster and faster heals are costing me more and more rating to achieve the same 0.1s gain. Gaining an extra 0.1s on a 1.2s cast is relatively more throughput than gaining the same 0.1s on a 1.5s cast of course, but I was looking at it the other way around... I suppose from the point of view of a throughput discussion that was incorrect, but haste remains a two-sided stat: linearly increased throughput, diminishing returns on the better reactionary healing component of it.

FoL and HLs coefficients were both buffed by ~25% from there TBC values, on top of the change for healing -> spell power. For example most 1.5 sec healing spells have a 81% coeff, but FoL's is 100%.

The main thing you guys need to keep in mind (and most seem to already be doing this) is that the current fights are easy, and unless you're intentionally running short on healers and/or doing the hard versions of the fights, you're not really getting effective feedback on your gearing. You always should be gearing for worst case scenario (meaning something like "everyone take a crapload of damage all the time and I need to heal as much of it as possible") - as if you can handle worst case, you're most definitely also going to be able to handle something easier.

Easy fights give leeway with gear, making people to argue with each saying that the way he's gearing works great. And obviously it's very hard to judge whose gear works better when nobody is getting even close to dying, not to mention even if they were, gear doesn't make THAT huge of a difference that you'll actually be able to measure the difference between 2 gearsets that gem a bit differently.

At the end, some kind of combination of the efficiency values RAWR gives you (heal as much as possible with your mana in a scenario where people actually need heals all the time), and raw burst HPS, is going to serve you best. How much one is better than the other really depends on how bursty the fight is as opposed to how much total healing is needed for it. But either way int scales your ability to heal a LOT better than any other stat.

Messing with int stacked gear in rawr - raid buffed in slightly better gear then I have (2.4k SP, 45% HL crit, 36% Haste - 1.47 sec HL):
For burst HPS - pure HL spam, 95 item stat points (I used the trinket slot - custom items + battlemasters) gives:
SP: 178 HPS
Int: 65 HPS
Crit: 74 HPS
Haste: 216 HPS

In terms of mana regen doing pure HL spam:
SP: 0 mp5
Int: 78 mp5 (Belf - sorry alliance)
Crit: 51 mp5
Haste: -40 mp5

As you can see, Int and Crit give similar HPS. Using linear algebra - you can break down the bonus from crit into a linear combination of int and SP.
Basically 62 int gives 42 HPS and 51 mp5. 19 SP gives 32 HPS. So it takes only 79 itemization points of SP/Int to add up to 95 item points of crit. My point is that crit is a subpar stat (83% as good*) compared to a mix of SP and Int. This math is also based on pure HL spam, which is where crit should perform at its best. Other spells being cast lowers crits relative values further, and favors more Int.

Haste - well you can see the results - see page 1 for the pros and cons.

*This was based on Belf, for alliance the number should be about 85-86%.

With or without having Blessing of Light rolled into our spell effects, having gear giving +healing or +spell power is irrelevant; Blizzard made them of equal benefit per itemization point to us. The point I was getting at is that I doubt any competent healers are still stuck with some idea of +healing = +spell power; no one is is going "so, where are all my items with 40 int and 85 spell power?"

This was on top of rolling in Blessing of Light. which only effected the base amount healed.