I'm having trouble understanding the value of mp5. It seems to me that you would only ever want more mp5 if you were running out of mana in the middle of fights. I find that both Divine Plea and Replenish are more than enough to refill my mana pool during the course of an encounter. I prefer to stack Crit and SP on my gear, favoring Crit, and avoid mp5 to the point of utter exclusion in my ideal gear set. I can understand stacking Int, because it offers so much in that it is the "Jack of all trades" stat for Holy Paladins. I also understand the reason to stack crit is partially for mana return, which is what mp5 obviously offers, but that is all mp5 offers and in a not fun way (not fun in my opinion, you may find mp5 super fun). Crit, however, also increases you healing by way of larger heals, and it offers a proc which may only be on Holy Shock, but I find it both fun and useful. I guess the question also is, with time being a factor in all calculations, do we measure on an infinite time line which stat is optimal, or do we limit time to the enrage timers of bosses? A friend once told me, "If your last spell goes off leaving you at 0 mana at the same moment the boss dies, you did your job".

Maybe it all boils down to a simple difference in play styles and play preferences, but I would really like to be enlightened as to why people choose mp5 over SP, mp5 over Crit, mp5 over anything. That said, aslong as the boss goes down at the end of the day, that's all that matters.

This is probably obvious and already mentioned previously, but the reason why MP5 "died" is due to its lack of scaling with talents, unlike its counterparts (Crit who scales geometrically with itself, and Int which scales with TWO talents and a key regen skill).

My opinion of MP5 atm is that it is completely irrelevant for a Holy Paladin, as regen can be sought by stacking other stats. The base crit level for an entry level geared paladin is already much MUCH higher than when BC first started (Due to the 8% crit from ret tree as well as the better entry-level itemisation compared to BC counterparts), whereas in BC, MP5 was generally a necessity for paladins sitting at <20% crit and the absence of DIvine Plea.

Mp5 will actually scale with crit... As mp5 provides more mana to cast more crits and return more mana.

Its definitely not even close to worth it, but its untrue that there is not any scaling.

I.E. if you got 50% flash crit... 100% with sacred shield up, you will get more mana returned from stacking mp5 at this point than you would int or additional crit.

shrug.

It's not that mp5 is bad, it's just that int is so great. According to rawr, I get similar values per item value (for example, 11 mp5 vs 27 crit rating) for mp5 and crit, with crit slightly better (and when I had a bit worse gear, mp5 was slightly better). So I wouldn't blindly take gear with crit over gear with mp5, but rather look at how much mp5 am I really trading for how much crit. Of course, since int is about 2.7X better than crit for me, when gemming it's really a no-brainer, as well as items of the same level where one has noticeably more int than the other.

In BC mp5 used to actually give you quite more efficiency than crit, or at least a little more than crit if you had crazy buffs (shadow priest+full totems). Now though, since you have so much more mana with DP, replenishment and a huge base mana pool, multiplying your available mana with crit actually gives similar returns to adding to your mana with mp5 - based on rawr values.

Bottom line is that it's not that mp5 (or crit for that matter) is dead, it's just that int scales so way much better than anything else right now, that there's really no question what to look at. The only situation where I would actually socket a non-16 int gem in something would be if it was a red socket with int or at least 5 spell damage for the socket bonus (and of course meeting the meta gem requirements, and everything I said here becomes moot with JC).

Though there must be a cap to this somewhere, that cap comes as diminishing returns on mana regen start to kick in - so MP5 will be worth 0 at that point.

Well, the cap is when you are spamming Holy Light 100% of the time you are not casting other buffs (BoL, JotP, etc). Once you hit that cap though, any additional mana stat (of any type) is worth 0.

Some Profession changes for the OP:
Herbalism: Fire Seed (herbalism consumable) never worked and next patch it will be a Grey item.
Mining: Gives 50 Stamina next patch or 550 health. I don't think that is worthless, but it is only marginally useful

To the talent builds, there is another popular PvP build:
49/0/22 (giving Divine Purpose for stun removal with 4 in JotP and 0 in Holy Guidance, in PvP Haste > SP)
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Also a point I'd like to make on these boards is why palas in all the leading progression guilds stack spellpower and crit rather than any int. If you've done all the content you know that mana is hardly a problem for holy palas anymore and hands down spellpower still increases output more than any other stat. However second in line to this is intellect, so you'd think it'd make more sense to stack spellpower/int rather than crit.

At 2200 spellpower a point of int provides a .0123% increase in output, while a point of crit provides only .0109%. The reasoning behind stacking spell power comes with the spell rotation many palas seem to use. You spam flash on a tank who is at full at the start of the cast, if the tank is below after the cast has landed, you holy shock to start your holy light. proccing infusion of light is the key here, and is what makes going pure crit more valuable towards keeping the tank alive than int. Output with holy light has never been a problem... the problem is being able to use it quickly when needed, and to do this stacking crit is more valuable than int. A glance at the palas in the leading eu and us guilds will show those who preform best don't stack int as those people who blindly follow this guide do.

I really don't think you read the first post section on Crit and Int at all. All the things you are trying to belittle me for not knowing are mentioned there. I don't know why you assume I suck at math, when I used that equation to make the graph that is in the first post. You can even see posts from back in March/April, in the old Healadin thread, where I used and showed where that formula came from.

What I said is entirely true, it scales your mana pool by a percantage. The percantage varies on your crit rate, using that equation. I never said the effect scaled linearly with crit. Yes you spend a fixed amount of mana for stuff that can not crit. It is fixed though, so it doesn't effect how much a percentage Crit gives you, but reduces the effective mana pool in crit calculations by that amount.

Kings and Divine Intellect do stack multiplicatively. I have 1341 Intellect with just Divine Int (1166 without), when I cast Kings on myself I go to 1475.

Additive stacking I would expect, 1166 * 1.25 = 1457.
Multiplicative stacking I would expect, 1166 * 1.1 * 1.15 = 1475.

So you can see that it is multiplicative stacking.

Yes I understand at 100% crit the crit portion of Int does nothing. You don't understand that Int is strictly better then Mp5 even if it didn't give SP/Crit, read the section on it in my first post if you are confused still.

If output on Holy Light is never a problem, then why don't you stack Int and spam Holy Light on the tank? Much more consistent, extremely high stream healing.

Hey guys, Im at a tossup here between a gear choice. Now I know Im going with the T7 shoulders, gloves, and legs seeing as how theyre the 3 pieces out of the 5 perfectly itemized with sp, haste, and crit. Now for the other slots, theres basically 2 choices which is Thaddius helm+T7 chest or the Sarth chest+T7 hat. The difference in the two sets is as follows:

Sarth Chest+T7 hat
+36 crit rating
+24 spell power

Thaddius Hat+T7 chest
+6 stam
+16 int
+42 haste rating

Now the 16 int will cut into the sp/crit lead just a tad, but tbh this is fairly close. Being a lover of my int and haste atm I think I know what Ill probably go for but was wondering what some other opinions were on this

Also re-reading the post I see where the spreadsheet I use for myself and your post differs. Its purely my fault, as a basis for quickly comparing loot, I use the actual number of Mp5 rather than the ilvl points spent on it... the idea being that the ilvl points of an item are not what I'm concerned about, only the effective increase of my healing output and mana regen. When compared this way 1 mp5 can be better than 1 int for regen.

As far as ilvl points go, mp5 never compares and can be seen as inefficient use of them blah blah.

But the truth is no items are itemized perfectly, so I thought it better for myself to only compare the effects of the actual stats on the item. Much like the survivability rating used for tanks on tankspot.