galzohar

The only excuse to socketing 27 int over 27 haste in 1 item and then 16 haste over 16 int in another, is saying that they're so close in value that when socketing the first int was better, and the increase actually turned haste to being better. Of course, in reality this is never ever the case, since you'd need the stats to be so extremely close in their value you'll simply never get to that point, mostly because we don't have enough control on our stats.

 

Endoscient

The part about the gems still makes no sense, you can get the same socket bonuses from +27 haste gems.

I want to you to do Sarth10+3 with 2 healers and say you never run out of mana with your gear. While it may only be one specific fight currently, and you get can away with gearing other ways for current content, that fight gives us the best idea of what to expect from the harder/hard mode fights in Ulduar. Unless you can spam HL 100% of the time you can use more mana, why would you want to cast cancel Holy Light over spamming it? Spamming it has a much better chance of keeping your tank alive.

 

zixa

Because I never said int was bad, just that its not needed in excess. Seeing palys with 250 haste but 1500 unbuffed int is what Im getting at. 20k~ mana is the sweet spot I found, I have plenty of mana to play with and my haste is able to stay very high. The 80 int from just 3 gems will basically satisfy my int needs.

 

zixa

Because I can bring 1 more healer and not gimp myself with a 30k mana pool but every heal getting sniped in every other fight in the game?

 

Endoscient

Current content is so easy you cannot gem or enchant any of your gear and do pretty much every fight but Sarth10+3 just fine, so it really doesn't matter for those fights. You really don't need to do any theorycrafting to succeed at it, so I don't get why people keep trying to. Show me a situation where you can't do a fight with a no gems/enchants and I'll explain how Int and extra mana will give you the best benefit.

 

zixa

Im not really too sure what else to tell you. You just seem set on having an unnecessarily infinite mana pool when no content including sarth+3 needs it. I dont need to end fights at 80% mana while 80% of my heals were sniped. Mindless spam sure sounds involving and fun, /sarcasm, but Id rather time heals according to swing and cast timers, get some use out of beacon, and have faster casting spells so I can react to ugly situations faster. Paladins are the heavy nukers of healing in this game.. You just drop fast, huge holy light crits when people take big spikes. The faster you pump them out the better, if you know how to actually play you wont have mana troubles.

 

Lollers

So you got sick of having all your heals 'sniped' and swapped out int for haste so that you could become the sniper.
If the content you are doing doesn't require min maxing then it is going to be easy even if you replaced your haste with spirit.

 

• Mex

Arguing that the current propensity towards int stacking is leading paladins to be lazy / one-trick / 'bad' healers is one thing. I don't particularly agree with it because I don't think switching healing styles is a particularly demanding task. The changes and differences between styles are largely cosmetic and don't require weeks or months of practice to master. This entire line of discussion is purely speculatative, as we have no idea what future content will require in terms of healing, nor what changes to our healing abilities will accompany that content. I for one find it interesting.

However trying to argue that int stacking in its current form is not the most efficient way to deal with T7 content is ultimately a losing proposition. Content is so undemanding right now that multiple play-styles and gearing strategies are all completely viable. Blood DKs are outputting highly competitive DPS without bothering to apply diseases, deep demo locks are seeing huge numbers because fights are so short that they've got ridiculous ratios of meta uptime, DPS on Saph is being told to ignore Blizzards because healers can simply afford to spam through it.

Those few fights that are challenging however (sarth+3, perhaps 1 or 2 of the other achieves like 4h), are not demanding due to high HPS requirements. They challenge players with complexity and randomness. In these situations, attempting to time your heals, cancel-cast, watch the boss' cast bar and swing timer, etc simply distract from the myriad of other things that you have to pay attention to, as well as leave you on the back foot when attempting to react to randomness when you simply could have pre-empted it.

Finally, telling other people that they don't know how to play properly when they've progressed as far or further than you have isn't really helping anyone.

 

Richforbroke

About [Darkmoon Card: Greatness]...i havent tested it completely yet, but it should be based off total mana so if the proc ends sooner than divine plea, then the remaining seconds of divine plea will be as if you never had the trinket (with the exception of the +90 int) but not the 300 int proc.



One pretty big benefit of this that no one has mentioned yet, many ppl wait till you get about 80% mana before using divine plea and the complaint was that this trinket only lines up with divine plea every 3 mins. BUT a big plus side to the trinket is that i noticed it procs almost immediately at the beginning of a boss fight. Pop divine plea and spam whatever spells you like because as of right now all spells are essentially "free", for those 15 seconds while divine plea and greatness proc is up, you are gaining mana you never would have had in the first place.

My mana is a little over 27k buffed and with the proc its at ~33k, divine plea will give roughly 8k mana based on my int, giving me 8k extra mana at the beginning of the fight to play around with for 15 secs.

 

Blutelf

I am expecting a change for Illumination, actually. I am not sure why many seem to be thinking along the lines of increasing the DP CD or decreasing DPs efficiency. It is Illumination that had caused problems with abundance of mana at the beginning of TBC and it certainly seems to be causing the same problems now.

The old Illumination mechanic was basically to allow paladins one free self-heal. Spell crit just did not exist preBC so holy paladins never stacked high enough to make the 100% return an issue. At the beginning of TBC however holy crit rates in 70 blues were already at around 25% so Illumination had to be decreased. Now that holy paladins may reach 45% HL crit in a set of introductory raiding gear, it seems that we are back where we started.

Now, we know it is the designer's intent to decrease mana returns for some of the healing and possibly some of the DPS classes. For holy paladins they can change Illumination and Divine Plea.

If the 'spell crit - 60% mana restore' mechanic of Illumination was changed or decreased to a much lower number, we would notice an immediate and huge decrease in mana gains. As a change with long-term implications this could possibly also result in holy paladins no longer needing specially designed plate armour, possibly sharing armour with warriors and death knights instead, although that would obviously require additional changes to be made. But I think that this is what the designers will eventually do, unless a plate wearing spell caster class is added in the next expansion.

Divine Plea is not likely to drastically change unless yet another mana restore mechanism for retribution paladins is added, and I think Holy paladins will still need an activated mana restore ability. Adding an increase in DP CD for holy paladins might work as well, but for future holy paladin balancing reasons I think an illumination change is likely as well as the better choice overall.

 

CrazyScot

And this is probably on the money, a change to Illumination from a mana restore talent to a "synergy" talent is the way I want to see the designers going with everything although I expect we'll just get a number change. Divine plea changes would mess about with balance of ret and prot whereas a change solely to the Illumination talent however done would only affect Holy and the over abundance of mana. I personally expect to see Illumination "just" losing some % of the mana returned on crits (60->25% is what I've predicted to guildies) would reduce the problem.

The only problem we'd be left with is that crit would become a virtually worthless stat and as such we'd see a massive shift from int/haste -> SP/crit -> mp5 gearing from paladins to a int -> haste/SP -> mp5/crit as int would be the only large source of mana return available to us and haste only further making the new mana issues worse until later raid content.

CrazyScrub Gnome Warlock Ex-Main

Headhunters Terenas EU

 

galzohar

Balancing DP to still work for ret/prot can be done by simply nerfing the % of max mana it adds while making it give back some % of base mana as well. Of course I think that if they reduce the regen for holy pallies they should also reduce the healing penalty.

 

Tzeni

The reason why people talk about Plea more than DI (even though DI routinely gives more mana than Plea on any given fight) is that there are actually two issues that a paladin mana regen nerf should correct. One is the immense mana regen of holy paladins and the other is the SCALING of int.

Nerfing Illumination would fix the former, but not the latter. Despite was some people may say about "I'd rather stack haste/sp than int", the core fact about paladins is that int basically gives you everything you need. Nerfing illumination will not fix the fact that int will always provide more sustained healing power than any other stat, by far.

If anything, I'd bet (without knowing for sure) that Blizzard may even nerf plea for holy paladins and buff Illumination so that crit gemming is again viable.

By the way, along the lines of what Mex and I have posted, check out on the 3.1 pre-notes that were posted by Blizzards. Bascially, holy priests got a talent that will hasten their Gheals (speed being the primary negative to Greater Heal as a spell) every time they cast a flash heal or binding heal. That's the kind of thing I'd like to see for paladins, though maybe in the form of mana regen/mana reduction everytime you cast a flash of light (haste not being a problem for paladins).

 

Malleus

To test the viability of this idea, I made a table of potential returns. I'm assuming you'd want Ret and Prot to get about the same amount of mana they do now (1518, from base mana + Kings-enhanced Int only). The Holy returns are based on a pool of base mana plus 24k from Intellect, which will currently return 7098 mana.

Depending on how much you want to nerf by, it looks like there's a couple of sweet spots: 15% base + 15% max will return 3k mana less, while 20% base + 10% max cuts Holy Plea returns by just over 50%. The numbers for Ret and Prot change by less than 50 up or down in either case.

In any event, it's certainly the case that Holy's monster mana regen can be effectively tuned down without neutering it entirely, harming other specs or requiring sweeping talent alterations that engender a major regearing exercise. Gemming and enchanting out of Intellect would cost 5k max mana, but that would only represent around a 16% loss of return from Plea and Replenishment.

 

Mox

These are my thoughts exactly, I highly doubt they will nerf Illumination significantly (if at all) because it will essentially force all holy paladins to gear and gem exactly the same (int), and this goes against thier policy of NOT forcing any gear/spec choices of any class upon players. A nerf to Plea/and replenish (since blizzard have already posted about potential replenish nerfs) is very likely incoming, it's just unknown from what angle they will approach the nerf(s) to these.

I'm glad the nerfs are coming too, anything that changes the current zombie HL spam is a welcome change imo.

 

Tzeni

A couple things: current Ret plea regeneration also uses arcane intellect and motw, so it's not just base mana+kings. I mention this only because since Ret paladin abilities are relatively low cost mana in absolute terms, even small changes in mana regen can become big nerfs. Secondly, it would be nice to see a table that kept base mana % at 30% (to approximate current Ret regen), then varied the max mana to various levels to find an acceptable amount of plea regeneration for holy paladins.

(Of course, then the question becomes what is the acceptable amount of plea regen? That's a very complex issue, but I'd say something that makes int scaling approximately 50% worse than it is now. That 50% could change depending on what changes to Replenishment are made, as well as what, if anything, happens to DI.)

 

Jylliana

Having a look at


My question here is, at what crit rate does mp5 get totally senseless, since the mana return by crit outvalues mp5? Did someone ever had a look at it?
Senseless means, that if I have the choice to use an item with mp5 or crit, crit would be my first choice, because I have a crit rate that gives me more mana back than any +mp5 could at that state. I think this is quite interesting, having in Mind the rumors about Ulduar, where Mana will again be an issue.
Sorry if someone already wrote something about it and I missed it... but maybe the answer to the question would be interesting to be included in the Thread.

 

Tzeni

Given: Illumination returns 764.4 mana on a HL crit, 100 item points gives 40 MP5 or 100 spell crit rating , 100 spell crit rating is equal to 2.17% crit.

Assume: You cast 3 HL every 5 seconds. So 100 item points will either give you 40 mana in those 5 seconds if you get MP5, or 49.7 mana in those 5 seconds if you get the spell crit rating.

However, note that crit scales with the frequency of your HL, and in this case I assumed a HL every 1.67 seconds (which is about the best anyone will do, given gear haste+Judgement haste-lag). That's fairly optimistic. If you change that to a HL every 2 seconds (2.5 HL every 5 seconds), then crit returns 41.5 mana, which is very comparable in mana regen.

Really, if you took actual real-world evidence, the two stats look pretty comparable. Here's a WWS parse of a recent under-handed patchwerk where we had several people DC and I had to essentially solo heal OT1 without replenishment:
Wow Web Stats

I cast 102 HLs in 4 minutes 22 seconds (or about 2 HL every 5 seconds), so an additional 100 spell crit would have saved me 1691.9 mana, whereas 40 MP5 would have gained me 2096 mana. However, I did have to space out my HL a little by the end b/c I was solo healing without replenishment for most of the fight (whereas with replenishment, I would have had more mana and been spamming faster), so in the end the two stats would probably be pretty equal.

 

Endoscient

First off it is Illumination that we are talking about, not Divine Illumination (DI).

Secondly, looking at a situation without Replenishment isn't a fair for crit. Since it scales with how much your total mana pool is. There is no easy answer for how much mp5 and crit are worth relative to each other, since the value of crit varies drastically with your gear and the fight. Use Rawr (or a spreadsheet) to determine their actual comparative value for certain fights.

 

Tzeni

The first thing is fixed. Brain fart on my part.

The second is not strictly true. The reason the mantra that "crit scales with your mana pool" is repeated is because it's reliant on casting HL to actually function. Therefore, more mana=more HL=crit does more is the logic. However, the actual phrasing is problematic because of the following situations:

You have 27K mana. You finish a 2 minute fight casting HL as often as possible, casting 80 and critting 40.

You have 30K mana. You finish a 2 minute fight casting HL as often as possible, casting 80 and critting 40.

In both situations, you cast the same number of HL so Illumination returns the same amount of mana. Just because you increased your mana pool doesn't mean that crit magically does more. Therefore, when looking at identical fight situations, Illumination will scale depending on how many HL you cast whereas MP5 will always remain the same.

Now if your argument is that the frequency of HL will increase with the mana pool, that may be true. Obviously, in this case, if I had replenishment I would have cast more HL and crit would have returned more than stated (which I mentioned), which is why I said the two stats are "probably" approximately equal.

As for Rawr, obviously it's a good tool to use and serves a purpose. But presenting the math is valuable too. In addition, I'm not all to familiar with the inner workings of Rawr, but does it simulate based on HL spamming? Is the time space between HL casting a variable that can be changed? Because if it does only consider HL being spammed as fast as possible, it probably overweights crit a bit, since no paladin that I know of spams HL every 1.5 seconds on every fight.

Edit: I looked at your Rawr post. I suppose Rawr does not overweight crit:
I still find that my phrase that crit scales with frequency of HLs rather than mana pool size is a bit more accurate, however semantic it may seem. Taking the way you do Rawr and my calculations however, one should arrive at the same conclusion when comparing gear. However, Rawr does calculate the frequency of HL for you, whereas doing it yourself you'd have make assumptions.

 

Endoscient

The point of gearing for more mana (mp5, crit, or Int) is so you are able to cast more Holy Lights. The best way to evaluate those stats relative to each other then is to compare how many more Holy Lights each lets you cast. In the situation you provided, the point of gearing for the 3k more mana was so that you could cast more Holy Lights, if it didn't let you then the extra mana was useless.

I know people are going to bring up "I never go OOM in Naxx, I don't need Int!". The usefulness of Int and what I am gearing around is for challenging fights, not trivial Naxx fights.

 

Tzeni

Yea, which is why I said we're probably arguing over semantics. I just thought my phrasing was a bit more accurate (in that crit scales directly with frequency of HLs, and so indirectly with mana pool), not that you were wrong. Effectively, your approach is Rawr probably provides an accurate weighting of stats.

Edit: Well, the original question was at what crit point does mana per 5 become the inferior stat. As I noted, it's whenever the number of HLs per 5 seconds is a bit less than 2.5, which is accurate. But yea, the frequency of HLs depends on what you choose to do with your GCDs, fight length, and manapool. Rawr already considers all these factors, so I suppose you're right. Just go use Rawr :p

Edit2: Just got a (partial) answer to the pally regen question:

This makes logical sense with the overall picture that devs are trying to paint:

With the incoming nerf to spirit-based regen (elsewhere on the post), it looks like our actual overall regen will remain superior to other classes, as long as you're willing to go 15 seconds with 50% healing every 2 minutes or so. In current content, 50% isn't a big deal. 15 seconds of this will probably be made harder to digest in Ulduar, however.

Source: World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Upcoming Changes to Mana Regeneration

 

galzohar

It's more like crit scales directly with the more mana you have, which causes it to look like it indirectly scales with the frequency of holy lights. After all we're looking at how many holy lights we can cast in a given timeframe (or more precicely, how much healing we can do using all our mana in a given timeframe). The direct cause for casting more holy lights is having more mana, and nothing else, so crit is an effective mana multiplier.

 

Endoscient

Blizzard put up a post about the changes to mana regen, World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Upcoming Changes to Mana Regeneration.

Relevant Paladin parts:
Even with the change to DP I still think Intellect is the stat to stack. Since when you are able to DP you want to get as much mana from it as possible, and its a good mana stat outside of DP (as shown at the end of the last page). Though we will have a better idea once we know how often we can DP in Ulduar.

Interested in what exactly will be the change to Spiritual Attunement. My first guess is that they will nerf it and have a deep Prot talent make up the slack, or maybe have it scale in someway based on defense or stamina.

 

Melkor45

(retracted) bah Endo beat me to it