In addition to the innate power of casting more Holy Lights relative to Flash of Lights, as highlighted in the first post of this thread, there are other benefits to a large mana pool due to intellect. Many often forget that Divine Plea has a noticeable downside, and while active it could potentially cost the lives of groupmembers if something were to go awry.

One of the beautiful components of additional intellect is that by making your Divine Pleas and Replenishment more effective, you can rely less on Divine Plea and thus be hindered less by its penalty. If one were to use Plea every time it left cooldown, then they would be hindered by the -20% penalty for a quarter of the fight; but by increasing the power of each Plea with additional intellect, a paladin can use Plea less often and thusly increase their throughput.

I know that during more intensive healing moments, I worry about using Plea and will put it off for extended periods of time if I think the -20% penalty could be damning. A more than healthy supply of Intellect allows you to take these reprieves when needed without fear of going oom.

When throwing around Holy Lights that are most likely going to overheal anyway, -20% healing is negligible. I see this as the biggest threat to Divine Plea - making the healing penalty actually a penalty as opposed to reducing your overhealing by 20% when bombing Holy Lights. Maybe the -50% will come back? Or maybe something like -20% crit instead, which is actually a far more interesting penalty that scales with your respective heal spells.

I won't argue the math behind Intelect, but I'll argue the actual practical value behind it.

If you can spam non-stop holy lights during a whole fight, more power to you. But I often find myself in situations where the tank is taking pretty controled amounts of damage, and suddenly a huge burst hits him and in those times I don't need a 100% mana pool - I need a huge crit, fast.

You can check my armory, and you will see my gear isn't even optimized for that effect, but I strongly believe haste/crit are our biggest assets as tank healers. Both of those immensely benefit the value of Flash of Light and Holy Light, simply because with decent amounts of them you can:
1) Spam quick (1.0 seconds) Flash of Lights, each healing around 5k (crit) - which provides a flat 5k HPS at basically 0 cost. This is what I use when the tank is >90% hp.
2) Holy Shock crit (7.5k), Holy Light crit (15k, 1.5 seconds not counting bloodlust or holy shock effect) for that very quick burst of healing. Continue spamming Holy Lights until the damage on the tank stabilizes - at which point you revert back to 1).

Of course, this is raid buffed (at which point I have an average of a little over 50% crit on my heals).

My empirical evidence shows that, as a paladin, my biggest limitation isn't regeneration but my global cooldowns. As such, I value haste (faster GCD) and crit (heal for more in a short amount of time) above everything else.

If you're hitting 1s FoL you're softcapped for haste and the GCD cannot become any lower, so stacking haste only reduces the cast time on Holy Light.

Just update to the latest Grid, it's not an extra addon.

Does it not currently show on WWS? Because I did afew tests this week during raids and checked the WWS logs and found:

Crazy Alchemist's Potion / 30,061 / Mana / 7 / 4294 - 4391

which would indicate the trinket having no effect, since the mana range on the pot is 4200-4400. compared to:

Restore Mana (aka Runic Pot) / 23,905 / Mana / 4 / 5976 - 6075

The benefit to stacking int and therefore being able to "spam" HL is that when this burst hits, you will ideally already have a HL casting. At the very least, you will be starting to cast a fresh one, which completely removes reaction time / waiting on GCD should you attempt to switch from FoL spam in order to react to a burst.

You say you're at ~50% crit raid buffed. That's not 5k HPS, unless the tank is taking so little damage that sacred shield is not being removed. If you assume 2 guaranteed crits from sacred shield, 2 crits from your crit rating, and 2 non-crits (ie 50% crit) in every 6 second window, then that's ~26.7k healing every 6 seconds, or just under 4.5k HPS. That's in ideal circumstances, and not counting SS refreshes and other GCD usage.

OK, for the sake of argument / devil's advocate / etc, let's look at this. Assume that you're spamming FoL every 1 second, and the tank takes a burst. Google tells me the average human reaction time is roughly 0.2 seconds. Let's discount latency, and assume that any time that you're less than 80% through a FoL cast, you'll follow it with a HL. Let's assume that the burst is random and unpredictable (tank's mischevious housemate rebound his shield block key to /sit or something), or otherwise you would have pre-cast a HL. Because you're stacking haste, we'll assume that you're sitting at around 1.3 second HLs (slightly over haste "cap"). We'll compare this to an int-stacked paladin simply mashing out 1.6 second HLs while watching the tennis or something. This paladin is guaranteed to land a HL on the tank within 1.6 seconds of any burst.

20% of the time (FoL at 0.8+ seconds through cast), you'll follow your FoL with another FoL, simply due to reaction times. The tank will still take 2 FoLs in the ~1.2 seconds following the burst, but the next HL will be 2.3-2.5 seconds after the burst, enough for another melee swing from a standard boss (2.2 seconds).

10% of the time (FoL at 0.7-0.8 seconds through cast), you'll follow your FoL with a 1.3 HL, for a total of FoL+HL in 1.6 seconds, the maximum amount of time it would take to land a HL from a spammer following a burst. This is a situation where haste stacking comes out ahead ... sorta. 10% of the time you'll do better than a spammer's worst-case-scenario.

70% of the time (FoL at 0-0.7 seconds through cast), your HL will land later than a non-haste stacked paladin's worst-case-scenario HL. Sure, you'll have landed a FoL in-between, but the value of this will depend largely on the fight mechanics, the size of the burst, and the amount of HPS it requires to equalise.

Now I'm not really trying to prove anything one way or another here, just to perhaps provide a bit of food for thought on the value of attempting to deal with burst reactively. Remember that I was comparing reactive HLs to HL-spam's worst case scenario. On average, a HL spammer's HL will land ~0.8 seconds after a random/unpredictable burst. Now of course all of this is grossly over-simplified, I didn't look at holy shock, I didn't take into account refreshing buffs / judgements / etc. As I said, it's simply a bit of a "well hang on, is it really _that_ much better?" question.

Well annecdotally, I started healing as a paladin while the guild was on Illidan. The last time I'd raided on him was SSC/Gruul/Lootreaver; ie FoL spam. I found that while healing fire elemental tanks, my tank would quite often die before I was able to react. After a few weeks in Sunwell, working on Brutallus etc, I found that switching to a (downranked) HL-spam healing style greatly improved my tank's longevity on Illidan P2. I'd often finish the phase on 10-20% mana with pot on CD, but P3 was fairly easy going, and I was able to work my mana pool back up to acceptable levels in time for P5 and enrages. You don't see large bursts of damage at all in this level of content, but in my experience, spam healing big heals tends to be the best way to handle them.

Hi Mex,

An argument implies a contradictory position, but we both agree the point you are trying to make.

You point that spamming holy lights probably gives better throughput, and that is something I fully agree with - in a fight like Patchwerk (or, for that matter, even Brutallus). (Un)Fortunately, it's not always the case where you can just stand there and spam one button and fall asleep halfway.

My point is that with intellect stacked my problems appear when I'm not able to stop spamming Holy Lights to perform simple and quick tasks such as refreshing Judgements of the Pure, Sacred Shield, ..., without fearing a dead tank.

In fights where I actually have to move and, by necessity, end up doing pretty much everything reactively during that time, crit+haste saves my day and intellect just means I'm sitting in a 75% mana pool with a dead tank/assignement (with people asking me on ventrilo "Why did the tank die?" and my answer is "I had to move.").

Considering holistically the boss encounters I've been in, instead of picking a specific fight or two, I would say crit+haste make me a better healer than having a quasi-infinite mana pool. My view is that what is important for me, as a Holy Paladin, isn't how long I can heal (realistically, I'm never out of mana when it really matters even without stacking intellect) but how much I can heal during critical moments.

I dont beleive so, certainly one of the very first things I noticed on reaching 80 was that in a lowbie instance with lots of mobs it was possible to have near 100% uptime. It could have changed between beta and the first 2 weeks of wotlk but thats hardly recent.

I find it hard to believe that the difference between choosing between an extra 100haste or crit would make a magical difference in your ability to heal on the move or while refreshing your non-healing spells. Or that an extra 100 Int would mean your mana pool somehow stays at near full levels for non-stop Holy Light spamming. Please try to be realistic, at the very least.


And for crit/haste to have any noticeable effect on your HPS "during critical moments": those moments would require some obnoxious amount of damage which means cooldowns will be used to mitigate it. Considering how out of whack the raid content is right now, it'd be hard to run in a situation where gemming for crit/haste would make such a monumental difference that it would be preferable to gem it over the alternatives, mainly SP (which I think outclasses crit/haste for output) or Int.


Edit: Wasn't clear enough, apparently.

I don't agree. Firstly, the importance of stats are of course not the same. 100haste != 100crit != 100int.
The consensus is that, you gear for crit and haste and gem/enchant for intellect. That can mean that you as well choose a gear with less crit and haste but with more sockets to gem with intellect. Spell power is the first to give up for larger int pool.

Crit/haste indeed do great difference even in the current content. You know you can only holy shock while moving, and with higher crit, the possibility gets higher to crit and give you another instant FoL, or a 1 second HL, which allows you to run for another half a second or one before you fail keeping your target alive.

I sometimes change my spec to PvP with prot talents, and with the same amount of SP, int, haste, I still feel the difference with my healing output. With 8% less crit I get from ret talents, I have less mana regen because of fewer HL crits, I have less HPS because I can not spam away as comfortable as with the extra 8% crit.

Saying that 100 of one stat won't mean much is in my opinion a bit ignorant, because it's those little numbers you start collecting and you end up having somewhat enough of that stat eventually. The extra crit and haste could indeed save you "during critical moments" since you could squeeze in another HL with your haste, and it can be a crit giving more chance for your target to survive. Example could be frost tombed melee during KT fight. You cancel your cast on MT immediately and cast one HL on one of the victims hoping for a splash heal, and use your Holy shock right after your HL finishes. Haste/crit is handy in such situations.

Having said that, I'm against the opinion that people gem for haste/crit saying they don't go oom at all. That'd only make me think that they have more than needed healers in the raid, their tanks have really high avoidance/resistance, or the holy paladins are just slacking by waiting for a spike damage instead of keeping healing whatever target they can heal.