I think you mean your meta gem. Yeh, 21 intellect + mana regen would suit your needs better imo.

As for the trinket, like you also said, stacking more than 2k+ spellpower is something I would only do if I wanted epeen for bigger numbers on the meters, but if your first aim is to maximize your output and be the best help to your raid, then I think you should increase your mana pool. That is, you go for the Greatness Darknmoon Card. 90int giving you 900 mana is simply extra 1125 mana return from Divine plea in 5 minutes (if u use it at every CD) and you'll get more than that with the extra crit it provides, so you'll restome more mana due to more crits. And ofcourse, if you happen to use your DP on a 300int proc, that's the sweetest thing about it.

I would believe that 30% crit, ~500haste, 20k mana, 2k SP are the basics a holy paladin should aim for in the beginning. Once you achieve it, you can pretty much go your own way to stack whatever stat you think suits best to your own play style. That being said, I never heard anyone stacking intellect at that point sacrificing some of the other stats regret their choice.

Hi,

I've also a question concerning the [Darkmoon Card: Greatness] and the use of divine plea.
Does divine plea return the same amount of mana if I use it just at the start of the proc or almost when the proc ends?

I've got it recently but didn't succeed in testing it.

thx for your replies

A couple of months ago I posted somewhere here stating the importance of Intellect due to the enormous amount of potential throughput and scaling it provides. At the same time, I alleged that haste provides the highest HPS by far. As the community has long figured, 676 haste is needed to hit the soft-cap of 1.0s GCD, assuming the raid is fully buffed.

Whilst exploring new possibilities, I deliberated the importance of spellpower. This was no easy task as you might have imagined. Using the relative amount of HPS haste bestows, I successfully pegged a similar amount of spellpower based on the ilvl weightage system. Using the newly attained ratio, I compared Intellect to Spellpower, which concluded that beyond the ratio of 1:1.5, spellpower would be relatively better. The significance of this finding? I'm now able to deduce that 63sp weapon enchant is more worth it than 30int as this ratio is 30:63, or 1:2.1. Amongst other things, I now use Flask of Frost Wyrm, 30sp bracer enchant, etc.

For the past 2 months, I've been diligently following my dream gear set which focuses on Intellect. The set also ensures I crawl towards 636 haste (676 with food for softcap). I've decided to update my new findings and post my dream set. Insight will be much appreciated.



Click here for Gear Table



Q&A:

Why is haste good?
Haste provides the most significant HPS increase. Presuming you're comparing similar amounts of haste and spellpower (based-on the ilvl weightage system), haste provides approximately 12-14% more HPS increase than spellpower, This % increase does not account for the fact that haste reduces the amount of time you're caught on GCD from refreshing Sacred Shield, Beacon of Light, Seals, Judgements, Hands, and other spells.

Is MP5 any good?
Int is essentially the new MP5. I created my internal spreadsheets by breaking down every stat to HPS and MP5. After much deliberation, I pegged 10int to 7mp5. Other simulations pegged 10int to between 6 to 9mp5. For unbiased results, I always use 6 or 7mp5 as my guage. Either ways, the current MP5 itemization is lacklustre (or some say Int is too strong). As a JC, I won't ever have to see mp5 gems on my gear.

How's crit?
I see more reliable stats out there. Notwithstanding, crit provides a minimal amount of HPS increase. My internal spreadsheets also determine that 10crit rating provides 4.5mp5. These amounts are pitiful, but I can see why some Paladins like their 58% crit.


Disclaimer: My internal spreadsheet assumed 5/5 Divine Intellect, 10% BoK and 5/5 Holy Guidance. Tables and values are subject to change.

These are some of my sentiments exactly. The real question we have to answer does not involve Spell power overmuch; it has been generally consented by well informed posters to not be a stat worth gemming for. The main debate here is between Int and Haste. We should all know most of the benefits of both stats, suffice to summarize both in that Int = greater longevity and Haste = shorter cooldown between heals.

We also have to look at the content people are evaluating. There are leagues of difference between the healing intensity required for naxx 25, Sarth 25 man +3 drakes and Sarth 10 man +3 drakes. There are also large discrepancies in what is required of you based on your healing assignment. I think it is well agreed upon that Sarth 10m +3D is the most difficult encounter currently available to us, and so this is where I will base most of my arguments on. I honestly do not feel that any other fight offers a strong enough challenge to really bring out the best and worst of both gem & enchanting strategies.

In the haste Vs Int argument, it comes down to this: What does each do for me to ensure that I get my job done on any given fight? As paladins, our job is typically somewhat simple: Keep the tanks alive at all costs. Thanks to beacon, this can also mean that sometimes we're capable of throwing some raid healing out while maintaining our primary task. To these ends haste decreases the time between each of your casts, which has the negative impact of increasing the amount of mana consumed per unit time. In a world of infinite mana, haste would be clear victor, but gladly we do not play in that world.

I believe haste, due to its nature: that it in and of itself it decreases your time to OOM, AND that it replaces int geming tends to make players lean towards a FoL based playstyle, or at a mimimun encourages you to use it more. The only other options are to reactive heal, or to cancel-cast Holy Light. Reactive healing on tanks is generally considered to be bad in difficult encounters. Cancel casting may be a valid playstyle, but due to human reaction time and inevitable lag it is "less safe" than straight spam. In the highest end of encounters, high FoL use simply will not do. We saw it in parts of Black Temple, we Saw it in Sunwell Plateau, and we see it in Sarth +3. I would be more than willing to bet we will see it again in Uldar. So from here we see that Haste pushes you towards using more risky healing tactics or FoL, and that unless it is dramatically buffed somehow, FoL has not and will not be strong enough to complete our healing tasks. This leaves us with the idea that we NEED a very high volume of Holy Lights to accomplish our assignments on encounters that are worthy of the title "Challenging."

These arguments raise another question: Will paladins have enough longevity to sustain high volume holy light use, with a Haste gemming? To answer this, we need evidence. I do not have mathematical evidence as to how long a Haste gemmed paladin can sustain holy light. What I do have however, is anecdotal evidence from Sarth +3 10 man. I know that despite having Int gemming, replenishment, 4pc T7, libram of renewal, Glyph of SoW and using DP on as close to on cooldown as permissible by fight conditions, that I can come down to as close to oom as about 15% mana towards the end of the shadron and beginning of tenebron phase. This was in a 2.5 healer set up, and I was healing the drake + add tanks as well as some of the DPS. Would a Haste build have found me Out of mana at that point? I believe so.

Something else to consider, is the psychological effect of running out of mana. As your mana pool gets lower and lower, most players are going to get more and more conservative with their mana. This means canceling that heal when the tank is at 90% and normally you would let it land, and a myriad of other things that you do to try to make your mana hold out as long as possible as it nears empty. Undoubtedly these things are not how you would want to play during a truly challenging encounter and lead to a higher probability of wiping.

Based on all the information available, I believe that Int is the clear winner of the stats that we should stack. High end gear already has a workable amount of haste on it, letting players get their Holy Lights already down to somewhere in the vicinity of 1.5s. While more haste would always be welcome were it to come nearly cost free, the ability to Flat out spam holy light for increased durations outweighs the gain of haste. Allowing a paladin to "carelessly" dump HL onto a tank is quite possibly one of the single greatest things you can do to stop a wipe in ANY encounter. A haste build will increase the probability of that tactic keeping the tank alive, but he will not be able to sustain it nearly as well as an Int build, and when he runs low on mana, his healing tactic will most likely focus on not running out of mana, and possibly let the tank die.