I disagree with the notion of "hard modes take longer". The only hard-mode that actually takes significantly longer than it's normal mode is XT. The rest may see slight increases in duration on the scale of 10 to 20 percent, but most match up fairly close to the duration of the normal mode fight. The big change is how intense the healing is -- doing Steelbreaker last is obviously much more intense than Runemaster or Stormcaller and Thorim phase two with Sif is night and day compared to the same phase without Sif. If you want to know if you've got the mana to handle that kind of intensity, next time you do that fight figure out where the intense parts would be and just chain-cast during them. Even if it's entirely overheal, it's a valid simulation because on hard mode you'll be chain-casting nonstop. If you run out of mana then you'll run out during hard mode and if your mana is fine you'll be fine during hard mode.

Like I said, the exception to this rule is hard-mode XT, but on that fight you can melee with SoW and this negates any risk of going OOM, even with nonstop chain-casting. (Seriously, I did it on 10m and had to plea twice during the ten minute fight. Generating the throughput to heal all the damage was difficult, but mana management was not.)

Having done multiple 10 man hard modes (sadly laggy server prevents us from doing 25 man hards), I haven't ever felt that I need more longevity. Even during Freya+3 you can either melee or plea at opportune moments while still keeping up with the HPS of priests and druids (3 healers).

BiS will still be haste/crit/sp, at least for 10 mans.

I generally try to work my DPs in with my Beacon, 2nd SS and JoTP rebuff (which takes up 1/3 of the DP if I add a quick Holy Light in just in case). For the other 2/3 of the DP, it's rather risky, but I've not yet had a time where my tank's died because I didn't lay down a big enough heal, especially 'cause I cancel it right away the second I see the tank spike. I wouldn't be able to do it without this macro:

One thing I haven't yet tested is whether or not you can cancel the effect of DP mid-spellcast. Also, it takes some serious timing, but I'll often pop a holy light while waiting the half-second for a tick, then cancel DP, then HS, then HL.

I run at 30k raid-buffed mana and a 55% crit rate on Holy Light, FYI.

I run with a similar macro only I have the cancellation built into my Holy Shock, I find that if I'm cancelling plea it's because the tank is spiking and Holy Shock is the first spell I cast into a spike if I've not got a pre-heal landing.

You can cancel Divine Plea mid-cast using the macro you posted and your spell will heal for the full amount.. It is a good way to deal with spike damage, I usually cancel it just before the Holy Light lands to maybe get an additional Divine Plea tick.

You are using 25 man gear for fights that were designed for people in full 10 man gear. That is going to skew the value of the gear you are looking at.

Yes you can find a time when you can risk meleeing or healing with plea, but the point of more mana stats is so you reduce how often you put the tank in risk.

I think your argument comes from an ideal perspective that suggests stacking haste can change gameplay dramatically. I've honestly seen 4-5 paladins from high-end guilds that have 800+ haste. But really I'm strongly against any formulae that believes 16haste>16int because that would destroy any consistency and logic of a paladin's gearing philosophy.

In general haste allows the option to cancel and recuperate asap. Haste also give you more numerical windows to execute your cast. Haste can become acutely interesting on fights like Vezax where staggering Holy Light is an efficient output method. In a lot of encounters, reacting to dodge and parry can backfire, but nonetheless an option when it calls for it. I think watching Protec's Freya3E video gives a strong account of a rapid reactive-proactive healing style.

The meta-theory behind the haste cap theory balances in between:
1) The natural haste that is inherent on many healing pieces
2.1) The fact that haste is 'better' than spellpower in direct throughput,
2.2) that haste reduces the GCD
2.3) that haste cannot be neglected because of its weightage leverage over spellpower
2.4) that haste is mightily useful until the cap
3) The flexible properties of haste;
4) The possibility of being able to be haste capped in the first place (no other class can do this so easily)

I doubt Blizzard will change the Holy gear to have less MP5, but it could happen. They like MP5 a lot .

Having two specs want one set of gear isn't bad, but it is bad only one wants spell power plate. The devs would like to remove sp plate, but they don't know how to best do it. The suggestion of adding an additional armor talent isn't something they would like to do, because it can bring balancing concerns (Holy Pallies tanking with capped armor by wearing plate).

The easiest way to do it would be a talent in the protection/ret trees that allows for the use of plate armor. I'd suggest it would be tied into the positions Holy Shield and Repentance (level 40) bringing it into line with when paladins in these trees would normally learn plate. But this isn't a suggestions forum and it's not especially visible to the devs.

As to the mana per 5 issue, it looks like a natural progression so as we actually have something worthwhile to go into Icecrown for, if all our gear had been itemised for SP/Haste/Crit then all we'd be looking at was a minor upgrade similar to the minor upgrades we got from t7 to t8 (if itemised better). On top of this we do have some very well itemized pieces from Hard modes even if they aren't incredible.

To illustrate the difference between hard mode and regular, I've been trying to find hard-mode reports. Does anyone have any they'd be willing to provide?

I'm specifically looking at the Holy Lights per Second differences between hard- and non- (mainly to theorycraft my optimum gear set). Freya, Mimiron and IC seem to be the ones that'll be the most healing-intensive, right?

Alternatively, I could, of course, just wait until we finally GET to those hard modes....

Here is a Wow Meter Online of our Freya25+3 kill. I would have Holy Lighted more and DP'ed less if I had more mana from other sources.

Though I don't think there is a good way to compute results from that. Since P1 (the add waves) are significantly more difficult then P2. I was quite low on mana when all 6 waves were killed, but the phase afterward is easy to heal if you have everyone alive, so I then ended the fight at 15-20k mana. An average of Holy Lights casted won't do the fight justice.

I think rather than trying to tailor a situation individually for holy pallies, adding clumsy talents to trees etc, that an entire overhaul of the armour system might be interesting. There are of course already plenty of examples of classes using lower classes of armour, including hunters, moonkin / resto druids, ele / resto shamans, fury warriors (and previously ret paladins too), etc. A global situation could be more attractive.

Something like removing the concept of plate / mail / leather / cloth entirely, giving each piece of armour a base armour weight, and then giving classes individual multipliers for that armour weight. So say a piece of armour has a 200 base value. Leather wearers get 180% of that, mail wearers get 420%, and plate gets 750% or so. It would be a very significant change, with a lot of retro-active consequences and considerations as well as the standard forward looking ones. Probably not something that could be easily done before the next expac, but I think it would be interesting. Homogenisation of gear could be problematic, but the +dmg/+heal -> +SP changes went ok, when previously mage / lock focused rings and necks suddenly became godlike for healers too, etc.

A change like this would let classes which share common itemisation desires across differing armour classes (eg hunters and rogues, or moonkins and shadow priests) much more effectively share loot. It would give the devs an extra tool to help fine-tune balance (eg rogues are a little too squishy in arena, just bump them up to 195% without giving feral druids access to high armour leather gear), although this wouldn't work as well with classes that tank (ie you couldn't lower paladin armour to nerf ret vs physical damage because it would impact prot pallies). Mechanically I think it would be doable, although I think perhaps one of the biggest downsides would be aesthetic. Mages in plate, paladins wearing silly dresses etc. There'd still be tier gear for that special look, but it would throw a bit of a spanner in the works for some people. Perhaps it could be paired with some form of armour customisation? Again, probably something that'd be left for a new expac.

I think a global solution like this could end up being much more elegant than making holy heals scale off SP, but then forcing differing coefficients so holy couldn't launch 4k judgements every 10 seconds, figuring out some crazy ArPen -> Mp5 conversion, and such nonsense.

Regarding haste, I was under the impression that SP actually gave more raw throughput? As in, an equal item budget of SP compared to haste will result in more overall healing done in a specific period of time, assuming mana is always available. This always made sense to me because haste came with the added benefit of destaggering heals, but I'm more than happy to be corrected if wrong.

imo, that'd make the game a chaos for looting. They have already made something similar by turning +healing into +spell power. I think we share enough now. Making no armor differentiation would make PuGs a real pain in terms of loot management. Also the people rolling on the same loot would be horrible in raiding guilds.

Blizzard already has this strategy for tier tokens. They drop for various classes rather than armor type. I am also not happy with the balance it has in itself. Conqueror token users being the worst issue, since I'm also a conq user.
If blizzard made no armor distinction, then mp5 users (resto shaman, disc priest?) would gear faster than any other role while haste/crit farmers would have a horrible competition (basically every caster except resto shaman and disc priest).

By the way, yesterday I had a little discussion with a mage in our guild about the BiS cloth boots from a hardmode. He was assuming that I'd never get it because cloth wearers can't use any other armor type. But this is BiS we're talking about and it's not like we are choosing from a big pool of BiS items. I have the exact same problem with nicely itemized daggers, yet I don't recall telling anyone not to touch BiS sword/mace drops and telling them to wait for their possibly inferior dagger. I would like to see a plate BiS, not a cloth one for sure. But if blizzard wanted us to not touch the cloth, they cold simply make paladins only able to wear leather and above, or make the plate versions of the same items.

Hey ^^ in my guild i am Main spec holy and offspec ret up till 3.1 i used the ret form on this site as a constant resource to building a successful retribution pally. But since 3.1 i have opened my self into my main spec thread this 1 since i am at a loss of idea's on how to optimise the new holy ulduar drops, i have tryed to follow various thread posts, there are 14 pages and i dont know where to start. Basically b4 3.1 gear optimisation was pritty simple for me as holy : try get haste/crit/sp items and then buff int and t7 4 set bonus was great. But atm i have picked up 5-6 holy plate pieces in ulduar and dont know what i should be looking for i still buff int in gems and so on and the guild that i am in dose not allow me to bid on non plate items could sum1 who has been following this thread give me a lil sum up on what i should looking out for for eg what is the haste soft cap and how good is Mp5 since i avoidid it quite a bit pre 3.1, and to what % of crit will one item point of crit = one point of mp5 since mp5 is linear inc and crit mana back is not . and is t8.5 setbonus only good for MT healing?

i have thought maybe use 2 t7.5(hands and legs) and 2t8.5(helm and shoulders) since thier 2 set bonus compliment each other and most fights in ulduar are movment fights. this also gives the stats that we strive for haste/sp/crit

but my question is why would blizz take most of the sp/crit/haste items away in uludar is thier a mech i am not awear of or was it cause we were to OP with itmes that just contained sp/crit/haste?

Blizzard balances classes via talents and gear, so they felt like adding more sp/crit/haste items wasn't how they wanted Holy to be balanced.

The advantage of using the Ulduar high mp5 items is less Divine Plea usage and having more stamina to live through the various AoE effects easier.

Blizzard could also make plate desirable by making a talent that adds SP or crit or haste based on armor value (similar to Armored to the Teeth, etc).

So I could post logs of my previous nights raiding/wiping on learning steelbreaker hardmode, but i'd prefer to just sum it by noting the rather poor performance of my meta gem last night. Its really a smaller matter of min-maxing my character, but i'm looking at procs and noticing a disturbing trend of a LACK of them.

I basically spam non stop Holy Lights from start to finish (supported by divine plea periods of melee swiping steelbreaker himself). Over the course of a 7 minute fight, Insightful Earthsiege Diamond procd twice for a total of 1200 mana. Going back through my encounters over the week I've noticed it not coming close to hitting the 15 second cooldown mentioned at the start of the post or even approaching a 45 second average also mentioned.

I switched myself over to Beaming Earthsiege Diamond for the time being. In my current gear I am getting 600ish mana out of the gate and some increased crit. Not a huge gain by any means, but I feel its significantly more consistent then what i've always considered as the "best" meta gem.

Has anyone else noticed lower then expected procs per minute from this meta lately?

Again, nit picking such a small impact on our performance, but never settle right?

No, I'm looking at my WWS from this weeks clear and on every fight I've checked, my meta was proccing at the normal rate of about once per minute, sometimes more, (since the icd is 45 seconds). The regen you gain from replenishment and DP from that extra 2% mana is no where near the amount you gain from the meta procs.

Consider a 4:05 minute fight like my most recent ignis, I recieved 3 procs from the meta for a total of 1800 mana. Raid buffed I had 31119 mana. If I factor in the extra 2% and do some math it comes out to roughly 381 mana back from replenishment and if I use DP say 3 times during the fight, that comes out to an extra 467 mana. Together, that's only 848 mana.

I'm guessing RNG was not on your side, or you should double check your parse.

I have legitimate reasons to believe your parse was inaccurate or you were just downright unlucky. I usually get at least 5-6 procs in an 9 minute fight.

Quick question on Sacred Shield mechanics. Does an increase in SP after SS is applied increase the effectiveness of the shield or would I have to re-apply SS to get the stronger shield. Likewise, if your SP goes down after the shield is applied, does it's effectiveness also go down?

The reason I ask is because I picked up Pandora's Plea the other day and am not sure if I should be rebuffing SS when the 850 SP buff procc's.

Pont, from my parses, it seems as if as long as the primary Sacred Shield buff is put up during a pandora proc.....your good. Basically, refresh it everytime you get a proc (obviously can't time them all that way).

Did you also notice how its only giving 750 spellpower.... not 850 like it should? hehe, the silly things you find. I only mention it in case you try to do the math to figure out whats going on here to verify my observation.

I haven't done any math with it yet, if I get a minute tonight after I get home from work and before my raid starts, I might see what I can find out with it.

I'll probably go out and find an elite somewhere to have beat on me for a fairly regular amount of damage and see what happens with when I buff the shield.