I'm particularly interested in this question in relation to Val'anyr (4 shards away!). I hear a lot of pallys resigned to Haste/mp5 and FoL spam but it seems like a waste of the proc for such little shields. I'm wondering if Crit/mp5 would make more sense or (gasp) a balanced approach with spellpower for red, Intellect for yellow, and ... i'm not sure what for blue.

Yep, I've been wondering abuot this as well. The selection of crit over any other stats are affected by several facts :

1. it's been nerfed heavily in 3.2
2. mp/5 is being buffed heavily in 3.2
3. crit had increasing returns as you stacked it, and increasing returns as mana pools rose. Now in the 3.2 environment, mana pools are getting smaller due to regen nerfs.
4. crit is unreliable as a healing output stat.

So with these 4 points in mind, are we going to abandon crit entirely, on the grounds that if you don't stack it it'll be inefficient, and if you do you're wasting item points on a sub-par stat?

Right now, the primary purpose of crit for a Paladin is mana regeneration (HPS is lost to overhealing). The primary purpose of spell power is to increase our HPS (HPM is lost to overhealing). The primary purpose of haste is to increase our HPS.

Once we're able to get real numbers for HPS requirements in the Crusader's Coliseum, we can make our decisions based on the amount of healing required. If HPS is not an issue in CC, then Haste and SP may take a back seat to Intellect and Crit. HL will likely have no HPS problems, but FoL may have issues with HPS. Depending on your spell preference, you worry about HPS or HPM of your respective spell.

That's where Paladins have been in 3.1: Holy Light heals for such a massive amount that our HPS is fine, and its HPM is also fine, so we stack mana in the form of Intellect and Crit/MP5. However, in the unlikely event that FoL's HPS rises to meet the CC requirements, then it may be possible to swap to that healing format. If we continue to use HL as our primary heal, we know that our HPS is fine (as we do massive amounts of overhealing), and so we simply need to adjust for our lower HPM (due to Illumination nerf) by adding more Critical Strike and MP5 (remember, the choice is not always exclusive). Balancing stats as a healer is all about evaluating the healing necessary and then adjusting your stats to match what's required. We KNOW that HL has the HPS we need already baked in, and so HPM / mana are going to be the two areas we focus on the most.

My thought is that HPS output of FoL can be assumed to be doubled since SS (which I try to keep up as close to 100% of the time as possible) will now always apply a HoT of the same value after a FoL. Though I don't think this logic works in everyday situations. It is presuming that you do not cast another FoL during the duration of the HoT otherwise it gets overwritten by the new HoT. The 12 second duration for the HoT effect is a long time to wait before casting another FoL which is not possible while MT healing in most real world situations.

Unless someone has another idea I'm thinking the way to maximize the utility of the HoT effect is to place SS on a DPS taking regular (but not substantial) damage (or an OT), allow the HoT effect to tick on them, and let the HoT transmit over the Beacon to the tank who you might be FoL spamming at the moment. Otherwise SSing the MT and FoL spamming them will constantly overwrite the HoT effect which would be self defeating I imagine.

Considering you can cast a maximum of 12 FoL in the duration of the HoT, it is not really able to count as a doubling of HPS. Currently it looks like the HoT will be trash untill the 4pc bonus, at which it may be too powerful when used in a deep prot setup

This. People need to get out of this stat priority / best stat mentality because it's a complete fallacy.

Crit and haste are apples and oranges. One increases throughput in random chunks and offers regen, the other makes your spells cast faster. Which one is 'better' is 100% subjective and based on your current gear, your raid group, the encounter itself, your healing line up, your tank's skill, etc etc. The changes to illumination do not affect what crit actually does for us, all they do is modify crit's effectiveness in this area.

Regarding FoL use, you're much better off putting the SS on the tank (it mitigates a not-insignificant amount of damage), putting the HoT on him directly, then healing raid members with FoL when you want a small / cheap heal and letting it transfer to the tank with beacon. If you SS a raid member, you're wasting the SS (mind you, with multiple paladins, you should have multiple people in the raid SS'd, so when you do decide to FoL someone else they may be SS'd and proc the HoT anyway).

That's not entirely true. Some stats are purely worse than others. For example, a combination of haste and intellect is going to be a better increase in HPS and longevity than purely spell power. While I agree that healing (and tanking to some extent) gearing, as opposed to DPS, is more of a balance/situational thing, there are some stats which are purely better than others.

What we can do is provide people with a way to make informed choices, and this is where stat equivalence comes into play, and what most people are looking for when coming here (well, most people who are likely to be looking for actual theorycrafting, not idiots drooling as they type "WUT BEST STAT?!").

No, you do a single flash directly on your SS target, he gets shield.
Then you beacon him and flash other people in the raid. Afaik, beacon of light heals (even when triggered with flash) don't give the hot.

edit: argh, I fail. Sorry.
Anyway, when spamming FoL, the hot should tick at least once anyway (it ticks once every second, you have xx ms lag in between your casts, should be enough to make it tick), so your HPS will still go up with the 4pc.

Except deep prot build doesn't have beacon.

The excessive tank damage on Ulduar hard modes seems to have been transferred to the raid in Coliseum. You won't want to drop haste. Longevity however seems to be an issue (for priests as well), so you won't want to get crit over the more effective mp5 or gem SP or haste.

In short: Nothing changes besides crit and mp5 swapping places.

This is kind of what I was getting at. I understand that healing is a lot of the times situational. I was just curious to see what holy paladins on the PTR were running into and whether or not they were finding it better to go with crit or haste.

Not having been on the PTR I didn't know how much value crit had lost.

Now given what has been said about crit does that make going deep into ret for all the crit talents a waste?

As a current 51/20/0 user, I know that in 3.2 I will be able to swap to 51/0/20. This allows me to pick up several points of extra crit, which will offset some of the Illumination nerf. Running 51/20/0 was already spec'ing out of regeneration and into absorption. Once my 4pc T8 set bonus is broken, I will simply lose a portion of my absorption and gain mana regeneration in its place.

I've been wondering for a while about the balancing issue. Ulduar itemization for holy paladins has been all over haste/mp5, to the point that a lot of people switched to the apparently better itemized mail items, which mostly have haste/crit on them.

With the coming patch things will change, if you go check our holy gear for the PTR items discovered so far, it ALWAYS has crit on it, and it's mostly paired with MP5, much less likely with haste, and I've yet to see a single Haste/MP5 plate item. IMHO this means we won't have much room for choice, since crit will be overly present on our gear, at least regarding the 3 bosses tried on the PTR and from T9 pieces itemization (and I don't see why it shouldn't reflect the entire patch).

Moreover from what I saw the stats increase in the new items is quite drastic (30% in some cases), so it's not like we can retain some Ulduar equip to balance our stats because it would be way too much underpowered compared to the new items.

In the end I think we shouldn't go for an equip setup based on our current personal playstyle. Many paladins on my server asked me if I was a HL spammer or FoL spammer. I always replied that I'm neither one or the other, my recount shows my healing is always balanced (at least when it comes to counting the number of spellcasts) and I think for most people playing this way is an issue because they don't know (or they don't want to put some effort in it...) how to decide which spell is better in said situation so they just stick to spamming one. Plus my overhealing is usually the lowest among paladins in raid (below 35-40%) despite my healing being the highest, another thing that a lot of people will have to adjust since we won't have the same mana regen to allow us mindless HL spamming.

So what do you think about this kindof playstyle issue?

I'm not sure how fully uptodate rawr (2.2.10) is but if you enable 3.2 mode it is still showing the crit+mp5 pieces as minorly better than haste+mp5 pieces. With 3.2 on the way and studip RNG loot I'm stuck with the choice of blue belt of chaos vs girdle of righteous and similarly with the Treads of destiny vs Lightning Grounded boots. There is only 2 HPS between either choice, where I would have expected alot more. I will probably just approach 3.2 gearing along the lines of keeping haste up around 550 and then just crit+mp5 rest.

With regards to 51/20/0 vs 51/0/20 I think its necessary to tank damage into consideration, with growing amounts of SP I'd be alittle wary of giving up divine guardian which is a pretty big passive boost to our healing, even if DiSac is working as intended it'll still be worth having.

I am not really sure about it. It depends. The point is that crit absolute mana returns depend on effective mana pool. The more int, mp5 and crit you have, the better crit is as effectiveness stat. Crit scales not only with itself but with everything that gives mana. Maybe at the beginning of 3.2 mp5 is a winner, but when we will be T9+hardmodes geared the crit will become better. Only time and simulations will tell.

I think I will keep my haste around the soft cap and then gear for effectiveness using rawr to optimise it for different T9 fights. My gut feeling (that can be completely wrong) is that for equivalent iLvL items haste+mp5 >= haste+crit > crit+mp5 for most fights, assuming that haste cap is not reached yet. Otherwise crit+mp5 > = haste+mp5 > haste+crit.

As for gem choise I am pretty sure that yellow = int, blue = int+mp5, red = int+SP or pure SP will be the most optimal gemming.

How much of a DPS loss is it for a hunter to take a tenacity pet?

As that way we can spam flash of light with +40% effectiveness on the pet, which is then beaconed onto the tank which increases the HPS of Flash rather a lot....

Or for feral druids to spec into nurturing instinct, for the +20%?

To clarify what I meant, the mentality is a fallacy and very detrimental to proper healing practices. Yes, there are times when stat X will be uniformly superior to stat Y, but this is always situational, there is never a hard and fast, unassailable rule like you find with DPS (stack hit until X, then str/ap/sp). A large proportion of these situational incidences are purely theoretical (hard haste cap, infinite mana, etc) however understanding the value of the stats and why and how they contribute to effective healing practices is still vital, because in several situations we have those situations thrust upon us artificially (Vezax, Loatheb, etc).

Just go and have a look at the 3.1 thread for an example of how damaging misunderstanding and trying to quantify two fundamentally different stats can be.

You're absolutely correct in that there are rules and priorities and equivalencies which are very valuable to healing paladins, but it really cannot be emphasised enough that unless one understands how and why these conventions exist, and when to deviate from them, that they will be useless.

I don't understand what you mean by rawr showing crit+mp5 pieces to be better. Crit vs haste comparison depends on the weigh you've put on burst healing in rawr.

I had the blue belt of chaos and I just recently crafted the girdle of righteousness. If I'm to heal the raid, I won't skimp on haste if given the choice. Healing the raid instead of the tank also makes crit worth less as a HPS stat. That said, I do plan on keeping the 239 pieces with mp5+crit, because they are just so damn good for regen and regen will be important in 3.2.

As for gemming, I'd put pure int into red sockets too.

The 3.2 model of Rawr shows pure int gems as being inferior to others that sport mp5; however, the deficit decreases as your ilvl gear scales so it seems that pure int gems are the way to go for scalability, which I'm assuming most people realize. From what I can gather, the model seems to be for as much intellect as possible to maximize returns from replenishment and DP since we can no longer rely on Illumination. We're going from a dynamic model of mana regeneration to a more static model, removing our ability to scale our regeneration as well as in 3.1. In order to counteract the reduced mana regeneration from crit as a stat, we need to increase other stats that still scale -- intellect. The issue with Mp5 is the fact that it is so static, but with them increasing that static amount it shouldn't be too bad but I think that what will happen is more DP usage in order to compensate. Since DP is being used more, intellect becomes the most important stat in terms of mana regeneration. Just my thoughts

The 3.2 setting on Rawr says Int is the best stat for me, however spell power and mp5 are getting closer. However, these values will depend on how often you need burst healing and cast HL vs FoL. I like HL because the glyph of HL helps with Beacon, so for me in 3.2 Int is the best (unless the socket bonus is good).

So in terms of actually casting healing spells, what do you guys plan on doing? For me, it makes sense to beacon an MT and then cast SS on an OT, get a HoT up via FoL and then spam HL on the OT or melee until the HoT wears off. This way I will make full use of the HoT and also to provide large heals to the raid in general.

Slight problem on that: "Spamming" HL is still right out since don't quite have the regen for it like we used to. Also, the HoT is a straightup buff for us, even if we don't let it tick the full duration. It might be best to get a crit HoT first (especially with 4pT9, which anyone and their dog can get the first level of) and then cast HL or FoL based on damage, et cetera. Really though, there's no one strategy for healing that'll always be used. There are "duh" things like keeping the HoT going on the applicable person taking damage, but we'll have to be more conservative with our casts until we get to the point that our mana pool is once again not a problem.