Yes. The evaluation of Holy Light should be "for situations in which no other spell can provide necessary throughput," not "current mechanics and gear allow for such abundant resources that efficiency is only a marginal consideration."

As long as design remains generally consistent with Ghostcrawler's statement from December — "If mana doesn’t matter [ . . . ] (overhealing) has no consequence. If you use the proverbial bazooka to kill cockroaches, then who cares?" — Cataclysm won't allow such liberal use of the paladin's most powerful spell.

It's been awhile since I've healed on my pallie, but the idea behind stacking int is that with replenishment, plea, etc, etc all scaling off int, you receive so much more mana back than you should be throwing out.. I've never noticed any of the holy pallies that I run with having mana issues, or calling out for innervates.

Maybe you're doing something wrong? Not sure..

With divine plea and divine illumination you should be able to keep up your mana and through avenging wrath and our 2t10 bonus you don't have to sacrifice much healing for DP. I find that remembering to DP regularly is the difference between going oom and finishing a fight with most of your mana in icc

Maybe it's not me doing something wrong, but the other healers... or maybe me...

I am in a 10man guild and the other healer with me is either a Druid or a Priest. Both are better geared than I am.

That being said, when I am healing the tank and I start to drop to around 50% mana, I pop divine plea. 50% loss in healing means i crit for 11-13k. The other healer, sometimes, can't make up the difference in healing. Even if I use Avenging Wrath or my 2set T10, it doesn't offset enough for me to maintain healing the entire fight with using pure HL. If the druid is not healing, but is going critchicken, I have him innervate me. That, along with my cooldowns, allows me to keep HL for an entire fight. Otherwise, I go OOM or the tank dies when I pop Divine Plea.

I've never understood the math on using DP, and losing 50% healing vs using FoL more and not needing to DP. Its the conventional wisdom that one should do that - but can someone point me to a good explanation as to why?

Or are people just DPing during the slower parts of the fight to recover for the nasty parts?

(I'm trying to get with the times on my dusty holy pally)

The reason many paladins use HL exclusively is because if you gear correctly (meaning not necessarily always the most current gear, the best in slot libram for holy is still the heroism badge libram) your HL has the same efficiency, if not better, than your FoL, with a remarkably similar cast time. If you can heal for 15K for 900 mana or 5k for 325 mana, which do you do? When you have 40k+ mana and the actual average mana cost of HL is less than 500 mana, you can quite literally cast nothing but HL and never run out of mana.

A FoL build is nice, but it is decidedly NOT for tank healing. It is all about big FoL raid heals and support for the HL tank healer.

I am pretty surprised...non of you guys melee for mana? Man best time ever to melee for mana is during heroism you go from near empty to full in mer seconds. I spend ass much time as I can during boss fights in melee range so when im not casting im getting a few hits in for mana regen.