The Light and How to Swing It: Examining secondary stats for holy paladins
by Chase Christian 
Jan 8th 2012 at 8:00PM
Despite any arguments to the contrary, I don't feel that spirit is a true secondary stat. I know you can reforge in and out of it and that it's not as ubiquitous as intellect, but it's actually closer to being our fifth primary stat. In Mists of Pandaria, intellect will no longer grant additional mana, making spirit the only game in town for improving longevity. Because of the way holy paladins function with the new Judgements of the Pure regeneration mechanic, spirit has gone from a good choice to a must-have stat.
When we start talking about the true secondary stats, we realize that there's a lot of baggage here. Haste rating was the de facto champion due to its ability to affect all of our heals, critical strike rating was avoided after the removal of Illumination, and our master rating has gone through more iterations than any other spell in Cataclysm.
Get past your bias
I will freely admit that haste is my favorite secondary stat. I have always liked the idea of lowering the global cooldown, and I hope to eventually get to the five-tick Holy Radiance haste break point. While haste is definitely awesome, it has one major flaw: It doesn't increase the HPM of most of our healing spells. I love haste for the HPS it brings, but casting more spells means using more mana. Critical strike rating and mastery rating don't have that penalty.
If you look at most of the holy paladins breaking records on World of Logs, they're almost all reforging into haste rating. AoE healing is the only way to generate enough HPS to land on top of WoL, and so you're going to see the AoE-focused holy paladins doing well. The truth is that having high HPS numbers don't always equate to being the most effective healer, especially when considering that many of the top holy paladins don't even make their parses publicly available.
There's nothing wrong with stacking haste rating on your holy paladin, and in fact, you'll be in good company if you do. My point is that the other secondary stats have come a long way since Cataclysm's release, and they're strong enough to warrant a second look.
Mastery has a bad reputation
Illuminated Healing was very bad for a very long time, and so it's understandable that holy paladins are still apprehensive about picking it up. The truth is that it's been performing pretty well as a stat since Firelands, where several holy paladins switched from haste to mastery builds and saw success. Mastery provides significant and fairly predictable HPS and HPM increases and boosts a raid's survivability by raising a player's effective health.
The problem with mastery is still finding a situation where it's always going to be useful. What I do is figure out where discipline priests are thriving, because that's where Illuminated Healing will thrive too. Fights like Yor'sahj and Ultraxion require tons of healing, and the sheer amount of AoE raid damage being dealt ensures that our bubbles will be fully utilized. Holy paladins facing heroic Yor'sahj favor mastery builds to counter the purple ooze debuff, while heroic Ultraxion makes haste irrelevant by giving us the Source of Magic buff.
Mastery is a great stat if we know that our raiders are going to take damage soon, and Dragon Soul has enough AoE damage on every fight (save Hagara) to make mastery an attractive option. I have seen several holy paladin parses where Illuminated Healing is near the top of their healing done, simply because we get a lot of potency per point of mastery rating. Our mastery won't be valuable on every fight, but it seems to fit in with the Dragon Soul encounters.
Critical strike is valuable, but unpredictable
Critical strike is always one of the tough stats to figure out as a healer. Doubling our heals for free sounds great, but the catch is that we can't control which heals are doubled. The fact that neither mastery or crit is completely reliable or relevant in all situations is a major reason in why they've been considered to be weaker than haste. Critical strike rating does increase our HPS and HPM by more than both mastery and haste, as long as all of the critical heal was effective healing.
The Spine of Deathwing encounter, with the Searing Plasma debuff, provides the perfect conditions for crit rating to shine. Imagine that every raider has 400,000 health when they land on Deathwing's back and that when Searing Flame gets applied, they lose 200,000 life. We have to heal that health back up quickly, and since there's such a large health deficit, any critical heals we get will be completely effective. There are many holy paladins stacking more crit on their gear to survive the heroic Spine of Deathwing, as the artificially inflated health pools are perfect for ensuring that critical heals aren't wasted.
I still value crit the least of the three secondary stats, but the takeaway is to realize that it's not always pointless. Critical strike rating can provide us with a massive HPS and HPM increase in the right situation, and knowing that we have that option available to us makes us stronger healers overall.
The Light and How to Swing It: Holy helps holy paladins become the powerful healers we're destined to be. Find out just how masterful mastery healing can be, gear up with the latest gear, and learn how to PvP as a holy paladin.
Filed under: Paladin, (Paladin) The Light and How to Swing It
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
steve Jan 8th 2012 9:26PM
It's worth pointing out that many of the fights on Dragon Soul demand high burst healing (usually aoe) with built in regen phases. In my opinion, this fight design favors haste, which gives us the best pure throughput. Heal them up, hit divine plea and melee for mana, rinse and repeat. You pointed to Yor'soj and ultraxion as fights that might favor mastery, but on Yor'soj it's easy to end the fight at full mana by taking advantage of the down time, and on ultraxion, you have a built in divine plea phase, just make sure you macro a cancelaura and you can hit it every time.
Alysandir Jan 9th 2012 12:28AM
In my experience, it's not enough to say that "X is superior" when considering a build strategy; you have to also factor in the tendencies of the individual healer.
In my case, I loathe long cast times. I think it probably hearkens back to when I was a baby healer and that one heal that would save the tank (and ergo save the day) always seemed to come a fraction of a second too late, mostly because I hadn't learned to properly predict damage spikes at that point. My style was also shaped by hating being out of mana and looking on helpless as the group swirled the bowl, with the other members not yet realizing their healer was effectively a doorknob, blissfully did not see the oncoming wipe train I was staring in the headlights. These two tendencies turned me into a "twitch healer," where I favored fast cast spells and having mana that could go on forever. Thankfully over time, my favoring haste and mp5 (later spirit) became the optimum stat strategy, and made everyone in my guild think I actually knew what I was doing.
But I've known many healers that just cannot do the twitch model. Too slow reflexes...too many things to triage quickly...too fast and loose for comfort. They are more comfortable looking ahead and planning when to do what, studying each fight to know what each boss is going to do when, and laying down healing and mitigation pre-emptively. I would think these kind of healers would do better with a mastery build vs a twitch build, because it plays into their natural tendencies.
So before buying into the "theorycraft says that if you don't do X, you're a baddie" hype, give all builds a try and see which one resonates with you. Experimenting costs you nothing but the gold to respec/reforge.
Marbles Jan 9th 2012 1:23AM
As a paladin who tends towards 10 mans (and normals at that), is Haste still "better" than Crit/Mastery? Only 25s I do are LFR - but maxing healing in LFR a fairly pointless effort.
Given that Holy Radiance has fewer targets to hit and the entire "Haste" section seems based around Radiance and AoE healing.
m.lourens1990 Jan 9th 2012 2:48AM
Yes, haste is still attractive for 10 man normals. It also decreases the cast time of Holy Light, Divine Light and yes, Holy Radiance, though Holy Radiance seems to get more out of haste then our other spells. That, and HR being the most used spell on most fights in DS, are probably the reason it's so heavily discussed in the Haste section.
lifebinder Jan 9th 2012 5:07AM
If you look at how each particular secondary stat scales (in terms of point of rating per percent), crit looks god-awful, while haste is beautiful.
In Wrath I loved stacking crit - nothing like seeing big green numbers all night long. But with how hard it is to actually stack crit now, and how fast damage comes in, critical chance rating is just untenable.
Note that I made no mention of mastery. It does, in fact, give a nice rate of return on investment, but mastery can be so situational, its sad. I do, however, remember seeing some BoT runs of a paladin that had stacked all mastery, and that was sick to watch. But by and large, you just get more bang for your buck from haste.
eel5pe Jan 9th 2012 10:09AM
I don't see any comments about secondary stats for PvP, so I'll chime in real fast. I play primarily RBGs btw. I reforge into all crit for more IoL procs. You're also almost always healing heavily damaged targets so the 2x heal is rarely wasted. Spirit is largely useless since fights never really last long enough to where you OOM, unless you're getting mana burned in which case you're screwed anyway (thank you judgement changes, grumble.) I find about equal utility out of haste and mastery.
Chase Christian Jan 9th 2012 12:20PM
Exactly. As I mentioned that haste doesn't affect sub-1s casts, it also doesn't affect instant casts. Instants casts are the backbone of any PvP healer, and critical strike rating makes a lot of sense in that environment.
Mark Jan 9th 2012 12:04PM
So I don't know what to take away from this. Should i still be reforging and stacking spirit or is the new sensation that's sweeping the nation haste?
Chase Christian Jan 9th 2012 12:19PM
I mentioned it up at the top, but Spirit is always going to be the #1 stat for us now, and nobody is going to argue that. We want Int and Spirit on ALL of our gear.
The question comes down to haste vs crit vs mastery. Haste is still the most popular option, but crit and mastery have matured enough during Cataclysm that they're not automatically excluded any more.
steve Jan 9th 2012 12:21PM
Int then spirit then haste (or mastery). You shouldn't have to reforge spirit because it should be on every single piece of gear you have.
Mark Jan 9th 2012 12:50PM
Awww okay, so if for some reason my gear doesn't have spirit on it i will reforge into spirit, but if it does and for some reason doesn't have haste, get haste. But what about gems? will I always pick up gems that have spirit/int or can i splurge a little and get some with haste or crit?
Angus Jan 9th 2012 4:29PM
Gem int.
If it is a blue slot and the bonus is nice, gem int/spirit.
Otherwise, INT
Diatenium Jan 9th 2012 4:50PM
I'm more a fan of crit over mastery myself, not to cheapen the usefulness of mastery by saying that of course.
I hear some talking about the int+3% crit meta now overtakes the 2% max mana meta since it now encompasses critical healing as well as damage, what are your feelings on this?
The easiest reason to cite for crit as my preferable choice is infusion procs--personally, I wish daybreak procc'd off of crits instead of a flat proc rate as well. Of course this isn't really enough to put the stat over mastery--at least for PvE--but the gap is close enough, I find, to leave it up to personal preference.
r.furrer91 Jan 10th 2012 12:11PM
I switched from haste stacking to mastery stacking once my guild started DS and it was a great decision. I've even started reforging out of spirit for MORE mastery. Between buffs and our judgement of the pure, my in combat mana regen is PLENTY high, and our mastery is essentially free "heals". For most of the fights Illuminated Healing is my top or 2nd heal, and I'm only sitting at 30% mastery. If you've got FL gear or better, DEFINITELY try stacking mastery over haste, is that .2 second quicker cast time going to help you that much? I mean, you also have to consider the 9% haste we get whenever we judge.
Armory link for reference: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/tortheldrin/Furger/simple