#0 - Feb. 14, 2007, 4:38 p.m.
I made this spreadsheet which people might find a bit useful:
http://files.filefront.com/pallyheal+post+illu+nerfxls/;8267241;;/fileinfo.html
The Spreadsheet
All calculations done in the spreadsheet are described in the wall of text below.
Insert your amount of healing gear, your crit chance not including any holy talents, your mana per five, and your mana pool. Simple enough so far… All calculations can be made using whatever talents for healing you have and whether or not Blessing of Light is on the target.
“Crit value” is up to you to decide, often when healing critical heals = overheals. It’s a value you can change between 0 and 50% depending on how large effect you feel critical hits on heals have, it’s the percent value added by critical heals to your heals so max is 50%.
Cast times are also found on the top, I left them there because for example a paladin using holy light might feel he only cast one heal every 3 seconds. These cast times are meant to be the actual time between your spell casts. Due to lag the fastest you can ever cast heals is their cast time +0.2seconds so minimum time for FoL is 1.7s and for HL it’s 2.2s.
The values the spreadsheet gives are HealPerMana, HealPerSecond, Effective Mana cost (described below), Healing until OOM, and average heal value including crits.
Actual mana cost
Since paladins have a one of a kind ability in that they get all mana back from critical heals this becomes quite an interesting thing to look at. Say you toss a rank 11 Holy Light at 840 mana, then you have a 20% chance to crit through gear and talents(low). Essentially this make the average cost of that rank 11 Holy Light 840 * (100-20*0.6)/100 = 739 mana on average.
The other mana efficiency ability is mana per 5 seconds, or MP5. While you were casting that one holy light for 2.5 seconds you got half a tick of your MP5 gear. Say you also had 80 MP5 that means you would have regained 40 mana while casting that holy light. Hmm, so casting that Holy Light rank 11 you on average spent 739 mana because of crits, and regained 40 mana due to your MP5 gear. Ie casting one rank 11 Holy Light your mana bar goes down by an average of 699, with 20% crit chance and 80 MP5 gear.
This can be simplified a bit so that you get the actual amount your mana decreases while casting any healing spell.
“Real mana cost” = “mana cost” * (100 – “crit chance” * 0.6) / 100 – MP5 * “cast time” / 5
Your crit chance decreases mana cost by a straight percent value of the base cost and MP5 decreases mana cost by a fixed value. There is a difference there, a quite significant one. Crit chance reduces the rate you burn your mana while casting by a value depending on the mana cost of the spell, and is much better at reducing the cost of high rank expensive spells(read:Holy Light). Whereas MP5 is far better at increasing your mana efficiency if you use low cost spells or down-ranked spells (Flash of Light and down-ranking, mmkay).
22.1 crit rating grants 1% spell critical strike chance at level 70.
Downranking
When downranking you get a reduced effect from your +healing gear to the spells, it’s described here by a blue:
http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=71337411&postId=713110257&sid=1#0
Essentially if you use a spell you learned at level 42 when you are level 70 the effect that spell gains from +healing gear will be multiplied by (42+11)/70. This can never exceed 1 so it's only important for downranking, a spell you learn at level 60-70 will get the factor 70/70=1.
Average heals
So how to calculate the average amount healed by your healing spell?
Well it’s quite simple if you’ve been doing this for a while. Spells with a cast time before talents of 3.5 seconds get 100% from +healing (or +damage). If a spell is faster than 3.5 seconds it’ll get: “cast time” / 3.5 amount from +healing gear. Also there is a holy talent to increase the amount healed by 12%, hence after you're done multiply everything with 1.12.
If Blessing of Light is up on the target just increase the amount of +healing by 580 for holy light and 185 for flash of light.
A formula for average amount healed, non-crit, can be written like this:
“Average Heal”=(“Base Average” + ”+healing” * “cast time” / 3.5 * (“level learned+11”)/70) * "talent bonus"
For flash of light, FoL, for example, say rank 4 to make it interesting, with 700 healing gear the average non-crit heal will look something like this:
“Average Heal” = (209+ 700 * 1.5/3.5 * 53/70) * 1.12 = 448
Excellent. Now how will this look if we also include crits into the calculation, using the average heal from above:
“Average Heal inc. Crit” = “Average Heal” * ( 100 + “crit chance” * “crit value”) / 100
So I added something called crit value, it was described under the spreadsheet section above but let me rephrase it. Crit value is how much YOU think a crit is worth in healing. Is it really worth the full 50% when a crit heal often = overheal? Neither is it completely useless when it comes to healed amount so somewhere between 0% and 50% is the actual healing effect added by a critical heal.
The rest
Now that we know the average healed, and the real amount of mana you spend while casting any healing spell we can calculate some other interesting values.
“Healing per Mana” = “Average Heal inc. Crit” / “Real mana cost”
“Healing per Second” = “Average Heal inc. Crit” / “cast time”
(Important: Put the cast times to their minimum to get the best values here)
“Healing to OOM” = “Healing per Mana” * “mana pool”
All this is already done in the spreadsheet so please test it.
MP5 vs spell crit for mana efficiency
As i pointed out earlier crit is more effective for reducing the cost of high mana spells and MP5 is more effective on shorter cast and downranked spells. But how much is more effective?
Take a quick glimpse once again on:
“Real mana cost” = “mana cost” * (100 – “crit chance” * 0.6) / 100 – MP5 * “cast time” / 5
Some rearranging and balancing MP5 against 1% crit will give independant on anything else (trust me):
"MP5 vs Crit %" = "mana cost" / ( "cast time" * 20)
This is asuming crits have no additional healing value and that you spam heal. Of course in fights with more breaks in casting MP5 will become more important and if you'd say that crits have an additional bonus in grating some extra healing it would also change. But it can be used as a good approximation.
It can also be done for MP5 against crit rating, at level 70 22.1 crit rating = 1% chance to crit.
"MP5 vs Crit Rating" = 0.6 * "mana cost" / ("cast time" * 20 * 22.1)
Some examples using 2.2s cast HL:
Rank 11 HL: 0.52 MP5 = 1 crit rating
Rank 10 HL: 0.44
Rank 9 HL: 0.41
Rank 8 HL: 0.36
Rank 7 HL: 0.29
Rank 6 HL: 0.23
Rank 4 HL: 0.12
And some examples with 1.7s cast FoL:
Rank 7: 0.14 MP5 = 1 crit rating
Rank 6: 0.11
Rank 5: 0.09
Rank 4: 0.07
Rank 2: 0.04
So which is better? If you look up item budget values on for example wowwiki you can see that 9.2 MP5 is worth as much on an item as 22 crit rating, or 0.42 MP5 = 1 crit rating.
http://www.wowwiki.com/Formulas:Item_Values
Looking at the values above, all ranks of FoL is under this value and so is HL of rank 8 or lower. Some asumptions were made, chaincasting and crits not giving additional healing values. The only spells which are close enough to 0.42 to be questionable is HL rank 9 and 10, so for those MP5 and crit are equally good choices. For everything else the difference between the value of MP5 which would give the same efficiency as one crit rating is large enough so the result won't change.
So in conclusion for increasing mana efficiency crit rating is the better choice for HL of rank 11 only, MP5 is the best choice for all ranks of FoL and HL rank 8 or below. For rank 9 and 10 of HL they are both as effective.
