I think I hit rock bottom. I broke out a spreadsheet and started doing math...WoW math. See, I am constantly going over my character. I hit forums, read guides, take recommendations, compare gear with other pallies, etc, all in a quest to be the best holy paladin I can be. Today, I decided to rock out some math to better understand the relationships between some stats, namely: Spirit, Intellect, and MP5 (Mana Per 5 seconds). It is widely held by the holy paladin community that Spirit and MP5 are throwaway stats and you should just stack Intellect until you can stack Intellect no more. Here are the basic equations that went into the spreadsheet (Keep in mind this is just for Holy Paladins with the relevant talents, it is a totally different world for other healing classes...and I don't understand any of them.):
| Mana | Bonus Mana + 20 + (Intellect - 20) * 15 + 4394 |
| Spellpower | Bonus Spellpower = .2 * Intellect |
| Regen (MP5), out of combat | Bonus MP5 + 5(0.001 + SQRT(Intellect) * 0.005575 * Spirit) * .6 |
| Regen (MP5), in combat | Bonus MP5 |
| Crit Chance | Intellect / 166.6667 + 3.336 + Crit Rating/45.91 + 5 |
Insert about an hour ... and after lots of tooling around, I decided it is all meaningless and I should fall back to something simpler: in a five minute fight, will I be able to cast another heal? Is it a bigger mana pool to start with (Intellect) or better regen during the fight (MP5 and Spirit)? This question immediately renders Spirit useless, since it only affects mana regen after 5 seconds of not casting. If I have a group where I am not casting for 5 or more seconds, I am barely healing anyways so who cares. Spirit is in fact a throwaway stat.
So now it is MP5 vs Intellect. For every 19.35 MP5 I get to cast one more big heal, while I would need 67 Intellect to have enough base mana for another heal. Seems like a no brainer, but 19.35 MP5 is just 19.35 MP5 while 67 Intellect is also 13.4 Spellpower (heals are slightly bigger) and .4% Crit Chance (heal is 150% more effective and gives back 60% of the mana used).
Taking that into consideration, Intellect is definitely a more attractive stat. But I think I have a little more respect for MP5 and will stop thumbing my nose at gear that has it as a stat like I have been doing. I think I might take a look at some of my gems/enchants and see where I can slip some MP5 in without affecting my Intellect too much. I think I might shoot for 80-100 MP5 (currently at 67) and everything else in Intellect (currently 1213).
And for those of you in the know, I am intentionally left out Divine Plea. To make you happy, just those 67 points of Intellect would give you 24.1 MP5 if used on cooldown, but your healing would suffer by 50% for a quarter of the five minutes. Divine Plea is awesome and renders the argument pointless, but some of us prefer to use it sparingly because of the hit to our healing output.
