PVE Projections for Holy Paladins in 3.2

Blizzard seems to have made it their policy in WotLK to design fights around stressing healers to the limits of their abilities. As such, mana regeneration is a vital standard to tweak. Mana regen for healers was deemed too high by Blizzard and spirit based regen was famously nerfed.

Now in 3.2, Replenishment will be nerfed. On top of that, holy paladins in specific will be targeted as Illumination and Divine Intellect is nerfed. Holy paladins are therefore facing a 3 pronged attack to their mana regen mechanics.

Currently, holy paladins favor stats like intellect, crit, haste and spell power. Mp5 is a stat that is mostly ignored for reasons I have detailed in previous posts explaining how mana regen works for a holy paladin.

So with the nerfs to Replenishment and our talent buffing our own intellect along with "buffs" to itemization allocation of mp5 on gear, will things change much for holy paladins?

This is my own opinion formed through my experience on the PTR, my current healing experience and my knowledge of my class. So feel free to disagree with me (respectfully if you so please).

1. Some mp5 on gear will be acceptable. Not that this means itemization for a holy paladin is much different than it is now. We will still love crit/haste/SP itemized gear just that if some of our gear has crit/SP/mp5 or haste/SP/mp5, it won't be /eyeroll like it was pre-nerf. Holy paladins will therefore have more mp5 in our actual stats. I'm guessing ~3-400 mp5 will be optimal.
   
2. Haste will be more desirable than crit - that is until you hit the soft haste cap at 676 haste rating. With the nerf to crit regen mechanics, having our heals land when we want will be more important than critting often. This is because having a very high crit rating won't be as important as trying to ensure a steady throttle of heals on the Beacon target. We will need to spot heal a lot more often and a high haste rating is vital to fulfill this role.
   
3. Intellect stacking becomes more important than ever. Unless you are a holy paladin that plans on solely healing with FoL, all your gems and trinkets will be intellect based. With crit being heavily nerfed as our mana refund mechanic, stacking intellect to benefit from Divine Plea and Replenishment will be more important.
   
4. New healing mechanics will encourage more spamming. Beacon counts overheal and that means some paladin healers may prefer to just target 1 person and spam all day long. Either that or they spend the entire raid playing whack-a-mole and heal sniping while refreshing SS and BoL.
   
5. No raiding guild progressing through new content will ever need to recruit holy paladins. As holy paladins lose our niche as powerful tank healers, only 1 holy paladin is necessary. Usually guilds already have their 1-2 veteran holy paladin healer in place. Unless something drastic happens to their current token holy paladin, most guilds will probably be recruiting other healing classes. It is TBC SWP part deux. Who needs a 2nd (or even just 1) holy paladin when a priest or druid or shaman will be able to do the job better. For buffs, ret/prot pallies are perfectly capable of providing them. After 3.2, holy paladins are only buffers for other tank healers while not doing any real raid healing. The heavy lifting will fall on the other classes.
6. Two schools of holy paladins will appear. There are already 2 types of paladins - those that favor stacking high SP and those that favor stacking high int via their trinkets, enchants and gems. Just that currently in end game raiding, most paladins are int stackers to support heavy HL usage. Both types should now be equally viable though I believe SP stacking paladins will be pigeon holed into FoL spammers while int stackers will be a little more versatile as they can support both FoL and HL usage.

Though there is a general consensus that holy paladins will now be more "balanced" in terms of stats, I still believe having a large mana pool is the best way for paladins to go. High haste is crucial for effective healing as we are single target healers on a cast time. In terms of throughput, haste>crit and ironically enough, there seems to be more crit to be found on gear in 3.2 rather than haste.

Things remain to be seen how the state of matters really stand for holy paladins in 3.2 raids. Though I am not very happy with how things have turned out so far for holy paladins, I will stick with the class and try to show success as a holy paladin.

Best of luck to all my fellow holy paladins! I'll see you all in 3.2 hopefully.