In a previous post I took my first swing at analyzing how valuable MP5 is in gear for holy paladins. I looked at WWS parses of fights in 25man Naxx to find out what portion of our regen came from MP5. The result? Barely any.
I guessed that this wouldn’t change in Ulduar because the underlying fundamentals weren’t changing. Some comments in that post suggested that the situation might change because Ulduar fights are a lot more mobile, etc. It took a while to get a decent set of parses showing the regen in 25-man Ulduar. I think I’ve now come to a representative sample from the early fights. The methodology is the same as in the post from Naxx. We express the sources of regen as MP5 for each fight:
We’re looking at about 1100 to 1700 MP5 from regen sources other than gear MP5 in 25-man Ulduar.
This makes small amounts of MP5 in gear irrelevant. It doesn’t come close to the other sources of regen we have. As an example, in the fights that were parsed I had about 56 MP5 from mostly T7.5 gear. That’s around, what, 4% of regen? That much MP5 may as well be Spirit or Hit for the amount of good it’s doing.
But what if we go all out and try to stack MP5? How much can we get and what do we sacrifice for it? Let’s throw together some rough gear sets that either stack MP5 or try to avoid MP5 entirely.
MP5 stacking set: 811 int, 255 crit, 367 haste, 1718 SP, 303 MP5
MP5 avoiding set: 821 int, 651 crit, 691 haste, 1667 SP, 0 MP5
If we really try we can get up to 300 MP5 at the cost of around half of our crit and haste ratings. All right, now we’re getting numbers that could matter. That much MP5 could be on the order of 20% to 30% of our mana regen.
I don’t want to get too lost in the details of our regen sources — that would make a fun post on its own — but let’s consider the nature of MP5 for a second. Replenishment and Divine Plea scale with the size of our mana pool. Seal of Wisdom scales with our mana pool and haste. Illumination scales with our casting speed and crit rate. MP5 always returns mana at the same rate. When your friendly neighbourhood shammy pops {Heroism,Bloodlust} your mana consumption increases. Illumination and SoW try to keep up. MP5 sits there staring at its navel, returning exactly the same amount of mana as it did before.
Is it worth it, then, to get static MP5 at the cost of huge chunks of our gear’s haste and crit, stats which scale our top two sources of mana regen? This pally says absolutely not. As long as we have the huge mana regen sources of Illumination, SoW, Divine Plea, and Replenishment I’ll continue to see MP5 as somewhere between useless to downright harmful.
Finally, these updated numbers combined with the experience of raiding after some “upgrades” ([Poignant Sabatons] -> [Greaves of the Rockmender], [Chestplate of the Great Aspects] -> [Breastplate of the Afterlife]) have given me a much stronger feel for the gear set that I’d consider best-in-slot. My initial hope that our Ulduar gear would be OK, given all its MP5, turned out to be sadly wrong.
[...] mostly worthless for a Holy Paladin. In fact, its very worthless. Zabery has a couple of great posts about just how worthless Mp5 is for us Holy Paladins. We get so much mana regen from other [...]
check mmo. currently the only BiS that has mp5 on it are the legs (cloth boots and mail wrists though). however some of these pieces are pretty difficult to get. luckily my guild is good enough that i haven’t even bothered to find 2nd and 3rd BiS, but if it’s all loaded up with mp5 i can see how that would be frustrating.
[...] Items with crit and haste, and thus no stinky MP5 [...]