Holy Paladin BIS

When looking at BIS gear for holy paladin I noticed that it is preferring versatility over crit. In fact for the raid healing strat it has crit as the lowest stat priority. When playing my holy paladin I have 2 builds one which I have 18% crit, 32% mastery, 4% haste, and 8.35% versatility. This is what would be considered the best gear that I have in my bags and is what Pawn and ask mr robot recommend. I also have a cirt setup which has the following stats 28% crit, 8% haste, 2% versatility, and 27% mastery. While playing my crit setup I find that it feels much more powerful than the setup AMR recommends. The crit setup especially seems to be more powerful in mythic + where the setup seems to be able to produce more burst healing than the AMR setup. Yes the AMR setup has each ability doing more healing by about 6% on the sheet ability healing and 5% more healing when taking into consideration the mastery in optimal conditions. However the increase infusion of light procs which the crit setup provides seems to be more impactful. Also you have the chance to crit on those infusion of light procs which of course is more often in the crit build. I think AMR is putting a lot of weight into light of dawn which yes when most effectively used provides a lot more healing than the crit setup but not many fights has people stacking in Uldir and it can be rare to hit the people who actually need the healing. I am wondering if the AMR gearing strat is correct or if I am wrong and the AMR setup is just overall more powerful than a crit based setup.

You can use a high crit setup if you like it. Mathematically, it’s not going to be superior on average. You don’t really get that many more infusion of light procs over the course of a fight - not enough to make crit particularly better than other stats, anyway.

The value of crit is depressed for holy paladin because of the built-in extra crit on holy shock. The infusion of light procs then make crit more valuable. So, in the end, you end up with a stat that is more or less on par with other stats.

The way we rank gear is using simulations. We set up the simulator to keep everyone alive as the first priority, and then we maximize average HPS as second priority. All sets of gear that keep everyone alive are equally good for a healer. We use HPS to “sort” those sets of gear so that we can pick one on the website. Having higher crit can keep everyone alive, but it won’t do more HPS on average, which is why we don’t pick it by default.