Critical healing, the paladin mastery, is a poor talent from a game design perspective even if, for whatever reason, it comes out the gate wildly overtuned. It isn't sound because it reduces the amount of choices paladins have with regards to their gearing as a response to stat balance and encounter demands. Healing gear will apparently have Stamina, Intellect and Spirit baseline, and then have two of three green stats: crit rating, haste and mastery.


Three Green Stats Means Three Knobs to Turn

For other healers, mastery is essentially a third unique green stat - as a Holy priest, wherever it says "mastery" I can pretend it says "Radiance" and treat it as a third throughput option to weigh against haste and crit. It is conceivable that I can determine that mastery is more or less useful than one or both of those traditional stats - I could want mastery, but not crit, for example. For Holy priests, and the other healing specs, the three green stats are sufficiently independent in function that I also will desire or reject them independently. As the expansion, encounters and gear level progress, these three stats will probably fluctuate in power. If for whatever reason crit rating is poor in the early tiers or certain fights, I can gear for haste and mastery. If crit then becomes better than mastery, I can gear for crit and haste. I have three knobs to turn to react to the ebb and flow of the balance of the game.


When Two of Your Three Knobs are the Same, You Only Have Two Knobs

But the paladin mastery ability doesn't function like the other healers'. Paladins will have the same stats on their gear, but where it says "mastery" they can't pretend it's a third independent green stat to be evaluated on its own - because it isn't. They'll see haste, crit, and "more crit." Without even looking at how the mastery is balanced, or how much overhealing crits will do, or paladin crit rates, or any other factor, it is apparent that it is poorly designed - since crit rating and "crit healing" aren't sufficiently independent from one another, paladins are unlikely to be able to evaluate them independently. Assuming that crit rating is made at least marginally useful as a throughput stat (as has been indicated), it is unlikely that there will be a point in the expansion where paladins will want critical healing but not crit rating, or crit rating but not critical healing, not because of balance but because the two stats are too closely linked to allow it. The fortunes of the two stats are bound to rise and fall together.


Two Knobs Is Too Few Knobs

For this reason, paladins only have two knobs to turn, instead of the three the other healers are afforded. If at any point in the expansion crit is a poor stat for paladins, they have no third stat to retreat to. They'll take gear with haste on it, but both of the two remaining green stats are variations of crit. They don't have three knobs to turn to react to the math; they only have two. Even now, while current tier spellpower plate is universally loathed, paladins have three choices (usually by taking mail, but that's a different post!) - which is good, because it has allowed them to abandon the horrible stat and cast their lot in with the two palatable ones.


Mixed Metaphors: Knobs as Baskets

Even if crit and critical healing come out of the beta gate overpowered (which is unlikely given how the paladin mastery scales wildly differently than the others), it's still an unfortunate design for the class to have two of their green stats tied together like this. It's best to keep your eggs in as many different baskets as possible, but when the baskets are being handed out in Cataclysm paladins are going to come up one short.

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Q u o t e:
My issue is with our Mastery stat (our third throughput option) being functionally tied to an already existing stat such that it will be hard to separate them should the need arise.

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Q u o t e:
It doesn't refute the argument that having a mastery so closely tied to the stat crit will reduce the number of choices when it comes to paladin gearing.

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I'm not sure I understand the logic here. Having larger crits makes crit chance attractive on gear, but I don't think the reverse is true. You won't be at a disadvantage if you have high crit and low mastery because you will just crit more often. You won't be at a disadvantage if you have low crit and high mastery because when you do crit, your heals will be larger. Crit and mastery do complement each other well and I can understand why it might be a problem if haste and Spirit weren't attractive stats so you were pigeon-holed into just crit + mastery gear, but those should both be very good stats.

(I'm ignoring the effects of Illumination, overhealing and the (specious) argument that "crit is inherently bad because it's RNG" to keep things simple, so let me know if any of those is key to understanding this.)

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Q u o t e:
If at any point in the expansion crit is a poor stat for paladins, they have no third stat to retreat to.

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I agree with this, but that's like saying that if at any point in the expansion Holy damage is a poor damage source for Retribution, they would have no other spell damage source to focus on. If paladins don't care about crit, then we have a problem. It doesn't matter at that point that they care more about crit than other healers. Disc priests care less about crit than they might because of Power Word: Shield, but that doesn't mean crit won't improve their healing.

So if you're arguing the flaw is that there is a risk to the paladin if crit isn't valuable, then I guess I see that. If you're arguing there is just an inherent flaw no matter what, then I'm not following you.

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Q u o t e:
Well do you think there is a problem now? I would take more comfort in your words if critical strike hadn't been nerfed mid expansion and then our final tier of gear was itemized with crit on every piece.

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I think there is a problem now because more throughput (in terms of bigger heals because of crits) is wasted on overhealing. Paladins rarely have trouble healing a single target to full. Their problem is not having enough GCDs to bring up everyone before the next round of damage happens again. That won't be the case in Cataclysm hopefully.

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Q u o t e:
If I give it +1% crit chance its now a 125.5 average heal, if I give it +1% crit size instead, it will be a... 125.5 average heal.

They *feel* like the same stat. So if I'm look at gear with +Crit, +Mastery, it just looks like +A lot of Crit. If I see gear with +Crit, and + Haste, it looks like +Crit/Haste, if I see gear with +Mastery and +Haste, it looks like +Crit/Haste.

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I can understand that argument to a point. At the same time, if you integrate things over a long time then most of our stats make you better at healing over time. I think you'd feel pretty differently is you swapped from say 1000 mastery rating to 1000 crit rating.

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Q u o t e:
Increasing crit and mastery will be more effective than increasing either alone

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I agree with that, and I further agree that it makes them both highly desirable. As long as it doesn't make other stats very undesirable then I don't see the fundamental flaw here.

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Q u o t e:
If I were to rephrase the issue, I would say that what we need to watch for is a specific combination of secondary stats becoming mathematically superior to the point where we stack that gear at the expense of all else. As has been evident repeatedly throughout WotLK, one secondary stat combo or another tends to trump the rest. This is a highly numbers-dependent evaluation, however. While it is absolutely worth flagging, I don't think we can say yet whether it's a major issue.

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Yeah, I agree with that. For a number of reasons (that I've gone into before), we allowed some stats to become much more valuable than competing stats that also occur on your gear. We're really trying to prevent this in Cataclysm. We're making changes including, but not limited to, letting hots and dots crit, asking healers to care about mana regen, getting rid of group buffs that improve hit, keeping combat rating from getting inflated, etc.