Holy Paladins and Gems.Follow

Meta Gem
Insightful Earthsiege Diamond is the best. It isn't even an argument in both theorycraft and real raid application has been shown to be the King.

Seriously, put down the 2% to intellect one. Both in theorycraft and also in actual encounters (via WWS) it has been shown that its not even a close race. Insightful wins by a mile. Putting in the 2% intellect one is like a Hunter gemming for Strength, ok maybe not that bad but you get the point.


SP
Don't gem for it. Stacking SP is bad for a holy paladin, unless all you do is spam FoL. Which if at lvl 80 you are still spammng FoL you need to get sat down. All it mainly does is contribute to overhealing. You will have to have 1 gem with it for the meta but honestly leave off, with current itemization you are good for Spellpower quit measuring your ***** by it. Its not healthy.

Mp5
Don't do it, honestly mp5 is trivialized for pallies.


Int or Crit or whatever floats your boats, honestly I don't mind a little variation but bad meta is bad, gemming entirely for sp is bad and gemming Mp5 is terrible. Stop it.

Really there are only 2 fights in T7.

Sartharion 3 drakes. Heroic and non heroic.

The rest is extremely poorly balanced. No hyperbole, Naxx in 7.5 gear feels like Kara in SWP gear /easybutton. Malygos is not quite so bad but its meh. Ulduar will hopefully be mixing that up. 3.1 is going to mess up mana regen, not just with Divine Plea but also with how spiritual attunement works for holy. They want to revamp healing because they feel it is to much SPAM SPAM /w unlimited mana. They want more thoughtful, mana conservative healing so they don't have to throw mass splash damage like Malygos or the SWP fights at raids to challenge healers.

We have a bit for Ulduar, or even 3.1 but at least get the meta right. Also if you are looking for 3 drakes you will definitely want to gem for some mana regen rather than SP because while you will end fight with 100% mana you will probably be 10% mana the first time you down the third drake.

Very true!

I still think crit/int is preferred or even crit/sp gems are nails.

Mp5 is still undesirable, and I think stacking +healing is kind of yucky but yar, I have actually gone both Int and Crit in terms of gemming testing it out and honestly there wasn't a lot of difference as far as I could tell.

Its like Intellect or any other stat. After a certain amount its overkill. 20k unbuffed mana and you are good for all Wotlk content with Divine Plea. Go past 45% crit (raid buffed) and it can start to be overkill as well. Ditto with plus healing, I am seeing bad paladins on server stacking it up to 2500 which is great for saying "2500 sp Pally lfg" /flex. End of the day its just wasted stats.

There is flexibility in gemming, mainly you want to use it to fill wholes in your current itemization. Not to stack on stat to a insanely high number that doesn't actually enhance your performance.

600 mana returned, 5% proc rate, might or might not have a 15-second ICD. Procs off anything that is classified as a spell, including summoning your Charger. Apparently has been seen to proc twice in one second in a WWS parse, but WWS is not 100% reliable.

I have yet to go OOM (nor particularly close except once, when our undergeared Naxx-10 group took Patch about 10 seconds from enrage, and I was timing my OOM for the timer expiration, figuring that mana would do no good after that). This is largely because I'm gearing for Int, using Divine Favor and Illumination religiously (ha!), and in no small part because I have this meta.

Even at 1 PPM, that's 50 mp5.

Thanks to Bhodi and the posters in this thread. I didn't realize I had been gemming wrong all this time. I went and swapped out most of my SP gems for INT gems and popped that meta gem into my helm. Holy cow, what a difference! Instead of going oom every fight, I usually have much more to spare for Holy Light. My heals still hit hard and I have many more of them to go around. Great advice which is much appreciated.