Soft Crit Cap?

[Aeshur]

Is there still a soft crit cap for Holy paladins in PvE? I recall reading that being >~19.5% crit was a no-no, but that was also before WoD went live. Currently my paladin has acquired a lot of prismatic gear + combined with a lot of crit gear (BoEs/660 PvP Chestpiece) and I've hit 21.6% crit un-buffed (1766 crit rating) . So with food and crit buff I'm effectively at ~27.5% crit chance. Does crit lose priority after hitting this soft cap? My Holy Shock crit chance is about 55% as the end result. Should I swap some of my gems to haste instead? Some insight would be appreciated.

[Jackielope]

The only crit "soft cap" is when using Avenging Wrath and Sanctified Wrath. AW boosts crit by 20%, but since Holy Shock gets double AW boosts HS's crit by 40%. Then SW boosts HS's crit by another 20% (which doesn't seem to get doubled since it's HS only, but it's possible it does) so AW + SW boosts HS crit by 60% or 80%. If it's 60%, factor in the 5% raid buff counting for double and that's 70% crit taken care of meaning you just need 30% HS crit, which is actually 15% base. If it's 80% then factoring in the 10% raid buff means HS needs 10% crit, or 5% base crit. Then there's Glyph of Merciful Wrath which lowers the crit effects.

I'm not sure if it's been completely verified beyond any doubt how exactly the crits are calculated. The most straightforward way to see how it goes is take SW and start spamming HS and only HS while AW is up. This is preferably done with Bloodlust and other haste buffs up to maximize the number used in the CD window. Take logs of all of it and make note of the character's gear crit and window percentage due to the crit attunement. Ideally this is done with 0 crit from gear and HS cast hundreds or even thousands of times to get a good statistical analysis of the logs.

Or ask on the Blizz forums and pray they give a thorough and clear answer on how exactly it all plays out.

As far as haste goes, if you go by the stat weights BouchBagette gives at http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...adin-Guide-6-0 then it'll either be tied with mastery for second or fall slightly behind multistrike. If you find you don't feel fast enough then haste might work for you, but if you're comfortable with your healing speed then mastery or multistrike should probably be your second pick since they give you throughput without the expense of casting more heals per time and thus using more mana.