Val'anyr - Hammer of the Ancient Kings

Vrakk · 05/04/09, 11:48 PM

Ghostcrawler and Bornakk clarified the proc on the Ulduar healing legendary today (blue post) and I thought it warranted some discussion.

The way this works is that when the proc happens (which is a 10% chance whenever a hot or direct spell heals, with a 45 sec internal cooldown) you gain a buff (the Blessing) on yourself. Now all of your heals for the next 15 sec cause an 8 sec damage shield. The shield stacks with itself. It includes healing done by subsequent ticks of existing hots on the target. Note that the spell has to actually heal, so hots ticking on a fully-healed target cannot cause the proc. However the shield is based on the size of the heal itself, not the amount healed – i.e. 100% overhealing will not proc the Blessing on the healer, but the shield itself includes overhealing once the Blessing is active. The shield can grow to a maximum size of 20,000 damage absorbed.

With that said, I'm curious how people feel about the proc. Is it truly equally effective for all healing classes? Are all classes capable of a 20k bubble? Are there any especially creative uses for the 20k shield in the current pve content? What class do people plan to give the mace to and why? What are the pvp implications?

edit: Updated after Ralnar's post below, thanks.

Ralnar · 05/04/09, 11:56 PM

You'd need 133k healing to fill up a 20k damage shield, since only 15% of the heal value transfers to the shield.

Val'anyr Hammer of Ancient Kings - Equip Effect - Spell - World of Warcraft

Aditu · 05/05/09, 12:44 AM

Thanks to the internal CD, its a single target healing oriented proc.

Very useful for paladins.

Slightly less so for most other healers.

Least useful for raid healing shaman.

Feist-Mok · 05/05/09, 1:04 AM

Originally Posted by Aditu

Thanks to the internal CD, its a single target healing oriented proc.

Very useful for paladins.

Slightly less so for most other healers.

Least useful for raid healing shaman.

The ICD is on the buffgain that allows the shield to trigger.

There is no ICD on the shields created once the buff is active.

It's quite nice for a raid healing shaman as I read it.

Aditu · 05/05/09, 1:45 AM

Ok yea I clearly can't read properly.

Spreading around multiple shields as a shaman, especially if you're executing a strategy that has you in charge of healing a group would mitigate damage pretty well.

Ellyh · 05/05/09, 2:13 AM

I see a lot of people, here and elsewhere saying that this is an amazing proc for a raid healer. However I just cannot see how it is that wonderful for raid healing. First off we can't control when the damn thing is going to proc. Second you will as an absolute maximum have the buff up for 33.3% of the time with 28-29% uptime max being much more plausible because of how internal cool-downs work. Finally in any fight with sporadic AoE damage then downtime, everyone spam heals the raid for 4-5 seconds and then nothing happens for another 10-15 seconds. The shield that procs is only 8 seconds in duration and will for a single AoE spell healing 6k will produce a whopping 900 hp shield. This is nothing in an age when AoE effects routinely lands for 8-10k damage.

Given these limitations I can't see how if you are looking for maximum efficiency you can justify giving it to anyone other than your dedicated tank healer (who is probably a holy pally). In reality most guilds will give it to the healer they trust the most not to jump ship who has high attendance but that is outside of theorycraft and into guild dynamics.

Jebraltar · 05/05/09, 2:27 AM

It's effectively a 15% increase in thoroughput that can't be wasted by overhealing when it procs. Since it affects hots, which surprises me, it's as good for everyone. Wherever a 15% increase in thoroughput will help the most is where this is best. Tank healing is going to be one where the shields tend to be particularly useful - just because shields are an HP buffer for anything like Plasma Blast on Mimiron, but a 15% increase in thoroughput is going to be good for raid healing or anything else. The only time it's not going to be useful is if the people getting healed aren't going to get hit again for 8 seconds, or there's nothing to heal while the proc's up. Since there's no cooldown on the proc itself, it's fine for raid healing.

It's not going to let you toss away all of your spare raid healers or tank healers, it just has a cool, useful proc.

I really admire the thought that went into this, actually. I doubt that there's a serious difference between any healing class with it, just the differences that are already present in their normal playstyle. (Except Disc Priests, who probably have reason to be annoyed at this.)

Lazak · 05/05/09, 3:05 AM

Random thoughts:
Is there any way to use this on tanks prepull?

Using Death Knight Hysteria you can guarante that each healing spell will heal at little, and thus causing the effect to proc. This way you can prebuff the tank with a big nice shield.

Blood Tap can do the same, to a lesser degree.

Any other effects?

Peppermort · 05/05/09, 3:24 AM

Life Tap. The blessing is on the healer not the healee. Once you have the blessing, all your heals apply the shield to their target. So heal a lifetapping warlock to get the blessing, then heal the tank to apply the shield to him. If my understanding is correct.

Starfire · 05/05/09, 3:31 AM

Some of you are wrong. The damage shield it creates lasts only 8 seconds, therefore if the raid takes no damage within said 8 second the proc is wasted.

The mace seems like a nice bonus for raid healers, but it also seems too unreliable and not very legendary. Not in the same vain of Thunderfury or Warglaives.

My thoughts is the proc seems best used on a Paladin and the worst possible use of it is on a Disc Priest. Every other class lies somewhere between. The tank healing Paladin will always put up the biggest absorb-shields with it and the tank will always eat damage in the 8 second window.

The Disc Priest unfortunately tends to be lowest on effective healing done, and therefore will put up the weakest shields. Further antagonizing Disc, an enormous part of their "healing" is done via mitigation from Power Word: Shield / Divine Aegis (and in theory Renewed Hope) which do not/will not contribute to the shields.

I am seriously disappointed. On the otherhand, as far as I can tell there are no ilvl 239 healing 1handers, so the mace is a sound investment on it's own. It's just not very legendary. The absorb shield does seem incredibly powerful in the hands of a Holy Priest though. Being able to shield up the raid using Circle of Healing and Prayer of Healing (with Serendipity). And with a lucky proc and good timing, Divine Hymn should be insane with the mace.

Honestly. I would of been completely happy if they had just ripped off the effect from [Crystal Spire of Karabor]. And either update the proc to be number more consistent with heals thrown out now; or have the proc be a 15% increase in the healing done.

sarf · 05/05/09, 3:45 AM

Originally Posted by Lazak

Random thoughts:
Is there any way to use this on tanks prepull?

Using Death Knight Hysteria you can guarante that each healing spell will heal at little, and thus causing the effect to proc. This way you can prebuff the tank with a big nice shield.

Blood Tap can do the same, to a lesser degree.

Any other effects?

Just have your tank (or anyone else) unequip and equip gear if having healing spells actually heal is what you are after.

ninor · 05/05/09, 4:28 AM

Originally Posted by Ellyh

The shield that procs is only 8 seconds in duration and will for a single AoE spell healing 6k will produce a whopping 900 hp shield. This is nothing in an age when AoE effects routinely lands for 8-10k damage.

Won't the 8 sec duration be refreshed whenever you heal during the 15 seconds the buff lasts? That's at least how I understand it, that you have 15 seconds to pour out as much healing as you can on either one target or several targets to increase the shields absorption. As far as I can see, this will be very good for any type of healer.

Frogmite · 05/05/09, 4:36 AM

Honestly from what we've seen from hard modes the difficulty is generally about raid damage. Tank damage in most of them doesn't seem a big issue so this proc on for instance a priest is godly. Remember that the blessing lasts 15 seconds AND the shield lasts for 8 so that means that you can keep shields up on people for essentially 23 seconds as each time someone recieves a heal from you if they've already got the shield then its duration will be reset and its absorbtion increased.

I actually feel that they've implemented this proc as a kind of long-term easing of Ulduar for the not so hardcore guilds. Thorim/Freya/Mimiron/IC (Runemaster last) and to a lesser extent Hodir all throw around raid damage on their hard-modes. The less hardcore guilds that are just starting to finish off clearing ulduar now or in the next few weeks will probably have two maces within 3 months both of which will significantly help in alleviating raid damage.

We've assigned our maces to those healers that most deserve them almost entirely irrespective of class differences but honestly I think two of these on two raid healing priests would just be insane. With the current power of PoH and CoH and the fact that different peoples shields will combine its going to be a really lethal combination. Shamans to a slightly lesser extent will have the same type of power but it seems it will be slightly less consistant.

I do feel that people are overstating is power on paladins however, yes they could well get the most usage out of the shield but honestly how often are MT deaths a problem? The mace may let you set another healer to raid healing which would be useful but it's my feeling that this proc will smooth raid damage and give that extra little buffer that will really crank down the difficulty of say Freya hard mode when there a number of mace procs going off at once.

klüger · 05/05/09, 5:33 AM

Originally Posted by Frogmite

I actually feel that they've implemented this proc as a kind of long-term easing of Ulduar for the not so hardcore guilds. Thorim/Freya/Mimiron/IC (Runemaster last) and to a lesser extent Hodir all throw around raid damage on their hard-modes. The less hardcore guilds that are just starting to finish off clearing ulduar now or in the next few weeks will probably have two maces within 3 months both of which will significantly help in alleviating raid damage.

Less hardcore guilds that are only now starting to clear ulduar will not be getting 5shards pr week on average (which is what it'd take to get two hammers). Add to that the fact that less hardcore guilds usually have bigger problems with turnover/guild splits and that they will be doing significantly fewer hardmodes and less chance of dual-clears (10&25) (I do think the drop% is higher for hardmodes) you are way off course here.

Other then that I agree with your post, but this hammer will not be seeing any large quantities in any guilds that are not bleeding edge (think 4hm t3&tf-warrior transfers in classic), any time soon.

Then you will have guilds who are hardcore and do dual clears and lots of hardmodes

Then you will have less hardcore guilds.

The hammer is mainly a hardmode-easer in my mind, your healers heal more pr cast/faster so they get more mileage out of the shield and the shield is a lot more important on hardmodes for a good guild then on normalmodes for a "bad" guild however you want to interpret that.

burghy · 05/05/09, 5:44 AM

They put on the legendary healing mace the thing healers hate most, random "hps" proc.
As for assigning it, doesn't really matter the class, each of them has scenarios where if the weapon procs properly it's godly and if not the proc is wasted. Also you need to keep in mind class "balance" can change 2-3 times between the time you get first fragment and the time you create the weapon.