Healing Efficiency

Nadagast · 04/20/07, 1:22 PM

I posted this on the official boards, but I think I'll probably get better input here so I'm going to repost it. I'm sure a lot of you won't need the introduction so you can skip it if you want and just give me your thoughts...

I think one of the major things that people overlook when looking at Paladins and their healing efficiency is the efficiency of Flash of Light. This isn't because of Illumination (well partially but mostly not) it's because all that matters for a particular direct heal's mana efficiency is the base amount of mana per second it uses (in the limit of large amounts of +heal).

This is because you can think of +heal as adding a direct amount of Healing per second to your heals, and your mana cost will be HPS/MPS. The lower MPS is the more efficiently the heal will scale with gear. People like to say that faster heals and faster nukes get less benefit from +dmg or +heal but it's not true at all.

In the case of Flash of Light we have a spell with 180 mana cost and a 1.5 second cast time, so we get 120 mana used per second. This is the reason Flash of Light scales so well. No matter what heal you're spamming (unless it has a cast time reducing talent like GHeal) you'll be getting the same amount of +heal per second.

Flash of Light lets you use 100% of your +Heal for a mere 120 mana per second (less if you include Illumination but it doesn't matter).
Holy Light with Light's Grace lets you use 125% of your +Heal for 420 mana per second. This is why Holy Light is so mana inefficient compared to Flash of Light even though Holy Light actually starts off more mana efficient (2.76 hpm vs 2.64 hpm).

The problem is that healing efficiency scales (disregarding talents) like +heal/(mana/sec) and the only thing that the spell contributes to this is the mana/sec. So the slope of the hpm vs +heal curve goes like 1/(mana/sec), up to a constant coefficient and obviously talents.

I think this picture shows it much better than I ever could with words:
http://img406.imageshack.us/my.php?i...ciency2uc9.jpg
I left out talents (other than Illumination where indicated, and I included the -15% mana cost on GHeal). This is a graph that shows efficiency as a function of +heal for the 2 main Pally/Priest heals, with and without Illumination. For Illumination I have a 30% critrate with the nerfed Illumination.
By nerfing Illumination Blizzard is missing the point entirely. The efficiency of Paladins healing isn't due to Illumination (although it's an amazing ability) it's due to the ridiculously efficient scaling of Flash of Light.

I wonder if Blizzard has anyone doing the math like this, it's a pretty obvious problem with the way +healing works, and it's the exact reason downranking was so powerful before the nerf (not to say it isn't useful now). By downranking you were decreasing your mana/sec usage and still unloading all of your +heal hps.

As far as I can tell this is one of the biggest problems with Priest PvE healing, we have no well scaling heal. All of our heals have a high mps cost.
It's unbelievably powerful for Paladins to have a heal that scales the same as our Flash Heal and yet costs about 1/3 the mana. I don't want Paladins to get nerfed, it would just be nice if Blizzard gave every healer a heal this useful. (IE Priests, and Druids and Shamans to a lesser extent)

It seems to me like Blizzard does the math at 0 +heal and then doesn't check to see if it holds as +heal increases. At 0 +heal the values seem to make sense, but as +heal increases, the system goes downhill.

These are the values of M/S for heals if anyone cares (again after -15% GHeal talent, no Illumination)
Flash of Light 120mps
Holy Light 420 mps
Flash Heal 313.3 mps
Greater Heal 280.5 mps

That was the post, and, I'd like to add for this forum that I think this problem will just continue to grow as gear gets better. Flash of Light will just keep becoming more and more efficient and other heals just don't scale HPM-wise nearly as fast. Do you see this as a problem or not? If so, what do you think could be done to solve it? If not, why not?

PsiVen · 04/20/07, 1:37 PM

Paladins generally don't spend any meaningful time outside the FSR, don't tend to have much spirit anyway, and don't have access to Shadowfiend. Illumination is a big deal because Flash of Light just doesn't cut it in many situations. I haven't been Holy since Naxx, but almost all of the changes in 2.0/TBC were improvements to Holy Light for a reason.

Xantcha · 04/20/07, 1:39 PM

There's one big problem I'm seeing.

Downranking. Any Priest/Druid who wants to heal effectively will do it.

e.g. Greater Heal/Healing Touch can be downranked with great effeciency.

GHeal 1. is 125.8 MPS,
Htouch 6. is 90.3 MPS. (Bal/Resto cheaper HT spec).

Nadagast · 04/20/07, 1:45 PM

Yeah but the problem is that downranking nerfs how much of your +heal per second you get, so it doesn't really help with mana efficiency (again, not to say downranking isn't useful, just that it doesn't change very much).

For example in my PvP gear I have on right now with 800 +heal, all ranks of GHeal are between 5.2 and 5.3 HPM according to DrDamage (which I'm pretty sure is correct). So downranking doesn't alleviate the problem, like it did in the past.

So as an example, (with made up numbers) if I have GHeal 7 and 3, maybe with GHeal 7 I get 120% of my +heal in terms of HPS, with 280 mps, but with GHeal 3 I get 60% of my +heal in terms of HPS but only 140 mps, so the effective HPM is the same in both cases. The numbers for GHeal 3 aren't exactly correct but the HPM doesn't change like it used to with downranking.

Xantcha · 04/20/07, 1:58 PM

Downranking is still worth it even with the nerf, it's just stopped downranking from being insanely overpowered.

1. 800 +heal is low. A priest that I play with accumulated 1400 heal pre-raid instances, at the current time I have 1612 heal unbuffed. (Possible to reach 1800+ just on crafted tailoring gear alone)

2. Flash of light is a very weak heal. (Especially without BoL). (If someone could provide numbers please do.)

3. Quickly testing unbuffed with SWS.
Rank 6 HT. 8.5 HPM
Rank 13 HT 7.15 HPM

Jimb0v · 04/20/07, 2:00 PM

Correct me if I'm wrong though, theres still a lot of benefit to downranking for a priest just in the inspiration bonus, and because you are more likley to be able to keep the tank at ful lhealth without losing efficiency.

When I was only casting max greater heal I could go many fights without casting a single heal because the tank never dropped low enough for it to make sense to let my heal land. if a tank has 15k health and he has to be at 11k health for me to let my heal land that can be dangerous on some of the tougher fights. Its a lot better to be constnatly casting rank 1 gh keeping insrpiration up and the mt topped off isn't it? I understand in theorycraft world theres no difference, but in reality there are a lot of benefits to downranking still.

Nadagast · 04/20/07, 2:10 PM

Yeah again I'm not saying that downranking isn't useful just that it doesn't seem to be close to making up the difference. I know 800 +heal is low, that's in PvP gear

Ideally I'd like to see how downranking scales with extra +heal but last time I looked (which was admittedly awhile ago) the formulas didn't seem to fit the data that well.

Mencius · 04/20/07, 2:15 PM

Downranking is an absolute must for Druids and Priests. I have played both classes and without down ranking you'd go out of mana so quickly and most of your healing would be overheal. Yeah, they nerfed it but the reason they did is because of the insane amounts of +healing that is attainable these days. I have upwards of 1700 +healing raid buffed and being able to use a rank 3 or 4 HT with that amount of +healing would make me over-mana-efficent (if thats possible). Downranking isn't as useful with lower +healing because you'll still need to post reasonably high numbers to keep people up and therefore need a larger base heal. But with the current attainable +healing for PvE content downranking in absolutely nessecary.

However, these days I am thinking about losing some +healing to gain more mana regen (see my thread +Healing Cap?).

+Healing Cap?

Nadagast · 04/20/07, 2:18 PM

I'm well aware how necessary downranking is in raids, but that (at least with the data I have) doesn't really change the HPM very much. Or am I wrong?

Xantcha · 04/20/07, 2:20 PM

From the top of my head.

Priest 1600 Heal

Gheal Rank1 - 2500~ per heal
Gheal Rank3 - 3500~ per heal (not too sure, but its in the 3k range somewhere)

Druid 1600 Heal

Healing Touch Rank4 - 1300~ per heal (guess, don't use this much if ever)
Healing Touch Rank5 - 1800~ per heal
Healing Touch Rank6 - 2300~ per heal
Healing Touch Rank9 - 3300~ per heal
Healing Touch Rank13 - 5400~ per heal.

Downranking does increase HPM even with the downranking nerf, just not so much that you would never run oom.

Drekor · 04/20/07, 2:21 PM

2. Flash of light is a very weak heal. (Especially without BoL). (If someone could provide numbers please do.)

Not really, a lot of people don't really give it the credit it deserves because they discount the fact it's a 1.5s cast heal not a 2+ second heal like the others.

At +1100 healing, BoL and souls redeemed my FoL goes for about 1350-1400 on average non crit. This is 900-933 HP/s that I'm putting out which is pretty standard for a single healer in any raid encounter when you take a look at the numbers after a boss fight.

When I was only casting max greater heal I could go many fights without casting a single heal because the tank never dropped low enough for it to make sense to let my heal land. if a tank has 15k health and he has to be at 11k health for me to let my heal land that can be dangerous on some of the tougher fights. Its a lot better to be constnatly casting rank 1 gh keeping insrpiration up and the mt topped off isn't it? I understand in theorycraft world theres no difference, but in reality there are a lot of benefits to downranking still.

Yes and no... for a paladin spam healing is ideal because no other class can do it as well as we can so we provide a "base" so to speak for other healers to build off of and they can always except X amount of healing from us. With a priest even with inspiration you have to think on the FSR a bit, basically the question is if you can chain cast X heal(x being a small heal) and switch and chain cast Y heal(y being a big heal) when needed and not run out of mana then by all means otherwise I'm not sure it's worthwhile there are other priests and shamans around that can apply the same buff.

Mencius · 04/20/07, 2:21 PM

Are you assuming that every single point of you heal is landing every time? Take into consideration the amount of overheal you are doing. All that extra HPM that is overheal is lost and is basically wasted mana and healing.

Its usually better to land a 3k heal for full than a 5k heal with 2k of that being overheal. You've now spend extra mana and still only healed the target for 3k. Get it?

Here are the numbers for a Druid's HT assuming 3k +healing.

Rank    Healing     Mana         HPM         HPS
4        1947        148        13.14        779
5        2789        216        12.90        930
6        3332        268        12.42        1111
7        3903        324        12.03        1301
8        4556        396        11.49        1519
9        5272        480        10.97        1757
10       5943        577        10.31        1981
11       6509        641        10.16        2170
12       6795        657        10.34        2265
13       7207        749        9.62         2402

Nadagast · 04/20/07, 2:27 PM

Is that with all talents factored in Mencius? And even there you're only getting about a ~30% increase in HPM from rank 13 to rank 4. While that's very respectable it doesn't seem like it even comes close to making up for FoL's ridiculous base efficiency.

Xantcha · 04/20/07, 2:27 PM

Originally Posted by Drekor

At +1100 healing, BoL and souls redeemed my FoL goes for about 1350-1400 on average non crit. This is 900-933 HP/s that I'm putting out which is pretty standard for a single healer in any raid encounter when you take a look at the numbers after a boss fight.

Yes, FoL is very powerful. I'm just trying to put it into context where the OP was comparing max ranked GHeals and HTs to FoL spam.

FoL is what Healers try to imitate when they downrank, low hps, high hpm heals. Though paladins will always be superior with the 1.5s casting time.

Mencius · 04/20/07, 2:29 PM

Originally Posted by Nadagast

Is that with all talents factored in Mencius?

Yes. My Spec 27/0/34. I have only 1700 +healing or so, but the numbers are pretty much equally scaled down. The break even point for me is rank 7 or 8. If the mob hits extra hard (say, during an enrage or heavy cleaves) I use rank 8 to push out a little more healing, otherwise I use rank 7.