• Sunchips

Once I got my second piece, I noticed a massive increase in regen and longevity; it was to the point where I was almost never using super mana pots. I'm a firm believer that if you're not chugging them, you could increase your stats elsewhere. Its to the point where I've been dropping mp5 in gobs for more +healing and stamina.

Just wondering if anyone has done any theorycrafting into how much mp5 the set bonus can equate to.

For numbers sake, I went from 402/172 mp5 to 409/148 mp5 (some of the gear I changed had more spirit. That's why the non-casting number went up). It still seems as if I could drop more while casting mp5.

Thoughts and feedback on this set-bonus would be appreciated.

 

Molice

Its 100 mana per cast (best case). Greater Heal with 5/5 Divine Fury is a 2.5 second cast .. so that comes out to 2 Greater Heal casts per 5 seconds, or 2 x 100 mana per 5 seconds = 200MP5.

 

Bokchoy

That's a moot point. If you are chain casting GH and overhealing on each and every single cast, something is wrong.

I think this is a very decent set bonus though. It gets a lot of criticism because it rewards poor play, but I think overheal occurs naturally and is inevitable. Unfortunately, I don't have this bonus, but looking forward to getting it.

 

Molice

That would depend largely on the encounter, and the healing tactics of your fellow healers. As you mentioned yourself, overhealing is inevitable. And chain casting GHeal certainly isn't always a poor tactic. It is a good (and necessary) complement to reactionary healing, because it provides far greater sustained raw HPS compared to any other form of single target healing.

That would depend on your definition of poor play. In my book, poor play is pure reactionary healing. This set bonus emphasizes just the opposite: chain casting GHeal, even if at the start of your 2.5 second cast the tank is full health.

 

Irise

A few tangential questions.

The priest set bonuses seem backwards to me. I would much rather have priest tier 4 4/5 bonus than tier 5 2/5 bonus, although I do not have 2 pieces of tier 5 yet.

I am curious as to whether healing priests in Hyjal and BT switch between tier 4 and tier 5 depending on the encounter.

If one was to get tier 5 or 6, which gem would you lean towards for the yellow sockets?

 

Ochem

i dont think so

 

Mirai

I can't contribute a lot of mathcrafting, but I got my 2nd piece yesterday and its fuckin awesome

It is the best setbonus ever designed \o/

 

Incoherence

T4 4/5 sort of implies you're casting mostly Flash Heals and a few Greater Heals for spike recovery. While this might make sense pre-1.10, when Flash Heal was the staple raid heal, it really doesn't make sense now.

 

• Icecreamshop

Edit: Nvm. Too much time playing my mage.

I love you, economy.

 

Incoherence

Global cooldown fires at the start of a cast, not at the end. So yes, if you had 0ms latency (granted, impossible) or perfect timing with a /stopcasting macro you could cast two GHeals per 5 seconds. You're implying that you can't chaincast GHeal?

 

• CheshireCat

The global cooldown doesn't effect the casting rate of GHeal at all. The GCD is long over by the time you finish casting a 2.5s spell.

Latency would indeed alter the results, but I really think the base assumption that every cast overheals introduces way more error to an estimation of its value than lag does.

 

Lazare

125mp5 = 25 mana/sec = 100 mana/4 sec.

Umm...that's just...bizarrely wrong. The GCD starts when you START casting. Since a talented GHeal is 2.5s, the GCD ends well before the spell does, so assuming zero latency, you can cast 1 GHeal in 2.5s (hence 200mp5). If we assume, oh, 200ms of lag then it might take 2.7s or so (or maybe 185 mp5). But it'll never take 4s; the GCD doesn't work that way.

 

• Icecreamshop

Yes, this is correct. I am a moron.

I love you, economy.

 

Caldar

IMHO, both of the T4 healing set bonus' are crap and I wouldn't even consider them when lookin gat gear upgrades. I doubt there are worse set bonus' than the priest T4 ones.

 

Incoherence

I remember when I figured out that the T4 2/5 bonus broke on damage. "Wait... it's even more worthless than it looks? That's impressive!"

 

• Snowy

Very simplistically, it's a refund on overhealing. I looked at our last Kael kill, and one of our priests with the bonus got 63 procs off it in a 21 minute encounter, which obviously worked out to 3 procs per minute, or 25 mp/5. On a Vash kill, a different priest only got 20 such procs in a 11 minute kill. Of course, he was being efficient on his heals. (only 21% overheal overall) At Al'Ar they got 54 and 47 procs respectively on a ~14 minute kill.

This set bonus would particularly shine in a situation where you're a solitary healer assigned to healing someone and you can time heals for very minimal overheal. Still, you figure on most long encounters it's going to add up to an extra couple mana pots, and that's nothing to sneeze at. I think it's a pretty neat bonus.

 

• CheshireCat

Having established an upper bound of the MP5 equivalence at 200 MP5, (Every heal an overheal, zero lag, spam casting) it may be useful to establish a lower bound, or move towards a formula for estimating its value.

Well, the lower bound is zero-- no value if you're not casting. Let's set up some conservative median values:

I usually overheal for 30-40% on my GHeals over the course of the night. (Adjust this number to fit your healing style.)

Now, the best case for the set bonus is that every heal I land is an overheal by ~30-40%. The worst case, though, is that 70% of my heals have no overheal and 30% are fully overheal. That means that only 30% of casts receive mana back.

This calculation is very sensitive to casting frequency. The assumption I usually use for theorycrafting is a casting period of 3s-- this is fairly rapid casting, but not spam, allowing for some regen breaks or just timing. (I'll check this assumption against some logs later tonight.)

For a 3s casting period, you get mana back on 100% (best case) or 30% (worst case) of the casts.

100% is (100 mana / 3s = 33.3 mana/s =) 166.6 MP5
30% is (30 mana / 3s = 10 mana/s =) 50 MP5

That gives you a range of values.

Now, to get a general estimate, let's try some statistical handwaving:

Treating individual casts as independent random events, it is likely that the distribution of overheal per cast will be normal, with a mean equal to your overall overheal percentage.

That is, if your overheal percentage on the night is 40%, then your average heal will be one that heals for 60% of its value with 40% overheal, and you will have roughly as many casts over this as under it, with most samples near it. (This is complicated by the fact that overheal is capped between 0 and 100%, but I think we can set up the assumptions for that not to matter.)

Now, the question becomes, given a certain overall overhealing percentage, what percentage of casts will contain no overheal?

Getting the actual answer would require figuring out what the variance is within a given sample of heals, which is complicated even given my huge assumptions about the underlying distribution.

But, we can use that assumption to make a guess-- namely, that the mean will generally lie halfway between the best and worst case scenario, which is a feature of normal distributions. For a 30% overhealer, an average of 65% of heals will contain some overhealing. For a 40% overhealer, 70%.

Given 3 seconds between GHeals, that's (65 mana / 3s = 21.6 mana/s =) 108 MP5 for a 30% overhealer, and (70 mana / 3s = 23.3 mana/s =) 116.5 MP5 for a 40% overhealer.

If you asked me to put an MP5 equivalence to the set bonus with a gun to my head and no access to real data sets, that's the model I'd use. Anyone with (a) access to good data, or (b) better knowledge of stats want to comment?

 

◊ Turik

An easy way to look at is that its a free rank up.


Cause now if you overheal with that rank up, you get the mana back anyway for using a higher rank.

 

Rollins

The set bonus is amazing. I just got two pieces and the impact has been impressive to say the least. I can post some WWS data later when my guild updates last-night's raid.

At any rate, I wouldn't at all say the set bonus "rewards poor play" as was earlier stated. Topping off your target isn't "poor play." Healing people isn't "poor play". Rather, it rewards precision in choosing the proper rank of Greater Heal.

I'm typically a total regen whore - mp5 and Spirit are king as far as I'm concerned - but this set bonus has me re-thinking the way I'll be socketing/itemizing my toon. +Healing has definitely gotten a lot more appealing over the past week.

 

Lightshadow

My experience is that this is, bar none, the best set bonus ever created for priests (and I don't make that statement lightly). As Rollins says it requires some thinking and tinkering with ranks to get it quite right, and I don't claim to have done all of that yet, or even finished thinking through it--I just got my second piece on Tuesday. I can share my results from last night's raiding, however, as an example. (All of the following is done either using the client version of WWS, or using a slightly modified version that logs overhealing for each of my spellcasts--it's a total hack, but it does what I need)

Healing the Karathress tank over the entire fight I generated 25% overhealing and 4600 mana over the 7.5 minutes it took us to finish the fight, or approximately 51.1 mp/5. Just looking at the first 4.8 minutes while the raid was killing the other mobs (and while I was solo/duo healing the tank) the mp/5 drops slightly to 48.2 and overhealing drops to 21% Cut out the egregious overhealing from the 5 mana-free spellcasts (it's mana free, why wouldn't you use max rank gheal?) and the number's more like 16% overhealing. Those overhealing numbers aren't fantastic, but I don't think they're terrible either and the set bonus is still unbelievable.

On lurker I was also MT healing and got 3300 mana over the 11 minutes of the fight. If you account for the amount of time he spends spouting or underwater though (WWS shows his dps time as 45%), I get ~56 mp/5. (I didn't use anything but renew in phase 2, I wanted to see how a couple of apps would handle a little bit of tank healing *grin*)

From watching SCT during the fights, many of my heals were coming very near but not quite topping the tank off much of the time, I actually feel like I can significantly improve on these results by switching my precast heal from rank 3 to rank 4, or by swapping in for some +healing gems where I have healing/mp5

 

• Sunchips

I use rank 4 now for this exact reason, and i've gone to completely stacking +18 heal gems. I'm still not having issues with mana, or using super mana potions every time they're up. I've always played under the philosophy that the pots are there to be used; but frankly, the only way I can lose enough mana to need to pot, is via CoH spam.

 

constantius

I have to question that. The 3-piece Trans bonus remains, hands down, the best overall set bonus I've ever seen. It scales, it was effective, it was passive - there was nothing not to like. Except them nerfing it.

15% of your regen occurs while casting >> 100 mana on a top-up GH. For one thing, yes, while using GH, you do get back 45-55 Mp5. But with our current gear status, most of us are running a *minimum* of 500 spirit raid buffed, making the 3-piece Trans (original) bonus work out to 47 Mp5. This only scales higher, up to 800 spirit being 75 mp5. Static. Completely undependent on spell casts.

Having said this, I'm salivating at the chance to get a 2-piece T5. It may even be good enough to justify breaking my 3-piece Primal Mooncloth (although I'd prefer to have my cake and eat it too o.O). But just thought I'd point out that this is the *second* best set bonus ever created, since our first one was so powerful that Blizzard nerfed it into the ground.

If they hadn't, I'd probably still be wearing (for some fights) the boots/belt/bracers combination of T2, since with my current buffs, that would be equivalent to having pieces each with 15 Mp5 on them.

 

Borelgore

It's worded "If your Greater Heal brings the target to full health, you gain 100 mana"

My initial thought when reading that was to wonder whether it would fire on a pure overheal. Anyone able to clear that up?

 

Hiba

Even if your heal would be complete overheal, you will still get the mana back.

Lightwell object increased in size to make it easier to click.

 

Lightshadow

I wasn't forgetting about the trans bonus Constantius, I just think the T5 bonus is better.

The T2 bonus only applies if you're in the 5SR, so 500/1.6 * .15 = 47 mp/5 only if you're in the 5sr 100% of the time. As it is, I find myself in there only 70% of the time or so (even while solo healing a tank), so I see the benefit as 47 * .7 = 32 mp/5 and at 800 spirit 52 mp/5. Sure, the T5 bonus is only mana when I'm casting greater heal, but lurker's the only fight I can think of at the moment where I'm not using it virtually all of the time (and I would be if I'd assigned myself a tank to heal in phase 2). Thus if I'm casting (to get the benefit of T2) I'm usually casting gheal (getting the benefit of T5).

They nerfed the T2 bonus not because when it was made it was broken (it wasn't, back then it was worth about 25 mp/5 to most people that were starting BWL), but because it scaled too well and they wanted some of the gear in BC to be better. As it is, running ~600 spirit raid buffed, I see the 51.1 mp/5 I actually got back on average during the karathress fight to be quite a bit better than the ~40 mp/5 that the T2 would have worked out to be, and I'm also confident that 50 mp/5 is on the low end of what you can actually get out of it if you try.