uh...ok

I was talking about getting swapped into an SP group if and when things go wrong, because at that point giving your healers slack on mana spending will do far more for your raid's survivability than having a bit more DPS from 1 caster. It is a rare occasion that healers should get an SP and that's the way it should be with most raids. My examples were mainly to point out that there are ways during the middle of an encounter to increase the effective mana pool of your healers, but short of using Bloodlust on them, there's not much you can do to increase their throughput.

And of course a majority of the wipes are because of people screwing up. But I'm talking about the cases brought up by some posters here - specifically "when things go wrong". In almost all cases where something bad but recoverable happens, having more throughput from your healers is more valuable than simply having more mana. If you find yourself frequently wiping in these bad situations with mana left on your bar, then it's an indication that you may have too much regen and not enough throughout. Of course, as someone who doesn't believe in gearing for the worst case (I much prefer to gear in such a way that minimizes worst-case occurrences), I'm not saying that you should go and change up all your gear just because of this.

 

Liths

I'm never going to understand this line of reasoning, the first thing I do when we start working on a new encounter is plan out my consumable/cooldown usage. If the case are that you just blow cooldowns whenever you get low on mana you're being terribly inneficient. Same thing with innervates, they should be well planed ahead of the encounter if you want maximum efficency. The amount of priests that say that they have "enough" mana baffles me, we have so many tools avalible to turn spare mana into increased hp/s that you never can have too much.

Fully buffed I run with 1250/465 mana/5s along with SSC and alchemist trinkets and stoping at an arbitrary number seems silly to me. I won't comment on Kil'Jaeden as I haven't even seen the encounter, but every other boss in Sunwell so far I've never felt I couldn't burn more mana on if I had it avalible (felmyst post the fixes to the mana regen buff at the demon could perhaps have changed it, but the encounter feels so trival now I have a hard time judging how it'd be for someone practicing on it). Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating only gearing/geming for mana regeneration, but I think many are weighting it too low compared to haste/healing. We're not shamans, our healing shouldn't consist of spaming a single spell as fast as possible. I still run at a bit over 2700 healing and 77 spell haste (don't get me started on my luck with ZA/felmyst neck, that's the one piece of haste gear I feel I'm really missing) and I certanly want to improve that, but not at a so big hit in regen that it'd require to gem/gear differently.

 

uh...ok

doubleposted, sorry.

 

uh...ok

What, exactly, are these tools you speak of?

And I think you misunderstood what I meant. The thing is that in most cases, without even having to gear/gem for regen, I can get through most (non-progression) fights without using all of my cooldowns and without heavy consumable usage. This is because I'm already familiar with the mana requirements of the fight and can anticipate exactly how much longer I need to last during any given moment of a fight. If something goes wrong, then I can compensate by using said cooldowns, and if worse comes to worst, I can still ask for innervates and/or to be swapped into an SP group. On progression fights where I don't have a good grasp of their mana requirements, I do plan my consumable/cooldown usage well ahead of time, though I never expect an Innervate or an SP as part of that planning.

With very minor exceptions, we (my raid) don't plan Innervates ahead of time because they're mostly a backup tool to deal with tight situations. As such, we go by most fights without using Innervates at all, though I don't see how this reduces efficiency one bit since nobody needed them in the first place to do their jobs.

Personally, I value regen and healing/haste roughly equally. I think they each offer their own special kind of versatility - regen stacking allows you versatile group placement for all fights while haste/heal stacking allows you to deal with bad healer situations more readily - and ultimately the choice should be made on an individual basis. I was merely making a case against the poster who said that you should be aiming to end a fight with as much mana as you possibly can in order to account for "when things go wrong". Quite contrary to their claims, the reality is that throughput matters far more than regen "when things go wrong".

 

Anedris

I suspect we more or less all agree that a middle ground is best. There's no reason at all to try to end the encounter with as much mana as possible, but it would be equally foolish to plan to be oom (with all cooldowns and consumables used - potions and shadowfiends etc. can all be considered part of one's mana pool for this discussion) at boss death with everything going smoothly.

 

uh...ok

Pretty much. How you reach that middle ground in your gearing and gemming decisions will ultimately depend on each individual's unique raiding environment as well as their preferred healing style.

 

Thelyna

The only possible exception to this is bosses with a hard enrage like Brutallus. I know I planned around having ~1k mana left when Brut enraged (the times I healed brut it was closer to ~3k thanks to clearcast/inner focus trickery), because mana left at the enrage is almost inconsequential.

DeeNogger: "No dot timer? Get your belt off, its spanking time."

 

Anedris

Yes, you don't need mana past 6 minutes on Brutallus. You might want to have a bit to spare at the 5:30 mark though in case one of your healers dies to burn and you have to spam max rank gheals for the remaining 30 seconds to minimize the chance of a tank gib. (Or related occurrences - obviously you know the maximum fight length, but things can happen that require you to spend more mana over the remaining time than you had initially planned. Of course, if you're tank healing, once you can literally spam max rank gheal for all of the remaining time you may as well do so, since that is your maximum possible expenditure.)

 

ionlylooklazy

If you hit enrage on Brutallus with mana to spare, that can be converted to nukes!

 

Havoc12

You can always use more mana to generate extra healing, but the scaling is not linear. In the same way haste allows you to get more effective healing by squeezing more heals into a particular window of opportunity.

Haste effectively allows you to amp up your mana usage in order to achieve higher throughput.

I currently have the potential to output 50-100k effective healing per minute with my current gear, depending on the kind of HPS I have to achieve and spellusage. I rarely deviate from 40-60k a minute. This means I want to increase my throuput, not my mana regen.

Let me explain it better:

In the end the real question is what limits your effective healing output. There are many parameters. The absolute limit is the amount of incoming damage on your targets. The first soft limit is throughput (how much of it you can heal in the presence of other healers). The 2nd soft limit is HPM and mana.

Throuput comes before mana, because HPM and mana only translate into effective healing when you heal (i.e. throughput). If your throughput is low no amount of HPM and mana are going to increase your output, but if your HPM and mana are not enough, but your throughput is high your output will be high until your mana runs out.

 

Bjork

... and you can always pot mana. A bit harder to chug a pot to magically increase throughput when shit hits the fan. (I doubt anyone runs with Destro pots!)

 

Liriel

If you are tankhealing you can switch from downranked spells to GH7. If you wear a regen-weapon you can switch to the +heal-weapon. You can switch the shaman from the casters to the healers (as I said we often dont have one). You can drink an elexier of healing and overwrite your elexier of mastery (or whatever it is called). Paladins could switch buffs to light. I as a troll can use berserker. One can trigger a +heal-on-use-trinket (ok nearly nobody uses them, I dont either) or at least the ssc-trinket even if it is better used for regen.

Most of the above things are seldom done since in an oh-shit-situation you often dont have time for doing so, but there are ways to up your throughput.

Edit: I dont want to say, that regen is better and you simpliy can switch your throughput on if needet. But the simple statement that you could do nothing for your throughput in combat does not fit to every situation.

Btw: We had fightes without an (hard) enrage counter where many people died because of their stupidity, and only tanks, some healers and one or two DPS standing, where regen did at least the same for our victory as did our throughput. (There are so many encounters where you can do nothing to prevent death if somebody screws up, because they get more initial dmg than their maxlife is or they simply never move out of AoE.)

 

Bjork

More like "never", yes.

E: I'm talking about situations like this: On Twins, one tankhealer is running with Shadow Nova and shadow-twin crush. Having a 2,1/2,0 sec GH (with drums) vs. 2,4 sec GH is like night and day. There is no way a regengeared/gemed priest with a 2,4 sec GH can even come close to a hastegeared priest in those situations. That scenario is not "one in a zillion", but something that happen quite often. Same goes with most encounters in Sunwell, you have critical moments when being able to push high HPS is wipe-saving. You obvisouly don't have time to overwrite an elixir, change groups or whatever in those situations.

 

uh...ok

And yet none of these things are really converting spare mana to throughput. You're converting regen into throughput, but that's a wholly different story. Someone who's geared for throughput can do exactly the same thing in these situations.

And let's be honest here: how many of these above things have you actually done besides popping Berzerker or upranking GHeals? (note that those two are things that anybody would do regardless of their gear or mana levels when something goes wrong)

 

Liriel

True - but the same goes for the more regen-geard healer the other way round. He can get the innervate, too, so he can GH7 longer than the hps-geard if he has to heal more (not faster) than he has planned.

In the oh-shit-moment the only thing that maybe would be done is the troll-healer going berserker. But if this moment extends to a longer period (one of the tank healers has died but you could hold the others) you can try to save the try by doing some of the above. Given, the chances are bad to make it if you are on your progression boss. - On the other hand most times we got our 1st-kill on the big guys at least one of our healers (and others) had died.

I dont know if you need everybody to survive up until the end of the fights in sunwell. Up until there the situation is not uncommon. There are even encounters where people HAVE to die.

All this said - I do think that to have a high enough hps (especialy with haste) is a good thing. But not everybody can maximize hps over everything else. In most encounters I do not get any help with my manapool from the rest of the raid so I have to look for my mana and regen myself. (In Recount our holy-priests together with the enhancement shaman are the last in the mana-regen-table.)

 

uh...ok

Right, and again, my original response was to the point out that in oh-shit situations, you generally care much more about throughput (in the form of faster or larger heals) than you do about mana, because mana is much more easily (and more effectively) compensated for than throughput. Additionally, going from 40% mana to 100% mana on your regen geared healer won't make as big a difference as going from 20% mana to 80% mana for your throughput geared healer because the latter is getting more value per heal from that extra mana than someone who's geared for regen.

I don't think anyone in this thread is claiming that maximizing HPS over everything else is the way to go. I should remind you that the debate originated from someone contesting the statement that you should get enough regen to comfortably finish fights with x amount of mana and then go all out on throughput after that. They were claiming that you want to maximize the mana you have at the end of fights in order to deal with when things go wrong. And my point all along has been that when things go wrong, mana is the wrong thing to try to maximize. While it is true that a throughput healer will not last as long through these situations, lasting longer should be the least of your priorities at that point.

Edit: here's what started all of this:
It looks like we're all basically converging to the same conclusion anyway, which is a good thing I suppose.

Don't know how I missed this, but my 1.7 second smites are hot!

 

Anedris

Throughput is better than regen in an "Oh shit" situation. If "Oh shit" situations occur frequently and you run out of mana trying to deal with them, all your throughput is abruptly rendered useless.

This is analogous to DPSers who put their gear into a spreadsheet and then say "Why is it telling me that intellect is better than spell damage!?" and the answer is "You set it to 10 minutes continuous casting with no shadow priest... you're running oom."

Personally, I haven't felt severely pressured on mana since the first time I did Naj'entus, so I plan to stack throughput from here on. It simply comes down to whether you can use the mana or not. I don't feel that I heal particularly conservatively and I have never had a mana problem that potions haven't been enough to solve, so I place minimal value on regen. (I'm planning to gem spinels, shadowsongs, and lionseyes and generally match all socket bonuses.)

 

Liths

Higher ranks, more frequent castings.. No priest is anywhere close to the point were you can spam max rank gheals or coh without running out of mana very fast.

Again, I can't imagine not using mana pots as often as the cooldown allows me. Only using them when "shit hits the fan" isn't even an option.

With drums even my casting time is down at 2.2 sec. I'll give you that my view probably isn't the same as yours, I'm very rarely healing tanks, certanly never on twins. Considering how good raid healers priests are for it, probably the fight best suited for pom in the game, and that tank deaths have been pretty much non existant with paladins/druids on that job I can't imagine doing it any other way. Haste certanly becomes more valuable if you spend the majority of your time as a tank healer, we've already done the math and max rank gheals and poh are by far the spells that benefits the most from haste so that isn't very suprising.

And lets not forget that how we tackle these encounters are always going to affect how valuable haste compared to regen becomes, haste is obviously the most valuable when you have predictable high spikes followed by times with lower healing requirements were you don't have to waste as much mana. Our strat for twins for example don't involve moving away from the raid when you get shadownovas so consistant healing rather than bursts when you're down a healer becomes more desirable.

 

uh...ok

Actually, raid healing on Twins is perhaps where I find haste stacking to be the most valuable. This is why so many guilds have their healers swap in [Battlemaster's Alacrity] for that particular fight.

Except you're already using highest ranks and casting on every GCD during emergency situations. Whether you run out of mana 10 seconds later or not doesn't matter if your targets are dying right now.

(Actually, given the proper group, you would be surprised at how easy it is to get to the point where you can spam max rank gheals and coh. I believe Robble made a post a few pages back showing some maths about this.)

 

Havoc12

Yet when is this needed? With the gear you have you can easily output 100k effective healing, even at 1.5k overall HPS with ~30% overheal. When have you ever had to produce this output.

The important thing is to be aware that when your output limit exceeds the requirement of the fight by too great an amount, it loses its value very very fast indeed.

So I think its quite important for any healer, not just a priest, to be aware that maxing your output limit is not the best way to improve performance and it is unwise to go too far in that direction.

 

Lambi

With utilities like Earring of soulful meditation and having super mana pots powered by your alchemist stone, there's no reason not to stack full haste.

The question you have to ask yourself is: Why did he/she die? And the answer in 9 out of 10 cases are because your heal didn't land on time. Mana issues is for amateurs, you can ALWAYS fix mana.

 

Liths

I know the math, you're talking about at least 1500mana/5s to sustain coh spam and 1400 for gheal, more if you have any haste at all. I can safely say that my group isn't ever going to be stacked to provide me with the kind of support needed to reach those numbers. Let's say I have a shaman and spriest in the group, far better synergy than I have normally. Mana tide plus mana spring is about 90 mana/5s and the spriest is 350. 465 m/5s mana from gear, 140 from pots and 50 from demonic runes, 60 from shadowfiend. Total comes down to 1100mana/5s and this is with a group that's far more stacked than mine normaly is and depending on the fight demonic runes might not be a good idea. With 1,4 casting time on CoH (minimal amount of haste gear) it'll require 1600mana/5s to maintain the spam. With 11k starting mana you'd be able to maintain the spam for 110 seconds. Obviously a bit longer than that since the consumables/cooldowns dont provide a static m/5s, but its NOT sustainable unless your group containts three shadowpriests or two if you're getting a lot of innervates.

More haste gear means you lose mana at a faster rate, and your mana regen would be lower than mine as well. If you're not using mana pots on every cooldown it gets even worse.