Ragnor

It's not really an issue though? For example the only situation I can think of where you'd want to not reactively taunt is say taunting off the MT to let a debuff reset which you can do with RD by RD'ing the MT.

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Destrox

A very simple macro can be made to make the paladin multi-taunt as easily usable as a warrior's taunt - quit effective too.

*Sorry if I misunderstood what you were saying there.

 

Shallistra

Well the way how I understand threat/agro works is that you need a certain amount of threat over the mob's current target to draw agro. With the ability to taunt a target pre-emptively, you can as a Warrior or Druid effectively "catch up" to, for example, ThatDamnWarlock that is reaching the 130% threat threshold and thus saving your group/raid from any sort of positioning or mob abilities that hit off-targets.

A simple example to help illustrate a problem scenario would be tanking those bats in The Underbog. The person that is highest on the threat list that the bat is currently not focusing on is the recipient of the fear that it casts. If it was a Warrior or Druid tanking, tapping taunt once in a while to ensure you're on top of the threat list ensures that you will never ever get feared. A Paladin would need to ensure he maintains agro through abilities (this is generally not a problem, but it potentially can be), because if he loses agro he needs to pray that the bats still have fear on cooldown long enough to RD or he's gonna eat one and you have a feared tank and bats flying all over the place eating people.

 

Liand

You can't use Taunt that way either: http://thottbot.com/?sp=355

It doesn't do anything if the mob is already on you.

 

Szoszi

/bit off
Our tanking paladin got tired to be tanking/offtanking and he was bit fustrated as I have SoC next to my 45 holy talents and he so missed his nice crits. So last night he respecced. Got BoK and full retri now.
We did Shadow lab run (2 palas, (one heal, one dps) 2 druids (moonkin and bear) and mage). After the run dps paladin finished on dmg meter first place. For everyone (so no sync misstake).

You can talk and discuss SoV/SoR/SoC and proc and math up holy dmg, but as he says: 2500 SoC crit is 2500....

 

◊ Wraithlin

If you have RD bound to a key you can "cast" RD while targetting the mob and then hit F(assist) to taunt its target without detargetting the mob itself; because the spell can be click targetted like a heal, casting RD while targetting the mob holds the spell until you pick a valid target via an assist. The only issue I have had with RD is when the person who gets aggro is out of range, would be nice if the range on RD was upped to 50yards to take account of increased range talents and being on opposite sides of a boss mob.

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Fjord

How do you figure?

 

Thelyna

I find quite often I waste RD due to UI/connection lag. Because I play with ~500ms latency, it feels like anything that causes the mob to lose/change target after I've hit RD but before the server's registered it causes the RD to have nil effect.

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• Nite_Moogle

Crazy math that doesn't look at the way you take damage from the perspective of a healer and uses some metric like time to death instead of the actual amount of damage you're taking over the course of a fight. Avoidance is a linear reduction and AC is exponential curving down.

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Fiola

To understand this, think of Illumination as a mana cost reduction on heals proportional to your spell crit %. (ie: If you have 10% spell crit, cast 100 heals, 10 will be free. So you cast 100 heals for the mana cost of 90.)


Now that you're thinking of it that way, if you have 0% spell crit and go to 1% spell crit, your effective mana cost goes from 100% to 99%. The number of heals you are able to cast increases by roughly 1%.


But what if you were on the opposite side of the spectrum? If you have 98% spell crit and go to 99% spell crit, your effective mana cost goes from 2% to 1%. If you can cast 100 heals with a 2% effective mana cost, you can cast 200 heals with a 1% effective mana cost. That marginal point of spell crit increases the number of heals you can cast by 100%.


If you went from 99% spell crit to 100% spell crit, your effective mana cost goes to 0%. That marginal point of spell crits lets you cast an "infinite" number of heals. Enjoy your paladin healing godmode where heals do not cost mana. (Once, in MC, Divine Favor bugged on me and wouldn't go away after casting a heal . Infinite healing is amusing if boring)


(Credit for this proof belongs to a post on the official forums from long ago)

 

• Nite_Moogle

That is exactly the crap I am talking about. A 1% increase in spell crit means you can cast 1 more free heal per 100 casts in a statistically perfect world, just like 1% parry means you take 1% less damage. Saying that it is a 100% improvement to go from 98% to 99% is spinning numbers and it is misleading. The comparison of how much of a gain it is should come from your empty set (0% mitigation or spell crit), not the point you were previously at.

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Liand

Huh? It doesn't matter what the reference point is.

At 9000 mana without any spell crit, I can spam FoL 50 times (9000 / 180); with 5%, 52.6 times (9000 / (180 * 0.95)); with 10%, 55.6 times (9000 / (180 * 0.9)); with 15%, 58.8 (9000 / (180 * 0.85)).

The increases are, from an "empty set", +2.6 for 5%; +5.6 for 10%; +8.8 for 15%. Or roughly, +0.52/1% up to 5%; +0.56/1% up to 10%; +0.59/1% up to 15%. There's nothing misleading about that at all. More spell crit you have, more effective it becomes.

 

Fiola

. . .

Why not? I used the extreme example to show that at a high spell crit%, 1% marginal spell crit is worth more, compared to 1% marginal spell crit% at a low spell crit %. Is the concept of marginal gains too difficult for you to grasp?

Here, I'll dumb it down for you by showing how spell crit% boosts healing output compared to the "empty set".
0% spell crit, 100% mana cost
X/1.00 = X

This is the baseline. At 0% spell crit, you can cast X heals.


1% spell crit, 99% effective mana cost
X/0.99 = 1.0101 X
marginal gain of .0101 (Not .01!)

2% spell crit, 98% effective mana cost
X/0.98 = 1.0204 X
marginal gain of .0103

3% spell crit, 97%
X/0.97 = 1.0309 X
marginal gain of .0105

5% spell crit, 95%
X/0.95 = 1.0529 X
marginal gain of .0217 for 2% spell crit, or .0108 per 1%.

10%, 90%
X/0.90 = 1.1111 X
marginal gain of .5821 for 5% spell crit, or .0116 per 1%

20%, 80%
X/0.80 = 1.25 X
marginal gain of .1389 for 10% spell crit, or .0139 per 1%.


Note that at 20% spell crit (an attainable level of crit %) you do not gain 20% healing endurance compared to the "empty set". You gain 25%.

ie: If you can cast 100 heals on a given mana pool at 0% spell crit, you can cast 125 heals for the same amount of mana with 20% spell crit. If you're a healer who is trying to figure out how long you can pump out heals, I don't see how that type of information is "misleading" or "spinning numbers".

 

Shallistra

It's actually 126 heals since the mana you regain from Illumination is still affected by Illumination.

The exponential effect that I was referring to does primarily revolve around this mechanic, but the way it has been laid out here is in a scenario where your mana bar is static. In practice, it is not.

 

• Nite_Moogle

I agree that spell crit has a cascading effect on the amount of heals that you can cast before you run out of mana, however this is not the same thing as what I said: you gain an extra 1 free heal per 100 for each spell crit you gain. The result of this is that you will have an additional free heal before you run out of mana, which can in turn proc another free heal. This does not change the fact that over the course of 100 heals each 1% of spell crit is worth 180 mana if you're casting FoL 7: this is a non-scaling amount. If you were to replace each 1% spell crit with 6 MP/5, the amount of mana you would have after X casts is the same. At 9000 mana with no MP/5 you can spam FoL 50 times before you're out of mana. If you have 60 mp/5 you regain 900 mana during this time, which is the same amount of mana saved by having 5% spell crit and Illumination. If you have 120 MP/5 you gain 1800 mana over 75 seconds, which is the same as Illumination going off 10 times. If you had 600 MP/5 you could cast FoL forever without running out of mana. That is not an exponential gain, it is linear. However since Illumination scales with the amount of mana that the spell costs it is vastly superior in terms of item budget and attainability. Holy Light 11 requires a staggering 1680 MP/5 to maintain forever when spamming, and the controllability of Divine Favor makes 1% crit worth more than the potential 16.8 mp/5 that each spellcrit is worth in this circumstance.

Or more easily explained: my original post was in response to Fjord asking how each point of avoidance was exponentially greater, and the answer is the same as above. Per 100 swings at you, a 1% increase in parry is a 1% reduction in the total damage you take. However because you are taking less damage per time interval, your time to live (that is the length of time until you die from the mob beating on you) is increased by greater than 1% since the comparison becomes recurisve. From the standpoint of healing required however, you are reducing your damage taken by 1%. The time-to-live stat is useless in the vast majority of situations because the amount of damage taken in a given time interval is an amount that must be offset by an equal amount of healing. You do not reduce the amount of healing required in a time interval by an amount greater than 1% when you gain 1% of avoidance.

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Fiola

So you're telling me MP5 is static? That is true, but that doesn't make spell crit%'s interaction with Illumination linear.

If a mage has 100% spell crit, his damage spells are 150%/200%/whatever stronger, and so he 150%/200% normal damage. If a paladin has 100% spell crit, the mana cost of her heals become 0 due to Illumination, and she gains infinite healing endurance.

Yes, Illumination is equivalent to a certain amount of Mp5 at a given gear level, spamming X heal Y times. But for real world usage, you will probably vary the types of heals you use. Thinking of Illumination as a static bonus works fine when you plug in the numbers, but is overall a harder to use model, and an inaccurate one.

 

• Nite_Moogle

For any given heal spell, there is a single MP/5 value that will offset 1% spell crit for any value from zero percent crit to 100 percent crit. That is linear.

It's quite easy to calculate the maximum amount of mana you can possibly spend in 15 seconds spamming your standard rank of your favorite healing spell and derive the equivalent MP/5 needed to offset it, and there is no greater inaccuracy in modeling this than attempting to decide how many spells you can cast before you go OOM from a full pool. Obviously factors like cancelled heals, varying ranks and further talents complicate matters (as they do with all attempts at predictive modeling) but it is a good benchmark for rough determination of choices between gear. There is no way to absolutely say 1% spell crit is worth an exact MP/5 value because Illumination always scales with the mana cost of the spell while MP/5 does not, but in commonly used situations it is not difficult to estimate the opportunity cost of 1% spell crit vs MP/5.

[Carebare]: I'd rather not fit through doorways than be a troll

 

◊ Wraithlin

Yes you do, because you do not start healing from the zero group.
Boss hits for 1000 per hit before mitigation and avoidance; over 100 attacks you take 100000 damage before mitigation or aviodance to be healed.
- 50% avoidance, over a statistically large sample (100 attacks isnt but lets play pretend): Damage taken 50000
- 51% avoidance, over a statistically large sample (100 attacks isnt but lets play pretend): Damage taken 49000
-- 1% avoidance reduces the amount of healing by 2%

-80% mitigation: Damage taken 20000
-81% mitigation: Damage taken 19000
--1% mitigation reduces the amount of healing by 5%

-99% spell crit on illumination: Averaged spell cost relative to base cost 1%
-100% spell crit on illumination: Averaged spell cost relative to base cost 0%
-- 1% spell crit reduces the spell cost by an undefined value (1/0), which we can term "infinate"

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• Nite_Moogle

It is no wonder that there are so many successful moneymaking scams in the world.
You never heal at the zero group because it's basically impossible to do so, but by your logic I could argue that you should have a mage tank and use a flask and a Greater Stoneshield Potion since that will increase their survivability by a much higher magnitude than a warrior using it. If your comparisons don't start at the mob's base amount of damage it can do then it simply is not a useful comparison, and it lends to misleading conclusions.

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◊ Wraithlin

Spurious example for two reasons.
Firstly, you do not determne which class should tank by how much you can increase their survivability with consumables.

Secondly, armor works on a scale that is inversely proportional to the increasing effects of improving your mitigation by a fixed percentile. That is; increasing your armor by a fixed amount reduces the damage taken by the same amount regardless of your base armor. At higher values of base armor the stoneshield pot will give a smaller increase in the percentage mitigation than at lower base values, but the total damage mitigated remains the same. This is exactly the sort of fuzzy thinking that lead to myths about diminishing returns on armor.

Finally, noone cares about the zero group because noone heals from the zero group. The question being asked is "If I have X% spell crit, how valuable is an additional 1% spell crit". Spell crit has an increasing effect on you casting longevity, but a linear reduction in the spell cost; the two are not the same thing and only one is a useful measure. In general noone cares how much their healing spell costs, only wether or not they have enough longevity to last the whole fight.

The maths is simply this:
spellcost = cost *(100-spellcrit)/100
Therefore spellcost= cost - cost*spellcrit/100
Hense the cost of the spell is linear in spellcrit.

Longevity = manapool/spellcost
Hence Longevity is proportional to spellcrit^-1, and this is NOT liner, but assymptotic at spellcrit=100

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• Nite_Moogle

Exactly. You determine which class tanks by how far away from the zero point they can get, which is why it is an important metric. This in particular is where a lot of people are horribly confused regarding tanking: threat issues aside, determining a better tank between a warrior with 30% avoidance and 60% AC mitigation against a druid with 20% avoidance and 70% AC mitigation should be compared against the zero poi