[Prot] 5.0 - I'm Sexy and I Know it - Page 3

Wrathblood · 10/03/12, 4:13 PM

I wondered what was going on last night. We were doing Stone Guards and my co-tank was having incredible problems hanging onto the dog he taunted off me. My eyes just about bugged out when I saw that Censure was ticking harder than CS hitting.

HW is going to hit like a truck now, easily surpassing HoW. Glyphing it still probably isn't worthwhile (less than 1% overall dps increase), but it depends on your alternatives. If Phase 3 of Feng or Gara'jal's Berserk are causing problems, it might not be a bad option if you're already sporting Alabaster Shield and Focused Shield.

In other fun, I did some testing and Glyph of the Battle Healer is looking interesting. It appears to proc off everything SoI procs from (auto-attack, ShoR, CS, HotR though BH also procs off the Holy Nova part while SoI doesn't). I was not able to test HoW, though. Does anyone know if SoI/Glyph of BH proc off HoW?

Ronark · 10/03/12, 11:23 PM

HoW is classified as a Ranged attack that deals Magical damage, so it is unlikely to proc BH.

Gloryrider · 10/04/12, 6:22 AM

Quick question: Sacred shield haste breakpoints. They're supposed to exist and with the haste now already a valuable stat it might be worth going for the first or second breakpoint. If anyone can figure out the ratings required in a raid that would be nice.
Same goes for Eternal flame, although I don't see myself using that anywhere soon.

And Censure hitting so hard, is that a bug? Or is it just scaling so well with the high vengeance levels we get at raids?

MBar · 10/04/12, 6:27 AM

After the blue post yesterday, I decided to use SoI for our Stone Guards attempts. During our kill, I did 22k HPS (20% overheal), which was quite a bit more than I was expecting. The breakdown of the healing was like this (rough numbers):

Seal of Insight: 35%
Sacred Shield: 35%
Word of Glory: 20%
Stay of Execution: 10%

(I was using the Battle Healer glyph, 90% of my healing done was to myself as I was offtank.)

I've not got a log of my kill, but I found this on WoL:
World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

Howly there has similar numbers to what I did. His SoI in fact did more healing than Sacred Shield.

The reason for posting is that judging from the numbers last night, SoI does easily comparable healing to Sacred Shield. I was very surprised to see just how much healing it does, and am now trying to understand the trade-off made with the DPS loss of not using SoT. SoI certainly is looking pretty great currently.

If SoT and Censure are typically 25-30% of our DPS, are we talking about potentially trading about 30% of our DPS for maybe 40% more personal healing with SoI?

thedopefishlives · 10/04/12, 8:46 AM

Originally Posted by MBar

After the blue post yesterday, I decided to use SoI for our Stone Guards attempts. During our kill, I did 22k HPS (20% overheal), which was quite a bit more than I was expecting. The breakdown of the healing was like this (rough numbers):

Seal of Insight: 35%
Sacred Shield: 35%
Word of Glory: 20%
Stay of Execution: 10%

(I was using the Battle Healer glyph, 90% of my healing done was to myself as I was offtank.)

I've not got a log of my kill, but I found this on WoL:
World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

Howly there has similar numbers to what I did. His SoI in fact did more healing than Sacred Shield.

The reason for posting is that judging from the numbers last night, SoI does easily comparable healing to Sacred Shield. I was very surprised to see just how much healing it does, and am now trying to understand the trade-off made with the DPS loss of not using SoT. SoI certainly is looking pretty great currently.

If SoT and Censure are typically 25-30% of our DPS, are we talking about potentially trading about 30% of our DPS for maybe 40% more personal healing with SoI?

On our attempts on Stone Guard Tuesday night, my experience was similar to yours, except SoI was clearly above Sacred Shield on our cleanest pull. Over 50% of my incoming heals came from myself, primarily with SoI, SS, and WoG, all of which were less than 10% overheal. I'm definitely inclined to think that in cases where threat/tank damage output are not strict requirements, SoI is going to be effectively mandatory to prevent overstressing your healers, regardless of the DPS potential. Doubly so now that SoT/Censure have been nerfed heavily for Prot.

Charybdis · 10/04/12, 11:13 AM

Originally Posted by Gloryrider

Quick question: Sacred shield haste breakpoints. They're supposed to exist and with the haste now already a valuable stat it might be worth going for the first or second breakpoint. If anyone can figure out the ratings required in a raid that would be nice.
Same goes for Eternal flame, although I don't see myself using that anywhere soon.

And Censure hitting so hard, is that a bug? Or is it just scaling so well with the high vengeance levels we get at raids?

Stacking haste only to get to a SS breakpoint wouldn't be worth it for Prot. If someone chose to stack haste after attaining expertise and hit hard caps then they might reach the breakpoint but it would be incidental (not to mention difficult since raids generally wouldn't give the tank haste gear in the first place.)

The math for EF suggests it isn't worth the uptime loss on SotR to maintain the HoT.

Blizz already posted that they felt prot was doing too much damage with Seal of Truth. If it's still dealing a lot of damage they either haven't done the hotfix yet or they screwed up on applying it and will fix it when they can.

Wrathblood · 10/04/12, 11:55 AM

The Censure hot fix went in yesterday, so its already fix. Censure is back down where its supposed to be.

As an update, I've been thinking about Theck's big new stuff on Exp/Mastery/Haste, and its occurred to me that it should have been obvious that hard-capping Exp would be a huge boost to damage smoothing, and its simpler than looking at 3-swing cycles vs 6-swing cycles or whatever. I'm kicking myself for having not seen this.

Ok, ignoring pooling HoPo for a second, think about your rotation. During your normal rotation, if run perfectly, the longest time you go without ShoR being up is 4.5 seconds. However, if on the third set of CS's in your rotation (the part where you don't get a J between the CS's. CS - X - X - CS - J) either CS is parried (because you're only soft-capping Exp) then there isn't another J to save you anytime soon. Your *best* case scenario jumps all the way up to 9 seconds, and if you're really unlucky and 2 of the 3 CS's don't land, you're up to 12 seconds when the next J comes through.

By failing to Hard cap Exp, you run the risk of periodically doubling (from 4.5 seconds to 9 seconds) the amount of time during which you don't have ShoR up. Sure, you might get lucky and Avoid or Block some of the hits that come through, but then again you might not. That's where the bulk of those 80% and 90% spike events come from, and that's why Hard-capping Exp is amazing for stopping them.

And those events will happen pretty often if you're merely soft-capped. Every single time that chunk of the rotation comes around, if you're sitting at exactly 7.5% Exp, there's about a 15% chance (0.925*0.925) that one of those two CS's will get parried and you'll be exposed for 9 seconds instead of 4.5.

With this in mind, I'll be rewriting the OP a bit, encouraging folks to first cap Hit, then hard cap Exp before stacking anything else. After that, I'm a bit on the fence as there are a few options:

- Mastery does a nice job of smoothing incoming damage, but with the tops chopped off the spikes already, do we really need the additional smoothing?

- Haste is almost as good as Mastery while also kicking in a fair amount of additional DPS and tank dps is pretty useful these days.

- Avoidance? With the tops of the spikes dealt with, perhaps Avoidance's damage reduction to variability trade-off isn't as unattractive as it used to be.

I'm not yet sure where to go on these yet.

Charybdis · 10/04/12, 6:50 PM

If I might make a recommendation, don't absolutely recommend one setup over another after capping accuracy. List the pros and cons and tell the readers to make their own choices based on what they feel will work best for them and their group, because that's what it will really come down to. Just make a note on haste saying such gear probably won't go to the tank first because chances are people haven't yet been educated on haste's value for Prot, and that it puts the tank in direct competition with DPS.

I don't play at the moment, but based on how gearing typically goes capping the accuracy stats then having a mix of avoidance and mastery is the most likely gear setup that will happen at the start. If the person's off spec is Ret then there will tend to be overlap since everything but crit is useful to Prot too (including gems).

pewsey · 10/04/12, 7:15 PM

A consideration to recommendations may well be the group and in particular the healer composition you're running with. I've been speaking with our newly created Monk healer (who has been a druid, priest and paladin raider) who says "I don't have any great tools for dealing with spike damage, but my throughput is fantastic". This may be a valuable consideration, especially for 10 mans. Besides, who doesn't like making healers happy?

Theck · 10/04/12, 10:45 PM

Originally Posted by Ronark

HoW is classified as a Ranged attack that deals Magical damage, so it is unlikely to proc BH.

We've already determined what procs GoBH over at MT:
Melee
CS
HotR (phys)
HotR (nova)
SotR

That's it. It's notable that every target hit by HotR procs it, and it's 100% proc rate. So if you hit 3 targets with HotR, you get 4 BH procs. I already have sims showing it to be about ~5k HPS in a single-target raid situation, potentially much more in an AoE situation.

My sims also have the AS/HW/Censure/SoT changes implemented. I haven't gotten them all posted on MT yet, but I should be able to finish that up tomorrow morning/afternoon. For completeness, here's the short version I posted on MT:

Originally Posted by theckhd

I have results, but it's too late for me to start posting them now. I should be able to get the bulk of them posted tomorrow though.

Short version: SoT is still better single-target than SoR. My initial estimates were correct, SoT now does between 3k and 4k damage at 100k Vengeance AP. SoI is still about 17k healing.

To give you some numbers to play with, here's a representative queue (which is also the highest-damage queue I've simmed so far):

7.50% hit, 7.50% exp, SoT
|    |                                       |    DPS |   SHPS |    DPS |   SHPS | SS/EF | Empty |        |
| Q# | Priority                              | V=100k | V=100k |  V=50k |  V=50k |   Up% |  GCD% |  HPG/s |
| 15 | CS>J>AS>Cons>ES>HW>SotR               |  93100 |      0 |  57165 |      0 |   0.0 |   6.1 | 0.3948 |

7.50% hit, 7.50% exp, SoI
| 15 | CS>J>AS>Cons>ES>HW>SotR               |  89615 |  16885 |  55014 |   9920 |   0.0 |   6.1 | 0.3948 |

7.50% hit, 7.50% exp, SoR
| 15 | CS>J>AS>Cons>ES>HW>SotR               |  91254 |      0 |  56151 |      0 |   0.0 |   6.1 | 0.3948 |

As you can see, SoT is about 3500 damage up on SoI and 1850 damage ahead of SoR. I suspect that the transition from SoT to SoR will be 3 targets based on the following logic: SoR is (91254-89615)=1639 DPS for a single target, and should scale linearly. So adding a second target only gives it an additional 1639 DPS, which isn't enough to catch up to SoT (which was 1850 DPS ahead). That's assuming you can't stack Censure on both targets, which isn't necessarily true. Rule of thumb will probably be that SoT/Censure will be ahead for 3-4 targets if you can keep Censure rolling on all of them, but beyond that it will likely fall behind no matter what.

If you scroll up, you'll see that queue #15 was doing 96.3k DPS before the patch, and there were tweaks we could make to push that up to 96.5k. So we've lost about 3k DPS from this change if we stick with SoT. Note, however, that with HW being buffed so much it should take precedence over Cons against a single target. I need to program in a few more queues to see what our new "max DPS" rotation is. It's probably CS>J>AS>HW>Cons>ES>SotR, but ES might move around a bit in there.

Glyph of the Battle Healer is around 5200 healing per second to a nearby target. I tanked some heroics tonight using SoI and GoBH, and it did a reasonably good amount of healing. It's hard to say though, because I was running with a resto druid, so I was probably just sniping his HoTs.

I've run some sims with different queues as well, and to summarize: our rotations got a little more complicated. In general, CS>J>AS>HW>Cons is now the strongest "default" queue that maximizes HPG and then DPS. AS>CS>J>HW>Cons is actually a DPS upgrade from CS>J>AS>HW>Cons at the cost of HP gen. I don't have numbers handy right now, but it was a few thousand DPS iirc. Like I said, I'll have full details posted by tomorrow for us to chew over.

Also note that the Final Wrath glyph just got a lot stronger. It's something like 8k DPS during execute now, provided you bump Holy Wrath to the top of the queue (HW>HoW>CS>J>AS>Cons).

Originally Posted by Charybdis

Stacking haste only to get to a SS breakpoint wouldn't be worth it for Prot. If someone chose to stack haste after attaining expertise and hit hard caps then they might reach the breakpoint but it would be incidental (not to mention difficult since raids generally wouldn't give the tank haste gear in the first place.)

Yes, but: don't forget that SoI grants 10% spell haste, which affects SS. Using SoI alone gets you another tick (even without the 5% haste raid buff, which it's multiplicative with - also note that it's multiplicative with your haste rating, but that's accounted for in your character sheet haste). Determining when you get new ticks is rather straightforward:

decimalHaste=(1+charSheetHaste/100)*1.05 = 1+netDecimalHaste
TickDuration=6/decimalHaste
NumTicks=round(30/TickDuration) = round(5*decimalHaste) = round(5+5*netDecimalHaste)

You should get new ticks when the argument to round() becomes 5.50, 6.50, 7.50, which occur at at 10%, 30%, and 50% haste (after raid buffs) or 9.524%, 28.572%, and 47.620% (rounding up just to be safe).

It's unlikely we'll reach 30% with or without SoI, I think, at least not until later tiers (8500 or 12750 haste rating). But if someone were using SoT, the 10% breakpoint would probably be reachable (4250).

Originally Posted by Wrathblood

With this in mind, I'll be rewriting the OP a bit, encouraging folks to first cap Hit, then hard cap Exp before stacking anything else. After that, I'm a bit on the fence as there are a few options:

- Mastery does a nice job of smoothing incoming damage, but with the tops chopped off the spikes already, do we really need the additional smoothing?

- Haste is almost as good as Mastery while also kicking in a fair amount of additional DPS and tank dps is pretty useful these days.

- Avoidance? With the tops of the spikes dealt with, perhaps Avoidance's damage reduction to variability trade-off isn't as unattractive as it used to be.

I'm not yet sure where to go on these yet.

You'll have your answer tomorrow.

Wrathblood · 10/04/12, 11:15 PM

That's terrific, Theck. I'm starting to write up a bit on DPS as its pretty clear its going to matter.

Pewsey & Charybdis,

Oh, certainly. I'm really not a big one for telling people what to do, especially since everyone's situation can be quite different. My thinking at this point, if Theck's numbers on Avoidance turn out the way I suspect they will, is to stick with the three gearing categories (though I might rename them) each of which has pros and cons which I'll lay out. What they'll have in common is that you'll want to cap Hit and, for at least two of them, hard cap Exp before starting on other stats.

Savius · 10/05/12, 10:05 AM

Is there any circumstance when spamming WoG would be better than spending most of the HoPo on SoTr?
I was thinking that we'd always want to increase the uptime of SoTr buff and only use WoG after large, predictable hits. But I see on WoL lots of paladin tanks from top guilds using quite a lot of WoG, even EF.

For instance, in 10m, the tank of the lonely stoneguard. Last night he was consistently around 50% health, he had one healer assigned to him that was also helping with the raid. What should he spend his HoPo on (totally ignoring tank's dmg done)? I'd say SoTr but it's just a hunch not backed by any numbers.

Of course, when there are more healers assigned on the tank, the dmg reduction should win by miles. But what about single healer or even a part time healer?

Which of those scale better with incoming dmg and by how much?
Is there a dtps breakpoint when the other one becomes better?

Theck · 10/05/12, 10:20 AM

Damage Smoothing Follow-Up, containing the answers Wrathblood was asking for regarding what to do after expertise hard-cap.

Originally Posted by Savius

Is there any circumstance when spamming WoG would be better than spending most of the HoPo on SoTr?

Not generally. WoG is a (5538+0.49*SP) heal per holy power, which is ~16.5k+0.735*AP. Assuming 40k base AP, that's ~40k+0.735*VAP, and since Vengeance AP is VAP=0.4*DTPS, WoG's average heal size should be
~40k+0.3*DTPS

Note that I've rounded up in a few places in that calculation to fudge the effects of crits.

SotR mitigates (30+mastery)% of DTPS for 3 seconds, or (0.3+decimalMastery)*DTPS*3 total damage prevented. A good estimate is 15% mastery, which is 3*0.45*DTPS=1.35*DTPS

Setting those two equal to one another, your DTPS would have to be 40k or less to make WoG heal for more than SotR mitigates. Increasing mastery drops this value even further. At the base 8% mastery, it would be a ~48k threshold, still fairly far below what a boss should be dishing out (even at 20k Vengeance AP, you're looking at 50k incoming DTPS).

Nairobi the Kenyan · 10/05/12, 1:52 PM

Perhaps not feasible at this current moment with raids only just starting, but I've got a pondering about SoI/BH and raid comp going forward;

Given that SoT is now down to a 4k DPS seal (using Theck's maths above @100k V), am I understanding that running SoI yields ~17k HPS on me, plus ~5-6k RHPS through BH? AND gives an extra tick of SS standalone? All at the cost of 4k dps from SoT?

If that's the case, it seems like the decision is an easy one to use SoI for most anything progression. But with all of the talk about tank DPS, especially with its synergy given haste gearing, I can't help but feel like the choice isn't as clear as it seems.

Anyhow, my original question is given the use of SoI/BH, and the liberal use of LH, could we theoretically replace a raid/melee healer in favor of another DPS at some point (before content is trivial of course)? Our loss of seal DPS would be made up for in spades, I'd assume. I saw this in our kill of the dogs on Tuesday, when my healing equaled the resto druids, and can't help but think that had they been DPS the fight may have been smoother.

At any rate, so far it has nearly entirely eliminated the need for a healer in 5man content, so I'm curious if that can be rolled up to 10man raiding at some point/gear level.

Charybdis · 10/05/12, 2:23 PM

Evaluating whether a healer should go DPS (or vice versa) has always been a bit of a sticky point with raiding. This is made more interesting by how some healers and DPS can halfway fill both roles nowadays. It's important to chat with the healers and tanks and see how they felt about the fight. If any of them start saying they weren't challenged at all to stay alive or keep others alive, that's probably a good indicator that more DPS could be squeezed out.