HolyHotty

I've been raiding with over 50% holy light crit and over 2200 healing for a couple weeks now and I really like the setup. I always get between 50-60% crit on wws and the crits are noticeably consistent and predictable since it's rare for me to see more than 3 non crits in a row. Last week during Archimonde I got 11 crits in a row, then 1 non crit, followed by 5 crits. Of course I don't always get runs like that, but I've been surprised how many times I get more than 3 crits in a row. The way you get the most out of having high crit is to just heal like you normally do and use the correct size heal for the job and not rely on downranking and counting on a crit. This way you always heal the tank for the right amount, but half the time you get 60% mana back and if the tank happens to take a lot of damage, you have a higher chance of getting a lucky crit and keeping the MT safely topped. No risk (since you're not relying on a crit), more mana, and you have a 50% chance to heal the MT to full if he gets hit hard.

I wouldn't suggest this setup to anyone that never gets a shadow priest (I always have one) or a resto shaman, and it only works if you have more than 50% buffed crit along with high +healing. But if you can get the gear and the right group setup, you'll be able to output more single target hps and still be more efficient than anyone else in the raid. It's also nice to be able to use lower rank heals, like rank 7, as a normal heal on easier fights since half the time it crits for 4800 and costs 186 mana. This obviously doesn't work if you have a flash of light heavy play style. Massive +healing and mp5 is the way to go for that, but in my opinion crit is the best stat for holy light.

This really shines on fights like paladin tank healing on council and fire elemental tank healing on Illidan because small heals just won't be enough.

 

Vitalay

Can you log out with the crit gear on for us? Or link your entire setup?

Your current profile only has >35% crit chance on generic holy, and I'd like to see what to aim for.

 

HolyHotty

This is my usual raid gear. I used to have more with a crit trinket, but the new skullfish makes it so you only need 29.47% regular spell crit to be at 50% holy light crit with mage and druid buffs (no talent points in mark), adept's and draenic wisdom elixirs, skullfish soup, brilliant wizard oil, blessing of kings, and the 2 piece t6 bonus. If I'm in a 5 man or something and I want to have 50% crit, I just switch out my healing trinket for the 32 crit one and use blessing of wisdom instead of kings. The only way to get any higher than 30 or 31% unbuffed is to start switching healing gear for damage and healing crit items, which will lower your +healing even more, and I like to have around 2200. But with the sextant trinket, doomwalker ring (either him or kazzak), and the council cloak, you could probably get pretty close and not have to use soo many crit consumables in favor of mp5.

You end up sacrificing a lot of mp5 with the change in consumables, but I never get close to running out of mana anyway so I prefer to sacrifice that over healing. Altogether I really only lose about 150 or so +healing and 25ish mp5 on my gear overall compared to all the other high end paladins in exchange for 9% crit. Since I don't feel like having 150 more healing or 25 mp5 would make a difference while I'm raiding (experience not theory crafting, I'm sure it would be useful :P), and I see and enjoy the effect of 9% extra crit, I prefer this setup as opposed to stacking some more healing and mana regen. It's also expensive to maintain 50%, consumable wise, but I've got over 2000g and nothing to spend it on, so I always use full pots in raids.

Also, keep in mind that 50% is an arbitrary value I decided I wanted to have. 49 or 51% would probably work just as well, but I like the novelty of having a 50/50 chance of critting on any given heal. I did some theory crafting a long time ago just to make sure it wasn't too much worse than stacking healing and mp5, and it wasn't far behind, so I decided to do it for fun.

 

Arfea

While your crit healing seems very nice, depending on a shadowpriest so much seems like an inherent weakness. What do you do if your shadowpriest dies midfight and for one reason or another can't res? Do you switch to FoL? Do you depend on being put in another shadowpriests group depriving another of a mana source? etc...

Aka Meaniemoo.

 

Vitalay

I'm pretty sure he was just presenting a fun sort of "casual" setup that is surprisingly tenable, though probably worse than other gear choices.

 

galzohar

While gearing for a shadowpriest puts you in a suboptimal position when you don't have one, gearing for not having a shadowpriest puts you in just as suboptimal position when you do have one! Remember that overall the gear choices for when you have a shadow priest and when you don't are not that different. Probably the lack of DPS from the SP dying will make more of a difference than you not being optimally geared for not having one.
The question is - is that crit setup really better... Let's face it if you have heaps of mana nothing will help your MT survive more than more +healing (as it can be almost directly translated to extra stamina assuming he already has the stamina survive more than 1.5-3s...) - critting is more like avoidance in that term and is thus going to fail eventually. If you're mana limited mathcraft have shown over and over again that unless your crits pretty much don't overheal (at least not more than your non-crits overheal), crit just isn't worth it in terms of "getting as much healing as possible with your mana", at almost any gear level I was toying around with. You'd need over 2.2k healing, high crit chance with pretty much every single mana buffing ability available (more or less depending on SP's DPS) and to assume crits always heal for 1.5x to have 1 crit rating be as good as 2 +healing. Anything less, and 1 crit rating is less good than 2 healing. And again the "crits heal for 1.5x" is already agreed upon as being completely unrealistic. The real question is, how much do crit heals effectively heal for? As it's definitely not 1x either.

If nobody is dying ever etc and mana is never an issue, I don't see no reason to consider any stat other than +healing to give the tank more defniite burst survivability. This, as I've seen, is rarely the case though, but I could very well be wrong here or this could be different in a guild that is overgearing every encounter in the game etc.

 

Vitalay

Can someone check my math here? I'm trying to figure out the effective mp5 of Y crit% for, say, HL rank 11.

I've got:

Mana Cost TIMES 60% DIVIDED BY cast time TIMES 5 seconds TIMES crit% of item

840 * 60% / 2 * 5 * Y = 1260*Y

This formula gave me that 1% crit chance = 12.6 effective mp5 from chain HL casts.

Is this right?

 

galzohar

While I didn't check if your math is wrong based on your assumptions, your assumptions are defniitely wrong.

mana after crits = tota mana/(1-crit*0.6)
Total mana is starting mana + mana regened from mp5 + mana regend from shadow priest + mana from meta gem + mana from spiritual attuenement etc etc etc, which is obviously dependant on a lot of stuff.

With small changes of crit your mana will change by approx {total mana*0.6/[(1-0.6*crit)^2]}*(change in crit)
If you want to be accurate calculate mana after crits with old crit rate, then mana after crits with new crit rate, and use the difference in mana between them.
To see the mp5 difference simply divide this number by the length of the fight in seconds and multiply by 5.

As you can see the conversion of crit->mp5 is compeltely dependant on how much mana you actually have, which depends on everything that gives you mana in a fight.

 

Vitalay

Eh?

Numerical Product * Probability of the event = The amount of the Numerical Event the Probability will create, right?

Amount recovered from spell crit * the probability of the spell critting = the expected return on a given probability, right?

 

• Karakas

Vitalay: while your math is technically correct, it's not a really useful way of looking at the benefits of %crit in terms of mana regeneration.

You numbers for regen are inflated for a higher mana cost spell - however, your mana consumption also goes up, at a faster rate than the growth of your mana regen from Illumination. Therefore, be careful of using your calculated statistic as a metric for mana regeneration from crit on gear.

 

Yilona

I prefer to take an empirical approach to this and use WWS for calculating how much equivalent mp5 crit% gives you.

Let's take this WWS from this week.

My stats were:

FoL = 3,428,345 healing = 55.5% at a crit rate of 30%
HL = 2,753,500 healing = 45.5% at a crit rate of 47%

My HPS time was 91 minutes and Illumination gave me 147,714 mana.

147,714/(91*60) = ~27 mana / second = 137 mp5.

My effective total crit rate was .555*.3+.455*.47 = 38%.

This means that 137 mp5 / 38 crit% = 3.6 mp5 / crit%.


Let's take another example WWS from a month ago:

My stats were:

FoL = 3,926,659 = 80.2% at a crit rate of 27%
HL = 966,876 = 19.2% at a crit rate of 48%

My HPS time was 107 minutes and Illumination gave me 95,151 mana.

95,151/(107*60) = ~14 mana / second = 74 mp5.

My effective total crit rate was .802*.27+.192*.48 = 30.8%.

This means that 74 mp5 / 30.8 crit% = 2.4 mp5 / crit%.


If I take yet another example WWS:

My stats were:

HL = 4,011,606 = 100% at a crit rate of 39%.

My HPS time was 62 minutes and Illumination gave me 130,368 mana.

130,368/(62*60) = ~35 mana / second = 175 mp5.

This means that 175 mp5 / 39 crit% = 4.4 mp5 / crit%.


So this data includes 3 examples with different compositions of FoL/HL. Crit % has about an average mp5 equivalent of ~3.5 mp5.

Keep in mind that these numbers are highly encounter dependent. I've seen some fights be upwards of ~6 mp5/crit% and others be very low. This is mostly due to the duration of the fight and how much HL you use. The more HL you use (compared to FoL), the higher the mp5/crit% conversion will be.


So if we take this knowledge then and look at itemization/gems, we can compare items that have various amounts of crit% and mp5 together and see what items are better. However, keep in mind that items that spend points in multiple stats can have more of those stats than if they spend all points in one stat, due to the exponential nature of stat allocation. For example, an item that has both crit% and mp5 will have, say, 70% of the mp5 of an item using the same number of points that have everything spent in mp5 instead. In this case, then, is the crit% worth more mp5 than the equivalent item with straight mp5? It will all depend on the items!

So, I'm not an itemization master and I don't know the actual numbers for crit% points and mp5 points, so I can't say whether crit% is worth stacking over mp5 in terms of itemization cost. However, I am still a strong believer in balance... and I would choose the item that has both crit% and mp5 over an item that stacks one or the other.

As far as gems go, the 10 crit rating gem = 0.48 % crit, so it would roughly equal 1.68 mp5, if we use the 3.5 mp5/crit% conversion. The Royal Shadowsong Amethyst (+11 healing and 2 mp5) definitely has an edge over the crit rating gem, then, since it provides reliable +healing and roughly more mp5 equivalent, but I wouldn't snub the crit rating gem if it gives a good socket bonus.

Anyway, I would welcome any experts on the itemization discussion, as I simply just don't know enough about that to say whether crit is more expensive than it's worth. If anyone sees any errors in my math, just let me know. =)

Also, this still doesn't address the fact that crit requires mana spent for the mp5 returned, whereas mp5 is a benefit (unless you're max mana). In that regard, things could shift more in the mp5 favor than just these straight numbers presented here.

 

HolyHotty

I mainly picked this setup because I like it, I have a shadow priest every raid, and I'm always on MT or some type of single target high burst damage healing. My guild also raids with less than the recommended number of healers, so the extra crits help on fights like council when I have to heal the paladin tank with one other healer. Altogether I sacrificed 243 healing for 5.2% crit when you count up the gems and shoulder enchant, so it's really not that much healing, but granted it's not that much crit either. My goal was just to get to 50% crit with buffs and have fun with it.

From the math side though, it's not a huge sacrifice either. 243 healing works out to be about 238 extra healing on every max rank holy light when you figure in 45% crit. 5% crit is about 135 extra healing per max rank HL and -26 mana. So I'm trading ~103 extra health on a heal for -26 mana with the added bonus of having semi-reliable crits. With over 2200 +healing and a bit more on the way I don't really feel the need for larger heals since no one has ever died because my heal was too small, and I was getting 40% over heal back when I had 30% crit already. I always have a shadow priest and use consumables so mana is never a problem with rank 11.

Like galz said, if my shadow priest dies mana can get a little tight depending on the fight, but I just downrank or be more careful with my heals to compensate. It's pretty rare for one to die though unless they get marked by gorefiend or azgalor.

The best setup is still to have the most +healing possible since it's more reliable, but that's not my style. Gambling on a coin flip makes the game more exciting :P It's always fun to see the tank drop to -10k hp then getting an 8200 crit right after.

 

Blackwater

Ok afer reading most if not all of the preceeding 10 pages, and the guide, this is what I have gleaned from it all. (And I have probably missed a bunch as well, my head hurts from all the theorycraft)

(I am 4/5 T4 pally, 50/11/0 Build, thinking of switching to the 42/11/8 build)

1) +healing, then MP/5, then Crit.
2) FOL 6 and 7 for general spamming.
3) HL 7,8,11 (for light's grace and big heals)

What I should shoot for:

1700+ healing 200mp/5 18% crit.

What I am now:
1696 +healing MP/5 185 20.2% crit


Analysis / Questions.

Is healbot worth having?

I am trying to become a better healer. And the one paladin that constantly beats me in healing uses it.

If you look at this: Loading... I was at 42% over heal (Mostly from spamming FOL on the main tank) Is that a bad thing ?

This was from our Gruul/Mags fight. I am using Clique with FOL (left mouse) and HL (Right mouse) maxxed levels, with Holy shock to the middle button. Should I have a couple of spare buttons for HL 7,8? Or is there a way to use Clique to (using the scroll button) to change the lvl of spell that my HL does ?

Basically I am looking for ways to lower the overheal percentage, which in turn should raise my HPS.....correct ?

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-s...e&n=Blackwater

 

HolyHotty

The best suggestion I have for becoming a truly great healer is to not worry about healing meters or overheal, and to not try to compete with other healers in the raid. There are only 3 things that matter: Keeping your assigned target(s) alive, not running out of mana, and keeping the tank "safe" if you're on MT healing.

The first one is self explanatory. If no one died, you did your job and nothing else matters. Don't worry about the shaman healing the raid that are getting 100k more healing than you or your paladin friend that got less overheal or beat you by 20K. We aren't dps. However, that is not to say that wws is not a useful tool. It can be very helpful for optimizing your style of healing if you feel you are doing something wrong. Just don't let the numbers fool you into thinking you are doing a bad, or even good job.

Second is just as obvious. If you run out of mana either the raid is doing something wrong or you are doing something wrong. Drink mana pots, don't needlessly heal if you can't spare the mana, and kick that slacker warlock out of the shadow priest group. If it's a fight where you need to use large heals, proper prehealing can make a huge difference in mana usage and healing efficiency.

Finally, by keeping the tank safe I mean using the right heal for the encounter, not endangering the tank by canceling heals at the wrong time, and always have a heal incoming on the tank. If it's a fight where you can just spam flash of light then this isn't too important, but on fights where that's not possible, then you need to be constantly casting and canceling heals so if the tank takes damage, a big heal is only a second away.

Besides that, use Quartz and Grid, both are awesome healing addons.

 

galzohar

While I don't think about how I'll look on the meters during a fight, looking at them after the fight can give you some useful information. While having high overheal doesn't mean you played dumb, it makes you look maybe you did and force yourself to at least provide a reasonable explanation for your overhealing other than simple lack of attention. Same with total overall healing.

That's giving you very skewed results as I've noticed. The reason is your WWS mana returns from crits completely ignore the mana you had left at the end if the fight. Since your mana is not only the mana you used but also the mana you had left, your crit could allow you to spend more mana than what shown as mana returns from crit on WWS.
The mana you can spend in a given fight of a given length with given buffs (on average) is a fixed number that doesn't change based on how much you actually did use. If you get closer to your mana limits in one fight and less on another, it doesn't mean crit had any different mana value on either. When it comes to the mana return portion of the calculation, the spreadsheet afaik does the job correctly (althoguh the extra healing done is modeled extrmely wrong as it assumes 1.5X crits and no overheals and no mp5 benefit from the additional hps allowing more HL and less FoL). As you can see below, crit multiplies your mana in a very easy to calculate way:

Yeah but when that event creates more events you get a 1+P+P^2+... which adds up to 1/(1-P). Of course I immidiately said it was 1/(1-P) which can be derived by simply calculating the average mana cost reduction from critting. Both ways of course get you that mana = (mana with no crits) / (1 - 0.6*crit).

Granted more HL and less FoL will make crit slightly more valueable due to increasing returns on crit and HL starting out 6% higher, this is a very small factor that hardly has an effect on the mana value of crits. You can see its relative effect by looking at the P^2 factor and seeing that it's quite smaller than 1. P^3 and beyond will be even much smaller.

P=0.6*crit in case it wasn't clear


Remember you're calculating how much mana you had, not how much mana you used. Having 4000 mana left (or even more if you didn't pot on cooldown) is actually a lot more than that since the crit affects that mana too. Granted many will say mana at the end of the fight is useless, but my response would be why the hell are you comparing crit to mp5 since both are useless to you? If you're looking for how much spare mana you had that could go into emergency healing, looking at crit as giving you the mana shown on WWS is not the way to do it. I bet if you go to your WWS and check total mana used you will see the illumination mana returns were quite close to a fixed % value of that mana (with the 6% HL crit margin of error). Since you didn't end the fights with 0 mana, those WWS results are pointless for telling you how much mana you could've used thanks to illumination.

 

Vitalay

%Crit to mp5 Conversion

Assume that the crit% we're looking at is 1%. Also assume we're looking at HL Rank 11, with a mana cost of 840.

If you cast HL, 1% of the time you will recover 60% of 840 mana. That means that on average you will recover 5.04 mana for each cast of HL. The more HLs you cast, the more frequently you will regain 5.04 mana.

Importantly, here, if you chain cast HL, you will get 5.04 mana every 2 seconds, or 12.6 mana every 5 seconds. The WWS results are absolutely on point for telling you how much mana Illumination has given you, by giving accurate figures on how frequently you really are casting HL, since no one chains HLs.

I simply can't reconcile this basic conception with your proposal for the 1/(1-P) model, Galz. The formula I am using is correct in giving an average mana return per cast, with the only remaining variables being how frequently you're casting and for how long. The event can create more events, but we're not looking for a looping model, here, since that's possibly more deceptive. Further, given that %crit can give a certain amount of mp5, figuring out how long the gravy train lasts is irrelevant in the event that the mp5 given by %crit exceeds the raw mp5 of a particular item, or if it exceeds even the abstract mp5 given by "more FoL casts due to higher +healing." I.E., mp5 is mp5, whether it is the result of talents interacting with spells, or because it has X mp5 stamped on the item.

Mana left in bar vs. Mana used

Galz's is a great point and goes toward efficiency vs. throughput, or HPM vs. HPS. Before we can even really have this discussion, however, we need to know how much mana regen we're getting from illumination in order to properly evaluate where %crit goes on the scale in terms of its effect on HPM and HPS.

In addition, of all possible worlds, the play-style most likely to produce an "unempty" mana bar at the end of a fight would be a "chain FoL due to high +healing and saving on HL casts," as proposed by Galz.

%crit vs. mp5

I wanted to quote this because there's an interesting point here:

If Y %crit = X mp5, and an item presents a given amount of %crit with a resultant mp5 greater than the "stated" mp5 on another item, then it doesn't matter how long you can keep casting that spell; the %crit will give you more mana than the mp5 item will.

Further, even though HL can't be chain casted reliably, FoL absolutely can, and the numbers are pretty staggering from a mathcraft perspective:

1%crit * 60% * 180 = 1.08 mana per cast, on average. When chain casting FoL, therefore, 1%crit yields an average 3.6 mp5. Interestingly, this is borne out in the real world testing done by Yilona.

Conclusions

I think the crit% -> mp5 conversion concept is a helpful one in light of the Illumination talent, and helps give a new understanding in a post-nerfed-illumination world.

 

galzohar

My post didn't go off, so I'll post again:

Crit does indeed have a looping mechanism. It gives you more mana that you can use, and that mana can crit again thus giving you more mana you can use, and so on.
Or you could say "crit gives an average mana cost reduction" and reach mana cost = base cost * (1 - 0.6*crit) so you can cast is total mana / mana cost = total mana / (1 - 0.6*crit), which is exactly the same as mana * (1 + x + x^2 + X^3 + ...) where x=0.6*crit, which is exactly the looping effect.
As you can see 2 different approaches lead to the same result. You're taking only the first order ignoring the rest, which if crit was <<1 was true, however it is not. with 30% crit x=18% and x^2=3.24% and x^3~=0.58%. By ignoring x^2 you're ignoring over 3.24% of your total mana, which is quite a lot - with 40k mana used in a 10 minute fight (without shaman/shadow priest!! or else it would be more) you're ignoring ~1300 mana, over 10 minutes that would be 10.8 mp5. Of course when you look at actual gear changes your crit changes by a little and thus your error is small, however I see no reason having an intentional error when you have a simple formula of mana after crits = mana before crits / (1-0.6crit).

*note that by mana pool I mean every single point of mana you could use in the fight, inccluding shadow priest, potions and everything else you were getting except illumination.
Assuming you end the fight with 0 mana, the amount of mana you can use is directly dependant on your mana pool, and thus the amount of extra mana you could've used due to illumination is independant of anything in the fight that doesn't affect the amount of mana you have. You're HL:FoL ratio has a very small effect here (due to 6% crit difference and non-linear scaling of crit, which is small but existant effect and not the kind of effect you're talking about). Granted when you cast more HLs you spend more mana and thus gain more mana back, but if you end the fight with 0 mana it doesn't matter much if you reached 0 mana with FoL or HL.

If you did not reach 0 mana at the end of the fight, all mana calculations are completely pointless. Stack +healing to save the tank when he takes a burst instead. If you're trying to have more mana in case you would need to do additional healing that in that specific fight you didn't need to do, why are you looking at a WWS of that specific fight where that healing wasn't needed? Instead calculate how much mana you had available and calculate how much crit would increase it, using those very simple formulas.

 

Pyre

Search-fu isn't turning up anything, and there's barely two lines about this in the OP. I'm thinking of using PvP to shore up a few slots in my healadin's gear (currently at roughly early Kara gear), and I'm looking for stat valuations to figure out optimal gear choices. I'm looking at battleground puppydog healing, since there isn't enough interest in my guild to get into arenas. The only mention in the OP is that mp5 is generally discounted due to the short duration of the fights. Is it safe to just plug stamina into the stat equation at some reasonably important value, or should I just stack +healing and +spell crit on the assumption that the vast majority of players never bother to attack healers in the back?

 

Vitalay

In my experience in mass PvP (BGs, etc.), you die well before you run out of mana.

My PvP gear is just pure stamina, and where possible, high stamina / high +healing.

Ask for some mana biscuits and back off from the front lines if you actually run out of mana before dying.

I am not an expert PvPer.

 

Toppazz

You'd probably be better off posting your PvP questions in the PvP forum paladin thread (The Paladin PvP Thread).

Anyway, while healing BGs and arenas, the most common two conditions where I have people dying are either I'm locked down (CC, Rogue on me, or spell locked) or I'm out of mana. Because of the second condition, I'll be gemming my season three gear with healing/mp5 for blue/red slots and crit for yellow slots. Granted, I almost always enter the smaller BGs with a Warrior so my BG experience is probably slightly different than yours, but as long as you are following groups in AB, WSG, and EotS, general PvE stats will be more important for the group's survival.

 

Shag

Whenever the Gear Spreadsheet is updated, you might want to remove all the non-plate engineering goggles. Paladins can only learn and therefore craft and wear:

[Tankatronic Goggles]
[Justicebringer 2000 Specs]
[Furious Gizmatic Goggles]

 

Wynddom

On the topic of engineering goggles and the like -

Many of the other spec-specific raiding guides have suggestions or at least a brief cost/benefit analysis of taking various professions. I'm leveling and gearing up a healadin on the side and I've been wondering about professions. I thought perhaps the guide either left off professions because: 1) the optimal professions are obvious, or; 2) it's a matter of personal taste. Is there obvious profession advice you could toss in the direction of the guide?

*edited - spelling.

 

Yilona

A brief discussion of professions in the guide is warranted with regards to what's useful to you as a healer (if you don't already know), but largely your profession choices are going to be governed by your personal circumstances. For instance, you might want to spec Alchemy or Enchanting if you're your guild's only Alchemist/Enchanter, or you might want to spec Engineering if you will not immediately have access to ZA or SSC helms or if your guild needs repair bots (not as common anymore).

From a straight Healadin perspective (crafting specs and BoP items):

Alchemy - [Alchemist's Stone], which is one of the nicest trinkets available.

Blacksmithing - Not too much here you'd be interested in.

Enchanting - [Formula: Enchant Ring - Stats], [Formula: Enchant Ring - Healing Power]

Engineering - [Justicebringer 2000 Specs]

Jewelcrafting - [Figurine - Talasite Owl], [Blood of Amber], [Kailee's Rose]

Leathercrafting - Not too much here you'd be interested in.

Tailoring - Not too much here you'd be interested in (unless you need a Spellthread crafter).

Please let me know if I've forgotten anything.

 

galzohar

In the long run enchanting is the most powerful proffession for every class. If you're not looking too far ahead, enchanting probably *still* wins at least 2nd proffession slot. Only other proffessions that would benefit a paladin are engineering and alchemy, and both provide a not-so-big increase (if even an increase at all) once you have SSC/TK gear. If you compare their increases to enchanting they become not worth it much faster.
So considering enchanting is will be best at the grand majority of your raiding time (if not all of it) and in the long run is the only one keeping its benefit (as you can keep enchanting new, better rings but alchemist stone and eng head's benefits only drop in comparison the their alternatives the more you progress), I say every class in the game should have enchanting as one of their proffessions.

 

Shag

Generally, the benefits of enchanting are the same for an enchanter as well as a non-enchanter. The obvious benefit is you have dust and shards readily available.

Engineering has an epic BoP that is applicable to every class as does the alchemy trinket or the BoP gems that JCs make. Granted you can outgrow these items as you progress but when you are first able to craft them they have a pretty long shelf life.

JC, Alchemy and Engineering seem to have the most direct return. Although the last is somewhat of a one trick pony, the port trinkets and mote extractor ease the pain.