Quozzy

My favourite way of getting Large Brilliant Shards is to solo 5 quick Strat runs. I go in through the side entrance, skip most of the trash and kill The Unforgiven and Hearthsinger Forresten. Thats two shards every 5minutes if you are fast and don't accidentally pull any trash.

If you are not an enchanter then ask one to come with you, you will probably only need to do this once every 2/3 weeks. With two people you can fit a few more bosses into it and still do the run fairly quickly.

 

Ravenor

Does anyone know of a Spreadsheet that will include the +healing effects that you get for 20 seconds ( on a 2 min cd) from a use on a trinket, ex. Tome of Diabolic remedy.

 

Darion

Been out a few days but needed comment on this. Making a case that 26 more +healing is worth more than 24 more spell crit is a stretch. I'm not sure if you are a FoL spammer or more toward HL's. 26 +healing gets lost in the mix either way. Is the healing increase there? Of course, on average your FoL is 0.6% bigger (ie: 11 HP) and you HL11 is 0.4% bigger (19 HP). Is that noticable in the scheme of things. No. As for 24 spell crit. that is 1% more crits ie: 1 out of 100 healing spells will crit. Is that noticable? Not really. But just considering the mana back and not the crit portion of the heal - you get more value out of spell crit.

I guess you perhaps can make the case that you never pot or need mana during a boss fight. In which case Mp5, Int, and Spell Crit mean nothing and you should stack +healing. But if that is the case then you are either farming everything or not carrying as big of a load as you could in the raid.

 

galzohar

I already took the extra healing from crit into account. If I didn't it would be outright useless and not even worth discussing - the mana returns alone are simply not worth enough on their own to match any other stat.

As for not going oom - consider how many times someone you were healing died while getting healed - you probably won't be able to think of many cases like this, but the cases you went oom with full pots/consumeables/etc will probably be even fewer. That means you should have no problem losing very slight efficiency from 24 crit to gain the reliable HPS of 26 healing (as 24 crit is worth ~31.5 healing in terms of efficiency). Basically you lose 6 healing in terms of efficiency (~0.4% efficiency) and gain 26 healing in terms of reliable HPS (~0.5%). Note the relative values also include the HPS->mp5 value included in my other thread, or else the efficiency loss would be quite smaller (as in, you'd need to lose more stats to actually lose 0.4% efficiency, while the +healing needed for 0.5% HPS would remain the same).

So again if efficiency is your limiting factor and you actually have so many mana buffs that flask of mighty restoration doesn't win out, adept's elixir is something to consider. Most of the time, though, it's healing power (with major mageblood unless you *really* don't need mana on this fight and use draneic wisdom), with the occasional mighty resto for the fights where you need mana and/since you don't have shadow priest+shaman. This leaves very few cases where adept's elixir would be good - as it would require you to have mana being a factor with a shadow priest (or more). Anything else (either mana not being a factor or you not getting a shadow priest (or both)) will mean you're not going to use adept's elixir.

 

Darion

Bluntly I'm having a hard time following your argument. You reference some other post - have you posted somewhere before on this? If so can you link it? I have done plenty of theory craft myself and can only imagine one way of believing 24 spell crit is less then 26 +healing. That's under some assumption that you don't go OOM. I'm not sure if you are in some hard core end game guild that has everything on farm - or you are surrounded by uber healers. But in normal guilds struggling through the content (90%+ of the players) - healers go OOM. I have 266 Mp5 on my paladin fully buffed (casting). I pot, I have Talasite Owl, I use my paladin abilities. And I still go OOM at times. Usually on content not in farm status.

Here is a spreadsheet I created that probably is worthless to you:

Paladin Healing Calculator | World of Warcraft Tools | Curse

It takes a fight length (provided by you) and then uses your Mp5, trinkets, starting mana, etc to calculate a fight mana pool. Then it uses the spells you cast (provided by you) to figure out the heal output in a fight. Then it assigns values to Int, Mp5, +Healing, and Spell Crit. Then it sorts all the items in the game by their total heal output - best to worse. It establishes relationships between the various attributes. And Spell Crit >> +Healing. Again for fights that are mana limited. I'll repeat what I said in the previous post. If you never go OOM then by all means stack +healing until your eyes bleed. By definition that is the best way to get more heal output - better than even the spell crit 1.5x heal modifier. But I believe your case to be 'special' while my case of actually going OOM to more the norm.

Darion

 

galzohar

I suggest you go read the other thread and enter those adjustments to your calcualtor - if you do that it would actually be very useful.

In short, while assuming all your crits overheal becuase you heal assuming your heal won't crit is lowballing the value of crit, assuming all crits heal to their full effect is extremely highballing it. Figure out how much of your crits overheal (which is very hard to do... I estimate 40% of the crits not overhealing which is likely highballing it anyway).
On top of it, having more HPS will allow for increased efficiency since the lower HPS spells you use, the more efficient you are, and you only use higher HPS spells when needed, and higher HPS will mean you don't need to use low HPM spells as often. This is increased both by crit and +healing, however +healing gains a much more significant benefit from it as a noticeable portion of the value of crit is from its mana returns, especially if you assume some reasonable crit overheal amount.

[Paladin] Holy raid itemization for best performance

I'm not saying your spreadsheet is worthless, it's pretty much the same as the spreadsheet I based my post on, but it does require those modifications which noticeably change the relative values of stats.

Then you need to remember that when someone is dead he doesn't care how much mana you have, so HPS has that extra benefit here which is not possible to caluculate since you need to evaluate yourself how you would weight burst VS efficiency. If you really want to evaluate items objectively you will need to give them both "efficiency points" and "burst points" and then pick the item that suits the fight/raid comp/party setup best.

Through all of my progression experience people usually die first, then healers go oom becuase there's no DPS, and not the other way around. Make sure you look objectively at your "going oom" and think if more efficiency is really what you need, or you just need to do the fight properly and just heal more so people don't die and make you get to the point of dragging the fight long enough with enough healers dead for the living healers to go oom. Maybe the other healers in your guild are simply not healing enough and making you and themselves go oom, or just run around with easily upgradeable gear, but in my experience in every progression part of the game I've seen, healers weren't going oom unless some of the people in the raid were doing some things horribly wrong.

This isn't saying you never need mana and never need to evaluate items by efficiency - if you actually read the linked post you'll see most of it is about how to max your efficiency and not HPS, as calculating how to maximize your max burst is pretty simple, while calculating max efficiency is not due to all those factors you need to take into account on top of the many factors you already are taking into account.

 

• goss

In terms of modeling, why must crit be treated as a special case when modeling hp/s? Its a new upper bound for the value of spell, why not incorporate it as a range from noncrit lowest bound to crit highest bound, and use the expected value of the spell for subsquent calculations, based on your critrate. That seems like it could be reasonable without trying to model overhealing, which is pretty much totally encounter dependent anyway.

 

galzohar

The reason I ignore crit towards "burst" is that if a person actually needs you to heal him with your maximum HPS (when it happens it would usually be for a short period of time, but usually more than once if it's not a super-low-chance event), if you can keep him up with average 2.5k HPS becuase it's somewhere between 2k and 3k due to crit, sometimes you'll only roll 2k and he'll die and sometimes you'll roll 2.5k or more and he'd live. Getting above that 2k minimum HPS is therefore quite more useful than increasing your average, as you will eventually roll all "non-crits" in a bad moment. This is pretty analogous to tanks and "no-dodge" streaks, and due to avoidance chances "no-dodge-streaks" are much rarer than "no-crit-streaks", yet they're still enough of an issue for stamina/armor to be what you want if burst damage is an issue.

Crit gives you more average healing done with same mana (when it doesn't overheal) on top of the mana returns. And the HPS it gives when it doesn't overheal do allow you to use more efficient spells.

Still you normally heal based on your non-crit heals. Let's say you think someone will need 4k healing so you throw a 4k heal on him. If you were right and you crit, you get 2k overheal. If you were wrong and you crit, you get up to 6k healing. Therefore the extra healing done by a crit is somewhere between 100% to 150%, and probably not really close to either. I take 120% as a rather safe assumption based on experience and gut feeling until I see some more realistic way to actually measure that value - I have yet to figure one out. An approximate way to measure it would be fine too as it would be better than just my rough guestimation. But I think we can all agree it should be quite more than 100% and quite under 150%. This value will affect both the extra healing done and the HPS->mana efficiency value. Even if it's very encounter dependant, which it likely is, it's still going to make a big difference on the value of crit for efficiency and therefore you can't just ignore the fact that you need this number in order to do any realistic calculations regarding the values of crit. Just like shadow priest presence and mana requirements change a lot from raid to raid and encounter to encounter - but you can't average those out... You just have to optimize differently for different encounters or at least gear in a way that will make you best where it's most important for your guild.

Crit does not, however, help you reliably save people in a worst-case-scenario, as that worst-case scenario is defined by not critting in the firstplace, just like it's defined by the tank not dodging. While DPS and mana efficiency can safely go by averages and be good models, survivability cannot go by average, as you cannot heal dead people, and that worst-case-scenario is bound to happen once in a while, and if you get unlucky just one of those times all the times you did get lucky are pointless, and therefore you need to increase your ability to handle worst-case scenario every time rather than sometimes.
The only exception to this is if the worst case scenario is already impossible to hande without luck. However since this game is pretty far from having common impossible-to-handle situations, this exception doesn't really happen, at least not enough to warrant gearing around it.

 

Iconoclast

Dont know if you guys saw this on mmo-champion but

-[Libram of Absolute Truth] now reduces the mana cost of Holy Light by 34. (Was 84 before the nerf)

Some times this game pisses me off oh so much.

 

Saved

I can confirm this. I happened to notice this on PTR last night... and was heartbroken. Was it really necessary to bring it down to thirty-four? It doesn't even seem worth using over Souls Redeemed again.

 

Darion

Ok - found the post and need to dig into it. I also downloaded the spreadsheet you modified and I'll dig through that as well. I'm not sure if you realize but I'm the original author of that spreadsheet and I would appreciate recognition and a pointer to the spreadsheet at Curse:

Paladin Healing Calculator | World of Warcraft Tools | Curse

You assumed an astronomical Mp5 in your spreadsheet - 420 base casting Mp5. I'm assuming you increased that to model a shadow priest? We tend to raid with one shadow priest and he almost always goes to the mages / tree groups. But I'm starting to understand some of your comments. With a Mp5 in the 500 range after all buffs you have yourself in a almost infinite mana position and you are doing what any sane person would - bump your +healing. I might quible about your addition of 300 or so Mp5 through out a 600 sec fight coming from a shadow priest. I think that is over modeling the effect - but perhaps you have data that show that. I'll be glad to update my next sheet with an option to model a shadow priest.

Also, I agree in principal that some amount of crit's extra healing is wasted. I'll make my next spreadsheet version include a modifier where you can select how much actually is useful. That will downshift spell crit's value - although not as much as you may think.

Ok - let me dig into your other thread. Unfortunately I'm not sure how useful it will be to the general population. I'm thinking you may be in a special position where mana has little meaning to you and that changes your whole thought process. But I need time to digest. Will post later.

 

galzohar

The modified version of your spreadsheet was just an example of what I mean. It just happened to be with the "shadowpriest+shaman" mp5 mode as that's the last thing I looked at. The most important thing from that post is what I listed there as changes that need to be incorporated into the spreadsheet rather than calculated the way I was doing it (mostly the HPS->mp5 value, as the crit value and base healing/downranking values are easy to adjust)

Note that your original spreadsheet (unless you updated it) had wrong base heal values and possibly wrong downranking values (especially after the blessing of light change), as the wowhead values are taken from a character that just trained the spells rather than a lvl70 character, while spells in WoW generally scale as you level up until a new rank is available. wowwiki actually has the lvl70 values as far as I can tell.

Remember that even without a shadow priest, with mp5 being by far the best for efficiency, it still provides no burst, so you have to show the burst gains/losses alongside with the efficiency gains/losses, as if you get something like 20 healing being worth 4 mp5 for efficiency after taking into account HPS->mp5, 20 healing is still going to be better overall as on top of the 4 mp5 worth of efficiency it also provides extra burst ability.

My post was edited to credit you for the original spreadsheet as well as linking to it (if you looked, I actually said I don't know who the original author is and asked if anyone knew). I hope you can actually put those additions into your spreadsheet to make it give more realistic/adjustable results. Totems, shadow priest etc as an option as well as seeing the burst ability difference alongside the efficiency difference (and adding haste as both burst and efficiency stat since more HPS gives more efficiency, especially after 2.4 with haste also affecting FoL - it's never going to be close to other stats for efficiency but it does provide some).

 

Darion

The base heal values and BoL change were incorporated a number of versions ago. I'm guessing 3.5 (I'm on 3.8 released with 3.9 soon to come). Totems were added a while back too (Mana spring) although I don't keep up with shamans well so perhaps there is something I'm missing. 3.9 will have in it:

- a Mp5 adder for Shadow priest
- a spell crit modifier to down shift the 1.5x multiple to accomodate overhealing

I'm not sure I'll modify for you efficiency calculations. I have to understand them yet. And after understanding I'll have to agree. Your writing style makes it hard slogging to really understand - not a shot at you - I have a poor writing style as well. I'll keep digging - thanks for your work. BTW, looking at your 3.4 it appears you are more of a FoL spammer than HL? I'm curious of the role you play in the raid. You talk about burst damage but as many FoL's I'm assuming you are more of a smoother - and somebody else is in the HL burst damage role? Just curious.

 

galzohar

Since you can't cast HL as the bulk of your healing due to mana, nor will you have enough HPS with pure FoL spam, I use both. FoL when everything is nice and cool while keeping LG up with a low rank HL, and HLing when things go bad (thus "burst"). The idea is that the bigger your FoLs are, the less often you'll run into a "need HL!" situation, and more mana you can save. Even if you downrank HL isntead of FoL for some reason, the same rule applies, as you will be able to use more efficient ranks rather than less efficient ranks. Haste also affects this (although nearly not as much per itemization point as it only increases HPS and doesn't increase efficiency).

Situations where I would generally HL over FoL:

-Tank/raid member dropped under a certain threshold (actual threshold depends on the fight etc).

-I know some healers that normally help heal the tank currenty aren't, for whatever reason.
Examples: Multiple healer graves on morogrim, silence resist on azgalor, being in a tremor totem group on archimonde...

-I know large damage is coming.
Examples: Abomination stunned an AOE tank, someone just took a doomfire, fel rage, DPSer pulled aggro...

I actually have a macro that heals target if it's friendly but also heals target of target if current target is unfriendly. The macro is basically a copied "taunt" macro from the protection paladin thread except you swap "righteous defense" with the heal you want to use.

 

Darion

Hmmm...I use HL for the bulk of my healing. HL11 and HL7. I also use FoL7 but it gets maybe 15% of my mana - 30-40% of my casts. I tend to be in 'worst case healing' mode all the time. I get the least equiped tanks and most mana intensive healing spots. It tends to shape how I heal and what equipment I use. We have FoL spammers in the guild. You can see them in action. Tank takes big blow for 8-10k. HoT's pick a little. Lifebloom and FoL's for a bit more. Then a big heal hits and they are back up to full - either from me or another priest. I think you have to have a mix of both types. Someone who 'smooths' and someone who throws much bigger heals to handle burst. I tend to do a lot an 'anticipating' - starting and stopping casts, etc. It depends on the fight. Weird thing is that my overheal tends to track or beat the FoL spammer. Around 35% if I don't really watch it.

Oh and one more thing. I think part of people's usage of spells depends on both the guild and the farm status. I've noticed the easier battles in SSC where they used to take heavy healing - you can get away with more FoL spamming. Equipment is better, etc.

 

galzohar

HL7 is not far more HPS than FoL. Generally when only/mostly the tank is taking damage (which is a significant amount of the time if you look at damage taken charts after the fight) you have quite a lot of extra healing, most healers are generally throwing their most efficient heal and the combined HPS is more than enough to keep him up. I just don't see situations where you'll need the HPS of HL7, but won't need the HPS of HL9-11 and at the same time won't be able to get away with FoLs. Even on archimonde's 8k hits 3 FoLs, a couple HoT ticks and some odd low rank greater heal / lesser healing wave top the tank off quite well - even if he takes 2 in a row. Only times you'll need more is if some other healers are busy (keep track of doomfire) or feared and/or the tank was hit by multiple doomfires and/or your raid took a soul charge. Other fights are similar in principle and even easier (vashj only hits for 3-4k normally... Only real damage comes from her specials which don't happen often enough to warrant consistent HL usage, even morogrim doesn't grave+burst often enough to warrant it, and kaelthas doesn't really do a lot of damage (although on phase 2 you may need a holy light here and there to catch up)). Consistently HLing when it's simply not even near needed and then not having the mana to burst when it is needed just doesn't make any sense. FoL is so much more efficient even with absolute truth + badge libram rotation I really don't see a reason to put up a bit more HPS for a lot more mana when it's simply not needed.

Everything said, you still gain efficiency by being able to HL7 more and HL11 less if you choose to play like that... But the healing on the tank, most of the time, is much bigger than the damage the tank takes (or else the bursts/fears/silences/movement-requiring-AOEs would be impossible to handle). Not really the best example, but even looking at healing meters on trash I notice that HL and FoL don't really make a difference in my standing, but when a bad pull happens and I HL the right people until things stabilize I jump way up the top. I even kept the tank up on archimonde for much longer than you'd normally expect with only 2-3 other healers up spamming holy light - again not a good example but it shows you not wasting mana when it's not needed can help later when it is actually needed.

15% of mana into FoL means you spend 25-37% of the time actually casting FoL. All or at least most fights don't have high DPS dealt on your raid for anywhere near even 50% of the time, needing high HPS for ~70% of the fight just doesn't make sense. Encounters simply don't deal that much damage to your raid, or they would be unhealable (and they aren't unhealable - you're either wasting a lot of mana on using downranked HL when FoL is enough or overhealing a lot with HL11 or both). Of course this is not easy to actually see until the one time you die or have to run really far from a doomfire and somehow everything keeps going as normal without you doing any healing... Then again you can look at WWS or something and check actual DPS taken by the raid during the fight.

 

MasterLoco

I was checking out the new Sunwell healing gear a while ago. Working out a socketting pattern for all the gear I've got on my wish list atm so I don't have the resocket 20 times & still keep the requirements for my meta socket.

Anyways. Untill now I've pretty much always stacked straight up 22healing gems (apparent from 2 10spellcrit & 2 11heal/2mp5 gems for the meta socket. With the implementation of the new 10 spellhaste games & haste afflicting GCD as off 2.4 I was wondering if it wasn't better to socket with 10 spellhaste gems rather then 22 healing gems. I did some pretty simplistic calculations myself earlier today & according to those 10 spellhaste should increase my HPS quite a bit more then 22healing (calculations been made from +2400healing PoV). Just wondering if anyone has made any calculations or has a spreadsheet to back this up (I have a feeling I forgot to take something into account). Maby it's been posted before in this or another topic but I couldn't really find anything straight away... and I pretty much stopped reading the original post after it pretty much stated 10int gems to be the best for paladins in game.

 

Darion

I use FoL7, HL7, and HL11 because they have a nice division of healing done. My FoL7 averages 1730, HL7 averages 3040, and HL11 4960. I select the one that is proper for the situation. No thought at all to HPS, simply what is the damage on the target, how much do I expect it to change prior to my spell hitting, then select the proper spell. HPS wise I'm getting about 1150 out of my FoL7, 1520 out of HL7, and 2480 out of my HL11. Again a reasonable distribution. Could I use FoL more - absolutely. In Karazhan it becomes my dominate spell. As my guild continues to gear up I suspect SSC/TK will get many more FoL's as we transition into Hyjal and BT. In the end my advice is to go with what works for you. I'm a good healer, I get the tough assignments and succeed, and I heal more than any other healer (including the shamans with that incredible chain heal spell). Am I broke? Nope. Can I do things better - yep. I'm here and learning.

 

DarKNecross

Most of the gear is a trade-off of sCrit for sHaste. The main difference is, sCrit is an unreliable HPS increase that gives mana back, whereas sHaste is a reliable HPS increase that is more taxing on mana.
How many gem-slots does the full Sunwell gearset have? I want to assume 15, but I can't be sure. Assuming 15 slots, 2 of them would be Shadowsongs for the Meta, so if you wanted to go the path of ignoring socket bonuses, that leaves you with either 286 Healing or 130 sHaste (8.25%). The sHaste drops FoL down by .12sec. Let's assume your Flash of Lights are going to do 2100 healing noncrit. The sHaste is roughly a 122 HPS increase (without factoring crits). 286 healing is going to be 138 extra healing to FoL, so a 92 HPS increase.
For Max-Rank Holy Light, sHaste drops the cast time to 1.84sec. If we assume the average Holy Light to do 4900 without the gems, the sHaste increases your HPS by 213. The Healing gems add 229 Healing to Holy Light, or an extra 115 HPS.
So yes, if you were to choose one to increase your HPS, sHaste reigns supreme. However, I don't really think it's fair to compare sHaste and Healing, since sHaste is dependent on the amount of Healing you have.

http://crimson-guild.com

 

MasterLoco

Well it is fair to compare the 2. Since they are pretty much what you'll be choosing between when socketting up your gear. You just have to compare them @ the appropriate gear (+healing) lvl's. Anyways thenx for your post they pretty much backed up my own calculations.

 

Deris

K I apologize for this, but it might possibly be my fault, as I was on PTR spamming R3 Holy Light (which cost 26 mana with this libram - R1 and R2 cost 0) for most of the night, multiple Twins/etc. attempts. I didn't even touch FOL the entire night - just R3 HL, R7 HL,R11 HL. Had some decent numbers, and man it would have been the best pvp libram by a mile with 2 Piece T6.

 

Vanadis

Holy Light rank 1 costs 35 mana. With a value of 34 you can't cast rank 1 or 2 for free anymore.

 

Saved

It would have been the best libram for anything had it stayed at -84 mana. I'm not really sure why they waited three weeks to make this change, especially after quite a few of us had already begun creating gearsets to take advantage of it. PTR isn't over, so hopefully they will buff this back up to a respectable number again.

 

Jelloshots

This makes some sense as being a significant reason for the change. I still don't understand how they seem to have forgotten how they previously itemized mana saving relics, e.g. [Idol of Longevity].

 

Endoscient

With like 2400 healing Rank 2 Holy Light is 300-400 healing. Doing 200hps for 0 mana is very rarely useful. If that is enough healing to keep anything alive so would waiting for regen to be able to cast FoL.