The above post is excellent, as soon as I figure out exactly where to put it and what to use (if not the whole thing) I will be adding it to the main post (giving you credit Galz, of course).
1. In any given fight the amount of heals you'll be casting is large enough for the variance in %crit to be rather small, and while sometimes noticeable, on average it'll deviate equally both in your favor and against you, regardless of if you cast 1 spell or 1 million.
Casting a heal every 4 seconds in a 5 minute fight will result in 75 heals. Say you have 40% crit chance, you will crit on average a total of 30 of those heals. The variance of this total will be 70*.4*.6=16.8, which means you will likely not see your # of crits go up or down by more than 16.8^0.5=4.1, and extremely extrelemly unlikely to have it go up or down by more than ~12. This is with taking rather small number of heals, in most fights you will heal a lot mroe than that wether you want to or not, both due to length and hp/s needed, making the relative difference in # of crits even smaller. When you cast enough spells, the variance of your crit % goes down by a factor of N (number of casts) and the difference you'd expect seeing thus goes down by a factor of N^0.5.
When you cast less spells total, you have a higher chance of getting 0 crits, as well as a higher chance to get everything crit (with any crit chance)! On average though you get the same benefit from crit as if you would've casted 1 million heals. Therefore casting more heals or less heals doesn't statistically favor any kind of crit ratio. The only thing that makes crit stronger when you cast a lot is the fact you're spending more mana and thus getting more mana returned, especially if it's using holy lights that spend more mana per second as well as spend more mana per healing done.
Great explanation! Thank you very much for correcting me on this!
The variance math was the essential "probability understanding" I was missing.
The gear sheet is still trucking along slowly. Trying to rework some of the math for some of the stats, like +heal from trinkets and how much mp5 some things actually give.
If there's anything you want added into it, drop me a PM and I"ll be sure to add it tonight so that I can get this thing out for the weekend.
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[2] [Ardente]: I get to put on a donkey show in dalaran every day now!
Wanted to ask you all a quick question that hooks in to the current heal/spell crit debate. What do your typical raid consumables look like? I'm assuming for progression nights where a fair amount of wipes are to be expected, 25mp5 flasks are the norm, but what I'm particularly interested in is what elixirs folks are using (if any). I've typically been running with mageblood/healing power - but I've recently become curious whether it's worth using adept's elixir instead of healing power. Put another way, is giving up the 26 healing worth the 24 spell crit you get in exchange? (Currently in T5 gear just starting into MH/BT, gemmed with nightseyes and dawnstones).
If you go with my "HPS equals extra efficiency" concept, even if you count all crit heals as non-overheals the healing power elixir is still better. However if you spend all your mana on the exact same FoL:HL regardless of what gear you got, based on the spreadsheet you get that the adept's elixir is better.
Basically healing power is more HPS while adept's is more efficiency, but with my HPS->efficiency conversion (which is this on this very page) the healing power wins in every fight that you're already casting 100% FoL 100% of the time in which case adept's will be better (since the extra HP/S don't let you cast less HLs).
If you go with my "HPS equals extra efficiency" concept, even if you count all crit heals as non-overheals the healing power elixir is still better. However if you spend all your mana on the exact same FoL:HL regardless of what gear you got, based on the spreadsheet you get that the adept's elixir is better.
Basically healing power is more HPS while adept's is more efficiency, but with my HPS->efficiency conversion (which is this on this very page) the healing power wins in every fight that you're already casting 100% FoL 100% of the time in which case adept's will be better (since the extra HP/S don't let you cast less HLs).
The only problem with the HPS-->efficiency conversion is that the higher your overheal gets, the less this conversion is true. +crit gives efficiency no matter your overheal, while +heal gives efficiency only when you have minimal or no overhealing.
Personally, I carry around both elixers, and use each depending on the fight. Healing intensive fights I pop out the healing pots - Kael (I am typically healing the warlock tank), Vashj, HWL Naj in BT. For Hyjal, or most spike damage fights I use adepts - I get higher overhealing on those fights due to less predictable damage, and the crit efficiency helps (and seeing every holy wrath hit crit on a pack of ghouls is awesome!)
Using overheal as a reasoning to have less +healing is flawed. If you're overhealing and don't want to overheal, use lower rank or swap to FoL. If you feel you do need that large heal even though it often overheals, reducing your +healing counteracts your reasoning to use that heal in the first place (reasoning being that it doesn't always overheal and when it doesn't you need it to do its max).
So either you should use more FoL and less HL due to overhealing, or at least not say you need less +healing because you're overhealing.
The only time +healing is wasted is if ALL your heals overheal, and there's absolutely nothing you can do to change it, which just doesn't make sense. More +healing means you can either heal later for more or heal at the same time for less mana (using lower rank). That's the efficiency the spreadsheet actually counts from +healing (the "heal later for more" part, at least). What I'm saying is that your +healing will also, on top of efficiency improvement, let you cast less HL and more FoL to keep the same HP/s thus increasing your efficiency. Granted this isn't 100% straight conversion but it's the closest to reality thing I can think of that would take HP/s into account, and TBH it looks pretty damn close to reality. Only thing that could use serious tweaking is possibly using HL11->HL9 downrank or HL9->FoL instead of HL11->FoL which might give somewhat different results.
Bottom line is that additional HP/s allows you to use more efficient heals thus saving mana allowing you to do a bigger portion of the healing in the raid. While not the perfect model, I've yet to see anything more realistic. Note that I'm not ruling out the spreadsheet, I actually use it, only that I count each HP/s increase as additional mana on top of the benefit the spreasheet is showing.
crit->HP/s conversion
As for crit->HP/S I'd really like to see some kind of measurement of how much crits overheal VS effective heal. You can't just take the overhealing % of your crits, though, as you have to consider your normal overhealing - if you cut down the effect of crit due to overhealing you have to cut down the effect of +healing as well. I'm still trying to figure out a way to turn a certain fight's data into a number that will tell you what portion of your theoretical crit hp/s (0.5% hps per 1% crit) you're actually getting.
I was fortunate (?) enough to obtain this libram tonight and have been looking into the best way to use it, and in which circumstances.
*edit: Long story telling - moral of which I used to know a lot about spell coefficients ect and looked into the benefits of downranking with this libram. I thought before I did the math that my gear was simply not to a point where the bonus +healing would outweigh the base efficiency of HL*
Onto the meat of the topic - after doing my own set of calculations, as nothing I ever saw when people were suggesting using this libram for HL spam had math, I came to the conclusion that it is not beneficial to wear this libram for HL spam rather than wear a libram such as the blessed book of nagrand to increase +healing for FoL 7 spam.
Now heres where this forum comes in - before I go over to the WoW boards and try in vain for a blue to notice that this epic quality item is... worthless - I want to pass my math by a few people and make sure I have it correct. I did not figure in the extra crit chance as an extra 300 mana every 100 seconds would have been a trivial difference in the numbers I calculated. So without further ado - heres the numbers I came up with for using this trinket.
First the spell co-efficients taking into account post 2.0 (I think thats when they changed it) downranking rules (Next rank trained level + 5) / Player Level
As you can see when it comes to gearing up in +healing gear, it is already obvious that FoL will benefit more than Rank 4, and Rank 5 will barely benefit more from +healing than FoL. So this immediately ruled out my thought that I simply needed better gear to cross the "Break-even point" so to speak between HL4 and FoL7.
The next logical step from there is of course to move up to Rank 5 and see where the break-even point with that would be. In order to help find the break-even point I calculated the Average healing each would do as +healing increased (to be honest that was the first step but it allowed me to deduce the next step without having to perform the simple act of looking at the percentages). For every 100 +healing FoL7 gains 42.86 additional healing while HL5 gains 43.88. The initial values (I define initial as 500 +healing as that should be easily accomplished leveling up to 70) of Healing/Mana for FoL7 and HL5 are 3.89 and 3.05 respectively.
Initially one may think that since Rank 5 gains more it would eventually catch up in this value. Unfortunately that is far from the case. Due to the fact that Rank 5 HL costs nearly 1.5 times the amount that FoL 7 costs the small difference in bonus healing does not matter. Flash of Light outpaces Rank 5 HL by far and by 1400 +healing the difference has gone from .83 to nearly 1.5 almost doubling the gap.
From there I was at a loss and I was TRYING to find a way to make the statement I read correct. So I calculated mana usage (over 30 seconds with a 2 second HL and 1.5 second FoL for simplicity) While HL4 did USE less mana than FoL 7 the benefit in terms of m/5 due to illumination was about 2/3's what you regain using FoL 7. In addition with 1400 +healing you heal nearly 10,000 less health over that 30 seconds using HL4.
So once again I moved to HL5. HL5 uses more mana total over 30 seconds of spamming than FoL7 would use, but has a higher regen rate from illumination (difference of about 10 m/5) However once again at 1400 +healing you would heal nearly 5,000 less over that 30 seconds with HL5 and use 500 more mana.
At that point I gave up trying to find a way to make this work. I have just come back from a 4-5 month hiatus from the game so I'm hoping a missed something that would make this libram better, or at least useful. Please let me know what you think, let me know if I missed something. If I havent looked at it from a certain angle, or anything. Otherwise - we'll make a post about the worthless epic item and make sure everyone knows to just take the shard :-P
When people say that absolute truth is better is because currently it is.
What you have to remember is that paladins are the best single target healers in the game, thus assume that the paladin will be healing a tank and that tank will have blessing of light.
Now at max rank BoL you gain an additional 580 +healing from HL and only 185 from FoL. Redo your calculations with that as currently downranking doesn't effect the bonus gained from BoL. Also remember that most people that use this libram are using the 4 piece tier 5 bonus which makes up for a huge difference in throughput when comparing HL 4 or 5, to FoL 7
Now, your calculations and conclusions are correct after 2.3 is released but until the BoL healing coefficient nerf, as well as the 4 piece T5 bonus, Absolute Truth is the superior libram.
And of course every time you cast holy light you can macro it to put on the libram, no? Mana cost is determined at the end of the spell cast, while the 1.5s GCD is generated at the start of the cast, when you would be in GCD anyway due to casting HL so you'll basically see no negative effect from swapping aside from possible UI lag. Then macro your FoL to do the same with your FoL libram.
Pre 2.3, the math is well known, and the healing/s and healing/mana comparisons of different ranks of HL and FoL is shown with the [Libram of Souls Redeemed] and [Libram of Absolute Truth] in the Healing Efficiency spreadsheet from the OP.
Post 2.3, however, the healing/s and healing/mana of lower ranks of HL is drastically nerfed due to the BoL change, and the healing/s and healing/mana of all ranks of HL is nerfed from the T5 change. How much it's nerfed is still up for debate, but Fiola has done some initial testing and it looks pretty grim. This means that yes, the Libram of Absolute Truth loses a lot of its effectiveness.
The new libram [Libram of Mending], as well, is no longer really that appealing.
Of all the librams, I'd say [Libram of Light] is actually the most appealing to me as a FoL spam bot. However, it's going to be difficult for many pallies, like me, to get if they don't already have it. Another nice alternative is the [Blessed Book of Nagrand], if you haven't already DE'd it. If you're raid healing (which happens on a few boss encounters and on trash), the Libram of Souls Redeemed pretty much does nothing unless there are at least 4 pallies in the raid.
It really boggles me why the only two healing librams available in SSC/TK/ZA/BT/Hyjal are both based on Holy Light, when they've made it very clear they don't want you using Holy Light unless you really need a hruge heal, which means you won't be using it *that* often (certainly not as often as FoL). It seems like another major itemization "whoops."
Fortunately for me, my job is almost entirely MT healing, so I still get a very large amount of use out of [Libram of Souls Redeemed], but I definitely still carry around [Blessed Book of Nagrand] for the few times I do have to raid heal. Then again, libram itemization has been absolutely terrible for most of TBC. The same holds true for Ret/Prot paladins, although their new librams are pretty amazing (at least, the Ret one is for alliance paladins).
Edit:
I believe I'm done updating for 2.3. If there is anything I've missed in the main post, please let me know in PMs! TY!
A request for the makers of this: would it be possible to get a list of pre-raid (preferably pre-heroic) items to shoot for as a baseline for a healer? Or at least mention what one should shoot for? I realize that the itemization is not as critical for a healer, but it does help quite a bit when evaluating potential rewards and whatnot. Thanks!
Do you mean stats that you should shoot for before you start raiding SSC or TK? Or an actual list of gear? I try to avoid lists of gear because its easier to go to WoWHead and go through their item database using the filters, but I do provide a list of trinkets (many of which are obtainable before raiding) as well as generic stats and rules to follow. If you need more specific help feel free to shoot me a tell in-game or through the PM system here.
Easiest way to search is put up the stats you're supposed to have after you get that gear level, put them in the spreadsheet, create some kind of "AEP" system and figure out by that what points to put for each stat in lootzor.com - say if you base everything on +healing give healing 100 points and if 1 mp5 is equal to 10 +heal by your numbers, you give it 1000 points and so on. Then if 1 +heal is worth 0.7 crit rating for you, you give crit rating 100/0.7~=143.
Lootzor.com will sort your items, make it show "low raid" or whatever you're running and make it show "paladin" items (so no druid only items for example), and check wowhead.com where to get the best item that drops in a place you can run.
It'll even tell you how to gem your gear.
Thanks for the reply. I actually had the chance to talk with a fellow druid reroll who was able to explain the same thing to me. Unfortunately as I only have 1 more 25-man raid night before 2.3 hits and Im usually the only Paladin the group for the guild ATM I doubt I'll have a chance to use it with BoL :-(
While I havent tested it on the PTR since Ive had bad luck getting on there - by using the same numbers for downranking (I am assuming it will be the same numbers since they are correcting rather than "recacalculating" you will get ~207 from BoL for HL and ~79 for FoL. This gives HL an inital advantage over FoL in terms of efficiency and up until about 1365 +healing HL4 will be more efficient in terms of H/M than FoL. So assuming you have the libram, and BoL is up, and you have less than 1365 +healing I guess this libram will still be useful after 2.3. My only remaining question is how many paladins will be under 1365 +healing when they get this trinket? I know Im one of them but I just started raiding again...
P.S. sorry to mod's thought this might be seperate enough for its own thread
Kaliban's Class Loot Lists has lists of pre-raid gear for every class and every build. For the most part they do a good job with it but make sure you know what kinds of stats youre looking for in case you need to resort to another method such as the ones listed above.
Such low +healing is very unreasonable for a paladin in a position to get this trinket, though not impossible - then again if you have that low +healing but your guild is letting you have this trinket, your +healing probably isn't going to stay that low for long at all.
Agreed I just got into the guild after a long break from WoW and had hardly done any instances after I hit 70 about 3 weeks after release (Horde side Pally FTW) In a single night I was able to increase my +healing 300-400 points on my own and have since gotten T5 shoulders ect (benefit of being the ONLY pally that comes consistantly I guess) so I doubt I will have many - if any - chances to use this while it makes sense :-/
Remember the libram swap macros... Have it up for your max rank HLs that aren't going to be on BoLed targets, macro the FoL libram to FoLs that aren't going to be on BoLed targets, and macro libram of souls redeemed for heals (or at least FoLs) that go to the tank
Im confused by all the math and calculations. Can someone tell what to stack, +healing, mp5 or spell crit? What I have now, is a mix really. Maybe mix is the way to go?
Pretend that 2.3 is live, whats best to stack?
My guild has killed everything except Vashj and Kael'thas. I am using Alchemists Stone, so mana aint no problem.
A mix is generally the better choice. Although, if you're not having any mana issues, then the value of mp5 is going to be drastically low. Then you just need to figure out what's worth more to you; Healing, Intellect, or Crit rating.
I've been valuing Int around a 0.3 rating, with Healing at 1, and Spell Crit Rating around 0.7. I havn't had any mana issues at all recently, as I sit around 140mp5 while casting fully raid buffed.
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[2] [Ardente]: I get to put on a donkey show in dalaran every day now!
General rule of thumb will be +healing first, and then with a pally m/5 and crit are going to be similar due to illumination. I would suggest placing +healing on a higher priority until you have enough healing power with FoL to heal most regular damage on tanks, but still keeping regen and crit in mind. Once you have ample +healing is when you should start looking to maintain, rather than increase +healing, and make upgrades in the regen/crit areas.
I had a post right after TBC release where people were discussing a possible +healing cap and the "soft cap" came into discussion (aka your desired maximum +healing before regen/survival stats are more important to overall ability). Here is a quote that contains my method for determining what my ideal level of +healing will be.
"In order to come up with this number I took my playstyle into account (I liked HT more than HoTs since rejuv's would hardly ever tick fully with druids throwin em around with 1000 +healing or so), I took the casting penalty into account (when I figured out the "cap" I used rank 5 as my standard heal, and adjusted it later for rank 4), and I found how much +healing I needed for the desired rank to heal how much I wanted (~1000hp per cast). This was all before 2.0 so it came out to around 365 for rank 5 (ZG/MC gear) and when I changed to rank 4 this number went up to 578 since I also found I didnt need the full 1000 on all my heals with our set of healers."
In otherwords - take a few minutes to find out which heal will be your primary heal (FoL 7 most likely), and how much damage you need to heal on a regular basis (normal hits on a tank, AoE damage, ect), then use the following formula to figure out that +healing amount -
Int does not give Healing, it provides 15 extra mana points and it takes 80 int for 1% spell crit.
That means you need 12 int for 1 extra FoL and after you cast it the mana is gone. An ample mana pool is important but it just needs to be big enough that your regen covers the rest.
*edit* I guess talented it does give +healing but at a rate of about 1 +healing per 3 int. Seeing as +healing is about the cheapest stat for iLevel calculations that difference is trivial.
11/02/07, 8:50 PM
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