There seems to have been a lot of pallies here decrying the abundance of MP5 on Ulduar level gear. This seems to be a sentiment paralleled by mages having a lot of Spirit on their gear. Both stats are relatively undesirable.
The reason I draw the parallel is that the mage issue has recently been getting a considerable amount of attention from blue posters. Has anyone spotted blue posts in a similar vein RE: MP5 on paladin gear? Or has the uproar gone largely unnoticed by Blizzard? Maybe we should start asking a few questions of Blizzard to see what they have in mind for holy paladins, see what kind of response we get.
It's unreasonable to assume Paladin itemization is unintentional. They haven't commented on it because people don't want to hear the answer.
On an interesting note, from Ferraro, who may or may not be in contact with Blizzard (just judging off her comments), had this to say about future Holy paladin itemization.
Change #2
Change paladin heals to scale with AP and eliminate SP, converting holy to use ret gear.
Reason: Spell power plate is used by one spec of one class. It must be on loot tables, but odds are in favor of it being wasted, or at best becoming constant off-set.
"Sweeping" changes like this have been on the table for many months now. The soonest a drastic overhaul of this magnitude would happen is the next expansion. Not commenting on it's likelyhood, but just be ready for it.
The obvious solution for Ulduar is to take what elemental shaman gear we can, and for the other slots debate them individually. The bigger unknown question of Ulduar loot is our set bonus, and if it will be better than 4T7.
-Glyph Of Lay on Hands - gives you back 3900. Does it still work on the PTR where casting it on yourself grants more mana back? I haven't checked.
etc
etc
etc
I'm trying really hard not to be sarcastic here, but seriously ... did you honestly think that these were news to people here? The condescending tone doesn't really help whatever case you're trying to make when it appears that you haven't even made an effort to read through the thread. Believe it or not, we're not blithering idiots who all forgot that mana potions and shamans existed.
Int versus MP5 is not a debate. I don't think there has ever been a doubt regarding which is superior.
Utilisation of Paladin mana regen mechanics, more often than not, scales very well with Int, which is why it's stacked. Believe it or not you aren't the first person to come here and suddenly 'reveal' that haste is Godly and anyone who stacks Int is an idiot. Read back through the thread and try to find some new arguments; simply stating that haste is great because it's more HPS and "I never go oom!" is not the news flash that you seem to expect it to be.
Saying that .2 seconds off a HL could be the difference between a wipe and a kill is not a valid argument. So could a HL hitting for 12k instead of 6k because you don't have to chain DP to maintain your spam. So could the fact that you're melee'ing the boss instead of prepping HLs and cancelcasting on the tank. I will grant that I think haste is an absolutely fantastic output stat simply for its ability to de-stagger healing, but it's not the 'stack this and tank will never die!' miracle cure that you make it out to be.
The bottom line is that right now, content is ridiculously easy, and anything works. This has been said time and time again but it's ultimately where the differences in opinion stem from. People see that their way works and assume that it's superior. In the current climate, where a 4 minute fight is a marathon, tanks are taking 5-7k hits at the most, and the raid has done encounters so much that they could dodge the fire in their sleep, of course haste will emerge as a powerful and attractive way to increase overall HPS. That doesn't mean that it'll be the same in Ulduar though. 7-8 minute fights will be common early on, with bosses hitting significantly harder, and raid damage being trivialised by muscle memory much less.
To try and get some perspective on it, what sort of heroic / crafted gear would you wear to do Naxx 10 for the first time, assuming a similarly geared raid? You wouldn't have tanks in full T7 and DPS laughing all the way through 6-7k Patchwerk parses. If you stacked haste in that situation, back when Patchwerk lasted 4-5 minutes, then you'd be in trouble. Sure, it'd probably still be doable, but it'd be a hard slog, much harder than necessary.
My reasoning for choosing Int on my gear is simple -- it's the best stat to stack for unknown / progression content. It gives me a much larger mana pool to work with, and more margin for error (and error will always occur when learning encounters). It's the same reason tanks should be stacking EH while learning fights. Once you're comfortable with the mechanics of the encounter and the specific sort of healing that it will require, then you can begin fine-tuning your gear. In many cases this will mean sticking with Int, in others it will mean switching to a much heavier, output-focused set, or even intentionally dropping haste for _more_ regen (even if it is MP5). The key is knowing when to do this. You coming here and saying that you don't understand why Paladins need 25k mana pools suggests that perhaps you still have some learning to do about your own class.
Last edited by Mex : 03/17/09 at 9:00 PM.
A latent appliance fetishist is someone who refuses to admit to his or herself that sexual gratification can only be achieved through the use of machines.
- L. Ron Hoover
It’s not really mp5 hate, I think a lot of people just share my sentiments and enjoy having high levels of both crit and haste. I’m kind of surprised all of the gear in Ulduar is all still packing only 3 green stats, I suppose the haste/crit/mp5/SP gear is being saved for T9 content.
Personally I feel that backtracking on haste even a little bit would make my heals feel unbearably slow, so that leaves me with trading crit for mp5. Though they’re both very similar in mana returned (even over a spam heavy fight) I feel that with a high crit rate and low mp5 my mana expenditure is actually more predictable than the alternative low crit high mp5. The self-scaling that crit has (reducing the probability of large strings of non-crits occurring) holds a somewhat unquantifiable value in preventing panic or over-compensation for a sudden unexpected drop in mana, like getting ten non-crit HLs in a row. That little bit of security crit provides over mp5 is what tips the scales in my book, and is why I’m not looking forward to making the tradeoff. My opinion could be horribly wrong right here though.
From 25 man hard mode Deconstructor, illustrates my previous point of not expecting normal mode Ulduar loot to be ideally itemized. This is the first hard mode Holy Pally loot discovered yet, and it is itemized quite well.
Having more crit does not reduce randomness. The opposite is true - statistically you will have LESS variance if you swap out crit for mp5. Not only mp5 is always there, but also the closer your crit is to 50%, the higher the standard deviation gets (how far the # of crits you actually get is likely to be from the average expected value, be it higher or lower). Of course this doesn't mean anything about which stat is better, it just makes your comment about reliability completely reversed. In addition, I wouldn't call an argument that starts with "I feel..." a valid one.
MP5 is NOT a "shit stat". It's not a whole lot worse than crit when you consider the itemization cost. Yeah INT is much better than mp5/crit, but it doesn't mean those stats are useless. What people do seem to always prefer is SP/crit/haste items, though I don't really see a direct reason to always prefer those items. While they do provide the best balance of burst and efficiency, since 1% burst via haste is easier to get than 1% efficiency via mp5 and haste is the only real burst stat (sp is also giving burst, to a somewhat lesser degree, but items of same ilvl seem to have same sp anyway). However if you're running into a long fight that requires a lot of healing, there is no real reason to prefer sp/haste/crit itemization over sp/mp5/crit itemization, as the latter provides significantly more efficiency at the cost of burst (and I just said it's for a fight where efficiency is most important). Keep in mind that if you have to resort to meleeing the boss or casting FoL on a phase where the DPS done to the raid is not a joke, then you ARE having efficiency issues. You only have burst issues if you have players dying because your heal was too small/slow, and I'm not talking small/slow because you meleed the boss or had to cast a FoL - I'm talking small/slow while spamming HL as fast as you can. In addition to all that, the difference between an item with crit to an item with mp5 is small enough that the distribution of the other stats (like how much of the budget is spent on int and how much is spent on SP vs haste vs mp5/crit) can easily make the mp5 item better in some cases. [b]At the end, if you need mana, mp5 gives a lot lot lot more mana than haste. The reason gear opens this kind of gap is the ridicules amounts of mana we gain with gear makes multiplying it with crit better than adding to it with mp5.
Overall, yeah, I'd love it if all my gear was as much int as the itemization rules allow, with rest spent in as much sp as possible and the rest in crit and leftovers in haste, and then have a second set with having the rest spent in mp5 rather than haste for long healing intensive fights (which may or may not be the new trend). But like blizzard keeps saying, the whole point is having to make decisions about your gear, with most pieces of gear not being itemized exactly the way everyone would want them to. Then again, even if you'd let people itemize their own gear however they want I bet most people would still wear suboptimal gear.
When comparing to mages and spirit, my arcane mage gains the same DPS from 9 spirit (9/16 gem) as he would from 1 spell power (1/19 gem) making spell power more than 10 times more effective use of itemization than spirit (fire mages get 0 benefit from spirit making it even worse), and spell power is not an overpowered stat (it's not a LOT better than haste for arcane and crit/haste for fire, and worse than hit if you actually don't have enough already) like int is for paladins, yet you only need 6 mp5 (1 gem) to match 5 int (5/16 gem) making int only 3.2 times better use of itemization points compared to mp5 - and again this is because int is overpowered and not because mp5 sucks. With the same math crit is only ~1.5 times better than mp5 per itemization point and that's with top-end gear, it's much closer with lower gear.
Having more crit does not reduce randomness. The opposite is true - statistically you will have LESS variance if you swap out crit for mp5. Not only mp5 is always there, but also the closer your crit is to 50%, the higher the standard deviation gets (how far the # of crits you actually get is likely to be from the average expected value, be it higher or lower). Of course this doesn't mean anything about which stat is better, it just makes your comment about reliability completely reversed. In addition, I wouldn't call an argument that starts with "I feel..." a valid one.
If you check his (Rustyventure) armory he has 29% crit rate that makes his HL crit 40% after talents, and >50% with full raid buffs and consumables even without Focus Magic. >70% with IoL proc after patch. In his case having more crit indeed reduces variance, and so does for every Naxx25 geared Paladin with a Ret subspec (which is about everyone who takes raiding half seriously). A tier later you will definitely have more consistent and cheaper heals by stacking even more crit at which point you might consider re-gemming and gearing for crit if the devs somehow let this slide.
In his case having more crit indeed reduces variance, and so does for every Naxx25 geared Paladin with a Ret subspec (which is about everyone who takes raiding half seriously).
I wouldn't say that is true, there are quite a few fights in Ulduar that Divine Sacrifice is worth picking up over the extra crit.
It certainly wasn’t much of an argument, and I was second guessing myself throughout my previous post. I suppose I was mostly trying to justify why I, and maybe some other paladins, aren’t big fans of mp5. Claiming that stacking an rng stat makes mana expenditure more reliable does seem incredibly backwards at first, but I suppose my reasoning behind it is that mp5 is static, whether I have 25 from gear or 400 I know where my mana will be at down the road, leaving crit as the wild card in all cases.
I’m currently in a situation where my HL crit is moving away from 50%, focus magic puts me at about 56-57% raid buffed. Does this mean my standard deviation is getting smaller? That might explain my feelings of more predictable mana consumption as compared to my gear setup a few upgrades ago.
I’m sorry I keep using the words “feelings” but anecdotal evidence is about all I have concerning the “steadiness” of mana usage (I’ll try to avoid using it in the future). I don’t think I’ve ever seen any math or discussion behind the subject, and though I’m decent at math I don’t really have the capacity to deal with the probabilities involved. I think I see the light though, if it’s as easy as the two extremes (0% crit and 100% crit) being the steadiest and 50% crit being the most volatile.
According to Rawr some of the best pieces in the game have mp5( Malygos shoulders and chest come to mind).
Depending on your spell rotation and buffs, MP5 may be a slightly larger benefit than crit/haste. The reason Maly chest is BiS is because of its iLvl. A 226 chest compared to a 213 chest is an obvious upgrade, even if it has MP5. The same things can be said of Ulduar gear, simply because of their iLvl. In my experience, Rawr tends to portray MP5 as a better stat than anything else, which would explain why is gives Ulduar gear a better place in upgrades.
Bottom line is that there's a reason t why we are getting so much mp5 on our gear. Why did we get a lot of haste on some BT pieces + all sunwell pieces? Because it was basically needed for the instance, perhaps Mp5 is of the same importance regarding Ulduar due to the boss encounter designs.
We'll have to wait and see before we can actually complain.
I’m currently in a situation where my HL crit is moving away from 50%, focus magic puts me at about 56-57% raid buffed. Does this mean my standard deviation is getting smaller? That might explain my feelings of more predictable mana consumption as compared to my gear setup a few upgrades ago.
Yes/no (binomial) variables have a variance maximum at 50% chance.
[b] MP5 is NOT a "shit stat". It's not a whole lot worse than crit when you consider the itemization cost. Yeah INT is much better than mp5/crit, but it doesn't mean those stats are useless. What people do seem to always prefer is SP/crit/haste items, though I don't really see a direct reason to always prefer those items. While they do provide the best balance of burst and efficiency, since 1% burst via haste is easier to get than 1% efficiency via mp5 and haste is the only real burst stat (sp is also giving burst, to a somewhat lesser degree, but items of same ilvl seem to have same sp anyway). However if you're running into a long fight that requires a lot of healing, there is no real reason to prefer sp/haste/crit itemization over sp/mp5/crit itemization, as the latter provides significantly more efficiency at the cost of burst (and I just said it's for a fight where efficiency is most important). Keep in mind that if you have to resort to meleeing the boss or casting FoL on a phase where the DPS done to the raid is not a joke, then you ARE having efficiency issues. You only have burst issues if you have players dying because your heal was too small/slow, and I'm not talking small/slow because you meleed the boss or had to cast a FoL - I'm talking small/slow while spamming HL as fast as you can. In addition to all that, the difference between an item with crit to an item with mp5 is small enough that the distribution of the other stats (like how much of the budget is spent on int and how much is spent on SP vs haste vs mp5/crit) can easily make the mp5 item better in some cases. [b]At the end, if you need mana, mp5 gives a lot lot lot more mana than haste. The reason gear opens this kind of gap is the ridicules amounts of mana we gain with gear makes multiplying it with crit better than adding to it with mp5.
Overall, yeah, I'd love it if all my gear was as much int as the itemization rules allow, with rest spent in as much sp as possible and the rest in crit and leftovers in haste, and then have a second set with having the rest spent in mp5 rather than haste for long healing intensive fights (which may or may not be the new trend). But like blizzard keeps saying, the whole point is having to make decisions about your gear, with most pieces of gear not being itemized exactly the way everyone would want them to. Then again, even if you'd let people itemize their own gear however they want I bet most people would still wear suboptimal gear.
When comparing to mages and spirit, my arcane mage gains the same DPS from 9 spirit (9/16 gem) as he would from 1 spell power (1/19 gem) making spell power more than 10 times more effective use of itemization than spirit (fire mages get 0 benefit from spirit making it even worse), and spell power is not an overpowered stat (it's not a LOT better than haste for arcane and crit/haste for fire, and worse than hit if you actually don't have enough already) like int is for paladins, yet you only need 6 mp5 (1 gem) to match 5 int (5/16 gem) making int only 3.2 times better use of itemization points compared to mp5 - and again this is because int is overpowered and not because mp5 sucks. With the same math crit is only ~1.5 times better than mp5 per itemization point and that's with top-end gear, it's much closer with lower gear.
I 've been keeping an eye on what has been going on with blue posts and GC already said they plan you works Holy's regen with Illumination. How they will do they or what form that will take I don't know. The problem with MP5 is you have to stack ALOT of it to get any real benefit out of it. In the scheme of things it's not really worth it. The problem for Blizzard at the moment is they are faced with a lot of Holy Paladins staying in their Naxx gear while waiting for T8 to drop, because Ulduar gear will not be veiwed as much of an upgrade and will be seen as a downgrade, or sidegrade. Faced with mana regen issues we are going to have to go with the stats that will give us the most mana. Right now it's Int.
Personally, I don't see the Ulduar MP5 gear as being MP5 versus Int. Any piece of gear we choose has intellect on it, and we will gain the same int from gem slots and enchants on either piece in a given item slot. The real choice here is that we are giving up either Crit or Haste for MP5. Said differently, this choice has not changed the amount of intellect you can obtain from gear. Given that, I am not sure Blizzard is after anything here except to maybe give us more choice between crit, haste and MP5.
While increasing crit above 50% does reduce the variance, I'm not sure what would happen to the reliability if you increase crit above 50% by losing on mp5. Assuming you're making a tradeoff that keeps your average mana the same (in order to test the effects on randomness alone and not overall mana efficiency), when you drop mp5 for crit with crit>50% you make the worst-case-scenario as well as the best-case-scenario worse, but like I just assumed you're keeping the average the same. It takes somewhat deeper statistic analysis than this to actually tell whether or not this increases or reduces variance.
An easier way to look at it, I think, is that the more mp5 you have the bigger the variance (since it scales all values up) while the more crit you have (above 50%) the lower the variance, therefore swapping mp5 for crit while keeping the average equal will reduce variance (and therefore also relative variance since average value is the same).
In a more practical sense, though, your ability to affect the variance by changing stats is extremely minimal and not worth taking to consideration, not to mention over a real fight the relative variance is already pretty damn small.
The problem with MP5 is you have to stack ALOT of it to get any real benefit out of it. In the scheme of things it's not really worth it.
Can't this be said of any stat?
Are you saying mp5 scales differently? It seems like your saying there is some amount of mp5 where it becomes much better. I always thought it scaled linearly.
Paladin T8 Holy 2P Bonus -- Your Holy Shock critical heals now also place a periodic healing effect on the target, healing for 15% of the Holy Shock's heal amount over 9 sec.
Paladin T8 Holy 4P Bonus -- Increases the damage absorbed by your Sacred Shield by 10%.
Paladin T8 Holy 2P Bonus -- Your Holy Shock critical heals now also place a periodic healing effect on the target, healing for 15% of the Holy Shock's heal amount over 9 sec.
Paladin T8 Holy 4P Bonus -- Increases the damage absorbed by your Sacred Shield by 10%.
I wonder if HoT from 2p is rolling
I really doubt it will be. It could be easily 'wound up' to do insane amounts of healing before the fight... If you mean if the HoT will overwrite the old one, it's still only just 250 healing (assuming an average 5k HS) if you use it on every CD. Not game breaking, not even sure it would matter much, considering the nerf to HS makes it less desirable.
As for the four piece bonus... I'm just not seeing any conceivable scenario in which I would drop my 4 piece T7 bonus for that...
Edit: Also: # Paladin T8 Holy Relic -- Increases spell power of Holy Light by 160. This one is actually half decent, though it seems a bit situational to me. 160 spell power means 300 more healing on your HL.
Last edited by gcbirzan : 03/18/09 at 11:07 PM.
Reason: Math is tough
Disappointing, to say the least. I'm sporting pretty solid gear, 4/5 valor, mix of 25/10 man for the rest, putting me a little under 2k spell power and just over 22,000 mana, unbuffed.
Holy Shock is hitting for about 4475 without any raid buffs. 4475 x .15 = 671. Over nine seconds is probably 1 tick every 3 seconds, so 671/3 = ~224 per tick. Too small to make a difference and too small to rely on, imo.
With Sacred Shield sporting a 75% scale of spell power, leaving me with an absorption of roughly 2,000. 2000 x 1.1 = 2200 absorption.
With a maximum of 5 full absorptions leaving you with a total shield of of 11,000 for 474 mana. Mana wise vs. holy light it's about twice as efficient, assuming your holy light does not overheal and does not crit.
But since we get no regen from sacred shield it loses it's efficiency rating in my book. Furthermore, not scaling with mp5 so a lot of the gear we're seeing won't specifically benefit it anymore then it would our other spells. Our current gear and the choices we have upcoming still lead towards very much stacking INT and forcing out the most amount of heals in the shortest period of time.
Personally, i'd rather have the dependability and mana conservation powers of cheaper holy light vs a shield. Sacred shield is just another trick. It'll be worth it to keep it up, but 5% cheaper holy light and -mana cost libram will outshine the set bonus by far.
But for heroics I'd like the set. Instants into hots with strong shields = sleepy time for free badges.
Disappointing, to say the least. I'm sporting pretty solid gear, 4/5 valor, mix of 25/10 man for the rest, putting me a little under 2k spell power and just over 22,000 mana, unbuffed.
Holy Shock is hitting for about 4475 without any raid buffs. 4475 x .15 = 671. Over nine seconds is probably 1 tick every 3 seconds, so 671/3 = ~224 per tick. Too small to make a difference and too small to rely on, imo.
With Sacred Shield sporting a 75% scale of spell power, leaving me with an absorption of roughly 2,000. 2000 x 1.1 = 2200 absorption.
With a maximum of 5 full absorptions leaving you with a total shield of of 11,000 for 474 mana. Mana wise vs. holy light it's about twice as efficient, assuming your holy light does not overheal and does not crit.
But since we get no regen from sacred shield it loses it's efficiency rating in my book. Furthermore, not scaling with mp5 so a lot of the gear we're seeing won't specifically benefit it anymore then it would our other spells. Our current gear and the choices we have upcoming still lead towards very much stacking INT and forcing out the most amount of heals in the shortest period of time.
Personally, i'd rather have the dependability and mana conservation powers of cheaper holy light vs a shield. Sacred shield is just another trick. It'll be worth it to keep it up, but 5% cheaper holy light and -mana cost libram will outshine the set bonus by far.
But for heroics I'd like the set. Instants into hots with strong shields = sleepy time for free badges.
It's holy shock crits, not hits. A 7.2k holy shock crit will heal for 1080 over 9 seconds, or 360 a tick. Still meh though, IMO.
The 4pc is nothing amazing, and nothing (will reserve full judgement until I actually see the stats of T8) really that is going to keep me from wearing my 4 pieces of T7. I know that Ulduar is seeming like some fights where the tank can get hit really hard, but I guess we'll have to play it by ear. I still don't see it being better than 5% off HL.
Yeah, I don't want a single piece of that. Unless they drastically change how Divine Plea works or 4pc T7, I'll maybe take the helm and shoulders. If that.
Last edited by MrGuru : 03/18/09 at 11:59 PM.
Reason: Saw T8 stats
What is really sad is that after 3.1 goes live, when every one is still using 4Peice T7. Then those bonuses will be nerfed through the floor as evidenced by the nerf to T5 bonuses when people where still using T5 over T6 due to T5 bonus being so good.
03/17/09, 7:18 PM
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