Anyone have a sense on crit vs. spirit for the gearing choices? Obviously spirit increases mana regeneration for priests, but honestly, not massively while inside the 5 second rule. Crit on the other hand yields surge-of-light smites, which are free of mana cost. Now these also won't take your outside the 5 second rule, but they are free of mana cost. The spirit gear tends to lack crit, so it doesn't yield high-crit, high-dps smites anyway. And the theorycrafting above shows that while crit has diminishing returns with regard to DPS, it does indeed increase DPS until somewhere in the 60-something-percent crit universe. I'm not really capable of understanding how to draw the graph, but there should be a "time to out of mana" tradeoff that show crit rating vs. spirit for this build. Thoughts appreicated.
One note: Assuming you will be go OOM on long-ish fights, you need to regen during downtime by not casting. Lacking an evocate, you have to rely on out-of-5-sec-rule regen. There are two things you can do on your own to boost this (1) have spirit (2) wear the earring in a trinket slot. If you could actually fight for 7-8 minutes, this consideration is not real in most tier 6 content, but it does affect the question of how much spirit you really want to give up along the way while seeking dps and also crit-based mana savings.
I don't have the WWS at the moment to support this (and I won't for a couple of weeks because I'm out of town), but I ran smite last week and found myself doing much more dps than I did as shadow, in BT quality gear.
The best way to spec smite, in my opinion (I tried a few different builds) is to abandon Surge of Light and take Improved Divine Spirit. In this way, you're not only packing some raid utility and allowing your holy priests to go full holy, but you're also getting more damage out of the smite cast itself.
I run without about 250 haste, and my Smite was a 1.72 second cast. Again, I haven't done the math, but the 50% chance to get a 1.5s (GCD) cast 0% crit smite was not worth the two talent points to me.
As shadow I normally pull 1300-1500 dps (1560 best on Teron, no fucking shaman then either), and I was over 1400 every fight, including 1800 on Patchwerk during a saturday night Naxx run and 1690 on Kaz'rogal.
At the end what you get is higher average dps, but with less mana efficiency, less raid utility (but still some utitlity! Imp DS frees up your other priests and I think this is significant, especially with how much druids and priests want DS in their raids since 2.4), and a less exciting spell rotation (i was rotating holy fire-->SW:P-->mb-->SW-->smite with that priority, occasionally dropping off SW so as to *sigh* not die).
But let me tell you, PI+smite with 250 haste is a lot of fkin fun. I recommend it
1. Why wouldnt you take both SoL and IDS?
2. Mind Blast is a horrible spell to use as smite spec, as its dpm is terrible, as well as it having 5 percent less crit chance.
3. With 250 haste, your global cooldowns are much less than 1.5 seconds, further improving your SoL dps.
Anyone have a sense on crit vs. spirit for the gearing choices? Obviously spirit increases mana regeneration for priests, but honestly, not massively while inside the 5 second rule. Crit on the other hand yields surge-of-light smites, which are free of mana cost. Now these also won't take your outside the 5 second rule, but they are free of mana cost. The spirit gear tends to lack crit, so it doesn't yield high-crit, high-dps smites anyway. And the theorycrafting above shows that while crit has diminishing returns with regard to DPS, it does indeed increase DPS until somewhere in the 60-something-percent crit universe. I'm not really capable of understanding how to draw the graph, but there should be a "time to out of mana" tradeoff that show crit rating vs. spirit for this build. Thoughts appreicated.
One note: Assuming you will be go OOM on long-ish fights, you need to regen during downtime by not casting. Lacking an evocate, you have to rely on out-of-5-sec-rule regen. There are two things you can do on your own to boost this (1) have spirit (2) wear the earring in a trinket slot. If you could actually fight for 7-8 minutes, this consideration is not real in most tier 6 content, but it does affect the question of how much spirit you really want to give up along the way while seeking dps and also crit-based mana savings.
Spirit is much more important imo than crit, but crit should come natually on the higher end casting gear, so it shouldnt be a problem. Stacking spirit is key for the build to be successful. While we don't have an innervate, we do have a sf, which can give you about the same mana return as an evocate if timed correctly with your trinkets.
Gems can be used for crit, and would recomend +crit +damage gems, with +dmg/+spirt filling your blue slots. The only +dmg/+spirit gem I've found drops in heroic BF, so right now Im actually using +healing/spirit gems in some of my blues, because the socket bonus is usally better than other gems alone, and +dmg/+stam gem causes me to gain about 2 spell damage, and lose 2-4mp5, depeniding on the item.
Tene, I appreciate your sense of this, but there is actually a mathematical answer. I'm just not really certain how to derive it. For every xx points of crit rating you have a certain chance of saving the entire cost of your next smite. For every yy spirit, you will regen zz mana while casting. There is a tradeoff between crit rating and spirit. It's simply not correct to say "spirit is more important than crit". If you could crit on 1/2 your smites, you'd get away with virtually no spirit at all. If you stack all the available spirit, you still can't chain cast smites on Illidari Council.
Tene, I appreciate your sense of this, but there is actually a mathematical answer. I'm just not really certain how to derive it. For every xx points of crit rating you have a certain chance of saving the entire cost of your next smite. For every yy spirit, you will regen zz mana while casting. There is a tradeoff between crit rating and spirit. It's simply not correct to say "spirit is more important than crit". If you could crit on 1/2 your smites, you'd get away with virtually no spirit at all. If you stack all the available spirit, you still can't chain cast smites on Illidari Council.
I've done the math a while ago, and I remember it showing that spirit has better gains than crit for mana regen. Let me see if I can remember it...
*Bah, all my previous spirit calcs were based on the old model, pre-Intellect change. I won't include them here.*
Assume:
Smite mana cost : 385 mana
Smite casting time: 2 seconds
Free Smite cast: 1.5 seconds (global cooldown)
SoL gives 1 free cast per 2 critical strikes.
22 critical rating = 1% critical strike.
At 0% crit, for 50 casts:
Total mana used: 385 * 50 = 19250 mana
Total time used: 2 * 50 = 100 seconds
Efficiency: 19250 / 100 * 5 = 962.5 MP5
At 1% crit:
Total mana used: 385 * 50 = 19250 mana
Number of free smites: 50 * (1% / 2) = .25
Amount of time taken casting free smites: .25 * 1.5 sec = .375 sec
Total time used : (2 * 50) + .375 = 100.375
Efficiency: 19250 / 100.375 * 5 = 958.904 MP5 (-3.596 mp5 compared to 0%, -.163 per crit rating)
At 2%:
Efficiency: 19250 / 100.75 * 5 = 955.335 MP5 (-3.569 mp5 compared to 1%, -.162 per crit rating)
The relative gains per crit rating will go down the higher your crit % is. At the relevant ranges:
So at 25%, if your gains from spirit is more than 0.138 MP5, then spirit will have more gains than crit rating.
*EDIT*
Yeah...so I just looked up values for spirit, and incremental gains are .242 MP5 at 300 Intellect, to .343 MP5 at 600 Intellect. There's absolutely no comparison, and no way you'd take crit over spirit from a mana regeneration standpoint.
That's not to say that Surge of Light won't provide savings, though. At 30% crit, a priest taking SoL gets 97.33 MP5 over another priest who doesn't spec SoL. So I guess the conclusion is, SoL is very worthwhile for longevity, but it's not worthwhile to gear with SoL gains in mind. Simply think of crit rating as a damage modifier, with mana savings as the cherry on top.
** EDIT #2 **
Originally data about haste, deleted because of incorrect data
** EDIT #3 **
OK, I got obsessed and actually ran the hasted numbers through, and my original results that I got in Edit #2 were misleading. Haste increases the effect of Surge of Light (more casting = more procs), for example, at 0% haste and 25% crit, each crit rating increases MP5 by 0.138, but at 250 haste rating (15.9% haste) and 25% crit, the incremental gains from crit rating increases to 0.163 MP5.
However, this must be tempered by the fact that haste makes you cast faster, thus burning through mana faster. So at 25% crit and 250 haste rating, adding an additional point of haste, while slightly increasing SoL efficiency, actually decreases your overall mana efficiency by 0.789 MP5.
However, it should be noted that as you increase crit rating, the incremental mana losses from haste go down. At 25% crit and 250 haste, each additional haste rating loses 0.789 MP5. However, at 30% crit and 250 haste, each additional haste rating loses 0.776 MP5. The end result is that having high crit will slightly offset the mana losses of having high haste.
Tene, I appreciate your sense of this, but there is actually a mathematical answer. I'm just not really certain how to derive it. For every xx points of crit rating you have a certain chance of saving the entire cost of your next smite. For every yy spirit, you will regen zz mana while casting. There is a tradeoff between crit rating and spirit. It's simply not correct to say "spirit is more important than crit". If you could crit on 1/2 your smites, you'd get away with virtually no spirit at all. If you stack all the available spirit, you still can't chain cast smites on Illidari Council.
Sorry, thats completely wrong.
It is inside the 5 second rule that plays a key part in the longevity of smite dps. So at 100 percent crit, and 0mana regen, You will be able to cast about 9 smites with 4 free ones, and then go oom. Now obviously this is an exxageration, but its the easierst way to prove the point. SOL improves dps, with a secondary function of increasing mp5
An instant cast smite is still and instant cast 2k damage spell, only limited by the global cooldown. Even though it can't crit, the instant cast part improves DPS throughput. Crit is just to unreliable of a stat, for any build, as its CHANCE to crit. It doesnt mean you will crit 1/2 times, even with 50 percent crit rating, unless your casting over 20-30 minutes, and even then it could be alot less, or alot more.
I've added an new thread to our forums, and for those interested, please check it out and give me some feedback, I've learned and continue to learn alot about the build, so here is alink to our new forums.
It's not in fact completely wrong. Perhaps you didn't read what I said or perhaps you just don't get it; I'm not sure which. It was perhaps a bit hyperbolic what I wrote, so I'll try again.
Surge of light gives you a mana-free cast. Because "virtually no spirit" didn't mean "literally no spirit" you will still have some regen no matter how much crit you stack with what's out there. And really, without access to Sunwell gear and full tier 6 gear, you are as a practical matter talking about something like 100mp5 while castting that you might get from spirit between the "stack" and "no stack" sets.
And crit is not really an unreliable stat. The standard deviation will be small enough you can predict your crit percentage within a small range before the fight has even started. It will not vary so much that you will be critting 20% or 80% if you have 50% crit chance. It doesn't work that way.
The fact is you can stack all the spirit the game offers and it's nearly 100% accurate to say you can't possibly chain cast smites on IC. That's about 12 mins of chain casting. No one has come close to suggesting a smite priest has 12 mins of longevity without casting breaks.
Alici's post actually answered my question without resorting to some seat-of-the-pants "I feel" stuff and was thus quite valuable. 1 pt of spirit is ~ 1/3 mp5 on my heaing gear, so it's approximately 2-2.5x as good as 1 point of crit rating where longevity is the only standard. But crit rating is not that hard to come by. The 2 different badge legs have 43 crit rating vs. 30 spirit (assuming you don't need the spell hit). And the crit ones will obviously out dps the spirit ones. So before we go pooh poohing crit, we should realize it's an alternative path to longevity to some extent, albeit one that's less efficient than spirit in the relevant ranges. Since 43 crit is nearly 1.5x 30 spirt, the gap between those two legs is actually smaller regen wise than it first appears.
UPDATE: I gemmed up nearly all the gear and sure enough spirit-based regeneration on this set is approximately 100mp5 while casting. Given that you don't leave the 5 second rule at any point unless the fight actually has an interruption of meaning (like Illidan phase transitions for instance), you will make ~20 mana/sec from spirit or 1200 mana per minute. If we generously round this up to 4 smites worth of mana (i.e. almost 1600 mana), that's 8 seconds of longevity gained per minute from spirit. It's not nothing, but it's not letting you cast all that long either.
Now let's take a quick look at surge of light with 25% crit. Over the course of a minute, you'd cast 30 normal smites, but 7 1/2 of them will crit on average and be followed by a mana-less, albeit shorter (1.5 sec), smite. If we round that down and say you'll only get 7 of them in a minute -- which is in fact a low estimate; i.e. I'm punishing Surge of Light in the opposite way I overcredited spirit -- we are saving 2700 mana from Surge of Light. We are also getting 14 seconds of longevity. Even in this pessimistic scenario, Surge of Light saves us 2x as much mana and provides nearly 2x as much mana as spirit.
Of course, this is slightly misleading because surge is mana saved while spirit is mana earned, but it's not entirely misleading since that spirit generated mana is really a tiny portion of your useful mana which comes from base mana + potions + fiend + blessing of wisdom + other consumables.
This isn't to say that the math I credited above is misleading. It appears true that >>from here<< a point of spirit = more longevity than a point of crit rating. But the reality is that the crit rating is providing far more of your longevity than the spirit is at the "baseline gear" level, according to this crude analysyis.
UPDATE: I gemmed up nearly all the gear and sure enough spirit-based regeneration on this set is approximately 100mp5 while casting. Given that you don't leave the 5 second rule at any point unless the fight actually has an interruption of meaning (like Illidan phase transitions for instance), you will make ~20 mana/sec from spirit or 1200 mana per minute. If we generously round this up to 4 smites worth of mana (i.e. almost 1600 mana), that's 8 seconds of longevity gained per minute from spirit. It's not nothing, but it's not letting you cast all that long either.
Now let's take a quick look at surge of light with 25% crit. Over the course of a minute, you'd cast 30 normal smites, but 7 1/2 of them will crit on average and be followed by a mana-less, albeit shorter (1.5 sec), smite. If we round that down and say you'll only get 7 of them in a minute -- which is in fact a low estimate; i.e. I'm punishing Surge of Light in the opposite way I overcredited spirit -- we are saving 2700 mana from Surge of Light. We are also getting 14 seconds of longevity. Even in this pessimistic scenario, Surge of Light saves us 2x as much mana and provides nearly 2x as much mana as spirit.
Of course, this is slightly misleading because surge is mana saved while spirit is mana earned, but it's not entirely misleading since that spirit generated mana is really a tiny portion of your useful mana which comes from base mana + potions + fiend + blessing of wisdom + other consumables.
This isn't to say that the math I credited above is misleading. It appears true that >>from here<< a point of spirit = more longevity than a point of crit rating. But the reality is that the crit rating is providing far more of your longevity than the spirit is at the "baseline gear" level, according to this crude analysyis.
Medeci, I do not believe you're comparing the two stats correctly. Let me make some comments:
Surge of Light is a 50% proc on crit, not 100%. That would reduce the number of procs that you would see from 7.5 to 3.75...let's call this 4. That would equate to 1540 mana saved.
However, the problem is that you are deciding to choose to compare spirit and crit at two arbitrary levels. You can claim that at "25% crit and 100mp5 from spirit" makes crit have 2x the effect (which isn't true), and while that may work for your level of gear, it's not comparable on a universal level. If my personal gear had 10% crit and 200mp5 from spirit, I'd probably be claiming the opposite of what you see, or if I had 50% crit and 50mp5 from spirit, I'd claim that your math is wrong, it's supposed to be 4x. Your personal results cannot translate to someone else. Such a claim only proves that Surge of Light is useful for mana savings, but we knew that already.
It's more useful to take an arbitrary level of gear (let's say, 25% and 100mp5 from spirit), and then compare how adding a bit of crit or a bit of spirit would affect your baseline. Assuming that 1 crit rating = 1 spirit in terms of gear budget, then you can say, "Okay, 1 crit rating would give me .138MP5, and 1 spirit would give me so-and-so." Then, you have the math to back up a decision when 2 pieces of gear present themselves to you, identical in respects except that one has +30 crit, while one has +30 spirit.
Actually, you are both right to a degree, and I was wrong, but I'm not entirely sure to what extent yet.
My MP5 while casting is just over 200 fully raid buffed. My guild let me test the build out up until Teron Gorefiend, which gave me aquite a bit of information.
I went into the fight stacking damage, with crit being the last stat I worried about.
Unfotunately I died early, with gorefiend at bout 20 percent because of a unlucky healer transition (main dispeller), but when I did die, I had a mana pot on cooldown, and was at about 55-60 percent mana, which meant I had much more time I could have dps'd, and stacked way too much regen.
One thing to keep in mind is that I do use the Sorc.Alch stone and I do pop a mana pot when it avail and I'm down 4kmana. This should be factored into any equations you guys do in regards to longevity of fights.
The problem here, that I hit a wall due to surge oflight, and it was my first time in as dps on the fight. Our guild pretty much goes all out, right fromt he start, which from a healer standpoint, I guess I never noticed. ie Bloodlust, drums, destruction potions,etc, etc.
So I've changed my talents around, in order forme to be able to stack more crit,and rely on gear a bit less for +hit rating, and specc'd out of SoL. I don't know if I'll be able to maintain the dps time I could as SoL, I need a nice long boss fight and a good raid makeup, but I'll post the results once I do.
I'm gonna continue to post any information I find, however it's gonna be on our guild's website, as I am tired of typing everything twice, lol. You are all welcome to visit and post, just have to request access.
All of your help is greatly appreciated, btw, so thanks.
Medeci, I do not believe you're comparing the two stats correctly. Let me make some comments:
Surge of Light is a 50% proc on crit, not 100%. That would reduce the number of procs that you would see from 7.5 to 3.75...let's call this 4. That would equate to 1540 mana saved.
However, the problem is that you are deciding to choose to compare spirit and crit at two arbitrary levels. You can claim that at "25% crit and 100mp5 from spirit" makes crit have 2x the effect (which isn't true), and while that may work for your level of gear, it's not comparable on a universal level. If my personal gear had 10% crit and 200mp5 from spirit, I'd probably be claiming the opposite of what you see, or if I had 50% crit and 50mp5 from spirit, I'd claim that your math is wrong, it's supposed to be 4x. Your personal results cannot translate to someone else. Such a claim only proves that Surge of Light is useful for mana savings, but we knew that already.
It's more useful to take an arbitrary level of gear (let's say, 25% and 100mp5 from spirit), and then compare how adding a bit of crit or a bit of spirit would affect your baseline. Assuming that 1 crit rating = 1 spirit in terms of gear budget, then you can say, "Okay, 1 crit rating would give me .138MP5, and 1 spirit would give me so-and-so." Then, you have the math to back up a decision when 2 pieces of gear present themselves to you, identical in respects except that one has +30 crit, while one has +30 spirit.
Yeah, I pooched the fact the Surge is 50%, not 100%.
But the 25%/100mp5 thing wasn't arbitrary. All the discussion centered around some 25% crit metric as being reasonable to achieve with the gear. And as for 100mp5, it's what the gear provides. I'm not making this up. Put the gear you can obtain on and that's it "when casting" regen benefit. The gear itself, not your intrinsic spirit nor what you get from buffs. Maybe it's a bit over 100mp5, but it's not 200mp5. This isn't healing gear and it doesn't have that kind of spirit.
-------
@Tene: I'd dump Power Infusion, honestly, take the spell hit talent and keep Surge of Light. PI seems to be a very small DPS boost overall. It's mana expensive to actually cast it and then mana expensive to be under it. I took it today and tried to DPS in Hyjal (I had to heal too much to get any useful data for various reasons). I found myself not really wanting to PI myself when mana was tight.
Have you considered saving your Inner Focus for when you want Power Infusion? Obviously, Power Infusion isn't capable of a critical hit itself, so you lose that +25% aspect (for one spell), but using Inner Focus when you want to pop PI would save you the 16% of your mana pool it normally costs. Do me a favor, next time you go into Hyjal, use a macro like this:
Ok, I'm debating something at the moment. I'm currently Tailoring/Leatherworking (LW is currently being levelled for drums). Tailoring after replacing PMC is essentially useless for anything other than cloth cooldowns, and so I'm considering dropping it for something more viable. My choices are either Enchanting (healing to rings), which is extremely difficult and expensive to level, or Alchemy (Redeemer's Alchemist Stone). Just for the record, the trinkets in my rotation currently are Earring of Soulful Meditation, Essence of the Martyr and Darkmoon Card: Blue Dragon. I'm really not sure which direction I should go in, because both options are viable, but I'm currently leaning towards Alchemy. Thoughts, opinions? Anything to get me to lean fully in one direction would be greatly appreciated.
I think you're in the wrong thread Dys, to be honest, but, yes, the Alchemist's stone is ridiculously good and alchemy is super cheap to level all else being equal.
The Essence of the Martyr is a fairly bad trinket and the Blue Dragon is also not very good (see the thread on healing trinkets for more). You'd be able to gain more average +heal than the Essence and more average regen than Blue Dragon (assuming use of pots) all in one with the Redeemer's stone... Anyway, wrong thread, but good luck.
*If you aren't interested in the method I used to get the numbers and just want to see the findings skip to the ------------- and read below that*
Base stats used were of a priest just starting raids.
220 Spirit, 900 +spelldmg, 400 Int, 200 Crit rating
I ran the tests with 2 different builds: For the purpose of the test, ONLY smite is being chain cast.
1) With Force of Will, has a +10% crit chance from talents (using the given stats, a 25% chance overall to crit.) and a smite coeffient of 0.821445 (.7143 x 1.15). This was to simulate a build similar to Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft . This build focuses on overall DPS, and gives the raid utility of IDS, and inspiration from a simple flashheal to the tank.
2) Without Force of Will, has a +5% crit chance from talents (using the given stats, a 20% overal chance to crit.) and a smite coeffient of 0.78573 (.7143 x 1.1). This was to simulate a build similar to Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft . This build focuses on DPSing trash, and support healing through instant cast renew (It has just as many talents that benefit it as a full holy spec'd priest), then switching over to pure heals for boss fights to make runs go quicker. In general the +hit talents aren't needed for trash because they aren't higher level like bosses and gear should be sufficient.
This formula was used to get the average smite dmg:
Average Smite dmg =(Overall Smite Dmg*1.5*Crit%)+(Overall Smite Dmg*(1-Crit%))
Overall Smite dmg being the average of the base smite dmg (640.5) plus (+spelldmg x the coefficient).
1.5 is how much spell crit gives to an attack.
Crit% gives the dmg on the left side a weighted average of 20% in this case, and on the right it gives "normal"(non crit) dmg, a weighted average of 80% (1-.2).
This was then converted into DPS by dividing by 2
Avg Smite DPS= (Average Smite dmg/2)
To find out how Surge of Light affects the dmg, the following formula was used:
Surge of Light DPS= (Crit%*0.5*(Avg Smite Dmg/1.5)
Crit% is multiplied by .5, since that is the occasion of the SoL proc (50% off of a crit). Avg Smite Dmg was then divided by 1.5 to account for the 1.5sec GCD after the SoL smite is cast. This formula calculates the "additional DPS" supplied by SoL.
I also ran some more figures by imputing how the presence of a ret pally would affect damage output (Improved Judgment of Crusader +3% crit, 219 +spelldmg to holy, +12% dmg from sanc aura)
An interesting occurrence here, Given the base stats above (220 Spirit, 900 +spelldmg, 400 Int, 200 Crit rating). Dmg/Crit Gems are better until 6 gems, then +Dmg and +Dmg/Crit gems become equal. From 7 gems onward +Dmg Gems are better.
+Dmg Gems are superior no matter how many you have.
Keep in mind this is only the dmg of SMITE. Proper Holy DPS priests always have shadow word: pain up and use Shadow Word: Death whenever its on CD to get an some extra dmg in (as well as a chance for a free smite).
In short, +Crit gems should NOT be used for smite builds. +Dmg gems are better.
According to recent posts of WoTLK, they plan on eliminating +healing gear and replacing it with only +spelldmg/heal gear.
"Tom Chilton (Kalgan) : We’re also going to be doing away with spell-damage only type gear. We’ll be moving to a system that, as part of your talents, will let players convert healing into spell-damage and vice-versa as part of their talents. That way they can use the exact same gear, but their talents just adapt what it does.”
Holy DPS priests need to pick up a lot of healing talents just to reach some of the DPS talents. The consolidation of all gear will allow a Holy DPS priest to react quickly to situations where extra healing is necessary. Instead of casting Penance on an enemy for instance, it could be cast on a party member. Holy DPS priests may see the light of day and their utility may be seen as not just a DPS, but a DPS that off heals to keep members alive and to alleviate the the healers of stress. When I DPS as holy, I have a habit of casting out renews to people with low HP. This is something a shadow DPS CANNOT DO (its possible, but at great mana expense). With the change in gear, this will be done with much greater effect.
According to recent posts of WoTLK, they plan on eliminating +healing gear and replacing it with only +spelldmg/heal gear.
"Tom Chilton (Kalgan) : We’re also going to be doing away with spell-damage only type gear. We’ll be moving to a system that, as part of your talents, will let players convert healing into spell-damage and vice-versa as part of their talents. That way they can use the exact same gear, but their talents just adapt what it does.”
Holy DPS priests need to pick up a lot of healing talents just to reach some of the DPS talents. The consolidation of all gear will allow a Holy DPS priest to react quickly to situations where extra healing is necessary. Instead of casting Penance on an enemy for instance, it could be cast on a party member. Holy DPS priests may see the light of day and their utility may be seen as not just a DPS, but a DPS that off heals to keep members alive and to alleviate the the healers of stress. When I DPS as holy, I have a habit of casting out renews to people with low HP. This is something a shadow DPS CANNOT DO (its possible, but at great mana expense). With the change in gear, this will be done with much greater effect.
I would just like to say that this change (heal/damage consolidation) is a major step in making the dps/healer hybrid, which the smite priest is arguably the best example of, viable in high-end encounters. Many of the proponents for Smite spec attest to being able to heal on the fly, while opponents would say that priests in damage gear can't heal. With the gear disadvantage for hybrid healing gone, the only obstacle left would be talents. This greatly increases the hybrid viability of not only priests, but elemental shamans, balance druids, and protection (and ret?) paladins.
It also alleviates one of the gripes about the discipline tree, in that it's a healing tree in practice, yet there were no true healing talents in it. I would think that one of the main culprits was the healing/damage divide in gear. Damage gear made discipline priests Smitebots with underpowered healing, while Healing gear made discipline priests second-class healers. The gearing change doesn't give discipline the healing output of holy (it shouldn't, really), but instead allows the discipline priest to diversify its role as smiter, healer, and dispeller. In all honesty, it may prove to be the most versatile healer type yet.
I've been fiddling with smite spec for a while and finally got a night where some people went back to naxx to try it out. Now ideally if you want to rock out on smite you want a group consisting of a Ret Pally, Boomkin, Shadow Priest and Elemental Shaman ( a bm hunter would probably work just as well as a boomkin), however all I could muster was a shadow priest. So first off my stats.
1301 sp
307 spirit
14.74% crit base 24.74 holy spells
266 Haste
123 Hit
My hit is low and I'm working to re gem my old BT/MH gear to work for it as I replace it with SW gear but it seemed ok last night.
So to the meat of the post. Here is my WWS from the 3 bosses I was in on.
To sum it up on patchwork I did 1446 dps with just a shadow priest and CoS up. I could have timed my PI better to get a second one in but I screwed it up. You'll notice that I mix holy fires into some of my dps cycles. From all my Dr Boom testing I've found that casting holy fire and letting the dot run it's full duration only lowers your dps by about 50 total making it very mana efficient. Of course part of last night was getting use to how much mana I use. For instance with a T6 shadow priest I found I could easily go a 6 minute fight full time dps'ing with using a mana pot (alch stone) each cooldown and my shadow fiend.
The gear that I would eventually like to try once we've finally killed KJ is closer to this:
As some have mentioned crit really isn't that great for smite dps, for that WWS I was specced into SoL but I did it just to get some better numbers on it, I've been of the mind lately that it's more likely a dps decrease than anything.
Last edited by cheebamonkey : 06/22/08 at 2:48 PM.
Except that it isn't a DPS decrease, which is proved in this very thread. Crit is a DPS increase until an inredibly high crit rate -- higher than you'll ever obtain. It offers diminishing returns farily early. But diminishing returns are not a DPS decrease.
So, well, my project finally came to fruition. Sapphi the Smitepriest is now 70 and geared enough that she can dps in heroics and Kara, so hardly top end gear (about 1000 spelldamage, 25% holy crit). Buffed with basic 5man buffs she has about 500 spirit - quickly came to the realisation after running around in mostly Invoker and Sorceror type gear that the regen from spirit is just... far too important. Socket-wise, when matching, I've gone for +8 spirits in blue sockets (still gives 3-4 spellpower anyway), pure damge in reds and damage/hit in yellows until i can swap for damage/haste.
I can't post any wonderful WWS's of damage, but I have to say that the 30/28/3 spec I went for (3/5 spirit tap seemed all I could afford but it's so worth it) is possibly one of the most versatile specs for any class that I've played in the small game. The damage is... certainly coming... bit more gear and it will be there (push about 800-900 dps in heroics at present). What's just made me fall in love with the spec though is the ease of swapping to healing.
With high spirit in the dps gear and a spec that includes all of the fast-cast and a lot of efficiency talents (just suffering from small top-end heals) it's so easy to help out the healer by throwing a PoM or a PoH in between smites, with comparatively little dps loss. I can swap between pure healer and pure damage roles as easily as a feral swaps cat/bear, I can push out reasonable dps in healer gear when the tank is overgeared and barely needing healing. The terrors of MgT in blue gear without a CC was no problem when your team can suddenly contain -two- healers spamming POH and PoM.
Going to push hard for the badge gear to get raid-viable stuff fast, but right now I'm incredibly happy with how versatile and useful the Smite spec has proven in the small game. The ease at swapping between good dps and good healing even without a full gear change has made me an asset.
One thing that really struck me thuogh, is the power of Holy Nova combined with Surge of Light. Threat-free AOE with a free instacast Smite after every one (as with enough targets you're pretty much guaranteed a proc each nova) can seriously bump up the damage in small groups, especially as you have absolutely no fear of aggro from any bar the one you smite. I was playing with DM: Wrath and found that, oddly, crits from the damage portion dont remove the stack of crit boost, only critical heals, and a well placed holy nova can add 7-10 stacks in one go. Wrath card basically seems to give a constant 170 crit rating bonus during Holy Nova Spam.
The work around for a lolsmite priests mana problems isnt spirit, it's Sorcerer's Alchemist Stone. This makes mad alch pots recover on average 3080 mana (I have seen mad alch pots crit btw) and makes Major Dreamless Sleep Potion recover 5040 mana...kinda like a priest evocation. Doing this, mad alchs for minor fights and major dreamless for bosses, my mana problems have ceased.
Just a bit of feedback. My DPS Priest reroll respecced 3-4 month ago from Shadow to Holynuker, mainly because I'm not a big fan of Shadow (too much watching for CD timers). I do purely PvE.
I find that:
- For farming/grinding while thinking about other things, Holynuker is vastly superior : holy flame/spam smite macro, pop a heal once in a while. No ooms, and not much thinking required ^^
- for heroics and kara, Holynuker can either top DPS charts or main heal competently versus other similarly geared classes. It's especially fun to be able to switch roles if the healer dies or if group heals are needed - to complement a paladin main healer on the last boss of Magister's Terrace for example.
- after Kara, I just can't hack it. My reroll's gear lags a bit behind (full Kara + Badges, guild at MH clean + Gurtogg), but still, my DPS at ZA was the worst of all, and my healing was insignificant. I think the lack of a +hit or a bigger +damage boost talent shows a lot.
I've been a long time fan of the holy smite spec. Mostly because I've always been a fan of doing things a little out of the ordinary. I raided as a shadow priest before Vampiric Touch and played a shaman to level 40 or so spec'd as a tank (pre rockbiter threat changes). I've spec'd into holy smite several times with 1200 or so spell damage and have always had fun but have found it very difficult to manage any compelling dps. It scales very well with the perfect group set up and the few times I've convinced people to let me do it has been VERY fun.
All this is to say that I'm interested in the possibility of a smite spec in WotLK. With more talent points to throw around and some good utillity in the high end discipline tree it just may work. Penance adds a good dps burst or a great way to maintain a buff on the tank. I hope to see a rebalancing of the mana cost of Smite or maybe a mana reduction tacked on to another talent. The ease of switching between dps and healing (especially with the spell power change) would be very fun.
I'm a firm fan of the smite dps build, and although it bring no utility to a raid group, it does allow others to respec and bring it instead. The primary reason that people spec into the discipline tree is for buff purposes (Fortitude and IDS).
On these forums, it has been proven that a CoH specced holy priest bring better raid utility and overall a better choice to a raid than a holy priest specced into IDS. This is a basic fact due to the amount of raid damage that all end game raid dungeons hand out by the bucketload. Taking a holy damage specced priest frees up the spots for all healing priests to spec into circle of healing, giving the raid more survivability.
I have raided as holy damage spec, running with these stats.
1340 spell damage (23 damage food, Flask of blinding light, wrath of air totem)
148 Hit rating
26.31% Holy crit rating Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft Spec.
Also i would like to state that my group had both a retribution paladin and elemental shaman.
Using a basic spell rotation consisting of
SW:P --> Holy Fire--> SW: D--> Smite-->Smite-->SW: D and repeating. Note that devouring plague was not used, due to the imense mana cost.
I had a fight long DPS output of 1320, the fight lasted for 8 minutes 37 seconds - Reliquary of Souls.
As always, there are plus and minus points.
The plus points include -
Reasonable damage
Healing can be done quickly and still powerfully
Improved Divine Spirit, meaning all healing priest can spec into their better high end raiding spec.
Minus points -
Dps is limited, there are no 8 - 9k crits like a warlock or a mage, its just constant DoT's and at most a 3 -3.5k critical hit.
Even with talents, threat was an issue.
Without a retribution paladin, dps would have been alot worse. Other classes can do high dps no matter what the group.
I mentioned this in the WotLK thread but I think they are much more interested in the holy vs. disc healing output at the moment and this might be a better place to bring it up anyway.
I'm a huge fan of Spirit Tap in a Smite build and with the new Improved Spirit Tap talent I think it would be an amazing chance for Blizzard to help make Smite DPS viable. All it needs is to proc off of any of our direct damage spells instead of just Mind Blast and SW: Death. Getting a +50% Spirit increase after critting along with 50% mana regen while casting would be huge for a Smite build.
Generally I'm somewhat excited about Smite at 80 because it seems we will finally have enough talent points to spread around.
I was playing with DM: Wrath and found that, oddly, crits from the damage portion dont remove the stack of crit boost, only critical heals, and a well placed holy nova can add 7-10 stacks in one go. Wrath card basically seems to give a constant 170 crit rating bonus during Holy Nova Spam.
Just to clarify, you are saying holy nova damage crits don't remove the 170 crit rating? (But the healing crits do?) Or are you saying the smite crits don't remove the 170 crit rating?
Because that's hell of a strange behavior if a card that only procs on direct damage gets its buff removed from direct heals. On the otherhand, you now have me curious as to how viable this is for both my priest and paladin.
And if I understand you correctly (that holy nova damage isn't consuming the crit rating) I am even more curious to see how this card will work for offensive penance. Might be worth the investment for leveling to 80.
05/28/08, 5:33 PM
-->smite with that priority, occasionally dropping off SW
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