Dasil, you can't simply use the default settings of simcraft and decide it is wrong. You need to customize the rotation as per the fight you're in. It doesn't matter what the default spell choices simcraft uses; you have to customize the selection. It is clear you haven't done so and that pretty much makes every point you have to say about simcraft incorrect. I don't see how you can even claim to draw conclusions from it when you clearly realize it isn't using the rotation in discussion. simcraft is a fairly complicated system; powerful, but complicated. You have to use it properly before you can draw conclusions.

In addition, while your spreadsheet may give you results backing up your point, unless you make it available, it is pretty much impossible to use as evidence for anything. On the contrary, you should instead produce the same results via the "standard" priest spreadsheet.

I point you to prior work on the subject, including not just poh spam but also poh mixed with pws in various ratios:

Cataclysm Discipline Priest Compendium

The net result is this; depending on how many pw:s you use per poh, you can get mastery to be stronger or weaker. The BT boost from PW:S helps maintain the hps of a pws/poh rotation, and the rapture procs are very important, but mixing in pw:s doesn't really increase overall hps. If poh is involved at all, haste is supreme.

I agree with your comment of haste being a significant mana risk. It depends on the fight and gear level as to whether that matters or not. It also depends on how long you need to maintain intense periods of healing and external buffs (which on a fight like Ultraxion are a tremendous factor).

Regarding the info you posted, the spreadsheet basically falls under the same category as yours, but it expands on it a bit more as far as a POH to PW:S ratio. The idea behind the picture included simply shows what you have in your linked post, but goes into a bit further detail rather than just a PW:S>POH>POH. It expands on the required breakpoint for crit and mastery to be even, and the expected number of casts of POH per PW:S to make mastery valued slightly higher than crit.


The biggest thing to take from it all is it DOES rely on your healing style and priorities, but for the vast majority of players you will cast enough POH per shield to value mastery slightly ahead of crit rating.


In regard to the rotation itself, I am not arguing the value of haste, I am more arguing the value of Crit vs Mastery AFTER haste.


My biggest question for you though is how can you argue Crit when most of the bosses you killed this week your number 1 heal by a significant margin was PW:S. The more you cast shield, the higher Mastery is valued over crit. The only time (in my theory) is crit is only valued higher than mastery on Ultraxion

I think pretty much every post about prioritization has emphasized healing style, raid assignments, and encounter specifics. Those should go without saying, but the disclaimer is always there.

You should share your spreadsheet, or reproduce the results with the other one, or some other established tool, or provide some concrete math of your own -- otherwise you're basically saying "trust me" and not providing any actual theory crafting. I highly encourage making your spreadsheet available so we can determine if there are issues with it, or with the current spreadsheet, or somewhere else to explain the discrepancy.

In the meantime, I'll re-run various AOE rotations in simcraft using your armory profile and post the specific files I use so that you might also experiment to see the proper results from simcraft for aoe healing.

Modified my original post, take a look at that. I'll look over the current spreadsheet that is avail and see if I can reproduce the results and/or determine where the math disparity is.


Here's a SS of what I came up with, I'm not entirely sure if it matches the log I am trying to compare to but it seems really really close. My playstyle is literally borderline on the "it doesn't matter" reforging wise. The difference is very very minimal and obviously will vary depending on how many shields you cast.

Log I am referencing:
World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis




I'm going to try and look into it more to determine if it is as close as I'd like it to and figure out which way will be better, so if anyone has anything to offer regarding the above as well that would help speed up the process a bit

Now of course I am fairly new to the Simcraft world so it wouldn't at all surprise me if you came up with different results.

Edit: yeah I'm going to try and get it to simulate more of a 3 poh cast per 1 shield to get more accurate results. Not sure why Penance is counting for so much healing.

Editx2: giving up for now until I can figure out the above with a 3xpoh 1xshield rotation

So, for simcraft to properly handle AOE healing, you sadly need a raid with 5 people in it. To do this, you should add this to the top of the file:

That will get PoH hitting more targets. Likewise, to simulate a specific rotation, use this:

In this case, it is a pws/poh/poh/poh rotation. The ignore_debuff is important (otherwise it would wait for weakened soul on yourself to disappear).

Running it on your armory profile yields these results:

rotation	hps	int	crit	haste	mastery
PoH	56051	4.4961	3.5180	3.2574	1.7934
PW:S->PoH	57013	4.2295	2.6775	2.8155	3.1509
PW:S->PoH->PoH	56618	4.3903	3.0484	3.0303	2.6726
PW:S	51274	3.2878	0.8595	2.3771	5.1273

Some interesting new results! At current gearing haste levels (~2500 haste), the impact of haste is lessened compared to crit and mastery for mixed pws/poh. Most notably, though, with the 4pc T4 and generally higher int levels, mastery is once again very strong for a 1:1 pws/poh rotation -- stronger than both haste and crit.

Running the same for my gear (T12 4pc, ~5 ilvls lower), haste tops out mastery, but by a very small margin.

T13 is probably a big fraction of this; it should improve the benefit from mastery for PW:S by 10%, obviously, though it doesn't contribute to DA.

If you add more PoH, though, Mastery is surpassed by crit and haste (which are very close, but crit nudges haste out).

Any real AOE rotation should include at least one PW:S every 12 seconds (so roughly a 1:5 ratio of pws to poh). It would appear from raw HPS that, in 4pc T13, a 1:1 ratio is higher HPS (though at a significant mana cost). In this mode, mastery is, indeed, supreme, followed by haste and then crit.

I suppose the bottom line is that all of our stats are getting pretty similar for AOE healing, and that there is more freedom than ever in selecting stat priorities based upon the priest's own preference and role. Numerically mastery, if you maintain poh/pws tightly in a 1-1 ratio, is stronger, but in reality I suspect most will have a 1:2 or 1:3 ratio during intense aoe, which slightly prefers haste.

Note though that this really only occurs at around high (2000+ ?) haste and 4pc T13. If that haste is removed, other stats more quickly decay in value. There isn't an exact cutoff of when stacking haste should stop but it is clear at around 2500 that the incremental benefits slightly favor mastery and crit, but removing haste still is more costly than removing other secondary stats.

Premise (tl;dr) % total absorbs on your healing chart in WoL (PW:S + aegis) decide whether mst is desirable. PW:S per PoH is a bit of a simplification. Could get a little more specific and I intend to try. I'm waiting for a simcraft patch to do so.

I'm interested in answering this question with a slightly better context. To be fair, if you cast nothing but PoH and PW:S, MST will break even with CRIT at fewer shields than it should. Most everyone finds a certain percentage of their throughput to be single target healing. Each single target heal you cast pushes CRIT's scale factor up and MST's scale factor down. I think you may actually need just slightly more PW:S than your run suggests.

I propose that you can only really answer this question by matching a simcraft run against a WoL parse. That is, I want:
- Same % single target heals (by name actually to get the scale factors right, esp for haste)
- Same % PoH
- Same % aegis
- Same % PW:S.

When you can do that, simcraft's scale factors actually make sense for the priest in question. Luckily the simc devs added a nifty option for us that makes doing this a LOT easier. The min_interval option sets a custom cooldown on any healing ability. You can use it to delay heals and reduce their %healing individually on the results:
actions+=/penance_heal,min_interval=20

Only trouble, that option doesn't work for PW:S (yet).

Now, the tricky bit is there's something simcraft can't account for. If a disc priest has 15% overheal, it's a very good bet almost all of that came from actual heals and almost none of it came from absorbs. To account for that, there's a few ways that matching a run to a WoL parse doesn't work (has to be tweaked by hand). To match the WoL parse, you have to:
- Take all overheal from the WoL and apply it to heals in simc, leaving absorbs alone.
- Heals will make up a bigger % in simcraft, and Absorbs will make up a slightly smaller %.
- In this context, MST becomes desirable BEFORE its scalefactor overtakes crit - it'll be somewhere close to when MST's scalefactor is about 10% below CRIT's.

If anyone has a H Madness parse that gets near the end of P1 I'd be interested in using that as a base for this experiment . Please do link.

Hey Soximus,

I would take the Maw unless I had the Scalpel on heroic. Even then it's probably better to roll with Maw, but (disclaimer) I don't have any math to back this up. You will still get quite a bit of healing from it if you are smart about positioning. It can do 3-4% of your healing if your group isn't too chaotic. It's probably impossible to find a weapon with stats that will increase your throughput by that much.

As well, you will find that haste is still great on Heroic Morchock, in all likelihood. Two healing it is rough - but absolutely doable.

Look for about 40-45% mastery (depending on your ilvl budget), and go haste for the rest, I reckon. You will absolutely have to PoH spam on this, and the math heavily supports haste for this healing method. Stomp timers are key, and a bit of bubble spam before the first of two is really effective and makes the PoH spamming more manageable. Keep Grace up on your soaker.

As well, this is one fight in which I'd recommend picking up Inspiration, as even the randomness of crits will help keep people alive through stomps. More experienced players on this forum can tell you more about whether or not that talent is worth it for you to have. Barrier when you can, Hymn when you get overwhelmed.

The scalpel is missing a red socket, and is thus underbudget. Maw proc is amazing even on 10s. Maw >> Scalpel for any healer.

Do you all forget about [Vagaries of Time]? Its much better then Scalpel because of Red Socket.

Hello, 1st time poster, long time reader.
First of all I would like to thank arison and Alice Wonderbra for posting all the useful information about the state of disc priest during the last content, (cataclysm) it has been a good resource and it has help me to "grow" as a priest/player.

As many of you tested so did I.. the battle between Crit and Mastery... and for ME what works is Haste>Crit>Mastery.
I have read peoples opinion on this matter and the one that have helped me so far was the Crit over Mastery.
On Blackhorn I could feel the Crit working!
Here's log of the fight I recently did: World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

Like arison said in older posts: "There is no fight in cataclysm that requires shield spam!" I totally agree with him.

I feel comfortable at this point to reforge my Spirit to Haste or Crit... and boy did I notice a difference. Although I have alot of Haste, I never feel threatened by mana, however everyone have a different playing style, and i'm not saying that Mastery is wrong, i'm just saying for my current playing style, it doesn't work.

This discussion about Mastery and Crit is very interesting and useful for alot of readers I hope we can finally see the end of it and we can all agree on the one stat.
Thank you Affinitii for making this more interesting and I will continue to follow up on this.
Once again thank you for all the useful information.

This isn't a direct answer to your gearing question, but you should really consider bringing more than 2 healers to that fight. If you can do it with 2, more power to you, but just so you know most guilds killed it with 4 at the start of Dragon Soul (and our guild never saw a reason to stop taking 4 healers). There's no dps requirement, you just need to rotate cds on the players that soak the double stomps sub 20%.

As for healing strategy, I wouldn't worry about shield spam. Shield the double stomp soakers before each stomp and pre-cast PoH, then spam PoH until everyone in your group is topped. Set your focus to the mob you're healing and have a focus cast bar to assist pre-casting and if your group is fine, assist on the other group with PoH (adjust positioning where possible to do this).

The only 2 heal fights in Heroic are Ultraxion and Warmaster. Maybe Madness, we haven't gotten that far. So ya, tell your GM to better aquaint himself with the mainstream kill compositions for each boss.

World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis
HMorchok 2 heal.

World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis
HYorSaj 2 heal, 1 tank

HeroicHagara cant be 2healed only because there is a possibility that both Ice Prison will target healers. There is nothing to heal really.

HSpine can be 2 healed I think with good enough gear to heal those 300k heal absorb debuffs and not get OOM. Not now, but soon.

HMadness only difficulty is 2 phase below 5% Deathwing hp. There are kills with 2 healers at WoL (like guild Silent), but they definitely abuse some sort of bug, which remove 90% of aoe damage. And afaik they cant repeat their kill with 2 healers.

Sure you can do it, but on those fights there's really very little reason to. Morchock has no enrage. Yorsahj can easily be killed before the Enrage with 6 DPS. Hagara you could make an argument for sure, but again there's very little reason to play it so risky. Ultraxion and Warmaster are the only 2 fights you NEED to drop a healer for DPS to make Enrages.

There is another point of view.
If you can take less healers, why do it other way? More DPS always better.
But if you HAVE to bring more healers, you should consider it.

And about Ultraxion10hm - it will be easy to deal with enrage even with 3 healers (Our last fight with one ppl stupid death at the middle of the fight was 5:00 long). But there is nothing to do for him =( I really think, with enough gear HPal can solo heal it soon.

This may be true on 10 man but on 25 the fight is actually pretty tightly tuned. Our first 25 man kill was a nail biter with 6 healers/2 tanks (had plenty of 5% wipes) so we had to seriously consider dropping to 5 healers which makes it pretty rough during Red/Black/Yellow (fine all other combo's though with proper CD use). Now we out-gear it and have time to spare but it's a weird fight in that more healers doesn't make it easier outside of that one color combination. It's the one fight in here that you can't easily out-gear in total since the healing "trick" is not really HPS based. Yes it helps somewhat but its usually not throughput that causes the wipe, it's a single mistake by a healer or accident.

We also have always preferred 2 healers on Yorsahj heroic. The extra dps actually makes the healing easier by killing mana voids and fixate adds more quickly. The additional healer rarely improves the chance of keeping players alive, because of how often purple is kept alive (you're holding back rather than spamming). The only time the third healer actually helps is on yellow/black/red/green (killing yellow ofc) and we just explode the adds with the extra dps and cover the damage with cds or hero if needed.

I thought it isnt possible to survive red+green in hard mode. Are you sure you kill yellow when red+green+black+yellow come?
We always kill green in that case, gather close to each other as possible, pop up bloodlust and heal through double red damage, blow up first wave of adds and just forget about second wave of adds (dots + aoe after smashing one of next slimes)

Yep, we always kill yellow no matter what. On this combination we just position early, hugging the boss as tightly as possible in a circle without splashing green and cover the red/black damage with hero/healing cds, etc. Spike damage on single players can be high, but we've been doing it this way since week one of heroic modes and it works for us I guess. Anyone who is really getting nuked (red + fixate) is expected to just use a healthstone or a defensive cd (i usually call it out on ts). And yea, as soon as the adds are dead it's very stable. Last week we even survived this combination with no deaths and no heroism, because someone screwed up and called for hero earlier in the fight...

As for 2 - healing Spine heroic, agreed it can probably be done once mana is no longer an issue. We tried it a few times when we were first progressing on the fight and we were just running oom around the 8 min. mark. The tank damage might be too high at the end for two healers, but I guess that varies from tactic to tactic.

And yea the Silent kill of Madness Heroic with 2 healers was definitely bugged at the end.
I think I saw another guild that killed it with 2 healers 2 tanks, although I can't remember where I saw the log. I'll try look for it if I get time today. If I remember correctly, this mystery guild was able to do it by using res elixirs and 2 shadow priests for passive healing, although they may have also gotten a bug at the end of the fight (I never checked).

*EDIT* Here we are, found it (Hordlinge). It doesn't seem like they bugged it considering everyone dies at the end and I can't confirm that they used res elixirs, that was just an assumption that I made earlier:
World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

Soximus asked about the value of 403 [Maw of the Dragonlord] vs 397 [Scalpel of Unrelenting Agony], and Maw was clearly recommended. My question would be how does the raid finder version (384) of [Maw of the Dragonlord] compare to the normal versions (397) of [Scalpel of Unrelenting Agony] and [Vagaries of Time]?

Will the lower item level of the LFR Maw leave it disadvantaged over the others, due to less spell power (though it does actually still have +7 Into over the 397 weapons, discounting sockets), or will its proc still be too powerful?

I have essentially this same problem, using 403 maw vs. 410 vagaries. I've essentially concluded that fights where the maw proc is at least decent (zon'ozz, yor'sahj, ultraxion, and madness), maw has a clear advantage, usually making up 5-10% of my healing done on those fights. Elsewhere, I subjectively find the higher stats from vagaries outweigh the value of the proc from maw. I should note that I do 10mans, so maw probably has even higher value in 25s--probably enough to use for morchok.

I would never use scalpel compared to any of those other options; I think it's been mentioned recently, but scalpel is underbudget by 50-60 int because of its missing red socket.

Could someone explain to me why you guys consider haste such a valuable stat?
I understand why it is valued over mastery, but after crunching the numbers, Ive found crit to be a much more attractive stat.

A 1% increase in haste, which takes 128.06 rating points to achieve, constitutes a 1% increase in healing per second for any spell with a cast time... right? There doesnt appear to be any synergy between haste and any other rating.
1%/128.06=.007809

A 1% increase in crit , which takes 179.28 rating points to achieve, does different things depending on the spell. Crit has synergy with mastery, so i will evaluate it at base mastery and at 12 mastery.

For greater heal, heal, flash heal, binding heal, etc, it increase the chance to land a heal for double the normal amount (more if using the meta gem), which in turn procs DA for 30% of the heal before mastery (base mastery is 8, so at a minimum, DA will be 36% of the heal.) However, for every crit you land, you are not landing a non-crit heal.
1%/179.28*(2*1.03*(1+.3*(1+(8*.025))-1)=.010049 (with base mastery)
1%/179.28*(2*1.03*(1+.3*(1+(12*.025))-1)=.010394 (with 12 mastery)

For atonement heals from smite and holy fire, the crit effect does not double the heal, it only adds an extra 50% (however the meta gem effect is applied twice, once on damage and again on heal.)
1%/179.28*(1.5*1.0609*(1+.3*(1+(8*.025))-1)=.006493 (with base mastery)
1%/179.28*(1.5*1.0609*(1+.3*(1+(12*.025))-1)=.006760 (with 12 mastery)

For POH, non-crit heals apply DA, and crit heals apply double dip in DA.
1%/179.28*(2*1.03*(1+.6*(1+(8*.025))-(1+.3*(1+(8*.025)))=.012177 (with base mastery)
1%/179.28*(2*1.03*(1+.6*(1+(12*.025))-(1+.3*(1+(12*.025)))=.012699 (with 12 mastery)

In short, crit seems to be stronger for healing spells (ie not smite and holy fire, since they only crit for 150%) than haste, and the value of crit increases as mastery increases. Crit and haste both increase HPS, but in addition to HPS, crit also increases HPM, procs inspiration, and affects POM.

I really don't follow the logic behind saying haste is the strongest stat for disc.