Hello this is very good forum about the holy priest. Thx for the new infos and tips! But i wanna ask you about which the better gem for us: [Purified Shadowsong Amethyst] or [Sparkling Empyrean Sapphire](and the 10 spirit about how much healup/mana regen?)
And another question: About how much heal up need with priest at Sunwell?
Thx for answers
I think the general rule of thumb is that they're roughly equal, but it also depends on what you feel your current gear setup is lacking. If you have enough regen to finish every encounter with some extra mana left over as emergency cushion, then you can probably substitute some Purified's for Sparkling's to boost your HPS. Personally I prefer the [Purified Shadowsong Amethyst]. But I'm also starting to look at factoring more haste into my gear, which will both increase my mana usage rate, and replace some pieces/gems that previously provided regen. So that 'double whammy' might be enough to warrant focusing more on spirit again. With that in mind I'm replacing some 10spi with 11heal/5spi, but not all.
I have a question concerning inspiration, well not so much inspiration but critical strike chances of certain abilities. If this was posted earlier I am sorry, I have read near every page of this forum and have yet to see a post directly relating to my question. I have done several heal test to see how long I can consistantly heal with greater heal (1) from full to zero mana and then repeated with flash heal (9). I am sure we all know how these results came out, as usual gheal is the best option except in them clutch situations. While going over my stats one thing I noticed repeatedly was greater heal would crit almost three times as much as flash heal per cast. Is there some sort of mechanic out there that I do not know of such as shorter cast time heals have less chance to crit that I am not seeing. Any help would be greatly appreciated...
A little character info....
2/5 Holy Specialization
3/3 Holy Inspiration (dont think this matters)
Crit Chance - Holy Spells - 10.14%
WWS Reports ... these are only 2 attempts I still have saved....will add more later if I get time to do a couple more Greater Heal Rank 1 Flash Heal Rank 9
There's absolutely no difference in the critical strike chance of Flash Heal vs Greater Heal. It's just RNG. You cast 99 Greater Heals (and had 9% of them crit); you cast 31 Flash Heals (and had 1 of them crit). Go cast 100 Flash Heals and you'll see 8-12% crit rate, the same as GHeal.
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - R.A. Heinlein
There's absolutely no difference in the critical strike chance of Flash Heal vs Greater Heal. It's just RNG. You cast 99 Greater Heals (and had 9% of them crit); you cast 31 Flash Heals (and had 1 of them crit). Go cast 100 Flash Heals and you'll see 8-12% crit rate, the same as GHeal.
In terms of inspiration uptime, flash heal is technically better since it casts faster so you have more chances to crit and refresh the buff. But that doesn't make flash heal worth using.
Apparently everyone but me figured this out a long time ago, but I wanted to try and codify this idea of needing more regen or not needing more regen.
First of all, let's set up some scenarios: chaincasting GH7, chaincasting GH7 with the 2 piece T5 bonus, and chaincasting CoH. I realize that all of these are to some extent unrealistic, but it's my personal opinion that "not needing to risk a cancel" is a good thing to be striving for; I welcome comments to the extent of "you really don't need that", especially from people who've actually killed bosses in Sunwell.
Chaincasting GH7 requires 701 mana per 2.5 seconds, or 1402 mp5. Subtract 6% for Clearcasting (yes, this assumes you use every proc) to get 1317.88 mp5.
For 2 piece T5, let's assume a 70% Efficiency proc rate (seems about right from my experience), so you only need 631 mana per 2.5 seconds, or 1262 mp5. Subtract 6% for Clearcasting again to get 1186.28 mp5.
Chaincasting CoH requires 405 mana every 1.5 seconds, or 1350 mp5. Yes, this is slightly unrealistic.
Now let's talk about static sources of mp5 that don't depend on raid buffs. Let's assume 12k buffed mana.
Chain potting with Super Mana Potions: 100 mp5
Since I'm an alchemist, throw in the Alchemist's Stone buff: 40 mp5
Shadow priest doing 1400 DPS: 350 mp5 (hey, why not)
Mana Spring/Mana Tide: 288 mp5 (is this right?)
TOTAL: 778 mp5
You also have your base mana pool; again, we're assuming 12k, so you can consider that as 12k/(length of fight) * 5 mp5. Let's say a 6 minute fight, so your mana pool contributes 166.67 mp5.
So how much character sheet regen + regen from timers do you still need?
GH7: 1317.88 - 778 - 166.67 = 373.213 mp5 required
GH7 with T5 set bonus: 1186.28 - 778 - 166.67 = 241.613 mp5
CoH (chaincasting): 1350 - 778 - 166.67 = 405.33 mp5
All of these are pretty easy to attain, actually; the CoH one is kind of borderline (especially for non-alchemists) but Shadowfiend/trinkets can probably make up the difference. Obviously, once you hit this point, you should start looking for healing and especially haste, since regen isn't doing you much good. (Caveat: haste also increases your HPS used, so not only do you want to keep your regen constant as you add haste, but you want to increase it slightly.)
The key is that this requires a shadow priest and a resto shaman in your group. If you don't have both of those, then you can't chaincast GH7/CoH with impunity; too bad for you. And, of course, if you don't need to chaincast GH7/CoH, you still don't need both.
The one thing this model does not account for is player skill and judgment - which I realize you purposely ignored. It seems that one of the goals behind hitting this practical "regen cap" is to dumb down healing to a simple matter of spamming the same spell ad infinitum throughout a fight.
In reality, when people claim that they have no need for more regen, it's based on the foundation that their skill and judgment allow them to get away with *not* chaincasting GH7 or CoH, or what have you. They can achieve the MP5 requirements for chaincasting by carefully choosing the correct ranks of healing as well as knowing when to time their heals, and by canceling casts at moments when it is absolutely safe to do so. In other words, lack of regen can be compensated to some degree by player skill and judgment.
Of course, people make mistakes and there will be times when a player judges poorly that could lead to a wipe or a death. But it's likely that this is still worth it because the HPS they gain by not gearing/gemming for regen allows them to perform better 90% of the time, and more importantly, in ways that not even skill can compensate for.
The one thing this model does not account for is player skill and judgment - which I realize you purposely ignored. It seems that the goal behind hitting this practical "regen cap" is to dumb down healing to a simple matter of spamming the same spell ad infinitum throughout a fight.
In reality, when people claim that they have no need for more regen, it's based on the foundation that their skill and judgment allow them to get away with *not* chaincasting GH7 or CoH, or what have you. They can achieve the MP5 requirements for chaincasting by carefully choosing the correct ranks of healing as well as knowing when to time their heals, and by canceling casts at moments when it is absolutely safe to do so. In other words, lack of regen can be compensated to some degree by player skill and judgment.
Of course, people make mistakes and there will be times when a player judges poorly that could lead to a wipe or a death. But it's likely that this is still worth it because the HPS they gain by not gearing/gemming for regen allows them to perform better 90% of the time, and more importantly, in ways that not even skill can compensate for.
I agree that it's quite possible to do better than this with downranking, timing, and canceling; the requirements above were only reasonable a short time ago, so we've been doing that all along and it hasn't really hurt us that much.
But, as you've noticed, at this point I consider canceling a gamble. This goes back to over a year ago on Malchezaar and wiping on phase 2 several times because you just happened to cancel a heal right before the RNG hit the jackpot, and Illidan gave me much the same feeling, and I understand Brutallus is more of the same. If at all possible I want to not have to make that choice. How much regen would I need so that I don't even have to think about it? And it turns out the answer is "it depends whether you can get a shadow priest and a resto shaman in your group".
I don't doubt that 1000/400 or wherever you end up in BTish gear is enough regen for most people. I actually had a fourth scenario where you cast CoH 70% of your GCDs and stood around the rest of the time, and you have way more than enough regen to do that.
The other reason is more of a gear modeling reason: given that the value of regen drops significantly once you hit the point where you can't use more mana, I was curious about how far that point could possibly be; turns out it's not that far.
But, as you've noticed, at this point I consider canceling a gamble. This goes back to over a year ago on Malchezaar and wiping on phase 2 several times because you just happened to cancel a heal right before the RNG hit the jackpot, and Illidan gave me much the same feeling, and I understand Brutallus is more of the same.
You miss the point. That's where skill comes into question. Prince p2 on a blue/kara geared tank means that there is no room for cancel-casting. A skilled priest will make sure to be at 90%+ mana when p2 starts, and then find a good enough rank to spam through the phase. Same goes with Brutallus, you can easily save tons of mana outside of Stomp and then start spaming highest rank a few seconds before Stomp.
Cancel-casting is viable when you a) know other heals are landing (like paladin + rolling lifebloom) and that your tank won't die in a window of >3 sec, or b) have full knowledge of the mob's swingtimer and can actually "feel" how and when damage will land on the tank (this is normally when solo-healing).
Prince p2 and Brutallus during Stomp are good examples of when you should not cancel-cast (if not your tank outgear Prince), because you cannot predict the damage due to fast swingtimer and potential "burst" when the tank doesn't avoid anything. A good healer pays attention to these things and know when to "waste" mana and when to save it. Overhealing during p2 on Prince and Brutallus' Stomp is a good thing, while it's a bad thing to land a 9k crit heal on a 100% hp tank when damage is easy.
Personally I have /stopcasting keybinded and if I feel it's safe I just hit my /stopcasting and then immediately start a new heal. I know a few priests still like to jump around to cancel heals, but it's not really efficent
Personally I have /stopcasting keybinded and if I feel it's safe I just hit my /stopcasting and then immediately start a new heal. I know a few priests still like to jump around to cancel heals, but it's not really efficent
While I generally agree... instants still work just fine jumping.
"It's kind of fun to do the impossible." - Walt Disney
I just have every major heal (GH:1, GH:3, GH:7) macro'd with /castcancel. It means you can't mindlessly spam the button, but I never have to move; just-recast the same spell (or a higher / lower rank) and cancel the previous cast, starting a new one.
M'uru P1 is basically 6 minutes of me doing that ... over and over.
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - R.A. Heinlein
I agree that it's quite possible to do better than this with downranking, timing, and canceling; the requirements above were only reasonable a short time ago, so we've been doing that all along and it hasn't really hurt us that much.
But, as you've noticed, at this point I consider canceling a gamble. This goes back to over a year ago on Malchezaar and wiping on phase 2 several times because you just happened to cancel a heal right before the RNG hit the jackpot, and Illidan gave me much the same feeling, and I understand Brutallus is more of the same. If at all possible I want to not have to make that choice. How much regen would I need so that I don't even have to think about it? And it turns out the answer is "it depends whether you can get a shadow priest and a resto shaman in your group".
I don't doubt that 1000/400 or wherever you end up in BTish gear is enough regen for most people. I actually had a fourth scenario where you cast CoH 70% of your GCDs and stood around the rest of the time, and you have way more than enough regen to do that.
The other reason is more of a gear modeling reason: given that the value of regen drops significantly once you hit the point where you can't use more mana, I was curious about how far that point could possibly be; turns out it's not that far.
Spam cast rank6 or 5 (with more +healing) on prince works exactly the same as rank7 on a blue gear tank that can be burst down in the blink of an eye and saves you a ton of mana. If someone is taking constant dmg in excess of 2k DPS then you should not be healing them alone as its far too risky and not cost effective. Rank 6 will give you 2k HPS.
The mana regen that you need is not enough mana regen to spam rank 7 non stop. This is not a realistic situation. The mana regen you need is what will allow you to maintain a stable 1.2-1.7k HPS over the whole fight in any senario you are likely to encounter. 1.2k HPS over a 10 minute fight is 720k healing.
Having hard regen to allow you to maintain drains in excess of 1200 mp5 is an impossible dream, even 1100 is effectively impossible, without taking up a lot of resouces from your raid. However you have to take soft regen into account too. Regen breaks, cutscenes, phase changes, clearcasting/inner focus/earring, a good target for using your shadowfiend.
In some fights you will be able to sustain higher mana drains, because of these factors.
I just have every major heal (GH:1, GH:3, GH:7) macro'd with /castcancel. It means you can't mindlessly spam the button, but I never have to move; just-recast the same spell (or a higher / lower rank) and cancel the previous cast, starting a new one.
M'uru P1 is basically 6 minutes of me doing that ... over and over.
Damn you got a boring assignment :/ M'uru P1 is actually one of the most hectic fights for me, almost as hectic as P2. What's your healer setup?
Now let's talk about static sources of mp5 that don't depend on raid buffs. Let's assume 12k buffed mana.
Chain potting with Super Mana Potions: 100 mp5
Since I'm an alchemist, throw in the Alchemist's Stone buff: 40 mp5
Shadow priest doing 1400 DPS: 350 mp5 (hey, why not)
Mana Spring/Mana Tide: 288 mp5 (is this right?)
TOTAL: 778 mp5
First of all the targets are unrealistic. Its absoludely impossible to manage to a cast rate of 1 cast per 2.5 seconds for gheal and 1 cast per 1.5 seconds for gheal. You will have to cast another spell, you will have to cast shadow fiend. There are animations you may have to move, you have phase changes etc. A cast rate of 1/2.7 for gheal and 1/1.65 for CoH is effectively total spam.
If you are chaincasting rank 7 gheal, then clearcasting is without question a 6% reduction in mana cost. How is it possible that you won't use every single proc if you have a gheal going off every 2.7 seconds.
Potions are an average of 2400 mana every 2 minutes. That is 2400/120*5 = 100 mp5 [edited]
In practical terms its less however since in a 10 minute fight, although you can potentially squeeze 5 pot timers, you can only realistically get benefit for 4-4.5 timers. Anyway lets keep it to 87.5 mp5. Add alche stone buff and that becomes 140 mp5 [edited]
Mana spring with the 25% talent buff is 20*1.25*5/2 = 62.5mp5
Mana time with 12k mana is 0.24*12000/60 = 48mp5
Shadow priest is 350mp5.
Total: 350+62.5+48+140 = 600.5mp5. [edited]
Shadow fiend returns on average 4k mana every 6 minutes = 4000*5/360 = 55mp5
Total 655.5mp5 [edited]
If you are chain casting that leaves you little mana regen potential from inner focus/clearcasting, but lets say its another 15mp5.
total 670.5mp5. Add to that 100% FSR clearcasting and 400 mp5 charactersheet regen => 1070.5mp5 [edited]
1 gheal rank 7 every 3 seconds equals a mana drain of 705*5/3*0.94 = 1104 mp5. With a mana pool of 12k you can do this forever.
Total spam of rank 6 (1/2.7) has a mana drain of 1110mp5. With 1070.5mp5 regen and a 12k mana pool you can also maintain this forever.
Total spam of CoH (1/1.65) has a mana drain of 1228 mp5. You can maintain this for 6.3 minutes.
Lets see what kind of numbers one can generate this way.
Rank 7 every 3 seconds for 11 minutes gives you 750k effective healing with 40% overheal at 2300 healing
Rank 6 every 2.7 seconds for 10 minutes gives you 700k effective healing with 40% overheal at 2300 healing
CoH every 1.65 seconds for 6.3 minutes gives you 570k effective healing with 50% overheal at 2300 healing
The only thing you cant mindlessly spam with 400 mp5 a resto shaman and a shadowpriest is flash heal.
WWS stats from brutallus (10 samples over a range of total DPS) suggests that the average fight for brutallus is 5'30'' and priest healers cast an average of 105 max rank greater heals. This is 1 gheal every 3.3 seconds.
[e] As an example: If once every 4 minutes you drop your casting rate to 3 casts in 20 seconds, your overall gheal/sec rate is 3/20*20/(4*60)+ 1/2.5*(4*60-20)/(4*60) = (3-20/2.5)/(4*60)+1/2.5 = 0.38 or 1 gheal every 2.63 seconds. Losing just 12.5 seconds of casting time in 4 minutes already shaves 0.1seconds off your gheal/sec rate. [/e]
Damn you got a boring assignment :/ M'uru P1 is actually one of the most hectic fights for me, almost as hectic as P2. What's your healer setup?
Didn't say it was boring ... just monotonous. The tank spikes are ... exciting, to say the least. I have the fate of the raid in my hands.
6 healers: resto druid healing the prot paladin, and rolling LBx3 + Rejuv on the sentinal tank. Me on the sentinal tank. Paladin+shaman on each side group; shaman heals raid with CHeal through the tank. I assist the shaman on the near side since there are 13 people on near side, and only 10 on far side (plus sentinal & spawn tanks off in the distance).
My total healing done for the night actually broke down to 50% GHeal (6 million healing done), 45% CoH (5.x million healing done), and 5% random stuff - the odd flash, some renews, some bindings, etc..
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - R.A. Heinlein
First of all the targets are unrealistic. Its absoludely impossible to manage to a cast rate of 1 cast per 2.5 seconds for gheal and 1 cast per 1.5 seconds for gheal. You will have to cast another spell, you will have to cast shadow fiend. There are animations you may have to move, you have phase changes etc. A cast rate of 1/2.7 for gheal and 1/1.65 for CoH is effectively total spam.
If you are chaincasting rank 7 gheal, then clearcasting is without question a 6% reduction in mana cost. How is it possible that you won't use every single proc if you have a gheal going off every 2.7 seconds.
If you read his post, he made it pretty obvious he's ignoring these sorts of things. The goal is to establish a hardcap on mana drain; in essence, saying "You can't spend more mana than this."
Originally Posted by Havoc12
Potions are an average of 2100 mana every 2 minutes. That is 2100/120*5 = 87.5 mp5
Without an alchemist stone, super mana pots will give you an average of (3000 + 1800) / 2 mana every 120 seconds, or 2400 mana/120 = 100 mp5
Originally Posted by Havoc12
In practical terms its less however since in a 10 minute fight, although you can potentially squeeze 5 pot timers, you can only realistically get benefit for 4-4.5 timers. Anyway lets keep it to 87.5 mp5. Add alche stone buff and that becomes 122.5 mp5
Mana spring with the 25% talent buff is 20*1.25 = 25mp5
Mana time with 12k mana is 0.24*12000/60 = 48mp5
Shadow priest is 350mp5.
...(snip)...
The only thing you cant mindlessly spam with 400 mp5 a resto shaman and a shadowpriest is flash heal.
Again, the point isn't to say "You should do this" or "You can do this now!" It's to say that "This is the hardcap on the mana drain given the most commonly-used spells. You cannot exceed this mana drain no matter how hard you try (excepting haste, but it scales linearly with your haste). Therefore, because this is the maximum mana drain achievable, if you have more mp5 than this, it's overkill and a waste, and those item points would be better allocated elsewhere."
I'm doing MH/BT at the moment and if our raid is not too stupid to kill the ghosts before they kill the healers at Teron we work on BB. We have a setup with 2 druis, 2 priests, 2 shamans and 2 pallys. But I think they want to give one more slot to our DDs. We seldom have a SP for healers and often enough no shaman. Currently I'm not very happy with my priest so I spend much of the last few days reading this thread.
I stumbled over the discussions about CoH or not and if renew is valid or not. Maybe I can contribute something here. Since two ore three weeks ago I was our guilds IDS-priest. I've done that job since somewhere in MC or BWL and never tried CoH. Since our raid had no problems when I had to rotate for other priests and I was told that in Sunwell you have to have CoH I respecced to get at least a fealing about how CoH works. (I cannot decide one over the other if I never tried it.)
When I did so my overall healing droped significantly. But after some runs learning how to play with CoH I'm back at where I were in the healinig meters maybe somewhat better. (The other thing I realised the imense drop of candles I needed. 120 to 60.)
I was and am asigned to MT healing most of the time. But since trash fills a good amount of the healing-time in MH and BT and the MTs dont need much concentration after the pull, I do a big chunk of raidhealing, too.
I really tried to do as much CoHs as possible after I respecced and was disappointed how seldom it was really usefull. Only after I combined CoH with my other healing strategies I climbed back up in the healingmeters. So my conclusion is: You can numbercruch whatever you want but outside the lab CoH is not the one-click-wonder many priests think.
For example if I look at the melee-group. There will often be at least one who will not take some aoe but pulls aggro from a trashmob or other. I can CoH there, but if I give him renew (most times my PoM is reserved for the tank I'm supposed to heal) and CoH (or let the other priest CoH and switch back to my tank) the whole group is healed much smoother. Sometimes I simply maintain up to 8 hots (3 tanks, 5 melees) and PoM and than stopcasting GH1 on my tank to regen. Maybe this looks stupid but mosttimes thats all the melees need - they stay about 100-200 in range of max-HP. You could do this with CoH but you would do overhealing, or your group would drop lower in between (well that may not be a problem if the stupid melees would not try to pull aggro everytime they see a mob) or you would only have small brakes for regen and have to wait again to come back out of 5s-rule.
I've seen some tables for the comparision between renew and CoH and somebody pointed out that you have to do a lot at the beginnig if you heal with HoTs while you would not have to do so much in a row with CoH. I dont see why this is bad. I prefere to have a row of heals and than a longer break than to heal break heal break. Since I could stay longer OO5SR with the first approach. The first 5s after the last cast are only a third as valuable as the next 5.
The last table that was represented that tried to get the longest possible breakes with CoH let the group drop down to 4k needed heal befor CoH started. I would not call that safe and in my raid there would be some CH in between and shamis going oom needlessly.
We did not kill BB jet and most times we tried I was assigned to a tank who more often than not stacks up to 23 debuffs so I realy could not do much group healing. After reading this thread and thinking about the pros and cons I would prefere the renew-strategy over the CoH-strategy especialy if phase 2 is about to start. Everybody has to spread out so CoH has a great chance not to hit all targets and if the group has a hot you can switch most of your healing to the felrage-target. The debuff will be finished before the group will get additional dmg so there is the chance that you dont have to do much about the health of the group, soon. The group most likely will get CH since the shamis would chaincast it on the felrage-target. So renew will help to not let the group drop too low and the CH will pull them up again (or be wasted). If you have the time you can help with CoH. If not the group will have a good enough chance to survive.
I nearly never (not speaking about special encounters like Najentus or BB) found CoH the spell to realy make the difference between someone dying or living since mosttimes its a single person who is in need and most of CoH would be wastet anyway. Mosttimes CoH is used to top up a group which is fine - but is not such important. So CoH is a nice tool but you can do nearly as well without it in most situations.
While looking at the melees I find PoM a much nicer tool than CoH. It's only one instant and heals also up to five people who are getting dmg at the moment. You cannot control at whom it will land after the first person but normaly it will land on another melee (or tank or bombing mage) and help there. In MH and BT-trash I can hear it jumping and healing around quite nicely. It is a waste to not use nearly every CD (ok keeping the tank alife just now may be more important sometimes but starting PoM on him helps there, too).
If not in a special fight for CoH (maybe something like Najentus etc) I would never be caught with a high percentage of CoH healing. Yesterday with a MH-clear I was 2. in Recount followed by another CoH priest. (I dont have access to WWS.) The spell I healed most with was PoM(32%) followed by GH(23%) and renew(22%). CoH only got 14%. The other priest had 31% renew, 28%GH, 28%CoH (with 8% FH before PoM). Since we had similar enough assingements I think the values are comparable. I did not think about it while raiding (and I hide recount while in combat) but with using CoH less I healed more than the other priest. We both healed more with renew and GH than with CoH. (And we had a low useage of FH so you cannot call us a heal-sniper as was said about someone else who posted here and had a low usage of CoH.) We also got between the two shamans which is not such an easy task so we did nocht sleep with our healing. (Well I will not show up as high in WWS since PoM would not count as my healng, but who cares?)
My conclusion is that there are some encounters which call for CoH. And it is a very easy tool to heal much while doing trash but thats all. It is not such better than the other tools of a priest especialy the other instants.
Most times I read about the comparision between Renew and CoH in this thread Renew was not given a fair chance since everytime someone spoke about it they put it in a real world situations (CH comes in between and most of the heal is wasted) but did not do the same to CoH. You assume that everytime you do CoH you have at least 3 peaply to heal. Sure than CoH may be better - but maybe at least one of them gets a CH nearly at the same moment, too. The CoH or the CH-procc would be wasted, too. If you look at the whole raid it does not matter if the shaman or the priest does the overheal (if it matters anyway). The other question is: What do you do while waiting to get 3 people of one group who are near enough together to become enough dmg? What do you do if only 2 get dmg? Or if all get dmg but 2 are standing appart of the other? Do you do nothing? Put CoH in a raid situation like you do it for Renew and than you can do your comparisions. Dont whine that you will have more or less overheal with a spell - not everything is for healing efficency and even so you will get a big enough overheal in a raid with every spell. Live with it.
Renew has its value even for a CoH-priest. I think the same can be said about FH. (Topping up a mage who just lost his aggro to a tank but does not stop bombing after he got a shield....) A priest who says only 1 to 3 of his spells are valuable and should be used should think about rerolling a healer who only has 1 to 3 heals (or healing methods).
If you read his post, he made it pretty obvious he's ignoring these sorts of things. The goal is to establish a hardcap on mana drain; in essence, saying "You can't spend more mana than this."
I did and what I am saying is he is calculating the hard cap in a way which is unrealistic. It is not possible to get 100% casting time, unless you stand still in a corner and mindlessly press a button as fast as you can. 100% cast time models are simply not valid.
Without an alchemist stone, super mana pots will give you an average of (3000 + 1800) / 2 mana every 120 seconds, or 2400 mana/120 = 100 mp5
Thanks for the correction I edited my post.
Again, the point isn't to say "You should do this" or "You can do this now!" It's to say that "This is the hardcap on the mana drain given the most commonly-used spells. You cannot exceed this mana drain no matter how hard you try (excepting haste, but it scales linearly with your haste). Therefore, because this is the maximum mana drain achievable, if you have more mp5 than this, it's overkill and a waste, and those item points would be better allocated elsewhere."
The hard cap calculated with that method is way higher than what is realistic. 95% maximum cast time, is an assumption that must be taken for granted when calculating the mana hard cap.
The best and most realistic way to calculate a regen hard cap for a specific encounter, is to determine how much total healing and HPS is required and calculate the mana drain from this.
If your potential given your current regen is say 1.5k HPS and 750k total healing and the fight requires 1.2k HPS and 300k total healing, you are *way* above regen hardcap.
I did and what I am saying is he is calculating the hard cap in a way which is unrealistic. It is not possible to get 100% casting time, unless you stand still in a corner and mindlessly press a button as fast as you can. 100% cast time models are simply not valid.
I wouldn't immediately jump the gun and say that it's a bad thing to make an unrealistic hardcap. That's the point of a hardcap, it's to say "You CANNOT exceed this number, no matter how hard you try."
From there, you can work in the specifics of the encounter to create an encounter-specific softcap, that's much more realistic and useful for modeling purposes. But never discredit an upper bound merely because it's unrealistic.
Originally Posted by Havoc12
The hard cap calculated with that method is way higher than what is realistic. 95% maximum cast time, is an assumption that must be taken for granted when calculating the mana hard cap.
The best and most realistic way to calculate a regen hard cap for a specific encounter, is to determine how much total healing and HPS is required and calculate the mana drain from this.
If your potential given your current regen is say 1.5k HPS and 750k total healing and the fight requires 1.2k HPS and 300k total healing, you are *way* above regen hardcap.
You're speaking of creating an encounter-specific softcap. He is demonstrating a global hardcap, the whole intention of which (if I'm not mistaken) is for it to be the absolute maximum achievable mana drain. It's an important, and useful, distinction. Your softcap is far more practical and realistic than his hardcap, but his hardcap gives you something to put any calculated softcap in perspective.
Or perhaps I'm just getting something different out of his post. I see it as "here's a worst-case scenario" and then the maximum practical mp5 required to support a worst-case scenario. You can obviously scale this dependant on raid support, mana pool, fight specifics, OoFSR time, and what have you, but you can never exceed the maximum mana drain that he calculated. So, as you customize specific to your fight from this baseline, you can then determine if you have too much mp5 for the fight, and whether or not it might be worth it to regem/reprioritize what stats you're stacking.
Obviously, you can increase the hardcap with haste; 10% haste requires 10% more mana, so if you have more mp5 than your specific softcap requires, you can raise it (situationally) with haste. Again, I say situationally, referring back to my earlier arguements about haste, and how it can either increase or decrease your mana regeneration, depending on if you're landing more spells in the duration, or just the same number in a shorter period of time.
I think you should look closely at those tables and compare how the health situation is in the renew and CoH senarios. CoH/pom does a better job in keeping health deficits low than CoH/pom/Renew. Also the tables clearly show that you can gain more OFSR time with CoH/PoM than with renew/CoH/PoM.
If someone prefers the renew/CoH/PoM approach then its for reasons other than efficiency and effectiveness.
Getting CH bounces is in no way detrimental to either approach. In fact its beneficial, if one undestands the dynamics of CoH.
You will find that if PoM can jump between all the people needing heals then CoH will heal all of them too.
CoH/PoM has a good deal of smart targeting. If one person has less health he will get more pom bounces.
As for the rest I have used CoH in the entire content from karazhan to the end of T5 and my experience is very different from yours. I find it to be an essential tool for maximising my effective healing. My healing would be lower without question if I did not have CoH. The power of CoH varies with the proficiency of the healer with the spell and the raid tactics. This is why when you say look I used CoH less than the other guy and healed more, it does not really mean anything. Unless you can show us the exact stats for both of you, and talk us through your raid tactic there is no way to make any sort of logical conclusion from this.
CoH is a very powerfull spell, but effective use of it, is not straightforward. You can go wrong with CoH. You can burn a lot of mana and time for low effective healing, if you don't use it well. Your comments lead me to believe that you do not yet appreciate the true dynamics of CoH. All I can say is give it time.
You will find that if PoM can jump between all the people needing heals then CoH will heal all of them too.
No - they have to be in one group. This seldom is true to everybody outside the melee-group. Normaly we have at least 4 other peaple at the mob and maybe some bombers or shadows are in range, too.
Originally Posted by Havoc12
CoH is a very powerfull spell, but effective use of it, is not straightforward. You can go wrong with CoH. You can burn a lot of mana and time for low effective healing, if you don't use it well. Your comments lead me to believe that you do not yet appreciate the true dynamics of CoH. All I can say is give it time.
Yes, I think you are right. But I do not think that everybody who says CoH is such a better spell than everything else does appreciate the true dynamics of all the other spells. CoH is for efficency I dont deny that. But raidhealing is not only about (mana)-efficency. I think someone who had to compensate for not having CoH long may know some tricks with the other spells where a CoH-usere would not think about.
One of the more subtle skills a CoH-user has to develop is picking the target amongst the 5 in the party from whom the CoH will heal. This doesn't apply on fights like Najentus, Tidewalker, Gorefiend, RoS Kalecgos, Mother (one-group strat), BB, P2 Illidan; those are fights were either the whole raid is close enough together that a CoH on one party member is guaranteed to perform healing on all 5, or fights where the groups have specific positioning assignments.
I'm talking more about demon phase Illidan, Council, Kael, possibly Vashj, and Lurker. You need to be able to pick a target roughly in the middle of their group. I've found heroics to be great practice for getting a feel for this; often, the mage / lock is schway far away from the tank / melee, so I try to position myself between them and CoH myself.
05/19/08, 11:53 AM
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