Stamina is never worthless for casters. If you had 0 stamina on your gear there would be very few fights in the game that you would be able to function in. I'm not sure where this myth came from, or why people propagate it. Imagine Brutallus with 4000 hp. You'd die to burn every time and you'd be completely unable to soak slashes. You couldn't do Felmyst because you wouldn't be able to take Encapsulate ticks without some *amazing* healers. You couldn't do Kalecgos because you wouldn't be able to take the ticks of damage long enough to even make it to a portal phase. You couldn't do Twins because a Shadow Nova would 1 shot you. You couldn't do Kil'jaeden because you wouldn't be able to take a single Shadow Spike tick.
Saying that stamina is worthless is a huge fallacy.
Keeping the charges mechanic. There are glyphs, talents now that increase the number of charges. I've discussed this in length before.
This is a classic case of pure hard-headedness. Reminds me of the whole Tactical Mastery thing for Warriors back before TBC came out.
Warriors bitched and bitched because every warrior had to spec into TM, and Blizzard absolutely refused to budge despite the fact that they had just made Innervate and Imp. Arcane Explosion baseline, and ultimately they finally gave in and made the first 2 points trainable and the last 3 points optional - coincidentally something I had suggested before but I'm sure my post was never read.
Similarly, you have Blizzard going in and eliminating the poison skill for the sake of doing away with things that are annoying, yet bring up Inner Fire and "that's different".
My suspicion is that Spirit will become a much less worthwhile stat in WotLK due to the way mana regeneration abilities function in raids - as a percentage of mana, rather than a fixed sum. Since your Intellect adds to your mana regeneration (albeit not as much as Spirit) and then you get an enormous feedback every time a Survival Hunter/Retribution Paladin/Shadow Priest tags you with his buff, it seems likely that +1 Intellect will return more mana than +1 Spirit in most PvE raiding scenarios.
Assuming constant Replenishment, 1 intellect increases your return from Replenishment by 0.005 * 15 * 1.1 (Kings) * 5 = 0.4125 mp5 for holy and more for discipline, in addition to the effective mp5 from raising max mana and the effects on spirit (which of course mean that you shouldn't completely neglect spirit). So yeah, that'd make it somewhat more worthwhile than spirit, depending on FSR% and how much you get Replenishment (nearly 100% in 10 mans, possibly not in 25 mans if you only bring 1 mana battery).
This is a classic case of pure hard-headedness. Reminds me of the whole Tactical Mastery thing for Warriors back before TBC came out.
Warriors bitched and bitched because every warrior had to spec into TM, and Blizzard absolutely refused to budge despite the fact that they had just made Innervate and Imp. Arcane Explosion baseline, and ultimately they finally gave in and made the first 2 points trainable and the last 3 points optional - coincidentally something I had suggested before but I'm sure my post was never read.
Similarly, you have Blizzard going in and eliminating the poison skill for the sake of doing away with things that are annoying, yet bring up Inner Fire and "that's different".
It's the same with Warlocks and improved corruption. When they were working on 2.0 and dot coefficients, Kalgan admitted that they nerfed corruption's coefficient from 1.2 to .9-something because most warlocks take imp corruption to make it instant anyway, yet at the same time refuse to make it a base-line talent. Just like arcane explosion, if you don't have the talent, almost no one uses it.
I still can't fathom what made them think charges were a good idea. I wish it were back to the 3min duration version we had in vanilla wow.
Purgespam will kill the priest as quickly in WotLK as it does now. Maybe Rapture could get buffed to return the mana not only with absorbed damage but also when the shields are getting dispelled, or else I fear the disc priest will stay the most mana inefficent arena healer.
How does critting a heal on someone with Mortal Strike up work with Divine Aegis?
For example, say my flash heal hits for about 2k base (like it does on my 70 s3/s4 priest), and 3k crits. I flash heal my partner (under mortal strike) for 1.5k. Does Divine Aegis base its shield on 1.5k or 3k?
Nonetheless--the purgespam thing is actually less of an issue now, because of the larger number of junk debuffs. Grace might suck, but if you crit heal someone (with a 51+x/12+x/0 spec) you now can throw on Divine Aegis, Grace and Inspiration--from a single cast. If you yourself were crit, you're proccing Martyrdom, Focused Will, and Blessed Recovery. That's up to *SIX* junk buffs on yourself, all with 30% dispel resistance.
The latter is important to note, actually. I can't afford to take 5/5 Silent Resolve for 20% right now. But I can certainly take 3/3 Silent Resolve for 30%!
The end result is that dispel mechanics (especially for/against priests) are going to get increasingly aggravating. Nearly every class will have 30% dispel protection now: mages, paladins (for hands, at least), shaman (not that it matters as much), priests, druids (note: for HoTs only!), and many warlocks (as you can get Soul Link with affliction now). I'm not looking forward to my Afflicted2 mod spamming even more "failed to dispel" messages at me.
Edit:
On the topic of inner fire charges:
Most of my problems with Inner Fire would be solved if there was a cooldown on how fast individual charges could be eaten, much like Shaman elemental shields. This would at least assure me that Inner Fire would still be up at the end of a rogue's stunlock.
My suspicion is that Spirit will become a much less worthwhile stat in WotLK due to the way mana regeneration abilities function in raids - as a percentage of mana, rather than a fixed sum. Since your Intellect adds to your mana regeneration (albeit not as much as Spirit) and then you get an enormous feedback every time a Survival Hunter/Retribution Paladin/Shadow Priest tags you with his buff, it seems likely that +1 Intellect will return more mana than +1 Spirit in most PvE raiding scenarios.
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I disagree. You are only considering spirit as a function of regen when it provides more then that. Also, you are making the assumption that we can fully depend upon replenishment for our regen. The worst part about it (unless the math works out such that the buff is up on most mana users all the time) is that its totally unpredictable. Before you could depend upon getting x amount of mana back from your spriest. But now that may or may not be the case.
The whole stubborn refusal to recognize the faults in inner fire is just mind boggling to me. I really don't understand their reasoning other then "we don't want to fix it." And now he acknowledges our point when it comes to DS but refuses to change that either. Wtf? Not in this expansion, but maybe the next? How freaking hard is it to just remove DS from the tree? It's one point. They could just yank DS out and move iDS into it's place. Problem solved. I'm just totally aghast that a blizz employee keeps treating priests this way.
It's the same with Warlocks and improved corruption. When they were working on 2.0 and dot coefficients, Kalgan admitted that they nerfed corruption's coefficient from 1.2 to .9-something because most warlocks take imp corruption to make it instant anyway, yet at the same time refuse to make it a base-line talent. Just like arcane explosion, if you don't have the talent, almost no one uses it.
I still can't fathom what made them think charges were a good idea. I wish it were back to the 3min duration version we had in vanilla wow.
There's a real inconsistency too - which just makes the whole thing even more frustrating for players.
The 'discussion' that Koraa had about Inner Fire had something to do with mana cost, but many players pointed out that Inner Fire is far from 'dirt cheap' without even considering the charges, and that if you consider the average re-casting required in any situation where you're actually going to be hit it's extremely expensive.
Currently, Inner Fire is worthless unless you're being hit, where the spell becomes extremely expensive. In WoTLK, it will be useful for the spellpower boost, but the armor portion is still worthless unless being hit where the same problem pops up again.
It's just bad design - I'm sure part of the reasoning is wanting to maintain some of the flavor of the original Inner Fire from WC3, but they already deviated from that massively when they made it the 'self buff' for Priests rather than making it a cool targettable buff.
I can't honestly understand why the problems with Inner Fire (or with other things) aren't being acknowledged.
The fact that when soloing I'm not even bothering with Inner Fire because it's just so annoying is enough of a reason to remove the charges. Good game design first, balance later.
Same thing with Lightwell. I simply don't want the spell because it's a pain for people to use. It doesn't matter how powerful or weak it is, if it's not fun it should be made fun or removed.
Saying that stamina is worthless is a huge fallacy.
It's called "Primal Suicidecloth" for a reason
Anyway, here's how I see disc pve heal stat balancing when gearing (haven't seen beta):
-Enough stamina to survive
-Enough intellect/spirit to not run out of mana (even in worst case scenarios, "Shadowpriest/Survival Hunter is not online" isn't an acceptable excuse)
-Rest healing power stats
Now, regarding "healing power stats", I'd rate them like this, from best to worst:
1)+crit
2)+spellpower
3)+haste
Crit because Divine Aegis effect and Inspiration are based on criticals. Spellpower is in second place, because...well, spellpower is in every single caster item out there. You can't ignore it, you will always have the bare minimum amount. I'm not sure if spellhaste is needed for disc priests, and disc priests get +5% spell haste anyway, so haste isn't something you should go after, I guess.
Interesting thing is, will there be enough cloth items with both +crit AND regen stats? From what I've seen, there are not many items with both: Items - World of Warcraft
That could lead into having to choose between regen and +crit.
My suspicion is that Spirit will become a much less worthwhile stat in WotLK due to the way mana regeneration abilities function in raids - as a percentage of mana, rather than a fixed sum. Since your Intellect adds to your mana regeneration (albeit not as much as Spirit) and then you get an enormous feedback every time a Survival Hunter/Retribution Paladin/Shadow Priest tags you with his buff, it seems likely that +1 Intellect will return more mana than +1 Spirit in most PvE raiding scenarios.
This is an interesting idea. So I did some napkin math on it (well, a Mathematica-napkin). If I have the formulas right, then there are plenty of cases in which intellect is better, at least for the generous assumption that Vamp Touch is always up. I may have missed something, though, so I'll show my work.
First, we define a function for mana-per-5, assuming 100% up-time of Vampiric Touch and Blessing of Kings:
where s is spirit, i is intellect, m is base mana before mana from intellect (it cancels later), and r is the rate of spirit regen (between 0 and 1). To find out when additional intellect is better than additional spirit (assuming you can only increase one or the other), we compute the rates of change for s and i:
When dM/di > dM/ds, intellect is your better option. This reduces to an ugly condition:
So maybe the easiest way to see the result of this is to make a table of the right-hand side, for different values of r and s:
The values inside the table are the amounts of intellect that you need LESS THAN, to make intellect better than spirit. In other words, if you have more than the amount of intellect listed, spirit is better.
Consider the case of having 700 spirit and an average proportion regen of 0.5 (0.3 means always in the 5sr). Then if you have less than 778 intellect, additional intellect returns more regen than does additional spirit. That seems pretty easy to satisfy.
I don't know what spirit will be like at 80, but you can figure the relevant r with:
where p is the proportion of time inside the five second rule.
For a Discipline priest, these thresholds will be even larger, because of Mental Strength and Enlightenment. Putting both in as multiplicative effects---1.15 and 1.05 respectively---I get:
Anyway, if I've done the formulas correctly, it should be pretty simple from here to compute the optimal intellect:spirit for maximizing regen. I'm afraid, however, that it will depend up the absolute amount of stat points you have to distribute between intellect and spirit, as well as the rate r.
Does anyone know the exact mechanic for replenishment yet?
Will it target the 10 with the lowest numeric or percentage mana?
If several sources have the ability in the raid, will it overwrite itself or will 2 replenishment cover 20 raid-members?
What are the range?
If it targets the raid-members with lowest numerical mana I can see how certain classes will take advantage of this,
prot/retri palas, hunters, enhancement shamans do have a rather small mana pool so they will always get replenishment then, warlock have a larger manapool but wants to avoid life-tapping so they will empty their mana pool to take advantage of replenishment so they don't need to lifetap so much. If it works like this, healers that are always a bit conservative with their mana-usage will most likely not benefit from replenishment until the end of an encounter, in other words, a very low uptime on replenishment for priests.
As there are 15-20 mana-users in a raid, there is a rather large chance that some of them want be able to get any or very little mana from replenishment if it only targets 10.
That's pretty awesome. If I couple that with the glyph I might almost have it where it should have already been by default
Not really, the rate at which charges are lost needs to be normalized, ie. it shouldn't lose a charge more often than every second or so. Otherwise we still have the huge discrepancies in duration depending on the type of attacker.
I can't honestly understand why the problems with Inner Fire (or with other things) aren't being acknowledged.
The fact that when soloing I'm not even bothering with Inner Fire because it's just so annoying is enough of a reason to remove the charges. Good game design first, balance later.
There is no problem. Inner Fire is cheap. It costs you a global every now and then. You can keep charges up by Shielding yourself. People being lazy doesn't mean the design is bad.
Inner Fire cheap, really? While soloing it has to be recast constantly, same in PvP. Even when no recasting is necessary it costs more than the other armor spells over time. The only exception is recasting it after death - but a priest will still spend more mana rebuffing than the other two cloth casters when that happens.
The recasting is a problem against dual wielding opponents, or hunters. Recasting every 15 seconds or so is actually a lot. Add another opponent and you're recasting it every 8 seconds. Add another and you're recasting every 5 seconds. Don't tell me this isn't completely flawed. Granted I'm depicting one of the worse scenarios here but it illustrates the problem very well.
Hency why I'm saying that the rate at which charges are lost needs to be normalized. And all this said, charges are not fun. for this reason alone they should be removed, and IF rebalanced accordingly if needed.
Inner Fire cheap, really? While soloing it has to be recast constantly, same in PvP. Even when no recasting is necessary it costs more than the other armor spells over time. The only exception is recasting it after death - but a priest will still spend more mana rebuffing than the other two cloth casters when that happens.
The recasting is a problem against dual wielding opponents, or hunters. Recasting every 15 seconds or so is actually a lot. Add another opponent and you're recasting it every 8 seconds. Add another and you're recasting every 5 seconds. Don't tell me this isn't completely flawed. Granted I'm depicting one of the worse scenarios here but it illustrates the problem very well.
Hency why I'm saying that the rate at which charges are lost needs to be normalized. And all this said, charges are not fun. for this reason alone they should be removed, and IF rebalanced accordingly if needed.
What's the difference between recasting shield to mitigate damage and recasting Inner Fire to mitigate damage?
The effect is PW:S is very noticable. That of Inner Fire is barely noticable (12% less damage taken for me, and I'm not refering to the mitigation numbers in the char sheet here). I don't bother with PW:S either for soloing by the way, unless it's needed.
The charges are good for Priests, particularly in PvP. It means that the spell gets more armor than it would get otherwise. Solo'ing is hardly a meaningful test for the usefulness of anything. And if you find it annoying AND hardly noticeable then you might as well ignore it.
I'd be rather upset if the charges got removed and the armor halved.
Stamina is a bit like spell hit. It's great until you have enough - and then it's basically pointless. However, unlike spell hit, most of the time you'll get enough Stamina by gearing appropriately for your other stats while ignoring Stamina.
The values inside the table are the amounts of intellect that you need LESS THAN, to make intellect better than spirit. In other words, if you have more than the amount of intellect listed, spirit is better.
To add some perspective, for current Priests (well, Holy Priests since no one raids with Discipline right now), your optimal point is approximately twice as much Spirit and Intellect. Your figures indicate that it will go about 50% the other way.
I'd be rather upset if the charges got removed and the armor halved.
In PvP, I'm not sure it would matter due to armor penetration.
Assuming a PvP Priest has 2850 Armor, which means 21.29% Melee Damage Reduction. Inner Fire raises the Armor to 4420 Armor and 28.39% Melee Damage Reduction. So Inner Fire gives you a damage reduction of
.
That means you got 1.8 less attacks at the time Inner Fire was up. When a Rogue is attacking you, that's most likely not more than 1k Damage, so casting another Flash Heal seems more worthy against rogues.
When two Melees are attacking you Inner Fire will last about 8 seconds, so you must spend 337.5 Mana every 8 seconds (211 mp5) an every 5-6th Global Cooldown. I don't think that's really "cheap".
Assuming Inner Fire only gives half the armor it gives now, but doesn't have any charges, it'll raise your Armor from 2850 to 3635, which means 24.52% Melee Damage Reduction. So you get
more damage from melee attacks. But it saves you a lot of Mana and Global Cooldowns that you can invest in more heals and dispells, so I think it would be more than worth it.
I don't understand why people complain about losing Inner Fire while soloing. Sure, in PvP it comes off way too quickly with 20 charges when facing a rogue or enhancement shaman, and that's a problem that may need to be addressed. But you don't lose Inner Fire charges if you have Power Word: Shield up, and that's why currently in Live, I only have to recast Inner Fire prematurely if I mess up my rotation or I fight a stronger-than-usual named mob.
I don't know why you don't bother with Power Word: Shield while soloing (I don't know if you're referring to Live or WotLK Beta). PW:S affords me 100% spell pushback resistance, no loss of Inner Fire charges, and keeps me from using a heal. Although, my priest is also Disc on live and has 50% damage reflection and is 15% stronger, so the shield hardly breaks during a fight unless I am taking on multiple mobs.
Inner Fire is also very noticeable. With it up, your PW:S goes down less. Your complaints, Shan, are because of your playstyle, not because of design issues. If PW:S shatters from just 4 mob attacks in WotLK while leveling, however, then okay, I can see some justification of complaint.
Back to Itemisation: Looking at the Naxxramas 10 Players Loot (Build 8905 - Dungeon and Raid Loot), all Non-Set Items (with one exception) with Spirit also have Hit or Crit, while the Non-Set Items with Haste only have MP5, but no Spirit. Seems like we don't have any choice but gear for Crit and forget about Haste...
I don't understand why people complain about losing Inner Fire while soloing. Sure, in PvP it comes off way too quickly with 20 charges when facing a rogue or enhancement shaman, and that's a problem that may need to be addressed. But you don't lose Inner Fire charges if you have Power Word: Shield up, and that's why currently in Live, I only have to recast Inner Fire prematurely if I mess up my rotation or I fight a stronger-than-usual named mob.
I don't know why you don't bother with Power Word: Shield while soloing (I don't know if you're referring to Live or WotLK Beta). PW:S affords me 100% spell pushback resistance, no loss of Inner Fire charges, and keeps me from using a heal. Although, my priest is also Disc on live and has 50% damage reflection and is 15% stronger, so the shield hardly breaks during a fight unless I am taking on multiple mobs.
Inner Fire is also very noticeable. With it up, your PW:S goes down less. Your complaints, Shan, are because of your playstyle, not because of design issues. If PW:S shatters from just 4 mob attacks in WotLK while leveling, however, then okay, I can see some justification of complaint.
The reason I don't use Inner Fire nor PW:S is because they are not mana efficient. Using them gives me more downtime than not using them. That is without a full disc spec which definitely wants to use PW:S as often as possible. I'm talking about soloing since that's a good example, not because I'm particularely concerned about it.
I'll simply quote a post from the beta forums which saves me from having to go into detail regarding the efficiency.
Here's another way to look at it.
Renew - 656 mana, 4450 heal, 1.5s GCD
Inner Fire - 540 mana, 1.5s GCD
Flash Heal - 625 mana, 2100 heal, 1.5s cast
Inner Fire provides 2440 armor, increasing my damage reduction from 10.38% to 21.63%. That is an increase of 11.25%.
Now, in order for the damage reduction from Inner Fire to equal the amount of healing provided by renew (which only costs 116 more mana), I need to take 39555.55 damage over the course of 20 hits, or 1977 damage per hit.
In order for the damage reduction from Inner Fire to equal the amount of healing provided by Flash Heal (which only costs 85 more mana), I need to take 18666.66 damage over the course of 20 hits, or 933 damage a hit.
In reality, Inner Fire reduces between 30-50 damage a hit. Spread over 20 charges that means that the spell reduces 600-1000 damage.
09/05/08, 1:28 PM
