Kortar

Well, it depends on the player I suppose. But I still recall running MC/BWL back in the day and all the Mages being decked out in wall-to-wall greens with +damage because their set items gave them all sorts of useless stats they didn't need.

In BC, the tier items weren't generally the best possible choice for any given slot, but at least you didn't have to farm the AH for 'top end' gear.

qft

About the only way I can see Holy ever wanting crit is if Blizzard did something like changed Holy Specialization to give +100% crit effect bonus rather than +5% critical effect chance. Which, now that I think about it, would probably fix a good deal of the Discipline/Holy balance problems. Holy would still be able to outgun Discipline single target in a theoretical sense, but with downranking nerfed, Holy Greater Heals would be awfully hard to land fully unless you waited for your tank to be near dead before casting. On the other hand, it would provide a significant buff to Divine Aegis for Discipline.

While I haven't run down all the breakpoints, it's very likely that an optimal set of gear for Holy would almost ignore spellpower in favor of spell haste. Which is definitely not the case with Shadow.

 

tasha

In my opinion, this would mean blizzard screwed up the mana regeneration again.
As an offtopic : they will be changing mindflay, so that it has a better coeficient (hopefully it's not considered as a dot anymore). Haste would be an acceptable stat for shadow, after spellpower of course. Yes I really hope it will be the same gear

On another topic : for PvP, isn't anyone afraid of the crit-heavy emphasis blizzard is putting on disc tree ?
- The first spells you usually cast are PW:S, PoM and Renew. And they are the ones doing most of the healing.
- Your spells improved by crit rating are interruptable and obviously require you to stop moving. But of course they are the ones really helping during a burst.
- Crits are still random ... I don't want to explain to my partner : "Sorry, you died because my penance didn't crit."
After seeing the PvP gear, I don't want to pick up the crit gear anyway, but the spirit gear. Maybe gem haste before crit even... (nice dispel glyph).

Is the new Guardian spirit working on beta ? 10% max healing as instant, this seems a little raw...

 

Sarjin

On the other hand, it would also be a nice buff for Serendipity. I normally aim my heals to bring the target to full, which would mean a 200% heal would either proc Serendipity, or in the case of a bit bigger burst if the target took more damage than expected. That said, part of that heal fitting will obviously be gone, unless they add new ranks of Heal to the game.

Pretty concerned as well though about the new itemization seen in Naxx. MP5 is basically a stat no cloth class will ever want, so is just incredibly stupid to be put on our gear. Whereas many other classes can make good use of all stats involved (Hit, Crit, Haste, Spellpower, Spirit), whereas we only scale nicely with 3 of those, crappy with Crit, and have no use whatsoever for Hit. Looks to me like some classes because of this get to use the full power of the item, whereas priests end up using suboptimal parts with undesired stats on them. In that light I don't think the idea of intentionally sub-optimal distributions to limit item power is in any way valid, since for other classes, this problem isn't present at all. Really envision a situation again where we have to gun for an item which is suboptimal for us yet still the best option, whereas it has an optimal distribution for Locks and Mages. That's going to be a lot of fun in many cases...

 

bologne

Divine Aegis + Inspiration?

I have been looking at some of the disc tree talents, and the new DA talent has really got me excited if i'm honest.

I was wondering though, assuming a tank has 60% reduction in damage, with each critical heal proccing DA, it looks to be useful to spec inspiration in the holy tree aswell. Would this affect the longevity of DA much?

How much would adding 25% armor to a tank affect the damage that DA absorbs? As in, in theory, with the tank having 25% more armor, shouldn't the DA last 25% longer?

Just a query I had is all

 

Kortar

This is a common misconception, rooted in the fact that for pretty much every other class/spec in the game raising spell haste simultaneously raises mana consumption. But not for Holy Priests due to being Spirit-based casters who don't chain-cast the entire fight.

Spell haste doesn't raise the amount you need to heal or lower the mana efficiency of your spells. But it does allow you more FSR time. It also allows you to more accurately predict what healing is actually needed, since the time between when you cast your heal and when it lands is dropping you end up overhealing less.

In Live, you don't see this effect all that much because spellpower/spell haste breakpoints are covered by downranking. The fact that any Holy Priest in purples is well over the Greater Heal breakpoint for these two stats and has 'too much' spellpower is covered by the massive advantage of not having to cast the spell at max rank.

In WotLK, downranking gets nerfed. As a result, you can't simply convert all that excess spellpower into mana efficiency. To compound the issue, Renew is the only healing spell that receives no buffs whatsoever while comparable spells from other classes (Druid HoT and Earth Shield) get some fairly hefty jumps in power. Renew happens to also be the spell with the highest spellpower/spell haste breakpoint in the Priest's arsenal.

The uniqueness of Holy Priests in their ability to exploit spell haste also runs afoul of the gear consolidation strategy. Levels of spellpower which would make a Shadow Priest, Mage or Warlock scoff at spell haste are still well above the point were a Holy Priest is really eager to grab some.

Given all this, I find it very likely that it will almost impossible to gear effectively and not have 'too much' spellpower with 'too little' spell haste.

 

Sarjin

Basically any Disc priest is likely to spec Inspiration as well for PvE yes, assuming the spec ends up being viable.

For the rest, a 25% increase in armor does not equate a 25% increase in damage reduction. From what I know (my knowledge is limited), armor is designed so each point increases the marginal survival time of the tank similarly. Which with increasing mitigation means that the procentual damage reduction per armor point goes down. (Compare the effect of 2k armor from Inner Fire on a Priest's damage reduction to the % increase in damage reduction a well geared MT gets) I don't quite know the actual numbers, but in other words, I don't think it will be 25% difference. That said, assuming the damage is physical an inspiration proc will obviously see Divine Aegis (and PW: S) last longer, as damage shield absorption gets calculated after damage reduction.

 

tasha

I agree with most of your post. But this :
If you gear for haste, you get less spellpower assuming same gear level. Thus your heals' HpM is lower.
Now you add in Serendipity and Test of Faith wich both benefits big heals over small fast ones.
Normal GH also gives you opportunities to get out of the 5sr by using the effects of clearcast, and timing your instants at the end. You can manage an oo5sr tick before your next GH lands. All of this while theoricaly keeping the same HpS as a haste oriented priest. The faster you cast, the less such opportunities arise.

Undoubtfully haste is great for reactive healing. But currently the end game people are overgearing most encounters. When we start WotlK with new gear it is possible that raw HpS itself becomes a difficulty. And the haste priest will get oom first. I am thinking about 5/10 men here. For 25 men you can probably get more haste and rely on paladins for constant healing.

In the end I suppose it depends on your playstyle. Haste gear is harder to play depending on your personal time reaction and ping : you will loose part of its potential due to gameplay. Although I can't get a definite opinion without trying the no-downranking policy, and who knows, maybe a new intermediate heal as well.

I couldn't find the breakpoints you are refering to, wich it all comes down to. So any link would be appreciated if you can spare the kindness.
Especially considering Divine Providence, the new Empowered Healing, and the Renew Glyph, etc... I expect those numbers to form the bible of holy priest gearing.

 

Kortar

1. Gearing for haste loses spellpower. Basically what you're doing here is trying to compare two stats, but weighting spellpower twice - once for the comparison, and then once for the loss. You don't "lose" mana efficiency by gearing haste vs. spellpower. You just don't gain it.

2. Serendipity. This benefits Greater Heal primarily for the reasons I outlined that made haste good - larger, slower heals are more likely to overheal. But if you actually want to "exploit" the talent, it's a lot easier to do with the much quicker Flash Heal due to healing precision.

3. Test of Faith. This is enormously more useful for Flash Heal than Greater Heal. When someone is low on life, you have less time to heal them. So you'd prefer to use Flash Heal. Unfortunately, you can't because its too small. This dramatically bridges the gap between Flash Heal and a 'large' heal, allowing you to use Flash Heal instead of Greater Heal to cover emergency situations more often.

4. Timing FSR. The only way you can maintain the same FPS with the same FSR in terms of haste is if you're casting very slowly and intermittantly. In which case you could be wearing quest greens and it wouldn't matter since you're not being pressured for either throughput or efficiency.

I think you may not understand just how good haste is in terms of throughput. Let's say you're a current BC-era Priest. You've got +2500 healing and 0% haste. If you could actually switch out gear in a neutral fashion, you can trade 22 healing for 10 spell haste rating. So -990 healing would yield 450 spell haste rating (28.6% haste).
With Greater Heal (Rank 7) you heal 2590 base in 2.5s (DF). With SH, EH your +2500 healing Priest generates 2303 non-critical hps. With the same talents, your +1510 healing Priest generates 2369 non-critical hps. So if your primary concern is raw hps, you want to gear for haste (not healing). And when you're talking about weak gear, throughput is everything. The rest of your group/raid can't realistically help your throughput much. Every class in the game can deal with your mana problems - either through mana restoration or simply ramping up their dps.

Breakpoints are more normally used in reference to caster dps since they have set casting cycles. But it's still a useful metric to know for healing.

Essentially, all spells have the form: (Base + Spellpower * Coefficient) * Multiplicative Modifers.
Given a fixed ratio between the cost of increasing spellpower and the cost of increasing any given multplicative modifier, there is always a 'breakpoint' at which the multiplicative modifiers become more valuable (assuming they have any value to begin with) in terms of throughput.

As to Glyph of Renew, my suspicion is that this will be a waste. You've got two major glyphs to use, and Renew is the only healing spell Priests get that doesn't get talent buffed in WotLK (indeed, for most Holy Priests it ends up getting effectively nerfed due to the likely specs excluding Mental Agility). It's already of limited use in BC raiding due to the power of Druid HoT and the infrequency with which it hits, and it falls even further behind in WotLK. Glyph'ing your Renew turns it into an inferior version of Rejuvenation in pretty much every respect - and Rejuvenation is a significant step down from the 'real' Druid HoT (Lifebloom). It's a bit like Glyph of Mind Soothe. Yes, it buffs the spell a great deal. But when the base spell is crap, that doesn't help.

Assuming they change Glyph of SoR so we don't end up with "dead Priests heal everything", I'd expect most Priests would raid with Flash Heal + Circle of Healing as their glyphs.

 

bologne

If I remember correctly from my feral druid days, a 1% increase in armor means you live 1% longer, regardless of DR.

This doesn't seem right now i'm saying it though. Meh, I could be very mistaken

 

Lanlaorn

My understanding is, in the current build, we get 3 Major Glyphs and 3 Minor Glyphs, you can still get the Renew Glyph. Unless the PW:S or Dispel glyphs prove useful I imagine most people will, there's not much else worth taking really. And yes the SoR glyph will need to be nerfed into the ground.

 

Raglu

You're right, armor has no diminishing returns in regards to effective time to live. Each point of armor that you get increases the amount of time you live by an equal amount, regardless of how much armor you already had.

 

bologne

In theory then, Inspiration would increase the duration of your DA by 25%? The "time to live" of the shield could be viewed as the same a time to live of someone else.
Granted, this wouldn't return 25% more mana through Rapture, but purely from an absorbtion point of view, the shield would last 25% longer, right?

Note: This will be even more useful now, since druids won't be at armour cap

 

Raglu

DR% = Armor / (Armor + (467.5 * AttackerLevel - 22167.5))

Effective time to live = 1/(1-DR%) * Base time to live

If we had 50% damage reduction and 100 seconds base time to live, Effective time to live would be 1/.5 * 100, or 200 seconds.
If we improve that damage reduction by 25% to 75% total DR, with the same 100 seconds base time to live, Effective time to live would be 1/.25 * 100, or 400 seconds.

But is 25% more armor equal to 25% more time to live?

50% = Armor / (Armor + (467.5 * 83 - 22167.5))
.5 = Armor / (Armor + 16635)
.5(Armor + 16635) = Armor
.5Armor + 8317.75 = Armor
8315.75 = .5Armor
Armor = 16635

Now 25% more armor is 20793.75. Stick it back in.

DR% = 20793.75 / (20793.75 + (467.5 * 83 - 22167.5))
DR% = 55.5556%

Effective Time to Live = 1/(1-.555556) * 100 seconds
Effective Time to Live = 225 seconds.

No. If you had 16635 armor, you would have 50% DR against a level 83 boss, and if you would have lasted against that boss for 100 seconds with no armor, you will last 200 seconds with that 16635 armor.

When you increase that armor by 25%, you would have 20793.75 armor, which is 55.5556% DR against a level 83 boss, and you who have lasted 225 seconds, which is a 12.5% increase in Effective Time to Live.

So, if we were viewing the effective time of life of that DA shield, it is half the increase you were suggesting.

Edit: I checked the numbers again, armor definitely has a linear increase (in percentage) with respect to effective time to live.

 

tasha

To Kortar.

Whatever the wording is... :P A priest with more spellpower than another will have better HpM. Regen is taken in account after.

You are making assumptions out of the best current gear available. Of course 2500 healing is overgearing in TBC, downranking is a must after 1500. My point is that when we will start WotlK we will have to get the gear first by killing the bosses. Not the other way around.

Now, agree or not, but the end-game gear screwed up the mana managing difficulty for priest. Remember before they changed the spirit/int regen model ?
If you can wait 5 seconds without healing, is it because you have haste gear and heals super fast, or because the encounter was designed about random spiky damage, instead of regular damage. Current fights are about saving lives, w/e the mana cost is, since anyway, healers have gear and options to ignore the mana difficulty. Haste saves lives. While progressing in BT our priests use like 10 mana pots per week, mages ten times more.

About using FH for serendipity, I cannot understand. It's 2 FHs, for 140% FH's cost total, vs 1 GH for 40% GH's cost. GH cheaper, faster.
edit : nevermind, got your point. Abusing sounds silly though.

Test of faith may be better for FH than for GH, it still gives better bang for your bucks the more spellpower you have. If it's a dps, using FH vs GH is a matter of : can you take the risk of a GH or not. Faster heals will land earlier but a slower heal has a possibility to bring the target to full health in one shot. On a tank you're probably better casting a shield or a GH anyway, since you're not the only healer on him.

Renew is the priest's answer to silence/stun/whatever cc you're going to suffer anytime soon. Thus being dependent on encounter. It is still a great spell to use on tanks, and a cheap one.

I know what breakpoints are ty I was wondering if you happen to possess the values of WotlK breakpoints for a holy priest.

Well, it's late and I probably typed too much, but my feelings from reading you consist in : you are not worried about getting oom anytime soon. Thus my initial statement about giving us challenge with the mana regen.

 

Incoherence

In the end, it doesn't really matter; you're getting haste anyway. The Naxxramas gear we're seeing has 5 stats on it: stamina, intellect, spell power, and two of {spirit, hit, crit, haste, mp5}. If you restrict yourself to spirit/crit gear you're going to be passing on a LOT of gear (including 3 set pieces). Even restricting yourself to gear with spirit and not hit limits your options; for example, out of the six caster weapons (and two offhands) on MMO-Champion as of this writing, that leaves you exactly one staff (and zero mainhands, and zero offhands).

 

Tainter

Your point is irrelevant. If you're in PvP and you take a lot of damage you can't just cast 2 Renews on yourself instead of 1 Renew and 1 Inner Fire now can you? You put all your instants on cooldown (or duration or weakened soul or whatever) and then you start trying to cast against Melee. Your Flash Heal is going to get interrupted by someone competent and then you would be stuck without Inner Fire. I however would have a bit of extra mitigation.

It's not the cheapest form of mitigation and ironically increased armor on PvP items makes Inner Fire worse (it should really give a percentage), but it is mitigation. With a Shield up it does last for a few moments. And with the "new and improved" Shield in Wrath it will probably last a few moments longer.

Of course I would prefer it if there were no charges, but I'm not willing to take a higher mana cost or less armor or any other nerf you can think of in return.

If you can't join them?
Beat them.

 

Sarjin

Higher mana cost, longer duration, no charges and undispellable (aka, in line with other caster armors but still lacking in power)? =P That said, not particularly realistic given Blizzard's (Koraa's? The guy's supposedly a class designer, and given his limited understanding on some things, it gives me the feeling he's one of the reasons we're still stuck with some idiotic spell/talent issues...) idiotically stubborn view on the thing.


And yeah, Naxx gear design depresses me more and more, since it seems the few items are not an incident so far. Aside from the universally present Int/Sta/Spellpower, I'd like Spi/Haste obviously, while preferring to skip Crit as well. As is, it's pretty much impossible to skip the waste of item budget MP5, Hit or Crit on pretty much every piece I've seen so far...

 

Doctah

While I agree with the rest of your post you might want to have a peek at what someone posted just 3 up from you, AC does not scale linearly with DR, it does scale linearly with time to live.

 

Tainter

Hmm, I'm a bit confused now. I thought the formula for calculating damage reduction from armor was changed when TBC came out. I was under the impression that the current form isn't quite the "flat increase to lifetime" anymore.

Maybe I'll give it a try when I get home later tonight.

If you can't join them?
Beat them.

 

Havoc12

Holy priests want haste and spellpower. Each of these talents is greatly beneficial to holy priests.

Test of faith is equally useful for both flash and gheal and benefits equally from haste and spell power. Haste => easier to get sub50% heals. Spellpower ==> magnified by test of faith.

Test of faith also benefits from your existing crit, since the 15% healing amplifies the crit you already have and all +healing modifiers on target.

Haste also benefits serendipity as it allows higher throughput. Higher throughput benefits serendipity because a larger number of heals per second keeps tank HP higher and reduces the time the tank spends in the HP zone where there are no serendipity procs.

Serendipity transforms gheal to flash of light on steroids but only when the targets deficit is less than half of the gheal value.

Test of faith results in a nearly 30% increase in effective healing for all spells landing at sub50% health and thus massively amplified your effective healing.

Test of faith and serendipity however must be viewed together. Serendipity allows you to blindly chain cast GH on a high health target. If the target spikes and goes below 50% health test of faith minimises the time the target will spend outside serendipity range. Aside from increasing effective healing and reducing mana cost serendipity and test of faith have the immediate benefit of also reducing the time the target spends in the "dead zone" where no serendipity or test of faith procs.

Minimising this "dead zone" is best for a holy priest. Both spellpower and haste are beneficial in minimising this. Crit helps as well, though crit is mostly good for multitarget heals + test of faith due to the multiplie stacking amplification modifiers. I dont think the itemization issues will hurt holy priests too much unless they force us to take too much caster stats or force us to sacrifice spirit.

 

Supermerkicus

Why would you not take a higher mana cost?

IF isn't cheap anyway, how much worse could it get? I think that's just silly.

 

Tainter

Something's not right about this. With more haste your heals land more often, but they also heal for less. (You will probably have to have a trade-off between spell power and haste.) If haste and spell power were balanced (and I have no idea if they are) then serendipity will not be affected by trading one for the other.

What changes is the variation in the tank's health. If you had a very slow heal that healed for a massive amount (like the old GH perhaps) then the tank would always drop a fair bit in health before he get the effect of it. Wether or not Serendipity will proc here will depend on the average health of the tank when the heal hits and the average size of the heal. If you get more healers to bump the average health up then you get more serendipity. If you get more Spell Power: same.

If, however, you were hasted through the roof so that you heal every half second, but a much smaller amount. Then you would effectively stabilise the tank's health. If he takes more damage than you heal he'll slowly run out of health and after a short while you will not get any serendipity procs, unless someone else bumps the health back up. That's the situation you'll be in in a raid. Your healing alone won't keep the tank alive. Wether you get serendipity or not will depend on how close to maximum the other healers can keep the tank.

So, yeah: Free haste and free spell power benefit serendipity. If the stats are balanced and there's a trade-off between them then it doesn't benefit one way or the other. If the stats aren't balanced then one will be either outright better or there will be a sweetpoint.

I suspect the point at which you have the highest HpS is the point at which Serendipity is the most useful. (If the other healers give a constant, bumpy flow of health.

If you can't join them?
Beat them.

 

Tainter

From a PvP point of view because it can be dispelled. Against some class combinations I need to rebuff it at a later point in the fight because it got dispelled. Sometimes the original dispeller is dead, or CC'd or out of LOS and then I would rather it not be prohibitively expensive.

And also when I play Disc PvE I don't usually run out of charges, I run out of time. So more mana for no charges would just cost me more mana at no additional benefit.

If you can't join them?
Beat them.

 

Vitalay

Help me out a little here:

I was trying to compare the two sets of Arena Season 5 gear spoiled from Beta (LK Arena 1 Priest - Wowhead Search). Now, keep in mind that these are subject to radical change before release, but currently we have a Spirit set and a Crit set being offered, where all else is equal. Concordantly, I have contrasting the OFSR regen being offered on the Spirit set vs. the mana regen potential via Rapture on the Crit set.

The relevant stats are: 233 Int for both, 161 Spi for the spirit set, and 3.08% crit chance (at level 80) on the crit set.

I used the formula we currently have for Spirit/int based regen which gave: 114.6095 mana regen OFSR for the spirit set.

For the crit set, I assumed Rapture and Divine Aegis would come into play, and used Penance as my baseline spell, and calculated a 161.8118 mp5 assuming penance spam (which, needless to say is ridiculously unlikely).

Either way, it seems that for PvP specs that include DA and Rapture, and assuming a greater reliance on channeled spells than currently takes place, that the crit set is mostly a winner in terms of mana regen without including the HPS bonus.

Thoughts? Corrections?

 

Shan

Well this can't quite be correct can't it?

Presuming a 4k flash heal with 20% base chance to crit:
4000*(1+(0.2*0.5))= 4400 healing on average with crit factored it.

Adding test of faith with 15% more healing and 10% additional crit:
(4000*1.15)*(1+(0.3*0.5)) = 5290 healing on average with crit factored in.

5290/4400 = 1.202

It's a 20.2% increase with these values, with a negligible diminishing effect as base crit chance increase. Pretty solid for 3 points but not quite as good as you're making it out to be.

By the way, I have no idea how you came to a 30% figure since even at 0% base crit the increase is just 20.7%

I just had the same discussion with a guildmate last night. It's not true, spellcrit is less than half as effective as spellpower/+healing for increasing CoH's healing. Just because you see more crits with CoH doesn't mean that spellcrit is good for it.

Quoting myself here

Also, this should be quite relevant to the discussion about crit rating on healing gear and holy priests.