• constantius

If you want to drop IHC, then you should be picking up more efficiency talents, not dumping points deeper into Holy. Not even taking 5/5 Mental Agility? It's huge when you consider how many instants we have (Renew, PoM, CoH).

I'm considering taking this build until I get enough crit to make an IHC build viable.

[e] As far as a Disc build, you would have taken 5/5 Twin Disc, 2/2 Imp PW:F, 3/3 Imp PW:S, 3/3 Meditation, 1/1 IF, and 3/3 Imp IF anyway. It's just shuffling around how you take them. If you want to say that you wouldn't have taken Imp IF, then you might have an argument, since Imp PW:S is pretty much mandatory for a Disc priest.

And remember, Tier7 has basically one point to spend, so you need to make up 4 points earlier in the tree anyway. 2 come from Focused Power, 1 from Divine Spirit, and the final point has to come from somewhere around the Imp IF range, or possibly Absolution. Additionally, if you are going with a 51/20/0 build, you want to avoid spending points in Tier 10 (Borrowed Time), so again you need to download those points somewhere in the first 3-4 tiers.

It's not an issue. 2 points were not sucked out of Disc. Unless you want to explain what build you thought you were going to get that went 51 points deep in Disc but took 0/3 Imp IF?

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

 

Supermerkicus

Heaven forbid they consolidate the horribly bloated (see : bloated in a bad way; mediocre talents) Disc tree by just combining Imp. Inner Fire and Imp. PWS.

Imp. PWS is not a very good talent by itself, especially now that it's at tier3, and combining those two talents seems a lot like something that has already happened to many other classes with their consolidations.

There you go, done, and the name of the new talent is just as lame as whatever they'd come up with too!

 

Paracelsus

The problem is that the nothing in row 3 is now optional for a Disc priest. That means that you have to take all 7 talent points. Before you'd take meditation and inner focus and then dump a point in imp inner fire. Now, you have to take all 3 points in Imp PW:S since it's a defining talent for the tree. Disc is "cool shields and penance".

This means you lose two points from something better up the tree. [edit: put more details in the next post]

On a whim.

 

Paracelsus

Help me out here... why would you go 51/20 in disc? And why would you avoid spending points in Borrowed Time? I can't even comprehend that. If you get Penance, you'd be going 53/18. At Tier 8 on, you're about two points short and have to make a compromise between Borrowed Time, Grace, Aegis, Aspiration, Renewed Hope, Rapture, and Imp. Healing. You have to short yourself two points - probably the easiest being 1/2 points in Grace and Renewed Hope.

Enlightenment, Mental Strength and Mental Agility all want 5/5 and 2/2 in Focused Power is even more important.

This means that with the tree as it was, you had 3 points to spend in rows 7 and below. Let's look at our options:

Power Infusion - 20% haste, 20% mana reduction
Divine Spirit - +80 Spirit raid wide - with the spirit to X conversions on the caster classes, more impresive than ever, really.
Reflective Shield - ~780 damage for free on a 5.2k shield per point in the talent
Absolution - Dispel discounts
Imp Inner Fire - +18 Spell Power

The argument being put forward is that no one would get 51 points into the tree without picking that staggeringly cool 18 spell power talent 3 times. I just don't see it. If the change goes through, reflective shield/absolution goes first and then you're looking at losing power infusion, divine spirit, or a point out of mental agility. Imp Inner Fire tastes of ashes at that point.

 

Gourd

What if after the swapping of Imp IF and Imp PW:S, they were to swap Focused Power with the newly-positioned Imp PW:S, tacking dispel resistance (10/20/30%) onto it (or giving 10/20/30% of the absoption back as a heal, and swapping the glyph to increase its dispel resistance)?

 

Supermerkicus

I think a lot of the discussion in this thread about Disc, whether it mentions or complains about bloat at all, would serve as a great compilation of reasoning behind a final, last ditch attempt at getting Blizzard to address the Disc bloat before it goes live.

Unfortunately, it's not the 'good' kind of bloat that say, Balance has for Druids because they're being forced to choose from great talents while we're sifting through a lot of overpriced mediocrity - MA and Enlightenment come to mind as good examples of this.

10% off instant cast spells is cool, but for 5 points it just isn't potent enough.

 

• constantius

[e] Edited in a correction because I'm dumb and missed the reduction to 3 talent points.

You don't take Reflective Shield for raiding. You can't afford to waste 3 talents points to do minimal/useless damage. Threatless, small, waste of talent points under all circumstances.

Realistically, there is no way to take 5/5 Borrowed Time and still get Improved Healing (which is 18 points in Holy). You *could* get 4/5 before, with Tier breakdowns of: 5 / 5 / 6 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 1 / 7 / 6 / 4 / 1 in Discipline. However, to do that required dropping Aspiration entirely.

The main issue is that to get only Power Infusion (Tier7) you need to put an additional 4 points somewhere in Tiers 1-6, since Tier 7 is crap. The only logical candidates are Imp IF and Focused Power. You said 3 points, but that doesn't compute: you need 4 more.

This change just fixes in stone Tiers 1 and 2 (5/5 Twin Disc), 2/2 Imp PW:F and 3/3 Imp IF. Then Tier 3 is 3/3 Meditation, 1/1 IF, and 1/3 Imp PW:S. Mental Agility, Mental Strength, Enlightenment and a spare point in DS means you've taken care of 2/4 points so far, and have capped Power Infusion. Toss your next 2 points into Focused Power, and move on.

Ideally, I agree that they need to trim down a couple of talents slightly. The fact that Tiers 4,5,6 are each 5-point talents should be changed to have at least one of them 3-points, so we could toss 2 extra points into (say) Absolution or Imp IF.

You may even be able to justify dropping Improved Healing to have enough points to cap everything in Disc that seems important. Depends on how much dispelling you're doing, and whether saving mana on dispels ends up being enough to finish fights without going oom.

To be honest, Disc is starting to look a lot like Resto for druids. Almost all of the talents directly or indirectly scale your healing or regen in some way. Resto is a very bloated tree; it just has "focus' going for it. A couple of tweaks, and Disc could easily be as strong. Just need to take 1 or 2 of the 'must have' 5-pointers and drop them to 3 points, and/or mesh Imp PW:F and Imp PW:S into a 2-pointer in Tier 3 (Meditation to T2) or in Tier 2 (and leave the Imp IF move in to keep 5 useful points).

What I do find interesting is that almost no-one will end up taking Silent Resolve ever again. That's a shame.

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

 

Observer

Your points are well-made, but I meant that Test of Faith is stronger per talent point -- 3/3 Test of Faith is stronger than 3/5 Spiritual Healing when the target is below 50%. 10%/10% would be perfectly justifiable -- for 5 talent points. But it's only a 3-point talent.

Has anyone been able to test yet whether Twin Disciplines affects SoL-procced Smite or Flash Heal?

And is there any word on whether the severe Holy Fire nerf was intentional or not?

 

Kortar

Let's check that theory, shall we?

A 3/3 HC, 0/3 IHC build casting Greater Heal with 15% spell critical, 3% spell haste and 20 mp5 will generate a throughput of 0.4429 * base heal hps and consume about 2065 mp5.

A 3/3 HC, 3/3 IHC build casting Greater Heal with 20% spell critical, 0% spell haste and 0 mp5 will generate a throughput of 0.4627 * base heal hps and consume about 2010 mp5.

So your talent/gear swap has lost you a fair amount of throughput and cost you about 35 mp5. And that's on Greater Heal - the spell least improved by SoL/IHC. Binding Heal and Flash Heal do even better.

Of course, if you just thought about the fact that you decided to switch talent points away from talents that buffed Greater/Flash/Binding Heal into talents that had no impact on them at all, you probably would have realized this without the math.

What you're really trying to argue is that Renew and Desperate Prayer are more valuable parts of your healing arsenel than Greater/Binding/Flash Heal.

In fact, you're trying to argue something even more expansive than this - that they're more valuable than Circle of Healing. Why? Check this chart out:
Crit Mana Red. HPS Red.
10% 106.02% 86.75%
15% 108.70% 81.32%
20% 111.16% 76.57%
25% 113.39% 72.44%
30% 115.40% 68.86%
35% 117.20% 65.76%
40% 118.78% 63.11%
45% 120.17% 60.83%
50% 121.38% 58.90%

This lists the maximum rate at which you can interleave free Flash Heals onto guaranteed overheal targets to recoup mana via Serendipity with Surge of Light proc'ing off a Glyph'd Circle of Healing, and the impact on CoH (in terms of efficiency and hps, assuming those Flash Heals have 100% overheal) of doing so. Note that there is nothing forcing you to perform this interleaving - you can achieve any conversion rate up to the maximum listed. Note also that I don't include FSR in this - the 'exploit Serendipity via SoL' method actually gives you a considerably leg up as you want to convert throughput into efficiency due to its superior FSR optimization.

 

Tattersail

Test of Faith is about +3% effective healing per point sub50%, if you count +1% crit as +0.5% crit (the added healing modifies the added crit again, but this is negligible). Looking at it realistically, you won't gain much mana efficiency from it at all, but you do gain healing power when you need it most. This contrasts with Spiritual Healing that will gain you some mana, but less healing power when you need it most.

----------------------------------------------

Havoc small mistake in your Test of Faith math: - should be /
All talents are multiplicative, including Spiritual Healing and Test of Faith, after adding spellpower.

Counting +1% crit as +0.5% healing is a fairly accurate approximation:

realCritMultiplier = (1 + 0.5(C + 0.01) ) / (1 + 0.5C)

For C = 15%, realCritMultiplier = 1.00465.
Approximation would tell us the multiplier = 1.005. Error is less than 1%.

----------------------------------------------

Above formula can be simplified to:

realMultiplier = 1 + 0.005 / (1 + 0.5C)

Test of Faith formula simplifies to (this is simply 1.06 * the crit formula):

tofMultiplier = 1.06 + 0.00318 / (1 + 0.5C)

 

Tattersail

Kortar: assuming HPS Red. stands for HPS reduction, why is it that it goes down with more crit? Wouldn't you get more SoL procs, and thus more free flashes, reducing your HPS?

 

Supermerkicus

There's just no room for this talent at all in a PVE build - it's only useful in PVP for the dispel resistance.

Speaking of PVP, Priests are looking really bad in WoTLK and PTR due to a lack of survivability, and I can pretty much guarantee you that the class will be getting some buffs in that regard - even if it's after WoTLK is released.

Personally, the fade-snare removal functionality needs to be baseline at a minimum, and the horror effect on PS should have been applied to your target only (rather than AoE which is rather OP) and made baseline as well.

As it stands, the big DPS increases coupled with Priest cloth-tanking nerfs is resulting in a big bag of suck for PVP.

 

Cooljo

Though it's something completely different... I asked myself if PoM is a "Holy Spell" and thus benefits from the 5% crit from Holy Spec. I'm not into statistics and such, so I would appreciate some comments on the gathered data:

5% crit (@paperdoll)
casts: 830
crits: 46
crits/casts: 0.055421688

10% crit (+5/5 Holy Spec)
casts: 955
crits: 84
crits/casts: 0.08795811

So Holy Spec definetly increases the critchance of PoM, but somehow not the mentioned 5%... or can someone clarify how this "margin of error" thing works? :|

 

Kortar

The label is probably confusing. If you've got 50% critical, you have the numbers '121.38%' and '58.90%'. If you'd ordinarily spend 1000 mp5 to get 5000 hps, you could change this to a limit of:
1000 / 1.2138 = 834 mp5
5000 * 0.589 = 2945 hps

Note: 1000/5000 were completely arbitrary numbers for demonstration purposes and don't reflect the actual cost/throughput of CoH in any way.

It should be noted that this isn't really all that compelling an argument for piling on critical. However, it is a compelling argument for taking Surge of Light. For two points, you're effectively buying the ability to reduce the cost of Circle of Healing by 10% if you're willing to sacrifice 20% of its hps - or any fraction of that - with even basic gear/buffs. Given Circle of Healing will generate 30% greater hps than Chain Heal in the first place, that's a pretty good tradeoff in an age with no downranking.

Also note that I'm completely disregarding the possibility that you might actually heal someone with those Flash Heals rather than just throw them away - it's really not all that hard to land an instacast Flash Heal that hits for almost full.

 

cruumash

Or if you do lots of pickup groups where the quality of your tanks is unknown. In TBC Silent Resolve was handy when you had a warrior and lots of mobs per pull. With the removal of Priest Misdirect (ProM) and all the tweaks to threat going into WoW 3.0.x you may or may not need the extra threat reduction while leveling.

For end game PvE, I agree.

 

Khoross

Cooljo:
The numbers you posted for casts with 5/5 holy spec, 5% crit base have an 11.6% chance of them or worse occuring in random sampling, if PoM had a 10% crit rate under these conditions (so if 1000 people did the same test, with same numbers, 116 of them would get 84 or less crits. Actually slightly over, but I feel no shame rounding off less than a tenth of a percent)

This was determined as follows:
Assuming that the crit chance of a PoM is independant of all other casts of PoM, the random variable X assigned the number of PoM crits in a number of repeated trials has a binomial distribution.
Assuming that the actual crit rate in this case was 0.1, X~B(955,0.1).
Now, the probability you see results no better than those you observed is P(X<=84), which is a rather large and painful calculation, as the binomial distribution gets ugly when you get to numbers that high. So I found an internet tool to do it for me (I expect it determined the answer by modeling it as a normal distribution, but the error should be tiny in this case, as the sample was large).
It gave the result of a cumulative probability of 0.1164230, this being the probability that you get no more than 84 crits.

Using this tool to work out the probability that you observe 84 or more crits, given that the probability of a crit is 0.05 comes out as less than 4 hundred thousandths of a percent, so it is very much likely that holy spec changed the crit rate.

However, an 11% chance of observing results no better than that in repeated sampling is not really statistically significant, so provides no hard evidence that the crit rate is not 0.1.

I hope that's all correct, I haven't done any stats for almost a year now, and have a tendency to repress all memories of it for a while after my exams finish.

TL;DR Holy Spec almost certainly effects PoM in some way at least (almost certain because this is statistics, nothing is certain) and we don't have any strong data to suggest it doesn't work fully.

 

Supermerkicus

Really? Or are you just playing devil's advocate?

I never, ever found SR necessary and I did/do tons of pugs - healing aggro was never a big deal unless it was a mob completely uncontrolled and in that case reducing my threat wouldn't change the fact that it was after me because nothing had touched it anyway.

They should move meditation into Silent Resolve, and move the dispel resist component to something else, like Imp. PWS.

In fact the more I think about that the more I like it - kills three birds with one stone - 1) consolidation for Disc bloat 2) Imp. PWS is a weak talent especially for its new position in tier 3 3) moves meditation up to be more accessible.

If I had a beta account I'd be all over the forums with this.

edit : whoops

 

cruumash

Ya, really. Take Shadow Labyrinth with a warrior MT and no mage as an example. Maybe you always ran with amazing tanks but it's quite common for 1 or more adds to peel off the warrior and come for me. Can probably fade off the first time, but if your tank is getting pummeled, they're gonna come at you again.

I noticed I was higher than "normal" threat on my last Gun'Drak but I haven't been back yet to confirm if its me or the tank.

 

Jood

I posted this on the beta forums earlier, after reading a lot of what was said on improved inner fire here toay:

 

dukes

1% of 2000 is 20. You need to check where you've put the decimal in all your percentages. Making it scale would certainly make sense, and 1/2/3% means it's virtually worth the same at Naxx gear level, and will actually be worth more as you progress further through raids.

It does make it less enticing as a PvP talent once you start making it a percentage, assuming that the PvP gear gives up some spell power for stam/resil.

 

Paracelsus

I think I understand where you're coming from on this. You are cheerfully killing off your PW:S points. At 2K SP + glyph, you're looking at dropping your shield's healing+prevention from ~5100 to 4450 as a result - a gap that gets larger with scaling.

Just as Penance > Gheal, PW:S > Flash with the trade off being that they aren't spam-able. I can't see crippling one of your major disc tools. It's also reflected in your Reflective Shield opinion. At 2k SP, Reflective Shield is 42DPS per point just for maintaining your shield on the tank. In a scenario like the Illidari council where you can maintain a shield on 4 people you're talking about 510DPS for free while doing nothing more than your absolute bog standard healing rotation and if you're facing AoE you can actually hit some pretty amusing numbers all without costing so much as a GCD. Is the talent point trade off worth it in the standard case? Probably not. Waste of talent points under all circumstances? I think that is a poor analysis.

 

Chirality

They're not mutually exclusive. Improved Inner Fire could, for example, read "Increase the effect of your inner fire spell by X%, the number of charges by 12, and while Inner Fire is active your spellpower is increased by 1/2/3%".

Though that's a long and awkward description. I will say, however, I would *much* prefer Inner Fire charges to simply have a cooldown on being eaten rather than having a lot of charges, similar to how Earth Shield, for example, works. I'm not looking forward to having to both talent AND glyph inner fire in PvP just so that I can live through a stunlock with the buff still intact.

 

Paracelsus

I hadn't seen anyone else post this yet.

They hotfixed in the new spell haste from Borrowed Time sometime today on the PTR. Fantastic! Gheals are now under 2s. Stacks with Power Infusion to drop Gheals down to 1.59s even w/o spell haste.

Looks like Disc priests got their oh crap mechanic. REALLY liking what this does. Makes it feel like Disc will have a shot at not being blown out of the water by Pally single target.

 

• constantius

My point was not to *stay* with 1/3 Imp PW:F, simply that to get to the next tier, you'd automatically take 1 point in that talent. The other 2 are the choice -- take those, or put them somewhere else. If you decide to go full-fledged Disc, you need to take not only 3/3 there, but also 5/5 Borrowed Time for the additional absorption. In that case, I don't think you can go 18 deep in Holy and make it work. At least, not without dropping crazy cooldowns from Disc (things like Pain Suppression and Power Infusion).

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

 

Jaz

You say that like it's a constant thing, it isn't it comes every 15 seconds. When you're shielding others you're lowering your single target throughput anyway. It's also not much of an oh shit mechanic unless you're saving your target's weakened soul for it.