You are suggesting that you call our 'cookie-cutter' with Test of Faith?
Yes, of course any spec going that deep in holy should have Test of Faith. Calling anything a cookie-cutter and gimping throughput severly on the ones needing healing the most simply doesn't make any sense.
Very cool that they give us two specs, guess I will be shadow/holy for farm content and deal dmg on trash/some bosses. If I go for two holy specs I think they will be something like this:
I'm not a big fan of renew at the moment (might change with content) so I skip Imp. Renew totally in both specs. Inspiration is obviously also very encounter-sensitive for spec "1" and can easily be skipped for Spell Warding.
Something I just found out today: the new Earthsiege Diamond is actually 21 int + 600 mana restore function. I had been told it was +300. Makes it significantly better than the old one, which is sexy.
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
Bjork, why in your 14/57 build do you not take Surge of Light? With the instant cast, free flash heals I'm fairly certain that over the course of a raid you would gain more benefit from it (if used effectively) than Test of Faith.
As far as I'm aware, the Armorsmith bonus was never added to the game. It was mentioned, in passing, as a possible track they'd take, and then never touched on again.
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
Maybe not so surprising again, but Bracing Earthstorm Diamond becomes a contender with Insightful Earthstorm Diamond - Item - World of Warcraft for Discipline specs. +6 all stats, +12 int bracers, +4 all stats rings and +30 intellect weapon are also valid (if not even better) alternatives for the Disc priest. The Disc priest can easily reach 15k mana buffed, at which point he becomes retardedly effective.
A Penance hitting for avg 6000 total with 20% crit, gives 6000*15000/2620*0.01035 = 356 mana back from healing, and an additional 6000*1.5*0.2*0.3*15000/2620*0.01035 = 32 from absorbing. Penance costs 417 Mana, and you just regained 382 from Rapture.
It should be noted that this is at extreme gear levels. (Full sunwell + 4pt6).
Also for both holy and disc the old DPS shoulder enchants may nudge out the healing shoulder enchants.
Last edited by The Not So Evil : 10/13/08 at 4:15 AM.
You also get mana back from the DA's that penance may or may not proc.
Infinite HPM penances will probably be very possible at the end of this expansion(or sooner), a little perk from extreme gearing like rogue dodge tanks...
Take for example the ZA Hexlord encounter, which I typically do with 2 CoH healers. I put one in each of the two groups, and make sure the group members are aware of the strategy. As for shadow resist the BT fire resist cloak and neck, along with the shadow protection buff is plenty and does not gimp you.
Yes, clock and neck (or other combinations) are fine, however they only really help if they reduce damage for the person with lowest HP, since a priest will use 5-man heals anyway. Personally, I only use some SR gear if it's me who has lowest HP, since I mostly raid ZA with Kara/badge equipment players who don't have SR gear themselves. If all low-HP players have SR gear, or at least all except one (then that one gets a renew or the first Pom), then of course two pieces like neck and cloak are great.
Originally Posted by Kortar
The fact that I can make an assertion and pick a random WWS that demonstrates the assertion strongly indicates that there's a good chance if you did a wider survey of WWS parses, you'd find the assertion was generally true.
Inarguably, it's far from conclusive proof, but in the absence of the WWS designers redesigning their site, it's about all I can offer people who don't understand the principle I'm trying to present.
Check your own WWS if you're willing to take a hard look at the way you heal. In all likelihood, you're overhealing a lot more when you use Greater Heal than when you use Flash Heal, and that ends up bridging the difference between efficiency/throughput of the two spells. The reason this occurs is that you're "racing" against other heals caster by other healers - and those other heals are more responsive than Greater Heal.
What you are doing is proof-by-example. That's just random. Even if you could actually show that the majority of Illidan parses look like the one you posted it wouldn't necessarily mean a thing. If an encounter is on farm and the mana pool is plenty, players tend to get lazy. Especially if you run with too many healers. This is even more extreme when looking at MH WWS parses. Today, priests can do crazy things there due to really infinite mana and typically too little damage to heal.
You spend a lot of time developing models and presenting the results here. Please do not waste this by picking fights that you don't fully understand. You just cannot properly evaluate a WWS without really understanding a fight. Pick fights that you are intimately familiar with to illustrate your point. Then you personally know how much that WWS you pull resembles the fight as you think it should be done.
Last edited by Hegen : 10/13/08 at 5:17 AM.
Reason: added second half
Originally Posted by Pewsey
Many of our snakes are 3m+ in size. They'll just take the lawnmower off you and beat the shit out of you with it to make you tender, then bite you and eat you.
Spirit bolts are - at the start of the fight - 450 shadow per person, but twice per second! Some of these will be partial resists (with shadow protection buff) at 338 shadow damage, and much more rarely a 50% resist at 225 shadow damage.....
Its not 4500HPS over 10 seconds, its a longer period.
I get about 25k HP to group 1 from PoH and around 5000-8000 from PoM, that is 30-33k grup 2 gets 4xCoH and a PoM. Everyone takes around 400*20 = 8000 at start and ~10k at the end of the fight. Deficit is 2k at first and ~4k at more stacks. I only need 1x CoH on each group after the bolts to bring the to the point where 1-2 ppl on each group will be full due to criticals.
It takes 2-4 seconds after the end of the spirit bolts before hexlord does anything at all to the raid, so no one is ever in danger. Also lets not forget I *do* have a 2nd healer (pally or druid usually), who should have no problems dealing with the rest of the deficit even if he drunk and watching TV at the same time.
I maintain 1700-1900 HPS over the whole encounter. If I just use PoH on one group I will simply nerf my HPS. You need to squeeze in 2 PoM CDs, 2 PoHs and 4 CoHs (total casting time = 1.4*6+2.8*2 = 14 seconds) into the 10 second spirit bolt interval.
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Surge of light: Is one of those talents which makes people happy when they see the proc, but they dont actually stop to consider the benefit. I tried SoL on the PTR and found it to be an extremely underwhelming talent.
Yes I could get a decent mana return from it, but I purposefully ignored a lot of procs because it just interferes with my healing pattern. If someone has a deficit of say 5k and I have an SoL proc to fire on him, I will have to heal him again, with another flash heal. I will spend 350-470 mana on the second flash heal depending on whether I get serendipity. If I gheal him (a crit will heal him to full) I do more healing in less time at a cost of most probably 420 mana (280 removed from serendipity and 2t5 bonus). In other situations I want to sequeeze a PoM or CoH into a short window of opportunity and I really just waste the proc if I get another one from the extra spells. To take advantage of SoL you actually have to reduce your HPS. When I found SoL to be most helpfull is when I get a double clearcast/SoL proc and I am tank healing, so I can use the SoL proc straight away and cast cancel the two gheals for some extra ooFSR time, its actually quite underwhelming here though if the tank takes a lot of spike damage, because that flash puts me on the GCD and it really does not heal much.
I used about 1 SoL every 8 seconds on a bloodboil run and mostly fired it on the tank as a shot to nothing when I had time between CoHs and PoMs on my groups it made no difference at all. I have no incentive to fire it on one of my groups as CoH+PoM will heal the damage anyway. It just adds to my overheal. Test of faith made a massive difference though when I used a PoH on my group after an acid geyser and during fel rage. You cant beat the value of a 9k crit (normal crits are ~8k) when the fel raged target is below 50%. Certainly not worth burning a GCD at all. I found the SoL proc to be fairly useful on terron and mildly useful on RoS. On hexlord malacrass I used the SoL proc after the spirit bolt phase on the tank. I got a little ooFSR time from it and that is about it. All In all I was extremely unimpressed by the talent @ 70.
It might get better at 80, though.
Whereas SoL is a talent that is pretty much hanging loose on its own and has a negative cooperativity with our other talents, test of faith synergises with everything and it really adds that little bit of extra juice when you really need it. It is underpowered there is no denying that. I hope blizzard will buff it to 9/9 and give it the power it deserves.
I have healed raid on Hexlord with both Priest and Shaman, without raid having any shadowresistance apart from shadow protection and some chose to use necks & backs. As Priest I easily managed to keep everyone up with just circle of healing, with only 1 healer in backup. As Shaman it was a bit tougher, as I had to give up water shield for earth shield in order to avoid pushbacks, which limited my mana regeneration. You dont have any spell pushback problems as Priest. It was still possible as long as the raid were smart enough to realize the shortcomings of Chain Heal. Prayer of Healing is not something I would use on Hexlord.
Regarding healing on Illidan: My WWS stats looks more or less exactly like the one Kortar posted. Although, I do feel I trust Greater Heal too much. Yes, I admit I use Greater Heal for raid healing, I guess I'm just used to using chain heal as Shaman, long heals dont bother me as much. A lot of the reason for trusting Greater Heal is of course that I know how the damage situation will look like. After being bombed by Illidan, there is not going to be any damage on the raid, and people are too spread out for anything but the PoH you land just as the bombs land.
Er, what I am trying to say, is that in any raid, people heal differently, and as a Priest, you have the tools to pick the right heal for any situation, and in many cases, the right heal is the one that covers the weaknesses of the other healers.
The whole spec switching in raids is an interesting thought. Will buffs be cleared if you swap specs, like when you respec? I suspect blizzard will ensure people aren't switching simply to buff up.
I certainly hope they do. If not than I guess our oh-so-cool dual spec might quickly become (at least for one priest per raid) our normal spec + 23/0/0
Bjork, why in your 14/57 build do you not take Surge of Light? With the instant cast, free flash heals I'm fairly certain that over the course of a raid you would gain more benefit from it (if used effectively) than Test of Faith.
Does 2/2 Healing Focus make sense? I was under the impression that the changes to spell pushback mechanics kind of remove the reason to spec into this.
It looks like I'm moving from Druid healing to Priestly ways in WotLK. I've healed a couple of heroics and raids on the beta realm and it's a much closer match to my personal healing style. I'm thinking 51/20 for initial 80 encounters, as the extra mana, power infusion, and pain suppression could help in fights where gear lags behind aspirations of victory.
The one item that's causing me consternation is how to treat PW:S. Discipline has 3 talents that boost PW:S directly and one talent that assumes that you're using PW:S quite often. It seems as if Blizzard is expecting discipline-centric priests to work PW:S in as a natural part of their rotation. With my premade gear a fully talented PW:S would be roughly 4.5K in magnitude and reflect roughly 2K damage back at the attacker. An untalented PW:S would absorb 3400 damage. Is it really worth investing 8-13 points in shield-boosting talents? Flash heal heals for 3400, can crit, and costs a little more than a GCD (it looks like GCDs were shortened for WotLK; I've been on hiatus for a while). I'm trying to figure out how to weigh PW:S improvements without a wealth of priestly experience to draw upon. Any comments?
It seems like I'd have to gut a lot of the interesting disc talents to fully boost PW:S. Increased cooldowns on 31/41-pt talents, slower casting, reduced STA/SPI, and divine aegis. It it really worth dumping all that to boost one spell? Would I be making a poor tradeoff by using stock PW:S?
It looks like I'm moving from Druid healing to Priestly ways in WotLK. I've healed a couple of heroics and raids on the beta realm and it's a much closer match to my personal healing style. I'm thinking 51/20 for initial 80 encounters, as the extra mana, power infusion, and pain suppression could help in fights where gear lags behind aspirations of victory.
The one item that's causing me consternation is how to treat PW:S. Discipline has 3 talents that boost PW:S directly and one talent that assumes that you're using PW:S quite often. It seems as if Blizzard is expecting discipline-centric priests to work PW:S in as a natural part of their rotation. With my premade gear a fully talented PW:S would be roughly 4.5K in magnitude and reflect roughly 2K damage back at the attacker. An untalented PW:S would absorb 3400 damage. Is it really worth investing 8-13 points in shield-boosting talents? Flash heal heals for 3400, can crit, and costs a little more than a GCD (it looks like GCDs were shortened for WotLK; I've been on hiatus for a while). I'm trying to figure out how to weigh PW:S improvements without a wealth of priestly experience to draw upon. Any comments?
It seems like I'd have to gut a lot of the interesting disc talents to fully boost PW:S. Increased cooldowns on 31/41-pt talents, slower casting, reduced STA/SPI, and divine aegis. It it really worth dumping all that to boost one spell? Would I be making a poor tradeoff by using stock PW:S?
I've seen a lot of people build specs that don't use PS or Aspiration because they tend to be somewhat situational, especially in the case of Pain Suppression. I personally will be spec'ing into it because I love the idea of 40% damage reduction.
As far as Healing Focus is concerned, Holy paladins will have that covered with Concentration Aura. I don't think any main-spec Discipline builds will be running with 2/2 Imp. DS because of the dual-spec system and the availability of Spellpower boosts from Demonology warlocks and Elemental shaman.
Also, 5/5 Borrowed Time is a given if you're going to be using PW:S in any sort of rotation, because of the boost to absorption and the massive burst HPS.
The Not So Evil is attempting to model the value of talents on a per-point basis; he seems to have a decent guideline for spec building worked out so far. Check it out here if you missed it:
It was still possible as long as the raid were smart enough to realize the shortcomings of Chain Heal. Prayer of Healing is not something I would use on Hexlord.
...
A lot of the reason for trusting Greater Heal is of course that I know how the damage situation will look like. After being bombed by Illidan, there is not going to be any damage on the raid, and people are too spread out for anything but the PoH you land just as the bombs land.
Regaring Hexlord, why? As long as you have a paladin with concentration aura (which is an assumption we started with), PoH is higher HPS than CoH. Even with some remaining pushback you win a GcD from two PoH that you can use for a CoH on the other group. In addition, you can use PoH with Inner Focus twice in the fight, making it more mana efficient.
As for Illidan, your assertion is exactly why the point of using FH instead of GH doesn't hold true at Illidan. You may find logs that seem to illustrate the point, but given the nature of the fight, you have time to choose the proper healing solution. In most places where a higher rank of GH may produce too much overheal, either a GH1 or a Renew is the better solution. The question is: if the mana pool is almost unlimited, why bother fine tuning healing efficiency for that encounter?
Originally Posted by Havoc12
I get about 25k HP to group 1 from PoH and around 5000-8000 from PoM, that is 30-33k grup 2 gets 4xCoH and a PoM. Everyone takes around 400*20 = 8000 at start and ~10k at the end of the fight. Deficit is 2k at first and ~4k at more stacks. I only need 1x CoH on each group after the bolts to bring the to the point where 1-2 ppl on each group will be full due to criticals.
...
I maintain 1700-1900 HPS over the whole encounter. If I just use PoH on one group I will simply nerf my HPS. You need to squeeze in 2 PoM CDs, 2 PoHs and 4 CoHs (total casting time = 1.4*6+2.8*2 = 14 seconds) into the 10 second spirit bolt interval.
Your scenario sounds about right for group 1, but less so for group 2. How much haste do you actually run with so you have a real world casting time that allows for "1.4*6+2.8*2 = 14s" during spirit bolts? In addition, I don't understand your explanation. You want to squeeze 14s into a 10s interval. One of the casts is a precast PoM. That's ok, saves you 1.4s, but there are still 2.6s that need to fit inside the 10s. You can't significantly precast PoH as it will overheal if it lands too early. Even at 4 stacks, you can perhaps precast it about 0.5s, else it will overheal even noncrit. So you still have 12.1s to fit inside 10s. How do you do that?
If you can demontrate this technique with a WWS, I'll be happy to have a close look, saving on lots of arguing. The numbers just do not add up so far, and I very much suspect we end up finding out that CoH is not the best primary heal for that encounter - except when you don't have a paladin. If not, then I'm very keen on learning what I have been doing wrong all the time.
My point still is that you can either fully heal one group and help out a bit on the other, or you stabilize both groups - meaning you slow incoming damage so far that nobody dies for the duration. As far as I see it, you get maximum HPS by using PoM and three PoH (three may not be necessary at the start) while throwing only a single PoM to the second group. The more time you save on your group, the more time you have to help out on the other group. Fully PoHing your group would only gimp your HPS if you would not squeeze in a PoM after the second PoH.
What am I missing here?
Originally Posted by Pewsey
Many of our snakes are 3m+ in size. They'll just take the lawnmower off you and beat the shit out of you with it to make you tender, then bite you and eat you.
What you are doing is proof-by-example. That's just random. Even if you could actually show that the majority of Illidan parses look like the one you posted it wouldn't necessarily mean a thing.
It wouldn't necessarily mean a thing. But it would be awfully compelling evidence that what I was asserting was, in fact, true.
Essentially you're making the assertion that what you 'feel' is true is more likely to be true than what the data indicates as true.
Yes I could get a decent mana return from it, but I purposefully ignored a lot of procs because it just interferes with my healing pattern.
I drive an automatic. But this doesn't mean I don't recognize that a standard version of the same car doesn't get better mileage and better performance with a skilled driver.
I'm not a competitive driver, so I don't really care. If I were a competitive driver, I'd buy a standard and adapt my 'driving pattern' to maximize my performance.
in most holy templates linked in that thread , no mention of mental agility
from my understanding , it is far better than divine providence in any template isn't it?
DP increases both hpm and hps; MA only increases hpm. Given that the heals we're talking about heals that are already 'too small', this makes DP almost strictly better than MA.
Yes, clock and neck (or other combinations) are fine, however they only really help if they reduce damage for the person with lowest HP, since a priest will use 5-man heals anyway. Personally, I only use some SR gear if it's me who has lowest HP, since I mostly raid ZA with Kara/badge equipment players who don't have SR gear themselves. If all low-HP players have SR gear, or at least all except one (then that one gets a renew or the first Pom), then of course two pieces like neck and cloak are great.
The point about the lower health players being the ones most in need of some shadow resist other than the SP Buff is a good one I intend to implement into future runs. No reason to gimp the others at all. That seems a good way to even out the damage to each player relative to amount of HP each has. Our groups typically include players who outgear it paired with others at about that level gear.
I've seen a lot of people build specs that don't use PS or Aspiration because they tend to be somewhat situational, especially in the case of Pain Suppression. I personally will be spec'ing into it because I love the idea of 40% damage reduction.
As far as Healing Focus is concerned, Holy paladins will have that covered with Concentration Aura. I don't think any main-spec Discipline builds will be running with 2/2 Imp. DS because of the dual-spec system and the availability of Spellpower boosts from Demonology warlocks and Elemental shaman.
Also, 5/5 Borrowed Time is a given if you're going to be using PW:S in any sort of rotation, because of the boost to absorption and the massive burst HPS.
The Not So Evil is attempting to model the value of talents on a per-point basis; he seems to have a decent guideline for spec building worked out so far. Check it out here if you missed it:
Thanks for the information! I'm digesting it now. A quick follow-up:
Is there an easy way to get penance to not cast on the current target but cast on the person that I click on? I've tried beta Click2Cast and it blew up all over the place.
This is what I'd like to do:
1)Target boss or enemy to watch their casting.
2)Click Penance macro.
3)Click heal target.
4)Penance casts on heal target.
What's happening:
1)1)Target boss or enemy to watch their casting.
2)Click penance.
3)Attack boss.
4)Profanity.
Yes, that's easily possible without any addons. With a macro you can have penance casting on your mouse-over target, on the target of the boss, on a target with a certain name or on a focus target. But that question really is better off in the macro section as it is not specific to Penance. (Dispel Magic is very similar.) Alternatively Wowwiki has a good simple macro guide with lots of options. Good luck.
It wouldn't necessarily mean a thing. But it would be awfully compelling evidence that what I was asserting was, in fact, true.
Essentially you're making the assertion that what you 'feel' is true is more likely to be true than what the data indicates as true.
Okay, let's take the issue in context again. The assertion in question was that GH is too slow to be a key spell in the Holy priest raid arsenal except for healing tanks.
You support this claim by posting the WWS of a supposedly random Illidan fight. To begin with, it's certainly not an arbitrary WWS log, it actually is the number one horde speedkill with a time of around 6 minutes.
To take this as a prototypical example to support your claim is not reasonable. To begin with, this raid uses just 5 healers in order to maximise DPS. A more typical setup for a raid not overgearing the encounter is a combat time around 15 minutes and with around 8 healers (fights of 20 minutes are not unheard of). This changes everything. The priest in question does not use FH out of necessity, he does so because he doesn't care. I am not sure this raid even spreads out (they probably don't, otherwise we would see way more overhealing on CoH).
In order to choose a good example to support your point you really should pick a fight that has the requirement for quick raid healing. Otherwise your entire point is moot. Illidan is not such an example. The point of this fight is for the entire raid to react and position properly. The real challenge is on the tanks. Healing is fun, but it's also easy since everything except the target of dark barrage is so utterly predictable. This is why I urge you to use WWSes of fights you are really familiar with - if you don't really know the fight, you don't fully understand what you see in the WWS - the *why* aspects eludes you - and that makes for false conclusions.
Your point is an interesting one to discuss, but please use examples that make sense. Otherwise we end up concluding that wearing thick glasses is the primary reason for having bad eyes just because we've seen data that shows a correlation.
Originally Posted by Pewsey
Many of our snakes are 3m+ in size. They'll just take the lawnmower off you and beat the shit out of you with it to make you tender, then bite you and eat you.
In order to choose a good example to support your point you really should pick a fight that has the requirement for quick raid healing.
I didn't pick the fight - the person I was responding to did. And I've mentioned several times now that a single fight was not my preferred method but I had no recourse given the limitations of WWS.
If you feel the data shows something significantly different, then please tell us what data you're using.
10/12/08, 10:06 PM
