12 cosmics is the reason. I don't need to gain 2 spirit that badly.

re: Soul of the Dead, it doesn't have an ICD as far as I'm aware. It procs a *lot*, and can be significant mana savings. I'm just not sure it's worth a trinket slot. Might take it after our paladins are done (2/3).

10-man healing is a different issue. In a 5-man, you can afford to skip to Serendipity/IHC/HC/IH since the fights are short enough that inefficient single target healing won't cripple you. In a 25-man, you bring enough healers that you can be confident that you'll never be assigned to heal a tank (or, if you are, it will be the lightest possible tank healing duty) since every other healer in the raid is markedly better than a Holy Priest at tank healing.
In a 10-man, you combine fights of some length with the need for all healers to be able to tank-heal, so you need a more balanced spec.

I can't agree with that spec. Both Divine Spirit and Mental Strength are terrible talents - they're talents Discipline Priests take on the way to real talents. So essentially you're throwing away Guardian Spirit and +10% to your most common spells for a 4% boost to all of your spells.

In any case, I suspect that MA specs won't be particularly worthwhile once the 6s cooldown on CoH goes in. Hopefully at that point, Blizzard will realize just how bad Greater/Flash Heal are and fix our single target healing.

Not that I support a 20/51 spec, but I don't see how this is true at all. Mental Strength is far from terrible, and worth putting points into even for hybrid, CoH-focused specs (24/47/0; like Nidaba's spec). Intellect scales amazingly for Discipline priests (read: ALL priests). With the new changes, this is one of the best talents in the tree.

The gains from the current Mental Strength are tremendous. You might be confusing it with pre-expansion MS, which was quite underwhelming.

I have now played enough with a holy build at 80 to be able to refine my calculations for this tree. I have not played much with disc as I will raid as holy.

With just blue/epic heroic gear I am standing at 800+ int and 700+ spirit unbuffed. So I will assume at the very least 1k spirit and int. My crit is currently at 14% unbuffed with about 3% crit from items, so I will take a minimum of 18% crit.

These are the formulas I will use for spirit and int.

0.033620879*SQRT(I)*(1-0.7*%FSR) per point of spirit

0.033620879*S*(SQRT(I+1)-SQRT(I))*(1-0.7*%FSR) + 0.33 per point of int.

For crit, I will use (1+0.3*crit)*(1+0.3*(1-(1-0.45*crit)^2)) as the modifier for throughput and 0.45*crit for clearcasting. For SoL I will use the formula 1-(1-0.5*crit)^n, where n is the number of casts between each SoL use.

Also an important thing to note is that it takes 0.5-0.7 seconds for a proc to appear, so realistically you cannot react to a proc until about 1 second afterwards.

Crit and ooFSR time

Taking a base ooFSR time of 10% without clearcasting/IFocus/SoL. Then assuming each clearcast adds t seconds of ooFSR time on average and inner focus adds t+3 seconds on average every 3 minutes (due to combos with clearcasting), then 2% clearcasting being ~1 proc every 3 minutes returns t seconds of ooFSR time every 3 minutes or t/1.8 %FSR. IFocus returns t+3 seconds every 3 minutes or (t+3)/1.8% FSR. Thus without SoL and assuming 50 IHC procing casts per 3 minutes.



With trial values of 2 seconds and 0.18 crit this comes to

ooFSR = 0.173 and each point of crit adds 0.0025on top i.e. 17.3% and 0.25% per point of crit.

Obviously if you can increase the value of t, then crit will be worth more. At t=3 seconds the same values are 20% and 0.375% per point of crit.

The regen from increased ooFSR time comes thus to 1.5mp5 per crit point at t=2 seconds and 2.3 mp5 per crit point at t=3 seconds with 1000int 1000spi.

The full formula is

, which becomes



It is easy to modify the calculations with a different value for casts/3 mins.

The values for SoL are very hard to calculate. If you get an SoL proc and you use it straight away, then after GCD is over you have 3.5 seconds before the 5 second period is over and double SoL procs without spending any mana in between are too rare to count. So the value of SoL is realistically only to attach some extra time periodically to IF/IHC procs. Unlike clearcasting where a significant amount of the mana return comes from the ooFSR regen time, with SoL the majority of the gain is free heals, unless the fight is quite trivial in which case none of this matters.

Crit, SoL and clearcasting

Clearcasting with a frequency of 50 casts per 3 mins returns about 0.225*crit procs per 3 minutes. Each point of crit thus adds lets say 225/180*5 = 6.25 mp5 from the free spell, in addition it returns 1.5mp5 from ooFSR regen.

Thus each point of crit under these conditions is worth 7.75 mp5 from IHC.

SoL is obviously very dependent on the number of proc uses per second. If you are using 1 proc per 10 seconds its worth 250-300 mp5, but 1 use per 10 seconds is really very frequent. Currently after looking at several WWS reports from grobbulus in naxx25 a fight with a relatively high PoM/CoH usage I see something in the order of 15 procs per 5 minutes when normalising to ~30% crit . Assuming 80% of them are used (which is unlikely as more than that will be lost to ovewrites) this is 0.8*15 = 12 procs per 300 seconds this is 1 proc every 25 seconds or about 100 mp5, this is 3.3mp5 per point of crit.

Adding the two together gives back 11mp5 per point of crit from SoL and clearcasting, with the above assumptions.

Crit, Spirit and Intelligence

At ~20% FSR (which is in line with the above estimates):

1 spirit = 0.46780164 mp5

1 Intellect = 0.563842374 mp5

This is in terms of pure regeneration and does not take into account the 16.5 mana per point of int. For a 5 minute fight this 16.5*5/300 = 0.275 mp5 per point increasing the value of int to 0.84mp5 for a 5 minute fight


It takes about 45 spirit or 45 int to get 1 % crit so

For the same amount of item item points you can get 11mp5 from 1% crit, 21mp5 from spirit or 38mp5 from int.

For throughput. Each point of spirit adds 0.25 spell power and each point of int adds 0.006% crit. Thus 45 spi adds 11.15 spellpower, 45 points of int add 0.27% crit.

1% crit adds 0.383% to effective healing at these crit values, but if you are using SoL you are exchanging throughput for mana regen, so to get the best mana regen from into you will get even less throughput.

int has 27% of the throughput contribution of crit obviously

11.15 spellpower at 2000 spell power adds about 22 points of healing on a 9.5k gheal, which is 0.24% that means it has 66% of the throughput power of 1% crit.

To summarise everything for equal item points (1% crit, 45 int or 45 spi)

Mana: Crit - 11mp5, spi - 21mp5, int - 38mp5

Throughput: Crit - 0.383%, spi - 0.24%, int - 0.1%

However it must be borne in mind that the mana value of crit is also dependent on the value of ooFSR regen time.

Spellpower returns about 40% more throughput than crit. Haste returns approximately 2.7 times the throughput value of crit.

CoH, SoL, crit and HPS/HPM

If you are hitting 5 targets with CoH then the chance to proc SoL is



The following table gives the proc chance for each 10% of crit

This is the gain of proc chance per addition point of crit at each of these values


Basically holy priests are looking between 41 and 56% chance of procing SoL per cast of CoH.

Due to the potential for overwrites however, as casts are not uniform but tend to go through very intense concentrations (e.g. pom ticking a few times in very short succession while you are spamming CoH then you take a short break), that means a certain proportion of procs are lost. I arbitrarily take 80% as the usable value, because that is what I estimate from my own experience healing instances in smiter disc/holy spec with SoL, while I leveld to 80.

If a point of crit adds 1.6% chance of procing a 500 mana proc then that means its worth 8 mana each time you cast CoH, but it takes 3 seconds to do so, (2 instants) 8 mana per 3 seconds is 13mp5. As your crit rate goes higher however the value of extra drops quickly. 13mp5 is the hard limit in the mana regen from crit via SoL, in practical terms no one EVER gets more than 10mp5 per point of crit from SoL. After looking at over a dozen WWS reports, I never found anywhere where someone got more than 4mp5 per crit point from SoL.

Conclusion

Int has ~ 3.45-fold the mana regen value of crit rating, but 0.27% its throughput
Spirit has ~ 2-fold the mana regen value of crit rating, but 0.32% its throughput

Spell power has 1.4fold the throughput value of crit rating.
Haste has 2.7fold the throughput value of crit rating.

1) For CoH/PoM spam you need 0 crit rating, all you need is raid buffs and talents, its best to stack int, spellpower and haste. With this playstyle its best to actively avoid crit rating.

2) For a mixed style and tank healing, crit rating can be used as a substitute for spell power and haste.

Have you been reading this thread at all?

Mental Strength is a great talent. It can easily, with little effort in gear gathering, be worth 150+ intellect. That is a good chunk of regen; both from the regen formula, from top end regen mechanics (shadow fiend, hymn of hope, replenishment, mana tide, etc.). As well, about 1% crit.

Divine Spirit is also a good talent, improved divine spirit not so much. +80 spirit (that stacks with kings, so 88) is great for all priests, mages, warlocks, and druids (sans feral). That is added spellpower and regen for most of those classes. If you have multiple priests in a raiding environment, one should definitely grab Divine Spirit.

Assuming you have 1000 Intellect/Spirit, those 5 points in Mental Strength net you 63.8 mp5, 0.9% spell critical and 2250 mana. Over a 5 minute fight, that 2250 extra mana yield 37.5 extra mp5 equivalent from the initial exra mana and 28.125 mp5 from 100% Replenishment. That's a total of 129 mp5 and 0.9% spell critical.

With +2000 spellpower, the impact of 5 points of DP on your CoH/PoH/Holy Nova (greater impact on BH/ProM due to coefficients) would be the same as 590 points of Spellpower.

To gain +590 Spellpower via gemming, it would require 49 lvl 100 gems. To gain 129 mp5 and 0.9% spell critical via gemming, it would require 29 lvl 100 gems. So 5/5 DP is almost twice as powerful as 5/5 MS if you think about it in terms of what gear you'd have to replace to get the same effect.

I am making no such assumption. I am pointing out that you have a choice between buffing certain stats via gear or via talents. If you choose to buff throughput via gear and mana regen via talents (with the MS choice), you are increasing your character's effectiveness far less than if you do the reverse (via DP).

In terms of spell selection, in most 25-man raids you'd never cast Greater Heal and only rarely cast a Flash Heal that wasn't prompted by Surge of Light.

For a Holy priest, OK. For a Disc priest, the Rapture returns make MS even stronger than you show (also you neglect Shadowfiend and the cumulative effect with Blessing of Kings, which together bump the mp5 value of MS over 150 even for a mostly-Holy priest). But in any case, showing that Divine Providence is *even more awesome* than MS is not quite the same as saying that Mental Strength is a terrible talent, which was your original claim. 130 or 150 mp5 equivalent for 5/5 MS is quite large; that's about the same per point as Inner Focus, and dwarfs the estimates for mana returns from things like IHC or SoL.

Further, while I understand the validity of looking at gems and gear points to see what the gear cost would be of emulating one or the other talent, I think this can also lead to bad conclusions. If something is very costly in Blizzard's itemization (*cough* crit *cough*), does that mean that a talent that gives us more of it is really good? Replacing Holy Specialization with gems would be very expensive, but it doesn't necessarily follow that the talent is great.

In this particular case we have another way of comparing the value of +590 spellpower and 150 mp5, namely, the total healing we could expect to do in 5 minutes. Without going through the math here, I will just say that in a fight where heals per mana are high (as for CoH and PoM), the value of mp5 per point is about 5-5.5 times as large as spellpower. See entrop's WWS and my analysis of the Sapphiron fight in it, for example.

When we look at things in this context, it's fair to say that MS is slightly better (even for Holy) if we want pure endurance, while DP gives us almost as much endurance and also a lot of throughput.

One additional note (edited in): If you want to look at gems/gear point equivalents, I think you can make MS look even cheaper ('worse') by assuming that you emulate it directly via Int gemming, not mp5/crit. Of course, this tells us nothing and should make us even more suspicious of this method of valuation.

Never cast Greater Heal? I'm sorry but that is just plain wrong. I cast flash heal plenty, and I don't even have surge of light.

Kortar, you need to not make false assumptions. Just because Divine Providence (which I am currently spec'd for) has more of a 'item level' budgeting per talent point than Divine Strength. However, in terms of Intellect versus Spell Power it matters in terms of preference.

Divine Strength is worth more to someone who is lower on Intellect, while Divine Providence (in my case) is worth more to me because I'm fine with my regen. However, healing is not a DPS numbers game. Healing style comes into play and what not and personal preference of both stats and talents. Sure there are theoretical 'bests' and what not, but it is not the same for each player.

I think that depends on your play style. I am personally not a CoH spammer yet I picked up MA because it is useful for PoM, renew and other spells I use quite often. I don't see myself losing it until I get some better gear and I can re-evaluate where I am efficiency wise.

I've been comparing my BiS list to others in this thread, and I can't help but wonder if the 4pc bonus is good enough for a holy priest to be worth sacrificing some of the other pieces, that I personally rate higher. I realize gear rating is partially subjective due to it's dependence on play style and healing assignments, but I've seen several people in this thread allude to the fact that they're trying to choose the non-set piece that is best for them while maintaining their bonus.

I'm primarily focused on a holy priest, so my assumptions and claims are not valid for a disc priest, but based on my math both the 2pc and 4pc set bonus are only marginally valuable compared to some of the nicer pieces of gear available. We've already covered that the 2pc bonus for a priest with DP is pretty low value. Currently the only two fights where I can assume I'll get 6 bounces during my CD are Saph and Malygos P1. The rest of the time, I'm more likely to recast PoM to direct the healing where I want it than to let it bounce an extra time. As for the 4pc bonus there are only two current fights where I'm expected to chain-cast GH in a manor that would make the bonus valuable enough to be worth using (Sarth+3, Patchwerk) and considering we've managed to do these without these bonuses, I'm disinclined to gear with the bonuses in mind. Unless my math is off, I have the 4pc bonus worth at most 130 Mp5 (20% haste assuming 0 IHC procs) and under most circumstances, dramatically less, so I can't imagine passing on a better piece of gear to maintain the bonus.

Now, I realize that T7 pieces are going to drop more consistently/frequently and have less overall competition than some of the top end non-set pieces, so if the difference is small, T7 may be a more attractive option, but I'm curious if people really have T7 Head/Shoulders/Gloves/Legs rated higher than some of the ilvl 226 items that are available in the same slot.

I've been looking around the thread but I didnt find any model to calculate the MP5 equivalents of spellpower, especially for Disc priests via Rupture. I understand Rupture is capped but it would be nice to have a model on a typical Tank-healing rotation of sort, or by spell, to understand how much Spellpower is not only a throughtput stat but also a regen stat, especially on shields.

Moreover an explicit formula on how Spellpower affects the MP5 effects through crit->DA by spell may be handful, even if this is still bugged as it seems.

Thank for nice work.

One thing to remember: Fel Intelligence and Divine Spirit do not stack; a gain of only +16 spirit (not factoring in Kings) is provided to the raid if any of your Warlocks raid with a Felhound.

In terms of Discipline Priests, you'd don't even have to wonder about Rapture returns to note that Discipline Priests rarely ever cast any of the spells buffed by Divine Providence.

In terms of comparing two dissimilar talents, any comparison between mana regen and throughput is necessarily going to fall afoul of the problem that you're not talking about the same thing. The 'gem equivalent' method is useful because it observes you have to get those stats from somewhere, and it tells you how mostly efficiently to get those stats. While it won't give you an accurate point-weighting without further consideration, it basically gives you a decent understanding of the comparitive value of talents in any situation where you actually need the talents in question.

The method you describe "I can cast X amount of healing in Y amount of time" is commonly used, but it's actually meaningless for any reasonable set of gear/talents/content. The 'X' we're talking about is actually a constant - the amount of damage dealt (or, perhaps, the share of damage our healer has to cover). But in a 25-man raid, this 'X' is a ridiculously low percentage of the actual theoretical healing thrown So really all you're doing is comparing two situations where we already have enough mana regen.

What really occurs as we stress mana more is that we very, very slightly start to increase risk by not throwing heals that we prioritize as unimportant. Because the heals we're not throwing are the least important heals, they also increase the risk the least. This logarithmic process means that until we're fairly close to the point where we literally can't generate the raw "X healing in Y time", it barely has any impact at all.

Of course, you don't have to buy my explanation. Just run the numbers throughout the history of WoW. You'll notice that the "X healing in Y time" metric always claims you need more mana regen at the expense of throughput for reasonable assumptions. Yet throughout the history of WoW, it's been the exact opposite - loading mana regen at the expense of throughput has always been a losing strategy (to be fair, there are some other very important considerations here, such as how it's a lot easier to re-arrange your raid to increase mana regen than it is to re-arrange your raid to increase healing throughput).

You mean Rapture.
Anyway, the mp5 equivalent depends on other things, mostly our mana pool and the total of the effective spellpower coefficients of the spells we cast during them time under consideration.

mana returned = (healing / 9330) * (mana pool / 40)

With a 20K manapool, this would mean that

mana returned = (healing / 18.66)

So the question becomes what our effective spellpower coefficient is over 5 seconds - the sum of the coefficients for the average or typical spellcasting activity in a 5-second period. In a long but fairly intensive fight this value will likely fall between 3 and 4.

So our ballpark estimate of the regeneration we get from spellpower via Rapture will be 'somewhere between 3/19 and 4/19 mp5 per spellpower' or between 1/5 and 1/6 mp5 per point of spellpower.

For the sake of consistency (and although it´s readable from the tooltip) you should also note that Rapture caps at 2,5 % of your total mana.

There really isn´t any sense in taking Spirit for a Holy Priest at all. If you have a Disc Priest - fine. He´ll specc Spirit (1 point, not 3, of course) since he´ll need to spend a quite useless point anyway to get down. However, forcing or making a Holy take Disc is plainly stupid.

I'm wondering the exact same thing, the other options for those slots seem so much stronger so i'm not sure if the 2 and 4 pc bonus are worth losing those extra stats.

Honestly, the T7-bonuses are quite crappy. The case with PoM has already been discussed in this thread. It´s not very likely to bounce 5 times, even more so 6 times. Especially as Holy with only 7 second CD on PoM it´s pointless.

The 5 % less Mana cost on GH is nice, but it´s pointless, too. You simply don´t cast GH often enough for it to be valuable (regardless whether you´re Disc or Holy) and in the cases you do you don´t care about Mana since those are the cases where raw throughput on a single target matters (also, 5 % isn´t really much, anyway).

On another note I have to say that unless they acknowledge Holy and Disc to really be different speccs (which also need different gear - especially sets) it´s unlikely we will get good bonuses for both speccs. However, a bonus that would at least benefit one of the Priest speccs would be highly appreciable (although, on the other hand we have the situation of not being forced into sets due to specific bonuses, which some might regard as a good thing since it broadens your choice when gearing).

I am pretty sure there are warrior set bonuses somewhere that affect both BT and MS, so its not hard for us to have one set. That said, I was thinking today and I believe what Discipline really needs is just a little bit more oomph from Spirit at some higher talent levels. Personally, I think some percentage of Spirit converting to crit rating would be nice, but of course Discipline already gets bigger bonus from intellect and haste.

Anyways, my short and sweet point is: I don't think they should develop two sets, I think they should work towards having both specs value similar stats, and at the minute the biggest point of argument seems to be spirit.

Is anyone else starting to feel ready to retire using greater heal as disc? So far I've used it as a necessary heal on patchwerk only, and nothing else in this content cycle seems to require its hps, and more specifically, raw large numbers at all. In fact, the difference in gear (mine & tanks') from last week to this week has made it dramatically less necessary. When our tanks and I are done using blues, I expect it to be very possible to heal patchwerk and things like maexxna enrage without gheal.

Glyphed flash heal is very good. The extra ~18% HPS (that number will vary by gear levels obviously) that gheal provides may not be outright overtaken by 40% more DA/trinket procs, grace uptime, and less overheal, but the value of having different time priorities, while subjective, is pretty high. Raid damage in general seems to never dip into the gheal range at all on any fight I've seen, it's mostly in the range of very healable by other healer's group heals combined with a few flash (or any healer's 1.5 sec heals) on whoever is left over.

Likewise, I feel that the shadowfiend spec (5x/0x/17) is a very real option of a raid spec at around 25,000 mana ( averaging ~10k mana back per shadowfiend per 3 minutes), making it very hard to go oom, but I never see it discussed on here, so maybe I'm missing the obvious flaws. The loss of inspiration and atleast 2% crit is what I would miss the most, but seems manageable.

Thank you for that, you are indeed correct I think its 210% for gheal, with all things considered, so spirit throughput is undervalued. I will fix that.

I am using 500 as a token value instead of 625, for flash heal to account for the fact that flash heal could have procd serendipity and for the fact that you may spend mana in other ways if you did not have SoL. All in all, crit rating does not do that much in terms of mana return from SoL.

For tank healing the parameters are a bit different, because 50 casts per 3 minutes are too low. When you are tank healing, and you have an item choice between spellpower and crit rating, it is a valid choice as long as you don't end up sacrificing int or spirit. In a mixed raid healing environment it is different.

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In terms of mental strength vs DP comparison, the conversion of DP to spell power is wrong. Spellpower affects all spells not just the spells affected by DP, so that grossly overvalues the talent.

Mental strength does more than give you more mana and crit. It also increases the regen value of spirit.


1000 spi int, means 1150 spi and 1100 int with kings. That gives you a regen of 1063. With mental strength its 1140. That is a gain of 77/23mp5, which with 20% FSR is 34mp5. This about 170mp5 and 0.9% spell crit.

The right way to compare the two is to determine how many more CoH/pom/PoH/BH can you cast within a given time frame with an extra 170mp5. If your mana regen is limiting in any way MS compares favourably with DP alone, but taking MS requires a lot more sacrifice than just DP.