It may, but the wording isn't too clear on whether that would mean the overall shield gains 5%, or whether the spell's coefficient is simply bumped up 5%. It should be easily testable by respec.

As for the glyph, it's likely a safe assumption that the heal value is 1/5th of the absorb, but there could be talent interactions we're not aware of. I'll see about getting a log later tonight if no one else does.

On this topic:
is there a good way to parse just how much shields are "shielding" for? Or does one have to scour through WWS for "gains Power Word: Shield" then scroll down a bit to watch for how much was absorbed? (And then hope that there weren't other absorbs involved)

The magically mysteriously unlisted SPP cooeficient lol. Its not even listed anywhere about this number...thats why my calc was off. Hey, if Bliz wants to buff us big like this, we'll take it!

This unfortunately. There are no indications that absorptions was done by a (your) shield. You simply have swings or spells and their absorption values, either full or partial. If there are several absorbing effects on the same target, you can't distinguish which effect absorbed what for how much. You can take educated guesses, but that's about it.

For glyphed PW:S you can calculate it back, however the healing effect occurs at the time of applying the shield and the shield might not use up it's full potential.

If you want to write an addon or simply calculate shield absorbed damage, I'd simply use the full absorption occured and take that as a first approximation. You can still subtract 10% from the value for it's uncertainty, just to have a broad idea how much it is.

When I ran the numbers on PW:S this is what I came with. Matched actual absorb values the closest. (when I last checked)

Unless the tank needs the extra HPS provided by GHeal, then flash heal often ends up being more convenient, so greater heals are infrequent unless the tank healing gets heavy. Cast cancelling greater heal doesn't work so well because things like grace (especially) and inspiration will fall off. A quick flash heal will keep grace stacked with less chance of overhealing (--> better mana returns from rapture).

Another thing I'd suggest is not to save penance. It's bigger than a greater heal and costs less mana than a flash heal. It is thus your first choice heal for either high HPS or high mana efficiency goals. Get as much mileage out of that as possible. If you want to save something for healing spikes, save shield. Shield plus a borrowed time hastened greater heal covers spikes well if penance is on cooldown. Shield + penance + greater heal covers a huge spike if penance happens to be available within a GCD (which happens a lot even when keeping penance on cooldown). But you don't strictly have to save anything for damage spikes IMO since most of your options (except greater heal) are quite fast.

It's not really ridiculous. The coefficients on instant casts are the same as for 1.5 second casts, and the "normal" formula is:



which in this case would be 1.88*(1.5)/3.5 = 0.80571428571428571428571428571429... if you want to be excessively precise. So 0.8 is what you'd expect and is the same as you'd get from flash heal.

I can't find where, but this was tested earlier by someone else, and I believe PW:S did benefit from Twin Disciplines.

I've done it before by going through combat logs, but it is not trivial and took a few hours. Absorb amounts are noted in the combat log, but the source of the shield absorbing the damage is not. To attribute the absorb events to a specific player, you have to look at the buffs the target player gains and loses, as these will show who put a shield on the target and when.

If there's only one shield buff up or all the buffs are from the same player, then it is easy to attribute the absorbed amount to the player who was responsible for the shield buff(s).

Also, if damage breaks through a shield, then it's easy to attribute the absorbed damage to a player because the shield buff will be removed simultaneously.

If there are multiple shield buffs up from different players and the absorbed damage doesn't bring the shield buff down, then you have to make a few assumptions but you can look ahead in the log to see which shield goes down next and assume the damage was absorbed by that shield. I cannot yet prove the precise mechanic for how multiple shields stack, but it should be possible to deduce from log data.

I have thought about writing an application to parse logs for absorbed damage but I'm hoping the WWS people or someone else will do it so I don't have to.

This is very confusing, really. Don't want to be fucking ants or be annoying, but I really tested this ingame cuase of the confusion. You do get Serendipidity returns from IHC. Just not from Clearcasting but thats 2 different things. Even if its obvious, why not use the correct terms?

Improved Holy Concentration - Spell - World of Warcraft
Clearcasting - Spell - World of Warcraft

I just tested this and you do not get Serendipity off of the first IHC charge (because it has the clearcasting buff) or off of an Inner Focus charge, however I was receiving mana back from the 2nd charge of IHC.

Theres only one Clearcast proc. IHC is the haste buff [1/2 stack(s).

Yeah, I observed the same thing in this post. It's a discipline-specific bug, Borrowed Time most likely, as the holy priests were showing the proper values on their glyph heals.

The one posted by aurelito in another topic was accurate when I tested it a few weeks ago, which was.

1.15 = Improved PW:S
1.04 = Focused Power
0.4 = Borrowed Time
1.05 = Twin Disciplines

The formula above could be altered to account for the difference you are seeing:

FLOOR((Base Absorb + 1.5/3.5*1.883*SPP + 0.08*BT*SPP) * (1+Imp*0.05) * (1+TD*0.01+FP*0.02))

I don't mean to imply that your formula is wrong. This illustrates what the problem is in the current calculations; TD and FP are being applied incorrectly.

That's basically what GridStatusShield does. It's not perfect, as it can't differentiate between different people's shields, but in my experience, it's close enough.

Any ideas why page 1 of this thread wont load, but the rest of it will? If I try to go to the first page, it just hangs on Loading... for a few minutes then gives a time out error.

Looks like this:

Warning: mysqli_query() [function.mysqli-query]: (HY000/2013): Lost connection to MySQL server during query in /includes/class_core.php on line 1075
Database Error Database error
The Elitist Jerks database has encountered a problem.

I'll forward that to Boethius, we've been having a few issues lately.

Following on from this experiment, I jumped onto the PTR to try to figure out why the healing done by Glyph of Power Word: Shield does not match exactly 20% of the absorption supplied. The suspicion was that some Discipline talent, maybe Borrowed Time, was not interacting correctly with it.

Borrowed Time actually seems to be just fine, but I found two things:

1. Improved Power Word: Shield does not affect the healing of the glyph. At all.
2. Focused Power is being applied twice, both increasing the power of the shield by 2% or 4%, and then increasing the heal which is determined by the size of the shield by another 2% or 4%.

So the formula for the Glyph heal is:

(Base Absorb + 1.5/3.5*1.883*SPP + 0.08*BT*SPP) * (1+TD*0.01+FP*0.02) * (1+FP*0.02) * 0.2

My experimental numbers, based on shielding after taking each talent point.

And then I started removing gear to do some tests with decreasing amounts of spell damage.

So to convert from an observed amount of healing from the Glyph, to the amount shielded, assuming full Imp. PW:S and FP, the formula is:

(heal * 1.15 * 5) / 1.04

Or simply:

heal * 5.5288

So you can look at a WWS parse, multiply the total healing from the Glyph by 5.5288, and that's how much PW:S shielding was provided. Of course the fudge factor to estimate how much of that was used and how much was wasted is left to your own speculation.

Without posting numbers (they are already somewhere in this mega thread) I can confidently say that MP5 is a waste of an itemstat from an ilvl perspective. You simply don't get the bang for the buck. At the start when you're struggling with mana your best friend will be intellect by far, followed by spirit and mp5 coming last. Ofcourse if you had the choice of getting mp5, haste or crit when you were oom within the first minute, you'd get more from mp5 as a pure regen stat.

Is Improved Divine Spirit not such a good investment of talent points? I would think, if you already picked Divine Spirit, you might as well pick Improved Divine Spirit if you are going with a discipline build (for holy priests, two more points in the disc tree may be more painful).

At 2400 spell power, 80 additional spell power doesn't look that much, it's about three per cent. But it's three per cent nobody else can bring to the table, isn't it?

Does Fel Intelligence ("felhunter buff") overwrite Divine Spirit in a way that you actually lose the DS buff (and the spell power bonus)? And if, does this happen with IDS, too? Because in that case, i would probably prefer the 48 int.

I don't believe that it stacks with Totem of Wrath.

or Flametongue Totem... and if you are doing any serious content without a shaman, then it's your loss and you might as well spec it

I believe its only mentioned because with Disc healing, Mp5 is more appealing as it provides stronger in casting regen than spirit with meditation. Spirit shines more out of casting, and favors holy's big healing with breaks as well as its stock of spirit modding talents.

That said, Disc still gets more out of int, as rapture scales of max mana. But if disc were need to stack some sort of regen, mp5 would be it.

I thought of this initially while responding in the quick question thread about itemization re: discipline, and was hoping for some further insight.

Even given aegis' non-stacking nature, has there been a breakdown done of the increase in effective HPS when comparing crit vs haste with regards to flash heal/penance spam? There would have to be some assumptions made in regards to how many aegis' were absorbed. Although it is probably a safe assumption that aegis' is completely absorbed on any hit (if it was one applied via fh/penance), the question would be how many of them actually expire and/or get overwritten in non-stop casting situations. Given a reasonable fixed value for said absorption rate, I would assume crit would top off and haste would then be the superior addition, but I really have no idea where that breakpoint would be.

An additional thought I suppose is even if it is 'worse' from a raw HPS perspective to stack crit to the exclusion of haste, how great is the value of attempting to 'always' have a flash/penance generated aegis up? The ~2k+ absorb on any hits that do go through would seem to go a decent ways towards reducing spike impact and allowing for (while admittedly fractional, we are being relatively pedantic here) more reaction time from other healers, as the 'shot across the bow' as it were would have less initial impact.

Of course, this is under the assumption that their values are even relatively similar. If haste is completely overshadowing it at any middling values, then the second question may just be rendered moot.

The above is also operating on the assumption that the spellpower breakpoint is achieved via passive means just by virtue of standard gear acquisition and basic enchantments, ala standard TBC thought process for holy priests.