You sure? Reads to me like he's proposing making T4's 4 piece bonus ([Robes of the Incarnate]) into a talent.
I don't remember anyone being blown away by that particular set bonus, do you?
It seems you are taking the quote a bit too literal rather then look at the big picture. What GC said had more to do with how healing is being done, especially from Holy. Its not about making a new talent or some new bonus on armor to better a talent. Its about using something besides 1-2-3,1-2-3, etc. GC did quite a good job at explaining this idea with his examples. The Disc priest and how its healing is dependent on active buffs that you cast and create when using other spells. The need to take weakness and Grace into consideration before simply casting any heal. This brings a great change to healing mechanics and the exact reason I enjoy Disc so much. Its not simple healing, it requires greater awareness and skill utilization thus ending in a more satisfying outcome.
I agree with Constantius, if what GC is saying is true and they do in fact want to improve healing in that manner, then it will make healing far more exciting.
You sure? Reads to me like he's proposing making T4's 4 piece bonus ([Robes of the Incarnate]) into a talent.
I don't remember anyone being blown away by that particular set bonus, do you?
Most people were not blown away back then because we used a different style of healing. I know i particularly have used alot more flash heals in WotLK then i ever did in BC. I also think set bonus was overshadowed by how good 2 piece T5 was at that point. I know i would downrank GHeals instead of using Flash if i had the time because of the insane mana efficiency.
"We have some exciting changes planned for priests. Many of them will make it in 3.1 (Ulduar). We hope to have them finalized enough to be able to announce some in the next couple of weeks"
This was from a blue post on mmo-champ. Makes me wonder what kinda changes they are planning for us priests. After the changes on circle of healing, i would love to see some changes on our renews. Renew was such an amazing spell and still is, but i don't see many people using it. If blizzard should change our renew so it would heal and leave a small HoT on the target and give it a 1sec casting time, it would balance it out with our nerf on CoH.
Imagine a situation where someone is low healt. The best istant you can shot him in order to prevent him from death is PW:S (unless you are discipline with penance up). After that you heal him. In case he had take a hit while you were casting a flash he'd been death, so the shield actually would be a saver in case of an hit. It did a good job even if that possibly fatal hit never landed.
I would definitely cast the shield, I think it's a good idea to cast the shield, but overhealing can often result from doing things that are good ideas. If we start talking about things that could have happened, but didn't, then we can imagine a lot of scenarios. After all, every single time you cast a heal there is a chance that a Lay on Hands hits the target 10 milliseconds before your heal does. Does that mean you shouldn't have cast the heal? Certainly not. Does it mean the entire heal was overheal and not credited to your effective healing? It almost certainly does.
Originally Posted by Promethia
That is, however, just my own estimation, and I could be persuaded otherwise. I'm primarily concerned that it would be easy to underestimate the utility of shields, which do have some advantages over heals. On a practical level, I don't think ignoring expired shields will end up overvaluing shields.
Perhaps a better option still is to avoid adding things together that are not the same, since that definitely leads people to conclude (incorrectly) that those things have the same value. Statistics "lie" primarily by misleading people into thinking/assuming they mean something that they don't, not from being incorrect measurements.
I find this really interesting. What, in your view, differentiates healing done from shields put up? Obviously shields prevent spell knockback, but I figure we talking as much (if not more) about shielding tanks than anyone else. In my mind they seem different, but no matter how I try to wrap my head around it, a point of health seems like a point of health to me, whether it is in green bar form or buff form. (No faceciousness here at all, I'm really interested in people's perspective on the difference between shields and green bars)
I agree that statistics are often misinterpretted, but overheal can be very misinterpretted as well. I think overheal is automatically labelled as being bad because of its history. I think things went something like this:
- First no one had meters; there was little way to tell who was doing what, so there was little pressure to do anything
- Meters were introduced to measure total healing, those with the highest healing were seen as the best; the pressure became to chain cast your best spells, but that targets were not important so a very bad healing style read as the best healing style by the metric being used
- Meters measure overhealing, healers with the highest effective heal were seen as the best; the pressure is to cast heals on people who need health, which is much closer to how people should actually heal
In its early conception, overheal was a way to tell healers who were actually good at playing from healers who cast g. heal on random targets. Without measuring overheal, they are the same. If this is the purpose of overheal, then listing expired shields as overheal (or overshielding) fulfills the same function: it helps to tell the person who puts shields on people who need shielding from the person who has no idea what they were doing. It may sound like a ridiculous thing to worry about, but while outlying people who would actually cast shields on random people hoping to do better on the currently fictitious shield meters are unlikely, the measure of effective shielding vs. overshielding still gives some indication of how good you are are picking who to shield and when.
It's important not to get too carried away with effective healing/shielding being the only thing that counts. I remember our early days of Prince in kara with two shadow priests in the raid (the composition we happened to have). We told our paladin recruit to chain cast max rank holy light on the tank, don't bother cancel-casting or doing anything fancy because there was going to be plenty of mana. Having a huge overheal number for that fight did not indicate bad healing, it indicated that he did exactly what he was supposed to do and the tank dodged a lot. Similarly, "wasted" shields, as in the example above, are often the right thing to do. Overhealing and overshielding may be the right thing to do sometimes, but I think they are essentially comparable things to do. In the end, we won't have a single output function that tells us who plays well and who doesn't, so I'm concerned with getting the metrics I have to measure what they are supposed to so I can use them appropriately. To me, that means if you are going to add shields to healing done to compare discipline priests to other healers, you should only add actual points of damage absorbed.
An idiot is someone who would rather be treated like an idiot than called an idiot
Amazing changes will be some very mild buffs to disc, fixing the da/rapture bug, and buffing renew coefficient. Anything more and I will be shocked.
Actually, I remember a developer Q&A where someone suggested that Imp. Divine Spirit should give as much spell power as flametongue. The response was something like, "I'd be very surprised if that part of the tree looked the same in 3.1" (Sorry I can't find the source, I think it was around a week ago)
I think they may actually have more substantial changes in the works. Also, the same post on mmo-champ mentioned they were hotfixing the shields/rapture bug. I'll believe it when I see it, but apparently they think this will be done well before 3.1 (of course I seem to recall that it took them six or seven patches of "fixing" the Surge of Light bugs in BC before they actually fixed it).
An idiot is someone who would rather be treated like an idiot than called an idiot
GC said that "that part of the tree" (by which I assume he meant the entire 5th tier, basically) would look very different. Given that IDS is bloody useless, I'm hoping they roll the basic effect into DS, make it a single point talent, drop it to tier 3 to make the 5th point there (along with 3/3 Meditation and 1/1 Inner Focus), and then put something genuinely new into 21-25.
After all, the 21-25 talents are supposed to be interesting enough to consider losing your 51-pointer. GS is good enough that they need to come up with something interesting to make us have a decision to make, instead of the default "choose GS, continue".
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
l337noob, I agree on your answer to me, infact in the last part of my post I specified how actually I can't gather info from the overheal report.
Overheal
I wouldn't want to come to say it but, actually, overheal meter is more worthless than useful. If a dps is at -2k life and you have mana and GCDs to spare, wouldn't you cast a heal to top him? this would certainly be more than 50% overheal. And personally, being discipline with PW:S glyph, I usually top them by shielding if I think I'm not going to need to shield for emergency reason in the next 4 seconds.
Mind, I'm always been a fan of efficient healing and mana conserve, but I've not been able to find any way to use the overhealing meter from vanilla wow. Too many aoes flying on the raid, too many spammers not caring for hots, too much damage on tank to care for overhealing by 50% of our Gheals (holy spec wise, ofc, altough there are paladins on tanks now, usually).
In the end, if we can't gather any real info on the skill of the player, or how, when, why and how much there's been overheal, than what's the reason to have an overhealing meter at all?
A tool has to serve a purpose, the simple count of the overheal is just an info that can't be used in any way to improve our gameplay. Since it's like wanting to get info on a set of numbers by just knowing the value of the sum of all its members. It could be any quantity of number, you don't know if they are real or only natural, there are tons of possibilities and the only thing you only know is the total sum. There's no info in it apart from the info the sum carries in itself.
To get some meaningful overheal info we should not count the "useful" overheal: overheal done over a target which has been healed in the last 0.5 seconds (we need to account for lag+reflexes), i.e.
Another example of "good" overheal is from poh when the group has only 4 injured players.
The more I think about this matter, the more I think we would be better off without an overheal meter. Healing is about fast decision in critical situation. How can we decide a minimum treshold of overheal for a gheal, so that if the overheal is less than it than the tank was indeed in need of that cast so the overheal was "good" while if it is more than the tank could have taken another hit before us releasing the gheal (making this overheal "bad")?
I think there are too many things to evaluate for us to let an addon evaluate how much of our overheal was good an how much wasn't. And it's too situational too to have some fixed standard.
Shields
What a shield can do is to make your hps higher (a shield "heals" while you can cast another heal if the attack comes after the GCD for shield is gone). Shields are instant reactive heals. They are like a pom in many ways.
Shields also act as a sort of "stamina buff" if you like to see it this way. The tank with 30k healt and 5k shield on him has a 35k healt pool.
This is why a shield is much stronger than a heal mechanic wise.
Of course if your target is not going to be hit before the shield wears off, than your shield only provided some temporary, unsued, healt. Which is why heal is better than shield if the target isn't capped in life (of course, provided you compare an istant heal of 5k to an istant shield of 5k).
After this, come the pushback detail, but it's just a plus in this kind of healing talking.
A shield is only useful if there was an appreciable chance of the target dying without the shield. This seems to have been ignored. A shield is not useful under all circumstances.
For example there's no point in shielding your highest health melee-dps on Patchwerk, for the case that your hurtful tanks drop too low for too long. He will die, even with the shield. It got fully absorbed, but it didn't help.
If there's some 5k AoE going around it is useful to put a shield on someone below 5k. (Something akin to Malygos phase 2.) But if the target has 7k then a heal is clearly the better choice. Not least because that way you save shield to put on someone who may actually need it.
As a further example the damage on 4 Horsemen is very predictable. Yet I don't always pre-shield as many people as possible even though I know it would get used. Because I know that I'll use PoH/Nova on my group instead.
So in summary:
A shield can be valuable even if it doesn't absorb anything, by negating the chance of someone dying who's health dropped below the required threshold.
However, a shield that didn't absorb anything can also be completely useless if there was never any chance of the target dying without the shield.
A shield is only useful if there was an appreciable chance of the target dying without the shield. This seems to have been ignored. A shield is not useful under all circumstances.
For example there's no point in shielding your highest health melee-dps on Patchwerk, for the case that your hurtful tanks drop too low for too long. He will die, even with the shield. It got fully absorbed, but it didn't help.
I hate to beat a dead horse but that is not how the Patchwerk hateful strike mechanics work anymore. We have none of our melee remove stamina buffs, dip into the go, we heal up Ret Pally's using Seal of Blood, etc.
The mechanic is as such:
3 tanks get on the aggro table of Patch, 1st is your MT, 2nd & 3rd take hatefuls. The hateful strikes hit whoever of those two tanks (2nd & 3rd on aggro) has the lowest current health. If they are both low (say 6000 & 9000 HP) Patchwerk will not hit a melee at 20k hp, instead he will hateful the 9000 HP tank. The hateful strikes also give aggro to the three players 1st through 3rd on the aggro list.
Shields are useful anytime you 'suspect' someone is going to take a spike of damage (Sartharion/Malygos Breath) or if someone has just taken a large amount of damage and you instantly shield them while another healer (or six) can land a quick heal before they are hit by anything else.
Shields
What a shield can do is to make your hps higher (a shield "heals" while you can cast another heal if the attack comes after the GCD for shield is gone). Shields are instant reactive heals. They are like a pom in many ways.
Shields also act as a sort of "stamina buff" if you like to see it this way. The tank with 30k healt and 5k shield on him has a 35k healt pool.
This is why a shield is much stronger than a heal mechanic wise.
Of course if your target is not going to be hit before the shield wears off, than your shield only provided some temporary, unsued, healt. Which is why heal is better than shield if the target isn't capped in life (of course, provided you compare an istant heal of 5k to an istant shield of 5k).
After this, come the pushback detail, but it's just a plus in this kind of healing talking.
I actually completely disagree with your logic that it's bad to use a shield on someone low health. I use shields all the time on casters that get low/pull agro while aeing that has saved them/given a tank time to pull agro off. Take the following case:
I'm casting GH on a tank when Warlock pulls agro.
In the GCD from the GH I drop Shield on the warlock to stop the Inc damage
Gives me time to drop a flash heal or penance on them to heal up the damage and hopefully in that time the tank snags the agro back.
It seems you are taking the quote a bit too literal rather then look at the big picture.
Yeah, perhaps
Can't help but feel a little jaded and grumpy after a nerf patch that also helpfully included so many harmful bugs (GS bug, PoM refresh bug, figurine trinket bug, CoH-during-Vortex bug, did I forget any other major ones?).
So I'm afraid I'm done giving the devs the benefit of the doubt for now. Until further clarification I'm assuming that the big holy priest hope of 3.1 is T4 4-piece bonus. Yippee. I hope you're all as excited as me and gsman20.
Originally Posted by constantius
After all, the 21-25 talents are supposed to be interesting enough to consider losing your 51-pointer. GS is good enough that they need to come up with something interesting to make us have a decision to make, instead of the default "choose GS, continue".
Careful there, or you may get what you're wishing for and GS cooldown will be adjusted to 30 minutes to make your speccing more fun.
Sarcasm aside, perhaps the real silver lining of all of this might end up that with our only remaining adequate spell taken away, it might finally become painfully clear why we were reduced to relying on it quite so much.
Here's to hoping.
I actually completely disagree with your logic that it's bad to use a shield on someone low health.
Please.. do not judge something from only the last post of a discussion. Do some research before answering posts.
This way you'll not misunderstand others.
Another thing you can do is to pay attention when you read:
Of course if your target is not going to be hit before the shield wears off, than your shield only provided some temporary, unsued, healt. Which is why heal is better than shield if the target isn't capped in life (of course, provided you compare an istant heal of 5k to an istant shield of 5k)
Yes, we have no istant spell that heals for the same amount of PW:S (and have the same cd, if you like), but I was comparing two MECHANICS. After we deeply comprehen them, we can better evaluate our spells. Or as in case of the discussion that was going on, the worth of an unused shield vs overheal.
EDIT: better to explain it instead of trusting you to get it by yourself, since you could misread again.
In the example I made, provided the target is at 1k healt but isn't hit anymore by attacks, if you cast a 5k shield he's gonna be at 6k virtual healt for some second, than he'll drop to 1k again (no attack hits, remember). In the case of the healing spell he's at 6k healt even after the "expiration time" of the shield spell you could have used. What's better? To be at 6k or 1k life?
Now, don't misunderstand the reason why I did this comparison. Check the old posts and you should be able to understand what's the point. To help you: I'm a great fan of shielding, but I know that when the target has no life a heal is better. Point is we have only certain pre made spells, which means that our best option when someone is low is either to shield or penance him. Penance is a heal and thus would be better, in a way, on the other hand my penance first hit heals for far less than my PW:S, so if my target is too low on healt I shield, otherwise I penance.
I read it the first time and still disagree after you posted it again. Don't assume people only read the end of a thread i've been watching it since the beginning. Even if not agro I tend to shield someone that low on health just in case some splash damage or something of the like pops out, with the way mana regen is now it's in no way wasted.
I read it the first time and still disagree after you posted it again. Don't assume people only read the end of a thread i've been watching it since the beginning. Even if not agro I tend to shield someone that low on health just in case some splash damage or something of the like pops out, with the way mana regen is now it's in no way wasted.
Some other points (pertains to raid only):
1. You should consider what your other healers are doing and what their capabilities are also. Other healers do have instants, but they are mostly on long cd's. We have the ability to quickly shield, while some other healer gives them health quickly through a quick single target or a splash heal from various other healers. When you consider the other healers in the raid, it if often best for a priest should shield while another healer tops when a someone is very low.
2. There are random nonaggro sources. It is a good healer's duty to know the fight and all the possible sources of damage that will happen. If you are sure there is absolutely no possible way the person will take any damage whatsoever due to aggro or fight mechanics, sure a quick heal may be needed. But most fight include random dmg mechanics. Thus like Lilcure, I tend to shield a low person and rely on and trust another healer to top them off. Saving people is what we are supposed to do...as a group.
We have to remember that we don't live in a vacuum. It is necessary with some theorycrafting that we assume so, but in this case we are not.
Dirich I don't think we need to insult each other. The original post from Promethia was actually comparing the importance of a heal vs a shield when the target DOES NOT take any more damage afterwards.
So in your example the target having 6k health afterwards is not relevant for the specific case that Promethia was making.
Originally Posted by Promethia
Some might say "Well, some of those shields will expire", and that's true... but I'm not sure how relevant that is. Shields expire if the target does not take damage afterwards.
So back to the original topic!! Would anyone like to figure a way to quantify how much HPS DA and PW:S produce? I'm willing to help with some scripting if we can figure out a algorithm.
1) Lilcure: I made a post whose main point was to explain you we agree on that point, and that you read something in my words that wasn't there, with those word I was talking about something different from healing strategies, I was talking about mechanic. Yet you do another post repeating you don't agree but repeating that which I already explained I agree to.
Either you don't read or you don't uderstand what I write. We are saying the same thing (even though I wasn't saying it in that part you quoted, as I explained), how can you not agree with me?
2) dexwest: by making a post you can answer to other posts AND add additional points to the discussion. That small paragraph was a comparison on the mechanic of "heal" and "prevention". It was something related to the argument of discussion that I found to be a valuable addition.
Also, the discussion about shields started from me and Tainter at page 57. Promethea jumped in. Also I was talking directly to l337noob in the post lilcure quoted, as you can see if you read the first word of said post. You line about the 6k healt is wrong in so many ways I'll just stop here.
Oh, a small p.s. for you. I may have been a bit harsh, but I never insulted him. He actually didn't read or didn't understand what I wrote, since we agree on the point he says we disagree on.
Back to the topic, answering you question, dexwest, the amount DA and PW:S heal for is already being calculated by the modified version of recount posted two pages ago. DA is 30% of the crit heal that procced it, while PW:S is 5 times the heal from the Glyph, if my memory doesn't fail me.
The problem that was being discussed is the "overheal" from shields, aka the amount of damage prevention not used (and from here started the discussion about how useful is to calculate the overheal which is what was being discussed in these last posts of mine, promethea, l337noob etc).
Also, the same post on mmo-champ mentioned they were hotfixing the shields/rapture bug. I'll believe it when I see it
It is done -- I saw mana returns from shield on a warrior last night. It had been fixed in the PTR but somehow wasn't fixed when 3.0.8 went live. I suspect they inadvertedly left it out of the patch, but the hotfix seems to have fixed it. There are other reported rapture bugs, though, which are not fixed. Those are all less significant and tend to return too much mana, so I'm not in any hurrry to get those fixed.
Originally Posted by l337n00b
I find this really interesting. What, in your view, differentiates healing done from shields put up? Obviously shields prevent spell knockback, but I figure we talking as much (if not more) about shielding tanks than anyone else. In my mind they seem different, but no matter how I try to wrap my head around it, a point of health seems like a point of health to me, whether it is in green bar form or buff form. (No faceciousness here at all, I'm really interested in people's perspective on the difference between shields and green bars)
I agree that statistics are often misinterpretted, but overheal can be very misinterpretted as well.
...
In terms of preventing deaths (i.e. ignoring side effects like preventing pushback), shields are not incredibly different from health, but there are some differences. Shields do take priority on damage. That is, a shield gets hit before your health bar does. I don't tend to think of shields as extending health. Rather it's another (temporary) pool of health that gets used before your health gets pilfered. So shields protect the health bar (and are thus aptly named).
Also, shields do not interfere with heals, which has some practical implications in a multihealer environment. After a damage spike, for instance, every healer in the raid tends to throw some quick heal on the target, and these heals interfere with one another (sometimes leading to some wasted heals). A shield won't interfere with those heals, and others can "heal under" the shield. Shields do not stack, however, so if someone else shields then mine won't work, but I won't lose mana for trying (unlike a heal that overheals).
Still, on the whole, I agree with you that a point off a shield and a point off the green bar are roughly equal in value. They each have the potential to absorb one point of damage.
However, there is a subtle difference in the damage absorbed by shield and the healing done by heals. Each has the potential of preventing imminent death by absorbing a point of damage. A point absorbed off a shield actually did absorb a point of damage. It was sent to the front lines and gave its life for the cause. A point healed might or might not see such a fate. The only thing we know for sure was that it increased the health bar.
Now in the middle of ongoing damage to a tank, there will not be much practical difference between the two. The health bar is going to get hit for sure, and so is the shield. There also won't be any expiring shields (although there may be some over-writing of DA shields).
If damage on a target stops, then the situation may change. Shields (at least part of them) may expire, but if that happens, then that health bar wasn't hit for at least 12 seconds, so any recent heals did nothing but fill up the health bar. Those health points got cushy administrative jobs and were never sent to the front lines.
The latter situation (sheilds expiring and healing not really doing anything either) is where artifacts are potentially introduced into our metrics. Ideally, you don't want to count any of that as if it were as useful as heals and shields on a tank with ongoing damage. It's not the same. You can think of both expired shields and that unused healing as errors in the metric -- they aren't reflecting what we want to measure.
While in general you want to eliminate errors (or make them as small as possible), and that makes you want to subtract off those expired shield totals, if you do that then you only correct the shielding total. You still have a healing total which is inflated and no longer reasonably comparable to the shielding total. If you leave expired shields in then you're accepting that both healing and shielding totals are inflated a bit but hopefully by about the same proportion. When in combat, that's probably about true. Out of combat, the story is different because almost all shields then expire, however. So I am assuming we're only looking at in combat events.
Hope that makes more sense -- it is counterintuive at first. It's not really that a point of healing is worth less than a point of shielding, if each absorbs a point of damage. The problem is that not all healing absorbs damage within a relevant timeframe, and that makes it somewhat different from absorbed damage.
Re: Overhealing.
I agree with pretty much everything said on this. My point of view is pretty simple: overhealing isn't necessarily bad at all. Running out of mana is bad because it stops you from healing when you may need to. So being conservative and healing only when needed is "good healing". Overhealing might be an indicator of recklessly healing, but it might not be. The goal is keeping people up, and there are definitely cases where spam healing like mad with reckless disregard for the overhealing is warranted.
So it might be useful to compute overhealing and also to look at expired shield damage. You might catch something odd. However, most of the time these metrics are not going to tell you anything useful, and if you put a number in front of people, they assume it must be important. So keep that in mind.
Originally Posted by dexwest
So back to the original topic!! Would anyone like to figure a way to quantify how much HPS DA and PW:S produce? I'm willing to help with some scripting if we can figure out a algorithm.
Good point. It is still not easy to quantify precisely, but there are a few quick and dirty options:
1. The easiest way is do what the recount mod did. If you want to assume a reasonable usage rate rather than assuming all shields are completely comsumed, you can. Probably close to 85-90% of DA shields actually do get absorbed. I think I previously measured 89% absorbed at least something. So you take any crit heals, multiply by 30% and then your constant, and add them all up. That shouldn't be wildly off. For PW:S, you could try the same approach that the recount mod uses (estimating from the PW:S glyph heals) but adjust the estimate down a bit to account for expired/unused shields. How much down is hard to say, but PW:S end up being unused more than DA shields. Maybe ~80%, which is convenient since it means multiplying glyph totals by 4 rather than 5.
2. With rapture fairly functional, one could use rapture returns to estimate absorbed damage. This could be technically challenging because you'd probably need to pair up flash heals, penances, and greater heals with their rapture returns so that you can then reverse engineer their maximum mana and then use that to estimate absorbed damage when you get rapture returns that are not from heals. I'm not sure how difficult that would be.
3. You could try looking back in the log on every absorb event for a relevant buff on the target. So whenever you see a target absorb damage, you roll through the recent log entries and assume the most recent PW:S or DA buff is the one you should credit the aborbed damage to. Some events occur out of order in the log and so you'll find no buff to explain it sometimes.
4. You could cache absorbed damage on each target and then wait for a relevant buff expires before assigning credit, rather than looking back. This is probably more accurate than #3, but events still occur out of order in the log and so you'll find no buff expiring on a target to explain absorbed damage sometimes.
I find this really interesting. What, in your view, differentiates healing done from shields put up? Obviously shields prevent spell knockback, but I figure we talking as much (if not more) about shielding tanks than anyone else. In my mind they seem different, but no matter how I try to wrap my head around it, a point of health seems like a point of health to me, whether it is in green bar form or buff form.
Perhaps I'm viewing this in the wrong way, but one perceivable advantage for shields, is they gain greater value on high armor targets. (for physical damage anyway, and magical for DK's) My example being the difference between shielding yourself with and without Inner Fire while farming. So as a Disc. priest, your 7k shield doesn't actually grow in size, but does take longer to be used up.
Certainly your MT isn't getting a much longer duration while tanking bosses, but it is still there, is it not?
I'm a disc priest and I really love shields because of their ability to be sort of "instant heal with no overheal" (on tanks of course) and also the "virtual life" they provide (Big bad dragons' breaths for example).
Perhaps I'm viewing this in the wrong way, but one perceivable advantage for shields, is they gain greater value on high armor targets. (for physical damage anyway, and magical for DK's) My example being the difference between shielding yourself with and without Inner Fire while farming. So as a Disc. priest, your 7k shield doesn't actually grow in size, but does take longer to be used up.
True, but health from heals also benefits from the high armor (or resistance).... Sadly I've seen first hand that my health disappears much faster than the tank's. Maybe I can say that I was just trying to experimentally verify the effect of armor. Yeah, that's it.
I hate to beat a dead horse but that is not how the Patchwerk hateful strike mechanics work anymore. We have none of our melee remove stamina buffs, dip into the go, we heal up Ret Pally's using Seal of Blood, etc.
The mechanic is as such:
3 tanks get on the aggro table of Patch, 1st is your MT, 2nd & 3rd take hatefuls. The hateful strikes hit whoever of those two tanks (2nd & 3rd on aggro) has the lowest current health. If they are both low (say 6000 & 9000 HP) Patchwerk will not hit a melee at 20k hp, instead he will hateful the 9000 HP tank. The hateful strikes also give aggro to the three players 1st through 3rd on the aggro list.
Shields are useful anytime you 'suspect' someone is going to take a spike of damage (Sartharion/Malygos Breath) or if someone has just taken a large amount of damage and you instantly shield them while another healer (or six) can land a quick heal before they are hit by anything else.
Alright, got that wrong. But if you wanted to do it with only 1 hurtful soaker, say for chasing WWS records, then there would be no point in shielding your melee who's 3rd on the aggro list. He'd die either way if the soaker doesn't get topped up quickly enough.
Well basically my point was that shielding someone is a waste of time and mana if the person would die anyway, despite being shielded.
That's just circle logic. Of course it's a waste if they'd just die anyway, the same is true of a full heal or anything you could do. That's really stupid reasoning.
"I have nothing personally invested in my own opinions. I'm just, like, inviting you to join me on the bandwagon of my own uncertainty." -Taylor Mali
"Q u o t e:
Are there any mechanics of the tree that might get tweaked soon?
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Yes. Spirit and Penance come to mind. No, they're not nerfs. -Ghost Crawler
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Q u o t e:
I've also heard that some Disc Priests complain that it doesn't scale as well as Holy at extremely high gear levels. Is this an issue that is being looked at, or is it not considered significant?
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There are no extremely high gear levels in the game so it's a little premature to worry about. We do need to make sure Discipline's tools scale with spellpower and other stats as do other healers. -Ghost Crawler
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Q u o t e:
Last and perhaps most importantly, is there any possibility of either getting separate Disc armor sets, or set bonuses/stats that appeal to Holy and Disc equally? Currently, I find the Holy sets to be great but not ideal: I'm aware they were not designed for my specc.
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Bonuses we might do. Sets are unlikely. A big direction for us this time around was to drop fewer unique types of armor, but let players customize them towards their own play style with gems and enchants. "-Ghost Crawler
XI c. Spell Coefficients Holy (14/57/0):
Talents that matter: Twin Disciplines, Improved Renew, Spiritual Healing, Empowered Healing, Divine Providence. CoH. Ignoring Test of Faith.
Renew:
Prayer of Mending:
Flash Heal:
Greater Heal:
Circle of Healing:
Prayer of Healing:
Power Word: Shield:
01/23/09, 9:58 AM
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