Reptyler

My apologies if this has been discussed elsewhere, but the 3.1 healing theorycraft thread has me slightly confused. Is there such a thing as a list of concrete weights for Holy priest stats? I'm especially worried about haste vs. crit, as my guildmate is a disc priest and seems to think that all the crit gear should be hers, while I should take the haste gear. I know we're totally different from a DPS class, but are there any hard and fast rules as to how I pick one piece of gear over another?

Quick side note: is Serendipity really all that awesome? Is it a better choice than Test of Faith?

 

• constantius

Holy priests still need lots of crit gear, and neither of you should get priority on anything. Disc priests still should want things like [Grasps of Reason] and [Conductive Seal], simply because they're amazing items. If you wear the [Handwraps of the Vigilant], you only have haste on shoulders and legs, so you need some (up to ~ 350, +/- your preference) from somewhere else.

Basically; do it on an item-by-item basis, and share the gear. Wreath and I trade off, one item to me, one item to him, from the list of priest-and-druid-only-stuff that we compete on. Besides, you should both be planning on having a gear set for both: there are fights where 2 holy priests is far better than 1 disc + 1 holy.

Serendipity is a fairly solid talent, and not something you should be skipping. You can read the arguments for dropping points out of Empowered Healing to pick up Test of Faith in the Compendium thread (just use the Search feature).

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

 

Gofa

I think it's a matter of personal preferences whether you choose crit or haste as a holy priest. Both are good stats that increase your hps. In most situations haste is probably the bigger hps gain but you'll lose some mana due to faster heals and the reduced gcd. On the other hand, crit will give you a smaller hps gain but it will provide you additional manareg (holy concentration).

You shouldn't focus exclusively on one stat in my opinion. It's all about the right balance between these two stats. However, most holy priests seem to prefer haste over crit if they have to decide between those two stats.

From my point of view about 15% crit + 300 haste unbuffed is the minimum of what you should aim for. After this it's more or less up to you.

 

Tronn

Hm, Disc Priests choose Crit over Haste a lot, then? I've always been confused about that while itemizing through Ulduar :-/

 

• constantius

The main issue with Disc is that Borrowed Time drops your GCD to 1.0 (i.e. PWS spam) very quickly, so you don't need much haste at all. For this reason, most Disc priests tend to stop picking it up around 300-350 haste, and just stack crit.

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

 

Silkath

It's surprisingly difficult to have much less than 300 haste, given that 3/5 of our set pieces come with a lot of haste. Haste is still moderately useful, just not as useful as crit. In terms of picking up upgrades, as long as an item has more spellpower and int than what you're currently using then I'd take it. If at a later date a crit piece drops but you've got a haste piece with similar spellpower/int then I'd take that as an upgrade too.

 

Zju

There's split opinions on this one - for Holy, I think that gemming for Regen [basically, Int] and gearing almost exclusively for Haste is the way to go. It seems to be the best approach against HM's damage patterns, where it's crucial to spam fast, and be able to maintain doing it. You should deffo test out and see what you're most comfy with, but make sure you don't write Haste-stacking off just for being something less conventional [less conventional compared to the "go for balanced" method of gearing].

As for Disc, neither is a particularly good stat if you're raidPWSing [assuming you're GCD capped], however, again, I'd value Haste a bit higher than usual for the occasional non-PWS spell - usually, I find it's better for my heal to land when I need it to, rather than a split-second later but with a higher heal potential.

For MT-healing, Crit becomes an extremely powerful stat through DA procs [so it should be favoritised over Haste in, let's say, same-ilvl cases], but you're Haste Cap also goes way, way higher - meaning that you shouldn't disregard a clear upgrade just for being Haste-heavy.

Got a question of my own as well, though

Which fights exactly are those? Off the top of my hat, I can't think of a single HM where this would hold true, even if we're talking exclusively about the raid-healing sector. Maybe Mimiron pre-nerf, with a particular tac that obviously favors Holy? or IC HM? But still, I wouldn't call it "far better". Cheers.

 

Celsius

Hodir hard? Not done it enough times really but it strikes me as holy territory.

 

Zju

Hmm. If you have access to Sanctuary [or don't need it - which is another discussion], if the dispels are perfectly covered and executed by the SPs [which for us doesn't happen], and if MT damage is a non-issue, then the raid healing potential of PoM/Beam-hasted PoH/CoH is indeed something that would warrant the 1st priest spot to a holy. But #1 - the raw healing difference between the two specs wouldn't be that big in the end [certainly not "far better"] and #2 - as for the main point, if out of the 4 healing spots I'd have 2 for priests, I would still take the 2nd one as Disc.

So possibly. But not convinced about "far better"

 

tedv

Does Divine Aegis really make crit that good? It's a 30% shield on every crit heal (150% of normal healing), or 45% of the base heal. This brings the total effective healing for a crit to 195%. So with Divine Aegis, a 1% increase in crit produces a 0.95% increase in healing output. It takes 46 crit rating to get 1% more crit, so 1 crit rating produces 0.0207% more healing from the crittable portion of a discipline priest's heals (ie. not Power Word: Shield itself). This is roughly half of the healing done.

For actual numbers, Penance heals for around 5k before crits on a target with grace. This means 1 crit rating increases the healing of penance by 1.035. In contrast, if you had 0% crit, 1 spell power gives 1.61 healing before taking any multiplier talents into account. It's 1.81 with grace up. With a 30% crit rate, you gain around 2.3 healing.

What about flash heal? It heals for around 3900 before crits on targets with grace. So 1 crit provides 0.8073 healing. One spell power gives 0.8068 before any multipliers. With the full stack of grace, this is 0.9117 healing if you had a 0% crit rate. At 30% crit, one spell power gives 1.17 healing.

Needless to say, in the case of Power Word: Shield, spell power beats the pants off of Crit for effective healing. The shield absorb can't crit.

Neither haste nor crit are worthless for discipline priests, but in most situations you are casting a lot of power word shield. That spell makes crit bad and haste meaningless since you are GCD capped. Even if you in a solo tank healing situation where you aren't casting lots of shields though, spell power is still better than crit. So if you say crit beats haste in that situation, then discipline priests should just stack spell power and int and call it a day.

 

rokareot

If it's been asked somewhere here please forgive me, but do you think Blizz will ever have a more accurate way of tracking it>>?

While sure, I can see and do the math on my shields as well.. procd, 9200 etc.. 7200 not procd perse, at least the glyph is trackable and seems to be accurate.. I still would like a more accurate way of knowing.


ALSO::


If this was asked elsewhere please forgive me..

3.2 Concepts of healing and more? Has that thread started and if so where?

 

Zju

Precisely. For Disc, SP is hands-down the best way to increase throughput. However, my point was about gearing, not gemming - follwing Reptyler's question about how he as holy and his disc guildy should value items based on the rating they provide. And I've yet to see a case where you can choose a solid amount of SP instead of the Crit/Haste rating, on two similar ilvl items.

 

tedv

This is very much true. All pieces have comparable amounts of stamina, intellect, and spell power, and you must pick two of crit, haste, and spirit, all of which are bad in different ways. I think the real moral of the story is to favor pieces with gem sockets. I also suspect that overall, haste is the least bad of the three and spirit is the worst. Discipline has no Holy Concentration equivalent of spirit -> spell power conversion, so spirit is terrible.

 

rokareot

I myself do not see any difference in the (GEAR) to a extent.. While sure some items are better suited for each spec, maybe via gemming... (gloves off General hardmode) or (some of the items, like pandoras plea, does me more justice as disc perse) or has a greater value one would say.

I guess the point would be, while sure I see the point of maybe having more spell power, I also think that some of this may have to do with each of our raid make ups to a extent of other healers in the raid.

 

Jariel

Would somebody mind clarifying the complete formula for PW: S mitigation?

 

Sinndir

Not sure this is what you meant, but if you are curious as to how spellpower is added to PW: Shield look no further!

Power Word: Shield gains 80.7% of your spell power so just take the base amount of absorb and add your spellpower *0.807.

Total Absorb = Base + (Spellpower * 0.807)

Then you can factor in Borrowed time:

Total Absorb = Base + (Spellpower *1.207)

And finally factor in Improved Power Word Shield:

Total Absorb = [Base + (Spellpower *1.207)]*1.15

 

Senres

Don't Twin Disciplines and Focused Power affect Power Word Shield or am I mistaken?

That would result in:

[Base + (Spellpower * 1.207)] * 1.15 * 1.05 * 1.04

or

[Base + (Spellpower * 1.207)] * 1.2558

 

Sinndir

You are correct. If I had a dollar for each time I did a calculation without twin disciplines...

 

Ruohttas

I've hunted around a bit, and noticed that there don't seem to be any spreadsheets available for healing or shadow priests. Bare in mind that I'm coming from the rogue community that is overflowing with minmaxers and number fetishests. I'm looking to help my wife with her gearing, and wanting a source of hard numbers, not the "This is best in this slot" type forum information that Shadowpriest.com is peddling. I feel that Rawr also leaves much to be desired.

So, to make a long story short, is there a source for this spreadsheet information I am seeking? I also don't seem to be able to find stat weighting. Thanks!

 

The Not So Evil

You find Rawr leaving things to be desired, but you want stat weightings? I think you need to explain this logic further.

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Jorak

It's probably worth noting that a number of important holy priest spells, namely those with a cooldown or HoT (CoH, PoM, renew), scale poorly with haste. You're only lowering the GCD, and not directly increasing the amounts these spells heal with haste. Crit, on the other hand, scales quite well with smart heals (CoH, and PoM to a lesser extent), especially in conjunction with Test of Faith.

Haste is really only significantly beneficial to PoH (which can already be hasted pretty significantly by Serendipity). All things considered, I tend to favor crit over haste, and don't really understand why so many priests do the opposite.

 

Ruohttas

I'm not able to load the app on the machine here at work, but is there a section of Rawr that will provide the raw stat weights (To two decimal places) for Int, Spirit, Hit, etc etc etc? I'd love for someone to come up with a spreadsheet like Aldriana's (Combat) for Holy/Shadow priests. If I could get those raw stats, I may be able to take her sheets and plug in the appropriate numbers.

Am I making sense in my desires?

 

The Not So Evil

Thanks for the explanation. Yeah, that makes sense. Damn those useless Work Machines.

Rawr does supply Stat Weights, but it has a major warning about taking those as the absolute truth. In general, as Priest, its really simplistic. You want the gear with highest itemlvl and most possible sockets. A very harsh generalization but I think it will give you a gear setup able to handle anything.

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Reptyler

Is 3/3 Silent Resolve ever worth it? Again, raid leader is telling me things that I don't agree with. We wiped twice on Thorim because I was on the phone with my girlfriend and spammed CoH in the arena rather than heal intelligently. Now everyone's offering to pay for my respec. Worth it or not? I can't imagine it's worth sacrificing throughput talents for.

 

The Not So Evil

Personally I dont find them worth it. Priests have Fade to deal with aggro.

Rawr - Coder of HolyPriest (Healer) and ShadowPriest (DPS) Modules.
Get Your Rawr 2.2.20!