Under your math for a 12 minute fight, a 5 min CD Fiend gets popped 3 times. However, both of those scenarios see subpar mana regen from fiends as it's not usable mana. The Fiend is either used very early when your mana is not low enough to make use of it or late enough in the fight that it does not matter. The typical Fiend hits 10 times for 5% mana back each hit. You're assuming those hits are *never* dodged or miss and both those combined give a 10% chance to not return mana. Heroism is once every 10 minutes now and a WF totem will net you at best one more swing realistically for 5% more mana. You are ignoring real world conditions for your argument while I am taking at least modest steps to assume what would be an actual scenario.
Shadowfiend doesn't appear to be able to miss or get any of its swings dodged/parried anymore. My sample size haven't been that great (it's on a 5 min cooldown after all), but I've tried to five times on heroic training dummies, twice against real level 80 elites and another five or six times against normal level 80ish mobs. No misses or anything, and as long as the mobs have stayed alive its always been 10 mana returns.
There was a somewhat overlooked change to the shadow-fiend whereby any non-miss attack would give mana irrespective of wether it was dodged/blocked/parried or not.
Also, and this wasn't stated for Priests, Warlock pets have been granted some innate (~10%?) hit chance I believe. This may have copied over to the shadowfiend as it is a summoned pet, much like an infernal.
Not gonna bother continue any argument about the shadowfiend spec, either you like getting 50-100% of your total mana pool in a fight over 6% crit and inspiration or you don't. As I've tried to say, it's a situational spec and not a cookie-cutter. I have a feeling though that a lot of people have forgot that it is possible for Blizzard to make hard encounters, pushing our limits. But I guess that's not what some people are interested in.
Havoc12:
To repeat myself, you cannot look at Serependity isolated from the regen nerf. We just lost our capasity to chaincast single target-heals so if you're example lasts for a bit longer, your superskilled holypreist will be in big manatrouble. You say it yourself, tankhealing is about sustaining high HPS over a long period of time and to deal with spikes. Dealing with spikes was never really our problem, our sustained HPS was! We've been nerfed where it hurts the most and we've been buffed where we already were okey (PW:S / PoM). Again: A holypaladin can go FoL-spam and still do competetive HPS and hardly use any mana, a druid can also heal for a lot while hardly using any mana - while we're still forced into stop healing to get mana back.
Fact remain, holypriests will have to be carried by other healers on any hardhitting boss. Which is fine I guess since we're by far the best healer for anything else IMO. (And we can spec disc. and do good healing + Inspiration.)
If the cooldown is at maximum 10sec + 60sec (10s is for the buff to end), wouldn't a raid party with 7 priests keep a 40% heal buff in rotation on a tank?
Maybe it's a useless concept depending on how hard the bosses are in Ulduar .
While this may theoretically be possible I would never sacrifice the versatility of having different healers around. And I doubt anyone else would do either. Fights usually consist of more than healing one target. I would also be quite concerned about mana with only Priests.
If the cooldown is at maximum 10sec + 60sec (10s is for the buff to end), wouldn't a raid party with 7 priests keep a 40% heal buff in rotation on a tank?
Maybe it's a useless concept depending on how hard the bosses are in Ulduar .
The first time anyone would do this, Blizzard would nerf it with some Weakened Soul-like effect. It would not be worth annoying all the other healers for a short lived experiment.
But you are probably correct in that there is nothing currently preventing it.
Well, if all you take are holy priests then "maybe" this would be true. However this does assume that all your healers in the raid are within range of the tank, Not a safe assumption. Anyway if the boss is so mean that you actually need that extra 40% healing surely the odds are good that the save part of GS will proc at some point because a string of unmitigated hits and then your stuck in a much longer cooldown with gaps in your coverage. As I remember the 1 min cooldown is only applicable if the GS is "wasted" and does not proc.
If people want to stack a raid to such a ridiculous level they are welcome to do so but it's so amazingly unlikely to every actually happen that I'm not worried. Also if the boss really requires the level of healing intimated by needing a permanent 40% healing boost the design team has failed their task to an unprecedented level or your raid has missed a key component of the fight. Overall It's not something I think any of us need to worry about.
For disc healers, has anyone yet considered the value of using Power Infusion on yourself for the mana savings? The cooldown is fairly short, and over a 10 minute fight, I'd expect you could use at least 5 of them on yourself, if not 6. In any sort of high HPS requirement situations where you are forced to blow mana quickly, this could alleviate some of the mana pain being up 15% of the time, or used to increase HPS at no extra cost. It's certainly not new information, but for those of us that haven't looked at this spell this way, it might be a good idea.
The more I've thought about it over the last couple of days (and since I haven't seen any replies to my last post about switching to mp5 gear as holy), I think I'm going to stick with spirit-saturated gear. Spirit still gives the same amount of casting mp5 on Live and PTR (I tested with my 180 spirit trinket, and the full stack was identical). It might be possible to switch to a few mp5 pieces that are budgeted over their equivalent spirit pieces, but I think my preference is still going to be full spirit gear. This will benefit Renew more anyway.
Now that some numbers have been crunched on HC uptime, is anyone in a position to give some mp5 per crit values? If in my gear my HC uptime is around 47%, then is that 0.47*currentmp5 more while-casting mana regen over the course of a fight? If so, the diminishing returns on crit regen are pretty sharp already (only 2.1% additional uptime for an additional 5% crit, which might be something like an additional 6 mp5 on average?) and that would be disappointing. However, I like the idea that switching in some pure regen pieces would make HC procs that much better, and could be factored in to the gear's innate regen value.
I'm thinking the maximum regen time (not including shadowfiend, which we may need to use more aggressively) would be HC proc + five seconds + two seconds of HC+spirit regen + Inner Focus + try to get a consecutive HC proc with the coin flip. But when will we get a 5-8 second breather? Ugh. I hate saying it, but I foresee steamrolling right through most of these HC procs in the name of sustaining HPS (and additionally, I have a guess that Ulduar gear will be the missing piece in this mana regen issue we're concerned with, combined with more efficient healing choices in general).
Keep up the good work, guys. I'm really liking the way discipline is looking, but I think holy will still be the most important healing spec you can have in a raid, just because of its versatility. It's quickly becoming the most nuanced of all the healing trees (where pre-WOTLK it used to be about brute force CoH for many players, but not all of them), and I absolutely love it.
There was never a point during this PTR that MP/5 was viewed as more valuable than Spirit. There's a fair bit of maths regarding HC-uptime and the value of crit towards the end of the Holy priest compendium. In my opinion there are no diminishing returns on crit in regards to regen, as explained in the link.
From feedback it seems serendipity is a bit too powerful, and the regen nerf too harsh.
I myself expect further changes on those.
Shamans wont be happy to compete with us on raid healing if we have: the new PoH, a better CoH, and a 1s GH on tank when needed. (Besides the satiated debuff increase).
I know everyone here is focused on raiding (unlike blizzard :P). But I fear that our average priest, who starts healing heroics in quest blues, will struggle with regen in 5-men. As far as I remember it wasn't too easy at all on a fresh 80 (the regen). Replenishment will be mandatory...
Ive been following MMO Notes fairly closely. I have not seen any mention of making ShadWordPain more user friendly in regards to the buffs that didn't work with it which i believe were Shadow Weaving. At least not without SWPain being refreshed or cast after a 5stack.
Has Blizzard said that this is working as intended in the past?
Reason i ask is that, it seems like one of those little things that would get on everyone's nerves over time and i am just surprised they haven't fixed it yet. Admittedly i only started doing Shadow Priesting again about 6 months ago.
The more I've thought about it over the last couple of days (and since I haven't seen any replies to my last post about switching to mp5 gear as holy), I think I'm going to stick with spirit-saturated gear. Spirit still gives the same amount of casting mp5 on Live and PTR (I tested with my 180 spirit trinket, and the full stack was identical). It might be possible to switch to a few mp5 pieces that are budgeted over their equivalent spirit pieces, but I think my preference is still going to be full spirit gear. This will benefit Renew more anyway.
If you want exact numbers and proof that our while casting regen is the same look at the simple math:
With the changes to the regeneration formula (they cut the while not casting regen by 40% but then buffed the while casting regen to 50% via meditation and similar talents):
Pre-3.1 regen worked as such: 1000 mp5 while not casting (30% via meditation) & 300 mp5 while casting.
Come 3.1 it is similar, 40% nerf to while not casting so 600 mp5 while not casting but a buff to meditation (50%) so 300 mp5 while casting.
The only way our regen was nerfed is we no longer get 333% the regen while not casting (1000 = 300*3.33) and we lost one of the main ways to get out of the 5SR (old Holy Concentration, or current if you will).
Crit is still a great regen tool in the fact that you are going to want enough of it that frequent flash/binding/renew/greater casts will keep you buffed with the new Holy Concentration a large percentage of the fight. And in terms of feeling like you are hampered for regen, just stack Intellect.
I know everyone here is focused on raiding (unlike blizzard :P). But I fear that our average priest, who starts healing heroics in quest blues, will struggle with regen in 5-men. As far as I remember it wasn't too easy at all on a fresh 80 (the regen). Replenishment will be mandatory...
They can't really balance around blue-geared fresh 80s, I'm afraid. And it won't be a problem.
Because even if you're fresh 80, you are unlikely to group with 4 other fresh 80s. Your tank will likely have better gear than you, easing the healing throughput requirement. Your dps will have better gear than you, shortening fights, making regen less important.
In the current state of the game regen is so powerful that I can't be bothered to drink in heroics. That somehow shows that there's a problem in my opinion. If one has to drink after a few pulls then at least mana is a consideration. I feel more like a Rogue, than a caster in that regard.
And finally more classes are receiving replinishement, which should make it easier to have one of those around, even in 5-man content.
1) You assume 100% return from critical which immediately on its own invalidates your calculation
2) You base it on max HPS, which is meaningless. Its sustained HPS, burst HPS and heal spacing that count.
3) You are looking at flash heal spam, which is quite a ridiculous assumption when tank healing.
1) You seem to ignore the fact that a stacking 10k Divine Aegis (i.e. the 3.1 version) on the tank is never ever ever wasted unless the content is so absurdly trivial that I don't even have words for it. Tank healing in ZG maybe. That's a straight up 45% that cannot be wasted. Period. I don't care what fight it is, there's no point in time in any fight currently* where an MT can sit there and simply just not take damage. You might like holy. But critical overheal is WORSE for holy than it is for disc. Since holy is doing more of its healing as straight healing instead of mitigation (i.e. potential for overhealing) this is an argument in favor of disc.
So, to succinctly summarize what you evidently missed by skimming the calculations, this is an argument for Disc because disc does less overhealing
I wasn't comparing apples to apples. I was giving Holy a huge advantage (pretending that their method of healing was as good as disc's method of healing in all situation) and they still fall behind.
2) Sustained HPS, Flash heal>Greater heal. Once again, not for holy, for disc. For burst, nothing holy can put out will ever equal the PW:S -> 25% hasted penance burst heal, which can easily do more than 20k health in instant mitigation+heal, in under 3 seconds (with a 1 second flash heal immediately following). If you're arguing burst, Serendipity-sped G Heal is nowhere near that level. So once again, you're arguing for disc. If you're arguing sustainability, Disc has smaller efficient heals (so is better able to top off the tank) less overheals (so is more mana-efficient), and can simply Power Infusion themselves to deal with sustained healing level problems (while saving on mana quite nicely).
3) Flash heal is better heals when the tank is low on health (faster, more crit), better heals when the tank is high on health (less overheal), and better HPM than Greater heal.
Look, I don't mind people playing holy, I'd certainly never pretend Disc has a raid healing tool equal to CoH, but you put down three great arguments for disc as tank healers, then declared what I said meaningless. There was discussion of Holy being better tank heals than Disc. This is conclusively, definitively wrong.
*For the nitpickers - Phase transition on Thaddius, Malygos with Nexus Lords down, no deep breath incoming, and adds choose not to shoot tank, and Heigan dance. Argument could be made for Loatheb because he hits so weakly on the MT and you have so much time to stack Divine Aegis it could simply cap itself at 10k if you're spamming (this seems grossly inefficient, but what do I know, obv). Feel free to add more silly circumstances and gimmicks to this list (I guess divine Aegis is a waste in Malygos phase 3, hur hur)
They can't really balance around blue-geared fresh 80s, I'm afraid. And it won't be a problem.
Because even if you're fresh 80, you are unlikely to group with 4 other fresh 80s. Your tank will likely have better gear than you, easing the healing throughput requirement. Your dps will have better gear than you, shortening fights, making regen less important.
That's quite a weird way to look at it. Doesn't seem the game is healthily balanced if you have to count on getting overgeared players in order to be able to play the content of your level.
In the current state of the game regen is so powerful that I can't be bothered to drink in heroics. That somehow shows that there's a problem in my opinion. If one has to drink after a few pulls then at least mana is a consideration. I feel more like a Rogue, than a caster in that regard.
And finally more classes are receiving replinishement, which should make it easier to have one of those around, even in 5-man content.
You are decked in T7-level gear. Of course you don't need to drink in heroic. That's what "outgearing the content" means. I didn't need to drink when I was doing Blood Furnace in T4 either.
Having more classes getting Replenishment is, I'm afraid, only going to worsen the problem. There is already too much emphasis on this buff, and the whole game is being balanced around it. Really doesn't seem adequate to rework a game around a buff. It shouts about something being not working right.
I don't really get why Blizzard isn't simply nerfing a bit Replenishment and adjusting individual regen for classes, rather than taking Replenishment as a basis and nerfing regen to have everyone in the same ballpark.
If violence doesn't solve your problem...
... you simply haven't been violent enough !
I agree with you on replinishement. I'd prefer it if more regen came from me and the way I play my class. Unfortunately we're not heading that way.
In regards to the heroics in blue gear, I really don't think there are many places where one full mana pool isn't enough to beat trash, even without regen. Or where a full mana pool with fiend and potion isn't enough on a boss, even without replinishement.
I think people have perhaps gotten too used to chain-pulling and AoE-ing down heroics. That was probably never intended. I haven't seen anyone sheep/sap/trap anything in a long time. In fact I didn't even see that in fresh 80 groups. It wouldn't be so bad if heroic difficulty went a bit towards TBC, where group-composition actually mattered, initially at least.
@Tainter: Wrong. Chainpulling in Heroics IS intended. The thing is, that in many heroics is an encounter where the chainpulling will happen at a given time. It is not steerable by the group who would like to have the healer get some mana back. Such encounters are in
- Nexus: respawn of the little spores
- Azjol Nerub: nearly everywhere
- Violet Hold: everything
- old Stratholm: everytime you started Arthas
- Halls of Stone: event
- Ut Pinacle: 2 events
You could argue that some of them are considered the hard ones. But you have to be fair to see that some of them are the easiest heroics.
Since I play a priest I go for regen. When I reached 80 I nonetheless had to struggel with my mana in heroics. I cannot see how one will perform when reaching 80 after the nerf. Yes, you could try to go some non-heroics on 80 to gather some gear there (which to be honest will not help much). But it is much harder to get a good group for non-heroics than for heroics.
I had a comparable problem on 70 with my tank. You had to be def-capped to go heroics but it was very hard to get def-capped without doing heroics (since you even could not buy something for badges since you need to do at least heroics to get some). Yes, it was possible but it is not fun to have to grind quests to get your blue stuff to at least survive in a heroic while everybody else gets their first epics in heroics. They simplified the gearing for heroics for tanks. I cannot see any argument such a struggles has to be implemented for healers in WotLK.
It's easily possible to drink between the waves in Violet Hold, unless of course your dps is pitiful. And then you don't have to pull the groups immediately when they spawn and you can even blow them up occasionally if it gets too much.
The "events" in UP are more or less boss encounters, not trash. So you can use your cooldowns. AN has plenty of breaks. Again the boss encounters take a bit longer than in some other dungeons, but that's what cooldowns are for. The HoS event again is akin to a boss encounter.
In Nexus you have to be quick to hit your drink button and your tank has to be quick to pick up the flower spawns. But you can drink. Their damage in a tank hardly requires immediate spam-healing.
I grant you that the last Arthas bit in CoT is quite long and pretty intense. It could be problematic.
But rather than discuss this here, the best course of action seems to be to go onto the PTR, take a few pieces of gear off (to emulate being fresh 80), say to ~1600 spell power, and do some heroics.
I hit 80 with my priest on Sunday. I immediately respec'd into pvp Discipline. I got bored of honor grinding and decided to give heroics a try. With all quest blues and a few crafted things I picked up on the AH I had 0 mana trouble. I forgot to buy drinks because in BGs I'd die long before I went oom. I didn't need to drink at all. The tank did not out gear the place by any significant degree. He was defence capped but wasn't wearing any raid gear.
This cannot be intended. I should have mana problems. I should have to get better gear. I shouldn't walk into a normal Vault pug with only one other healer and never drop below 50% mana and never use fiend.
Mana nerfs are needed in pve. I think the trouble in the balance doesn't come from blue gear scaling to raid gear but pve gear to pvp gear. In pve situations mana isn't much of a concern, but I struggle in pvp. Getting the balance right so I have to worry about mana in pve but not go oom within minutes in the arena is tricky.
@Kigale: Yes that is the actual state for a disc-priest. However, that ist NOT the actual state of the holy-priest. Disc has much more mana and mana-regen than holy on life. The difference is huge. I'm speaking about PVE.
@Tainter: No one can not not-pull the groups in VH. They start to run the moment they spawn. (Its diferent with the guardians.) You could delay attaking tham right from the beginning sometimes but not with every group. And if you label the other encounters as boss fights or trash that does not matter. You have to heal while doing them and you cannot drink in between.
@Tainter: No one can not not-pull the groups in VH. They start to run the moment they spawn. (Its diferent with the guardians.) You could delay attaking tham right from the beginning sometimes but not with every group. And if you label the other encounters as boss fights or trash that does not matter. You have to heal while doing them and you cannot drink in between.
The point for VH was that the mobs don't run to you. They run to the gate. The gate will last quite some time with mobs hitting on it. (I've watched them once when everyone except me died, while I was on the phone.) You can literally just sit around and watch. It takes minutes.
The point for boss fights was that you have all cooldowns ready. Priest cooldowns are all pretty short. So you've got a full mana pool (from drinking) of say 16k, a fiend for 8k, a mana pot for ~3k, Inner Focus for ~800 and even Hymn of Hope. In most cases you will also have someone providing mana, be it via totems, replinishement, dps-druid innervate or whatever. Discounting Hymn of Hope that's ~28k mana. At ~200 MP/5 in combat over six minutes you get at least 14k mana from regen (without holy concentration), without any outside buffs. 40k+ mana will probably be enough if the priest and the rest of the group know what they're doing.
But more to the point: Do you really think heroics should be balanced around an inexperience fresh 80 holy (raid-specced) priest, with level 78 blues, running a group with no caster synergy or off-healer? Well, I don't think so.
Has anyone actually done any heroics on the PTR? I guess it's not exactly a popular activity.
3) Flash heal is better heals when the tank is low on health (faster, more crit), better heals when the tank is high on health (less overheal), and better HPM than Greater heal........
Look, I don't mind people playing holy, I'd certainly never pretend Disc has a raid healing tool equal to CoH, but you put down three great arguments for disc as tank healers, then declared what I said meaningless. There was discussion of Holy being better tank heals than Disc. This is conclusively, definitively wrong.
1) 100% return on criticals is always wrong and it overestimates the effect of crit. I am not disregarding divine aegis, that is definately 100% return on a tank, but the healing part of a crit is not. That means you are overestimating the effect of crit
2) & 3) Completely meaningless and a lot of it is wrong/specific to certain builds. Also penance consumes borrowed time.
I saw no arguments in your post only statements not backed by anything. Your method of comparing disc and holy tank healing was to compare max HPS from flash heal with 100% return from crit assumed. This is not just wrong, its completely meaningless. Neither holy nor disc priests tank heal by spaming flash heal and even if they did it would not matter in the slightest that disc can produce a little higher HPS with flash heal. It says nothing at all about the tank healing capabilities of each spec. If you can't do a calculation properly dont do it at all.
Also I never said that holy is better at tank healing, only that your method of comparison is wrong.
To fully compare tank healing capabilities you need to compare (with numbers not anecdotes) three parameters
a) Heal spacing: What is the frequency of heals landing on the tank
b) Sustained HPS: What is the highest HPS you can sustain for a certain fight time (this is the most crucial parameter)
c) Burst HPS: What is the maximum short burst HPS you can deliver and in what time frame so you can deal with spikes.
Disc currently heals with a combination of PWS, penance, flash heal and gheal on borrowed time. Holy currently tank heals mostly by spamming Gheal.
I have now verified this formula from the PTR. HC does not apply to mp5 only to base regen from spirit/int
The 0.005 factor promethia has been calculated by regression calculations, when the new regen formula first came out. Check the relevant post here at EJ and also at the combat ratings at 80 post. Its simply because mana regen never goes to zero even if spirit/int go to zero. Its not really important as its so small. I only included it for the sake of completeness.
The value of increasing crit from C1 to C2 is simply
, where G is the basic regen formula
This is ofc dependent on how much crit you already have and it has diminishing returns. It also depends on how much spirit and int you have.
At 25% crit adding 1% crit gives you Rc = 0.0083255*G
This is 0.83% of your current spirit regen. I would say between 2.5 and 3mp5 per point given our current spirit/int values. Its really not a lot. Certainly not worth gemming for crit or taking crit trinkets over spirit/int trinkets.
HC increases the value of spirit regen, at 25% crit spirit and int have about the same regen values as they had in the current build when casting spells that proc holy concentration. Spirit has lost about 25% of its value when casting spells that do not proc HC. That means we get a drop of 300-400 mp5 when spamming single target spells and about 125-150mp5 when spamming spells that don't proc HC.
Unless I have made a mistake somewhere holy priests will experience a very large decrease in their ability to single target heal, but the effect on the nerf when casting other spells will be much less pronounced.
At 25% crit I estimate that holy concentration will be worth about 100mp5 when casting 3 HC procing spells per 8 seconds.
03/03/09, 11:53 AM
