WotLK Healing Compendium v3.2: Same Old Thing - Page 14

Allesin · 05/06/09, 2:41 PM

Originally Posted by BulgarBG

To all 'renew-nay' sayers: (apologies for spelling and wording in advance)

Here are some logs from last night, on the fights that I did as holy, I wanted to post this earlier but without the logs it just felt a bit too much opinionated:

(Ignis) WoW Meter Online - Combatlog Replay in Engrish
CoH - 31.3%
Renew - 22.7%
PoH - 19.5%
(Kologarn) WoW Meter Online - Combatlog Replay in Engrish (I think I failed a bit on Prom here)
CoH - 30.3%
PoH - 23%
Renew - 20%
(Auriaya) WoW Meter Online - Combatlog Replay in Engrish
CoH - 35.5%
Renew - 18%
PoH - 16.7%
(Hodir) WoW Meter Online - Combatlog Replay in Engrish
CoH - 30%
PoH - 19.3%
Renew - 18.2%

[edit] spelling

Ignis: 1.93 ticks of renew per cast (2076/tick)
Kologarn: 1.85 ticks of renew per cast (2012/tick)
Auriaya: 1.59 ticks per cast (2042/tick)
Hodir: 1.65 ticks of renew per cast (2145/tick)

I am assuming ~1917 for the heal on your Empowered Renew (to allow for crits).

At 656 mana (assuming no [Spark of Hope]), you were getting the following healing done for 656 mana:
Ignis: 5923 (9.02 HPM)
Kologarn: 5639 (8.59 HPM)
Auriaya: 5163 (7.87 HPM)
Hodir: 5456 (8.31 HPM)

So, it is still fairly efficient for you. However, let me post some parses of my own to illustrate what I was attempting to say above; that it depends greatly upon the rest of your healers' tendencies.

Our first Mimiron kill: WoW Meter Online - Combatlog Replay in Engrish
42 casts of Renew for 42 ticks, healing for ~3780 per cast and an HPM of 5.76

Our first Freya kill: WoW Meter Online - Combatlog Replay in Engrish
I had 34 casts of Renew for 36 ticks, healing for ~3730 per cast and an HPM of 5.68

Perhaps I could do better at precasting Renews, but I do stand by what I said earlier; the efficiency of Renew depends greatly on your other healers and their healing styles in addition to your own. Renew can be very good for some priests/guilds, and closer to an inefficient spell for others. It should be evaluated on an individual basis.

[e] I will note that Flash Heal is not more efficient in my parses. There is an incredible amount of overheal in the parses I linked that comes from carrying one or two healers too many. The reason I favor Flash Heal in this circumstance is the ability to build Serendipity stacks (and sometimes I do purposefully cast needless Flash Heals to build/maintain a Serendipity stack when I expect raid damage to be imminent).

spathos · 05/06/09, 6:07 PM

That seems to be my main problem with renew (or with other hots on the times I've healed on my druid), is that often times it turns into overheal if you have other healers that are constantly sniping it. With the new talents it seems to work alot like a druid's rejuv which makes it great for fights where you have to heal on the run or where there's a small amount of raid damage and the raid is spread out, but not as flash heal for fights where you're standing still alot of the time.

I guess this is another example of Blizzard making priests the "switch hitter" healing class.

BulgarBG · 05/06/09, 6:25 PM

I'm having a hard time chewing on the argument 'depends on your other healers'. I'm keen to argue that there is much bigger similarity from one raid to another then a difference. In any raid, any guild, any situation if people are loosing health there will be healers healing them.

I don't think that the fact that some guild have better healers or lets use faster 'able to heal up faster' then other guild matters much. The difference is no more then couple .2 - .5 (of a second) to make an effect on your healing and playstyle. These 'fractions' of second certainly matter in life / death situation, hard-modes etc, but for overall renew discussion, I don't see how they make any difference.

Kashir · 05/06/09, 7:43 PM

Originally Posted by BulgarBG

I'm having a hard time chewing on the argument 'depends on your other healers'. I'm keen to argue that there is much bigger similarity from one raid to another then a difference. In any raid, any guild, any situation if people are loosing health there will be healers healing them.

I don't think that the fact that some guild have better healers or lets use faster 'able to heal up faster' then other guild matters much. The difference is no more then couple .2 - .5 (of a second) to make an effect on your healing and playstyle. These 'fractions' of second certainly matter in life / death situation, hard-modes etc, but for overall renew discussion, I don't see how they make any difference.

Different players, difference class balance and number of healers, and different strategies can make huge differences in the most effective healing methods. I'm not sure why this would be in question.

It's not really a question of reaction times; it's more a question of healing assignments and crosshealing. If your healers are accustomed to heavy crosshealing (as is the case in my guild), HoTs are far more likely to be overriden as we strive to top people to 100% ASAP. If you enforce stricter responsibilities (running with 5 healers instead of 7, for example), HoTs will typically heal more because people won't be topped to 100% as quickly.

For an example (not really Renew related): We normally run with 2 Resto Druids, 1 Resto Shaman and 2 Holy Priests raid healing, and on Ignis I don't even bother using PoH anymore. Yes, we two Priests could take two groups each and solo heal those groups through Flame Jets, but we have so many smart heals and HoTs flying around that it's easier, faster and more efficient to rely on PoM and CoH.

Personally I don't use Renew as a staple spell at all. Our Druids are excellent, and their HoTs are far better than mine. I'd rather spam FH and have a fast PoH ready to launch when the big AOE bursts come. If that means that the Druids look better than me on the healing metres, I can live with that

Kelwick · 05/06/09, 11:59 PM

PoM is OBVIOUSLY a poor choice because it's less healing than a flash heal in the same amount of time. It's not even an instant heal. Even if someone is low enough to be killed in one more hit, PoM doesn't heal NOW, it heals when the person takes damage, and if that person is killed, it doesn't save them from dying.

After another night of attempts on heroic Mimiron, I stand by my reaction of Prayer of mending -> Empowered renew -> Flash heal for napalm shell ...occasionally if i feel that I'm hesitating at all I may trade off empowered renew for a Cicle of healing instead (not ideal of course but safer). The second impulse is just based on instinct.

I would like to just simply say in response to this quote that no one died from napalm shell in tonight's raid and yes there were casters 10+yards back from me getting napalm shell quite frequently (meaning they were not in range of the majority of healers). If you're casting Flash heal in this situation where you are the nearby healer I sure hope you're coming off of a critical for a surge of light instant heal. It is OBVIOUS that Prayer of mending is not a poor choice at all unless you're slow at healing after seeing the first initial tick and/or the debuff (which is what you are suppose to be able to do). Have Prayer of mending on the raid member for the second tick and you're fine if not CoH out of desperation.

Jamora · 05/07/09, 4:14 AM

I have followed the renew discussion and I would like to give my own viewpoint on the spell in the context of the priest's arsenal. This is all from 10man Ulduar experience, and Naxx 10/25, however Naxx is usually so easy to heal that it is difficult to measure the effectiveness of different heals.

In my opinion, renew is best viewed as a hybrid of FH and PW:S. On one hand, it does true healing, whereas PW:S does not. On the other hand, renew can heal damage which has not yet happened, just as PW:S does. Due to this nature, especially from the viewpoint of a discipline priest, renew seems quite useless. Just use FH or PW:S, whichever is more sensible in the situation. However, since PW:S of a holy priest is not nearly as strong, renew can be used to the same effect as a shield. Sadly, it is nowhere as effective, but putting 3 renews on people before flamejets is quite useful in my experience (I am mainly disc, but tried holy after a few wipes on Ignis 10. I changed back later since I did not feel as comfortable as holy as as disc. ) As a consequence, I would always avoid the glyph of renew, since it shifts renew further in the direction of FH, but that just diminishes the usefulness of renew. By the same train of thought is it that I do not like the front heal of empowered renew. If there is damage which needs to be healed immediately, renew is not the tool to use, and if it is not urgent, some random CoH will heal it anyway.

A second use I am training myself on is to constantly keep renew on the tanks. As disc priest, I have the habit of putting a PW:S on them whenever possible, however I believe that it might be better to keep it for spikes of damage, even if I lose 4% crit. I use myself as a wildcard in the fights, being in principle on tank duty but helping out wherever necessary. If I know that renew is on the tanks, I can ignore 2-4k damage on them and help elsewhere. If they get heavily hit, I have PW:S available plus a hasted heal. I actually considered taking improved renew over divine fury, since I am seldom casting GH.

As a last note, the composition of raid healers is definitely playing a role how often I cast renew. When there are many druids, I usually don't bother with renew and just tell them to keep a few HoTs on the tank, it's what they do anyway. However, when the healing team consists of a paladin and two priests, renew plays an useful part of healing, since there are no other HoTs available.

Liriel · 05/07/09, 6:37 AM

About the Napalm Shell discussion. If' not done it myself since we focussed on other bosses but I think here are 2 schools. One school is the instant-use-because-everything-else-is-too-slow faction, the other is the single-target-heals-for focussed-dmg faction.

A thing about instant heales I learned to hate at iron council is that if you are in a instant heal rotation you have to "pay" your time after your cast. As the only dispeller at iron concil I learned not to use an instant directly bevor I had to dispell the tank (I was disc at that moment) because the GCD I had to wait until I could dispell sometimes got another tick off.

So for napalm shells. If you start your healing with instants and want to change von instants to singel target heals you have to wait at least 2GCDs in between which is a very long time. So it may be a good thing to follow up your first instant with more instants even if they are less big but in time. If you start with instants I would recomend to start with those giving the best chance that the target will survive long enough for 2 GCDs - shield and if specced into it renew. As for shield it depends on wethere there is a disc priest around who would like to throw a shield on a good target to get a hasted heal.

For singel-target healing I would not use only FHs. I would use my serendipitiy GH preferable instead of the first FH. It is not much slower than FH (if you use divine fury) and heals for much more. (If your FH is 1.2s as in the example above, your GH should be at 1.26s: 3s -> 2.5s from divine fury -> 2.0s 0.8 haste from gear -> 1.28s 0.64 from serendipity. At the end you should have your serendipity stacks back but got much more healing off.

The chances that the target will die if the first heal after the original hit takes 0.08s longer is in the margin of your reaction time. But the healing difference - so the chances that you get enough healing of for the whole napalm shell - is about one FH.

I find it interesting that the first mention for renew as the good first choice for napalm shell started by someone who neglected divine fury becaus there are so few options to use it. The argument for renew was that you need a heal as big as possible as fast as possible for it. If I read that my first thougt is GH.

Elimbras · 05/07/09, 9:57 AM

Originally Posted by RootBreaker

Mimiron:
Obviously its not going to take other healers 4-6 seconds to react to a napalm shell, and the damage will be somewhat mitigated by fire resist aura, and the person hit could pop a healthstone if really necessary, but I think it's clear that renew is not a good spell for healing spike damage. Flash heal alone gives much more room for error if you or other healers are slow to react.

You can't really conclude that way, because you also need to remember that renew has still two ticks expected, that will help latter, either for preventing health or for topping the target up.

RootBreaker · 05/07/09, 11:50 AM

Originally Posted by Kelwick

After another night of attempts on heroic Mimiron, I stand by my reaction of Prayer of mending -> Empowered renew -> Flash heal for napalm shell ...occasionally if i feel that I'm hesitating at all I may trade off empowered renew for a Cicle of healing instead (not ideal of course but safer). The second impulse is just based on instinct.

PoM is OBVIOUSLY a poor choice because it's less healing than a flash heal in the same amount of time. It's not even an instant heal. Even if someone is low enough to be killed in one more hit, PoM doesn't heal NOW, it heals when the person takes damage, and if that person is killed, it doesn't save them from dying.

I would like to just simply say in response to this quote that no one died from napalm shell in tonight's raid and yes there were casters 10+yards back from me getting napalm shell quite frequently (meaning they were not in range of the majority of healers). If you're casting Flash heal in this situation where you are the nearby healer I sure hope you're coming off of a critical for a surge of light instant heal. It is OBVIOUS that Prayer of mending is not a poor choice at all unless you're slow at healing after seeing the first initial tick and/or the debuff (which is what you are suppose to be able to do). Have Prayer of mending on the raid member for the second tick and you're fine if not CoH out of desperation.

What do you mean by hesitating? That you're slow to react to the napalm shell?

I'm not really sure why you put so much value on tiny, instant heals, to heal napalm shell. If you're healing a person with 22.6k health who gets napalm shelled, (let's assume a 10k initial hit, though it varies from 9,425 to 10,575) they're going to die by the third tic (3 seconds after the initial hit) of the shell unless they get healed for at least 5400. They need to be healed for more than 35.4k health by the end of 8 ticks to survive.

Prayer of mending -> empowered renew is only superior to non-SOL flash heal -> empowered renew in the following circumstances.

Multiple people just got hit with the same napalm shell, so prayer of mending will bounce.
OR
You cast your first heal so late that your target will die before your flash heal lands but ALSO soon enough that your prayer of mending will trigger from a non-lethal shell tic. If you have a 1.2 second global cooldown and flash heal time from haste, there is only a 0.2 second window when this can happen: from 1.8 to 1.99~ seconds after the shell hits. If your reaction time is any faster, you can heal for more with the flash heal. If it's any slower, your target will die before they get healed from either spell.

In both cases, your empowered renew will come at the exact same time. As far as considering circle of healing more "safe" than empowered renew, there is nothing safe about using heals that do less than 3k HPS to heal someone taking 6k dps.

I'm also not sure why you think that its important that your first flash heal is a surge of light flash heal if you're solo healing someone who got napalmed. Surge of light does not increase healing per second. In fact, it decreases it, since the heals cannot crit. If you're actually solo-healing someone who got napalmed, it's not possible to do if you're wasting time with stuff like single-target circle of healing. It does half the healing of flash heal in the same amount of time. But you generally won't be solo-healing napalmed people. You don't need "the majority of other healers" near you to not be solo-healing a napalmed person. You just need one. The tank is pretty easy to heal when not being plasma blasted, and there's no other damage going out in that phase unless your melee is tripping over mines.

Originally Posted by Elimbras

Originally Posted by RootBreaker

Mimiron:
Obviously its not going to take other healers 4-6 seconds to react to a napalm shell, and the damage will be somewhat mitigated by fire resist aura, and the person hit could pop a healthstone if really necessary, but I think it's clear that renew is not a good spell for healing spike damage. Flash heal alone gives much more room for error if you or other healers are slow to react.

You can't really conclude that way, because you also need to remember that renew has still two ticks expected, that will help latter, either for preventing health[death?] or for topping the target up.

The only raid damage in phase 1 is from napalm shells. It's pretty unusual for the same person to get shelled twice in a row. Topping the person off after the shell ends is pretty trivial. The mana you save by using renew for this purpose is irrevlevant, as there's very little to heal in phase 1 and plenty of regen time while you're waiting for phase 2.

tedv · 05/07/09, 2:14 PM

Originally Posted by constantius

... we saw that in BiS Naxx gear it was "easy" to reach 400 haste without sacrificing other stats, and beyond 500 it became prohibitively expensive in terms of crit and spellpower to continue stacking haste.

...

14% remains a good number to aim for as a first pass in your gearing. If you know enough to understand where you need more or less haste, the compendium really isn't for you anyway. There's nothing wrong with running less than 14%, and there's nothing wrong with running more. The 12-16% range is the ballpark within which you aren't sacrificing too much haste for crit, or crit for haste.

The real contention I'm making is that there aren't any thresholds people should aim for. This is because in the grand scheme of things, all five useful stats (Int, Spirit, Crit, Haste, Spell Power) are in the same ballpark of usefulness relative to the itemization points assigned to them. It's not like being a Mage, Warlock, or Shadow Priest where Spirit is clearly worse than other stats, but still good enough to take into account when selecting gear.

In other words, literally any ilvl 226 item will be an upgrade over any ilvl 213 item, regardless of the actual stats traded or your overall stat levels before the trade.

Take this extreme example. Suppose that for whatever reason, you feel that you are low on haste and decide it's really important to stack more. You are currently wearing [Distorted Limbs], but you then get [Leggings of Mortal Arrogance]. Mortal Arrogance is clearly not optimal for stacking haste as there are ilvl 226 pants with haste. But even the worst of the ilvl 226 pants will be an upgrade over the ilvl 213 pants that stack haste. Here is the exact stat trade, using gems 8 haste / 8 spell and 8 haste / 8 spirit gems:

Distorted Limbs: 42 Haste
Mortal Arrogance: 57 Crit, 5 Spell Power, 8 Int, 7 Spirit,

There is no gear setup where 42 haste beats 57 crit, 5 spell power, 8 and, AND 7 spirit. That's simply not going to happen. Even the "bad" upgrade choice (of trading haste for crit) is worth making the trade just for the extra overall stats. It doesn't matter if it drops you below 14% haste, 12% haste, or 4% haste. The second set of stats is just flat out better.

We could do this for pretty much any pair of ilvl 213 and 226 gear and get exactly the same results too. The very concept of trying to fit stats into a particular range is misleading for someone trying to min/max their gear. If the range encourages use of the 226 item, it's no better than this heuristic. And if it encourages use of the 213 item, it is wrong. Calling it a window instead of a fixed threshold won't stop people from asking why that range is good. And the fact is, it's still secondary to having high item level gear.

This is the advice we should give people for gearing:

A) If the new item is a higher item level, it is always an upgrade.
B) Pick some ordering of these stats that balances your needs for throughput and regeneration: Spell Power, Crit, Haste, Int, Spirit
C) When deciding between two items of the same item level, pick the piece that has the fewest stats you rated lowest in importance.

That's definitely both more useful and more correct than, "Try to get your haste between X% and Y%, your crit between A% and B%, your mana pool this large, etc." That's because windows could encourage people to trade 3% crit for 1% haste, or 3% haste or 1% crit, and these are never correct choices. For example, suppose we said that haste should be between 12% and 16% and crit should be between 30% and 34%. If someone has 34% crit and 11% haste, the window heuristic would suggest that losing 3% crit (still in crit window) to gain 1% haste (finally in haste window) is a good trade. It is not, and we should not suggest it is.

constantius · 05/07/09, 2:49 PM

Originally Posted by tedv

This is the advice we should give people for gearing:

A) If the new item is a higher item level, it is always an upgrade.
B) Pick some ordering of these stats that balances your needs for throughput and regeneration: Spell Power, Crit, Haste, Int, Spirit
C) When deciding between two items of the same item level, pick the piece that has the fewest stats you rated lowest in importance.

That's definitely both more useful and more correct than, "Try to get your haste between X% and Y%, your crit between A% and B%, your mana pool this large, etc." That's because windows could encourage people to trade 3% crit for 1% haste, or 3% haste or 1% crit, and these are never correct choices. For example, suppose we said that haste should be between 12% and 16% and crit should be between 30% and 34%. If someone has 34% crit and 11% haste, the window heuristic would suggest that losing 3% crit (still in crit window) to gain 1% haste (finally in haste window) is a good trade. It is not, and we should not suggest it is.

I mostly agree with what you've said, except the ilvl thing. That's really not true in general, so we shouldn't say it. ilvl 219 gear is not automatically better than ilvl 213. ilvl 226 gear is not automatically better than ilvl 213. It's mostly a slam-dunk: gain 13 ilvls, gain int/spi/spell, and do some trading with crit/haste, but occasionally (actually, fairly often in Ulduar), the gear just isn't that great. This is especially true if you already have a socketed item.

The rule of thumb for gear drops for the guild as a whole so far (clothies included) is: does my current item have sockets? Yes: the item really isn't much of an upgrade. No: hey, I gain sockets. Upgrade!

Beyond that, we can agree to disagree. I much prefer having a guideline number to base my gear upgrades around. Knowing that I just gained a huge chunk of haste on (say) a chest, I like being able to ballpark how much of it I actually need, and swap other gear pieces around to keep my crit high at the same time. Put on a new crit item? Check my haste, make sure I haven't lowered it too much. The bounds are fairly loose, but they're still there. Running 300 haste and 600 crit rating is less useful for Holy than running 450 haste and 450 crit rating. All things being equal, crit and haste can be weighted as approximately 1:1.

Dekkar · 05/07/09, 3:02 PM

Originally Posted by RootBreaker

Mimiron:
(snip)

Flash heal priest:
0.0 12.5kk -10k Napalm Shell
0.5 Priest beings to cast flash heal
1.0 6.5k -6k Napalm Shell DoT
1.7 12.3k +5.8k flash heal
2.0 6.3k -6k Napalm Shell DoT
2.9 12.3k +5.8k flash heal
3.0 6.3k -6k Napalm Shell DoT
4.0 0.3k -6k Napalm Shell DoT
4.1 6.1k +5.8k flash heal
5.0 0.1k -6k Napalm Shell DoT
5.3 5.9k +5.8k flash heal
6.0 The target needs to have been healed by someone else by now, or they're dead.

Obviously its not going to take other healers 4-6 seconds to react to a napalm shell, and the damage will be somewhat mitigated by fire resist aura, and the person hit could pop a healthstone if really necessary, but I think it's clear that renew is not a good spell for healing spike damage. Flash heal alone gives much more room for error if you or other healers are slow to react.

Also, note that if any of the 4 flash heals the second priest crit, they would have been able to heal solo fine. If only the renew crit, the first priest's target still dies on the 4th second, and they only have one chance for their flash heal to crit.

While this shows a case for Renew failing when healing Napalm Shell, I have a different method of healing Napalm Shell Targets. I Flash Heal twice to keep the target alive, and then use my hasted GHeal to bring them from low to full.

tedv · 05/07/09, 10:36 PM

Originally Posted by constantius

I mostly agree with what you've said, except the ilvl thing. That's really not true in general, so we shouldn't say it. ilvl 219 gear is not automatically better than ilvl 213. ilvl 226 gear is not automatically better than ilvl 213. It's mostly a slam-dunk: gain 13 ilvls, gain int/spi/spell, and do some trading with crit/haste, but occasionally (actually, fairly often in Ulduar), the gear just isn't that great. This is especially true if you already have a socketed item.

What are some actual examples of this? Because I looked over all the cloth gear priests would actually want (no +hit, no mp5) and I couldn't find one example of a ilvl 213 item that would be better than a 226 item.

Originally Posted by constantius

Beyond that, we can agree to disagree. I much prefer having a guideline number to base my gear upgrades around. Knowing that I just gained a huge chunk of haste on (say) a chest, I like being able to ballpark how much of it I actually need, and swap other gear pieces around to keep my crit high at the same time. Put on a new crit item? Check my haste, make sure I haven't lowered it too much. The bounds are fairly loose, but they're still there.

Agreeing to disagree makes sense for Coke versus Pepsi, The Beatles versus Elvis, or Dogs versus Cats. It doesn't apply to a mathematical analysis. If someone claims 2+2 is 4 and someone else claims 2+2 is 6, you don't agree to disagree. And you certainly don't "split the difference" and claim that the real answer is 5. You analyze the data and figure out what is actually correct. You might well prefer having a guideline number, but unless you can explain the mathematics of why those values are optimal, then they aren't very useful. We cannot take these loose boundaries as axiomatic; they must be justified.

Furthermore, there's math showing that following thresholds can lead to sub-optimal gearing choices. Losing 100 crit rating to gain 30 haste rating (or 100 haste to gain 30 crit) is always wrong. This absolutely contradicts the concept of bounds, even loose ones.

At any rate, I've provided both examples and mathematics showing how following bounds can lead to incorrect choices. It would be good to get to the bottom of this disagreement, so some counter-examples would be helpful. Under what circumstances would some 213 ilvl gear ever be better than some 226 ilvl gear, assuming neither piece has +hit nor mp5?

Starfire · 05/08/09, 12:08 AM

I think on some levels you are wrong. I don't know how you guys do Vezax, but I noticed at a certain level of haste you can easily reactively heal with greater heal. It seems to be with enough haste to get your greater heal down to 1.9s (well I think it's 2.0s, but the 1.9s is some room for comfort) you can reactively use greater heal after damage.

x1 in 10 man, and x2 (as in two healers) in 25 man.

Also, in the case of Discipline, as been pointed out in the other threat, with Borrowed Time too much haste becomes ineffective since you cannot go past the 1 second on the gcd.

constantius · 05/08/09, 12:12 AM

Why on earth you assume that I would ever advocate losing 100 crit rating to gain 30 haste rating, I really don't know. Bounds have absolutely nothing to do with what you're talking about, and I'm really starting to think you're trolling me.

Saying that a goal is 450 haste, 450 crit by no means ever allows for a situation where you'd give up +100 of one for the cost of 30 of another. That would be silly. On the same token, your statement of how to decide on gear doesn't make any sense. If you just pick up a piece, and throw it on, regardless of what it replaces, because it's an ilvl upgrade, you could easily find yourself (esp. if you do it twice) dropping 120 crit for 120 haste. While this might look reasonable on paper, in reality it ends up giving you too much of one stat.

For example, say you had BiS Naxx/Sarth/Maly gear. Then you pick up the legs from Thorim ([Leggings of Lost Love]) and replace your [Leggings of Mortal Arrogance]. It's not an ilvl upgrade, but you do it anyway because you feel like it. Then you replace your [Valorous Mantle of Sanctification] with [Mantle of Wavering Calm]. You've just lost 114 crit rating (no sockets counted) and gained 90 haste plus some assorted stats. Was it worth it? Realistically, no. Not if your stats were balanced. If you began at 450/450, and you do that swap, you drop to 336 crit and jump to 540 haste. And you've really gained nothing.

It makes sense to put a soft cap on how much haste you want. That way, you can get there with the minimal number of pieces, and then stack crit and spell. I very much look at haste as something akin to hit, only for holy priests. We need some to keep our throughput high. We can live without it, but not without hurting our healing. And if we get too much, it really hurts us.

How much is "too much" is entirely up to each priest. I've chosen mine to be around the 450 mark. That keeps my crit over 30% for HC up-time and throughput, and lets me stack regen and spellpower in the remaining item points. If you want to advocate a higher level of haste usefulness, that's one thing. But if all you're saying is that you should never consider your overall stats as you take an upgrade just because it's higher ilvl, then I flatly disagree. And in that, I think we have arrived at a point where it's a difference of approaches toward the same end goal. If that's not agreeing to disagree, then I don't know what is.

In other words, stop arguing the same point. I prefer setting goals, then gearing around them. You prefer taking piece-by-piece. In the end, I think we end up at roughly the same gearset, and roughly the same levels of stats. If your BiS gearset is drastically different than the one I posted in the OP, then by all means post it and explain why it is so different.