In general I must agree with Tedv here, I don't see any reason to argue for any kind of target range for haste or crit. Constantius, you mention things like "keeps my crit over 30% for HC up-time and throughput", but why is 30% special? Why not 35%? or 25%? Why set 450 haste or crit rating as goals?

I am with Tedv that if we ignore items with +hit or +mp5, then we should take an item with a higher ilvl every single time, and I think that his example perfectly shows why. Would you really take [Distorted Limbs] over [Leggings of Mortal Arrogance] just because the 42 haste would put you at your 450 haste rating target?

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


The harder decision is between two items with the same ilvl, in that case I pick one based on whether my crit rating or haste rating is lower at the time (if my crit rating is higher than my haste rating I will pick a haste item over a crit item of the same ilvl, but will never take a ilvl 213 haste item over a ilvl 226 crit item).

Hey guys to change the subject a bit to glyps, I replaced to glyphs yesterday. The 10% less mana on flash heal is out and the Spirit of Redemption one is out (too bad it got nerfed :p). Instead I have to 20% HoT of PoH and the Guardian Spirit one (every min a GS if it dosnt hit).

Since I finaly learned how to propper use PoH (or getting close to it) I thought this would be the best choice. What do you guys think?

The point is that regardless of what your gear looks at any given time an ilvl 226 item will be more useful to you than an ilvl 213 item assuming that there are no "wasted"(for priests, lets take strength as an obvious example) stats.

Having no haste whatsoever and all crit but in full ilvl 226 gear will for all intents and purposes be better than having a "balanced" set of full ilvl 213 gear. If you don't agree at face value just imagine the previous comparison of
Distorted Limbs: 42 Haste
Mortal Arrogance: 57 Crit, 5 Spell Power, 8 Int, 7 Spirit

Take those numbers and multiply them by ten to account for a full set of gear and to be generous for your side of the argument and you get 150 more rating, 50 spell power, 80 int, 70 spirit. I hope you aren't honestly saying that priests can somehow compensate for that by balancing out their stats?

In theory, yes, shooting for some kind of balance will probably give you a slight edge in effeciency assuming you can choose from any gear you could wish for. In reality however everyone will get gear one piece at a time and as long as they do, a higher ilvl item will always be an upgrade as long as it doesn't have any bad stats(again, strength wouldn't be a very hot one or since we're talking cloth here, +hit) on it.

Tedv is pretty much right, for holy priests, all stats are more or less equally good (more or less) so iilevel trumps all. For shadowpriests, where we have 3 stats we care about (4 if you include hit) then things are a lot more tricky and sockets a lot more valuable.

Well you "need" to use FH to buff up your upcomming PoH. I took the HoT on PoH cause im close on getting the T8 2 set bonus. 10% more crit chance on PoH. A critting PoH is about 9k? Thats about 2k healing after it. It will not save ppl but might top them off .

And since my mana hasnt been an issue so far I dropt the FH. I must say since I readed on EJ I changed a lot to my priest. Dont focus on spirit too much, getting more intelect. Respecced about 4 times to check out some things etc etc. All for the better. But I have this other priest in my raid guild and his number one cast on Hodir was "Binding Heal", I tried talk to him but he called me Elite etc etc, anyone know how to convince him to respec and change rotation?

Constantius has my vote here.
Assuming unlimited drops and unlimited DKP take any 226 above 213 attitude is fine, but in reality it will leave you low in dkp and unable to balance the items out as quick as required.

any 226 full set > 213 full set (no hit/mp5) - is likely true. The extra Int/Spirit/SP on 8 items x 13ilevels is huge.
But 8x226 haste only cloth is not likely to be better than 6x226 haste + 2x213 crit heavy

Starting off yes just about any 226 is better but there is a point when the unbalancing (particularily on heavy haste) is not worth the trade off and loss of dkp/delay in balancing your set.

JC's have the widest choice as stats heavy dragon eyes in any colour socket is great for rebalancing of course.

EDIT Assuming there's a few people working on their fragments at the moment here (6/30 myself), there maybe some interesting shield maths on haste verses crit here, not enough to unbalance gear otherwise, but there should be a definite point where the crit graph cross the haste graph (unless crit is always better for it) for this effect.

Depends on the DKP system. How our guild works is that every member makes a list of BiS, and then the highest DKP automatically spends DKP if a BiS drops. You only get DKP when a BiS drops too (which tends to solve the issue of too much DKP accumulating due to farm content).

Everything else is free roll.

So I'd be careful about assuming too much about taking upgrades meaning what in terms of DKP. I, for instance, am free to roll on incrimental upgrades (like my current staff) without losing DKP (and no one else wanted it, I guess they hate staves. Oh well, I love my 28k mana pool).

First of all, of course I pass on anything that is a bigger upgrade for another raid member than myself, nobody is arguing you shouldn't.

You mention taking items with "the other stat you really don't care about", but what stats don't we really care about? If you are suggesting that crit is something we shouldn't care about when we are past some arbitrary crit rating, I think that is absurd. The same goes with haste.

And so what if items are side-graded later on? After a month of Naxx pretty much all loot except from KT were sidegrades, the same thing is going to happen in Ulduar (although it will happen twice due to hard mode loot). Once everyone else that would be interested in a particular item would be replacing an item of the same ilvl, it's a sidegrade for everybody and there is no reason to feel bad about taking it.

This is an issue of optimal loot distribution in the raid and not of actual usefulness. I pass on stuff that's a great upgrade all the time for me simply because other classes have fewer options to choose between. What we're really trying to decide is whether something is even an upgrade for us in the first place. I contend that all 226 gear beats all 213 gear and Constantius said that in some situations, the 213 gear was better. But I'm still waiting for example of a single piece of 213 gear that would be better than a single piece of 226 gear, and the stat situation that would make it the case.

For the record though, I'm not trolling. I really do mean to suggest that 226 gear is an upgrade over 213. There's three possibilities for the logical disconnect:

1. You understand my point but I don't understand the disproof
2. I haven't explained my point well
3. You don't understand my point

It's not #1, because the counter-example to my claim would be a piece of 213 gear that's better than a piece of 226 gear. The example of "two pieces of 226 gear versus a third piece of 226 gear and a piece of 219 gear" isn't a counter-example, especially when we all agree that some pieces of 226 are better than others. If you understood the point, I'd expect to hear an appropriate disproof.

That said, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume the problem is just my explanation, not your understanding. Other people have posted trying to explain the reasoning as well, so perhaps the different phrasing will help.

I understand both points. I think generally speaking, you want to keep upgrading to 226 pieces across the board -- there's no case where it's not an upgrade. I think what Constantius was getting it is you don't want to end up in a situation where you have very little haste and a boatload of crit. I'm not really sure if that's even possible right now. But then by saying that, the urge is to state "don't let your haste drop below X." How do you really define X? I feel perhaps that in the "Gearing Questions" section there should be a breakdown into exactly what Haste and Crit do for a priest. It can just be a good summary, or it can have some math, but basically lay out the benefits of both, and let the reader decide which they feel better suits their playstyle. It's important to remember that unlike DPS, healing is very dynamic. One size definitely does not fit all.

Haste up to a certain point provides two benefits. It decreases cast time and the global cooldown. Once your GCD has reached 1 second, then haste has diminished returns because it is only doing half the job it was before. By it's nature, that's a boundary that can be defined by a (rating) number. There is no saying you can't gear past that point, but that you are overall less effective doing so.

Piece by piece taken out of context of the rest of your gear is not a fair comparison, because it will naturally be superior by having more item points to spend. If you have already reached the soft cap for haste however, then replacing a lower ilvl piece of gear that contains crit for a higher once that has more haste is not going to give as big a benefit as it does on it's own on paper. At that point, you are more fairly comparing crit VS a few base stat increases.

If I'm not mistaken, it's suggested that there should be no bounds to gearing and we should pick our preferred order of stats and follow it. To extend that arguement to it's conclusion, we could end up with a gear set of entirely +haste or entirely +crit (ignoring base stats and +spellpower for the moment) if we have valued one stat higher than the other. I think it's very clear to see the drawback of doing such a thing. A all-haste set would have a lower throughput and an all-crit set would have high throughput but is in more danger of healing "too much too late". A crit set would work fine for those events you know are coming and can pre-cast but loses on reaction time to more random events.

If that is not what's being suggested then there is some sort of cap in mind, whether it's a hard number or just by feel. At that point, is suggesting (publicly) a haste and crit rating worse than essentially saying "I value crit until I don't value it anymore"?