Elitist Jerks WotLK Healing Compendium v3.2: Same Old Thing

05/13/09, 8:10 AM   #256
Zju
Glass Joe

Karazhan (EU)
 Originally Posted by Hungtar I played around with it a bit. The 5 second duration really is painfully short. Pulling of a PW:S, Penance, Gheal combo required button spamming (and a nochanneing macro for the Gheal). And that was at 2AM on a workday, on a medium population server that never had real issues with latency.
I recently got my hands on the 4-set, and have to say, it's quite impressive. I do have the luxury of raiding disc with a FFA role, so I spend a lot of my time pre-shielding - I couldn't think of a single encounter where it wouldn't shine. You may get lesser returns from it if your duty is mainly tank healing, but even so, I'd go nowhere near dismissing it. It's still, basically, SP-on-demand.

As holy, beyond the use prior to easily predictable aoe damage [in the lines of mid-air Flame Jets, during Tantrum cast ect - maybe even self-shielding in Mimiron P2] to power up a CoH+PoH at best, and after a B&S, I honestly can't see much use to it. I wouldn't write it off from the start, but I doubt the gains from it will justify keeping 4 pieces of T8.25 in favor of higher ilvl gear available from hard modes.

05/13/09, 9:22 AM   #257
Ranc
Von Kaiser

Human Priest

 Originally Posted by KamPa A stupid question perhaps - but did Body&Soul and Soul Warding nerfs went through already, or is that waiting for patch? With current "we hotfix things but leave tooltips intact" trend, I'm bit lost.
I don't think there is an annouced plan to change Body and Soul?, last notes I can find were a few months ago about some incorrect data mining about rank1 wrongly assumed to be rank2.

Divine Hymn now heals for 3024 to 3342 every 2 sec. (Down from 4320 to 4774)
New implementation is due another change -
Divine Hymn: Healing and healing scaling reduced by 30%. Buff on affected players changed from 15% to 10%.

Hopefully any further downward changes will allow the very long CD to be reconsidered. Just reading the forums here you can see how its falling further and further out of our thoughts as each change has been applied since the overpowered ptr version.

Last edited by Ranc : 05/13/09 at 9:28 AM.

05/13/09, 4:02 PM   #258
Hungtar
Von Kaiser

Blood Elf Hunter

Un'Goro (EU)
 Originally Posted by Zju I recently got my hands on the 4-set, and have to say, it's quite impressive. I do have the luxury of raiding disc with a FFA role, so I spend a lot of my time pre-shielding - I couldn't think of a single encounter where it wouldn't shine. You may get lesser returns from it if your duty is mainly tank healing, but even so, I'd go nowhere near dismissing it. It's still, basically, SP-on-demand. ...
Chain shielding gets you the best possible gain from the four piece set bonus. You have the spell power and borrow time buffs up for extended periods. You get 282 extra absorb per second (not accounting for lag and time to react). For Penance you get 269 extra healing and for a GHeal 402 extra healing.

If both get the spell power bonus thats 134 extra healing per second (for 5 seconds). If only the Penance gets the bonus, thats 54 extra healing per second. If you are lucky, you maybe able to get 50% healing of the amount shield spamming gets you. If not, you get less then 20%. Long story short: you get much less from the set bonus when your duty is tank healing. It's still free, though.

05/13/09, 5:25 PM   #259
Sharajat
Piston Honda

Night Elf Priest

 Originally Posted by Hungtar Chain shielding gets you the best possible gain from the four piece set bonus. You have the spell power and borrow time buffs up for extended periods. You get 282 extra absorb per second (not accounting for lag and time to react). For Penance you get 269 extra healing and for a GHeal 402 extra healing. If both get the spell power bonus thats 134 extra healing per second (for 5 seconds). If only the Penance gets the bonus, thats 54 extra healing per second. If you are lucky, you maybe able to get 50% healing of the amount shield spamming gets you. If not, you get less then 20%. Long story short: you get much less from the set bonus when your duty is tank healing. It's still free, though.
Numbers are quite a bit off, as those are the numbers with 0% crit. Should obviously be *crit%*0.95 on the penance and GHeal numbers. That makes it much more attractive.

But really, the 4 piece is a no brainer. There might be slightly better pieces than any one of the set pieces if you really look, but the two piece is amazing (there's no way I'd pass on it) so getting the four piece is just utterly obvious to me. If it's available, you take it.

The interesting thing is going to be when to break 4 piece in the next tier of content, but fortunately we don't have to worry about that for a while.

Last edited by Sharajat : 05/13/09 at 5:34 PM.

 05/13/09, 7:22 PM #260 moowalk Don Flamenco   Moowalk Troll Priest   Khaz'goroth Some uptime numbers from last night's raid. (There's not many bosses in there since we were working on hardmodes.) 4 Minute Ignis = 53% uptime. I was shielding 3 tanks while on MT duty. Also, I was dpsing for the first 20% of the fight and not shielding. Razorscale = 67% uptime. Shield spamming during P1, MT healing p2. I would have though this would be higher, but it's single target damage in p2 so that would bring the number down. XT = 45% uptime. Main tank healing and dpsing during heart phases. Kologarn = 64% uptime. Main tank healer and stone grip shielding. Quite high, but the difference here is I'm never dpsing during burn phases. Auriya = 57% uptime. It's a joke of a fight now, but pre nerfs this would have had very high uptime from crazy cat damage. There needs to be some correction to account for the time lost while in the initial shield GCD. Worst case scenario would reduce those numbers by 20%.
 05/14/09, 6:47 AM #261 Havoc12 King Hippo   Shaarra Night Elf Priest   Silvermoon (EU) Mana regeneration Lets consider mana regeneration again. Some basic stuff k k' m m*k' spi int uptime FSR oFSR k = 0.027875 k' = 0.016725 m = 1.20613 -- 1.15*SQRT(1.1) m*k' = 0.020172527 spi = 1200 (my value with all raid buffs xpt kings and without SoR, spirit food and 10 stacks from spi trinket) int = 1156 (my value with all raid buffs xpt kings) HCuptime = 60% iFSR = 411.5195545 oFSR = 823.0391091 Mana regen formula $Regen = m*k'*(1-0.5FSR)*(1+0.5HC_{uptime})*spi*\SQRT(int)$ I will focus one one specific fight, which is Mimiron This fight has an enforced ooFSR time of about 10% for us it takes ~8mins, roughly 2mins per phase with roughly 15 seconds between phases. During each phase ooFSR time is roughly 5%. At the end of phase 2, I generally have 0-15% mana left. At the begining of phase 3 I use fiend+hymn. My HCuptime is between 50 and 60%. Thus using the above formula and postulating zero HC uptime during the enforced breaks, 1 spirit is worth ~0.490mp5 from meditation and ooFSR regen, for my stats and in this particular fight. Intellect is worth ~0.243mp5 I only use fiend and hymn once at the begining of phase 3 and I would gain no benefit from using it twice. I usually get all 4 ticks. I never have manatide. Additional regen from int based abilities: replenishment (90% uptime) 0.185625 mp5 fiend (synched with hymn) = 16.5*0.5*(0.8*1.2+0.2)*5/60/8 = 0.0996875 mp5 hymn = 16.5*(0.03+3*0.03*1.2)*5/60/8 = 0.02371875 mp5 manapool = 0.34375 mp5 if my mana goes to full after using fiend+hymn or 0.171875 if it does not go to full. Total: 0.735 to 0.907 mp5 for intellect. Usually my mana does not go to full, because I dont let it to avoid losing regen time and I save my potion in case I need it in phase 4. Thus under the conditions described above 1 spirit = 0.490 and 1 int is in most cases worth 0.735mp5. So its important to remember that the values of spirit and int are not set in stone. Spirit can be a very good regen stat in some of the ulduar fights I have seen. I generally keep my spirit just slightly higher than int because I use the greatness card but I do so using consumables, my only concession to spirit in gearing is a spirit trinket. I think consumables are a great to massively boost your spirit in an extremely cost effective way. Flask of distilled wisdom allows for maximum regen but elixir of draeneic wisdom+spellpower elixir offer much greater return for your buck and they are dirt cheap. Being an alchemist, I gain 52 spirit, 49 int and 87 spellpower from flask of draeneic wisdom and elixir of spellpower. I cannot conceive of any situations where this is not superior to 98 intellect. Even if pure regen is important then elixir of healing power and draeneic wisdom offer 54spi and 30int, which at the very worst are equivalent to 59 intellect in terms of regen. The extra benefit is effectively like having a second food buff and is superior to 6 intellect. =========================================== I noticed a discussion concerning blessed resilience, versus empowered healing. For me this is an easy question that needs no mathematical treatment. Blessed resilience returns 1% to all healing per point. Empowered healing returns roughly 2% per point to gheal, fheal and binding heal. Statistically given that pom, coh and poh make up the majority of our healing, blessed resilience is better than empowered healing, but only statistically. The effect of blessed resilience is by no means observable by any means. Its simply too small. However the difference that 3 ranks of empowered healing make to bheal, fheal and bheal is very noticeable indeed. The reason is that unlike CoH and PoH, which are not emergency spells, flash, bheal and gheal maybe need to be used to save someone taking massive damage. 1200 less healing on your gheal or 300 less healing on your flash, are large enough to make a life and death difference. 90 healing on CoH or 150 on PoH on the other hand wont. Now someone might say that they dont see why 300 can make a difference but 150 cant. Its only half the amount. Think of this: The chance of dying due to a deficit in healing cannot be linear in the low range. Its not easy to understand why. The lower the HP the less the ways in which you can get there. The chance of dying due to 10 point difference is not 1000 times smaller than the chance of dying to a 10000 point difference in healing, also CoH and PoH are not really emergency spells, but flash and gheal are. I can think of plenty of times where I have hit someone with a gheal for 9000 bringing them to 80% health and then move on to heal another target and then they take a spike and go to less than 1k health. It happened very frequently in malygos P2. Not every fight but nearly. I can ever remember someone going down to less than 200 HP. Losing 1000 healing from my gheal, could have disastrous consequences, losing 90 from CoH on the other wont will just mean someone else will have less overheal. By taking blessed resilience you can increase your healing by an insignificant amount, but no one will ever stay alive because you have blessed resilience. You might simply get a tiny itchy bit higher in the healing meters though it is impossible to actually notice the difference. On the other hand if you skip those 3 points in empowered healing someone, somewhere along the line, will die because of it. Maybe in 0.1% of cases, maybe in 0.01% of cases. Personally I think having the extra punch on the spells that might be needed to save someone, is well worth 1.5-2% less healing. I can comfortably give blessed resilience a pass. If there are people out there for whom a slight improvement over others in the healing meters is worth a weaker heal that might be needed to save someone, that is a personal choice. It is not possible however to claim that one choice is superior in any way to the other. Blessed resilience is not automatically better than empowered healing.
 05/14/09, 7:37 AM #262 The Not So Evil Piston Honda     Brundtland Night Elf Priest   Trollbane (EU) On Mimiron, you are (nearly) oom at end of P2. This means you would want to get most possible healing out of every point of mana you got. So why would you take Emp. Healing which only gives a bonus to GHeal (probably 0 casts), Flash Heal (maybe 50% of casts, most likely less), and Binding Heal (a few), instead of getting all your AoE healing spells boosted? Rawr - Coder of HolyPriest (Healer) and ShadowPriest (DPS) Modules. Get Your Rawr 2.3.x!
 05/14/09, 8:09 AM #263 Sawbonez Glass Joe   Sawbones Human Priest   Drenden The other day while in raid my guild was facing off against XT-002 when I happened to mention in the healer channel that Divine Hymm was great for tantrum. My class leader then stated that it was not as efficent as PoH since it only heals 3 targets at once instead of 5. Can this be true? I was curious is anyone happens to have any numbers of PoH vs Divine Hymm for amount healed and amount of people healed? I have looked through a couple of threads and have not been able to find a comparison between the two. Thanks for any help that you guys can supply in this area.
 05/14/09, 8:21 AM #264 • Sjonkel Don Flamenco   Sjonkeldunk Human Priest   Doomhammer (EU) Divine Hymn ticks 4 times, and heals 3 people each time, for a total of 12 people. It's a smart heal, so each tick, it will heal whoever is lowest for a significant amount. It's hard to compare it to PoH since one is smart and the other isn't, but I suppose you could have a priest use it every tantrum if you have enough priests. Our guild uses a tactic where all ranged and healers are 10 yards from each other, so I often find myself out of range of a few people, in which case Divine Hymn wouldn't be as useful. If your guild has another tactic, then I'm sure it would be more effective. A single Divine Hymn will easily heal for 100k(not sure how much after the upcoming nerf), and this is even more significant because of the smartheal.
 05/14/09, 8:29 AM #265 Vintoran Von Kaiser   Vintoran Troll Priest   Gul'dan (EU) Could you please provide a log where you have 90% replenishment uptime? I keep reading numbers like that but I've never seen them on our logs. It's usually somewhere between 75 and 80%. On the topic of Empowered Healing vs Blessed Resilience: A while ago I "adjusted" my WWS logs (quite roughly I have to admid) from 5/5, 0/3 to 2/5, 3/3 and the difference was not that significant, on some fights the former was even higher, depending on the amount of Flash Heal obviously. Since that my reasoning was similar to Havoc's: CoH/PoH/PoM are more or less raid stabilisation tools and FH is used to save people that are low (often at least). Maybe if you specc for a specific hardmode where you hardly ever cast FH/BH it's worth it to get BR, but that's not the case for me so far. Mancher wird nie süss, er fault im Sommer schon. Feigheit ist es, die ihn an seinem Aste festhält.
05/14/09, 9:21 AM   #266
tedv
Observation: I am awesome

Goblin Priest

Mal'Ganis
 Originally Posted by Havoc12 I noticed a discussion concerning blessed resilience, versus empowered healing. For me this is an easy question that needs no mathematical treatment. Blessed resilience returns 1% to all healing per point. Empowered healing returns roughly 2% per point to gheal, fheal and binding heal. Statistically given that pom, coh and poh make up the majority of our healing, blessed resilience is better than empowered healing, but only statistically. The effect of blessed resilience is by no means observable by any means. Its simply too small. However the difference that 3 ranks of empowered healing make to bheal, fheal and bheal is very noticeable indeed.
I'm sorry, but this is another argument using the following logic:

- Effects A and B are really small
- Effect A is so small it's insignificant
- Effect B is equally small but it still matters
- Therefore B is better than A

That said, I don't really buy the argument that the main use of Flash Heal is to stop someone from dying. If someone is that low, Flash Heal is the wrong tool, and Greater Heal is so slow that other healers will have healed the person by then. The real answer is Guardian Spirit.

I find that Flash Heal is most useful as a tool to top off the raid and stack Serendipity for fast Prayers of Healing, ideally using Surge of Light procs. There's enough raid damage these days that well over half your healing comes from group heals on most fights. From that perspective, Blessed Resilience does a better job of preventing deaths than Empowered Healing, because it heals a little extra on someone who otherwise might not have received a heal at all.

I know that measuring healing meters isn't ideal, but when it comes down to it, it's a better metric than anything else we have to compare. And Blessed Resilience wins on most fights (but certainly not all).

05/14/09, 1:21 PM   #267
Havoc12
King Hippo

Night Elf Priest

Silvermoon (EU)
 On Mimiron, you are (nearly) oom at end of P2. This means you would want to get most possible healing out of every point of mana you got. So why would you take Emp. Healing which only gives a bonus to GHeal (probably 0 casts), Flash Heal (maybe 50% of casts, most likely less), and Binding Heal (a few), instead of getting all your AoE healing spells boosted?
I am nearly oom at the end of p2, but will be above 80% in the begining of p3, due to humn fiend, the break and p3 being generally slow on damage. On mimiron I most certainly dont want to maximise every point of healing, on the contrary I want to ensure that if I hit myself with a binding heal I will live the next time I take damage and when I hit the tank with a gheal while plasma blast is on he won't die from the next tick and that my flash heal won't fail someone hit by a napalm. On Hodir, I would say yes emp healing is not great, but on mimiron or iron council empowered healing may save a life and blessed resi just increases your healing v slightly.

 Originally Posted by tedv I'm sorry, but this is another argument using the following logic: - Effects A and B are really small - Effect A is so small it's insignificant - Effect B is equally small but it still matters - Therefore B is better than A That said, I don't really buy the argument that the main use of Flash Heal is to stop someone from dying. If someone is that low, Flash Heal is the wrong tool, and Greater Heal is so slow that other healers will have healed the person by then. The real answer is Guardian Spirit. I find that Flash Heal is most useful as a tool to top off the raid and stack Serendipity for fast Prayers of Healing, ideally using Surge of Light procs. There's enough raid damage these days that well over half your healing comes from group heals on most fights. From that perspective, Blessed Resilience does a better job of preventing deaths than Empowered Healing, because it heals a little extra on someone who otherwise might not have received a heal at all. I know that measuring healing meters isn't ideal, but when it comes down to it, it's a better metric than anything else we have to compare. And Blessed Resilience wins on most fights (but certainly not all).
You seem to quote this a lot, and you seem to attempt to apply it to any discussion where small figures are involved, whether it applies or not.

The logic you quoted has nothing at all to do with my reasoning. First of all effect A and effect B are most assuredly NOT equally small. My reasoning is the following:

-There exists a threshold C for achieving a function F (preventing a death).
-Effect A is very small but applies to most casts.
-Effect B is larger then A but only applies to few casts.
-Effect A is below the threshold C effect B is above the threshold C.
-Effect A provides statistitically more healing than B but since it is below the threshold it fails to fullfil function F.
-Since the statistical increase in healing is less important to me than fulfilling function F I choose effect B.

The rest is completely irrelevant, you have utterly and completely missed the issue. We don't care if guardian spirit is the answer to immediate danger. Immediate danger is not our problem. The question is whether a small heal can lead to someone dying. That means we are not concerned with the question of your heal not landing but of not being big enough. That means your heal lands but it does not heal enough to prevent the target from dying the next time he takes damage. If someone is low on health you dont automatically use GS on them. If that was the case you would use your GS very quickly and probably for no good reason too. Your first point of call is flash heal and your second point of call is Gheal if the deficit is big enough and you have serendipity. The size of your heal is crucial in preventing someone from dying if they get hit again afterwards. The significance of any number below 1k for this reason decreases exponentially. 150 is not half as good as 300 it is many times inferior and 90 is not 3 times but massively inferior. There exists a threshold where the difference in healing is significant to make a death from insufficient healing possible. Blessed resi is below this threshold. The logic of this is very simple to follow. The smaller the number the fewer the ways in which a player taking damage can be at or below that number but not dead and because of the randomness in damage amount this is strongly non linear.

I think you need to drastically improve your understanding of how people can die in a fight.

Blessed resi increases the amount of healing done, statistically by an amount which is under 3%. This is much less than the variation in healing numbers due to the randomnness in the base heal amount and hence it is completely invisible to the naked eye. It is merely a statistical difference. It saves no lives and has no utility other htan increasing (not even noticeably the amount you heal on the meters). Blessed resilience will win on the majority of fights in the healing meters, but it will lose hands down on every fight when it comes to preventing deaths.

05/14/09, 2:09 PM   #268
Glass Joe

Draenei Priest

Norgannon
 Originally Posted by Sawbonez The other day while in raid my guild was facing off against XT-002 when I happened to mention in the healer channel that Divine Hymm was great for tantrum. My class leader then stated that it was not as efficent as PoH since it only heals 3 targets at once instead of 5. Can this be true? I was curious is anyone happens to have any numbers of PoH vs Divine Hymm for amount healed and amount of people healed? I have looked through a couple of threads and have not been able to find a comparison between the two. Thanks for any help that you guys can supply in this area.
In practice, I find that PoH heals for at most about 15k for each cast in situations like tantrum, once overheal/cross healing is accounted for. With Glyph of PoH, it's probably about 18k per cast. Divine Hymn can heal for upwards of 60k, plus a hard-to-measure 10% boost later. In the 8 seconds of DH, you could cast 2.66 PoH, for about 50k healing, so DH has a raw HPS lead. It also has a commanding HPM lead. The smart heal factor is also very big - with chain PoH, some targets aren't going to get healed for 4-6s, depending on haste/BT, which can be a serious problem.

For XT as Disc, I tend to stick to PW:S and PoH for most Tantrums. If things look like they're going bad, and multiple people may drop, then I can hit Divine Hymn as an emergency button. DH is clearly better, that's why it has the cooldown.

Last edited by adso1 : 05/14/09 at 2:37 PM.

05/14/09, 2:31 PM   #269
tedv
Observation: I am awesome

Goblin Priest

Mal'Ganis
First, a bit of context about this poster's holy spec so that other people can see the perspective he's coming from:

0/3 Inspiration
0/2 Surge of Light
0/2 Body and Soul

5/5 Empowered Healing
3/3 Improved Healing
1/1 Lightwell

Glyphs: Flash Heal, Circle of Healing, Power Word: Shield
(Note: No Guardian Spirit or Prayer of Healing glyphs.)

 Originally Posted by Havoc12 The rest is completely irrelevant, you have utterly and completely missed the issue. We don't care if guardian spirit is the answer to immediate danger. Immediate danger is not our problem. The question is whether a small heal can lead to someone dying. That means we are not concerned with the question of your heal not landing but of not being big enough. That means your heal lands but it does not heal enough to prevent the target from dying the next time he takes damage. If someone is low on health you dont automatically use GS on them. If that was the case you would use your GS very quickly and probably for no good reason too. Your first point of call is flash heal and your second point of call is Gheal if the deficit is big enough and you have serendipity.
This is the crux of your argument. You are essentially saying that Empowered Healing beats Blessed Resilience because Flash Heal and Greater Heal are the heals you cast to save people from death. I agree that if Flash Heal is the important Heal, Empowered Healing beats Blessed Resilience. I disagree with the claim that Flash Heal is the "first point of call", in almost all situations. Here's why.

What are the situations where people are in danger of death? There are three basic options:

A) The tank takes a lot of spike damage
B) A random person in the raid takes a lot of spike damage
C) A bunch of people in the raid take a moderate amount of damage

In theory, situation A should already be handled by healers who are better at healing than the main tank. Additionally, the biggest contribution a holy priest can give in this situation is Inspiration, a talent you've neglected to take. Second, you want to keep Prayer of Mending on cooldown, refreshed on the tank as a preemptive heal. You also want to keep a renew on the tank at all times (if you are specced for it anyway). And last, a surge of light procced flash heal will be better than a normal flash heal with a cast time, because the former is instant cast (and free), though that's another talent you've skipped.

At any rate, the point is that Blessed Resilience actually offers slightly more spike recovery healing on the main tank than Empowered Healing, though the numbers are close. This situation is relatively common, for the record.

Situation B only occurs in one fight in Ulduar: on Razorscale. Here I agree that Flash Heal is absolutely the right choice for this situation. But the situation is so rare and the fight is so easy that this situation alone is not reason to take Empowered Healing over Blessed Resilience.

The third situation, massive raid damage, happens in nearly every fight in the zone. For a situation like XT-002's tantrums, Ignis' flame jets, or Kologarm's Oblivion, flash heal is absolutely the wrong choice. When 5 people are hurt and you choose to heal one of them for 6k rather than heal all of them for 3k, you drastically increase the chance that the other 4 people will die. Blessed Resilience isn't about "padding healing meters". It's about making group heals 3% better, and group heal situations are by far the most likely situations where people can die. At least in Ulduar. So I stand by my claim that Blessed Resilience does a better job of saving lives than Empowered Healing.

By the way, it's a lot harder to waste Guardian Spirit if you have the glyph for it, as the 70 second cooldown is enormously useful.

 05/14/09, 2:49 PM #270 constantius Soda Popinski   Nidaba Pandaren Priest   Windrunner Not taking one side or another, but I can almost never justify using GS on a raid member on a hard mode. It's saved for a tank, typically on enrages or "uber abilities" (Thorim, Mimiron, Hodir). And I also wouldn't use Flame Jets, Tantrums, or Kologarn as an example of anything that has to be thought about. They've all been nerfed into the ground. If you want to talk about raid damage and how to heal it, go to Frozen Blows on Hodir.25-hard (4 healers), Freya.25-hard (7 healers, say), or Mimiron.25-hard (7 healers). Those are situations where there's real decisions to be made. You can basically ignore TT and Flame Jets now. They either won't kill a typical raider, or will kill them by so little that *any* healing (Rejuv, Renew, PW:S, CoH, Flash Heal, FoL, LHW, Cheal, PoH, Divine Hymn, etc, etc, etc) will be more than sufficient. When we did Ignis last night at the end of the raid, 4/7 healers (from Mimiron attempts; just kept the same crew) did fake-dps and occasionally tossed a heal. It was boring beyond belief. 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

 Elitist Jerks WotLK Healing Compendium v3.2: Same Old Thing