I'd want to see some percentages..On fights shorter than 5 minutes that would be awesome (when you get the runic mana 'secondary' pot), over 5 minutes (again with the runic mana pot) that puts it in spark of hope territory, which is still very respectable.
(edit: I was misfiguring the mp5 by attributing the second possible runic mana pot to the trinket. So with correct math that takes it down to ~50mp5 over a six minute fight IF you get the second mana pot. That seems really lackluster. I keep hoping for a spark of hope drop everyweek, which I expect to be worth over 100mp5 based on my casting patterns. While I understand that the spark is consider BiS, there are other great regen trinkets out there. I would think that it would be easy to score a >50mp5 trinket that was a sure thing, and if you are doing hard modes....)
Definitely need to see statistics. Your personal experiences would inevitably suffer from a strong confirmation bias.
It's important to note that even if you proc Runic Mana Potion every time, the trinket itself still isn't that amazing. Assuming a 6 minute fight, it's worth ~24 mp5 with a Runic Mana / Crazy Alchemist Potion, which jumps to 48 mp5 for a (highly improbable) 100% double proc rate. A very decent and well rounded trinket, but far from BiS for either throughput or regen.
Definitely need to see statistics. Your personal experiences would inevitably suffer from a strong confirmation bias.
It's important to note that even if you proc Runic Mana Potion every time, the trinket itself still isn't that amazing. Assuming a 6 minute fight, it's worth ~24 mp5 with a Runic Mana / Crazy Alchemist Potion, which jumps to 48 mp5 for a (highly improbable) 100% double proc rate. A very decent and well rounded trinket, but far from BiS for either throughput or regen.
Oh I agree, but the big difference is sometimes you need the mana, sometimes you don't. And while I do agree that it isn't BiS (I've had awful luck so far) it is viable and can amount to some crunch time mana.
I picked up the Kologarn Robes of the Umbral Brute last night for my Disc set. I'm curious how people feel about using those for Holy given the sheer amount of throughput stats on it. I had been using the Maly 25 robes, so I lose a good chunk of regen and about 20 spellpower. Obviously, it is a personal balance given how I am doing on regen in fights versus needing the throughput, but I wanted to see if anyone else had tried these for Holy and how they felt. I'll be using them for Disc, regardless, but one less item to swap means my bags are that much lighter.
Been poking around at a spec that allows the use of Test of Faith, and Imp Renew/Empowered Renew while still maintaining to get Healing Focus for those crazy Ulduar 25 AoE fights. I easily justify moving a point from Innerfocus and taking a point from SoL. However to get the other points that I required I took a point from Empowered Healing, Divine Providence, and Spiritual Healing.
I am wondering if the single points taken from these 3 talents is worth it considering;
I lose 2% Bonus to CoH/PoH/BH/Holy Nova/Divine Hymn and a 6% lose of the CD on PoM.
I lose 4% Bonus of healing effects on Flash Heal and I lose 8% of healing effects on GH.
I lose 2% Overall healing
I gain 15% Bonus to Renew
I gain 15% Bonus Healing Effect to Renew
I gain instant heal on Renew causing 15% of the total periodic damage to instantly heal when cast
I gain 12% Healing on players under 50% health
I tend to cast Renew often in raids. I think it would be awesome to get the throughput benefits of ToF while still maintaining to receive benefits for Renew.
Though by looking at the numbers so far I think that I lose way too much throughput to even think about making a change like this.
Is my dream too far fetched? Do I need to make a decisive choice here?
Spec according to how you play. No two holy priests play the same. We have a huge array of spells. The game now is very spam heal friendly so what keeps the most characters horizontal is what counts and holy has a bit of flexibility to allow individual styles.
Been poking around at a spec that allows the use of Test of Faith, and Imp Renew/Empowered Renew while still maintaining to get Healing Focus for those crazy Ulduar 25 AoE fights. I easily justify moving a point from Innerfocus and taking a point from SoL. However to get the other points that I required I took a point from Empowered Healing, Divine Providence, and Spiritual Healing.
A large portion of the holy priests who post in this thread (most?) have had similar thoughts about Renew-- there's discussion on the topic a few pages back. The basic conclusion is that if you actually cast renew, the renew talents are really good. Test of Faith is a flat out mandatory talent though, as is Spiritual Healing. And while some people have suggested cutting points in Surge of Light, the math shows that the second point is exactly as good as the first, so therefore not worth cutting either.
This gives you 5 points to spend in other places, plus you can move the point out of Healing Prayers to most spots in Holy, if you really don't think you need the talent. In my case, I took 1x Inner Fire, 3x Blessed Resilience, 2x Body and Soul. But there's considerable flexibility here. The key is realizing that Empowered Healing is NOT a mandatory talent unless you plan on slugging Greater Heals at the main tank (in which case you should probably be discipline). It's not a terrible PvE talent either though.
It's worth noting that you can swap the 5 points in Divine Fury for 5 points in Spell Warding. This choice has been popular with priests working on hard modes, as all are full of AoE spell damage. And the Prayer of Healing glyph can be swapped for Holy Nova, if your raid groups are setup to make Holy Nova good.
I would never drop a point in spiritual healing, 2% to all healing is pure gold.
Dropping a single point from SoL is debatable. SoL is mainly a mana efficiency talent, it actually reduces your HPS. If you are having no mana problems I guess that you could do it. Even though I know that it reduces my HPS, I love SoL procs. You can heal on the run and the instant part means less overheal in my experience.
Dropping a point in divine providence is also debatable. ProM and CoH usually compose a large percentage of my healing. So increasing the CD on ProM and reducing the healing on that spell and CoH is not a good option imo.
If you are going to go renew, the place to fund the points is by dropping empowered healing. This is what I have done and I have been very happy with the results.
Edit: As tedv said, you can drop divine fury for spell warding...he mentioned hard modes, which I am not working on, but have made this change anyway. I realized that I NEVER cast greater heal in a raid environment. Even with divine fury, the only time I would consider it would be with a full stack of serendipity. But in Ulduar the raid damage is so high that I always sit on a serendipity stack until a PoH is called for.
The only bad part of dropping divine fury (for me) is that I can't stand to do dailies with the slower damage spells, so I quest in disc spec. This is actually much nicer anyway for reflective shield and such.
Dropping a single point from SoL is debatable. SoL is mainly a mana efficiency talent, it actually reduces your HPS. If you are having no mana problems I guess that you could do it.
Well it only reduces your healing per second in situations where you are spamming Flash Heal, but in my experience that's not a typical scenario. There aren't that many hard fights where you can do that though. Either you have to move or you need to cast a heal with higher throughput (or both).
I think it really depends on what you're using the spec for. e.g. I run main spec Disc, and recently swapped my dual spec from Shadow to Holy for HM-Hodir to have a better throughput AE heal spec. As previous posters have noted, I wouldn't drop any points out of SH, and for my intents and purposes, I'd never drop points out of DP either. I'm not completely sold on my choice (namely IF vs. 3/3 ToF) but, since the spec is purely raid heal AE healing for me, I went ahead and dropped Imp. Healing entirely since I don't plan on casting enough Gheals to make it worth the 3 points.
So, now that we've completed all hard-modes (except Algalon), here's a rough idea of what specs I use for each one (and Wreath's, as well, so you can see "the priests"). I know a couple of people had requested this from me: sorry it took me so long to get around to doing it.
FL+4
Doesn't matter, vehicle fight. Don't even have to be in for it.
XT:Heartbreaker
One priest holy with B&S for Gravity Bombs, one priest holy without. Both with 5/5 Spell Warding, and at least 1/3 Empowered Renew for HC procs. Both with 3/3 ToF.
IC:I Choose You, Steelbreaker
One priest (me) Discipline, cookie-cutter Disc spec with 5/5 Spell Warding. The other priest (Wreath) full Holy, 3/3 ToF, 1/3 Emp Renew, 2/2 SoL, 5/5 Spell Warding, no B&S.
Hodir:I Could Say that Cache was Rare
1 holy priest, cookie-cutter spec, doesn't really matter because moonbeams do all the work. Don't need B&S.
Thorim:Lose Your Illusion
1 priest Disc (me), cookie-cutter Disc spec with 5/5 Spell Warding. 1 priest holy (Wreath), with cookie-cutter hard-mode spec (1/3 Emp Renew, 3/3 ToF, 5/5 Spell Warding, no B&S).
Freya:Knock, Knock, Knock on Wood
1 priest Disc (me) spamming PWS on low-health people, Disc. 1 priest holy (Wreath), without B&S, spamming PoH and CoH.
Vezax:I Love the Smell of Saronite in the Morning
2 Disc, and when we first did it, respec'ing to drop all points in Meditation and picking up 3/3 Improved Healing for Penance savings. Now that we're outgearing the encounter, both holy, just using PoH and CoH selectively. 5/5 Spell Warding, of course.
Yogg-Saron: One Light in the Darkness
1 holy, 1 disc. Holy B&S (me) for brain room and general melee movement, and 1 disc cookie-cutter for up-stairs cleansing. Take 3/3 Absolution if you're learning the encounter for the savings in dispel. It's 90% of what you do in P2.
Of course, YMMV, Your Guild May Do Things Differently, and You May Not Care. But for those who were curious, those are the primary features of our specs for those fights. I run B&S 90% of the time just due to laziness, now, but it's the first thing to drop if you're tweaking a spec.
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
Honestly, what it boils down to is analyzing your own WWS and seeing what heals you lean on the most. For me, my top 3 heals are almost always POH/COH/POM. On some hard modes (XT/IC) Renew actually can be a useful tool (up to 16-19% of my effective healing even) but I don't quite lean on it enough to dump more points in talents. As such, I tailor my spec toward maximum throughput on my AOE heals. The number of times I cast Greater Heal on a raid night can probably be expressed as a single digit number. As such, it simply doesn't make sense to invest in talents that enhance its effectiveness.
[e] By the way, I find B&S incredibly useful just for myself on Freya, when moving from mushroom to mushroom. It's great to drop on anyone who gets Nature's Fury too. Otherwise, I let Mhedic do all the shielding on that fight.
Wreath basically doesn't believe (rightly so) in using PWS as Holy. Accordingly, I can measure his total PWS casts for a night in single digits, and it frees me up to literally spam them on fights like Freya. There's never a WS effect that didn't come from me, and there's no B&S.
I agree that it might be useful, but I'd rather do a 7k+ PWS + PoM on a Nature's Fury person than speed their path slightly. Good reaction time is far more important than a little speed, since the aura is really quite small.
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
I have read through this thread now, and I have been unable to find an answer to my question among the two great debates (eh vs. br and renew vs. fh).
I've been able to swing what I thought was pretty high hps in ulduar so far (my guild is working on thorim in 25 man) with my approach of balancing haste and crit. However I have been talking with a priest of a top guild on the server, and he has decided to swear off haste (The World of Warcraft Armory). I questioned this of course, being a frequent troll on these forums; however there is some evidence to support the claim that his approach is superior to mine.
With hasted pohs and many of our bread and butter spells being instant cast (sol fh, renew, coh, prom), why do we necessarily need to stack haste instead of just adding more crit?
I tend to be long winded so I will post the WWS reports and give a brief overview:
Let's look at Kologarn for example. My HPS according to WWS is ~6300, while the other priest's is ~7100. I don't understand how he can put up these sorts of numbers without any haste on his gear. He outdid my hps in a similar manner on deconstructor and ignis. I know judging healing based purely on meters/hps is stupid, but I'm asking (admittedly in a roundabout way, sorry moderators) if my investment in haste has been worth it when I am performing at a similar, arguably inferior level to a priest who does not use haste AT ALL. Or am I missing something in the WWS that points to me being incompetent; am I under-performing for my gear level due to bad spell selection, play style, etc?
Edit: I know there is a rule against "hand-holding". While personal advice would be helpful, the main goal of my post is to question the utility of haste in general. In Nid's OP he does not, in my opinion give a really strong rationale as to why we should gear up to 12% haste or so. I apologize if I am in violation of the forum rules by posting this.
WWS will never show that the 1.15 fheal you have with 700+ haste raidbuffed was quick enough that it saved someone from certain death, while a 1.3+ fheal might have been too slow.
I have read through this thread now, and I have been unable to find an answer to my question among the two great debates (eh vs. br and renew vs. fh).
...
Let's look at Kologarn for example. My HPS according to WWS is ~6300, while the other priest's is ~7100. I don't understand how he can put up these sorts of numbers without any haste on his gear. He outdid my hps in a similar manner on deconstructor and ignis. I know judging healing based purely on meters/hps is stupid, but I'm asking (admittedly in a roundabout way, sorry moderators) if my investment in haste has been worth it when I am performing at a similar, arguably inferior level to a priest who does not use haste AT ALL. Or am I missing something in the WWS that points to me being incompetent; am I under-performing for my gear level due to bad spell selection, play style, etc?
Edit: I know there is a rule against "hand-holding". While personal advice would be helpful, the main goal of my post is to question the utility of haste in general. In Nid's OP he does not, in my opinion give a really strong rationale as to why we should gear up to 12% haste or so. I apologize if I am in violation of the forum rules by posting this.
Your first question is easily answered: there is no definitive answer. Right now, all people have are opinions - albeit frequently ones backed up by limited amouns of data. My personal view is that the consensus is trending towards BR/Renew. But the point of a consensus is to get a broad array of people who have looked at the data and understand the class to agree, not to blindly follow what one random guy on an Internet forum says.
In terms of haste, you're venturing on what I consider very dangerous ground. My personal opinion is leaning towards the the idea that haste is effectively worthless for a Priest - a personal opinion that is far outside the consensus. So keep in mind that everything I'm saying from this point on is food for thought, not a recommendation on how people should gear.
The issue is that haste isn't actually a throughput stat for Holy Priests (or, for that matter, for Discipline Priests). If you heal a raid with 0% haste and 50% haste, you'll probably have the exact same hps over the course of the raid. The problem is that all the time you gain when you're spam-casting is lost when you inevitably take a break in healing due to lack of available damage. Those inevitable breaks come up quite often, and pretty much entirely eliminate any long-term throughput benefit you might receive from haste.
So haste is really only useful in terms of burst throughput and reaction speed. Considering that almost all of what a Holy Priest casts is either instant cast or simply restoring health rather than clutch 'emergency' heals, reaction speed is really only in terms of GCD remaining from last spell. In terms of burst throughput, Holy Priests are limited by cooldowns (ProM, CoH), effective cooldowns (Surge of Light, Serendipity, Renew) and spells that are simply too large to require throughput increases from haste (Prayer of Healing, Holy Nova).
Now look at critical. One of the hidden aspects of critical is that, for a healer, the smaller your spells, the better critical becomes. A critical on a 20k heal is probably pointless. A critical on a 2k heal will likely hit for full. And Priests cast almost exclusively small spells. Flash Heal is actually the biggest heal (in single target healing terms) Holy Priests routinely cast. So Holy Priests get an abnormally high return on critical for a healer (which is still abnormally low compared to dps).
Look back at the changing opinion on Test of Faith. In 3.0, the consensus was to skip it. After examining the logs, we're close to a consensus that it's a mandatory talent that's even more potent than Spiritual Healing. And if we're getting Test of Faith enough to prioritize it this highly, we're also getting full effect from criticals any time ToF is active.
Critical also increases longevity via Surge of Light and Holy Concentration. So the crit-heavy Priest can also cast more spells during the raid.
But what really makes me wonder about the issue is that no one has yet been able to come up with any argument for the ~20 haste concept other than "it feels right". While such feelings are useful in pointing us towards where we need to analyze the game, when you've got a lot of very bright people whose gaze is focused on a particular issue and they can't come up with even a sketchy reasoning for a belief, there's a good chance that the belief is more akin to a belief in Santa Claus than a belief in the Laws of Thermodynamics.
In terms of haste, you're venturing on what I consider very dangerous ground. My personal opinion is leaning towards the the idea that haste is effectively worthless for a Priest - a personal opinion that is far outside the consensus. So keep in mind that everything I'm saying from this point on is food for thought, not a recommendation on how people should gear....
Haste makes my heals land sooner, thus saving people/ topping people up quicker. I fail to see how that is worthless. Also, I have yet to see a hardmode where I can 'inevitably take a break in healing due to lack of available damage.'
Oh and HPS is a completely irrelevant stat that says very little about a healer.
and spells that are simply too large to require throughput increases from haste (Prayer of Healing, Holy Nova).
In the light of Ulduar fights like Ignis, XT, Freya, Hodir, Council, Mimiron, including, but not limited to hard modes, could you please elaborate on why Prayer of Healing is a spell that is too large to require throughput increases?
Originally Posted by Pewsey
Many of our snakes are 3m+ in size. They'll just take the lawnmower off you and beat the shit out of you with it to make you tender, then bite you and eat you.
Before I begin, I'd like to say that I'm in a behind-the-curve 10hr/week guild (on Yogg P3), so I haven't done hard modes yet, however in my limited experience I also find haste entirely underwhelming for holy.
Originally Posted by Ayreon
Haste makes my heals land sooner, thus saving people/ topping people up quicker. I fail to see how that is worthless.
You're only landing heals sooner if you're casting non-instant speed heals, or on the second heal immediately following a GCD. Perhaps this is more playstyle/hard mode dependant, but I cast almost exclusively instant speed spells and triple-serendipity PoHs (occasional flash/binding to get serendipity up if I think I'm going to need it soon). In this case, haste does nothing to increase the speed at which people are healed reactively, and only about throughput in terms of cramming more GCDs into a fight.
Even in hard modes, does spamming glyphed holy nova not produce enough hps without an extra 10% haste? (And this is completely discounting the extra hps you get from the extra crits you'd be getting.)
Originally Posted by Ayreon
Also, I have yet to see a hardmode where I can 'inevitably take a break in healing due to lack of available damage.'
If you can't take breaks due to massive incoming damage, doesn't that mean that regen becomes, on the margin, much more beneficial than throughput? Crit is a hybrid regen/throughput stat, so I would have thought that in this case, crit becomes more valuable than haste.
Originally Posted by Hegen
In the light of Ulduar fights like Ignis, XT, Freya, Hodir, Council, Mimiron, including, but not limited to hard modes, could you please elaborate on why Prayer of Healing is a spell that is too large to require throughput increases?
My understanding for the hard modes of those fights is that non-serendipity PoH is too slow regardless. Triple-serendipity PoH is already fast enough that the marginal benefit from stacking haste is very low. Since glyphed Holy Nova can be spammed in peak damage situations, my understanding is PoH should only be cast once in each burst-damage-cycle.
I try for stam/int/spirit/spell/crit, and only take stam/int/spirit/spell/haste if nobody else wants it.
(Sorry for posting about content I haven't attempted yet, however I am also in the camp that "haste is worthless", which I believe is relevant at all content levels, unless I misunderstand current hard modes.)
In Team Ice, Cios runs with Body and Soul and makes exceptional use out of it. As for me, I'm more than happy being the "odd Priest out" who doesn't use it save for our first kill of One Light. Instead, to compliment Cios' spec, I use Lightwell. While I do believe that it takes some time (i.e. a bit of "training" from your raid members to utilize it properly) to ensure that Lightwell is useful to your raid, with proper positioning (which can be quite the annoying endeavor!) I've seen some excellent results -- particularly on Heartbreaker and Firefighter. It does require a certain amount of patience in regards to the learning process from both parties, though. If anyone else has found it to be an excellent tool in hard-modes, I'd love to compare reports.
Definitely need to see statistics. Your personal experiences would inevitably suffer from a strong confirmation bias.
I tested this a bit. I was solo, with 100% hp and I cast spells until I went below 500 mana (21 000 manapool), after which I used the Crazy Alchemists Potion. I did not have the alchemist trinket equipped.
I used the potion 10 times. Yes, that's a very low sample size, but I don't have 100 000 potions or something like that to spare. Out of 10 times I got
3xRunic Mana pot
1xSuper mana pot (!)
3xWild Magic
2xNothing (or HP pot, not entirely sure)
1xPotion of Speed
It's too random to make any kind of reliable math out of that. But I guess if you ever are low hp & low mana, the bonus proc of crazy alchemist is very likely to be a welcome addition. However that doesn't double the bonus of alchemist trinket.
Look back at the changing opinion on Test of Faith. In 3.0, the consensus was to skip it. After examining the logs, we're close to a consensus that it's a mandatory talent that's even more potent than Spiritual Healing. And if we're getting Test of Faith enough to prioritize it this highly, we're also getting full effect from criticals any time ToF is active.
Wasn't this due to ToF having the increased critical component removed in favor of a more reliable % multiplier? While your correct that having ToF active increases the potential benefit of criticals. I don't believe that's the reason anyone is taking the talent.
Blindsight51 haste reduces your GCD, even for spamming instants like Holynava, it's a Hps increase. Your point about Serendipity makes little sense either. I can cast PoH with 0 haste and have it land sooner than you can stack Seren x3 and cast yours. While typically you can prep the stacks for when they are needed, any haste you have still makes the cast faster. Not to mention that often when you need to cast 1 PoH, you you need cast more than 1. Thus you can't afford to restack Serendipty again before making a followup cast.
Regarding crit in relation to regen, in the cases where your dealing with high raid damage, ProM/CoH/PoH/Holynova do not proc Holy Concentration.
Before I begin, I'd like to say that I'm in a behind-the-curve 10hr/week guild (on Yogg P3), so I haven't done hard modes yet, however in my limited experience I also find haste entirely underwhelming for holy.
Short version is, once you start serious work on most the hard modes, you'll find yourself utilizing almost every single GCD. Haste is invaluable here. Also, I cast non-Serendpity PoH all the time, the 2 most notable situations in hard modes are Tantrum at XT, and Ground Tremor at Freya. Obviously my first PoH is with a 3 stack of Serendipity, but I'm almost always following that up with another one.
Short version is, once you start serious work on most the hard modes, you'll find yourself utilizing almost every single GCD. Haste is invaluable here. Also, I cast non-Serendpity PoH all the time, the 2 most notable situations in hard modes are Tantrum at XT, and Ground Tremor at Freya. Obviously my first PoH is with a 3 stack of Serendipity, but I'm almost always following that up with another one.
I agree with Snowy.
On hardmodes (on some more than others), haste is very, very valuable. Especially if you run low healer amounts thanks to trouble with enrage timers (both soft and hard), like us. XT Tantrum and 3-Elder Freya Ground Tremor are good examples, but I would like to add Iron Council (hardmode) to that. We did Iron Council (hardmode) last thursday with 5 healers (not our 1st kill). With 2 healers dedicated to tank healing, that left 3 healers to deal with all raid damage thrown around, with 1 healer solo healing 2 groups of people. By the end I was very glad I chose a troll: the +30% casting speed is a saviour for the last 10 seconds of the fight.
I'm not saying you should stack haste, I'm saying ignoring haste is a mistake.
06/11/09, 1:30 AM
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