Kilborne

"Our POH potential thoughput was often unnecessary (let-s say mimiron p2 apart) and pretty much overhealed."

The throughput might be unnecessary, but I rarely do a ton of overhealing with PoH. There are just too many predictable raid wide damage points in which a PoH can heal 5 targets with very little chance of overheal.
Hasted PoHs are the only reason that I keep serendipity. Does anyone think this nerf will be severe enough to drop that for mental agility or some other talent?

 

Temur

Dropping Serendipity because of this nerf seems to me to be a case of shooting yourself in the head to cure a headache.

The nerf will definately have an impact on our output on some fights, and will most likely force raid leaders to set up strats where groups are kept together in Holy Nova range for fights that have lots of raid damage. What the nerf doesn't do, is make PoH a bad spell. Even with the nerf PoH will remain one of our most effective cross party raid heals available to us and the talents used to buff it (ie: Serendipity) remain important.

What is more likely to happen with the nerf, is that we are more likely to be a lot more selective of when we cast it and we are less likely to use it one after another. To me I would think that this would make serendipity even more important than it was before, since we are more likely to stack it up again before the next PoH is cast.

To summarize: PoH post nerf will most likely cease to be our "go to spell", but it will remain a very important part of our toolbox.

 

eliott

assuming a predictable 10k incoming damage (ignis,kologarn) it is pretty much obvious that our first POH will heal fully or almost, and usually it's even a more effective spell as you will have most likely at least 2 serendipity buffs, but pretty often i see my priests mates and myself as well casting a second one on a second group; This is a long cast, and i see usually that a good part of the healing was made by shamans already, and my POH ends up healing for 3-4k, way under it's potential (given roughtly that every uld25 geared priest is running at 3k+sp)... in this way i meant that our healing potential was in some way unnecessary.
In 10 men the nerf seems to be worse, as if probably you are the only raid healer or almost, but as far as i could see damage in is hardly over 5-6k in raid, which should be healable without any major issue even with 28% nerfed POH.
Of course the nerf will affect our playstyle once again, but that's not a major issue, as priests are going still to have a huge thoughput, compared with other classes. Situations at iron council hard with 2 priests with 60% healing done running with 6 healers were to be honest insustinable for other healing classes (shamans mostly).

 

grghrkn

If the damage is predictable, Serendipity is a very weak talent since you can always start casting your Prayer of Healing earlier. Against predictable damage, Serendipity essentially becomes a flat throughput bonus - and a terrible one, at that - even in PoH-intensive fights, less than 10% of your casting time will be dedicated to Prayer of Healing so casting it 36% faster ends up buffing your overall throughput less than Blessed Resilience would. Serendipity can only be construed as a solid talent in terms of reactive healing against unpredictable damage, where the speed may have deleterious consequences.

In any case, it might be worth examining how our various spells stack up with some sample stats and the 3.2 nerf. With full spec (all applicable talents for each spell possible in a 14/x/0 build, no glyphs except where otherwise noted) and 3k/30%:
Prayer of Mending (per target) = 3370 hps @ 10.91 hpm
Glyph'd Holy Nova (per target) = 2779 hps @ 5.4 hpm
Circle of Healing (per target) = 2224 hps @ 4.11 hpm
Prayer of Healing (per target) = 1824 hps @ 3.69 hpm (2849 hps w/triple stack Serendipity)
Flash Heal = 4393 hps @ 9.48 hpm
Renew = 7776 hps @ 17.76 hpm

Two concepts immediately spring to mind:
1. Glyph'd Holy Nova is significantly better than Prayer of Healing if you have to heal your own group. This actually encourages a more Priest-heavy raid, since you should never need to cast Prayer of Healing on another Priest's group (if all have Glyph'd Holy Nova). With 3 Priests, this essentially means your melee groups are the only ones who would possibly need Prayer of Healing. And with 3 Priests, you've got a CoH every 2 seconds. To some extent, the PoH nerf is a nerf on Paladins/Shaman since it makes Holy Priests more 'stackable'.

2. Rolling Renew is awfully close in efficiency to simply casting Prayer of Healing unless you need the burst throughput - you need 4.82 targets on efficiency and 4.26 on throughput before non-Glyph'd Prayer of Healing beats Renew. While managing to get the initial ER hit and all subsequent ticks to hit fully is a bit of a trick, it does showcase that Prayer of Healing has alternatives (Druids heal this way all the time, although Rejuv has some substantial advantages over Renew). Over on the Discipline side, rolling PW:S pretty much trumps 3.2 PoH (although Weakened Soul causes problems).

However, neither of these schemes (rolling Renew/PW:S) has all that effective a 'backup' to it. If your single cast heals can't cover the task, you can't replicate the feat again.

 

everwind111

I haven't noticed many posts about the Greatness card trinkets in this thread.
I currently use [Darkmoon Card: Greatness], but considered changing it to [Darkmoon Card: Greatness]. With this swap my spirit would drop below 1000 unbuffed. Would it be worth swapping to the +90int version or should i just wait til a [Spark of Hope]drops(been running ulduar10 every week since it came out and still hasn't dropped yet) and pair it up with [Sif's Remembrance]? or pair [Spark of Hope] with [Darkmoon Card: Greatness] for pure regen purposes? or would pairing one of the above trinkets with [Soul of the Dead] be better?

I do a lot of healing(holy) and generally sit at around 30-35% OH for every raid. I gem for regen, but because we lack a feral druid, I do not get any innervates. I struggle with mana on hard mode fights. Would Int still be a superior regen stat even with the replenishment nerf?

p.s) i apologize if this is posted in the wrong thread. I have been reading these forums for 2 years but this is my first time actually posting.

 

Temur

I have to say I disagree with the way you characterize Serendipity here and its effectiveness.

The way I see it, there are two different situations where PoH would be used to the highest benefit (assuming Holy Nova is not able to be used due to set-up or cross group healing)

Incoming predictable damage to raid as a whole:

• In this situation you seem to feel that because you are queueing your spell to land the moment the damage hits, the cast time is irrelevant. I would argue this is far from the case. The less time you have to spend casting the more time you have to be doing some other action. This could anything from last minute movement, to reapplying a Pom, or one of my favorite things to do before predictible damage...spamming renews on a party that will not be the target of my first PoH. Having Serendipity is a huge plus for that. Quite simply there is not a second in any boss fight that I am not actively doing something. Moving to a better position, casting a heal, casting a HoT, shielding someone, or wanding the boss for a little extra dps/mana regen. So if three talent points can buy that extra time, sign me up. The true strength of a priest is in the versitiliy of spells at our disposal.
  
  All this and it's not even the main reason to have it. The main reason is quite simply:

Unpredictable damage to multiple people in one party:

• This is where serendipity shines the most. Quite simply, the faster the heal the better the heal. There was a post early that I loved, it tried to weight mathimatically the significance of an immediate heal versus a delayed one. Even without math, you should be able to see the intrinsic value of how fast a heal lands. Every second trimmed from the cast timer is smaller chances of RNG death.

One other thing of note, in your example you use Blessed Resiliance as the tradeoff for Serendipity which confuses me a little. I'm pretty sure that most BR builds also have Serendipity, with the most likely place to put the points from Serendipity if you dropped them, is into EH. Personally I see EH as a waste of talent points as is. But that is just my opinion based on my play style.

 

grghrkn

The question isn't whether or not you save time. Of course you do. Rather, we need to ask how much time do we save.

If you check your logs, what you'll probably discover is that on a fight like Kologarn, you spend less than 10% of your time casting Prayer of Healing and you consume an average of ~2 Serendipity procs per cast. Given a 4 minute fight, that means your 3 points in Serendipity yielded a benefit equivalent to ~3% haste.

~3% haste is a pretty pathetic showing for 3 talent points. Which is why I mentioned that this talent is not really a throughput talent - it's virtue is entirely wrapped up in what it does for reaction speed.

 

Lambi

You can't calculate it that way since it's the haste at that particular time that's relevant not the average haste you gain with it. That's like saying guardian spirit only gives you 4% more healing so it's shit.

SNAKE!

 

grghrkn

Sigh.

From my original post on the subject:
From my second post clarifying what I was saying:
Does anyone else want to reply to my posts without bothering to read them?

 

Temur

I think you are missing the point with what we are saying on the issue of Serendipity.

The problem with the figures you are using to try to devalue it is this statement:

Why would you ever look at the value of serendipity over the duration of an entire fight, rather than what it is designed for? It is the healer equivalent of "burst dps". It is designed to be able to allow a priest to up their HPS dramatically over a very short period of time, when it is needed the most. If the entire raid were being damaged to a high degree 100% of the fight, then yes it would be a piss poor talent. The thing is, that simply is not how it works. Burst...Lull...Burst...Lull is a more accurate discription, and one that serendipity is very well suited for.

Like I stated above, just because on predictable dmg you can queue a longer cast time doesn't mean there isnt more valuable things you can be doing during that time that would dramatically increase your throughput through the upcoming damage (in that reduced cast time that serendipity gives you, you could have: Refreshed PoM, Renewed someone, or Shielded Someone) All things that would be a significant increase to your throughput when you needed it most

To say that it just helps with reaction speed sells it way short.

 

KamPa

Precasting PoH making Serendipity less useful ignores one thing - interrupts. Currently, there are 2 bosses who simultaneously deal significant raid damage and lock you down for several seconds if you try to precast. Delivering that hasted PoH right after the damage hits is clearly superior - by the time you'd finish your normal cast, you'll be halfway through another PoH, or having used CoH for even more emergency healing. One of the things that Haste does and which cannot simply be solved with precasting - or any other stat, actually.
Now, it might only be 2 bosses, but that's just those where the difference is quite obvious.

 

Awina

Serendipity clearly has it's value - nobody is saying it is worthless.

The issue gets to be whether it is worth more than the other options around that Tier, or higher in Disc (Mental Agility, etc).

Whenever PoH is REALLY needed, I am typically casting it twice, so Serendipity only affects 1/2 of my PoH spells, and since I cast almost zero GH's as a Raid Healer it affects 0 of them. That makes it a watered down talent for my tastes, and so I've gone down the Empowered Renew and Blessed Resilience path and foresaken all GH talents, including Serendipity, for now.

With Dual Spec I'm sure I will add a spec back into my set with Serendipity as we get to certain hard modes, but it certainly isn't required in any non-hard modes, at least in my book.

I suppose a true advocate of Serendipity would argue that it affects all spells that are chained together after significant AOE, since every spell in the sequence is arguably that much farther ahead While that is somewhat true, the pre-casting argument undermines it in some cases (not all).

 

• constantius

The problem with your argument is that *no-one* takes Serendipity to speed up their GHs. It's entirely a PoH-based spell, and as such, there's really nothing better you can take for throughput. It certainly won't be beaten by 3% extra healing, in terms of (as said above) burst-on-target when needed. This is especially true if you follow the HN->CoH->SoL->FH->PoH rotation, as you only cast a PoH when it will be hasted, as a supplement to your party focused spells.

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

 

l337n00b

Who, exactly, would say that 1 talent point for 4% more healing is shit? Averaging things out might not give a proper indication of how much benefit you really gain from a talent, but your example really serves to show how averaging things out can really give a baseline to compare against. If GS is 4% more healing for one talent point, then we pretty much know it is good. If a talent is 1% haste for 1 talent point, then how helpful that haste is becomes a real question, because if it isn't noticably more useful than it would be when averaged out it is a bad talent.

Personally I have trouble seeing how it is much better than the averaged out value. When you time a PoH to land just after a big AoE the haste is pretty much pointless. Yes, you might gain a little bit of time (upwards of three quarters of a second) to be doing something else, but I see two scenarios where that doesn't help: 1) you need to be spamming heals ahead of time to keep up with the massive damage, in which there might be a real cost to using Flash Heal to do so rather than using other AoE heals and 2) as someone said, you never do nothing, but if your net benefit from the talent is .75 seconds of wanding five or six times in the fight, you should take a different talent. I'm not saying these are the only ways it can play out, maybe spamming Flash Heal is the perfect thing for your to be doing right up to the moment when you need to drop that PoH.

For unpredictable damage, it's not always the case the PoH is a great spell anyway. When people get gripped or frozen in place just before an icicle is going to land on Hodir, or hit by a chain lightning, they are not necessarily in the same group. There are also unpredictable damage sources where PoH does work well.

The place I see Serendipity really shining is for Ground Tremor and Flame Jets. When a big AoE burst is coming in that is *also* an interrupt, it's great to have your first AoE heal hasted. They used that mechanic twice in 14 Ulduar bosses, I don't think there is any reason to expect it will appear more often than that. But for Ground Tremor, the time it is most dangerous is the time you can least afford to sit on a serendpity stack to wait for it. When detonating lashers are taking people's health down in chunks, I'm more likely to be chaining out some PoH's rather than casting FH in between to stack Serendipity.

In the situations that come to mind where Serendipity is really great, it seems like playing discipline, pre-shielding and casting a BT-hasted PoH is better.

An idiot is someone who would rather be treated like an idiot than called an idiot

 

Lambi

So you would be comfortable with "51 point talent, Guardian Spirit - Increases your healing done by 4%"? I thought not.

I'm saying you can't average out healing talents as you average out DPS talents because they're scenario based. It doesn't matter that the average gain of serendipity is so low when it's actually the talent that saves your raid from time to time. Ask yourselves this: What actually causes deaths to your raid? Burst damage or slow damage? What is the antidote? Burst healing or slow healing?

I believe having a talent which lets you plan ahead for bursts or keeping the buff just in case and which also has great synergy with SoL is a great asset to my toolbox. Ofcourse healing is very individual and for you guys it might just be a few % increase over a whole fight, but I'm the guy preventing the deaths, not the raid stabilizer.

SNAKE!

 

Thedankson

You're trying to oversimplify things to prove your point. Empowered Healing also affects Gheal but you decided to leave that out, which I agree with. The problem is that you list Serendipity affecting Gheal, which makes it "watered down". Regardless of what a tooltip says, the only way to judge and evaluate talents is going by how they affect your raids. Serendipity is a PoH talent and EH is a FHeal talent. Gheal should be left out of the equation. If anything it gives a *very* slight edge to Serendipity as having a hasted emergency Gheal > having a more powerful GHeal.

I don't see myself giving up Serendipity after the PoH nerf unless they change the boss fights. It's a talent that fits perfectly with a majority of the boss fights in Ulduar. It's more utility than straight out throughput, similar to B&S or Tuskar's.

 

l337n00b

Obviously everyone would be a little disappointed if their 51 point talent was just a straight up boring 4% increase in either damage or healing, but you'd have to be insane to not think that was worth the talent point (the fact that the 21 point talent in another tree may be significantly overpowered and worth more than 4% is another matter). My point is that if it averages out to 4% then clearly it is worth a point. If it averages out to .1% then it needs to be rather extraordinary to justify that that .1% comes at precisely the time it is needed (nature's swiftness falls into this category, if Serendipity were an on-demand instant PoH every two minutes it would average to less and I'd like it more).

My problem with Serendipity is that in order to have the Serendipity stack available when I want it, I need to not cast PoH in the mean time. It seems like a lot of waiting around to save a relatively small difference for the moment that might never come. Or, if you don't save it, then it really will end up resembling the average, which is lackluster. That's what happened to me when I was playing holy (I haven't since our first two weeks of Ulduar) I played completely ignoring the fact that I had Serendipity and never even particularly noticed whether it was stacked or not. It certainly hasted many of my PoHs, but it did so randomly with even distribution throughout the fights.

In all likelihood you have more experience with 25-man hard modes than I do, so it could be that I have not experienced the fights where it is really useful.

An idiot is someone who would rather be treated like an idiot than called an idiot

 

grghrkn

This is key. Every model of performance must necessarily be applied against actual raid scenarios. But we shouldn't confuse our individual, anecdotal perceptions of a raid with hard data. If evidence for the value of any given talent exists, we should be able to formulate a model and detect in our logs. At the very least, we should be able to compare performances between those using two different models to move towards an answer.

But we need to formulate a model not of Serendipity's weakness, but of it's strength. And then we need to come up with hard data that demonstrates the validity of this model. We're not debating which Jonas Brother is the cutest. We're discussing the value of a specific optimization to a purely mathematical system. We should be able to come up with a model that demonstrates the value of Serendipity and point to data that validates this model rather than merely relying on authoritative pronouncements.

 

BobTurkey

Holy

• Head - Crown of Luminescence
• Neck - Sapphire Amulet of Renewal
• Shoulders - Amice of Inconceivable Horror
• Back - Sunglimmer Cloak
• Chest - Conqueror’s Robe of Sanctification
• Wrist - Grasps of Reason
• Hands - Handwraps of the Vigilant
• Wait - Cord of the White Dawn
• Legs - Leggings of Profound Darkness
• Feet - Boots of Fiery Resolution
• Finger - Conductive Seal and Starshine Circle
• Weapon - Staff of Endless Winter (Constellus + Iron Mender are a close second)
• Wand - Scepter of Creation
• Trinkets - Pandora’s Plea and either Spark of Hope or Illustration of the Dragon Soul depending if you want mana regen or throughput

Discipline

• Head - Conqueror's Cowl of Sanctification narrowly beats Crown of Luminescence as it is the best option for the fourth piece of the tier 8 set bonus
• Neck - Charm of Meticulous Timing
• Shoulders - Conqueror’s Shoulderpads of Sanctification
• Back - Drape of the Sullen Goddess
• Chest - Conqueror’s Robe of Sanctification
• Wrist - Grasps of Reason
• Hands - Handwraps of the Vigilant
• Wait - Cord of the White Dawn
• Legs - Conqueror’s Leggings of Sanctification
• Feet - Boots of Fiery Resolution
• Finger - Conductive Seal and Starshine Circle
• Weapon - Staff of Endless Winter (Constellus + Iron Mender are a close second)
• Wand - Scepter of Creation
• Trinkets - Pandora’s Plea and either Meteorite Crystal or Illustration of the Dragon Soul depending if you want mana regen or throughput

Pretty similar for both Discipline and Holy. The 4 piece T8 bonus is very valuable for Discipline.

 

Glasswizard

Is "Heroic: All Is Well That Ends Well" repeatable that you have both Sunglimmer Cloak and Starshine Circle in your holy template? Did you forget http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/...ersbinding.jpg (Algalon drop)? Even as holy priest I'd prefer Conqueror’s Leggings of Sanctification to Leggings of Profound Darkness because of the first setbonus.

 

tedv

Forgive me for the criticism, but how exactly do you expect someone to take both [Starshine Circle] and [Sunglimmer Cloak] for the holy BiS list when they are alternate rewards from the same quest?

On the subject of trinkets, [Eye of the Broodmother] is just hands down better than [Illustration of the Dragon Soul]. The stack is easier to rebuild and it provides more total throughput. [Spark of Hope] beats [Pandora's Plea] by a sizable margin, even for discipline. 100 spirit isn't too much worse than 108 int, and the 42 mana cost reduction helps far more than a random proc that increases your spell power at some moment when you may or may not need additional throughput.

If you are including item level 239 hard mode loot on the list, then the best in slot weapon has to be [Val'anyr, Hammer of Ancient Kings]. I suppose a gear list is nice, but it's good to hear justification. Besides, stating that cloth pieces dropping from hard modes are best-in-slot isn't particularly ground shaking, and I suspect that most priests in guilds that are farming hard modes already know what items are best. A discussion between two alternatives at the same item level is the type of thing that generates value.

So all that said, can you explain what criteria you used to decide "best" and why it's a good heuristic to use?

 

• constantius

If you want an intellect regen trinket, [Meteorite Crystal] is hands-down better than [Pandora's Plea]. [Spark of Hope] is more regen than either of them, though. Personally, I'm aiming for Spark of Hope for Holy, and Meteorite Crystal for Disc, since the spirit->spellpower conversion makes Spark of Hope less valuable when I don't have SG.

[e] Actually, I would wear Amice. Interesting choice; I had originally discounted it. The net gain (assuming you socket +19 spell, +16 int) is basically 7 spirit, 5 spellpower over T8, but that is a gain. Of course, you lose stamina, which for most hard-modes is actually a consideration.

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

 

l337n00b

I love to make mathematical models, but I think for a talent like serendipity, anecdotal evidence and thoughtful arguements constructed out of scenarios we have a common experience of make more sense.

People talk about preventing death as being the goal of healing, but how can we tell if Serendipity (or any other talent) prevented a death? We could parse the whole log given people's known max health and figure out exactly whether the heal landed in time to get ahead of lethal damage to anyone. But if it was healing for less, or if it was slower, maybe we would have behaved differently at a different time. Maybe the person we were healing was about to hit a health stone and decided they didn't have to. Maybe we *should* have hit a different heal at a different time but we just weren't good enough to know we had to do it.

How much can we expect from our talent points? If Serendipity is doing it's job, then it is probably going to save your raid from a wipe with an incredibly low frequency. I don't say that to complain about Serendipity, that's just what it's function is. Nature's Swiftness saves raids from wipes very rarely, but everyone agrees they should take it. What if you were bugged only had 68 talent points (and for some reason people brought you anyway). Do you think that suddenly the raid would be wiping all the time to fights it can normally handle? A raid probably brings 5 to 6 healers to any given fight, it is hard to believe that losing 3 of the 71 talent points from one of those healers would make much more than a 1% difference to the chance of a wipe? (If we carefully selected the most relevant and impactful talents it might, but Serendipity is a middle-of-the-pack talent, one that few people would cut but not GS, Soul Warding or Penance)

If doing something changes your chance of wiping by 1% then to get "hard data" of any statistical relevance, you would have to track hundreds of boss attempts both with and without the talent to see if it made a difference. And how would you account for the facts of different raid compositions and gear levels? What if one style ultimately outperforms the other with significantly more practice, but underforms until the first style has plateaued? What if one way of spending talents would make the whole raid better off if only they learned to use it properly but generally is worse because people don't? What if one style is skewed by the fact that it is superior in the general case but unviable for one fight?

There are many problems in this world that are too complicated to answer by making a model, plugging in the data and seeing what comes out. Brains, however, are great problem solving engines that often have to justify (after the fact with anecdotal arguments) conclusions that have been drawn from very complicated processes that are beyond the grasp of the person with the brain. And, yes, it's the same way we would decide which Jonas Brother is the cutest, but brains are the best thing we have to tackle problems of this kind of complexity, and we are going to have to live with that.

An idiot is someone who would rather be treated like an idiot than called an idiot

 

Sinndir

Our proposed tier-9 set bonus' are in:

• Priest T9 Shadow 2P Bonus (Devouring Plague) (Class: Priest) -- Increases the duration of your Devouring Plague spell by 6 sec.
• Priest T9 Shadow 4P Bonus (Mind Flay) (Class: Priest) -- Increases the critical strike chance of your Mind Flay spell by 5%.
• Priest T9 Healing 2P Bonus (Prayer of Mending) (Class: Priest) -- Decreases the cooldown on your Prayer of Mending spell by 2 sec.
• Priest T9 Healing 4P Bonus (Prayer of Healing) (Class: Priest) -- Increases the critical strike chance of your Prayer of Healing spell by 5%.

Very blah to me, considering that the PoM spell could bring us to a 5 second PoM with 5 charges, that is a lot of needed bouncing.

The 4 piece is 5% less crit than our tier 8 2 piece gives... pretty lack luster.

 

Awina

Sorry, I posted that in haste and forget that people can't see my current spec, which indeed does not include Empowered Healing either. I meant Empowered Renew, and I'll edit that above - my bad.

Obviously the ultimate test is how it performs in raids - nobody is going to ignore that over theory. The talents were balanced (well, you know what I mean) around all the spells they affect and Blizz assumes a certain mix of those so that is what I mean by watered down. That doesn't, in and of itself, make them unworthy.

Either way, for me, in my current raids, I applied the same logic to both Serendipity and EH and deselected both of them. Mileage may vary for others. My % of FH has gone down as my Renews have gone up, thus watering down EH even further. /shrug