Daiketsu

Regarding your comment about Int, i can promise you that Int is more then just for e-peen. For Disc, Intellect is pretty much the main mana regen stat. Other then increasing your overall mana pool, the more Int you have, the bigger Rapture returns you will have, as well as giving you Crit. I play Disc for my guild during our raids, and up until recently I was using [Pandora's Plea] and [Talisman of Resurgence] for my trinkets which put me at almost 29k unbuffed (33k with GotW, AI, and Kings). My Rapture returns were somewhere above 900 mana each. Even though I am using double [Solace of the Fallen] now, I still think over 30k mana for a Disc tank healer is definitely reasonable so long as you do not go overboard with gemming Int (like putting [Brilliant King's Amber] in every slot like a Holy Pally).

And I agree that Disc should have the mindset that spell power as the most important stat overall since we dont have SG like Holy does. But it's easy to gem spell power (i think all ToC gear has spell power for socket bonuses now), but not so much mana regen because spirit vs pure mp5 scales for people differently at different gear levels. Now for obvious reasons, a Holy priest wouldn't have as much benefit for that kind of mana pool as a Disc priest would thanks to their stronger mana regen from Spirit. But Int for a MT healing Disc priest is our most useful means for mana regen, and it shouldn't be looked at as strange if such a healer had over a 30k mana pool.

And regarding your second comment, I would love for Blizz to put in a talent such as that. But we get Rapture while Resto Shamans and Holy Pallys who get spell power from Intellect do not have anything of the sort. So we do have a unique use for our Intellect in a way, which im sure would be Blizzard's excuse for why Disc doesn't get a spell power scaling talent.

 

Dtekkar

Priests have a unique ability to convert mana into heals well before damage is even on the raid. pre-shielding, renew spam before the aoe, mending 25s before the tank hit, and any spare mana in the heat of the moment can become an additional prayer of healing or binding or even holy nova on the move. With regen gear you You have the luxury to, for instance, PW:shield ranged VIPs in the downtime before a portal on Lord Jaraxxus instead of just the tanks and melee. It has saved my raid a few times from a ranged chain lightning+suplex gib combo. This isn't the best example, but it happened to me last night so at least it isn't hypothetical

I have found with my priest gearing for regen helps me win the mental game. Being able to spam heal a little and not worry about the wasted shield here or there is huge for your confidence. If my mana is looking tight i hesitate more. Maybe it is just a bad habit, but when I know mana isn't an issue I can focus on feeling the rhythm of the GCD swinging while I chaincast. Try healing Algalon with any second guessing at all

Lastly mana management is the first thing forgotten when the whole raid is exploding. It is pretty easy to make a stupid (mana pacing)mistake when someone else in the raid makes a stupid mistake. Regen really helps mitigate this before it compounds into a wipe at a low%. People say the whole raid goes critical less often with the throughput gearing. It makes sense on paper. But is it not my experience.

t9 level gear has a ton of regen built in anyway, as you approach best in slot a pair of solaces and the yellow gems you get should more than cover it. Until then, stay spammy my friends

 

pocketmage

Flip back a page or two in this thread. Moinsdetrois stated he had an unbuffed mana pool of 34k, which most certainly is overkill. That is what my epeen comment was in reference to and I stand by it. It truely isn't necessary for Disc at that point to gem/trinket for that much Int anymore. At ToCH10/25 levels of tank dmg, it's much more important to push out more HPS as mana is for the most part a moot issue. As was said by someone else, if you aren't running out of mana, that extra Int isn't doing much. If you want more crit, gem for it.

Mana pools are getting bigger on their own with ToC gear, and it'll be too much by the time we all gear up in ToC25H gear. I've run my toon through RAWR and I had 36k mana raid buffed as HOLY. If I did it as Disc, I would have had near 40k.

Too much? I'd be inclined to think so.

And I was never a real big fan of Int trinkets as Disc. I much more prefer Eye of Broodmother for the combination SP+crit, and another SP trinket of some sort (Sifs, the ToC one if you have it, etc..). At no point from Naxx to ToC, did I feel that I was mana starved that much to need an Int trinkets as Disc. Though, I did gem for Int purely, but that stopped with the introduction of ToC gear. As has been said, if you aren't running out of mana, it's useless.



And as a side, the amount of regen a holy priest gets from Int is about that of Spi. Int gives slightly more crit, and Spi gives slightly more SP from GS, so it's a wash in my eyes which one wins. A little of everything for me.

 

Daiketsu

Didn't know you were making a past reference to another post. Agreed, a 34k unbuffed mana pool would definitely mean you are gemming full Intellect, which indeed is a bit much and not necessary with the available ToC gear. Intellect provides mana regen and a bit of throughput which is why it is an optimal idea to trinket (and not gem) for it with at least one good Int trinket.

But maybe I should have mentioned when I was using Intellect trinkets, I had gemmed pure spell power in every slot. Nobody is saying Intellect > Spell Power. And you are right when you say ToC25 have high levels of tank damage, and with the exception of Faction Champs, the other fights in ToC require me for the most part to be spamming the tanks with heals the entire duration of the encounter. And when spamming heals with the level of raid damage going out, mana is not a "moot issue," it is definitely something to consider when you are MT healing on fights that last anywhere from 4 to 7 minutes.

I have heard the saying "If you're not going oom then [insert regen stat here] is useless" before, and imo that is a very generalized statement which does not hold true for every person during every encounter. I find it hard to use your point about being in full ToGC 25 gear as a benchmark for what I should and should not itemize myself for. Imo I can't just throw up RAWR to find a certain stats importance to me because my own gear, as well as my guild's are always improving, along with encounters changing based on different strats and raid comps.

This all being said, yours and my gear are very comparable, so I'm sure we are seeing close to the same results. Because as you said in an earlier post, "It's not like we have a lot of gear options."

 

Carnathagia

There is a lot of discussion about the value of Intellect, and the anecdotal intellect 'soft-cap', at which point you gain no additional value from intellect. Using the model of Time To Live from the Tanking Spreadsheet computations, I threw this together in an attempt to compute Time to Heal.

From intellect, you determine your total mana pool, total static mana available for use during a fight (I assumed 1 shadowfiend without heroism, 1 mana tide totem, and 1 mana potion) your total regenerated mana (from gear, replenishment, and rapture returns), and then find your time to heal based on a pre-determined mana per second usage (I chose 300 mana/sec based on some spam heavy Twin Valkyr Log analysis). Your intellect soft-cap would be the amount of intellect which provides a fight length longer than you will encounter.

Here is a quick glance at my preliminary findings:

Intellect vs. Fight Length (seconds)

1000 = 241.3766614

1100 = 274.029393

1200 = 310.9803198

1300 = 353.2240123

1400 = 402.079611

1500 = 459.336074

1600 = 527.4828767

1700 = 610.0912493

1800 = 712.474585

1900 = 842.8997288

2000 = 1014.971867

To do: I didn't find the algebraic formula for determining the maximum fight length based on total mana, but Excel's Goal Seek function worked well to set the difference between available mana per fight and mana used per fight to 0 by varying the fight length. If you can determine that function, feel free. Also, values for mana used per second are varying, so feedback there is appreciated. I would attach the spreadsheet I used, but I don't think that I am allowed.

edit: Time To Heal spreadsheet
Here is what I came up with. Just enter your Intellect, your mana spent per second, and it will tell you how long you can heal. If anyone can reverse the formula to determine the Intellect needed to heal an encounter of a set fight length, feel free. Thanks to TheDoctor for math help.

edit 2: Time to Heal v2.
This is much more polished, accurate, and customizable, with many new options, features, bells, whistles, and what not.

 

optimuus

I had a discussion with another Priests about this in my guild. After some time I told him that I will use 20int gems in every piece of gear I have to prove that you just dont need such huge amounts of mana, even on heavy tankdmg encounter like in ToGC25 or Algalon for example. I got over 40k mana raidbuffed with Int only gems and got like ~2700sp.

I spammed heals on the tank like mad and never dropped below 30k mana and no cooldowns like manafiend or smth.

the next week i switched to my usual sp only gems and showed him that i still dont have any manaproblems with just a raidmanapool of ~32k mana but with about ~3400sp in raids.

the difference in healing done was quite huge . now that i got both solace of the defeated versions, mana is smth i just dont have to care about whatever i have to do. i can improve other stats when i feel i need them.

let pallys go for the all int think :P we dont need it

 

TheDoctor

Spamming heals on one target as Disc just isn't going to tax your mana pool. Especially considering that for one target PW:S is going to on average regen mana, Penance is mathematically infinitely castable, and if you fill in with PoM/FH you should be able to go for well beyond any current encounter length.

If you don't use PW:S on the raid, PoH on occassion... Then you aren't doing everything for raid survivability that you offer, and thus aren't taxing your mana to the maximum. Granted 40k mana is beyond what is necessary. Though personally I can find use for about every bit of mana I pickup, because as my mana pool grows I use BT'd PoH more often.

 

pocketmage

@Carnathagia:

While your Int vs Fight Length spreadsheet is interesting, it's a bit of an obfuscation.
It completely ignores HPS and HPM, which is at the heart of stat allocation for healing priests, imo.
How do you qualify your mana/sec?

Playstyle and situation play a huge role, and I have trouble assigning a single value to it all. I prefer RAWR's HPS burst and sustained HPS calculation for such a thing, it's a very handy tool, but I still wouldn't put too much weight into the numbers it produces either. For me at least, it's just a rough eyeball of the effect of gear/gem/enchant swaps. And in game experiences trump it.









Oh I am sure every rule has its exceptions, and you can most certainly point to various encounters for this cardinal rule. This is why I favor gemming and enchanting for throughput and fine tuning your sustainibility via trinket swaps depending on first hand experience.

Though, the ToC trinkets sort of make even this level of modification moot.



I actually miss the Vanilla days of gear options and down ranking.
Today's options blow by comparison, so I try not to think about it too much. >..>

 

Carnathagia

I don't see it as intentionally misleading, unless you are trying to use it as a gearing spreadsheet, which it definitely is not. It is a way to quantify the "this is too much int, that is not enough" discussion. See the previous few pages.

Mana/sec will change based on the incoming damage and your mana efficiency. Look at a log parse, see how many spells you cast in a given fight length, and find the number. This will show Intellect as scaling negatively with raid progression, since fight length will go down, incoming damage will go down, and healing effeciency will go up as your raid gears up within a given tier of content.

 

Caliste

T10 Bonuses are out:

•Item - Priest T10 Healer 2P Bonus - After your Pain Suppression and Guardian Spirit talents expire on your target, they grant your target 10% increased healing received for 10 sec.
•Item - Priest T10 Healer 4P Bonus - Your Flash Heal spell has a 15% chance to reset the cooldown on your Circle of Healing and Penance Spells.

Not sure how I feel about them. I can see myself missing the cd reset the majority of the time. Thoughts?

Edit: I'm holy. Easier to see as disc I think.

 

Sun_Tzu

Even if it were 100% chance to reduce CD on CoH it'd be totally worthless for Holy. At 15% I'm easily bypassing t10 4p.

It's highly unlikely however that there won't be atleast 2 tier pieces worth taking, which might make GS glyph together with the 2p bonus a somewhat worthwhile thing to have, although again it'd be most useful during the kind of fights that tend to negate the GS glyphs usefulness, meaning you're down to a additional 10% more healing on a target after the worst has most likely passed and on a 3min cd. Not terribly useful.

GS does have some potential to be used in tandem with paladins divine plea, in which case you'd be more likely to see the increased uptime. There's also the possibility of stacking 3 Holy priests in a raid chaining GS on tank giving a 100% uptime of atleast 10% increased healing on the tank.

 

Kashir

Both set bonuses seem pretty terrible in their current state.

2-piece: A 10% healing bonus for 10 seconds, which only applies after the danger moment has passed? A very solid meh. Slightly better for Holy with a 1 minute GS, but still close to negligible.

4-piece: Ok, let's start on a good foot. It could be decent for Disc tank healing, due to high volume FH spam, a relatively long Penance CD, no opportunity requirement (it's never bad to cast Penance on the tank), and easily noticable since you're focussing on a single target and don't have any other procs to worry about.

For Disc raid healing? Useless.

For Holy raid healing? Useless. The only time it's usable is;

* CoH is on cooldown
* You use Flash Heal as your filler heal
* The effect procs
* You notice the proc and react to it in time
* You have valid targets for a CoH

The chances of all those factors aligning are, well, let's just say it would need to be a hell of a lot better than a -3s CoH cooldown proc for me to care about it.

We haven't used Disc Priests on tank healing since 3.1, but if you are regularly doing so then there is at least some redeeming factor to the 4-piece bonus.

Still, looking on the bright side; I enjoy the flexibility of not having to worry about set bonuses in T9. Looks like we can carry that through to T10 as well

 

Incoherence

I tend to agree with you about the 4 piece, but this one seems interesting.

If you have the glyph and use GS on cooldown, the bonus averages to 1.43% raidwide healing. Granted, the 10 second set bonus might not line up with anything useful, but it's certainly good enough to drop any previous set bonuses (not that the previous set bonuses were particularly inspiring for holy), and if you weren't using the glyph before it should push you over the edge to get it. Certainly will for me.

For discipline, it's not nearly as useful because of the longer cooldown on PS, although it's somewhat unlikely that you won't end up with 2 pieces anyway.

 

moowalk

Just a reminder that the 1 minute glyphed cooldown on GS is actually a 70 second cooldown since the timer doesn't start until the previous GS lasts its full duration.

 

Sun_Tzu

Does it actually work like that?

[Glyph of Guardian Spirit]

Now the wording is a bit ambiguous but I've still always assumed that the cd change is applied retroactively, mainly since I'd think 70seconds is a "ugly" number and not something that would have been intentional.

 

◊ Slackie

GS must fall off without triggering to start the 60 second cooldown.

 

Taoofss

GS isn't a spell you should be casting on every cool down. As Holy, I will be trying to hold on to the t9 2 Piece for as long as possible while ignoring T10 all together.

 

Elimbras

The closed-form formula is easy : just equate mana used and mana-available (where ManaPool is your buffed ManaPool, ManaStatic is your Mana gains that doesn't depends on your fights lenghts (shadowfiend, manatide, potion, hymns as approximation), MP5_In is your casting MP5 gain, and MP5Out is your mana expenditure (from healing spells), and TTH your Time to Heal :

Mana_Pool + Mana_Static + MP5_In * TTH = MP5_Out * TTH

which leads to
TTH = [Mana_Pool + Mana_Static] / [MP5_Out - MP5_In]

 

Mokhtar

This depends a lot on the context, on a fight with a predictable burst where you run the risk of losing the tank you can use it in a cooldown rotation (shield wall, last stand, pain suppression, sacrifice...). On other fights it is perfectly valid to use it every cooldown to increase the healed amount.
Your comment suggests that you are actually skilled enough to be able to use it reactively, saving the tank (or a key player) just in time consistently. I know I am not at that level of skill and I am not sure a lot of players are...

 

RootBreaker

Guardian spirit doesn't have to actually absorb a death blow consistently to make it worth casting as a reactive emergency save. You just need to use it on someone who could take lethal damage in the next second or so. GSing a tank who drops to 10% is a good move, regardless of whether they dodge the next hit or not. Similarly, GSing a DPS who drops low is a reasonable move, regardless of whether they're actually targeted with the next random-targeted boss ability.

It's used similarly to the way a druid or shaman uses nature's swiftness.

It's certainly better than using it strictly for the 40% bonus healing on a tank who can survive consistently without the healing bonus.

 

Ellyh

Doing some math on the proposed T10 4 piece shows that it is woefully weak in most RL raid situations. Basically for both Disc and Holy you are only going to get 1 ppm with what I consider "standard" spell spreads. On top of this the typical hurry up of the cooldown generated by the proc is a pitiful 2-3 seconds, as it is worth noting that standard chain casting lag with procs will almost certainly lead to a filler spell between proc and usage.

For Holy I assume a "rotation" of 1 FH in the 6 second CoH cooldown cycle. Thus for a 30 second window we are casting 5 flashes with a chance of proccing of only 54%. extending out to 1 minute we have only got an 80% chance of getting a proc in that one minute window. The average ammount of time gained from a proc is about a 2 second cooldown reduction. This is only a little more than 1 ppm over a long fight.

Despite first thoughts about pennance being notably better, when I thought about how I acutally cast while tank healing I realised that I only really cast 2 Flashes in the 8 second penance cycle with the rest of the time being PoM/Shield moving etc. Thus in a 32 second window we cast 6 flash heals with a 62% chance of getting proc. if we double that to 1m4 seconds we have a 90% chance of having had at least one proc and while I can't do the math I believe that this will equate to about 1.5 ppm over the course of a long fight. And again because of how lag and procs interact you will average about a 3 sec cooldown reduction.

If they really want this to be a meaningful and used bonus they probably need to increase the proc chance by at least a factor of 2 times. At 30% proc chance the holy cycle has a 85% proc chance and it is about 89% for the 32 sec disc cycle.

 

Kashir

Actually, I just did some rough maths, and even if the proc rate was 100% I think it would still not be a very useful proc.

Note: Figures taken from last night's (hilariously bad) attempts at Twin Valkyr. Raid buffed, I sit at about 3500 SP, 35% crit, and enough haste to bring the GCD to about 1.25 seconds. All figures are averaged to include crit heals, and assume 0% overheal. If you have less haste, the rotations would be a little different, but the core answer would probably be the same.

To start with, let's consider when a proc-based CoH cooldown reset would actually be useful. Obviously, the answer is "When the whole raid, or at least a portion of the raid clustered in a small group, are taking steady ongoing damage". In such a case, you can always be sure that when CoH comes off cooldown, you can use it straight away for optimal healing throughput.

As a rule, PoM should be kept on cooldown in such a situation, and our healing "rotation" must be built around that rule. Thus, if the 4-piece bonus had a 100% proc rate, the three "rotations" to compare would be:

PoM -> CoH -> FH -> CoH -> FH -> CoH -> PoM -> FH -> CoH -> FH -> CoH -> FH -> [Repeat from beginning. Note that we can't use a 7 second rotation, because CoH will be on cooldown after the second PoM]

versus...

PoM -> CoH -> Renew -> Renew -> Renew -> Renew -> PoM -> CoH -> Renew -> Renew -> Renew -> Renew

versus...

PoM -> CoH -> PoH -> PoH -> PoM -> CoH -> PoH -> PoH

---

Prayer of Mending: 6.7k average hit * 5 = 33.5k healing per cast
Circle of Healing: 3.8k average hit * 6 = 22.8k healing per cast
Renew: 1.8k average hit for Empowered Renew + 2.2k * 5 HoT ticks = 12.8k healing per cast
Flash Heal: 6.4k average hit, assuming ~50% SoL proc chance = 6.4k healing per cast
Prayer of Healing: 5.4k average hit * 5 = 27k healing per cast

---

If we compare the healing values to the rotations above, we end up with:

CoH / FH rotation: 2 * PoM + 5 * CoH + 5 * FH ~= 213k healing per 14 seconds
CoH / Renew rotation: 2 * PoM + 2 * CoH + 8 * Renew ~= 215k healing per 14 seconds
CoH / PoH rotation: 2 * PoM + 2 * CoH + 4 * PoH ~= 220k healing per 14 seconds

---

In short; even if the 4-piece bonus was a 100% proc chance, to maximise HPS it would be better to use a PoH or Renew rotation in an encounter with raid-wide AOE. Personally I'd stick with Renew; PoH is far more likely to be overheal than the other spells, and it chews through our mana obscenely fast.

Considering that the proc rate is 15%, not 100%, there is absolutely no comparison. Using FH over Renew / PoH in order to force CoH procs is a very, very bad idea.

 

Finkum

Blizzard have already updated some of the more egregious DPS set bonuses, and opened a feedback thread for the healing ones. As the priest feedback is overwhelmingly negative, fingers crossed they rethink both bonuses.

One of the more interesting suggestions was to make the cooldown-reset into a Lock-and-Load-type effect, where the proc effect stops your next CoH/Penance from triggering its cooldown, allowing back-to-back use. Ultimately the randomness of the proc remains a big issue for me, especially as Holy already has to track and react to instant FH procs.

 

• tsigo

Ooh. Yes, that'd make it much more interesting.

 

Lambi

Or they could just make those numbers static reductions instead of on a chance basis. Meaning that every flash heal would take 1.2 seconds off the penance cooldown and 0.9 second off the coh cooldown. That's what makes serendipity so good, you can actually control it. As a healer you don't really want those type of procs (if they're not for mana regen).

But yes lock and load sounds very good. Wish I could post on the american forums...

Speaking of tier pieces, T10 actually has pretty cool graphics for the rest of the classes so I'm really looking forward to getting a look on ours. Hoping to look very angelic.

SNAKE!