It is true that increased throughput yields a mana efficiency for all throughput stats except for the most part Haste. Now the point I am trying to make is:

Mana efficiency =/= Mana regen and it should be used to say that x.x SP = x.x Mp5

When optimizing your gear you don't choose a piece because you will save other people mana.. While it may benefit the raid as a whole that you can cast more spells or have them be more effective, that isn't the goal of this discussion and should be an obvious fact. The concept I am trying to point out is that when comparing stats it is not so simple a comparison and really you shouldn't try to compare regen stats and throughput stats.

Really each stat should be looked at for its relative value in throughput and regen. You should then gear such that you reach the desired levels of throughput and regen to match your playstyle, composition, etc.

Generally speaking increasing throughput -> increased efficiency -> reduced regen required and hence you can fulfill your role at a lower level of regen (possibly). While that relationship is good to know it is not necessarily true that having better throughput means you require less regen. In all likelihood situations will arise where the additional throughput is used at length and completely negates any mana efficiency that provided the opportunity to run with less regen and you will be in the situation of looking for Innervates and running OOM. I am merely trying to show that efficiency does not create regen it creates the potential to require less regen for the same amount of healing.

#1
It is in my opinion perfectly acceptable when evaluating the throughput provided by haste, to treat it as you have. It does not provide the opportunity to say that haste in any way impacts mana regen or mana efficiency... Unless you tie it to a change of spell that creates an increased efficiency such a as a transition from FH -> GH.

Possibly you mistook my point on HpM to be about haste.

The statement:
"So until you can fully quantify that you will cast X-1 casts vs. X casts you have netted no actual mana consumption gain. Furthermore even at the point that you have reached a consumption gain you have not improved regen you have only reduced the regen requirement of the encounter."

Is not Haste related it is HpM related. So to go into further detail lets say that your FH HpM is 11.15 for 5812 average healing. You are in a situation that requires casting two FH in period of time and is well within current bounds. Obtaining some gear you improve the FH HpM to 11.56 for 6027 on average. In this scenario does the improved efficiency provide you any gain? Does it reduce the regen requirement?

- Only if you required the second FH for 215 HP would it be a gain for 2 cast scenario.
- It requires 26.78 casts before the more efficient version nets a reduction of mana required equivalent to 1 FH over the duration of the fight. Given that all heals are 100% effective.

What further complicates this discussion is that HpM gains create the potential for "extra" casts similar haste. The mana efficiency can provide the opportunity to get the same healing on targets for less casts creating the space for either an additional cast (on another target) or the ability to refrain from casting and conserving that mana. This choice leads me to the belief that you shouldn't use these types of relationships to create any hard/fixed relationships between the throughput and regen stats.

Regen / Throughput Stat Weighting
In the Discipline thread I did provide a "combined" stat weighting which when I edit the main post will be removed because it creates trouble and is inaccurate depending on play-style and assignment.

The problem with combined weights is the basis: What drives the SP:MP5 ratios of (0.6:1) and (2:1)?

Once you progress from that point the entirety of gear, gem, and enchant selection really falls back to the assumption. That assumption can not be firmly rooted in any clear mathematical model for "general" healing. Because in essence you have said that the throughput requirement is now twice what the regen requirement while it was only 60 percent previously. Quite a significant shift.

For the masses I can agree that some combined ( x.x SP = x.x Mp5 = x.x Haste = x.x Crit = x.x Spirit = x.x Int) makes life simple. It really isn't the appropriate approach for every situation and I choose to not use it when gearing for myself.

For Discipline healing I find that most fights my healing falls into a rhythm of casting. That rhythm can be quantified into a number of casts per period of time, which can be extrapolated into an amount of mana required per time and per fight. This can yield a mana requirement and identify whether you are above or below the desired level and drive your gearing of regen stats. From this personalized information you can also account for the "I would have casted more but I know I would have gone OOM" and then add to the mana requirement to support what would have been optimal for you. After I reach the point of regen desired I stack throughput stats as completely as possible.

The resource (mana) is my primary concern because without it nothing is possible.

In the example I provided the difference provided by enough haste to knock .3 seconds off a flash heal / instant cast means that in the time to do 4 casts you can now do 5. This is an 6 second block of time which is very relevant in your burst healing scenario. Being able to put out an entire extra cast on the target of your choice is insanely powerful when it comes to actually saving lives. All it takes is 16.66% haste to allow you to fit a 7th heal into the space you had 6. (A 9 second window). This translates to 11% unbuffed which is trivial to get to.

Haste allows a fine tuning of how and where you heal. In a good raid players die because the burst healing ability of the healers is less than that required by the encounter and there is damage spread all over the place require OH CRAP healing triage. Haste increasing the number of targets you can service is the most powerful thing you can ever do in these situations, 9 times out of 10 the total size of the heal is fairly irrelevant provided it is in the 3-5k range. Usually it's a case of get any heal and live vs get no heal and die. Haste greatly increases the chance of getting the heal off so is by far the most valuable stat to stack for burst healing situations. Unless your tank healing a runaway freight train you don't generally need to worry to much about the size of an individual heal as any heal will contribute to a save.

Your comments about the redundancy of flash healing a target a second time has nothing to do with haste and is a function of the healing team working well together and having a clear understanding of their responsibilities in the fight. What did haste do for me? Well he isn't full but he's out of the danger zone so I'm actually doing triage on someone else who will die if not attended to immediately. Haste doesn't directly save lives when healing a single target if you are directly trading off with power, what it does is allow you to save extra targets in a small space of time. It also allows your healing on that single target to be spaced more closely, it's why hots that tick every second are so much more valuable than a hot that ticks every 3 seconds despite having the same overall healing potential. Smoothing damage and healing is always valuable and this is what haste does.

What you are basically saying is: people never die because there's always some healer available who has a heal in the pipe. Quite obviously, that's not true, otherwise people wouldn't die, right?

As for instants: PW:S is nice, unfortunately the targets must not have a weakened soul debuff. Renew? No, sorry. The instant part of it (for holy) is too small. You don't try to save someone with 2k. Perhaps if you are running and have no SoL proc in the pipe.

You can argue that it's very difficult to quantify the live-saving effect of haste (healing granularity discussion incoming), but you cannot deny the effect.

The best "life-saving spell" that a priest has in my humble opinion is Guardian Spirit and paired with the glyph that resets its CD to 1 min if not used, it can be a real benefit. Plus it increases the healing that target receives by 40% while the Guardian Spirit is watching over the target. So if the target does not die, it receives healing by 40% more and if it does die, the Guardian Spirit sacrifices and restores the target to 50% health. That is a real life-saving spell.

Except Rapture has a cooldown. Assuming you don't abuse the bug of multiple shields (which itself is somewhat of a pain to abuse), you would only get 712 mana per 12 seconds.

"When optimizing your gear you don't choose a piece because you will save other people mana.. While it may benefit the raid as a whole that you can cast more spells or have them be more effective, that isn't the goal of this discussion and should be an obvious fact. The concept I am trying to point out is that when comparing stats it is not so simple a comparison and really you shouldn't try to compare regen stats and throughput stats."

Absolutely disagree; anything that contributes to the raid is a worthwhile goal (the only goal that matters really). Also the comment that I was talking about was you discussing throughput and efficiency, not regen. I agree that regen and throughput are separate topics and ought not be directly compared. Efficiency and throughput are not. You cannot raise efficiency without also raising throughput. The question comes down to degree. If you chose to ignore the regen component of efficiency stats, that's fine, but throughput and efficiency are linked topics. Haste is the only pure throughput stat, every other throughput stat also increases efficiency.

Gear upgrading in general benefits the raid group.. If it was a discussion of optimal raid gearing I would agree. Then you would get into the discussion of the worst geared player or the worst in-slot item is the one that receives upgrades. My thought is this is a discussion of the relationship of stats and how it effects your individual ability to contribute.

Efficiency and throughput are linked... I am a little confused at the goal of pointing it out. If you are trying to argue that there is a definitive regen component I would like to see how you would define that.... Because as I see it all you create is the potential to A) possibly reduce the mana requirement of a fight and hence reduce the necessary regen required to do the same total healing that previously required more mana or B) that the efficiency is converted into additional casts and as such the mana requirement does not change and hence the regen requirement remains the same and all that happens is a pure increase in throughput over the course of the fight.

In the (A) case then mana efficiency does correlate to a regen savings and could be quantified as a Mp5 value and in the (B) case the mana efficiency is a virtual placeholder that really converts into additional throughput and can not be quantified as a Mp5 value. Because you can not quantify which of the two available options is used on a regular basis for the general population, you can not use them to correlate SP to Mp5 in general.

Perhaps you're not considering this in the right context. You seem to be examining haste in a situation where all the healers in your raid are available to cast on the poor soul (presuming it's not a tank) who's taken damage. We can find a much better example of how haste saves lives in something like hard-mode Mimiron. There is a ton of raid damage in that encounter, and it's an extremely mobile fight. It's very likely you have at least one and probably more than one healer who's either out of range, moving to avoid fire/rocket strike/bomb bot/etc., or is healing a tank/OT who's taking damage. Either way, they can't stop to throw a holy shock/LHW/Rejuv on the person who's taken an unlucky hit and whom you're trying to save.

Even if you haven't been stacking haste in your gear, it's easy to see here how haste can save that player without instants coming into play. Having done this fight as both holy and disc, there are several ways you can react to this situation. If you're holy on this fight, you're likely stacking up Serendipity (provided you specced into it, of course). If you're disc, you've probably got penance up, and failing that, you have PW:S and a hasted imp. flash (provided you specced into Borrowed Time/Imp Flash Heal) to buy you and your fellow healers some time to get a more solid heal on them. In that situation as holy, I can slam a 10k minimum heal on that player in 1.4 seconds. As disc, same deal using penance. The PW:S/flash is going to take a little longer just by virtue of the GCD involved there, but the PW:S is going to prop them up for the time it takes to wait out the GCD and hit them with flash/penance even if we're in phase 2 with Rapid Burst and Heat Wave ticking on them. That healing haste is going to mean that we get that person healed up fast enough to start on the next person who's taking damage (and there will be a next person). These haste talents absolutely save lives, and combined with haste gear and an encounter involving heavy raid damage and/or movement, it's easy to see the effect.

The case I put forward was one of a single person needing a quick reaction heal. When it comes to heavy raid damage encounters, I don't see how haste does anything at all tbh. If we take your example of FF(I assume you're talking p2 or p4), then everyone is taking damage, and casting single target heals just keeps you going from one crisis to another. What you need to be doing is finding spots to cast PoH, casting coh/pom while moving, and if you specifically end up in the situation you describe(most often only because you weren't getting enough overall raidhealing out there), you use a instant flash or pw:shield. As disc I'd apply the same reasoning, you need to spec into larger poh raidius and use shield/penance to get that spotheal off.

Now you might argue that haste lets you get off more poh's, thus being valuable for this fight anyway, and in some fights of this type that might be true, although in those cases we get back into the discussion of haste being a mana-inefficient way of doing this. However, if we consider FF specifically, haste again is only worth something if it enables you to get off a cast when otherwise you could not, or get off an additional cast. However, again better positioning will buy you the time you need, whilst crit gives you high throughput which is extremely unlikely to be wasted whilst also not costing you extra mana.

So as far as I'm concerned the question still stands if haste delivers enough increase in max HPS over crit to justify stacking it, because the other benefits of it are negligible.

Why do you keep trying to model haste only in the context of a specific cast? In FF you are obviously constantly casting so surely the ability to make 5 casts in the space you could previously only cast 4 is self evidently a good thing for your HPS.

On another note Max HPS is a fairly meaningless concept for 95% of fights. A better model is how much burst healing you can put out in a short space of time. This is usually quite different from Sustained HPS and is where priests often do better than a class like a druid where they need to get their hots up to speed to hit peek output.

You're looking at this from the wrong perspective. Druids compliment the healing team, let their Rejuvenations top off the raid; but in order for them to do that, they need people like Priests to quickly re-act to burst damage and to bring people back up while they spam-away at their Rejuvenation.

Don't get me wrong, Resto Druids have amazing tools, and they can react to burst as well, especially with Swiftmend, Regrowth and Nourish. But they can't spam the raid with Rejuvenation and Nourish/Regrowth at the sametime either.

Healing meters are bad. It doesn't matter who is #1 and who is #6 (although if your Disc Priest is #1, something might be wrong).

Just remember, you enable the Druid to spam those Rejuvenations. Healing by it's very nature is support, we aren't the superstars. To steal a quote from Amera/Sky, Healers are like the Offensive Line, we allow the Tom Brady and Peyton Manning's to look and act like the super-stars they are, but when Brady and Manning get sacked or fall down, the Offensive Line gets the blame.