I have followed the renew discussion and I would like to give my own viewpoint on the spell in the context of the priest's arsenal. This is all from 10man Ulduar experience, and Naxx 10/25, however Naxx is usually so easy to heal that it is difficult to measure the effectiveness of different heals.
In my opinion, renew is best viewed as a hybrid of FH and PW:S. On one hand, it does true healing, whereas PW:S does not. On the other hand, renew can heal damage which has not yet happened, just as PW:S does. Due to this nature, especially from the viewpoint of a discipline priest, renew seems quite useless. Just use FH or PW:S, whichever is more sensible in the situation. However, since PW:S of a holy priest is not nearly as strong, renew can be used to the same effect as a shield. Sadly, it is nowhere as effective, but putting 3 renews on people before flamejets is quite useful in my experience (I am mainly disc, but tried holy after a few wipes on Ignis 10. I changed back later since I did not feel as comfortable as holy as as disc. ) As a consequence, I would always avoid the glyph of renew, since it shifts renew further in the direction of FH, but that just diminishes the usefulness of renew. By the same train of thought is it that I do not like the front heal of empowered renew. If there is damage which needs to be healed immediately, renew is not the tool to use, and if it is not urgent, some random CoH will heal it anyway.
A second use I am training myself on is to constantly keep renew on the tanks. As disc priest, I have the habit of putting a PW:S on them whenever possible, however I believe that it might be better to keep it for spikes of damage, even if I lose 4% crit. I use myself as a wildcard in the fights, being in principle on tank duty but helping out wherever necessary. If I know that renew is on the tanks, I can ignore 2-4k damage on them and help elsewhere. If they get heavily hit, I have PW:S available plus a hasted heal. I actually considered taking improved renew over divine fury, since I am seldom casting GH.
As a last note, the composition of raid healers is definitely playing a role how often I cast renew. When there are many druids, I usually don't bother with renew and just tell them to keep a few HoTs on the tank, it's what they do anyway. However, when the healing team consists of a paladin and two priests, renew plays an useful part of healing, since there are no other HoTs available.
About the Napalm Shell discussion. If' not done it myself since we focussed on other bosses but I think here are 2 schools. One school is the instant-use-because-everything-else-is-too-slow faction, the other is the single-target-heals-for focussed-dmg faction.
A thing about instant heales I learned to hate at iron council is that if you are in a instant heal rotation you have to "pay" your time after your cast. As the only dispeller at iron concil I learned not to use an instant directly bevor I had to dispell the tank (I was disc at that moment) because the GCD I had to wait until I could dispell sometimes got another tick off.
So for napalm shells. If you start your healing with instants and want to change von instants to singel target heals you have to wait at least 2GCDs in between which is a very long time. So it may be a good thing to follow up your first instant with more instants even if they are less big but in time. If you start with instants I would recomend to start with those giving the best chance that the target will survive long enough for 2 GCDs - shield and if specced into it renew. As for shield it depends on wethere there is a disc priest around who would like to throw a shield on a good target to get a hasted heal.
For singel-target healing I would not use only FHs. I would use my serendipitiy GH preferable instead of the first FH. It is not much slower than FH (if you use divine fury) and heals for much more. (If your FH is 1.2s as in the example above, your GH should be at 1.26s: 3s -> 2.5s from divine fury -> 2.0s 0.8 haste from gear -> 1.28s 0.64 from serendipity. At the end you should have your serendipity stacks back but got much more healing off.
The chances that the target will die if the first heal after the original hit takes 0.08s longer is in the margin of your reaction time. But the healing difference - so the chances that you get enough healing of for the whole napalm shell - is about one FH.
I find it interesting that the first mention for renew as the good first choice for napalm shell started by someone who neglected divine fury becaus there are so few options to use it. The argument for renew was that you need a heal as big as possible as fast as possible for it. If I read that my first thougt is GH.
Mimiron:
Obviously its not going to take other healers 4-6 seconds to react to a napalm shell, and the damage will be somewhat mitigated by fire resist aura, and the person hit could pop a healthstone if really necessary, but I think it's clear that renew is not a good spell for healing spike damage. Flash heal alone gives much more room for error if you or other healers are slow to react.
You can't really conclude that way, because you also need to remember that renew has still two ticks expected, that will help latter, either for preventing health or for topping the target up.
After another night of attempts on heroic Mimiron, I stand by my reaction of Prayer of mending -> Empowered renew -> Flash heal for napalm shell ...occasionally if i feel that I'm hesitating at all I may trade off empowered renew for a Cicle of healing instead (not ideal of course but safer). The second impulse is just based on instinct.
PoM is OBVIOUSLY a poor choice because it's less healing than a flash heal in the same amount of time. It's not even an instant heal. Even if someone is low enough to be killed in one more hit, PoM doesn't heal NOW, it heals when the person takes damage, and if that person is killed, it doesn't save them from dying.
I would like to just simply say in response to this quote that no one died from napalm shell in tonight's raid and yes there were casters 10+yards back from me getting napalm shell quite frequently (meaning they were not in range of the majority of healers). If you're casting Flash heal in this situation where you are the nearby healer I sure hope you're coming off of a critical for a surge of light instant heal. It is OBVIOUS that Prayer of mending is not a poor choice at all unless you're slow at healing after seeing the first initial tick and/or the debuff (which is what you are suppose to be able to do). Have Prayer of mending on the raid member for the second tick and you're fine if not CoH out of desperation.
What do you mean by hesitating? That you're slow to react to the napalm shell?
I'm not really sure why you put so much value on tiny, instant heals, to heal napalm shell. If you're healing a person with 22.6k health who gets napalm shelled, (let's assume a 10k initial hit, though it varies from 9,425 to 10,575) they're going to die by the third tic (3 seconds after the initial hit) of the shell unless they get healed for at least 5400. They need to be healed for more than 35.4k health by the end of 8 ticks to survive.
Prayer of mending -> empowered renew is only superior to non-SOL flash heal -> empowered renew in the following circumstances.
Multiple people just got hit with the same napalm shell, so prayer of mending will bounce.
OR
You cast your first heal so late that your target will die before your flash heal lands but ALSO soon enough that your prayer of mending will trigger from a non-lethal shell tic. If you have a 1.2 second global cooldown and flash heal time from haste, there is only a 0.2 second window when this can happen: from 1.8 to 1.99~ seconds after the shell hits. If your reaction time is any faster, you can heal for more with the flash heal. If it's any slower, your target will die before they get healed from either spell.
In both cases, your empowered renew will come at the exact same time. As far as considering circle of healing more "safe" than empowered renew, there is nothing safe about using heals that do less than 3k HPS to heal someone taking 6k dps.
I'm also not sure why you think that its important that your first flash heal is a surge of light flash heal if you're solo healing someone who got napalmed. Surge of light does not increase healing per second. In fact, it decreases it, since the heals cannot crit. If you're actually solo-healing someone who got napalmed, it's not possible to do if you're wasting time with stuff like single-target circle of healing. It does half the healing of flash heal in the same amount of time. But you generally won't be solo-healing napalmed people. You don't need "the majority of other healers" near you to not be solo-healing a napalmed person. You just need one. The tank is pretty easy to heal when not being plasma blasted, and there's no other damage going out in that phase unless your melee is tripping over mines.
Originally Posted by Elimbras
Originally Posted by RootBreaker
Mimiron:
Obviously its not going to take other healers 4-6 seconds to react to a napalm shell, and the damage will be somewhat mitigated by fire resist aura, and the person hit could pop a healthstone if really necessary, but I think it's clear that renew is not a good spell for healing spike damage. Flash heal alone gives much more room for error if you or other healers are slow to react.
You can't really conclude that way, because you also need to remember that renew has still two ticks expected, that will help latter, either for preventing health[death?] or for topping the target up.
The only raid damage in phase 1 is from napalm shells. It's pretty unusual for the same person to get shelled twice in a row. Topping the person off after the shell ends is pretty trivial. The mana you save by using renew for this purpose is irrevlevant, as there's very little to heal in phase 1 and plenty of regen time while you're waiting for phase 2.
... we saw that in BiS Naxx gear it was "easy" to reach 400 haste without sacrificing other stats, and beyond 500 it became prohibitively expensive in terms of crit and spellpower to continue stacking haste.
...
14% remains a good number to aim for as a first pass in your gearing. If you know enough to understand where you need more or less haste, the compendium really isn't for you anyway. There's nothing wrong with running less than 14%, and there's nothing wrong with running more. The 12-16% range is the ballpark within which you aren't sacrificing too much haste for crit, or crit for haste.
The real contention I'm making is that there aren't any thresholds people should aim for. This is because in the grand scheme of things, all five useful stats (Int, Spirit, Crit, Haste, Spell Power) are in the same ballpark of usefulness relative to the itemization points assigned to them. It's not like being a Mage, Warlock, or Shadow Priest where Spirit is clearly worse than other stats, but still good enough to take into account when selecting gear.
In other words, literally any ilvl 226 item will be an upgrade over any ilvl 213 item, regardless of the actual stats traded or your overall stat levels before the trade.
Take this extreme example. Suppose that for whatever reason, you feel that you are low on haste and decide it's really important to stack more. You are currently wearing [Distorted Limbs], but you then get [Leggings of Mortal Arrogance]. Mortal Arrogance is clearly not optimal for stacking haste as there are ilvl 226 pants with haste. But even the worst of the ilvl 226 pants will be an upgrade over the ilvl 213 pants that stack haste. Here is the exact stat trade, using gems 8 haste / 8 spell and 8 haste / 8 spirit gems:
There is no gear setup where 42 haste beats 57 crit, 5 spell power, 8 and, AND 7 spirit. That's simply not going to happen. Even the "bad" upgrade choice (of trading haste for crit) is worth making the trade just for the extra overall stats. It doesn't matter if it drops you below 14% haste, 12% haste, or 4% haste. The second set of stats is just flat out better.
We could do this for pretty much any pair of ilvl 213 and 226 gear and get exactly the same results too. The very concept of trying to fit stats into a particular range is misleading for someone trying to min/max their gear. If the range encourages use of the 226 item, it's no better than this heuristic. And if it encourages use of the 213 item, it is wrong. Calling it a window instead of a fixed threshold won't stop people from asking why that range is good. And the fact is, it's still secondary to having high item level gear.
This is the advice we should give people for gearing:
A) If the new item is a higher item level, it is always an upgrade.
B) Pick some ordering of these stats that balances your needs for throughput and regeneration: Spell Power, Crit, Haste, Int, Spirit
C) When deciding between two items of the same item level, pick the piece that has the fewest stats you rated lowest in importance.
That's definitely both more useful and more correct than, "Try to get your haste between X% and Y%, your crit between A% and B%, your mana pool this large, etc." That's because windows could encourage people to trade 3% crit for 1% haste, or 3% haste or 1% crit, and these are never correct choices. For example, suppose we said that haste should be between 12% and 16% and crit should be between 30% and 34%. If someone has 34% crit and 11% haste, the window heuristic would suggest that losing 3% crit (still in crit window) to gain 1% haste (finally in haste window) is a good trade. It is not, and we should not suggest it is.
This is the advice we should give people for gearing:
A) If the new item is a higher item level, it is always an upgrade.
B) Pick some ordering of these stats that balances your needs for throughput and regeneration: Spell Power, Crit, Haste, Int, Spirit
C) When deciding between two items of the same item level, pick the piece that has the fewest stats you rated lowest in importance.
That's definitely both more useful and more correct than, "Try to get your haste between X% and Y%, your crit between A% and B%, your mana pool this large, etc." That's because windows could encourage people to trade 3% crit for 1% haste, or 3% haste or 1% crit, and these are never correct choices. For example, suppose we said that haste should be between 12% and 16% and crit should be between 30% and 34%. If someone has 34% crit and 11% haste, the window heuristic would suggest that losing 3% crit (still in crit window) to gain 1% haste (finally in haste window) is a good trade. It is not, and we should not suggest it is.
I mostly agree with what you've said, except the ilvl thing. That's really not true in general, so we shouldn't say it. ilvl 219 gear is not automatically better than ilvl 213. ilvl 226 gear is not automatically better than ilvl 213. It's mostly a slam-dunk: gain 13 ilvls, gain int/spi/spell, and do some trading with crit/haste, but occasionally (actually, fairly often in Ulduar), the gear just isn't that great. This is especially true if you already have a socketed item.
The rule of thumb for gear drops for the guild as a whole so far (clothies included) is: does my current item have sockets? Yes: the item really isn't much of an upgrade. No: hey, I gain sockets. Upgrade!
Beyond that, we can agree to disagree. I much prefer having a guideline number to base my gear upgrades around. Knowing that I just gained a huge chunk of haste on (say) a chest, I like being able to ballpark how much of it I actually need, and swap other gear pieces around to keep my crit high at the same time. Put on a new crit item? Check my haste, make sure I haven't lowered it too much. The bounds are fairly loose, but they're still there. Running 300 haste and 600 crit rating is less useful for Holy than running 450 haste and 450 crit rating. All things being equal, crit and haste can be weighted as approximately 1:1.
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
Obviously its not going to take other healers 4-6 seconds to react to a napalm shell, and the damage will be somewhat mitigated by fire resist aura, and the person hit could pop a healthstone if really necessary, but I think it's clear that renew is not a good spell for healing spike damage. Flash heal alone gives much more room for error if you or other healers are slow to react.
Also, note that if any of the 4 flash heals the second priest crit, they would have been able to heal solo fine. If only the renew crit, the first priest's target still dies on the 4th second, and they only have one chance for their flash heal to crit.
While this shows a case for Renew failing when healing Napalm Shell, I have a different method of healing Napalm Shell Targets. I Flash Heal twice to keep the target alive, and then use my hasted GHeal to bring them from low to full.
I mostly agree with what you've said, except the ilvl thing. That's really not true in general, so we shouldn't say it. ilvl 219 gear is not automatically better than ilvl 213. ilvl 226 gear is not automatically better than ilvl 213. It's mostly a slam-dunk: gain 13 ilvls, gain int/spi/spell, and do some trading with crit/haste, but occasionally (actually, fairly often in Ulduar), the gear just isn't that great. This is especially true if you already have a socketed item.
What are some actual examples of this? Because I looked over all the cloth gear priests would actually want (no +hit, no mp5) and I couldn't find one example of a ilvl 213 item that would be better than a 226 item.
Originally Posted by constantius
Beyond that, we can agree to disagree. I much prefer having a guideline number to base my gear upgrades around. Knowing that I just gained a huge chunk of haste on (say) a chest, I like being able to ballpark how much of it I actually need, and swap other gear pieces around to keep my crit high at the same time. Put on a new crit item? Check my haste, make sure I haven't lowered it too much. The bounds are fairly loose, but they're still there.
Agreeing to disagree makes sense for Coke versus Pepsi, The Beatles versus Elvis, or Dogs versus Cats. It doesn't apply to a mathematical analysis. If someone claims 2+2 is 4 and someone else claims 2+2 is 6, you don't agree to disagree. And you certainly don't "split the difference" and claim that the real answer is 5. You analyze the data and figure out what is actually correct. You might well prefer having a guideline number, but unless you can explain the mathematics of why those values are optimal, then they aren't very useful. We cannot take these loose boundaries as axiomatic; they must be justified.
Furthermore, there's math showing that following thresholds can lead to sub-optimal gearing choices. Losing 100 crit rating to gain 30 haste rating (or 100 haste to gain 30 crit) is always wrong. This absolutely contradicts the concept of bounds, even loose ones.
At any rate, I've provided both examples and mathematics showing how following bounds can lead to incorrect choices. It would be good to get to the bottom of this disagreement, so some counter-examples would be helpful. Under what circumstances would some 213 ilvl gear ever be better than some 226 ilvl gear, assuming neither piece has +hit nor mp5?
I think on some levels you are wrong. I don't know how you guys do Vezax, but I noticed at a certain level of haste you can easily reactively heal with greater heal. It seems to be with enough haste to get your greater heal down to 1.9s (well I think it's 2.0s, but the 1.9s is some room for comfort) you can reactively use greater heal after damage.
x1 in 10 man, and x2 (as in two healers) in 25 man.
Also, in the case of Discipline, as been pointed out in the other threat, with Borrowed Time too much haste becomes ineffective since you cannot go past the 1 second on the gcd.
Originally Posted by arison
Everyone should start from the same place and rise based on their abilities, desires, and schedule. No one plays MMOs to *be* powerful, they play MMOs to *become* powerful. It's the journey, stupid. The rarer loot is, the more cherished it is when you get it, but only so long as there is a reasonable expectation to get it. The rarer loot is, the better it feels when you kill a boss or when $AWESOME_TRINKET drops.
Why on earth you assume that I would ever advocate losing 100 crit rating to gain 30 haste rating, I really don't know. Bounds have absolutely nothing to do with what you're talking about, and I'm really starting to think you're trolling me.
Saying that a goal is 450 haste, 450 crit by no means ever allows for a situation where you'd give up +100 of one for the cost of 30 of another. That would be silly. On the same token, your statement of how to decide on gear doesn't make any sense. If you just pick up a piece, and throw it on, regardless of what it replaces, because it's an ilvl upgrade, you could easily find yourself (esp. if you do it twice) dropping 120 crit for 120 haste. While this might look reasonable on paper, in reality it ends up giving you too much of one stat.
For example, say you had BiS Naxx/Sarth/Maly gear. Then you pick up the legs from Thorim ([Leggings of Lost Love]) and replace your [Leggings of Mortal Arrogance]. It's not an ilvl upgrade, but you do it anyway because you feel like it. Then you replace your [Valorous Mantle of Sanctification] with [Mantle of Wavering Calm]. You've just lost 114 crit rating (no sockets counted) and gained 90 haste plus some assorted stats. Was it worth it? Realistically, no. Not if your stats were balanced. If you began at 450/450, and you do that swap, you drop to 336 crit and jump to 540 haste. And you've really gained nothing.
It makes sense to put a soft cap on how much haste you want. That way, you can get there with the minimal number of pieces, and then stack crit and spell. I very much look at haste as something akin to hit, only for holy priests. We need some to keep our throughput high. We can live without it, but not without hurting our healing. And if we get too much, it really hurts us.
How much is "too much" is entirely up to each priest. I've chosen mine to be around the 450 mark. That keeps my crit over 30% for HC up-time and throughput, and lets me stack regen and spellpower in the remaining item points. If you want to advocate a higher level of haste usefulness, that's one thing. But if all you're saying is that you should never consider your overall stats as you take an upgrade just because it's higher ilvl, then I flatly disagree. And in that, I think we have arrived at a point where it's a difference of approaches toward the same end goal. If that's not agreeing to disagree, then I don't know what is.
In other words, stop arguing the same point. I prefer setting goals, then gearing around them. You prefer taking piece-by-piece. In the end, I think we end up at roughly the same gearset, and roughly the same levels of stats. If your BiS gearset is drastically different than the one I posted in the OP, then by all means post it and explain why it is so different.
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
In general I must agree with Tedv here, I don't see any reason to argue for any kind of target range for haste or crit. Constantius, you mention things like "keeps my crit over 30% for HC up-time and throughput", but why is 30% special? Why not 35%? or 25%? Why set 450 haste or crit rating as goals?
Originally Posted by constantius
But if all you're saying is that you should never consider your overall stats as you take an upgrade just because it's higher ilvl, then I flatly disagree.
I am with Tedv that if we ignore items with +hit or +mp5, then we should take an item with a higher ilvl every single time, and I think that his example perfectly shows why. Would you really take [Distorted Limbs] over [Leggings of Mortal Arrogance] just because the 42 haste would put you at your 450 haste rating target?
The harder decision is between two items with the same ilvl, in that case I pick one based on whether my crit rating or haste rating is lower at the time (if my crit rating is higher than my haste rating I will pick a haste item over a crit item of the same ilvl, but will never take a ilvl 213 haste item over a ilvl 226 crit item).
I don't think constantius ever said that the numbers he throws out have any special meaning... I think he's just stating them as realistic numbers to aim for with the current available gear. He's said before that the numbers he gave for haste were approximately how much haste you could get with BiS gear without giving up too much of other stats, not magic numbers or anything like a cap.
Hey guys to change the subject a bit to glyps, I replaced to glyphs yesterday. The 10% less mana on flash heal is out and the Spirit of Redemption one is out (too bad it got nerfed :p). Instead I have to 20% HoT of PoH and the Guardian Spirit one (every min a GS if it dosnt hit).
Since I finaly learned how to propper use PoH (or getting close to it) I thought this would be the best choice. What do you guys think?
Saying that a goal is 450 haste, 450 crit by no means ever allows for a situation where you'd give up +100 of one for the cost of 30 of another. That would be silly. On the same token, your statement of how to decide on gear doesn't make any sense. If you just pick up a piece, and throw it on, regardless of what it replaces, because it's an ilvl upgrade, you could easily find yourself (esp. if you do it twice) dropping 120 crit for 120 haste. While this might look reasonable on paper, in reality it ends up giving you too much of one stat.
The point is that regardless of what your gear looks at any given time an ilvl 226 item will be more useful to you than an ilvl 213 item assuming that there are no "wasted"(for priests, lets take strength as an obvious example) stats.
Having no haste whatsoever and all crit but in full ilvl 226 gear will for all intents and purposes be better than having a "balanced" set of full ilvl 213 gear. If you don't agree at face value just imagine the previous comparison of
Distorted Limbs: 42 Haste
Mortal Arrogance: 57 Crit, 5 Spell Power, 8 Int, 7 Spirit
Take those numbers and multiply them by ten to account for a full set of gear and to be generous for your side of the argument and you get 150 more rating, 50 spell power, 80 int, 70 spirit. I hope you aren't honestly saying that priests can somehow compensate for that by balancing out their stats?
In theory, yes, shooting for some kind of balance will probably give you a slight edge in effeciency assuming you can choose from any gear you could wish for. In reality however everyone will get gear one piece at a time and as long as they do, a higher ilvl item will always be an upgrade as long as it doesn't have any bad stats(again, strength wouldn't be a very hot one or since we're talking cloth here, +hit) on it.
Tedv is pretty much right, for holy priests, all stats are more or less equally good (more or less) so iilevel trumps all. For shadowpriests, where we have 3 stats we care about (4 if you include hit) then things are a lot more tricky and sockets a lot more valuable.
Hey guys to change the subject a bit to glyps, I replaced to glyphs yesterday. The 10% less mana on flash heal is out and the Spirit of Redemption one is out (too bad it got nerfed :p). Instead I have to 20% HoT of PoH and the Guardian Spirit one (every min a GS if it dosnt hit).
Since I finaly learned how to propper use PoH (or getting close to it) I thought this would be the best choice. What do you guys think?
I stick to FH - Holy mana efficiency is quite bad and making one of your main spells 10% more expensive isn't helping. PoH is tempting, but since most dangerous raid damage requires quick healing, HoT part doesn't seem that attractive, compared to initial burst. Maybe if you never need to use Flash or your regen is sufficient, but I'm not at this point yet.
Well you "need" to use FH to buff up your upcomming PoH. I took the HoT on PoH cause im close on getting the T8 2 set bonus. 10% more crit chance on PoH. A critting PoH is about 9k? Thats about 2k healing after it. It will not save ppl but might top them off .
And since my mana hasnt been an issue so far I dropt the FH. I must say since I readed on EJ I changed a lot to my priest. Dont focus on spirit too much, getting more intelect. Respecced about 4 times to check out some things etc etc. All for the better. But I have this other priest in my raid guild and his number one cast on Hodir was "Binding Heal", I tried talk to him but he called me Elite etc etc, anyone know how to convince him to respec and change rotation?
Constantius has my vote here.
Assuming unlimited drops and unlimited DKP take any 226 above 213 attitude is fine, but in reality it will leave you low in dkp and unable to balance the items out as quick as required.
any 226 full set > 213 full set (no hit/mp5) - is likely true. The extra Int/Spirit/SP on 8 items x 13ilevels is huge.
But 8x226 haste only cloth is not likely to be better than 6x226 haste + 2x213 crit heavy
Starting off yes just about any 226 is better but there is a point when the unbalancing (particularily on heavy haste) is not worth the trade off and loss of dkp/delay in balancing your set.
JC's have the widest choice as stats heavy dragon eyes in any colour socket is great for rebalancing of course.
EDIT Assuming there's a few people working on their fragments at the moment here (6/30 myself), there maybe some interesting shield maths on haste verses crit here, not enough to unbalance gear otherwise, but there should be a definite point where the crit graph cross the haste graph (unless crit is always better for it) for this effect.
Depends on the DKP system. How our guild works is that every member makes a list of BiS, and then the highest DKP automatically spends DKP if a BiS drops. You only get DKP when a BiS drops too (which tends to solve the issue of too much DKP accumulating due to farm content).
Everything else is free roll.
So I'd be careful about assuming too much about taking upgrades meaning what in terms of DKP. I, for instance, am free to roll on incrimental upgrades (like my current staff) without losing DKP (and no one else wanted it, I guess they hate staves. Oh well, I love my 28k mana pool).
Constantius has my vote here.
Assuming unlimited drops and unlimited DKP take any 226 above 213 attitude is fine, but in reality it will leave you low in dkp and unable to balance the items out as quick as required.
any 226 full set > 213 full set (no hit/mp5) - is likely true. The extra Int/Spirit/SP on 8 items x 13ilevels is huge.
But 8x226 haste only cloth is not likely to be better than 6x226 haste + 2x213 crit heavy
...
I agree, and in the Constatius camp. Gearing without a target, and based solely on ilvl is too much like the 'greedy bastard' looting strategy. I will not argue that the 226 ilvl item will benefit you greatly due to the increased stats, but how much would said piece benefit another user due to the increased stats AND the other stat you really don’t care about? Looting solely based on ilvl will ultimately lead to a few of those pieces be side-graded later on. Personally, I would rather see it go to someone else than to have it be filler material until I decide how I want to balance my gear.
I agree, and in the Constatius camp. Gearing without a target, and based solely on ilvl is too much like the 'greedy bastard' looting strategy. I will not argue that the 226 ilvl item will benefit you greatly due to the increased stats, but how much would said piece benefit another user due to the increased stats AND the other stat you really don’t care about? Looting solely based on ilvl will ultimately lead to a few of those pieces be side-graded later on. Personally, I would rather see it go to someone else than to have it be filler material until I decide how I want to balance my gear.
First of all, of course I pass on anything that is a bigger upgrade for another raid member than myself, nobody is arguing you shouldn't.
You mention taking items with "the other stat you really don't care about", but what stats don't we really care about? If you are suggesting that crit is something we shouldn't care about when we are past some arbitrary crit rating, I think that is absurd. The same goes with haste.
And so what if items are side-graded later on? After a month of Naxx pretty much all loot except from KT were sidegrades, the same thing is going to happen in Ulduar (although it will happen twice due to hard mode loot). Once everyone else that would be interested in a particular item would be replacing an item of the same ilvl, it's a sidegrade for everybody and there is no reason to feel bad about taking it.
I agree, and in the Constatius camp. Gearing without a target, and based solely on ilvl is too much like the 'greedy bastard' looting strategy. I will not argue that the 226 ilvl item will benefit you greatly due to the increased stats, but how much would said piece benefit another user due to the increased stats AND the other stat you really don’t care about? Looting solely based on ilvl will ultimately lead to a few of those pieces be side-graded later on. Personally, I would rather see it go to someone else than to have it be filler material until I decide how I want to balance my gear.
This is an issue of optimal loot distribution in the raid and not of actual usefulness. I pass on stuff that's a great upgrade all the time for me simply because other classes have fewer options to choose between. What we're really trying to decide is whether something is even an upgrade for us in the first place. I contend that all 226 gear beats all 213 gear and Constantius said that in some situations, the 213 gear was better. But I'm still waiting for example of a single piece of 213 gear that would be better than a single piece of 226 gear, and the stat situation that would make it the case.
For the record though, I'm not trolling. I really do mean to suggest that 226 gear is an upgrade over 213. There's three possibilities for the logical disconnect:
You understand my point but I don't understand the disproof
I haven't explained my point well
You don't understand my point
It's not #1, because the counter-example to my claim would be a piece of 213 gear that's better than a piece of 226 gear. The example of "two pieces of 226 gear versus a third piece of 226 gear and a piece of 219 gear" isn't a counter-example, especially when we all agree that some pieces of 226 are better than others. If you understood the point, I'd expect to hear an appropriate disproof.
That said, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume the problem is just my explanation, not your understanding. Other people have posted trying to explain the reasoning as well, so perhaps the different phrasing will help.
I understand both points. I think generally speaking, you want to keep upgrading to 226 pieces across the board -- there's no case where it's not an upgrade. I think what Constantius was getting it is you don't want to end up in a situation where you have very little haste and a boatload of crit. I'm not really sure if that's even possible right now. But then by saying that, the urge is to state "don't let your haste drop below X." How do you really define X? I feel perhaps that in the "Gearing Questions" section there should be a breakdown into exactly what Haste and Crit do for a priest. It can just be a good summary, or it can have some math, but basically lay out the benefits of both, and let the reader decide which they feel better suits their playstyle. It's important to remember that unlike DPS, healing is very dynamic. One size definitely does not fit all.
I sit somewhere in the middle here. You need to take into account all your gear when making decisions. i226 is going to be better than i213 99% of the time [<3 Spark of Hope] 1v1 unless it has hit or mp5 on it. At the same time, if you end up with 800 haste or 800 crit while the other stat is horribly low you're losing out. Don't get locked into exact numbers for your haste/crit but don't let yourself go overboard with one or the other. Ideally you'll be able to balance them within i226 gear an not have to rely on any i213 gear, but a lot of that comes down to RNG.
Haste up to a certain point provides two benefits. It decreases cast time and the global cooldown. Once your GCD has reached 1 second, then haste has diminished returns because it is only doing half the job it was before. By it's nature, that's a boundary that can be defined by a (rating) number. There is no saying you can't gear past that point, but that you are overall less effective doing so.
Piece by piece taken out of context of the rest of your gear is not a fair comparison, because it will naturally be superior by having more item points to spend. If you have already reached the soft cap for haste however, then replacing a lower ilvl piece of gear that contains crit for a higher once that has more haste is not going to give as big a benefit as it does on it's own on paper. At that point, you are more fairly comparing crit VS a few base stat increases.
If I'm not mistaken, it's suggested that there should be no bounds to gearing and we should pick our preferred order of stats and follow it. To extend that arguement to it's conclusion, we could end up with a gear set of entirely +haste or entirely +crit (ignoring base stats and +spellpower for the moment) if we have valued one stat higher than the other. I think it's very clear to see the drawback of doing such a thing. A all-haste set would have a lower throughput and an all-crit set would have high throughput but is in more danger of healing "too much too late". A crit set would work fine for those events you know are coming and can pre-cast but loses on reaction time to more random events.
If that is not what's being suggested then there is some sort of cap in mind, whether it's a hard number or just by feel. At that point, is suggesting (publicly) a haste and crit rating worse than essentially saying "I value crit until I don't value it anymore"?
05/07/09, 7:37 AM
.
Similar Threads
