The only actual cap where haste becomes less effective is when you can get your GCD down to 1.0 seconds. This requires a lot of haste (1600+) and is not really a value you should attempt to attain. However, you may as well get as much as you can. Point for point it is the most throughput of any other stat plus reaching a target 0.01 seconds faster is far more valuable than landing it for an extra 500 hp.

I agree that haste is the obvious way to maximize throughput, but I am highly suspect of your statement:

This smells fishy. Convince me that it's true.

Long time reader, first time poster:

I believe what he means is that more haste = faster casting of the specific spell (ie. Penance) and therefore quicker casting of the next spell (ie. Gheal). You get more heals off for a total greater healing effect, vs getting only one heal off, at a slightly higher heal value, but in the middle of casting the second in the same amount of time.

I may be wrong though, only been on my priest as my main now for about 6 months.

What he means is that in Ulduar's HMs, landing the heal faster is far more important than a slower but potentially higher heal. And I couldn't agree more.

We have 2 enhancement shamans because we haven't any other rogue or hunter who can deal comparable damage. Our raid leader thinks that moving points from replenish to something else doesn't provide good benefit.
One of our mages said that because he is Arcane, he must either request Innervate in P3, or save mana in any other way and for first two bosses deal lower dps, or use wand.
"Tank" on Brundir is used for interrupts and because we don't want Brundir to do whatever he wants.
As for healing, raid leader's opinion is "I don't care how much healing you do, as long as people don't die."

that's indd the most important thing for Ulduar HM's.. i got 234 haste, 26.85% crit and 2664sp(with inner+illusion trinket) selfbuffed atm and noticed that i could use alot more haste.. for exampel on mimiron HM that where still working on i had a couple of times my heals for a Napalm Shell target came a minimum sec to late..

this might also be the result of not having cleared enough who was specificly healing what but still i feel like more haste could save alot of deads or close call situations.. time to farm some badges and get me that new gear from the vendor that is just insane good.. thinking of the shoulders, head, ring and trinket..

Convince you? Go and search my other posts I've done the math on it before.

Plus no amount of healing you can get will help your heal reach someone 0.1 seconds faster.

Exactly, the penance/greater heal comment is not what I meant.

No not really. I run around raids with over 600 haste, combined with 5% haste from the totem of wrath and you are looking at a lot of haste (~30%). I never had mana problems in the gear I had. As long as you aren't wasting heals and managing your cooldowns mana really shouldn't be an issue.

This is an argument to granularity, and there are no fights in the game where players are intended to take 100% of their health or more in less than an unhasted global cooldown but more than a hasted cooldown. I'm not saying that haste is bad-- it's a good stat, or at least good enough. But it's not reasonable to suggest that only a smoother granularity of healing matters. In fact, it's very rare that granularity is the constraining factor. On Algalon today and even on Patchwerk at level 60, total healing per second was the defining statistic, not how fast you could dish out heals.

If haste matters, it is because it increases your total healing per second in a sustained casting situation. It's not because it gives you 100 milliseconds of margin in your reaction time to a random spike of incoming damage.

And if I remember the math correctly, it showed that in general, haste is very slightly more HPS than an equivalent amount of spell power, but with no increase on mana efficiency. However, I'll also suggest that if your healers aren't strapped for mana, then you're bringing too many healers. Theoretically you want to bring just enough healers that no one dies and they all end the fight with almost no mana left. This lets you stack more DPS in the raid which in turn means faster kills and less time for people to make mistakes.

So I can't say this is categorically true, but I strongly suspect that if all your healers are stacking haste for a fight and still aren't having mana concerns, you could get the same total healing output with fewer healers in the raid. So stacking haste still isn't optimal.

Haste vs. crit plays by a lot of the same rules as flash heal vs. gheal debates. Haste is incredibly valuable because it decreases the granularity of your heals. You don't even have to keep up to the damage; another healer will see the tank dropping and assist. Crit has the advantage of giving you more total healing per mana bar, and more healing per cooldown (15% hasted circle of healing's cooldown is still 6 seconds, penance 8).

Haste is more likely to save the tank from a few unlucky avoidance strings since you have control over whether you chain cast and you don't have control over whether you crit. Over the long run, if the tank lives, crit is the mana-saver. You will get your first 6k into the tank (or any spot heal target for that matter) X seconds (.1 sec in my case with my 2 gear sets) before a crit build would.

It really comes down to whether you are running OOM in the fight. If you are not at risk of running OOM in any given progression fight haste is hugely more valuable than crit because OOMing is the most major downside to haste. If you are consistently running out of mana then swap out some haste and load up with crit to get more HPM and HC/SoL procs (which further improve HPM).

Personally I try to to be the hero too much when I get excited/strained, and I pre-heal and pre-hot and pre-shield my mana bar away. I've swapped over from playing a paladin, who until 3.2 had no mana concerns whatsoever. Old habits die hard. Although I'm getting better about canceling obvious overheals and knowing when to go into mana conservation mode and only react to real deficits as opposed to predicted/possible ones.

Haste does matter because it improves your reaction time. Have you never had a raid member die and been casting that heal that 'landed but didn't register'? Well 0.1 seconds faster and they would have lived.

Anywho, as for removing healers we already did that throughout ulduar and I still stacked haste. Throughput is what holy priests are made for, and haste is the best way to attain that.

Sure, we've had deaths like that. But we've had more deaths from overkill where an extra 100 healed would have saved them. Your argument just demonstrates that haste is good, a fact I agree with. It doesn't prove it's better than spell power though. How many healers do you run for your kills on the healing intense fights in the zone like Mimiron, Freya, and Algalon?

Haste (at least the last time I checked) was definitely the highest stat for peak hps. It doesn't help with sustained hps.
It's so good because it's quite cheap in fact ;-)

Now, the granularity argument is not huge in my mind. It is really useful only when a boss has capacities that need to be healed in less than about 2 seconds, and can take a player from full life to death in such a time frame. For any other time, reaction times doesn't matter, and hps only matters. I really mean it : if you're loosing players that died in more than 3s, or players that were not full life before the " fatal 3 last seconds", the problem is not reaction time. Either you made a wrong decision and didn't healed in time, or you could have topped them up before (with more hps), and then spellpower would also have been a solution. (In fact, I can imagine a more cases that have haste-oriented solution : basically, those that have let's say a 3s window to heal 2 persons, and where group heals do not work, etc. but they are really similar to the one I exposed).

A few example to make it clear : Kel'Thusad frost tombs are not a problem : an un-hasted flash heal has enough time to save anyone who was topped before the frost tombs. Freya / Mimiron / XT fights can be heal-frantic, but it's more a question of needed hps to keep people alive than reacting in a very tiny window. If you manage to keep everyone a full HP (and therefore have enough hps), then you'll have the time to react and non haste-oriented gear would be enough. The only fight I remember immediatly where you could die because of reaction time was Hyjal's first boss : Rage Winterchill. With undergeared characters (I went there with an alt with around 9k health), the icebolt (the block of ice) could be fatal in less than 2s (4250 - 5750 direct damage, plus a dot at 2500 per second for four seconds). The problem nearly disappeared when you had more than 10k750 health, because you could afford the direct damage + 2 ticks before any healing.

Related to this discussion, I've been thinking more about the [Revitalizing Skyflare Diamond]. It's clearly better than [Insightful Earthsiege Diamond] as long as you don't need the mana. The main gains from 11 m/5 versus 21 int are comparable. The proc costs roughly 800 mana per minute, or 4800 mana over a 6 minute fight. How many difficult healing fights do we end with more than 4800 mana? In my personal experience, I end fights about in that range. So perhaps it's worth trying with high end Ulduar gear.

The effect of 3% extra crit healing should be 4.5% extra healed whenever you crit, which is maybe 30% of the time. So roughly 1.3% extra healing. Because it's only increased crit healing, it's more likely to be overheal. But I suspect this effect may be discounted. The overheal is much more likely on fights that are easy on healing, meaning the mana gains from ISD are worthless anyway. On fights like Freya and Algalon, there's a lot less overheal because there's so much damage going out.

At any rate, I'm just suggesting that the metagem seems like a credible alternative and we should test it out to see how it performs. Have any holy priests tried raiding high end content with [Revitalizing Skyflare Diamond] and have information to share?

I have found that having my haste at 10% has improved my heals. People do under estimate haste in general and its effect on the raid. As a Disc Priest we are mainly single target healers; we also rely on our other bubbles that come off on our heals to protect/heal our single targets. So it isn't haste alone that I would say has a major impact on the raid or the single target you are healing. The addition of the Forethought Talisman is excellent addon for small heals to your target (every piece of healing is better then none).

Looking at my priest fully buffed my crit strike is around 28% in my guilds usual 10 man Ulduar runs. Looking back at the previous paragraph i feel that if your crit is high as in 26-28% your spell power can be slightly lower only because you are going to be criting almost every third heal if not more.

Those who have mana problems the trinket "Spark of Hope", works great.

Also acquiring the the t8.5 bonus of spell-power increase for 5sec after casting a Power Ward: Shield helps out. I REALIZE that most bosses in Ulduar the Power Ward shield barely lasts one shot but it is the added armor bonuses and absorption over time that makes it a worth while cast.

Thanks,

Kristyin
Defiance
Earthen Ring

Nothing prevents you from getting 500 haste AND 3200 spell power raid buffed, like somebody said higher in the thread, haste is so good because it's cheap, you don't have to sacrifice a lot to get it, once you've softcapped your crit for holy concentration, that's the smart stat to up

I think that [Insightful Earthsiege Diamond] is so overitemized currently with the proc being worth 66 mp5 that this should be the last place in your gear you would be looking to pick up throughput at the cost of regen.

The point was not to not do it. The point was to replace the meta last, if everything else has already been changed in favor of throughput and you then still want more.

I run with 600 haste on my holy set unbuffed, my crit is around 21%. My spellpower is lower than most (2400 unbuffed) but I haven't run into any problems. I do believe there's a limit to how much you can stack one particular stat, but in this case my high haste has not strangled any of my other ones, and it has helped me a lot in the hard mode content.

I'm running a significantly lower 393 Haste (11.99%) and 350 Crit (20.49%), these stats are of course unbuffed. I gem thoroughly for spellpower, run an Ember Skyflare. With Spark of Hope, replenishment, and high baseline spirit and intellect on items, mana problems aren't much of a concern as players break into/past ilvl 226 gear. The major concern for a healer (specifically the Holy Priest) is keeping raid members alive. So the fundamental question for gear is what causes people to die, and what part of fixing that is important for the Holy Priest?

Priests have a huge arsenal of tools to react to any situation, but handling an incoming death breaks into two parts...
How much? How fast?

Case Scenario - XT (Heartbreaker): Here is a moderately intensive raid heal, with a spark up (or possibly two), people can die from full health over the course of a Tantrum, so as a raid healer, your job is to bring enough healing to each raid member so that they survive. Well in a purely bare bones sense, bringing about 500 health to each raid member will keep them alive, this isn't in anywhere near sufficient. They must be high enough health to survive the inevitable Light Bomb that follows a Tantrum. Your other raid healers (likely shaman) who are focusing on light beam targets should be comfortable with 1-2 seconds to react, and maybe another 1-2 seconds to cast, land, and register sufficient healing to get ahead of the damage curve. This means you have to cover for 1-2 ticks of Light Bomb, or 2-4k damage. Added onto the necessary healing, you need to bring about 5k healing to 10-15 raid members before the tantrum ends. With two PoH, PoM bounces, and a CoH you are more than covered. Presumably you also have a Surge of Light proc ready to help that Light Bomb target, so things are a little easier on the other raid healers.

So you need to ask yourself, is a non crit PoH going to be enough? If you aren't getting that 5k a hit oomph, you aren't getting enough. Spellpower is often what is on the margins here. If incoming raid damage increases by 20%, you want 20% more healing from spellpower. The same spells you've always had should be solving the same types of problems you have, just scale up your spellpower until it matches your opponents abilities.

The issue is not maximized HPS over the course of the fight. Let the druid(s) deal with the aggregate numbers, HoTs are often much better at it. You are a Holy Priest, you excel at very suddenly increasing the health totals of several raid members. You are the healer who most directly stands between incoming raid damage and a raid member death. If something really gets hairy, you have GS; and yes, I suggest using GS on raid members, the only time you should save it for a tank is if you are using it as an added tank cooldown in a cooldown rotation (though PS often works better).

You must bring healing to bare on several targets. PoM and CoH run on cooldowns and are instant cast, to improve their efficiency, there's little you can do but increase SP. PoH on the other hand carries an annoyingly long cast time. A little change in haste can often be the difference in landing 2 PoH rather than 1, or 3 rather than 2 for long abilities (like Tantrum).

Haste is important, no... Haste is REALLY important! Even if you have overscaled your spellpower and you are healing for twice as much as you need to be, it doesn't matter. Saying "he didn't just survive that attack, he REALLY survived it" is silly. It only makes a difference in the context of more incoming damage. You often need to heal as many people as you can, really quickly. Haste makes this easier, the more haste, the more people you can get to in a given amount of time. But haste has cutoff points of its own. Itemizing for 10-15% haste may be the difference between getting of 2 PoH instead of 1, this is important. But screwing over your character entirely, going completely out of control and itemizing for 30-35% haste will still probably only net you a third PoH (and some major mana problems). Be under no illusion, Haste is better than Crit by a longshot, but don't go thinking it is the be-all and end-all of stats. You get enough haste baseline from most of your gear, just don't take too many crit items.

What does Crit offer? Crit makes the occasional heal more effective. This is irrelevant to you as a Holy Priest. It may be useful for Disc, but as a Holy Priest, you don't care if a lone target gets more healing than another. You want to provide a cutoff point. If you decide to vastly improve your crit such than 3 instead of 2 CoH targets get a crit, this won't make a difference if you can't bring healing to bare. Either the healing from the crit was irrelevant and they would have survived anyway, or 3 people died instead of 4. Either way, changing that crit into spellpower would change your non crit healing to be sufficient so all 6 survived. You need crit for a few purposes, Holy Concentration, and Surge of Light. Crit makes a huge difference in mana from Holy Concentration and having Surge of Light active whenever you need it is like having a spare Guardian Spirit, it'll stop a single target from dying and it'll put them in the clear by a fair margin.

So, a little synopsis, avoid crit, it isn't as important as you might think. It's good to have some, but don't ever, EVER gem for it. Haste is important, if you find yourself not getting that ability fast enough, or you find your latency/reaction times are a little slower than you'd like, gem a *little* haste. Stacking haste will increase your overall HPS, but at the cost of SP it often makes the difference between needing one CoH to get the job done, and having to revisit the targets and heal them again. As a Holy Priest, you want spellpower and enough mana to get through the fight. Bringing more healing to several people will make your other healers more comfortable, and giving them another DoT tick to heal someone will make more of a difference than haste ever will.

I'd like to have less Crit and more Haste, but I'm not gemmed for Crit, so the sacrifices have to come from re-itemizing pieces to have spirit/haste instead of spirit/crit.

This sounds suspiciously like anecdotal argument to granularity. I'm not suggesting your conclusions are wrong, but to prove you are right, you must make an analysis in the context of the actual mathematics behind haste/crit rating -> haste/crit percent -> odds of death prevention. For example, if 1 haste rating provided 0.001% more haste and 1 crit rating provided 1% more crit, then stacking crit would be the correct choice regardless, and haste rating would be totally irrelevant.

The argument you're making comes down to "haste has a small effect that matters in large quantities while crit has a small effect that doesn't matter in large quantities". Without mathematically analyzing the actual effects, I don't see how you can make that conclusion.

Regarding crit, I don't recommend ever stacking it, but I think it's better than you give it credit for. In addition to the effects you listed, it increases your inspiration uptime, a genuinely important buff for the tank. Also, crit group heals aren't wasted. In a tantrum, for example, each person that doesn't receive a crit from your prayer of healing will need help from some other healer to help top them off. The more crits you land, the more healers can focus on other targets. As long as a crit heal wasn't overheal, it's helpful-- it frees up time for other healers to heal other targets. To me this doesn't sound credibly better or worse than an equivalent amount of throughput provided by haste. The real question is how much crit and haste rating do you need for the same amount of much extra throughput.

Now all that said, I'm still not sure which stat is the best general purpose stat to fill in yellow sockets for socket bonuses-- I see good arguments for haste, crit, and int. For example, there might be merit in a 18/53 spec that can spam renew before incoming raid damage, but you'd want to back that up with a little extra int in your yellow sockets.

I could use some advice on a few questions that I have.

The first isn't 100% healing-relatd....However...We have done all hard modes in my 10 man, but we are now working on no light Yogg and Algalon. My issue here is with the first phase in Yogg. I'm bad, yes, I know, but I can't seem to get into the rhythm of moving in and out of the middle accoding to the pattern of the clouds, while keeping people up with the debuff and avoiding going through the middle at a bad time, when an add is about to die.

It had previously not really been a problem, since I would just avoid the clouds in my own way, which often involved going out rather than in. However, for some reason this is now causing issus with dps going out of healing range.


Anyone have any tips on how to get used to the pattern of the clouds while making sure everyone stays up? Any advice is much appreciated.

My other question involves mana efficiency. I see all of you talking about haste and how amazing it is, and how you all never have any mana problems anymore. However, my mana is really not very good at all. Part of this is because I heal in my 25 mans with a horrendous team of healers, and I am often spamming hard to try to make up for their lack of healing. I'm not clamining to be amazing myself or anything like that, but judging from the meters and the fact that I don't die to every random environmental hazard thrown my way, I at least can fare a little better than my fellow healers. At any rate, I have been going for more crit in an attempts to improve my mana. Is this the wrong approach?

I also gem entirely for intellect; my blue gems are spirit/int and my yellow are sp/int. Is this a good thing? I was always under the impression that gemming did not make as big of a difference for healers as it does for dps anyways, so I just went with the int and stuck with it.

On 10 man Yogg, I just stand in the middle and pre-cast PoH so that it lands as the adds explode. When she hasn't cast Sara's Fervor for a while, I take a few steps away to avoid unlucky debuff+explosion damage deaths. For 25 man, just watch the movement of the clouds well in advance. They move in circles orbiting the center of the room. Plan your route ahead of time and if you're really pressed to put out some healing, PW:S yourself (if you have the Body and Soul talent) to help you dodge clouds and get back in range.

For regen problems, even with full intel gems, check how you're managing mana regen cd's. Hymn of Hope + Shadowfiend (instead of using them separately) at least once per fight helps, making sure you're in range of mana tide if it's available helps, begging for innervate helps and using Potion of Nightmares - Item - World of Warcraft instead of Runic Mana potions where possible helps. After that, all you can do is try cut back on any unnecessary healing. For instance, when tantrum ends and the raid is 75% hp, leave the topping up to the druids.

As for the haste discussion, it's important to reiterate that haste has a very diminished value for instant-cast spells compared to its value for PoH (especially when you only have 2/3 or even 0/3 serendipity stacked at certain points in fights). I personally plan to try out stacking haste this week, I'll try remember a WWS.

On a separate topic, is anyone using the Holy Nova glyph since its nerf? I'm wondering if it's still worth using at Mimiron Hard mode 25 man. Looking at some theoretical numbers in RAWR, the glyph seems worth it, but I don't think RAWR is factoring in the Prayer of Healing glyph. If that's the case, it appears that PoH is slightly better (HPS and HPM), but the glyphed Holy Nova could be invaluable with the movement requirements. A WWS of glyphed Holy Nova, or advice for healing that hard mode would be much appreciated (I've done it many times on 10 man, just not 25 man yet).