Roffles

wheres the math behind this?\

Im a disc maintank healer and i was planning to stack crit inorder to have good DA procs while spamming greater heal. is this a bad idea?

 

moowalk

This is annoying for disc. One of our strengths is the ability to preshield the raid before damage hits.

For example, on NRB spamming shields on the melee will prevent an unlucky whirl + fire combo killing someone. Similarly on jaraxxus spam shielding the raid before a portal opens will reduce the chance of portal damage + lightning gibbing someone. The same is also true on algalon with stars + barrages.

The key to making this an effective strategy is that there isn't incidental raid damage to consume the shield before it is required. This aura will make shields worse the longer they've been on a target. Across a full 30 second shield duration you'll lose 3000 shield 'health'.

You could say that this makes disc better since there's less chance that the shield will expire without being consumed, but low value periodic raid damage doesn't kill people, spike damage does, and this makes shields far worse for preventing that occuring.

It'll make us look much better on the meters, but it won't make us more effective at keeping people alive.

 

Liths

I disagree. Unless they had a HoT on them chances are they'd be lower health when the AoE hit. Even if they had a healing stream totem or something it's under 100dps on everyone but tanks, not terribly noticeable. At worst your shield gets ~2k taken of it, and most of them will just have a fraction of that. If anything this is quite nice for priests if you ask me, forcing PoM to bounce every 3 seconds is a good thing.

 

Ayreon

Based on the wording of the debuff it is quite possible the damage is going to be unpreventable, thus not interacting with PW:S at all. Can someone check on PTR?

 

◊ madsushi

It was reported that this effect was a bug, and would be corrected on the PTR. It kills players at exactly 5 minutes and 3 seconds (with no outside intervention), so it may have been designed to kill AFK players.

Author of the Rogue column on WoW.com: Encrypted Text

 

Deschutes

i wanted to chime in on a couple of topics, and would love any input.

re: crit and shields:

there is a place where i often see my crit being used when tossing shields, and that is when my shield also gets a DA on the target. additional absorption is always welcome. raid buffed i'm usually seeing holy crit up over 35%, and i see a lot of DA.

re: haste and spirit

i have been choosing haste over spirit for one main reason. i am generally just on tank heals, and my favorite BT cast ( assuming i have the time available ) is a PoH. if the raid is taking a ton of damage, the tank *usually* is not, so i'll shield the tank, then hit PoH and try and help out the other healers, not just with the heal, but also leaving lots of DAs on the dps. while it's not quite as effective as spamming my shield on the party, it is much quicker.

kelani / draenor us

 

Miarose

The controversy is generally over Crit vs Haste, not Haste vs Spirit. So I don't quite understand what the correlation is that you're trying to make. You want more spirit in order to keep your regen up while you help out with raid healing? Go with int then if that's the case. Very rarely should you have to choose between haste and spirit on items. Only ones off the top of my head are royal moonshroud bracers versus bejeweled bracers. Spirit just isn't as important to us due to not having Spiritual Guidance.


Even on 10 man ToGC Anub, I rarely feel the need to heal with POH, but I'm always tossing out shields.

 

Venaliter

Our two piece tier 10 was updated (again!) several days ago and I haven't seen any discussion on it, specifically for a tank healing Disc priest.

Your Flash Heal has a 33% chance to cause the target to heal for 33% of the healed amount over 9 sec.


Anyone experimented with this on the PTR? Does it stack?

I wonder if the intent is for Disc Priests using Greater Heal as their go-to heal and weaving flash heal in to keep this HoT ticking, very similar to a Holy Paladin?

 

Starfire

Why would Greater Heal be our go-to heal when we have the 4 piece bonus? 'sides, the most likely reason for the change was so Holy priests wouldn't be penalized with SoL procs.

I am also willing to bet the Flash Heal will tick for 11% every 3 seconds.

 

l337n00b

Best case scenario it is a .33 * .33 = 10.9% bonus to our Flash Heal healing, so probably less than a 2% bonus to our overall healing. In the worst case where we cast multiple successive flash heals on a single target the chance of overwriting itself is very high and it would only be about a 2.1% bonus to Flash Heal throughput if it ticks every 3 seconds or a 3.2% if it ticks every second, so in either case a very small bonus. In reality it will be in between those numbers, you aren't going to spam flash heal and you aren't going to go out of your way to avoid casting them on people with the HoT. Of course a randomly applied HoT that people can't rely on being there is likely to get stomped, so the actual returns on it will probably be worse. Given all of this, and the weakness of the four piece, I'll probably end up passing t10 tokens to others who can use them more productively and taking whatever random drops there are for my own gear.

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

 

Squeakster

Speaking of the set bonuses, how about the 4-piece?

Assuming 25% spell haste, Penance takes 2.0/1.25 = 1.6 seconds to cast, Greater Heal takes 2.5/1.25 = 2.0 seconds to cast and Flash Heal takes 1.5/1.25 = 1.2 seconds to cast.

If you begin casting Penance, notice you proc the bonus and therefore immediately follow up with a Flash Heal, you will be able to cast your second Penance 1.6 + 1.2 = 2.8 seconds after you started casting the first one. Adjusting for lag let's say that's about 3 seconds. Three seconds instead of eight means you shaved five seconds off the cooldown.

So you have a 20%, or one-in-five, chance of taking five seconds off the CD, so you could say that on average over the course of a long fight it's like reducing the CD from eight seconds to seven. I know that's not a great way to think of it, because what it really results in is a random chance to have very high burst healing for a period of a couple seconds, and that in itself has certain benefits that are not obvious from "on average over the course of a long fight" type arguments. But the fact that the ability to supply that high burst is random also makes it much less useful.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

[Calculations below assuming 25% haste, 25% crit, 2500 SP, 3/3 Grace, 2/2 Focused Power]

Continuing with the argument that the set bonus, on average, reduces the Penance CD by one second means that in a 6 minute (360 second) fight you can cast 360/7=51.4 Penances instead of 360/8=45. So let's say an extra six Penance casts. At 25% haste that will take up 6*1.6=9.6 seconds.

Penance
(1580 + 0.5362(2500))*1.04*1.09 = 3312 HP/bolt
3312*.75 + 3312*.25*1.95 = 4099 HP/bolt including crits
4099*3ticks = 12296
12296/1.6seconds = 7685 HPS

Greater Heal
(4270 + 1.6135(2500))*1.04*1.09 = 9413 HP
9413*.75 + 9413*.25*1.95 = 11649
11649/2 = 5825 HPS

That extra 9.6 seconds spent casting Penance would (probably) have been spent casting something else, in this case I will assume Greater Heal.

9.6*7685 = 73776 healing with Penance
9.6*5825 = 55920 healing with GH

73776-55920 = 17856 extra healing due to Penance instead of GH

17856/360seconds = 49.6 extra HPS due to Penance instead of GH

Or you can think of it as being a handful of randomly occurring (uncontrollable) times in the fight during which you can put out a couple extra thousand healing to one target.

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A benefit of 49.6 HPS seems pretty underwhelming to me, especially given that it's a random proc and random procs generally do not lend themselves well to healing duties. Also, in order to take full advantage of it you have to pay close attention to notice the proc before Penance finishes casting so you can immediately follow up with a Flash Heal (L2Play, I know, I know), and even then it's only useful if you actually have a need for another Penance immediately after.

I must note I have neglected to include mana savings due to using Penance instead of another heal.

 

Kaylum

I could use some assistance reviewing the WoL from last night.

Link: World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis
Then please click on Healing by Spell.
This is Fada's report for the 4th try of the Twins. There are a few very odd things happening here that I can not figure out. Top spell is glyph of PWS. This is essentially straight 2K heal that a target gets when i cast PWS on them. Generally this should be about 10% of my over all healing because this heal is 10% of what ever my bubble is capable of absorbing. However here we see i casted PWS 75 times. Out of those 75 times it only absorbed any damage 16 of the times.Now i cant tell you if it absorbed full damage all 16 time or just partial damage but just that it only absorbed any damage 16/75 casts. This is very odd and I do not understand what is happening here.

So I take a look at Juggernaut. This is Xandrine's report for the same fight.
Link: Link: World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis
Then please click on Healing by Spell.
So he is doing a bit more Penace then I was. Reguardless look at his PWS and his Glyph of PWS. His shied is absorbing damage. We see that he cast the shield 44 times. out of those 44 times 38 times the target was not at full health and received healing from the glyph.

I am a little worried because I have no clue what is causing the difference.

 

Ellyh

Short version: That report is all buggered up.

Long version: It looks like your particular parse is not correctly counting absorbs. I say this as your pally's sacred shield only scored 10k healing for the fight which is stupidly low as well. WoL has something of a history of recording shields badly, it really really stuffed up when Val'anar first appeared.

 

• mutagen

PW:S parsing at WOL on Twins is broken (and really always has been).

Originally WOL interpreted any absorb event as belonging to the last shield event. Unfortunately Blizzard designed the black or white buff as an absorb against the constant damage and the combat logs don't distinguish where absorb events come from. So the WOL method of measuring absorbs gave fantastic numbers to any absorb effect, far beyond the amount PW:S or any other shield would absorb.

WOL changed the parsing for this fight alone and now PW:S absorbs are underreported for Twins. I don't think they'll be able to fix it given their current architecture and the way Blizzard reports absorb events in the combat log. There's more discussion of the issue in the WOL forums. I've found their PW:S estimates reliable for other fights.

BTW the [Glyph of Power Word: Shield] is 20% and is probably the best way to estimate PW:S contribution for that fight.

 

Rorimli

I wanted to bring up the subject again, how much intellect would we really need for spirit to be better than mp5?

According to wowwiki the formula should be about this:

MP5 = 5 * (0.001 + sqrt(Int) * Spirit * Base_Regen) * 0.60 rounded up

Now we want to find the amount of intellect where 1 mp5 is equal to 2 spirit but we also apply enlightenment and Kings (2-(0.9*0.94)=1,154):

1 = 5 * (0.001 + sqrt(X) * 2 * 1,154 * 0.005575 ) * 0.60

X ~ 2684.46

Now this is buffed so lets find the unbuffed by retracting buffs but obviously not talents:

(2684.46 / 1.1) - 97 ~ 2311

That's quite alot. How much mana is that tho?

3863 + 20x1 + (15x2291=34365) = 38248 mana unbuffed.

So if you ever close in on those amounts unbuffed you might consider that spirit is better than mp5 :P I don't think I'll be getting there anytime soon tho.

 

Ellyh

Note that your test assumes you are casting constantly and are inside the 5 sec rule 100% of the time. As your casting % time decreases the value of spirit to MP5 increases rapidly. Taking ToC as the current benchmark only Twin Valks really requires 100% chain casting with the other fights fluctuating radically from 60-90% time inside the 5 sec rule based on your role and how skilled your raid is. For me I rate spirit about 1.2 spirit = 1 mp5 when averaged over the course of the run. I would expect that if my int gained another 200 or so that I would be close to a 1-1 ratio between a point of spirit and a point of Mp5

Given that with a spirit build I was able to 3 heal the first 4 bosses Heroic ToC 10 with no replenishment and basically no int stacking (28k mana buffed)I think that arguing which is better is kind of academic right now. If you are in 245 level gear and running out of mana you almost certainly have bigger issues in either your playstyle or raid to address over MP5 vs spirit.

Finally remember that spirit gear can dual purpose as good holy gear whereas MP5 is dire for holy.