Ah, I see now -- I knew I was missing something. Thanks, that helps a lot.

Ignore. I misread something.

The 60/40 value was a very arbitrary ratio. I actually don't use the values from it personally and as I have stated previously don't recommend trying to come up with a combined value. The numbers provided were a "close enough" for those that aren't looking to maximize gear for each circumstance.

Realistically what you should know is how valuable stats are for throughput and for longevity. Then how/why each stat is valuable which is specifically true for comparing crit vs. haste. At that point you can set your gear up optimally for each fight and role. For example if you are tossing out a lot of PW:S primarily to mitigate raid damage and don't use other heals for any significant portion of you healing then you care about getting to the BT'd haste cap, stacking SP, having enough longevity for the length of the fight. That scenario crit is of little to no value because it doesn't help PW:S.

The valuation of the stats outside of the ratio are based on my spreadsheet. If you look at throughput for example you can find the hidden page that calculates how each stat impacts the current healing for a specific spell. Then the spells are weighted on a provided value for what % of casts you use that spell. This is then combined into a net value for each stat... These values change as gear changes, spell composition changes, ..etc.

Yep, the more I progress, the more I understand what you mean about Crit and Haste only being good to a certain point. I'm currently around 30% holy crit and 25% haste (raid-buffed). I'm under BT most of the time, so with that much haste, adding more isn't worth much. I have noticed that the number of DA's popping up seem much less than it used to, but I think that's due to the fact that I'm doing a lot more shielding due to Soul Warding. As a result, more crit just isn't worth that much either. So now it starts boiling down to Int/MP5 if you need regen -- otherwise: just stack spellpower.

Someone made a comment a while back about picking gear based on iLvl is about as good a method as any, and while that's a bit of an exaggeration, it's really not that far from the truth.

Looking at the whole stat weighting discussion the first thing I do is ignore int/stam/spellpower these are close to a constant based on iLevel and slot. This leaves spirit, haste, crit and MP5 as the only stats you actually have to consider. Now with Crit beyond ~ 30% raid buffed being of dubious utility and Haste beyond 10% suffering the same issue you are basically juggling between MP5 and spirit in most cases. Which one you value more probably has more to do with what your offspec is. If you are disc/shadow you probably don't care which one you take but if you take Holy as your second spec you probably want to favour spirit so your gear does double duty.

As disc what you want is more spellpower but because the SP total is fixed relative to slot and ilevel it's probably what you want to focus on from gems once you hit the crit and haste soft caps. Unlike most healers who suffer significant dimishing returns on SP after ~2k spell power disc priests and shields can always be usefully bigger. If you are below the soft caps what stat you want to focus on is probably going to depend primarily on how your raid takes/heals damage and the relative skill of the players in the raid. Some people will get better return from regen others from Haste to increase throughput or crit to get more Aegis shields on the tank.

Finally I find that stat weighting tools such as rwar are damn near useless for healers because of the tight bounds that they operate within. The fact is that even on the same fight your casting pattern can differ radically from one week to the next because this week the MT warrior is at the dentist and the Bear is tanking the fight today. Thus the only way to truly decide what stat to focus on is to critically review your own healing and focus on the things that you are personally lacking.

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I am not so sure sustained hps and peak hps work any better than longevity and throughput. Peak hps is ok, although it is similar to throughput. However, I do not see how sustained hps addresses a specific practical problem well.

My rather simplistic view is that gear can only help address two very specific problems you encounter while healing:

1. If you simply cannot churn out enough healing to keep people, that is a throughput problem. Increasing either your peak hps or your throughput seems to address that issue fairly directly.

2. If you can keep people alive for while but then run out of mana, that is a longevity problem. Looking at mp5 addresses this problem fairly directly, but sustained hps addresses it only in an oblique way.

It seems awkward and contrived to address what really comes down to a mana problem in a metric that uses hps as its unit of measure. While I'm sure that sustained hps is highly correlated with longevity and could be used as a substitute, I wonder why we wouldn't just look at mana directly, since that is what we run out of.

In other words, it makes sense to quantify a healing output problem with a metric in healing per time. By similar reasoning, it makes sense to quantify a mana output problem with a metric in mana per time units.

A lot of people have said things along those lines. Especially for discipine priests, I think random gear choices based purely on ilvl and brainlessly followed is a viable gearing strategy. It is probably better than those who come here looking to find out "What is better? Haste or crit?" and then stack one and neglect the other. Think of it as a strategy which avoids bad/misguided optimizations very well since by chance you are very unlikely to have a significant stat imbalanced.

Of couse I think it is possible to do better than random choices within the same ilvl. In a particular role, it might make sense to optimize a bit one way or another. But even then it won't make a huge difference.

However, even if what I'm saying is true and only gear ilvl makes any real difference, it won't stop people trying to optimize their gear. Based on all the discussion here and elsewhere about BiS items, it seems obvious to me that the quest for "the best" gear is an end unto itself. It doesn't matter if optimizing stats really helps because people just like doing it anyway...

And I don't want to be a grinch and spoil everyone's fun, so please optimize your gear if it pleases you. We do all this for fun, right? I just don't want anyone thinking he/she HAS to worry about that in order to play well.

Exactly. Your situation is constantly changing as a healer, so maximizing towards a particular common circumstance does not make much sense. It's a brittle strategy -- not robust. Instead, minimizing your chances of "breaking" in less common but possible scenarios may make more sense. Admittedly I am biased by being a biologist, since that is how nature operates (that is, "optimization" is attained by making extreme fatal traits go extinct more than by prospering extreme positive traits). Still, I would argue that as a healer your job is more to keep people barely alive under a variety of circumstances than to keep people alive "very well" under optimal circumstances.

Exactly. Once you hit a few key limits, the differences start getting smaller and much harder to quantify.

However, I really enjoy the metagame of gear optimization. I love all the tools and spreadsheets. I know at the end of the day that it might not make any difference, but I love my lists...

While that is true, it on the other hand makes passing on gear that much easier - if the item has the same ilvl and no extra gemslot its very safe to pass until absolutely no one else wants it.

Very well worded.

I also have a personal love of the meta-game of gear choices, so I spend lots of time working formulas to figure it out. I realize that in the real world we don't heal in optimized rotations, but I think there are ways to get around this problem.

Currently I use my own WWS logs to get my casting patterns. Rather than answering the question of how much better at healing a stat makes me in a theoretical situation, I can answer the question of how much better it would have made me last week, which is a pretty decent indication of how much better it will make me next week. It's not perfect, but it's very real-world. It also helps me a lot personally because I play in a 10-man guild, so most of the theoretical theory-crafting I see doesn't apply very directly to me.

Another way I can think to try to optimize stats in a real-world context could be to look at the breakpoints that we are actually going to encounter. For ten man I might ask myself questions like:

1) Do I have enough mana to spam enough PoH's to get through Frozen Blows?
2) Do I have enough throughput to deal with a Fusion Punch followed by a hit or two when a Rune of Death appears under Steelbreaker's tank?
3) Will my mana pool last through Vezax?
4) Will I have enough throughput to keep the raid alive after Ground Tremors in Freya+3?

Ulduar actually throws a lot of unique healing situations at us, and those situations are very different in the 10- and 25-man raids. If the group isn't winning a particular encounter, think about which stats are going to fix that. Ultimately this is probably very difficult to translate into actual numbers, especially when there are so many different fights, but I did write myself a simulator for tank healing on Sarth+3 to get stat weightings for that fight (back when that was the only fight worth worrying about).

I suppose, though, that I can't really prove that my stat weighting is better than selecting higher ilvl items at random. After all, I gear radically differently than most of the people who discuss gearing on this forum, and really, all of us who found our own ways of getting GoTR have reason to think our gearing method is "good enough." I guess we'll see about Algalon.

Rawr has a custom role that allows you to do exactly this. Use your WWS/WMO(preferred) and enter in relevant information and it will do calculations to show how you can improve yourself gear wise for the next time you do this fight.

Knowing you, I thought you might bring this up, because it is a good point. Changing your heal per mana will affect your mana by decreasing the rate at which you spend out your mana. This would affect your longevity without changing your mana regen. Longevity is actually proportional to:



So I am a bit uncomfortable with using mana regen as a surrogate for longevity since then you are implicity assuming your mana pool and your mana burn rate (the rate at which you spend out mana) are fairly fixed. That is fairly true for mana but your mana burn rate is affected by a lot of things, which does make me uneasy. Also, mana regen is related to longevity via a hyperbolic transform, which is very non-linear and tough to wrap your brain around.

Still, sustained hps has even more nebulous meaning to me. So if I have X sustained hps, what does that tell me about my chance to run out of mana on a particular fight? I don't know. "More is better" is about all I know. At least with mana regen, I have some idea about how quickly I am spending mana, and so I can estimate how a certain amount of Mp5 might slow that and how that ultimately will affect how quickly I run oom.

Also, I don't think it is all that crazy to assign negative Mp5 value to haste. The practical problem you're trying to get at is how the denominator is affected in the above longevity formula. There are a few alternative ways to approach that problem, but if you assume a spam healing (i.e. near max throughput) situation, then spell power and crit do not a affect that denominator and haste does (in a negative way).

Although some may disagree, I think that is a fairly intuitive approach. The "feel" of haste is that you can heal faster, but also that you run through your mana faster. With spell power and crit, I do not have a sense that my mana lasts longer -- only that I can heal for more. Maybe others end up feeling "Wow, this spell power really makes my mana go farther", but that has not happened to me, even though I know I can heal more with the same mana.

Alternatively, you could reject the "spam healing" situation and postulate that you have a fixed amount to heal. This is essentially what sustained hps does. In that case, your mana burn rate is unchanged by haste but goes down from spell power and crit. So an alternative to sustained hps would be to assign positive Mp5 values to crit and spell power.

Overall, I would like a better way to quantify longevity than what we currently have... but I really do not think any such metric should be measured in heal per sec. That just doesn't make sense to me. It is just the wrong unit of measure. I can live with mana per time or time, but heal per time is... odd.

Perhaps a more useful measure would be to know how long you can sustain your maximum hps. Sure, you don't usually operate at your maximum hps, but that would give you some useful information nevertheless. For instance, if you can sustain your maximum hps for 5 minutes, you know you are not going to run oom unless a fight lasts longer than that. For longer fights, you may need to slow down to last. That is useful to know, but I do not know how to easily translate sustained hps into such useful information.

You stated perfectly the 2 options.
Many people consider the "spam" option, where you are at your maximum throughput for the whole fight. In such cases, indeed, haste has a negative value.

I prefer the "fixed amount to heal" scenario, especially as a raid healer in holy. In many fights, I am used to provide the burst when needed, and then heal with cheaper heals / heal less. Basically, I still use the heal / sit model, but in order to adapt to the damage pattern. I can't spam POH for the whole fight, and I want to spam it when needed.
Now, in this scenario. you want to consider what is the maximum amount you can heal. As I assume a fixed fight length, this is equivalent to the hps you can sustain in the fixed fight length (it's just dividing by a constant). Note that in both cases, the fight length has the same impact on the relative weigth between crit / spellpower and regen. Finally, I don't know any way (and I don't think there is any) to remove the impact of this fight length, because healing (at least successful) won't have any impact about it. It depends only on your dps (and marginally on the damage you can add as healer). But if you prefer, you can consider total healing done. It's the same, just in a different unit (that is less clear to combine with peak hps).

As a final remark, if you run with a fixed amount of healers, the "fixed amount to heal" option seems right to consider. The fight length will be determined by the boss HP and your effective dps, and you need to survive for the whole fight (ie heal for the boss_dps x fight_length). I know that healers can be removed for dps. The option to do it within this settings is to "adapt" the fight length on the number of dps, and see wether you can sustain the needed hps or not for the fight length.

PS : The reason I want to keep the "peak" hps metric is because the boss damage is not evenly distributed in time, and you sometimes need more temporary hps.

Ideally I want metrics that make no assumptions about what the healer might be asked to do, including assumptions about how much healing needs to be done or how long a fight lasts. In other words, I want to know general bounds on what the healer is capable of, regardless of the particular encounter, raid makeup, or whatever.

For instance, peak hps is one such limit. That does not depend on who else is in raid, nor does it depend on the encounter. It is just a useful, general property of the healer. Even though that healer may never have to operate at max hps, it is still useful to know his/her peak hps.

Along a completely different dimension, an analogous measure on how long a healer can heal would be nice, although it is not nearly so obvious how to measure this best. I do not expect healers to be spam healing most of the time, but it still may be useful to know how long healers can maintain their maximum hps.

In theory, I don't object to following a "fixed amount to heal" scenario. But in that case I would want to specify a fixed rate of healing (instead of a fixed time) and ask "How long can you maintain X HPS?" And that is really the critical point for me: knowing how long a healer can last under some standard conditions is useful, but knowing how much hps you can maintain over a standard time interval is not. I'm not sure I'm getting that across well.

I guess another way I could say it is that sustained hps really answers the wrong question for me. I'd prefer to know how long I can heal at a certain rate rather than knowing at what rate I can heal for a certain length of time.... Hope that makes more sense.

Incidentally, you could specify an infinite time interval for sustained hps. This would answer "How much can I heal from my regen alone?", and it sort of gets around the problem of specifying a time. However, it still does not really answer the questions I most want to answer.

I agree with your idea of general bounds.
The throughput bound is easy : it's the peak hps, and correspond to the maximal hps you can provide in heavy damage phases.
The regen bound is less obvious. Basically, it depends on two main factor :

1. The needed hps you want to sustain
2. The duration you need to maintain it

Knowing both parameters, you can have an answer "Yes we can" or "No, you'll die".
Knowing only one, you can compute the limit for the other parameter (ie determine regions with answer yes and regions with answer no).

I don't have any theoretical reason to favor one approach or the other. Both makes sense, and are based on the same mathematical model. You just change the parameter you set up in the model (either fight length or needed hps).

I prefer to set up the fight length, but that's a personal opinion. The first reason for this is that I have a better estimation of fight length, which I also find more stable between fights that for needed hps. The second one is that I don't need to "change" the needed hps when my gear updates. Fight length is about the same order for every boss in LK (longer bosses have usely more regen phases). Starting Naax in blues, you want to heal for 6 minutes, but light damage. In hard mode Ulduar, you want to heal as mental for still about 6 minutes. I just know that if my peak hps is way above my sustained hps, I could do with more regen. If my sustained hps is close to my peak hps, it means I don't need a lot more regen.
But this is more practical reasons that theoretical ones. Last one I already indicated : there is a natural way to merge sustained hps and peak hps metrics. You need to be more clear about hidden weights when merging longevity and peak hps : you're adding apples and oranges.

I think you are right that to desire very general bounds. As you said, peak HPS is one such bound, and in my opinion quite useful to determine the abilities of one healer(however, one might have to differentiate between single target and raid-wide healing, especially if one wants values which are comparable between classes). Obviously the other important question is sustainability, however it is in no way obvious how to measure this.

Your first idea was to measure how long a given healer can sustain a certain rate of healing, a value one could measure in minutes per 1k hps. However, the fundamental problem is that time and hps are not anti-proportional to each other, so one has to fix an arbitrary hps value and just assume it is a good estimate. Again this is completely arbitrary and depending on class, spec and encounter may be wildly off.

Personally I had this idea as well and I think it is better than most other metrics. It is independent of raid set up(under the assumption that buffs like replenishment or paladin blessings are present), which is already a big bonus. You said it does not answer the questions you would like to have answered, and I agree. However I think you want something which just is not independent of the raid and encounter, so you cannot find an answer to this. So lets look at what information such a sustained hps value would yield. Beside the obvious interpretation(you could heal at this rate indefinitely), it is a measure of optimal sustained healing, in the sense that in practice your value will be lower due to overhealing, suboptimal choices of spells etc. Since it is class and spec independent(again, perhaps split in single target and raid-wide), one can simply add the values of all healers to get the raid sustained healing ability. Compare it with the similar sustained incoming damage of a specific encounter and one has an estimate of the number of healers necessary.

An additional advantage is that it is directly comparable to peak HPS. Peak HPS is the upper bound of the healing, infinitely sustained HPS is the lower bound. Actual healing will be somewhere in between. Also, by not using the mana pool size for sustained HPS(except for regeneration), there is this buffer to use for peak HPS without reducing your sustained HPS.

As a sidenote, I like both values because I have emotions attached to their interpretation. The infinitely sustained HPS is the "completely bored threshold", while the peak HPS is the "frantic healing goal", both of which I have experienced and can interpret.

After writing this wall of text, I have realized that the biggest plus in my book (beside the above intuition) is the fact that you get valued which might be comparable between different classes.

I've been following up on the discussion with haste. One thing I've found people aren't mentioning to often is Prayer of Healing and haste.

Lately, the more we do hardmodes, the more I find myself helping raid heal with Prayer of Healing. And even though I've got 420 haste in normal gear, I do feel like I could use more haste to power my Prayer of Healings.

I find it quite hard to keep a high level of haste in ulduar because it just seems to be much easier to acquire items with crit (and a high itemlevel for higher int and spellpower). But you're right of course. I find I'm either shield spamming (so crit and haste are useless/capped anyway), penance is more of an emergency spell and flash heal has become something used rather seldom. So maybe we should really evaluate crit vs haste on the basis of prayer of healing.

But concerning raidhealing, has anybody compared Prayer of Healing to just shield spamming the whole group? Obviously Prayer of Healing will be more hps but how about hpm?

I have decided try out Disc spec and since i will be using pw:shield a lot i have to ask a question about it. I am guessing its a pretty noob question to most of you here but anyway, here goes:

I allways get slapped in the head by some raid members, the tanks more than others that pw:shield does:
1. prevent rage from generating on tanks.
2. make the tank cause less agro.

what is false and what is truth in these 2 statements??

Hope you can help out, Thanks
Josh

You are right, I did not think of that. Of course reality is more complicated, but you cannot compress the reality of healing down to a few numbers anyway.

Yes, that is how I would calculate the indefinite sustained hps for a single target. PW:S and Penance whenever available, and then "filler" spells. A question is whether to include renew and prayer of mending. Renew can be extremely efficient, but in general is not, and prayer of mending helps the raid often more than the first target, but is important anyhow. Back to the calculation, spellpower and crit give you bigger heals and therefore increase HPS, Manaregen allow for more filler spells and increase HPS as well, and I am pretty sure that haste is for sustained healing completely neutral, meaning that it does not affect the sustained HPS number. The reasoning is that you will be forced to not cast anyway because of mana constraints, so haste just increases the time of not casting, but not to the extend that you can get out of the five second rule. Which is interesting in itself, since the stat weight for haste would be 0 for the sustained hps, and for the peak hps mp5, spirit and int(except for the small crit increase) have stat weight 0. This is a nice orthogonality property of the two values. As a consequence, spellpower is probably the best stat to improve both peak and sustained hps, which matches my experience to socket spellpower gems for best results.

The two points are intertwined. If the tanks get less rage, they will generate less threat. However, neither are true. It was changed recently so that you still generate rage even though the incoming damage is absorbed.

This kind of question fits perfectly in the Priest: Simple Questions/Simple Answers thread by the way.

Actually, thanks to Rapture they should even be generating more rage/aggro. Rapture - Spell - World of Warcraft