First, don’t take comments made here personally. The purpose of the forum is to allow critical analysis of various ideas.

Second, as Hodor said, this concept of 10MM is intriguing. It would be great to know if my gear would get me through a certain fight. I hope you will take Hodor’s comments and mine and use them to refine your spreadsheet. I would really like to see a revised version.

My question is: How does this differ from Shamstats? Shamstats currently tells you how long you can sustain casting depending on your gear, talents and buffs and which spells you are casting.

Sorry, but I still do not understand how you arrived at your values.


This makes sense and is very interesting.

Granted, the value of various stats does change depending on the fight. However it would be unfair to call it a ludicrious concept. It's used by many classes -- Tank Points, Rogues with AEP (Agility Equivalency Points), etc.

Don't make assumptions.

Grays: the 10MM thing is interesting.

When I'm not raiding/working I'll have a decent read through of the calculations (although if you can give me a brief rundown on how you worked the calculations that would be useful.

Also, when you're talking about your 10MM figure, are you taking into account extra use from haste?

Haste might not be needed in any fight, but haste can also make fights easier. It has nothing to do with 'meters' (i top them with or without haste).
The attention haste was getting is the fact that there were no numbers on it, and very little tested or theorycrafted on it. Now, if it sucks, it sucks, but i'd rather have the numbers there to prove it sucks than just blindly saying so.
If as you say, "it's pure HPS", then haste will increase your hps far more than +heal will on a point for point basis, especially once you get to 2k+heal.

It's all about balance, the particular fight and your healing assignment. I prefer Eye of Gruul to Fathom Brooch on most occasions. In fact, since getting the Fathom Brooch i've found it distinctly underwhelming and even prefer Ribbon of Sacrifice. Why Eye of Gruul; it's +heal and chance to restore mana and as i'm mostly chain casting chain heal it works out better.
Do i run oom with or without haste. No. Each to their own. At least if you have the information you can make an 'informed' decision on whether or not it is good for you.

I'm around 10% haste with 2150 +heal at the moment. Its easier to increase my haste than pushing my +heal to increase my HPS. Haste is an important stat and I will stack it as long as my mana regen support this.

Haste might not be needed in any fight, but you also dont need more +Heal in any fight. Haste is an way to improve your performance. Its not the one and only way, but I feel its an strong stat and I love my haste gear.

I think you miss something if you complete ignore haste rating.

It is not silly at all if you actually get the point of the discussion. People were calculating these in order to estimate the cap on haste, beyond which haste becomes nearly useless.

In order to discuss further your point of haste being useless, I'll just underline something simple : as you said yourself haste allows to get a higher HPS at the expense of a higher mana usage (higher than without haste, because haste do NOT decrease the HPM of your spells). But why are we shamans even in the raid in the first place, it is to produce some healing, not having a full mana bar at the end of the fight. What I mean by this is that HPS is the only real important stat and mana regen is basically useless until you go oom. And honestly with the changes to water shield I find it really hard to go oom even without a shadow priest.

In conclusion, you have to learn to love haste ! ;-))

Cheers

Put it another way.
362 Haste can see you cast CHR3 with 200 less +healing for the same HPS as unhasted CHR5, and for longer.
With equivalent +heal, you can cast CHR2 at 362HR at the same HPS as CHR4 for approximately half the same time again before going oom.

I have never said haste was useless. I said a large portion of the discussion and awe around haste was.

I've made my point and I'm standing by it. Throw me some numbers and situations where haste will tip the scale for you, and I will eat my words. As I see it, nothing like it has been produced.

Answer me this: To get some haste, say 200, where would you cut into your item budget? Int and stam are pretty much fixed values that follow your gear so we're left with mp5 and +heal. What would you cut back on to gain those 200 haste?

Edit: looking around wowwiki, I found that iit seems 1 haste raing equals 1 item value. 1 heal equals 0.455 item value. This gives those 200 haste the same item budget as 439.56 +heal.

Hey Skyhoof, just noticed something and thought you might want to make a slight change in the guide under the totemic focus section.

Totemic Focus: Reduces the cost of your totems by 25%. It provides a bigger benefit than Ancestral Knowledge. At worst, it will probably equate to giving you an extra 4.6 mp5 (Scenario 1). At best, it could give you the equivalent of 11.8 mp5 (Scenario 2).

Scenario 2: You are in a melee group dropping Windfury, Strength of Earth, Healing stream and Searing Totem.
Windfury: 325 mana
Strength: 300 mana
Healing: 95 mana
Searing: 205 mana x 2
Total: 5,650 mana during a 10 minute fight. The talent would save you 1,412 mana or 11.8 mp5



Assuming this is a ten minute fight with 10 casts of searing wouldn't overall dps be higher if a fire Elemental were tossed in at some point? So removing 2X searing and adding one fire elemental @ 680 mana gives you 12.2 mp5.

Also i think we can safely say that this talent is worth more in reality than on paper. I find myself (and would assume that others do as well) refreshing totems often before the entire duration is up when i have GCD's to spare as a precautionary move. Given even a 5% margin of error you would need a whole new set refreshes adding another 925 mana or the regen up to 14.1. Add to this two uses of Mana tide and things look even better.

By no means am i suggesting that this is a "must have" talent, but i do believe that you should bump the mp5 numbers that it returns upwards slightly as it does preform better than listed.



I'm going to review some random WWS parces from t5-t6 and look at total totems cast and see if i can find a practical average value for this talent. Going to leave out t4 even though a longish Maiden fight for a new Kara guild might be the best bank for the buck with the talent.

If you check some of the haste items, the neck for example, it's got sprit on it, but it has 75 healing AND haste AND Intellect. It lacks stamina.
Haste doesn't solely replace the item budget for healing.

I understand your point better : you don't feel that the usefulness of spell haste is in line with its cost in item budget. I agree that spell haste is quite expensive in that regard. However we should also note that we get more overall stats on an item if the budget is spent on more different stats. So we get more stats on an item with haste, heal and mp5 than on an item with only heal and mp5, at equal item level.

In any event all healers will have to adapt their playstyle when their haste increases, with more deranking and the such, in order to make the most of haste. It's not like we have much choice anyway since all healing items in sunwell have haste rating (from what I've seen)

Okay, a lot of replies to work through, let me cover as much as I can. (Geez, nothing at all for two days and then suddenly like 10 replies. 0_o )

Clarification on item weights

When blizzard calculates item level for any given item, it uses a formula. As one step in this formula, it applies a modifier to the value itself to make it line up with the other stats. In other words, 1 Int may equal 1 Spell Haste Rating (and every other rating, for that matter), but 1 Int != 1 Sta, and 1 Int != 1 Healing.

Let's say you have two items of the same item level. One has NOTHING but healing, one has NOTHING but int. The two values are different. But if you multiply the Healing by 0.455, it will then be equal to the int. It's a way of budgeting stats, and it's the method Blizzard uses to put a value on what each stat is worth.

So what is Ranking? It's taking the four derived values and coming up with a value that roughly mirrors the way item level is calculated. As I have reiterated many times, though, you can't take Ranking as anything more than a sorting algorithm, and you focus on the four derived stats.

I'm not saying Shamstats is bad, but it tries to accomplish waaaay too much. It has a lot of bells and whistles, and that's fine. (It also can't be opened by OpenOffice without a ton of errors, but whatever.) However, it's geared to be the most useful to elemental shamans, who need to know how much X crit or X spell damage is worth based on everything they have equipped or are buffed with. (This is the same for nearly every other DPS class/spec--the value of certain stats changes depending on what they have equipped.) Healers have no such restriction. Healing, Mana, Haste, and Stamina are four entirely independent variables. My spreadsheet is simply designed to illustrate the differences between items in a clear fashion.

As for my comments on HEP: I explained thoroughly in my last post why I feel that trying to come up with some sort of HEP (which is similar, but distinct from the Ranking stat) is a bad idea. I feel that most resto shamans should carry around at least as much gear in their bag as they have equipped, and swap pieces out for different fights based on their needs. The point is, items cannot be valued solely on one culmination of some formula, and that be the "one set" they will equip in every fight. Fights are different, and if you find yourself running out of mana, you need more regen and less healing. If your mana pool is fine, you need less regen and more healing/haste.

Perhaps I should run another example to illustrate my point:
[Shard of the Virtuous] never dropped for me in the 8 or so months I farmed kara, so I finally just got [Gladiator's Salvation] to fill the gap until I could get a new healing mace. This was a few months ago. It turns out in 2.4, [Gavel of Naaru Blessings] is badge loot! So should I care about Shard anymore? Intuition says no, as the Gavel is ranked at 251 (and only the [Crystal Spire of Karabor] puts out more healing), while the lowly Shard is only ranked at 196 and more than 100 less healing. But, I'm still going to get it, and put it in my bag. Why? Shard has more than 1000 more 10MM, and I'm going to put Spellsurge onto it. It will cut a deep gouge into my +Healing, but if I and other caster DPS put in my group with me are running out of mana in a long fight, I need to equip it to do my job. It's a situational item, and I don't expect to use it a whole lot, but I will have it when I need it.

I wasn't; I was illustrating why HEP or a formula to determine the "total effectiveness" of a gear is a bad idea to blindly RELY on. (If it was anything, it was more of a warranted argument than an unwarranted assumption.) In the next paragraph I explained that it was an extreme example. The paragraph after that, I illustrated an example of my own experience, and why looking at the four derived values helped me get a better handle on the value of a piece of gear I was looking at.

IRT Raut

Not quoting directly but, I believe you're expecting more out of the sheet than I intended. This is not meant to evaluate the gear you have on and determine whether you need more regen, or HPS, or whatever. All of these values are left up to the user. Relying on a single spreadsheet to tell you exactly how much regen you need to heal for X minutes at Y hps leaves you wide open to all sorts of variables like how other healers are performing, whether you have to run to reposition, whether the tank gets crit/crushed, whether emergencies happen and you have to pop swift Healing Ways, or spam LHW to keep a tank alive, etc. Let's say you come up with a flat value: I can heal for X minutes at Y hps. Both of those are going to be like 20% fuzzy either way based on what happens in a particular fight, right? So why come up with a precise value?

All of these things are serious considerations but I believe they are outside the scope of simple gear comparison. You can do that with Shamstats if you like; that's fine. The purpose of this spreadsheet is simply to consider what items you want to target based on the differences between the gear you have and your target gear, as well as compare pieces you have for their purpose in various fights. It is also designed to illustrate the differences between, let's say, the top 10 pieces in the game for various slots.

I also believe that coming up with something like "get 150 mp5 then stack +Healing" is fine for a rule of thumb "normal" set, but not having extra regen gear or extra haste/healing gear in your inventory to fit different fights is just coming unprepared. Use itemrack to set up balanced, healing, haste, regen, and stamina sets based on the gear you own. Swap into them for fights that require them. If you have a boss on farm, then one set fits all; if you're trying to progress, you need to change your gear around every attempt to fit what the last attempt's problems were like.

In conclusion:

The sheet I made has a few advantages (for me, at least):
1. I do not believe that coming up with HEP or analysing all gear you have equipped plus buffs is necessary for simple gear comparison. This sheet accomplishes all its goals with no extra weight.
2. This sheet gives you four completely independent variables characteristic to ALL shaman-equippable healing gear, while completely ignoring crit, resilience, and spirit (except as it applies to healing w/priest buff).
3. Most Important: I can generate this sheet from scratch within minutes based on live Wowhead data and it will be complete as-is. Further, I can modify the format and appearance of the sheet as much as I want, and just re-run the script to generate everything in its completeness. Further, and perhaps most interesting, is that it uses an abstract system that I can provide to any class, any spec.

The sheet isn't "everything and the kitchen sink". The kitchen sink is fine, but wildly unnecessary for healers my view. If you're just looking at comparing gear specific to a slot, then four independent variables between pieces is all you really need.