Totemtoter

It is not as difficult as you imply to figure out what percentage of new spellpower would be overhealing, or at least reasonably approximate it. If you take a log parse and find the number of your heals that overhealed (every one of those would gain zero benefit from additional spellpower) and divide by the total number of heals you cast, you have a rough approximation. For a better approximation, you'd need to weight based on the coefficient of each heal. All of this would require quite a bit of work, and I honestly don't feel current parses give a good enough approximation of what to expect in the future to provide a good basis for the calculations.

I disagree that you should look at raw throughput, as it gives you a horribly distorted view. I would guess your holy paladins easily dominate the raw throughput, but lag behind AoE healers on effective healing. I have also never seen a single fight where any healer had 0% overhealing, even when downranking was available.

 

Grummy

The worst case scenario you are suggesting never happens. Even in 3D sarth parses, overhealing exceeds 30%.

 

TeKniciaN

Maybe i didn't word it properly, i don't mean overall. I'm talking about those critical periods during the fight when heavy damage is happening. This may constitute 1 minute of the total 5 minute fight. I'm not talking about overall.

Let me try to explain it in a story format since im not so good at explaining it in equations.

My point is that healing is very dynamic. My overheals during the first 1.5 minutes of sarth 3d for example might exceed 80%. People arent taking that much damage, i'm just topping them off. Then shit starts to hit the fan, for the next 1 minute my heals kick in to high gear to respond to increased damage, and my overheals drop to 20%. We then hit a critical point and the raid and tanks are taking huge damage, we cant keep them topped off, my overheals are almost nonexistent, under 10% as i bomb trying to prevent the quickly approaching deaths of the raid member. Then the fight evens out and we go back to a leisurely pace where i blatantly overheal and finish the last 3 minutes of the fight doing 50%+ overheals.

At the end of the fight my overheals show 37%.

I'm not talking about the average throughout the fight, i'm talking about those critical periods within the fight, when overhealing will be naturally low due to large health deficits and heavy sustained damage.

 

Totemtoter

It is still better to model what is actually happening in the game as closely as possible. If you only care about that time interval, base everything off of that portion of your logs to come up with stat weights. I think most people generally think of HEP values for a more sustainable level of healing though, and probably not specific to a single portion of a single encounter.

My main point is that it is mathematically justified to adjust spellpower values downwards to account for overhealing, although not while ignoring the overhealing that other stats cause.

 

TeKniciaN

Ok, i see where your coming from.

I suppose my main point is overheals don't matter when we are measuring throughput. And when measuring haste vs spellpower for HPS we should calculate it without overhealing in the equation.

Factoring overheals into the calculation about what increases your HPS/throughput more, haste vs spell power is irrelevant because overheals is a mana innefficency, and reducing overheals does not increase your throughput, it makes you more mana efficient.

 

Daidalos

I only think overhealing "matters" if its not due to just getting the heal off .05s faster and causing another healer to have the overheal instead of you. I don't think its is better for the raid in any way, except in situation where heals are too slow to land and someone dies. I think meters aren't really useful in this regard.

Restoration Shaman calculations:http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?k...IWv3sPmcYnEJUg

 

Handyhoof

I couldn't agree with Daidalos more. Additionally, advocating a stat - even in part - because it lets you snipe heals just to play the meter is really something that should be discouraged. In another light: if you don't need to cast back-to-back heals, and the damage velocity is too slow to be a problem or you're overlapping with other healers, the Haste is a wasted stat.

Haste has 2 real uses: Raw throughput in a back-to-back healing scenarios and lowering your reaction time in emergency scenarios. The former is easier to quantify and calculate into a visible return, but the latter is more important (in my view).

Overhealing happens, and happens a lot more without downranking. It can be treated as a coefficient in determining your Effective Healing. As you increase your throughput you are doing one of three things. You can take more of the healing burden on yourself, and keep your overhealing and active casting constant. You can simply increase your overhealing as has been suggested. Thirdly you could cast less. You lower your Active Casting time and do the same healing with the same amount of overhealing. Granted, these are normalized scenarios that would be trends formed over time. Which of the three (or combination thereof) is an issue of personal play that makes a universal result impossible.

 

Daidalos

Agreed Handy.

Just to clarify haste IS a good stat. I certainly use it and do not deny its benefits, I just think its real benefits are not really easily reducible to a simple HEP value by a formula that shows how much you overheal. Pay attention to your raids and you should be able to figure out if you need more/less haste. The only hard figure you can get from haste is HPS

Restoration Shaman calculations:http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?k...IWv3sPmcYnEJUg

 

testthewest

Well, at least theroretical, overhealing should reduce, if you use more small heals instead of fewer big ones.
So if you have less spellpower and more haste, you will overheal less with an individual heal. But you won't cast those additional cast you gain throu faster cast on full health targets.

An example: Let's say you heal the MT with only HW, and next time only LHW (ignore mana efficency\throuput for a moment), then your overheal should be less with LHW, since smaller heals fit in the the holes in the hp-bar of the tank better than big heals.

 

MatsT

While this may seem true at a first glance it's actually the other way around in many cases. If your spell finishes casting earlier, there is a window where a healer could decide to heal someone else because he had time to see your heal and cancel his or change target before starting. If everyone only had instant heals, overhealing could in theory be totally removed.

In a situation where the healing capacity of the raid is much larger than the healing need, haste is wasted, as i spellpower, mp5, crit and all other stats. Someone else would heal them instead, you wouldn't wipe anyway, so better gear is not needed.

In situations where it actually matters, haste will reduce the overall overhealing of the raid, not only your own.

 

• Philondra

I would add one caveat to this: in practical situations, the amount that haste will reduce raid overheal is strongly proportional to the amount of raid healing that comes from smart heals (specifically CH, as CoH and WG don't really heal much faster with increased haste.) As stated above, whenever a player has to make a decision, there is a chance they will make the wrong one, whether through poor play, latency, or health bar update lag. Smart heals are done server-side and eliminate this human error.

In some kind of bizarre WOW pyramid scheme, this has the interesting side effect of making haste more valuable for a resto shaman the more resto shaman that are in the raid. Let's take a hypothetical 10-man situation in which the healing capacity of the raid is approximately equal to the healing needed and the raid is clumped up such that all multi-target heals will always hit their maximum number of targets if possible. (I'm choosing 10 man because it lets us isolate the raid down to two raid healers.)

Situation: The raid just got hit for 8k damage. The raid healers are 1x Resto Shaman and 1x Holy Priest. At 0s, the holy priest begins casting PoH on her group and the Resto Shaman begins CH on someone not in the priest's group.

* If the Priest has more haste, PoH will land first and the Shaman's Chain Heal will only bounce to people not in the priest's group. As such, PoH heals 5 people for the same amount and Chain Heal heals 4 people for incrementally less, meaning that only one person has not received a heal and there is almost no overhealing (except for crit heals potentially topping someone off.)
* If the Shaman has more haste, CH will land first, and there is a non-zero possibility that the it will bounce to someone in the priest's group. Thus, when PoH eventually lands, it will hit the 5 people in the priest's group, potentially overhealing some of them due to errant CH bounces out of everyone's control. The total number of people healed is anywhere from 6 to 9, depending on how the CH bounced, but even the best case scenario is only equal to that in which PoH landed first. This introduces inefficiency into the raid healing unless the shaman and priest are superhuman in reading each other's actions.

If this raid healing combination was instead 2x resto shaman, then any difference in haste would be nearly inconsequential in terms of effective healing, as the slower Shaman's CH would automatically choose targets that the faster shaman didn't hit. However, when smart raid heals and targetted raid heals are mixed together, it is theoretically better for the smart heal's caster (usually a Shaman with CH) to have slower heals than the non-smart heal's caster. (Incidentally, the raid healing in this situation would also be less inefficient with 2x holy priests, as each could just PoH different groups and sidestep the heal sniping issue.)

I would conclude that if we are interested in raid survival rather than meter topping, haste's actual usefulness in a practical raid healing situation is directly related to the number of other resto shaman in the raid.

 

MatsT

Sounds more like it is directly related to the number of priests casting Prayer of Healing. That's the only spell that's really hurt by this kind of automatic sniping.

 

• Philondra

That's largely a semantic difference, as with to the upcoming 3.1 changes to prayer of healing to make it a more viable raid healing tool, PoH and CH will be the only spammable multitarget raid healing tools. Additionally, unless your guild has an overabundance of resto druids, our most common raid healing partner is the holy priest, and it looks like they will be casting a lot more PoHs in upcoming content. This odd interaction will likely become more pronounced going forward.

 

buzzed1979

Is Revitalizing Skyflare Diamond not worth considering? I have no numbers on it, I just assumed that the mp5 and the increase to crit healing was worth a look.

 

Maalek

At first sight, if you take a 15k critical heal on a 3.5 sec cast basis, 3% can be valued 450 hp ie 240 sp. With a 33% crit rate it means 80 sp.

With my value for sp and mp5 ity would make it roughly equal to the IED. With the value on the first page it would make it 10% better.

With our high crit rate, I find it a good meta for output, plus the 2 red requirement emphasizes on output

[edit] : but a lot might be spent in overheal

 

• Philondra

The 8 mp5 is very poor in terms of item budget. At standard raid buffed levels, the 21 int from [Insightful Earthsiege Diamond] and 2% int from [Ember Skyflare Diamond] provide greater regen for all reasonable levels of replenishment uptime.

3% critical healing is a fairly dubious benefit; even though most theorycrafting calculations are done assuming no overhealing, the critical heal would have had to have been 100% effective without the meta gem for the throughput bonus to be useful in an actual raid situation. It is worth much more on paper than it is in practice.

As the TTT points out, [Insightful Earthsiege Diamond] is probably the strongest gem overall because of the mana return proc, but if you truly do not find yourself running out of mana in any situation, then you may get more value out of [Ember Skyflare Diamond].

 

Kindralas

A couple of things:

First, haste can reduce overhealing if you have good reaction times and adjust to the fact that you have that much haste. A lot of healers who overload on haste don't spam cancel, or can't because their casts are now too fast that latency finishes the cast anyway. As a raid healer, the haste should allow you to slide casts under other healers, but that's also not very efficient, because people are overhealing anyway. Remember that raids aren't just about your performance, and there's times when all of your healers need to sync up on healing.

As for the meta, most Shamans will get somewhere around 20 Intellect from that 2% Intellect stat on ESD, which puts it approximately equal to the Intellect bonus from IED. The question then becomes whether the restore mana proc is better than 25 Spell Power, which generally speaking, isn't much of a discussion. If you're not running yourself out of mana, you probably are overloaded on MP5 anyway, and the IED would let you either regem or regear to get rid of some MP5, which will net you greater gains over other gear.

 

Torodo

TLDR:

+1 INT = 3.5 HEP
+1 MP5 = 2 HEP
+1 Spell Power = +1 HEP
+1 Crit Rating = 0.5 HEP
+1 Haste Rating = 0 HEP

The Long Version:

I have played a priest and druid in raiding content, and am now gearing up my shaman for healing with the advent of 3.1 and dual speccing.

A very successful approach I used for the other two classes was to focus in my Oh Sh1t spell and figure out what combination of stats would return the largest TOTAL healing before I go OOM.

This approach has a very practical application for dungeon and raid progression, because when things go bad, as they frequently do, a wipe is usually saved by being able to cast a fast heal for a very long time.

By gearing to this worst case scenario, I found, anecdotally to be sure, that when things are going smoothly, healing is easy and trivial.

Please be warned: I am not saying this is the "best" approach. YMMV depending on the specific needs of your guild and the challenges of specific boss fights you may be stuck on.

I AM saying that this has been very effective for me to quantify gearing decisions for PvE progression content through end-game raiding.

1. Compute the Healing per Second of the spell you want to optimize. For LHW, a "simple" estimate:

hps = (1.0 + (cr/4591.0 + itl/16700.0)/2)*(1738 + 0.808*hp)*(1.0 + hr/3300.0)/1.5

cr = crit rating
itl = intellect
hp = healing power
hr = haste rating


2. Compute your mana consumption rate while spamming the spell:

mps = (645*(1.0 + hr/3300.0)/1.5) - (mp5/5.0)


3. COmpute the time to go OOM at that consumption rate

tOOM = m/mps

m = total mana at the start


4. Total Healing to OOM is:

hOOM = hps * tOOM


The following vb script computes the effect of adding various stats to the total healing output, normalized for spell power = 1.

You can easily modify it for other spells. It might be nice to extend it to include various talent effects, like mana tide, tidal force and improved ws procs. I will leave it to some ambitious reader as an exercise.

 

Skyhoof

It's generally accepted that 10 Intellect = 6 mp5 with raid replenishment up 100% and Mana Tide. However, you show 10 Int = 35 HEP while 6 mp5 = 12 HEP, which would make 10 Intellect = 17.5 mp5. How did you arrive at these numbers?

 

Pitbuller

This don't calculate crit regen. But 0.33 crit rating what you get from 1intellect don't give that much mana.

Slow, slower, shaman weapon.

 

MatsT

Basically with his input values, he will go oom in less than a minute, which makes int extremely good and mp5 extremely bad. If you are gonna calculate how much you can heal before going oom you have to include all kinds of raid buffs and talents to get any relevant result at all.

 

Torodo

You will need to read and comprehend the long version of the post which comes after the TLDR. Responding to your question would just be me repeating what is already posted there.


Yes, but that isn't the point. It ignores mana tide, replenishment, mana pot, and WS procs to name a few. You can add them in to fine-tune the computation.

And if *I* am needed to spam LHW for more than a couple of minutes with my gear, then the raid needs to get a better geared shaman. >grin<

I read this entire thread, and for the most part it is people posting "intuition" and holding gear debates. You now have an approach and some code to quantify that intuition.

If you do not finding maximizing a healing spell's total output until OOM a useful way to value gear while under stressful healing situations, fair enough.

 

Vuldunobetra

My concern is that if you include Replenishment, IWS, Mana Tide, etc, the numbers will change. The gear value might be vastly different under raid conditions.

 

Torodo

Yes, I would expect a player deep into raiding gear to be fine tuning their build for specific utility. Enumerate specific effects you would like to see it handle and I will try to code them.

The issue I had with this thread was the extent of the "I think" and "I feel" proof given to support post HEP values. It hasn't been up to the expected EJ standard of information.

 

Daidalos

I added in MEP (mp5 equiv points) into my sheet today. Its affected by talents kings and replenishment uptime. This is in addition to my HPS HEP values and you can now weigh HPS vs MEP so I think this should help but some solid math behind future values. Somethings will always be out of scope for evaluation (like how much is it worth to land a heal .2s faster saving someones life etc) but now at least everyone should be able to look and if you find any errors (quite possible due to the complexity of the calcs) or suggestions for improvement feel free to let me know.

Restoration Shaman calculations:http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?k...IWv3sPmcYnEJUg