In no particular order, here are my favorite posts from the WOW blogs I read from the last week:
Anything amazing that I’ve missed?
This is take 2 on this post, because Firefox crashed and QuickPress doesn’t auto-save drafts. So please forgive me if I’m a little brusque.
First: in my previous posts on Haste I’ve completely forgotten about the talent Enlightenment, which grants +5% spell haste. So that’s another 164 Haste Rating you don’t have to stack. I also forgot about Renewed Hope, which grants 4% crit chance to Flash Heals cast on a target with the Weakened Soul debuff. Assuming that only half of your heals are on Weakened-Soul targets, that’s still an additional 2% crit, which gives you something like an additional 1% throughput (given that critical heals heal for 150% of the normal amount).
On to PW:S. Since PW:S doesn’t have a cast time longer than 1.5 seconds, it can effectively take the place of Flash Heal in the last post’s calculations. PW:S “heals” about the same as Flash Heal at baseline (2230 absorbed vs. ~2040 healed), and because of the cast times, both of them get about the same benefit from spellpower (about 80.6% of your total spellpower), but Discipline priests will have talents that let them increase spellpower by 40% when calculating PW:S’s absorption, and that let them increase the total absorption of PW:S by 15%, which boosts its “throughput” above Flash Heal. Unfortunately, there’s no way that I know of to tell how much damage a given PW:S has absorbed, so you can’t get “overhealing” on PW:S, but it’s fair to say that the total “overhealing” will be generally lower than for Flash Heal, since PW:S only “overheals” when its duration runs out before it’s used fully.
Since PW:S is essentially as much damage mitigated as Flash Heal is damage healed, and their cast times are functionally the same for the purpose of GCD timing, PW:S can be effectively interwoven with Flash Heal and Penance in a sequence similar to the one I put forward in the last post. Done properly, this will keep you in Borrowed Time nearly 100% of the time; with this strategy toward healing, a Discipline priest only needs to stack 656 haste rating (about 20% haste) in order to be hitting 1-second global cooldowns in a raid-healing situation.
There are, however, two major drawbacks to this tactic. The first, obviously, is that Power Word: Shield isn’t measured in the healing meters. All you have to do to counter that is remind your healing and raid leader to pay attention to the number of shields you cast during an encounter, and do the math for them to show how much your shields mitigate. The second, and potentially more serious, drawback is that Power Word: Shield can’t crit. This might not seem like a huge deal, but it means that your overall crit percentage is going to drop; instead of 133 direct heals you’ll have a maximum of 67 – 54 that don’t crit, 13 that do (thanks to Renewed Hope), and 66 that can’t crit. That’s a total of 120H + 13(1.5H), or 139.5H total. It’s still 18.5H higher than you’ll get by stacking crit, but you’ll get many fewer Divine Aegises. Then again, with all the Power Word: Shields flying around, you probably won’t need them.
So yes, even when half your casts are Power Word: Shield – which will be possible in 3.1, when we’ll get a talent that reduces PW:S’s cooldown to 1 second – a Discipline priest in haste gear still outheals a Discipline priest in pure +crit, all else being equal.
Well, I finally did the number crunching for +haste vs. +crit. The results turned out as I expected them to – although not as strongly toward +haste as I expected them to, which was kind of surprising.
Going as far +haste as you can, you can get 1095 haste rating from gear, gems, enchants, and buffs. You can get about the same amount of +crit. However, 32.79 Haste Rating translates to 1% haste; 45.91 Spell Critical Rating translates to 1% crit. That difference is crucial.
With 1095 Haste Rating, you get about 33.39% +haste. Essentially, that means that in the space where you could cast 100 spells without haste, you can cast 133.39 spells with that much haste. (I’ll use Flash Heal as the baseline, since its casting time is the same as the Global Cooldown.) With about 1100 SCR, you get about 23.95% +crit. Without any +crit gear, I have 17.95% +crit for holy spells on my priest, so 1100 SCR would put me around 41.9% +crit for holy spells (36.9% for non-holy spells).
So in the time it takes me to cast 100 spells with my +crit gear (150 seconds for Flash Heal), I can cast 133.39 (call it 133 for neatness’s sake, and note that I’m rounding down) spells with my +haste gear. At 41.9% crit with +crit gear, 41.9 of those 100 spells will crit (call it 42); at 17.95% crit with +haste gear, 23.9 of those 133 hasted spells will crit (call it 24). Incidentally – or not, if you’re Matt – that’s 42 Divine Aegis procs for +crit gear, and 24 for +haste gear.
I’ll take a moment here to define H as the amount that a normal Flash Heal heals for.
With the +crit gear, that’s 58 casts that don’t crit, and 42 that do. Since critical heals give 150% normal healing, over 150 seconds, my +crit gear gives me 58H + 48(1.5H), or 121H.
With the +haste gear, I have 109 casts that don’t crit, and 24 that do. Over 150 seconds, I get 109H + 24(1.5H), or 145H.
In other words, with the gear that’s available on the live servers, stacking +haste provides 20% more throughput over a similar length of time than stacking +crit.
Oddly, the trick I talked about a few posts back – interweaving Power Word: Shield and fast heals to get the benefit of Borrowed Time – has sharply diminishing returns if your +haste is above 820, because the global cooldown can’t be reduced below 1 second. In other words, you can’t get more than 150 spellcasts into 150 seconds. In fact, from the point of view of only throughput, it’s better to not rely on Power Word: Shield at all, and just stack +haste and throw out Flash Heal and Penance as fast as you can. However, that’s not taking into account the mitigation of Power Word: Shield… which I’ll cover in another post.
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