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.

I can’t decide whether or not it’s odd that one of the reasons I want to learn to draw is that I want to be able to draw WOW fan-art.

Matt mentioned, in response to my post on Discipline priest philosophy a few days back, that he was still divided on the issue because he “likes crit for the RNG procs like Divine Aegis“. The problem with stacking crit for Divine Aegis, at least, is that DA only shields for the amount that’s actually healed. If your heal lands on someone who’s already at full health, and it crits, the Divine Aegis that pops up will absorb zero damage. This is, obviously, less than helpful.

Also, I haven’t done the math to find out how much crit you can get on gear, but I feel like you’re actually more likely to get a critical heal with multiple fast heals than you are with fewer slow heals at a higher crit percentage. I’ll have to look into that tomorrow.

I see a lot of Discipline priests stacking Intellect, spell power, and crit rating. I’ve been trying to figure out why this is; in my mind, the best stats for a Discipline priest to stack are MP5 and haste, which a lot of Disc priests categorize as secondary at best. Now, at last, I think I’ve figured it out: Discipline priests who stack Intellect, spell power, and crit rating are Discipline priests who really want to be Holy priests who happen to have Penance.

Therein lies the problem. All of these Disc priests have got it in their heads that “Holy is the healing spec”. They truly want to be able to say “Disc is also a good healing spec!”, but so many people believe that the Holy way to heal is the only way to heal that these poor, misguided Disc priests can only heal by mimicking Holy abilities as much as possible. So they stack Intellect (to make up for not getting as much from Spirit as Holy priests do), they stack spell power and crit (to try to reach the same numbers on single heals that Holy priests get), and then they get relegated to single-target healing because they’ve focused on big heals so much that they don’t have the flexibility to do anything else.

I have a different philosophy. I see Holy priests as being about power: strong heals, a smart-targeting AOE heal, and the ability to keep going after death are their defining characteristics. Discipline priests, on the other hand, should be about speed and flexibility. The name of the spec says it all: Disc priests are tightly controlled, with shields, smaller but faster heals, and tiny buffs that make a huge difference. In an ideal world, instead of concentrating on making our heals huge and lumbering, useful only for single-target healing, we should be whipping around 1-second Flash Heals and, with Penance, be able to get three stacks of Grace on a target in 1.3 seconds. (With the Glyph of Penance and the change to Grace coming in Patch 3.1, a 1.3-second stack of Grace will be worth casting Penance even on an undamaged tank.) Disc priests should be healing as fast as they can target (and if my experience is any indication, mouseover macros or one of the healing add-ons will make that even faster); we have more than enough ways to stay on top of our mana pool, especially when we stack MP5 and glyph properly.

Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world; it takes 1640 Haste Rating to get a 1.5-second spellcast down to 1 second (and Penance’s 2-second channel down to 1.3 seconds), and the best we can do with gear, enchants, gems, elixirs, and Well Fed buffs is around 1100 Haste Rating – 500 or so short. Fortunately, as of patch 3.1, we won’t actually need to get that high! In fact, if we play our cards right and we’re willing to change our healing style somewhat, we’ll only need to get up to about 820 Haste Rating on our own, because we’ll pretty much constantly be under the effects of Borrowed Time, which increases our Haste percentage – not Haste Rating – by 25%. In 3.1 we can put points into Soul Warding, which lowers the cooldown of Power Word: Shield by 4 seconds – and since PW:S only has a 4-second cooldown, that means we can effectively cast it whenever we want, assuming the target doesn’t have Weakened Soul up. Since we can cast PW:S at will, we can ensure that when we need to cast, we’ll be under the effects of Borrowed Time (assuming we’re in a raid), which gives us half of the 1640 Haste Rating we need. If you happen to have the Egg of Mortal Essence and Embrace of the Spider equipped – each of which has a chance on spellcast (the Egg only on healing casts) to increase your haste rating by 505 – meaning that you could, briefly, be running at around 2750 Haste Rating, which is closing in on 100% haste (reduces cast times by 50%).

Anyway, the point is, Discipline priests can – and should – get insanely fast and incredibly flexible. It requires a certain degree of reflex time, and a certain willingness to play whack-a-mole, but once you’re up to speed – so to speak – you should be rising back to the top of the healing meters and providing significant mitigation, simply because you can get the heals out faster than any other class/spec in the game.
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