As you know, Bob, since 3.3 we’ve had three options when we roll for loot: Need, Greed, and Disenchant. Disenchant only pops up if there’s an enchanter in the group who can do the actual disenchanting; if you’re above level 70, Need only pops up if you can use the item and it’s the correct armor class for your character. (That is, priests can’t roll Need on plate and paladins can’t roll Need on cloth.) Below 70, that rule doesn’t apply (as evidenced by the mage who rolled on leather Agility gloves in RFC tonight because he wanted the higher armor and wasn’t paying attention to the armor class).

In general, the idea is that if you can use the item, it’s an upgrade, and you’re going to equip it now or within a few levels or when you get it gemmed/enchanted, then you can roll Need. Otherwise, roll Greed or Disenchant. This post is about the latter situation.

There’s a lot of disagreement (if the groups I’ve been in have been any indication) about which to choose. A lot of people think that you always Disenchant if you have the option and you don’t need the item, but as my friend Jess (who has not started up her blog yet) points out, that’s not always the best way to go. Unless you’re the enchanter or are specifically saving up mats, the best thing for you to do is actually to find out what the going AH price is for enchanting mats and for items of the level you’re likely to be getting in the instances you’re running.

On our server we have a bit of an odd situation. We have an auction-house mogul (hi Otto!) who’s artificially inflating prices on green items Just Because He Can, assuming that anyone who’s buying greens is someone with an 80 and therefore loads of cash. (This pisses off those of us who don’t have 80s on that realm, because we don’t really have the cash influx that he’s assuming, and we’re the ones who need the gear.) At the same time, because there are so many people running so many instances, the price of low-level enchanting materials has crashed – Strange Dust can be had for 2 silver a stack, where the Huntsman’s Bracers of the Naked Mole Rat that would otherwise generate the Strange Dust is selling for 10-15g because of inflation.

In this situation, do you really want to Disenchant that green? Wouldn’t it be better to roll Greed and then sell it directly? Sure, the odds of a Huntsman’s Bracers of the Naked Mole Rat selling on the Auction House might be kind of low (I’m not sure what class needs +Strength/-Hair; maybe a tauren with a glandular problem), but if they do sell, you’re pocketing way more than you would with the enchanting mats. (Actually, in our situation there’s a third option: price the bracers really low. Otto trolls the AH looking for low-priced items that he can resell at a profit, and you’ll probably be able to hook him with a price around 1-2g. Lower price, but much better odds of selling.)

By the same token, if you know you won’t be able to sell an item – say, if it’s BOP – then go ahead and roll Disenchant, because at least the enchanting mats will sell for something!

TLDR: Don’t just hit Disenchant blindly on your loot rolls. Make sure you know what the market’s like before you assume that enchanting mats are always better than the greens they’re made from.

Since according to my search results, you really want to know what I think about this…

3.3.3 changed the 4-piece set bonus for the Sanctified Crimson Acolyte’s Raiment, the healing priest Tier 10 set. Before the change, the set bonus was:

• (4) Set: Your Circle of Healing and Penance spells have a 20% chance to cause your next Flash Heal cast within 6 sec to reset the cooldown on your Circle of Healing and Penance spells.

Now it’s:

• (4) Set: Increases the effect of Power Word: Shield by 5% and Circle of Healing by 10%.

This is a pretty significant change, and one which a lot of priests are bemoaning; where the old version rewarded tactical use of cooldowns and variety of spell use, the new bonus just provides a passive bonus, and rewards spamming.

First, let’s be honest: this is continuing in Blizzard’s current trend of making content accessible to more people. The people who like the old bonus and who are bemoaning the new one are the ones who would have gotten T10 first – but there are a whole lot of players who are going to be getting at least four pieces of T10 who don’t have the tactical skill to make good use of the original bonus. To them, the new version of the bonus is a better bonus, simply because it doesn’t require as much thought; they can put more of their attention toward healing the people who need healing (or shielding the people who need shielding), instead of having to worry about whether their 20% proc rate went off.

What’s curious to me about the bonus is that while Holy priests get a bonus to a spec-defining talent (Circle of Healing), Disc priests get a bonus to a baseline ability. Any priest can benefit from the bonus to Power Word: Shield; only Holy priests will benefit from the 10% COH buff. I suspect that’s why the PW:S buff is only half of the COH buff: it’s more generally usable. It’s also on a shorter cooldown than COH is – in fact, for Discipline priests, it’s on a global cooldown, which means that this buff is just promoting the view of Disc priests as bubble spammers.

Mostly I’m just disappointed in this change. I’ve long believed that tier gear should be the best gear available for a given class and spec (and I’m aware of the argument that “then we’d just have everyone of a given class looking the same”, to which I say: given the prevalence of players relying on Elitist Jerks and Best In Slot lists to tell them what they Have To Equip, we have that anyway). If tier gear were the best gear available, the set bonuses would be icing on the cake – and because they wouldn’t be necessary to entice characters to wear the gear, they could (and should) be interesting. In fact, tier gear used to be that way – check out the Vestments of Transcendence, the priest Tier 2 set, whose set bonuses included “When struck in melee there is a 50% chance you will Fade for 4 seconds”. By changing the T10 set bonus from an interesting bonus to a purely utilitarian bonus, Blizzard is sending a message that they don’t consider tier set bonuses to be icing on the tier-set cake; they’re a necessary part of the gear, and necessary to entice players to get the gear.

A Duct Tape post about gear wouldn’t be complete without some numbers, so here you go.

• Circle of Healing, without any other modifiers, heals for 958-1058 per target. Its spell power coefficient is 40.29%; I think 2800 spell power is a reasonable number to go with for a priest in T10, so that adds another 1128 (2800 * .4029) to the spell, giving us an average per-target heal of 2136. An additional 10% to that is about 2350 per target, for a gain of about 1068 healing every 6 seconds.
• Power Word: Shield, without any other modifiers, absorbs 2230 damage. Its coefficient is 80.57%; the aforementioned spell power adds another 2256 absorption, yielding an average per-target shield that absorbs 4486 damage. With the set bonus, that’s 4710 absorption, or an additional 224 every 4 seconds. Discipline priests, however, have not only a 15% bonus to PW:S but a shield that can be cast once per GCD – that is, once per second for a properly-hasted Disc priest. (This is, I admit, a little unfair to Holy priests, since I’m denying them the benefit of Divine Providence and other talents. The problem is that while Circle of Healing doesn’t have a prerequisite – only any other 40 points in Holy – Soul Warding, which gives the cooldown reduction to PW:S, requires Improved PW:S, which gives the +15% bonus. So I have to include Imp PW:S to get the once-per-GCD shield, but strictly speaking, it’s possible to have Circle of Healing without any talents that give it bonuses.) That 4486 damage absorbed becomes 5159 damage with the 15% bonus, and the tier bonus brings it up to 5417, or 258 extra absorption every second. If the priest is bubble spamming, that’s 1547 extra damage absorbed every 6 seconds.

In other words, even though the PW:S bonus is smaller, the actual effect – assuming that all you’re doing is casting PW:S every chance you get – is about 45% larger than the bonus Holy gets. If we assume that Blizzard wants the bonuses to even out, then we can safely guess that they think that Discipline priests are casting Power Word: Shield roughly once every other spell. That seems to match with the popular perception of Discipline priests, and therefore with how (we can assume) most of the non-high-end Discipline priests are playing – which again points to the conclusion that Blizzard is trying to open the tier gear up to less hardcore players.

I’m not really sure how I feel about that, in the end. Yes, I’d like the tier gear to be the best gear available. But since it’s not, there’s a significant part of me that’s pleased that a larger portion of the player base has access to it. After all, tier gear isn’t really a sign of elitism if the elitists are going to be wearing something else.

Inspired by Dawn over on WOW Insider, here are my thoughts on meta gems for priest healers, very quickly (and leaving out the gems that are clearly not healing gems):

• Beaming Earthsiege: Maybe. Gives about 0.45% crit chance and +2% mana. The extra mana will vary depending on your current mana pool; the crit chance means that if you’re Disc, you’ll get another Divine Aegis for every 217 spells you cast, or 1-2 more per fight.
• Bracing Earthsiege: No. Gives 25 spell power and 2% reduced threat. Only take this one if you’re having trouble on the threat meters, which hopefully you aren’t.
• Chaotic Skyflare: No. Gives about 0.45% crit chance and 3% increased critical damage. That’s important. It’s tempting to think “oh, they mean “critical spell effect”. They don’t. It’s just damage. Steer clear.
• Destructive Skyflare: No. Gives bout 0.55% crit chance and 1% chance that offensive spells that target you will hit their caster instead. This is a PVP gem, although it can be useful for certain fights (those involving randomly-targeted spellcasts or poison affliction, for example). Spell reflect does not affect AOE spells, although it can redirect chained spells (like Chain Lightning).
• Effulgent Skyflare: No. Gives 320 health and reduces spell damage taken by 2%. Another PVP gem; if you’re really having that much trouble staying alive against PVE spellcasters, swap out one of your other gems for Solid Majestic Zircons.
• Ember Skyflare: Yes. Gives 25 spell power and 2% Intellect. This gem will directly increase your throughput, and while 2% Intellect doesn’t grant quite as much mana as 2% mana (Beaming Earthsiege gives about 72 more mana regardless of how much Intellect you have), it grants more crit and more regen.
• Enigmatic Skyflare, Forlorn Skyflare, and Impassive Skyflare: No. These give about 0.45% crit chance and various duration-reducing effects. They’re PVP gems with highly-situational PVE uses. Steer clear of them.
• Insightful Earthsiege: Yes. Gives 21 Intellect (about 315 mana, 0.125% crit chance, and mana regeneration that varies based on your Spirit), and every spell you cast has a 5% chance to restore 600 mana. That works out to an average of about 60 mp5 (which can go down if you insist on casting long-cast-time spells and up if you have lots of haste, as I do). This is the beloved, overwhelmingly-recommended meta gem for priest healers; over a 6-minute fight that adds up to 4,320 extra mana in your pool. Get this unless you can afford to be more concerned with throughput than mana.
• Powerful Earthsiege: No. Another PVP gem, this one gives 320 health and reduced stun duration. Not worth it.
• Revitalizing Skyflare: Yes. Gives 11 MP5 and 3% increased critical healing effect. That’s not healing chance; instead, when your heals do crit, they heal for 3% more. That means that if you’re Disc, your Divine Aegis will be 3% bigger too! The 11 MP5 is 792 mana – not fabulous, one additional spell over the course of a 6-minute fight, but it’s better than nothing.
• Tireless Skyflare: Maybe. This is another PVP gem, with 25 spell power and a minor run speed increase, but I ran with it for a long time. Part of this was because it helped me get out of the fire faster, and part of it was because I was entertained by running faster than anyone else in the raid. Sadly, it doesn’t stack with other speed-increasing effects. Go with this if you can’t get one of the others, or if you have a hard time staying out of the stuff on the floor.
• Trenchant Earthsiege: Maybe. Gives 25 spell power and reduces stun duration by 10%. It’s a PVP gem, but it has some uses in PVE. It’s not fabulous, but it can be useful for certain fights, especially in heroics. The faster you can get out of a stun effect, the faster you can start healing again. That said, if you have the chance to get another one of the gems, take it.

The bottom line: Get Ember Skyflare, Insightful Earthsiege, or Revitalizing Skyflare depending on your playstyle, with the first two recommended more highly than the third unless you really, really love Divine Aegis. Get Beaming Earthsiege, Tireless Skyflare, or Trenchant Earthsiege only if you can’t get one of the first three.

I’m trying to get threaded comments and editable comments working nicely together. It’s not going well. If anyone has any suggestions, I welcome them.

In the meantime, here’s a comment topic for you, in honor of 3.3′s new Need Before Greed system: what’s your favorite piece of “wrong” gear – gear that’s not in your “optimal” armor class but that you can still wear, and that you prefer to wear over the available gear that is “optimal”?

A quick catcher-upper: in WOW 3.3, if there is an enchanter with a suitable skill level in the group, group members will be given three options when loot drops: Need, Greed, and Disenchant. Disenchant is a fancy way of saying “Greed, but I want the enchanting mats rather than the item”. If you click Disenchant, you are treated exactly as if you had rolled Greed, and roll along with the other people who rolled greed, but instead of Spellweaver’s Skullcap of the Skunk, you’ll get seventeen Infinite Dust in your bags. (That I initially typed “Arcane Dust” should tell you that I don’t deal with enchanting very often.)

This is being implemented because in WOW 3.3, you’ll be able to PUG with characters from other servers. This sounds awesome in theory, but in practice it’s limited because you can’t trade items to characters from other servers. That includes enchanting materials. So the common practice of letting the enchanter in the group roll Greed on the drops, and then disenchant at the end of the run and hand out the proceeds, won’t work if you have someone from another server in your group.

There are four main objections I have seen to this. They are:

• The game is using my tradeskill without my consent.

Well, no. The game is using your level of skill with a given profession to trigger a flag in the system; if the flag is triggered, the game does the disenchanting. You don’t have to do anything. Your profession isn’t being used. You’re just toggling a yes/no switch.

• Sometimes I don’t want to give my fellow party members enchanting mats, because they haven’t earned them.

I will be blunt: you are a douchebag who needs to put the game down and spend some time in social-acclimation classes. These folks come highly recommended.

• If anyone can generate enchanting mats, the market for them will go down.

You haven’t thought this through. Here’s how economics works: People roll Disenchant because the mats sell better than the gear itself. The supply of enchanting mats grows slightly (but not very much; as a rule, roughly the same amount of mats is going to be on the market – it’s just going to be coming from different people). The price drops. People roll Disenchant less because the mats aren’t selling as well. The market price stabilizes at slightly under the original rate.

So yes, instead of 100g for an Abyss Crystal you might get 95g. Forgive me for not feeling particularly sorry for you.

• If people can roll to disenchant, I should be able to roll to get the contents of mining nodes, herbs, and skinnable mobs.

Nope. 100% wrong. Here’s why: you can’t pick up a Saronite Vein and cart it back to a vendor to sell. End of story. Without an enchanter in the group, the gear’s still there to pick up and sell. Enchanters just make it easy to turn gear into mats; this is especially true of BOP gear, which – in the absence of an enchanter – can only be vendored.

Without a miner, that Saronite Vein might as well not even be there. Without an herbalist, every single Frost Lotus in the instance goes to utter waste. Without a skinner, those worgs will just lie there and rot.

The only valid comparison is suggesting that maybe cloth (Frostweave etc.) should have a Need/Greed/Bolt option, and if you want to suggest that, well, be my guest. I suspect that that and a dollar will get you a cup of coffee, but you’re welcome to try.

The bottom line is this: the Disenchant option is an unqualified positive addition to the game, and the people who are complaining about it either haven’t thought it through or probably shouldn’t be interacting with other human beings.

Blizzard has updated the Tier 10 set bonuses for healing priests – and, oddly, both of them actually sport different mechanics than the original versions. (This is especially odd in light of a comment made by Ghostcrawler last week that they’d generally worked out the mechanics and were fine-tuning specific numbers.)

The updated set bonuses:

• 2-piece: Your Flash Heal critical strikes cause the target to heal for 25% of the healed amount over 9 sec.
• 4-piece: Your Circle of Healing and Penance spells have a 20% chance to cause your next Flash Heal cast within 6 sec to reset the cooldown on your Circle of Healing and Penance spells.

The 2-piece bonus continues a pattern Blizzard’s created of giving small heals HOT components and giving HOTs immediate-heal components, and as such, while it’s interesting to see priests’ utility heal get a HOT, it seems to largely be a rehash of Flash of Light.

The 4-piece bonus is a reworking of the original bonus (you may remember it from my last post); this version is, in my opinion, vastly preferable, both because it allows synergy between two heavily-used spells (which, as @Greth22 points out, feels elegant, even if we haven’t seen it in action) and because it doesn’t encourage Penance/COH-FH-FH-FH spam like the previous bonus did.

I continue to find it interesting that Blizzard is functionally equating the Discipline 51-point talent with the Holy 41-point talent with this talent, especially since they have much different cooldowns. Penance’s untalented, unglyphed cooldown is officially twice as long as Circle of Healing’s, although the channel time lowers the effective cooldown somewhat. To equate the strength of the 4-piece bonus on a Holy priest to its strength on a Discipline priest implies, I think, that Blizzard considers both Aspiration and Glyph of Penance to be mandatory, which seems kind of silly. Blizzard, you clearly want us to make the cooldown 8 seconds; just make the cooldown 8 seconds!

The following is the current (datamined) Healing Priest Tier 10 4-piece set bonus:

• Your Flash Heal spell has a 15% chance to reset the cooldown on your Circle of Healing and Penance Spells.

With my current haste rating, Penance has a 1.64-second channel, leaving me 6.36 seconds to cast Flash Heals before Penance’s cooldown is up. (I’m glyphed and have Aspiration.) Since my Flash Heal’s cast time is 1.31 seconds, I can cast it 4 times before Penance cools down, with 1.12s left over.

The math for determining how likely a percentage-based proc will go off is 1-[(1-proc chance)^(number of opportunities)]. (It seems unnecessarily complicated, but that’s how probability works.) In this case our proc chance is 0.15 (15%), and our number of opportunities is 4.

If I’m just spamming Flash Heal until Penance cools down – which I rarely am, but let’s assume it for the sake of a best possible scenario – then my chance to reduce Penance’s cooldown by at least 1 second is 1-[(1-0.15)^4], or 47.8%. Given that, roughly every other Penance cooldown will be shortened by at least 1 second.

(Without going into the math, the increased number of casts from dropping Glyph of Penance and Aspiration don’t justify the extension of the cooldown.)

For the record, if you’re just spamming Flash Heal after you use Penance (which I hope you’re not) and assuming 0 Haste (I hope you have some), you have 15% chance to reduce Penance’s cooldown by 4.5 seconds, 27.8% to reduce the cooldown by at least 3 seconds, and 38.5% to reduce the cooldown by at least 1.5 seconds. (Remember, the proc doesn’t go off until the Flash Heal spellcast does, so you have to let Penance cool down by at least 3.5 seconds – 2 seconds channeling Penance and then 1.5 seconds casting Flash Heal – before you can trigger the bonus at all.)

Incidentally, due to the nature of the problem, there is no point at which you’re guaranteed a proc. You get to 99.9% chance of having triggered the bonus at some point at about 27 Flash Heal casts, but it’s possible to beat probability and go forever without having triggered the bonus proc. That said, with no Haste, on average you’ll reduce the cooldown of your Penances by about 0.6 seconds. (If you have Haste, the average reduction is [0.6 * (1 + Haste %)].)

The other day, I was in a group for heroic Utgarde Keep with one non-guild member, a DPS warrior who’d put all 71 of his talent points into Arms. I noticed at the beginning of the run that he had some mismatched gear – pants with Spirit, mail shoulders, etc. – but I figured as long as he knew what he was doing, everything would be okay.

It wasn’t. We had enough DPS from other sources to carry him, but he was barely pulling 700 DPS. Midway through the run, after Prince Keleseth hadn’t dropped anything useful for him, he asked the party, “My friend said I should get PVP gear to make me better. What’s the best way to do that?”

I don’t really remember what the rest of the group said to him; it was along the lines of “no, get boss drops in PVE”. It was pretty clear that he didn’t know what boss drops to be looking for, though, and I got the impression that the response confused him. So I sent him a whisper: “You can look at Wowhead to find out what items are best for you. Here’s a link:” And I pasted in the URL of a Wowhead filter that contained warrior-friendly gear in Northrend. (I think this was the link I gave him.) “You should also take a look at WOWWiki to see the kinds of things warriors want on gear.”

He asked for a minute to go AFK, and we proceeded without him for a minute or two. When he got back, he ran back to the group and whispered me back. “Thanks a lot,” he said. “I never knew about those. I’m going to read them after we’re done.”

“No problem,” I replied. “You might also want to check out the talent calculator on Wowhead, and there are a couple blogs that are useful for warrior stuff.”

He thanked me again, we proceeded to take out the twins and Ingvar, and then he left the group. The next time I saw him, in Dalaran, he’d swapped out all of his warrior-unfriendly gear with warrior-statted heroic blues. I whispered him again. “It looks like you’re getting some better gear!”

“Yes, thank you! I didn’t even know what good warrior gear was. Wowhead helped a lot. Now I know what to look for.”

We have a problem, guys.

It’s certainly nothing life-shaking or insurmountable. We can work through it if we want to. But it does need to be addressed.

Here it is: our problem is that we think of players who don’t know what they’re doing as “bad”.

They’re not, really. They just don’t know what they’re doing. They aren’t playing consciously – they’re just picking up gear and taking talents that look like they ought to be handy or cool. They’re warriors taking a +spell power mace because it has higher DPS; they’re Restoration druids in +hit gear, because if their offensive spells miss, their healing spells might too. But this isn’t about badness. It’s just about inexperience.

See, if you’re reading this blog, I can make a couple assumptions about you, the foremost being that you’re interested in how Discipline priests work. That is, after all, mostly what this blog is about. You wouldn’t be here looking for [redacted because I don't want to show up in Google searches for those things]. You’re probably aware that I’m not the only WOW blog on the planet. You probably know that there are official forums for World of Warcraft. You might have a Twitter account where you discuss WOW.

Now here’s the important part: because of the spotlight fallacy, we assume that in general, people are like us. (It’s a very focused spotlight in this case.) We assume that Discipline priests read the Discipline priest blogs, and read the official forums, and use Wowhead, and read up on boss fights in WOWWiki, because that’s what we do. So when we see other players in gear that isn’t itemized for their class, who have talents that we wouldn’t have chosen, who don’t know how the boss fight works, we assume that they’re just Bad Players – that they haven’t assimilated all the stuff they’ve been reading, or that they’re consciously ignoring it.

Sure, that’s true in some cases, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that 95% of the World of Warcraft player base doesn’t visit the forums on a regular basis, and that probably 50% of active players don’t even know that there are official forums. They’ve never heard of WOWWiki or Wowhead. They see the tooltip on Spirit that says that it helps health regeneration, and figure that sounds pretty good. They aren’t bad. They just don’t know about the resources.

Here’s an open request: the next time you see a “bad player”, send them a whisper. Say “hey, I see you’re wearing thus-and-such” – or have this talent, or whatnot – “that I wouldn’t expect a warrior” – or whatever the player’s class may be – “to wear. Why’d you pick that piece of gear?” Establish a dialogue, rather than just writing the player off as bad. If it turns out they’re one of the vast number of players who don’t know about gear itemization, Wowhead, and the link, give them links; help them educate themselves. If they’re trying out something different, talk to them about it and maybe you’ll learn something. And if they say “shut up, mind your own business”…

Well, then they’re probably a bad player.

Did you notice the most important clause in the previous section? Go back and look. See if you can figure out what it’s going to have been. (I love the pluperfect.) I’ll wait.

*dramatic pause*

It’s “help them educate themselves“.

See, all the websites in the world aren’t going to do an uneducated player a lick of good if all the player does is follow the advice of those websites blindly. They’re going to be just as uneducated, but now they’re letting someone else tell them what to do instead of picking it up piecemeal based on tooltips. They’re in a worse situation than they were before, because now they’re going to rely on what you’ve shown them. What happens when the site you’ve shown them is down? What happens if the game changes but the page doesn’t (as seems to be the case with much of WOWWiki at the moment)? They’ll be back to groping at tooltips to help them figure out what to do next.

I’m sure you know the expression about giving a man a fish and teaching him to fish. I don’t need to repeat it. But the lesson applies nonetheless: help uneducated players educate themselves. Don’t just say “you need strength gear”, explain what Strength does for a warrior and compare it to other stats. Don’t just rattle off a Best In Slot list (you’ll notice I haven’t updated my Naxx lists for Ulduar yet); help them figure out why each piece of gear is desirable. Perhaps most important, let them make their own decisions about gear; guide them, but don’t define for them. The goal is to have players be playing consciously.

And yes, “I like the way it looks” is, at its heart, a conscious decision. Just so we’re clear.

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.