I posted about Strength of Soul in light of the 4.0.6 changes to Power Word: Shield. Now we have the subsequent hotfixes to increase the cost of Power Word: Shield and to increase the value of Rapture. Is Strength of Soul still a useful talent?
I had concluded that against a single target, Strength of Soul provided a 10% increase in throughput and a 4% increase in efficiency. Assuming you still cast Power Word: Shield whenever weakened soul is done, Strength of Soul now provides the same 10% increase in throughput but actually ends up costing you some mana for that extra throughput, decreasing efficiency by 2%.
Of course Strength of Soul is also what lets us do heavy single target throughput when the fight calls for it. The Shield -> Flash Heal x3 rotation just doesn't work without it.
Strength of Soul is now a talent that lets you burn mana for throughput when you need to. Given the state of Discipline Priest healing, I think this makes it a worthwhile investment. But if you are not in a moment where high throughput is required, Power Word: Shield should be timed to maximize Rapture procs instead of being cast whenever it is available.
Showing posts with label book learning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label book learning. Show all posts
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Cast More Spells
On Monday I looked at one way to liquidate excess mana: by substituting an intense casting rotation for a more regular one. Another way to liquidate mana is to simple cast more spells. If we simply took our excess mana and converted it into Power Word: Shields then the rankings for secondary stats would be Spirit (41.5%) > Mastery (28%) > Crit (12%).
If we instead used the extra mana to cast half shields and half renews - thinking that we are probably squeezing these extra spells in while on the move - then the values wouldn't be much different with Spirit (41.4%) > Mastery (23.5%) > Crit (14.7%).
But I feel that this is probably less representative of what is really going to happen in a battle, since encounters are designed around the idea that you will cast spells pretty much as often as you can, but in reality we don't have 100% active time on our log reports, so we can definitely squeeze some more casts in there. I was using a figure of 130k excess mana to spend, which would be enough for 28 shields, or about 38 seconds of extra casting over a 5 minute fight. This is surely an unattainable figure. 38 seconds would mean increasing your active time in a fight by 12.6%. Since my active time is usually around 87% this is getting a little too close to 100% to be believable. In addition to this, the reason we use intense healing rotations is because there are periods that warrant intense healing - even if these periods are just the result of a long time with dodges or critical heals. We can't make up for that loss by simply casting more shields during the lighter damage times.
Another option is to take a half-and-half approach, where we spend half of our excess mana on intense single target healing and half on extra shields and renews.
This result looks a lot like the result from Monday but with the numbers even closer together: Mastery (31%) > Spirit (28%) > Crit (23%).
Of course this doesn't mean that it's time to reforge spirit into mastery. In the case where we are simply running out of mana by the end of the fight, more mana would allow us to continue our normal 6.92 mana efficiency rotation. In this case Spirit (40.6%) > Mastery (18.7%) > Crit (16.5%). So it's a real blowout in favour of Spirit. If such a situation where actually winnable, it would mean damage output was low enough that the full rotation wouldn't be necessary, and mana efficiency would go even higher, making the benefit of spirit relative to the other secondary stats even more extreme.
Spirit has a kind of diminishing returns. Once you have enough mana to cast a baseline mana efficient rotation over all available times during an encounter, the value of spirit drops off. Similarly because an important part of what Intellect does is provide you with mana, the value of Mastery and Crit relative to intellect increase when you pass that point.
But of course determining where that drop off point happens is pretty difficult. Fights are not simple enough to be easily modeled all the way through. Also, I haven't talked about haste at all. Haste increases throughput at the cost of mana. But if I am trying to compare spirit to mastery through estimations of what extra mana can do for us, then surely I can try to fit haste in there somewhere.
When I have some time in the next week I'm going to build myself a spreadsheet dragon and discipline priest and have them face off in a tug-of-war over tank health. That will provide a better picture of how haste fits into the overall scheme of things.
If we instead used the extra mana to cast half shields and half renews - thinking that we are probably squeezing these extra spells in while on the move - then the values wouldn't be much different with Spirit (41.4%) > Mastery (23.5%) > Crit (14.7%).
But I feel that this is probably less representative of what is really going to happen in a battle, since encounters are designed around the idea that you will cast spells pretty much as often as you can, but in reality we don't have 100% active time on our log reports, so we can definitely squeeze some more casts in there. I was using a figure of 130k excess mana to spend, which would be enough for 28 shields, or about 38 seconds of extra casting over a 5 minute fight. This is surely an unattainable figure. 38 seconds would mean increasing your active time in a fight by 12.6%. Since my active time is usually around 87% this is getting a little too close to 100% to be believable. In addition to this, the reason we use intense healing rotations is because there are periods that warrant intense healing - even if these periods are just the result of a long time with dodges or critical heals. We can't make up for that loss by simply casting more shields during the lighter damage times.
Another option is to take a half-and-half approach, where we spend half of our excess mana on intense single target healing and half on extra shields and renews.
This result looks a lot like the result from Monday but with the numbers even closer together: Mastery (31%) > Spirit (28%) > Crit (23%).
Of course this doesn't mean that it's time to reforge spirit into mastery. In the case where we are simply running out of mana by the end of the fight, more mana would allow us to continue our normal 6.92 mana efficiency rotation. In this case Spirit (40.6%) > Mastery (18.7%) > Crit (16.5%). So it's a real blowout in favour of Spirit. If such a situation where actually winnable, it would mean damage output was low enough that the full rotation wouldn't be necessary, and mana efficiency would go even higher, making the benefit of spirit relative to the other secondary stats even more extreme.
Spirit has a kind of diminishing returns. Once you have enough mana to cast a baseline mana efficient rotation over all available times during an encounter, the value of spirit drops off. Similarly because an important part of what Intellect does is provide you with mana, the value of Mastery and Crit relative to intellect increase when you pass that point.
But of course determining where that drop off point happens is pretty difficult. Fights are not simple enough to be easily modeled all the way through. Also, I haven't talked about haste at all. Haste increases throughput at the cost of mana. But if I am trying to compare spirit to mastery through estimations of what extra mana can do for us, then surely I can try to fit haste in there somewhere.
When I have some time in the next week I'm going to build myself a spreadsheet dragon and discipline priest and have them face off in a tug-of-war over tank health. That will provide a better picture of how haste fits into the overall scheme of things.
Monday, February 14, 2011
Mana Liquidity
In a previous post I said that Discipline Priests were in the position of usually having enough mana to do the healing they needed to do over the course of the fight, but not having the throughput to actually apply that mana to remedy bad situations. Pach 4.0.6 changed that. Discipline priests now have the ability to have an all out mana fire sale, shipping our mana off in massive quantities for whatever healing we can get.
Before I get into that, I want to look at the question of how to understand spending more mana to do more healing. Given a fixed fight length you generally find yourself with a certain amount of mana to spend. In the case of a discipline priest and a 5 minute fight, that amount of mana might be in the neighborhood of 450k to 490k (plus about 40k per resto shaman in the raid). In a fight of that length you will probably be called on to do something like 2.5M healing, meaning you'll need to average between 5 and 5.5 healing per mana to get there.
A simple single target rotation of Shield -> Penance -> Renew (when Borrowed Time is up) -> Inner Focus -> Greater Heal gives 6.92 mana effiency, more than enough to do the job. With a rotation like this, you'll spend only 361k mana doing 2.5M healing, leaving you with something like 130k mana to play with. The question is, how quickly can you liquidate your mana into healing when you need to?
There are two ways to spend more mana: cast more often or cast more expensive things when you are casting. If we are sticking with a simple single target healing model then casting more often probably isn't a legitimate option. While no one is casting all the time, we are generally casting at all times when we are able and when healing is needed. Running out of a fire might cost us healing time, and a phase transition where no damage is incoming might also cost us healing time.
So today I am going to talk about replacing our existing casting time with more mana intense casting time. I hope to come back to this subject tomorrow or the next day with comments about casting more during downtime.
Discipline now has the Shield -> Flash Heal x3 rotation available. The ability to cast a Power Word: Shield every 5.3 seconds makes for some pretty extreme throughput. Using just Flash of Heal and Shield in 359s you can achieve a throughput of 19.7k, but at the cost of around 4360 mana per second, 2100 more healing per mana than the baseline rotation. For that extra mana you get 4130 more healing per second. You are buying extra healing at a rate of 1.97 healing per mana.
If you use the slightly less insane rotation of incorporating Penance when it is off cooldown, you can buy 3670 healing per second for around 2.23 healing per mana. If you incorporate Renew you get only 3250 extra healing per second but actually only get 2.19 healing per mana, so this is not recommended.
Given the high cost of these rotations, it stands to ask how long we actually afford them. With the 130k unused mana, Shield/Flash could replace the baseline rotation for up to 61 seconds. That actually sounds like an awful lot. If you are casting 90% of the time then you could afford to be on all out mana destruction mode for almost a quarter of the time that you are casting.
So can this tell us anything about how to value Spirit compared to throughput stats?
Using this model, we can calculate how much more healing we can expect to get out of various stats. Of course there are two ways to approach it. One is to fix the amount of time you have to heal and calculate how much more healing you can squeeze out in that time with more of a stat. Another is to fix the amount you need to heal and see how much mana you have left over.
Using either of these methods generates fairly similar results. With fixed healing time, we get Mastery > Crit > Spirit at 36%, 28%, 20% of an Intellect respectively. With fixed healing to be done we get the same order but closer together in the raw amounts at 33%, 27%, 26% respectively.
This model has a lot of deficiencies, and should not be applied as a stat weighting. My hope is that by doing calculations like this I can get a better sense of how Spirit interacts with the other secondary stats. These results can only be narrowly applied, but could suggest that if you find you have enough mana to get through fights, you should consider moving some of your spirit into mastery to increase your ability to deal with difficult situations. They also make me fairly comfortable that mastery is the better choice than crit for improving my throughput, but that could change as I go through more examples.
Before I get into that, I want to look at the question of how to understand spending more mana to do more healing. Given a fixed fight length you generally find yourself with a certain amount of mana to spend. In the case of a discipline priest and a 5 minute fight, that amount of mana might be in the neighborhood of 450k to 490k (plus about 40k per resto shaman in the raid). In a fight of that length you will probably be called on to do something like 2.5M healing, meaning you'll need to average between 5 and 5.5 healing per mana to get there.
A simple single target rotation of Shield -> Penance -> Renew (when Borrowed Time is up) -> Inner Focus -> Greater Heal gives 6.92 mana effiency, more than enough to do the job. With a rotation like this, you'll spend only 361k mana doing 2.5M healing, leaving you with something like 130k mana to play with. The question is, how quickly can you liquidate your mana into healing when you need to?
There are two ways to spend more mana: cast more often or cast more expensive things when you are casting. If we are sticking with a simple single target healing model then casting more often probably isn't a legitimate option. While no one is casting all the time, we are generally casting at all times when we are able and when healing is needed. Running out of a fire might cost us healing time, and a phase transition where no damage is incoming might also cost us healing time.
So today I am going to talk about replacing our existing casting time with more mana intense casting time. I hope to come back to this subject tomorrow or the next day with comments about casting more during downtime.
Discipline now has the Shield -> Flash Heal x3 rotation available. The ability to cast a Power Word: Shield every 5.3 seconds makes for some pretty extreme throughput. Using just Flash of Heal and Shield in 359s you can achieve a throughput of 19.7k, but at the cost of around 4360 mana per second, 2100 more healing per mana than the baseline rotation. For that extra mana you get 4130 more healing per second. You are buying extra healing at a rate of 1.97 healing per mana.
If you use the slightly less insane rotation of incorporating Penance when it is off cooldown, you can buy 3670 healing per second for around 2.23 healing per mana. If you incorporate Renew you get only 3250 extra healing per second but actually only get 2.19 healing per mana, so this is not recommended.
Given the high cost of these rotations, it stands to ask how long we actually afford them. With the 130k unused mana, Shield/Flash could replace the baseline rotation for up to 61 seconds. That actually sounds like an awful lot. If you are casting 90% of the time then you could afford to be on all out mana destruction mode for almost a quarter of the time that you are casting.
So can this tell us anything about how to value Spirit compared to throughput stats?
Using this model, we can calculate how much more healing we can expect to get out of various stats. Of course there are two ways to approach it. One is to fix the amount of time you have to heal and calculate how much more healing you can squeeze out in that time with more of a stat. Another is to fix the amount you need to heal and see how much mana you have left over.
Using either of these methods generates fairly similar results. With fixed healing time, we get Mastery > Crit > Spirit at 36%, 28%, 20% of an Intellect respectively. With fixed healing to be done we get the same order but closer together in the raw amounts at 33%, 27%, 26% respectively.
This model has a lot of deficiencies, and should not be applied as a stat weighting. My hope is that by doing calculations like this I can get a better sense of how Spirit interacts with the other secondary stats. These results can only be narrowly applied, but could suggest that if you find you have enough mana to get through fights, you should consider moving some of your spirit into mastery to increase your ability to deal with difficult situations. They also make me fairly comfortable that mastery is the better choice than crit for improving my throughput, but that could change as I go through more examples.
Monday, February 7, 2011
Strength of Soul
Strength of Soul is a really rotten talent. It lets you cast a bad spell more often at the cost of casting another bad spell. There was really no reason to take it, and if you did take it, you were best off treating those talent points as a sunk cost and never making use of the bonus it gave you.
But of course I am writing this on the eve of 4.0.6, and given the coming changes, this talent deserves some reevaluation. As of tomorrow, instead of letting you cast a spell you don't want to cast more often by casting another spell you don't want to cast, Strength of Soul is going to let you cast a spell you desperately want to cast more often at the expense of casting a spell you want to cast anyway. That sounds like it has a lot more potential.
So I modified one of my old simulators to see what benefit Strength of Soul would give if you had the following casting priority on a single target:
Power Word: Shield
Penance
Renew (if Borrowed Time is up)
Greater Heal
With this priority, Strength of Soul results in a 10% increase in throughput with a 4% increase in efficiency for the two points. Of course this isn't a very realistic situation, so I modified the order to the following:
Power Word: Shield
Penance
Prayer of Mending
Renew (if Borrowed Time is up)
Prayer of Healing*
Greater Heal
In order to simulate sometimes using Prayer of Healing I gave it a random cooldown with each cast from 0-30 seconds, which roughly corresponds with how often I cast Prayer of Healing against bosses on my last raid. Since Strength of Soul isn't doing as much with this set up, the two points give a 5.4% throughput and 1.4% efficiency increase. That's still a good amount of work to be getting out of two talent points.
With a top end of 5% more healing per point and a midrange of 2.5% healing per point, I think these talent points are probably better than some of the others I currently have, but I don't have a lot of flexibility to move talent points around. I think my weakest talent in my current build that I can afford to get rid of is Surge of Light.
As a side note, for now I am going to be moving two points of Mental Agility to Soul Warding as a nod to the new strength of Power Word: Shield. Both talents get better with Power Word: Shield getting better, but I think Mental Agility goes from somewhat weak to mediocre while Strength of Soul goes from downright useless to situationally great. After I've actually raided with the changes I'll be able to reevaluate Mental Agility to see how much I'm getting out of those points.
But of course I am writing this on the eve of 4.0.6, and given the coming changes, this talent deserves some reevaluation. As of tomorrow, instead of letting you cast a spell you don't want to cast more often by casting another spell you don't want to cast, Strength of Soul is going to let you cast a spell you desperately want to cast more often at the expense of casting a spell you want to cast anyway. That sounds like it has a lot more potential.
So I modified one of my old simulators to see what benefit Strength of Soul would give if you had the following casting priority on a single target:
Power Word: Shield
Penance
Renew (if Borrowed Time is up)
Greater Heal
With this priority, Strength of Soul results in a 10% increase in throughput with a 4% increase in efficiency for the two points. Of course this isn't a very realistic situation, so I modified the order to the following:
Power Word: Shield
Penance
Prayer of Mending
Renew (if Borrowed Time is up)
Prayer of Healing*
Greater Heal
In order to simulate sometimes using Prayer of Healing I gave it a random cooldown with each cast from 0-30 seconds, which roughly corresponds with how often I cast Prayer of Healing against bosses on my last raid. Since Strength of Soul isn't doing as much with this set up, the two points give a 5.4% throughput and 1.4% efficiency increase. That's still a good amount of work to be getting out of two talent points.
With a top end of 5% more healing per point and a midrange of 2.5% healing per point, I think these talent points are probably better than some of the others I currently have, but I don't have a lot of flexibility to move talent points around. I think my weakest talent in my current build that I can afford to get rid of is Surge of Light.
As a side note, for now I am going to be moving two points of Mental Agility to Soul Warding as a nod to the new strength of Power Word: Shield. Both talents get better with Power Word: Shield getting better, but I think Mental Agility goes from somewhat weak to mediocre while Strength of Soul goes from downright useless to situationally great. After I've actually raided with the changes I'll be able to reevaluate Mental Agility to see how much I'm getting out of those points.
Friday, February 4, 2011
Plans Get More Complex
Matticus recently put up a really simple healing guide for Discipline for path 4.0.6. I was asked once in the past if I could put together such a thing, and I've really struggled with the idea because my concept of how to heal isn't very readily summed up.
I'm not saying that healing advice can't fit into short tidbits and neat packages. I actually think Matticus' advice is a pretty good starting point for people who are wondering how 4.0.6 will affect them, or people who are starting to heal as discipline priests after the patch comes out. For example, his AoE healing advice (5 players) is to cast Prayer of Healing. Good advice!
But as I discussed on Wednesday, you can actually increase your throughput by alternative Power Word: Shield and Prayer of Healing. In fact, on Wednesday I forgot to include that using a Shield between Prayers would allow you to get a tick off of the Glyph of Prayer of Healing, increasing Prayer's effect by 6.5%1 and meaning that this alternating cast heals for almost 13% more than prayer alone for only about 7.5% more mana per healing - again assuming that your Rapture proc time will decrease to once every 14 seconds from once every 15.
There are other crazy interactions, however. If you are in for a long period of AoE healing and you cast Penance on one of your targets then while Penance has clearly worse numbers than Prayer, it stacks Grace on that person, giving them 24% more healing from Prayer for 15 seconds. That's an increase of 4.8% to the effect of the prayer as a whole, or more if you were only intending to heal three or four people. You can also haste the Penance with a Borrowed Time without consuming the Borrowed Time so it still gets used on the subsequent Prayer. By squeezing in Penance and Prayer of Mending in the same Borrowed Time window, you get an additional tick of Prayer of Healing. These shenanigans have the potential to get you around 0.8% less healing for around 1.6% less mana, which is hardly any different unless you have your 4-piece set bonus in which case you are spending around 28% less mana by doing this instead of just alternating Shield and Prayer.
Of course if the damage is being dealt equally to all people and there is no additional damage being thrown around, then you won't want to use tactics like these because there will create differences in the health of the people you are healing which will cost you efficiency later. That is, unless you know damage will be coming in for a long enough time that you will be able to give everyone a turn getting the boost. Or if the tank is if the group you are AoE healing then you can do this on the tank while AoE healing everyone else.
So, my AoE healing strategy for discipline priests would be something like this:
1. This is 6.5% rather than 10% because this glyph does not help the Divine Aegis portion of the Prayer.
I'm not saying that healing advice can't fit into short tidbits and neat packages. I actually think Matticus' advice is a pretty good starting point for people who are wondering how 4.0.6 will affect them, or people who are starting to heal as discipline priests after the patch comes out. For example, his AoE healing advice (5 players) is to cast Prayer of Healing. Good advice!
But as I discussed on Wednesday, you can actually increase your throughput by alternative Power Word: Shield and Prayer of Healing. In fact, on Wednesday I forgot to include that using a Shield between Prayers would allow you to get a tick off of the Glyph of Prayer of Healing, increasing Prayer's effect by 6.5%1 and meaning that this alternating cast heals for almost 13% more than prayer alone for only about 7.5% more mana per healing - again assuming that your Rapture proc time will decrease to once every 14 seconds from once every 15.
There are other crazy interactions, however. If you are in for a long period of AoE healing and you cast Penance on one of your targets then while Penance has clearly worse numbers than Prayer, it stacks Grace on that person, giving them 24% more healing from Prayer for 15 seconds. That's an increase of 4.8% to the effect of the prayer as a whole, or more if you were only intending to heal three or four people. You can also haste the Penance with a Borrowed Time without consuming the Borrowed Time so it still gets used on the subsequent Prayer. By squeezing in Penance and Prayer of Mending in the same Borrowed Time window, you get an additional tick of Prayer of Healing. These shenanigans have the potential to get you around 0.8% less healing for around 1.6% less mana, which is hardly any different unless you have your 4-piece set bonus in which case you are spending around 28% less mana by doing this instead of just alternating Shield and Prayer.
Of course if the damage is being dealt equally to all people and there is no additional damage being thrown around, then you won't want to use tactics like these because there will create differences in the health of the people you are healing which will cost you efficiency later. That is, unless you know damage will be coming in for a long enough time that you will be able to give everyone a turn getting the boost. Or if the tank is if the group you are AoE healing then you can do this on the tank while AoE healing everyone else.
So, my AoE healing strategy for discipline priests would be something like this:
1. This is 6.5% rather than 10% because this glyph does not help the Divine Aegis portion of the Prayer.
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Power Word: Shield is Awesome, but it May Not Be Overpowered, but it Probably Is
Obviously Power Word: Shield is going to be awesome come patch 4.0.6, if it doesn't get nerfed into the ground before then. I uploaded a fragment of a spreadsheet I have to google docs so you can see some of the numbers yourself. Check out the bottom of the "Spells" sheet here. The values on the sheet are based on my current gear.
For those who don't like looking at spreadsheets, the key facts are that Power Word: Shield has 97.2% of the throughput of Prayer of Healing and 73.3% of it's efficiency. Those are some pretty strong figures. The only single target competitor is Penance, which is 7% more mana efficient than Shield, but Shield has 72% better throughput than Penance. Nothing else in the single target department is ever close to Shield in either category.
The question is, is shield really a single target heal? If there was a healer who had an instant cast heal-to-full spell that didn't cost mana, but couldn't do anything else and that spell had a 15 second cooldown, you probably couldn't afford to use one of your three healer spots in a 10-player raid on them. 15 seconds is really a very long time to wait between being effective. Of course Discipline priests can do things when they are not casting shield, but the question is, is it right to consider a heal that can only affect a single target once every 15 seconds a single target heal, or is it more like an AoE heal?
As an AoE heal Shield is right about where it should be. Worse than Prayer of Healing in raw numbers, but probably better than Prayer of Healing because of targetting restrictions and overheal. Prayer has a tendency to overheal in excess of 20% because it will hit a target who doesn't need the healing. Shield doesn't overheal much if at all when used correctly.
Shield is both better an worse than other AoE heals. It's better because you can stop the damage from happening at all and react quickly and powerfully to individuals who are at low health. It's worse because you have to anticipate damage rather than being allowed to react to it, and because it doesn't heal evenly over multiple targets.
The second part is a minus because AoE heals are much better than single target heals. If a big AoE is coming at five people and I shield two of them before the AoE hits then those two people don't end up down health, or at least not much. If I then choose to use Prayer of Healing, my best spell for healing three people up after an AoE then it is working at 60% effectiveness. My pre-shielding was acutally just pre-overhealing. If I can shield all five people, or shield four and use Penance on the last one, or if the damage is dangerous enough that waiting on Prayer to heal them up after is too slow, Or shield everyone but the shadow priest and the feral druid who will heal themselves eventurally, or shield the one person who isn't in the same group as the others then Shield was great. If I just shield a couple of people at random, Shield may end up being a total waste of mana.
This is also why just casting shield every three or four seconds probably won't contribute enough to the group healing. By keeping a larger number of people at full health through the AoE you are denying your co-healers maximum mana efficiency in order to maximize your own. With smart shielding this shouldn't happen, but there are some damage distributions where it's simple not possible to contribute beneifically with a single-target effect that cannot be repeated within 15 seconds.
Back in Wrath I read all about how Discipline priests did nothing but spam Power Word: Shield. Some players countered that they cast all kinds of heals and that people who just spam one spell aren't playing right. The argument from Blizzard was that while spamming one spell may not have been the best way to play, it was close enough to the best way to play that it was a problem.
This never entirely clicked with me, but I realized at some point it was because I raided with 10 players. With a 1 second GCD on shield spam and only 10 people to target every 15 seconds, I was forced to do other things. Not that I kept a shield on everyone at all times, but even in a fight like Freya + 3 where putting shields on everyone is the norm, I still had to spend some of my time on something else. Now that the majority of raiders are raiding 10 player we may see shield "spam" go down dramatically even if Shield is substantially overpowered.
If Power Word: Shield is an AoE heal, then it probably balanced. If it is a single-target heal then it is grossly overpowered. In reality it is neither of these things, and I think the experiment of making it extremely powerful will be an interesting one. We'll see how it works out over the next month or so.
For those who don't like looking at spreadsheets, the key facts are that Power Word: Shield has 97.2% of the throughput of Prayer of Healing and 73.3% of it's efficiency. Those are some pretty strong figures. The only single target competitor is Penance, which is 7% more mana efficient than Shield, but Shield has 72% better throughput than Penance. Nothing else in the single target department is ever close to Shield in either category.
The question is, is shield really a single target heal? If there was a healer who had an instant cast heal-to-full spell that didn't cost mana, but couldn't do anything else and that spell had a 15 second cooldown, you probably couldn't afford to use one of your three healer spots in a 10-player raid on them. 15 seconds is really a very long time to wait between being effective. Of course Discipline priests can do things when they are not casting shield, but the question is, is it right to consider a heal that can only affect a single target once every 15 seconds a single target heal, or is it more like an AoE heal?
As an AoE heal Shield is right about where it should be. Worse than Prayer of Healing in raw numbers, but probably better than Prayer of Healing because of targetting restrictions and overheal. Prayer has a tendency to overheal in excess of 20% because it will hit a target who doesn't need the healing. Shield doesn't overheal much if at all when used correctly.
Shield is both better an worse than other AoE heals. It's better because you can stop the damage from happening at all and react quickly and powerfully to individuals who are at low health. It's worse because you have to anticipate damage rather than being allowed to react to it, and because it doesn't heal evenly over multiple targets.
The second part is a minus because AoE heals are much better than single target heals. If a big AoE is coming at five people and I shield two of them before the AoE hits then those two people don't end up down health, or at least not much. If I then choose to use Prayer of Healing, my best spell for healing three people up after an AoE then it is working at 60% effectiveness. My pre-shielding was acutally just pre-overhealing. If I can shield all five people, or shield four and use Penance on the last one, or if the damage is dangerous enough that waiting on Prayer to heal them up after is too slow, Or shield everyone but the shadow priest and the feral druid who will heal themselves eventurally, or shield the one person who isn't in the same group as the others then Shield was great. If I just shield a couple of people at random, Shield may end up being a total waste of mana.
This is also why just casting shield every three or four seconds probably won't contribute enough to the group healing. By keeping a larger number of people at full health through the AoE you are denying your co-healers maximum mana efficiency in order to maximize your own. With smart shielding this shouldn't happen, but there are some damage distributions where it's simple not possible to contribute beneifically with a single-target effect that cannot be repeated within 15 seconds.
Back in Wrath I read all about how Discipline priests did nothing but spam Power Word: Shield. Some players countered that they cast all kinds of heals and that people who just spam one spell aren't playing right. The argument from Blizzard was that while spamming one spell may not have been the best way to play, it was close enough to the best way to play that it was a problem.
This never entirely clicked with me, but I realized at some point it was because I raided with 10 players. With a 1 second GCD on shield spam and only 10 people to target every 15 seconds, I was forced to do other things. Not that I kept a shield on everyone at all times, but even in a fight like Freya + 3 where putting shields on everyone is the norm, I still had to spend some of my time on something else. Now that the majority of raiders are raiding 10 player we may see shield "spam" go down dramatically even if Shield is substantially overpowered.
If Power Word: Shield is an AoE heal, then it probably balanced. If it is a single-target heal then it is grossly overpowered. In reality it is neither of these things, and I think the experiment of making it extremely powerful will be an interesting one. We'll see how it works out over the next month or so.
Monday, January 17, 2011
Q&A
Swaggart Asked:
Is bubble spam feasible with the current regen numbers in-game? For example, can you actually cast PW:S 81 times on Maloriak in T11 gear?
Whether or not bubble spam is feasible depends on what is meant by "spam." In the post in question I divided the total healing that I did on an actual kill of various bosses by the approximate size of a Power Word: Shield from patch 4.0.6 to get the number of shields I would cast to contribute the same amount to the fight. This is a naive comparison to see whether shielding is an affordable way to heal, but is pretty far off the shield spam that discipline priests did in Wrath.
Maloriak has a six minute enrage times, and will almost always take pretty close to six minutes to win since for the foreseeable future we will need to wait until after the second green phase to put him under 25%. I'm almost in tier 11 now with an equipped item level of 356, so I'll just use my stats as a decent approximation. With all raid buffs up over six minutes I would have the following: 124k mana pool, 196k from in combat mana regen, 45k from replenishment, 11k from hymn of hope, 10k from a potion and 37k from shadowfiend. I'll talk about Rapture a little later. That's 423k mana. The cost of shield with Mental Agility is going to be 4626, so 81 shields will cost 375k. Clearly 81 shields in six minutes is doable with a lot of mana to spare.
Actually spamming shields, in contrast, is totally out of the question. Thanks to Borrowed Time I could in theory currently cast a shield every 1.17 seconds. That would be 307 shields in six minutes, costing 1.4M mana. That would probably be possible to 11 restoration shamans in my raid, but not under any plausible circumstances.
In reality using just shields to heal would almost certainly be wrong in a 10-player raid. Not casting Penance - especially now that we know it is also getting buffed - seems like a big mistake. It seems, however, that going from 4.0.3 to 4.0.6 a discipline priest will be able to match their old output using only shield and still have mana left over to do healing after that.
Does the inflated absorbency of PW:S mean this it will take a little better timing to get a rapture proc every 12s?
I do think that the larger size of the shield will make it harder to predict when your Rapture procs will come in some circumstances. Without predictability, you will have the choice of casting early and possibly "wasting" the chance at a proc or casting late and accepting that your procs per minute will be closer to 4 than to 5.
That being said, bosses hit pretty hard and a lot of the time their AoE damage will break shields. Halfus will do multiple Furious Roars followed by a Shadow Nova. Valiona does Blackout on the ground and Twilight Meteor in the air. On Maloriak breaking a Flash Freeze or taking a single hit of Scorching Blast will break shields. Magmaw does spew and spit at the same time. Shields won't be broken when a boss merely glances in your direction, but they will still be broken by randomly targeted attacks and most AoEs.
I think that actually getting a Rapture proc close to every 12 seconds is very hard. I used to get them close to every 14 seconds in Wrath, and these days I only cast shield every 15 seconds at most. But in 4.0.6 you will no longer need a Rapture proc to make shield worth casting. It's going to be one of your most mana efficient heals - and will totally blow competitors out of the water in terms of throughput - and discipline priests will go back to casting it a lot. It will be the heal of first resort instead of a weird mana return ability. Casting more shields should net more Rapture ticks, even if they take a little longer to break. I think we'll see Raptures between 13 and 14 seconds apart fairly consistently just because we'll actually be casting shield a lot. In the six minute fight above, that would be about 191k mana - over 500 mana per second and a great use of three talent points.
Do you think that Disc would fit in better with the current design philosophy if PW:S had a lower benefit from Mastery, but DA and maybe even PW:B got (better) use of the stat?
I honestly don't know what they could do to discipline mastery right now to fix it. I seems like they just need to come up with a completely new idea. It's too bad they already gave a healing-creates-shields mastery to paladins, since that would have made sense for discipline priests. Like other masteries, they are presumably want to keep it all down to a single number, so I doubt that affecting shields one way and aegis another way is in the cards, but it might be a good way to handle things. Unfortunately, the bonus to aegis would have to be over the moon to actually make the stat good for single target heals. If paladins get 1.25% of their heal to a shield every time, then it seems like discipline priests would need about an 11% boost to the effectiveness of DA per point of mastery since it is a percentage boost to 45% of the normal heal size less than 25% of the time.
I could brainstorm up some ideas for mastery for discipline priests, but it would just be a wishlist or trying to pretend I can comshow backseat develop the game I'm sure things will look different a year from now, but for 4.0.6 I think discipline priests should just enjoy being overpowered.
Is bubble spam feasible with the current regen numbers in-game? For example, can you actually cast PW:S 81 times on Maloriak in T11 gear?
Whether or not bubble spam is feasible depends on what is meant by "spam." In the post in question I divided the total healing that I did on an actual kill of various bosses by the approximate size of a Power Word: Shield from patch 4.0.6 to get the number of shields I would cast to contribute the same amount to the fight. This is a naive comparison to see whether shielding is an affordable way to heal, but is pretty far off the shield spam that discipline priests did in Wrath.
Maloriak has a six minute enrage times, and will almost always take pretty close to six minutes to win since for the foreseeable future we will need to wait until after the second green phase to put him under 25%. I'm almost in tier 11 now with an equipped item level of 356, so I'll just use my stats as a decent approximation. With all raid buffs up over six minutes I would have the following: 124k mana pool, 196k from in combat mana regen, 45k from replenishment, 11k from hymn of hope, 10k from a potion and 37k from shadowfiend. I'll talk about Rapture a little later. That's 423k mana. The cost of shield with Mental Agility is going to be 4626, so 81 shields will cost 375k. Clearly 81 shields in six minutes is doable with a lot of mana to spare.
Actually spamming shields, in contrast, is totally out of the question. Thanks to Borrowed Time I could in theory currently cast a shield every 1.17 seconds. That would be 307 shields in six minutes, costing 1.4M mana. That would probably be possible to 11 restoration shamans in my raid, but not under any plausible circumstances.
In reality using just shields to heal would almost certainly be wrong in a 10-player raid. Not casting Penance - especially now that we know it is also getting buffed - seems like a big mistake. It seems, however, that going from 4.0.3 to 4.0.6 a discipline priest will be able to match their old output using only shield and still have mana left over to do healing after that.
Does the inflated absorbency of PW:S mean this it will take a little better timing to get a rapture proc every 12s?
I do think that the larger size of the shield will make it harder to predict when your Rapture procs will come in some circumstances. Without predictability, you will have the choice of casting early and possibly "wasting" the chance at a proc or casting late and accepting that your procs per minute will be closer to 4 than to 5.
That being said, bosses hit pretty hard and a lot of the time their AoE damage will break shields. Halfus will do multiple Furious Roars followed by a Shadow Nova. Valiona does Blackout on the ground and Twilight Meteor in the air. On Maloriak breaking a Flash Freeze or taking a single hit of Scorching Blast will break shields. Magmaw does spew and spit at the same time. Shields won't be broken when a boss merely glances in your direction, but they will still be broken by randomly targeted attacks and most AoEs.
I think that actually getting a Rapture proc close to every 12 seconds is very hard. I used to get them close to every 14 seconds in Wrath, and these days I only cast shield every 15 seconds at most. But in 4.0.6 you will no longer need a Rapture proc to make shield worth casting. It's going to be one of your most mana efficient heals - and will totally blow competitors out of the water in terms of throughput - and discipline priests will go back to casting it a lot. It will be the heal of first resort instead of a weird mana return ability. Casting more shields should net more Rapture ticks, even if they take a little longer to break. I think we'll see Raptures between 13 and 14 seconds apart fairly consistently just because we'll actually be casting shield a lot. In the six minute fight above, that would be about 191k mana - over 500 mana per second and a great use of three talent points.
Do you think that Disc would fit in better with the current design philosophy if PW:S had a lower benefit from Mastery, but DA and maybe even PW:B got (better) use of the stat?
I honestly don't know what they could do to discipline mastery right now to fix it. I seems like they just need to come up with a completely new idea. It's too bad they already gave a healing-creates-shields mastery to paladins, since that would have made sense for discipline priests. Like other masteries, they are presumably want to keep it all down to a single number, so I doubt that affecting shields one way and aegis another way is in the cards, but it might be a good way to handle things. Unfortunately, the bonus to aegis would have to be over the moon to actually make the stat good for single target heals. If paladins get 1.25% of their heal to a shield every time, then it seems like discipline priests would need about an 11% boost to the effectiveness of DA per point of mastery since it is a percentage boost to 45% of the normal heal size less than 25% of the time.
I could brainstorm up some ideas for mastery for discipline priests, but it would just be a wishlist or trying to pretend I can comshow backseat develop the game I'm sure things will look different a year from now, but for 4.0.6 I think discipline priests should just enjoy being overpowered.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Rethinking Veiled Shadows
In my build I was taking Veiled Shadows because more Shadowfiend seemed more good. In fact, I think I was mostly taking it as a holdover from a time when the beta version of the talent was reducing the duration by 1 minute per point instead of 30 seconds per point. A shadowfiend every three minutes instead of every five is certainly worth two points. I am now less than convinced, however, that a four minute shadowfiend is worth the investment.
First of all, let's look at how much mana the talent gives us with a simple once-every-four minutes instead of once-every-five minutes analysis. Shadowfiend restores 30% of your maximum mana. In my case, that's 36000. 36000 mana every five minutes is 120 mana per second. 36000 mana every four minutes is 150 mana per second. So you get 30 mana per second for the two talent points. I haven't made a post about benchmarking talents yet, but this is clearly not that strong.
The real advantage of reducing the cooldown is not that it gives you 30 more mana per second if you cast it on the cooldown every time. It's that it allows you to get two shadowfiends in a fight where you would normally get one. If a fight is five minutes and you get to cast a second shadowfiend because of the talent, then that's 36000 more mana for the fight, or 120 mana per second over the fight. The question is, will Veiled Shadows actually do that for us?
I'll make this easy on myself to get a ballpark figure, and then talk about the complexities. First of all, I can ignore mana regeneration from any source that regenerates mana proportional to the length of the fight. So ignore spirit regen, Rapture, the Mp5 buff and Replenishment. When I talk about how much mana I am spending, I will be talking about how much I am spending above that continuous mana regen. I'm also going to assume I'm spending mana at a continuous rate.
If I get to Hymn of Hope once during the fight, then that will restore 9.2% of our base mana1 and a mana potion is around another 8.3% of my max mana. So I have around 114.5% of my base mana pool to work with. Just because I'd rather work out of 100%, I'll instead say that shadowfiend restores 26.2% of my augmented mana pool.
I wouldn't want to cast shadowfiend as soon as the fight starts because most of the mana would be wasted. The earliest you would want to cast shadowfiend is:
Where mana_spent is measured in percentage of augmented mana per second.
Veiled Shadows will give me an extra shadowfiend cast is the length of the fight minus t if between 240 and 300 seconds. We probably want to ignore at least those cases where the second shadowfiend doesn't last its full duration, so look at cases between 255 and 315 seconds instead of those between 240 and 300. Of course getting an extra cast isn't the only thing to consider. If Veiled Shadows is giving me an extra cast, am I actually going to use that mana? On the flip side of this question, am I going to have any mana left when it comes time to cast shadowfiend again? If this model has me running out of mana at the three minute mark, then it isn't a model of a winnable fight and Veiled Shadows is irrelevant.
So the amount of mana I have left when it's time to cast my second shadowfiend is:
And if we substitute in the above equation for t this simplifies to:
Which is pretty easy to work with. Our conditions above were that the second shadowfiend matters, so the amount of mana we have left should be less than the amount of mana we are expecting to spend in the rest of the fight, and also that we should actually have enough mana to get to the second shadowfiend without running out, so the amount of mana we have left is greater than or equal to zero.
Simplifying these two requirements, we get the following:
and
Substituting one into the other, we arrive at the conclusion that the length of the fight must be greater than 303 seconds in order for the second shadowfiend to be helping us. Basically in a five minute fight there is no way for the second shadowfiend to work out, and there are a lot of five minute fights. In the event that you are spending almost exactly 0.416% of your augmented mana per second, this talent would probably be very good, and maybe even necessary, but possibly not enough to make winning the fight feasible with your current mana.
Of course going over 303 seconds is no guarantee that the talent is working for you. We need it to not only be the case that a four minute shadowfiend is working for us, but also that a five minute shadowfiend would not be. Using similar analysis for mana expenditure per second, we can see that starting at around 379 seconds, the five minute shadowfiend starts being viable for a second use. The four minute shadowfiend won't be viable for a third use until at least ten minutes. Furthermore, the windows to take advantage of the extra shadowfiend are quite small. In order for the talent to be helping, you need to be casting your first shadowfiend between approximately 72 and 80 seconds into the fight. If you are casting it sooner - and not wasting it - then you are burning through your mana so fast that you have no chance of making it to the end of the fight. If you are casting it later then you are using mana at a slower pace and don't need the extra shadowfiend cast anyway.
The shape of damage on a given fight might alter these things. Veiled shadows might be useful on a fight like Halfus where you spend a lot of mana early on, then have a big lull. Conveniently, Halfus is also a six minute fight, which is where Veiled Shadows really has an opportunity to come into play. Use shadowfiend when you are still fighting the drakes and you might both get full effect out of it and have plenty of mana to make it to your next cast, which you might need because you are forced to heal up after the roars. This kind of high damage at the start, high damage at the end, lull in the middle fight, however, is pretty rare, and it is also a pushover that you don't need a special talent spec for.
Overall, I think I am just not hitting the window to make this talent work for me. The question is, where to put the other two points. For now I think I'll stick them back in Surge of Light, but with patch 4.0.6, both Improved Renew and Soul Warding present themselves as reasonable alternatives.
1. Hymn of hope gives 2% mana for each of four ticks. However, it also increases maximum mana by 15% for 12 seconds. Assuming you get all four ticks, that means that the second through fourth tick give 2.3% of your normal maximum mana, since your maximum mana will be higher, so it gives 8.9% of maximum mana. But also you have increased maximum mana for a total of 18 seconds from when the first tick hits you to 12 seconds after the last tick. That means 18 seconds of getting 15% more replenishment, which is 0.1% mana per second, which means 0.27% more mana maximum mana.
First of all, let's look at how much mana the talent gives us with a simple once-every-four minutes instead of once-every-five minutes analysis. Shadowfiend restores 30% of your maximum mana. In my case, that's 36000. 36000 mana every five minutes is 120 mana per second. 36000 mana every four minutes is 150 mana per second. So you get 30 mana per second for the two talent points. I haven't made a post about benchmarking talents yet, but this is clearly not that strong.
The real advantage of reducing the cooldown is not that it gives you 30 more mana per second if you cast it on the cooldown every time. It's that it allows you to get two shadowfiends in a fight where you would normally get one. If a fight is five minutes and you get to cast a second shadowfiend because of the talent, then that's 36000 more mana for the fight, or 120 mana per second over the fight. The question is, will Veiled Shadows actually do that for us?
I'll make this easy on myself to get a ballpark figure, and then talk about the complexities. First of all, I can ignore mana regeneration from any source that regenerates mana proportional to the length of the fight. So ignore spirit regen, Rapture, the Mp5 buff and Replenishment. When I talk about how much mana I am spending, I will be talking about how much I am spending above that continuous mana regen. I'm also going to assume I'm spending mana at a continuous rate.
If I get to Hymn of Hope once during the fight, then that will restore 9.2% of our base mana1 and a mana potion is around another 8.3% of my max mana. So I have around 114.5% of my base mana pool to work with. Just because I'd rather work out of 100%, I'll instead say that shadowfiend restores 26.2% of my augmented mana pool.
I wouldn't want to cast shadowfiend as soon as the fight starts because most of the mana would be wasted. The earliest you would want to cast shadowfiend is:
Where mana_spent is measured in percentage of augmented mana per second.
Veiled Shadows will give me an extra shadowfiend cast is the length of the fight minus t if between 240 and 300 seconds. We probably want to ignore at least those cases where the second shadowfiend doesn't last its full duration, so look at cases between 255 and 315 seconds instead of those between 240 and 300. Of course getting an extra cast isn't the only thing to consider. If Veiled Shadows is giving me an extra cast, am I actually going to use that mana? On the flip side of this question, am I going to have any mana left when it comes time to cast shadowfiend again? If this model has me running out of mana at the three minute mark, then it isn't a model of a winnable fight and Veiled Shadows is irrelevant.
So the amount of mana I have left when it's time to cast my second shadowfiend is:
And if we substitute in the above equation for t this simplifies to:
Which is pretty easy to work with. Our conditions above were that the second shadowfiend matters, so the amount of mana we have left should be less than the amount of mana we are expecting to spend in the rest of the fight, and also that we should actually have enough mana to get to the second shadowfiend without running out, so the amount of mana we have left is greater than or equal to zero.
Simplifying these two requirements, we get the following:
Substituting one into the other, we arrive at the conclusion that the length of the fight must be greater than 303 seconds in order for the second shadowfiend to be helping us. Basically in a five minute fight there is no way for the second shadowfiend to work out, and there are a lot of five minute fights. In the event that you are spending almost exactly 0.416% of your augmented mana per second, this talent would probably be very good, and maybe even necessary, but possibly not enough to make winning the fight feasible with your current mana.
Of course going over 303 seconds is no guarantee that the talent is working for you. We need it to not only be the case that a four minute shadowfiend is working for us, but also that a five minute shadowfiend would not be. Using similar analysis for mana expenditure per second, we can see that starting at around 379 seconds, the five minute shadowfiend starts being viable for a second use. The four minute shadowfiend won't be viable for a third use until at least ten minutes. Furthermore, the windows to take advantage of the extra shadowfiend are quite small. In order for the talent to be helping, you need to be casting your first shadowfiend between approximately 72 and 80 seconds into the fight. If you are casting it sooner - and not wasting it - then you are burning through your mana so fast that you have no chance of making it to the end of the fight. If you are casting it later then you are using mana at a slower pace and don't need the extra shadowfiend cast anyway.
The shape of damage on a given fight might alter these things. Veiled shadows might be useful on a fight like Halfus where you spend a lot of mana early on, then have a big lull. Conveniently, Halfus is also a six minute fight, which is where Veiled Shadows really has an opportunity to come into play. Use shadowfiend when you are still fighting the drakes and you might both get full effect out of it and have plenty of mana to make it to your next cast, which you might need because you are forced to heal up after the roars. This kind of high damage at the start, high damage at the end, lull in the middle fight, however, is pretty rare, and it is also a pushover that you don't need a special talent spec for.
Overall, I think I am just not hitting the window to make this talent work for me. The question is, where to put the other two points. For now I think I'll stick them back in Surge of Light, but with patch 4.0.6, both Improved Renew and Soul Warding present themselves as reasonable alternatives.
1. Hymn of hope gives 2% mana for each of four ticks. However, it also increases maximum mana by 15% for 12 seconds. Assuming you get all four ticks, that means that the second through fourth tick give 2.3% of your normal maximum mana, since your maximum mana will be higher, so it gives 8.9% of maximum mana. But also you have increased maximum mana for a total of 18 seconds from when the first tick hits you to 12 seconds after the last tick. That means 18 seconds of getting 15% more replenishment, which is 0.1% mana per second, which means 0.27% more mana maximum mana.
Monday, January 10, 2011
Inspiration versus Surge of Light
Inspiration versus Surge of Light was one of my least certain decisions when I was putting together a talent spec. When I swapped to Smite from non-Smite, it seemed like Surge would be better given that Smite does not proc Inspiration but does proc Surge.
Well, I have some real data now, so I can actually see how much physical damage was dealt to people in the 15 seconds following me landing critical heals on them. I'm working from our World of Logs reports, so it's a little cumbersome, but foolishly I haven't been running my own logs up to this point.
The result for Magmaw is that Inspiration would have prevented around 90k damage, and on Omnitron it would have prevented 139k. On both encounters I healed around the same amount, approximately 3.15M. So as a percentage of total healing, it was 2.85% on Magmaw and about 4.19% on Omnitron.
I calculated the expected number of Surge procs given the coming patch that will allow Flash Heal and Greater Heal to proc it. Surge did not fare to well, with only 3.5 procs on Magmaw and 2.9 on Omnitron. Even allowing that the free Flash Heal will be able to crit *and* will be substantially more likely to benefit from Grace, this is substantially less than the damage reduced by Inspiration.
Of course these numbers are pretty far from telling the whole story, given the very different ways that the two talents function. Surge gives a heal that takes my time to cast but that I get to personally direct. Inspiration is sort of a blanket over the raid, randomly reducing bits of damage. But I think in the intangibles category, Inspiration has a bit of an edge for a two reasons.
First, Inspiration does not take time to cast to extra "healing".
Second, while I would normally be in favour of benefits that I get to personally direct rather than benefits that are handed out at random, when the personally directed benefits are so heavily dependent on procs, they become very random. I can't make the best use of an instant cast, free Flash Heal if I can only use it three times a fight and if my windows to use it are only 10 seconds long. If those windows don't correspond to the best time to use it, then I am having to make decisions to direct it without getting the benefit of making decisions. In this circumstance, I'd rather have it just be handed out at random.
If the way in which the benefit is handed out is preferable and it's a bigger quantity of health over the fight then the choice is pretty clear. I'll be moving those points over in my build.
Well, I have some real data now, so I can actually see how much physical damage was dealt to people in the 15 seconds following me landing critical heals on them. I'm working from our World of Logs reports, so it's a little cumbersome, but foolishly I haven't been running my own logs up to this point.
The result for Magmaw is that Inspiration would have prevented around 90k damage, and on Omnitron it would have prevented 139k. On both encounters I healed around the same amount, approximately 3.15M. So as a percentage of total healing, it was 2.85% on Magmaw and about 4.19% on Omnitron.
I calculated the expected number of Surge procs given the coming patch that will allow Flash Heal and Greater Heal to proc it. Surge did not fare to well, with only 3.5 procs on Magmaw and 2.9 on Omnitron. Even allowing that the free Flash Heal will be able to crit *and* will be substantially more likely to benefit from Grace, this is substantially less than the damage reduced by Inspiration.
Of course these numbers are pretty far from telling the whole story, given the very different ways that the two talents function. Surge gives a heal that takes my time to cast but that I get to personally direct. Inspiration is sort of a blanket over the raid, randomly reducing bits of damage. But I think in the intangibles category, Inspiration has a bit of an edge for a two reasons.
First, Inspiration does not take time to cast to extra "healing".
Second, while I would normally be in favour of benefits that I get to personally direct rather than benefits that are handed out at random, when the personally directed benefits are so heavily dependent on procs, they become very random. I can't make the best use of an instant cast, free Flash Heal if I can only use it three times a fight and if my windows to use it are only 10 seconds long. If those windows don't correspond to the best time to use it, then I am having to make decisions to direct it without getting the benefit of making decisions. In this circumstance, I'd rather have it just be handed out at random.
If the way in which the benefit is handed out is preferable and it's a bigger quantity of health over the fight then the choice is pretty clear. I'll be moving those points over in my build.
Thursday, December 30, 2010
What Slow Means - Or Why You Should Take Heal Off Your Bar
Correction: Once again foiled by bad information on the net. While I think the essential point of my post is still completely valid, the casting time of Healing wave is indeed 2.5 seconds with the proper spec, not 2.
As Cataclysm was approaching, the developers talked about how they wanted to change the way healing worked. They said they wanted to "slow it down." What exactly it means to slow things down, however, might not have met the expectations of everyone.
Healing in the Wrath environment could certainly not be accused of being slow. Commonly people talked about how healing was all about twitch reflexes. You twitch wrong, someone dies. You twitch right, everyone is back at full health and everything is fine.
I wondered as Cataclysm approached how slowing things down could keep things challenging. After all, successful Wrath-era healers were used to making a life-or-death decision every second. If we only have a make a life-or-death decision every two seconds, how could that be anything but easier? It turns out that slower did not mean exactly what I expected. In the sense that nearly every GCD was life or death things were very fast in wrath. In the sense, however, of the amount of damage your raid took compared to the amount of healing you were capable of doing, things were actually incredible slow.
In Wrath healing, druids and paladins would often have overheal in the 60%-70% range, or even a little higher. Discipline priests had fairly low overheal, at 30%, but when you looked closely, because shields could not overheal, their actual overheal on spells that healed people could get just as high or sometimes even higher than paladins and druids. If you are overhealing 70% and no one is dying, that means you are outputting three and a third times as much healing as is needed. In a 10-player raid, that means that one healer is able to output enough healing to keep the entire raid alive. The reason you brought more than one healer was a question of distribution, not of throughput.
In a Cataclysm raid overhealing 70% would be next to impossible. You would pretty much have to go out of your way to target people at full health with your heals to achieve a number like that. Distribution of heals is no longer reason you bring three healers to a fight, you bring three healers because you need that many to actually heal the amount of incoming damage.
This was easiest to see in early experiences healing heroics. When the entire group had just reached item level 3291 healing through boss damage could be very difficult. The boss could actually output more damage per second than some healers could heal. The reason it was possible to win was that the damage coming from the boss only exceeded the ability to heal by a small amount. If the fight lasts three minutes, and your group has around 550,000 health between then you can actually win if the boss does 3000 more dps than your healer can heal.
This is a new kind of calculation, one that we would never have done in Wrath of the Lich King. This is what it means to "slow down" healing. Instead of needing to land a heal every second to make sure the boss doesn't two-shot the tank, you need to maximize the amount of healing you can get over a long stretch in the hopes that it will be enough total healing to give the dps time to win the fight.
Many of us, when we heard that they were going to make mana matter, rightly reasoned that if the total amount of damage that will be done before the fight ends is close to or slightly exceeds the maximum amount of healing that your healer can do over that period of time then your healer cannot afford to use low efficiency heals. The flip side of this – which is entirely necessary for the new healing model but which I didn’t see coming – is that if the total amount of incoming damage per second is close to or slightly exceeds the maximum amount of healing that your healer can do per second, then your healer cannot afford to use low throughput heal.
A lot of priests have taken the wrong path here. For a shaman, the real question was how to do enough healing over the length of the fight, and Healing Wave was an important part of the answer. But let’s take a look at Healing Wave. Its casting time is only 2 as opposed to 2.5 for Heal, but its scaling is similar to Heal and while its base healing is lower it is higher on a per second basis. Tidal Waves hastes it by 30% twice every six seconds. It can trigger Earthliving Weapon. Ancestral Awakening matches Divine Aegis in the extra critical department and Nature’s Blessing probably slightly exceeds Grace in a heroic dungeon. If you are having trouble keeping up with incoming damage than Deep Healing increases its effect by around 1.25% per point of mastery while the discipline priest mastery likely increases Heal by around 0.1% per point. The tank also has Earth Shield. All together, Healing Wave is slightly more powerful than Heal, and has an average cast time of around 1.7 seconds to Heals’ 2.2 seconds.
For a discipline priest, the question was never how can I do enough healing over the course of the fight, it was always how can I do enough healing to keep up with the incoming damage on a per-second basis. With 15% extra intellect, Hymn of Hope, Rapture and Shadowfiend, discipline priests have enough mana to get through the fight, what they need is enough throughput to get through any given 10 second period.
So the solution is to just not cast Heal. If you are trying to heal damage to a single target, cast Greater Heal. If you are looking to fill time casting something because you don’t think you can afford to waste it, cast Prayer of Healing - you can think of it as a single-target heal with benefits rather than a group heal if you need to. If everyone is near full use Renew. If none of these is a good option then just don’t do anything at all. This may sound like a strange suggestion given that I’ve been talking about not having enough throughput to keep up, but casting Heal can be worse than nothing. Given that Greater Heal has about 2.8 times the throughput of Heal and an at-par mana efficiency Prayer of Healing has around 2.9 times the throughput of Heal, starting a heal now instead of waiting one to one and a half seconds to cast a better spell is a loss of throughput.
Strangely enough I don’t even think this is a complaint. For Heal to be a bad spell for discipline priests – and I think a questionable one for holy priests – is not that bad a place for the game to be. Priests actually have a lot more spells than the other healing classes, and expecting them to use them all is a little unrealistic. We should be much more concerned about the relative weakness of Power Word: Shield for discipline and Renew for Holy than about Heal which I feel completely comfortable leaving in my spellbook to be pulled out for Chimaeron.
1. And many of the members of your group may have faked their way to item level 329. This is especially easy for most tanks since, as plate wearers, they can easily buy a whole bunch of gear that is absolutely useless to them from faction vendors. Cloth with spirit counts towards a prot warrior's item level.
As Cataclysm was approaching, the developers talked about how they wanted to change the way healing worked. They said they wanted to "slow it down." What exactly it means to slow things down, however, might not have met the expectations of everyone.
Healing in the Wrath environment could certainly not be accused of being slow. Commonly people talked about how healing was all about twitch reflexes. You twitch wrong, someone dies. You twitch right, everyone is back at full health and everything is fine.
I wondered as Cataclysm approached how slowing things down could keep things challenging. After all, successful Wrath-era healers were used to making a life-or-death decision every second. If we only have a make a life-or-death decision every two seconds, how could that be anything but easier? It turns out that slower did not mean exactly what I expected. In the sense that nearly every GCD was life or death things were very fast in wrath. In the sense, however, of the amount of damage your raid took compared to the amount of healing you were capable of doing, things were actually incredible slow.
In Wrath healing, druids and paladins would often have overheal in the 60%-70% range, or even a little higher. Discipline priests had fairly low overheal, at 30%, but when you looked closely, because shields could not overheal, their actual overheal on spells that healed people could get just as high or sometimes even higher than paladins and druids. If you are overhealing 70% and no one is dying, that means you are outputting three and a third times as much healing as is needed. In a 10-player raid, that means that one healer is able to output enough healing to keep the entire raid alive. The reason you brought more than one healer was a question of distribution, not of throughput.
In a Cataclysm raid overhealing 70% would be next to impossible. You would pretty much have to go out of your way to target people at full health with your heals to achieve a number like that. Distribution of heals is no longer reason you bring three healers to a fight, you bring three healers because you need that many to actually heal the amount of incoming damage.
This was easiest to see in early experiences healing heroics. When the entire group had just reached item level 3291 healing through boss damage could be very difficult. The boss could actually output more damage per second than some healers could heal. The reason it was possible to win was that the damage coming from the boss only exceeded the ability to heal by a small amount. If the fight lasts three minutes, and your group has around 550,000 health between then you can actually win if the boss does 3000 more dps than your healer can heal.
This is a new kind of calculation, one that we would never have done in Wrath of the Lich King. This is what it means to "slow down" healing. Instead of needing to land a heal every second to make sure the boss doesn't two-shot the tank, you need to maximize the amount of healing you can get over a long stretch in the hopes that it will be enough total healing to give the dps time to win the fight.
Many of us, when we heard that they were going to make mana matter, rightly reasoned that if the total amount of damage that will be done before the fight ends is close to or slightly exceeds the maximum amount of healing that your healer can do over that period of time then your healer cannot afford to use low efficiency heals. The flip side of this – which is entirely necessary for the new healing model but which I didn’t see coming – is that if the total amount of incoming damage per second is close to or slightly exceeds the maximum amount of healing that your healer can do per second, then your healer cannot afford to use low throughput heal.
A lot of priests have taken the wrong path here. For a shaman, the real question was how to do enough healing over the length of the fight, and Healing Wave was an important part of the answer. But let’s take a look at Healing Wave. Its casting time is only 2 as opposed to 2.5 for Heal, but its scaling is similar to Heal and while its base healing is lower it is higher on a per second basis. Tidal Waves hastes it by 30% twice every six seconds. It can trigger Earthliving Weapon. Ancestral Awakening matches Divine Aegis in the extra critical department and Nature’s Blessing probably slightly exceeds Grace in a heroic dungeon. If you are having trouble keeping up with incoming damage than Deep Healing increases its effect by around 1.25% per point of mastery while the discipline priest mastery likely increases Heal by around 0.1% per point. The tank also has Earth Shield. All together, Healing Wave is slightly more powerful than Heal, and has an average cast time of around 1.7 seconds to Heals’ 2.2 seconds.
For a discipline priest, the question was never how can I do enough healing over the course of the fight, it was always how can I do enough healing to keep up with the incoming damage on a per-second basis. With 15% extra intellect, Hymn of Hope, Rapture and Shadowfiend, discipline priests have enough mana to get through the fight, what they need is enough throughput to get through any given 10 second period.
So the solution is to just not cast Heal. If you are trying to heal damage to a single target, cast Greater Heal. If you are looking to fill time casting something because you don’t think you can afford to waste it, cast Prayer of Healing - you can think of it as a single-target heal with benefits rather than a group heal if you need to. If everyone is near full use Renew. If none of these is a good option then just don’t do anything at all. This may sound like a strange suggestion given that I’ve been talking about not having enough throughput to keep up, but casting Heal can be worse than nothing. Given that Greater Heal has about 2.8 times the throughput of Heal and an at-par mana efficiency Prayer of Healing has around 2.9 times the throughput of Heal, starting a heal now instead of waiting one to one and a half seconds to cast a better spell is a loss of throughput.
Strangely enough I don’t even think this is a complaint. For Heal to be a bad spell for discipline priests – and I think a questionable one for holy priests – is not that bad a place for the game to be. Priests actually have a lot more spells than the other healing classes, and expecting them to use them all is a little unrealistic. We should be much more concerned about the relative weakness of Power Word: Shield for discipline and Renew for Holy than about Heal which I feel completely comfortable leaving in my spellbook to be pulled out for Chimaeron.
1. And many of the members of your group may have faked their way to item level 329. This is especially easy for most tanks since, as plate wearers, they can easily buy a whole bunch of gear that is absolutely useless to them from faction vendors. Cloth with spirit counts towards a prot warrior's item level.
Thursday, December 23, 2010
Giving Atonement a Chance
First of all, I'd like to draw attention to the following blue post about bug hotfixes:
The range of the heal on Atonement has been increased to 15 yards. It has been verified to be working correctly for the priest and party/raid members.
It is nice that not only did the fix the Atonement bug, but they actually checked that it was fixed. I don't think I've seen a post like this before, but I'm glad to know that they are actually checking to see if they fix the priest bugs that they say they are fixing. If I recall correctly, and it is obvious that I don't, when Surge of Light first came out they indicated that they fixed it in approximately one thousand consecutive patches without ever changing anything about it1. It was one or two patches of claiming to have fixed early Rapture bugs before they were finally resolved.
The changes to Atonement go beyond that, however. Atonement is now affected by healing bonuses. This means that Atonement will always heal for 6% more than the Smite thanks to "double dipping" on Twin Disciplines. It also means Atonement can benefit from Archangel and Grace. I'm not quite sure whether these all stack and whether they stack additively or multiplicatively yet, but I do know that I have had heals well over 20k on occasion, which seems like a lot for a cheap 2 second cast spell.
This significantly increased throughput and mana efficiency added up to making Atonement viable. I gave it a test run in heroics before raiding with it last night and I was happy with it in both cases, though it seemed more useful in heroics than in raids. The main advantage of this build at the moment is that you don't have to give up much to get it.
This is the spec that I tried out. Comparing this with my previous healing spec you can see I took the five points out of Inner Sanctum and Soul Warding which were both of questionable value to begin with. I also swapped Inspiration out for Surge of Light, because Smite procs Surge of Light, Atonement does not proc Inspiration, and Inspiration doesn't have a very good up time with current crit levels. This choice may be a mistake, but I haven't had time to do a good quantification of either talent so far.
How many Smites I actually use varies a great deal from fight to fight. So far it has been important to keep in mind that the Atonement spec is not an all-out Smite spec. Smite is one heal among many, and the rest of the toolbox needs to be there. In particular, for our Chimaeron attempts I was not using Smite at all because it didn't provide the sort of healing the fight needed. Smite may actually be very useful for that fight, but it will need some more experimentation to figure out how to approach healing overall. For Magmaw, on the other hand, Smite is great for healing the tank.
I picked this spec out as overpowered because of unusually high scaling, and I was waiting for it to come into its own in future tiers. The most recent changes have buffed it enough to make it good at the current tier, and presumably it will need to be dramatically merfed in future tiers.
1. I think the actual number was somewhere in the four to six range. Anyway, for months on end every time they patched anything they would say the talent was now working correctly despite the fact that they hadn't fixed a thing.
The range of the heal on Atonement has been increased to 15 yards. It has been verified to be working correctly for the priest and party/raid members.
It is nice that not only did the fix the Atonement bug, but they actually checked that it was fixed. I don't think I've seen a post like this before, but I'm glad to know that they are actually checking to see if they fix the priest bugs that they say they are fixing. If I recall correctly, and it is obvious that I don't, when Surge of Light first came out they indicated that they fixed it in approximately one thousand consecutive patches without ever changing anything about it1. It was one or two patches of claiming to have fixed early Rapture bugs before they were finally resolved.
The changes to Atonement go beyond that, however. Atonement is now affected by healing bonuses. This means that Atonement will always heal for 6% more than the Smite thanks to "double dipping" on Twin Disciplines. It also means Atonement can benefit from Archangel and Grace. I'm not quite sure whether these all stack and whether they stack additively or multiplicatively yet, but I do know that I have had heals well over 20k on occasion, which seems like a lot for a cheap 2 second cast spell.
This significantly increased throughput and mana efficiency added up to making Atonement viable. I gave it a test run in heroics before raiding with it last night and I was happy with it in both cases, though it seemed more useful in heroics than in raids. The main advantage of this build at the moment is that you don't have to give up much to get it.
This is the spec that I tried out. Comparing this with my previous healing spec you can see I took the five points out of Inner Sanctum and Soul Warding which were both of questionable value to begin with. I also swapped Inspiration out for Surge of Light, because Smite procs Surge of Light, Atonement does not proc Inspiration, and Inspiration doesn't have a very good up time with current crit levels. This choice may be a mistake, but I haven't had time to do a good quantification of either talent so far.
How many Smites I actually use varies a great deal from fight to fight. So far it has been important to keep in mind that the Atonement spec is not an all-out Smite spec. Smite is one heal among many, and the rest of the toolbox needs to be there. In particular, for our Chimaeron attempts I was not using Smite at all because it didn't provide the sort of healing the fight needed. Smite may actually be very useful for that fight, but it will need some more experimentation to figure out how to approach healing overall. For Magmaw, on the other hand, Smite is great for healing the tank.
I picked this spec out as overpowered because of unusually high scaling, and I was waiting for it to come into its own in future tiers. The most recent changes have buffed it enough to make it good at the current tier, and presumably it will need to be dramatically merfed in future tiers.
1. I think the actual number was somewhere in the four to six range. Anyway, for months on end every time they patched anything they would say the talent was now working correctly despite the fact that they hadn't fixed a thing.
Friday, December 17, 2010
Train of Thought
Train of Thought is a very interesting talent, and fairly hard to evaluate. It's a talent that saves you mana, but only if you spend mana on an expensive spell. The question of how much mana it actually saves you is a difficult one to answer.
If you don't cast a good number of Greater Heals, Train of Thought is a very bad talent. Suppose you mostly use Heal as your single target heal, and use Greater Heal only when Inner Focus is making it free. Because Inner Focus must be available at the start of the cast, but it not used - triggering the cooldown - until the end of the cast, the real time between Greater Heals would be 45 seconds plus the casting time of Greater Heal. We'll use 2.28 seconds for the casting time of greater heal1.
So in this case Train of Thought would reduce the time between free Greater Heals from 47.28 seconds to 42.28 seconds. These free heals also benefit from +25% crit, so they are more powerful than typical Greater Heals. In order to figure out how much mana this saves us, we can't look at the cost of Greater Heal, because we wouldn't have been casting Greater Heal if it weren't free. Instead, we should look at how much mana we would have spent healing the same damage with our spammable spell of choice, Heal. In my current gear, a free Greater Heal is worth around 3.21 Heals of healing. Since heal costs 2118, that means we save 6799 mana per Inner Focus boosted Greater Heal. This is actually more than the cost of Greater Heal, thanks to the 25% crit bonus. If we save 6799 mana every 47.28 seconds, that gives us 143.8 mana per second. If instead we save 6799 mana every 42.28 second, that gives us 160.8 mana per second, only 17 mana per second for two talent points. Definitely very bad points.
The question is, what if we cast Greater Heal instead of Heal to heal the damage between free casts, reducing the time between free heals more. Things get a little more complicated in this case. We can figure out how many of our Greater Heals will actually be free to cast - and +25% critical strike chance - using the following:
In order to calculate the time between casts, we would need to know how much our average heal heals for, and how much damage we are trying to heal per second:
To get the average heal, we'd need to know the ratio of free heals, as well as the average amount a normal Greater Heal heals for (G) and the average amount an Inner Focus Greater Heal heals for (G'):
Fortunately, three equations is exactly the right number for three unknowns. The simple formula for the ratio of free Greater Heals is:
So, given a damage amount we can get the average free Greater Heal ratio and the time between casts, which allows use to easily calculate the amount of mana spent per second. The question is, is it cheaper to cast Greater Heals than Heals? If it is not, then Train of Thought saves us mana only when the damage exceeds the amount we can heal with Heal, and we should cast Heal as often as possible. If it is cheaper to heal the same damage with Greater Heal, then we should ignore Heal, even if the incoming damage is low.
There are two results from this simple analysis. The first is that it is cheaper to cast Heal, the second is that the amount of incoming damage you can actually heal with Heal is so low that Heal is basically never a viable option so it is a bit of a moot point.
Of course these results come because the model is too simple. In reality we have three spells - Power Word: Shield, Penance and Borrowed Time hasted Renew - that are all strictly better than Heal but that have real or effective cooldowns. We would never cast Heal if casting one of these were an option instead. In additional, while Power Word: Shield isn't strictly better than Greater Heal, it would have to be a very bizarre situation for us not to use it, and both Penance and the hasted Renew are better than Greater Heal in both efficiency and throughput.
So, what happens to the calculations when we cast Penance, Power Word: Shield, and hasted Renew on the "cooldown"?2 Fortunately we can use the same formula above for the ratio of free Greater Heals. What changes is that the damage we are trying to heal with them is much lower, and our mana expenditure depends not only on how many Heals or Greater Heals we cast, but also has a baseline set by the cost of our superior spells. When we factor this both of our conclusions from the simple case are reversed. While Heal becomes a viable option for some reasonable levels of incoming damage, Greater Heal becomes the more mana efficient way to heal at all levels of damage.
This may seem counter-intuitive at first, so I'll talk a little bit about how this happens. I can understand if your intuition tells you that if one thing is more mana efficient, then it should still be more mana efficient when used as a gap filler. The reason this doesn't end up being true is that Train of Thought is doing more work for us when we are casting other spells. While we still have the same number of real seconds between Greater Heal casts, many of those seconds are used up casting things we are going to cast regardless of what else is going on. At most we are going to fill around 30.86 of our 47.28 seconds with Heal or Greater Heal. The rest of the time we will be using more power heals with better efficiency. This allows us to increase the time between Greater Heals to Heal the same amount of damage. More time between heals means a higher ratio of free heals.
At around 8400 incoming dps - the highest incoming dps that Heal can take care of in my current gear - using Heal and the more efficient spells requires 1010 mana per second. At the same damage level, using Greater Heal instead requires only 900 mana per second. So Train of Thought is saving us 110 mana per second for two points, which is a lot more respectable than 17. Of course it's also important to consider that healing with Greater Heal instead of Heal saves us time, so we have more leeway to fit more heals in if we need them. While at this level of healing casting Heal means casting pretty much 100% of the time, using Greater Heal means only casting 70% of the time. Train of Thought is buying us a lot of time to move around and do other things, in addition to mana savings.
I haven't had Heal on my bar this entire expansion and this analysis just helps to reinforce that decision. While there would still be substantially more modelling to do to quantify the benefit of Train of Thought against the benefit of another talent, such as Divine Aegis, it is pretty safe to say that Train of Thought should be regarded as a "must have" talent rather than an optional one and that Greater Heal should be the staple spammable single target heal for Discipline priests.
1. I chose this number because it is the casting time of greater heal given that you have just enough haste rating to make sure your Renews get a fifth tick when hasted by Borrowed Time. Until throughput becomes more of an issue than mana, I will regard this as the "correct" amount of haste to have.
2. I'm assuming shielding a single target and casting one Renew per shield.
If you don't cast a good number of Greater Heals, Train of Thought is a very bad talent. Suppose you mostly use Heal as your single target heal, and use Greater Heal only when Inner Focus is making it free. Because Inner Focus must be available at the start of the cast, but it not used - triggering the cooldown - until the end of the cast, the real time between Greater Heals would be 45 seconds plus the casting time of Greater Heal. We'll use 2.28 seconds for the casting time of greater heal1.
So in this case Train of Thought would reduce the time between free Greater Heals from 47.28 seconds to 42.28 seconds. These free heals also benefit from +25% crit, so they are more powerful than typical Greater Heals. In order to figure out how much mana this saves us, we can't look at the cost of Greater Heal, because we wouldn't have been casting Greater Heal if it weren't free. Instead, we should look at how much mana we would have spent healing the same damage with our spammable spell of choice, Heal. In my current gear, a free Greater Heal is worth around 3.21 Heals of healing. Since heal costs 2118, that means we save 6799 mana per Inner Focus boosted Greater Heal. This is actually more than the cost of Greater Heal, thanks to the 25% crit bonus. If we save 6799 mana every 47.28 seconds, that gives us 143.8 mana per second. If instead we save 6799 mana every 42.28 second, that gives us 160.8 mana per second, only 17 mana per second for two talent points. Definitely very bad points.
The question is, what if we cast Greater Heal instead of Heal to heal the damage between free casts, reducing the time between free heals more. Things get a little more complicated in this case. We can figure out how many of our Greater Heals will actually be free to cast - and +25% critical strike chance - using the following:
In order to calculate the time between casts, we would need to know how much our average heal heals for, and how much damage we are trying to heal per second:
To get the average heal, we'd need to know the ratio of free heals, as well as the average amount a normal Greater Heal heals for (G) and the average amount an Inner Focus Greater Heal heals for (G'):
Fortunately, three equations is exactly the right number for three unknowns. The simple formula for the ratio of free Greater Heals is:
So, given a damage amount we can get the average free Greater Heal ratio and the time between casts, which allows use to easily calculate the amount of mana spent per second. The question is, is it cheaper to cast Greater Heals than Heals? If it is not, then Train of Thought saves us mana only when the damage exceeds the amount we can heal with Heal, and we should cast Heal as often as possible. If it is cheaper to heal the same damage with Greater Heal, then we should ignore Heal, even if the incoming damage is low.
There are two results from this simple analysis. The first is that it is cheaper to cast Heal, the second is that the amount of incoming damage you can actually heal with Heal is so low that Heal is basically never a viable option so it is a bit of a moot point.
Of course these results come because the model is too simple. In reality we have three spells - Power Word: Shield, Penance and Borrowed Time hasted Renew - that are all strictly better than Heal but that have real or effective cooldowns. We would never cast Heal if casting one of these were an option instead. In additional, while Power Word: Shield isn't strictly better than Greater Heal, it would have to be a very bizarre situation for us not to use it, and both Penance and the hasted Renew are better than Greater Heal in both efficiency and throughput.
So, what happens to the calculations when we cast Penance, Power Word: Shield, and hasted Renew on the "cooldown"?2 Fortunately we can use the same formula above for the ratio of free Greater Heals. What changes is that the damage we are trying to heal with them is much lower, and our mana expenditure depends not only on how many Heals or Greater Heals we cast, but also has a baseline set by the cost of our superior spells. When we factor this both of our conclusions from the simple case are reversed. While Heal becomes a viable option for some reasonable levels of incoming damage, Greater Heal becomes the more mana efficient way to heal at all levels of damage.
This may seem counter-intuitive at first, so I'll talk a little bit about how this happens. I can understand if your intuition tells you that if one thing is more mana efficient, then it should still be more mana efficient when used as a gap filler. The reason this doesn't end up being true is that Train of Thought is doing more work for us when we are casting other spells. While we still have the same number of real seconds between Greater Heal casts, many of those seconds are used up casting things we are going to cast regardless of what else is going on. At most we are going to fill around 30.86 of our 47.28 seconds with Heal or Greater Heal. The rest of the time we will be using more power heals with better efficiency. This allows us to increase the time between Greater Heals to Heal the same amount of damage. More time between heals means a higher ratio of free heals.
At around 8400 incoming dps - the highest incoming dps that Heal can take care of in my current gear - using Heal and the more efficient spells requires 1010 mana per second. At the same damage level, using Greater Heal instead requires only 900 mana per second. So Train of Thought is saving us 110 mana per second for two points, which is a lot more respectable than 17. Of course it's also important to consider that healing with Greater Heal instead of Heal saves us time, so we have more leeway to fit more heals in if we need them. While at this level of healing casting Heal means casting pretty much 100% of the time, using Greater Heal means only casting 70% of the time. Train of Thought is buying us a lot of time to move around and do other things, in addition to mana savings.
I haven't had Heal on my bar this entire expansion and this analysis just helps to reinforce that decision. While there would still be substantially more modelling to do to quantify the benefit of Train of Thought against the benefit of another talent, such as Divine Aegis, it is pretty safe to say that Train of Thought should be regarded as a "must have" talent rather than an optional one and that Greater Heal should be the staple spammable single target heal for Discipline priests.
1. I chose this number because it is the casting time of greater heal given that you have just enough haste rating to make sure your Renews get a fifth tick when hasted by Borrowed Time. Until throughput becomes more of an issue than mana, I will regard this as the "correct" amount of haste to have.
2. I'm assuming shielding a single target and casting one Renew per shield.
Monday, December 6, 2010
My Cataclysm Spec
First of all, The Spec, and then, the complaints.
I've written a lot about Atonement and its ups and downs. But all the number crunching in the world doesn't change the fact that it will only heal you if you are within 8 yards of the target of the Smite. For most raid bosses, that would mean standing well inside of them. For the most part, Atonement will simply do nothing against raid bosses, so I am opting out of the Smite spec completely.
Given that I won't be taking the Smite spec, there is actually very little choice about what I *will* be taking. There are 42 points in the three and I need to select at least 31 of them. Since I am not taking the five points dedicated to Smite, I have to choose 31 out of 37. Reflective Shield essentially doesn't do anything, so I'll rule that out right away, leaving me with a choice of four talent points I don't want.
Many of the talents are simply not candidates for cutting, so I'll focus on the ones that I think I could choose to do without:
Improved Power Word: Shield - Power Word: Shield without a Rapture tick is an exorbitantly expensive and underpowered spell. It is considerably worse than Renew, Penance and Greater Heal for both throughput and efficiency. While it is almost 10% more mana efficient than a Flash Heal, it only about 65% of the throughput. I know as well as anyone that instant casts matter, and that shields are better than heals some of the time, but ideally I want to avoid casting this spell more than once every 14-15 seconds. A talent point for a 5% increase to a spell I cast less than 10% of the time is not a very exciting point.
Mental Agility - I don't actually cast a whole lot of instant spells. If I am casting Power Word: Shield, Renew and Prayer of Mending each once every 15 seconds then it's about 91 mana per second, which is likely a decent investment of talent points, but it's certainly not obviously something you must take.
Inner Sanctum - I think I will mostly be using Inner Fire, not Inner Will, so this would be a 2% spell damage reduction per point. I think this is probably very bad. If I have occasion to need to run faster for a fight and switch to Inner Will then this talent is probably pretty good.
Soul Warding - If I don't want to cast Power Word: Shield more than once every 14-15 seconds, then I probably don't need to cast it more than once every three seconds.
Power Infusion - I have never seen Power Infusion as a terribly useful healing cooldown. I see it more as an external dps cooldown for the raid's casters. For that it is a great talent point. Since I am a healer, I would consider dropping this point if I am not using it for healing.
Rapture - It should be offensive that I am even listing this talent, but, as I say, Power Word: Shield is a bad spell that you don't want to be casting. If you are using it, then Rapture is over 160 mana per second for three points, which seems like it's definitely a good use. But when if I didn't take it and didn't cast Power Word: Shield at all? Right now I'm a fairly convinced that this would make me worse off, but it's hard to be sure without a lot of analysis. Of course, I probably won't do that analysis for reasons I'll explain soon.
Borrowed Time - Going back to not casting shield very often, Borrowed Time might not be doing much. Hasting one spell by 14% every 15 seconds is an average of 1% haste for two talent points, which isn't spectacular. That's not really how Borrowed Time works, though. The 14% haste can be applied to multiple instants - where Penance counts as an instant here - and then to a spell with a cast time. Also, the 14% haste on a Renew is likely a 25% or 20% increase in the effect as well as a 14% reduction in the cast time. Some simple simulations are showing me that this is more than 1% haste per talent point. Still not great.
Strength of Soul - Reducing the Weakened Soul debuff duration seemed like a pretty good idea when Rapture had been reduced to a 6 second cooldown. At a 12 second cooldown, this talent is near useless even if you are casting Heal on the tank.
Train of Thought - It's far from obvious that this talent is a good one to take. How much mana it actually saves you depends on how often you cast Greater Heal. If you are using Inner Focus for Greater Heals on the cooldown then Inner Focus is worth 141 mana per second, which is a really good deal for one talent point. Train of Thought increases this to 159 mana per second, a gain of 18 mana per second, or 9 per talent point. If, however, you are casting three Greater Heals per 30 seconds, then this would increase the mana gain from greater heal to 211. So the two talent points were worth 35 mana per second each. If you are casting five Greater Heals every 20 seconds then the mana gain is 318 per second, and the Train of Thought talent points are worth 177 mana per second, or 88.5 each. The trick is, that they are only worth that additional mana if you were going to cast the Greater Heals anyway. Of course it does make casting those Greater Heals more attractive, so even if you substituting them only because of the talent it will still give some advantages.
Focused Will - 10% of my total health is presumably going to be more in Cataclysm than it was in Wrath. For example, I don't expect bosses with damage auras that tick every 2 seconds to do 10% of my total health. I do, however, expect this to trigger from occasional raidwide AoEs or from having a fire spawn under me. However, it only helps if another hit comes within 8 seconds. Ultimately I find it hard to believe this is going to be good for raiding.
So why did I make the decisions I made? As I indicated above, I think that Strength of Soul is probably going to do nothing useful at all. In fact, Weakened Soul might be a handy timer for me to know when to recast my shield, and reducing it may mean having to pay attention to more information without getting any benefit. There are several talents here that require analysis to figure out how good they are, but my intuition tells me Focused Will is the worst of them. It will depend on the structure of boss fights, and it might easily turn out to be a better investment than Inner Sanctum. For now, I'm going to have to go with my gut and I'll do the calculations when I actually have fight data.
I just trash talked a huge amount of talents and then elected not to pick ones that I thought would have no or virtually no effect on raiding. More importantly, I trash talked every talent that affect Power Word: Shield. Basically, I think Power Word: Shield is a terrible spell that only becomes castable because of Rapture. Assuming Rapture still interacts the same way it did in Wrath with large AoEs that hit the whole raid at once, Soul Warding will probably edge out Focused Will for utility. If they have fixed that bug then I'll probably switch those.
The real reason I take Rapture, Improved Power Word: Shield and Borrowed Time is that I simply can't avoid it. If Atonement isn't going to work on bosses, and I don't want Power Word: Shield talents, then there are only 24 talent points left in the tree. I have to pick something.
So why am I even discipline in the first place? First of all, it's because Penance, Divine Aegis and Grace are all insanely good and Holy just doesn't have anything with that kind of oomph. Secondly, it's because I feel like external tanking cooldowns are too useful to pass up, and Discipline gets two of them.
I'm not going to be writing for probably at least a week, maybe two. When I do come back I hope to have a little bit of data so I can answer a few of the following questions:
I've written a lot about Atonement and its ups and downs. But all the number crunching in the world doesn't change the fact that it will only heal you if you are within 8 yards of the target of the Smite. For most raid bosses, that would mean standing well inside of them. For the most part, Atonement will simply do nothing against raid bosses, so I am opting out of the Smite spec completely.
Given that I won't be taking the Smite spec, there is actually very little choice about what I *will* be taking. There are 42 points in the three and I need to select at least 31 of them. Since I am not taking the five points dedicated to Smite, I have to choose 31 out of 37. Reflective Shield essentially doesn't do anything, so I'll rule that out right away, leaving me with a choice of four talent points I don't want.
Many of the talents are simply not candidates for cutting, so I'll focus on the ones that I think I could choose to do without:
Improved Power Word: Shield - Power Word: Shield without a Rapture tick is an exorbitantly expensive and underpowered spell. It is considerably worse than Renew, Penance and Greater Heal for both throughput and efficiency. While it is almost 10% more mana efficient than a Flash Heal, it only about 65% of the throughput. I know as well as anyone that instant casts matter, and that shields are better than heals some of the time, but ideally I want to avoid casting this spell more than once every 14-15 seconds. A talent point for a 5% increase to a spell I cast less than 10% of the time is not a very exciting point.
Mental Agility - I don't actually cast a whole lot of instant spells. If I am casting Power Word: Shield, Renew and Prayer of Mending each once every 15 seconds then it's about 91 mana per second, which is likely a decent investment of talent points, but it's certainly not obviously something you must take.
Inner Sanctum - I think I will mostly be using Inner Fire, not Inner Will, so this would be a 2% spell damage reduction per point. I think this is probably very bad. If I have occasion to need to run faster for a fight and switch to Inner Will then this talent is probably pretty good.
Soul Warding - If I don't want to cast Power Word: Shield more than once every 14-15 seconds, then I probably don't need to cast it more than once every three seconds.
Power Infusion - I have never seen Power Infusion as a terribly useful healing cooldown. I see it more as an external dps cooldown for the raid's casters. For that it is a great talent point. Since I am a healer, I would consider dropping this point if I am not using it for healing.
Rapture - It should be offensive that I am even listing this talent, but, as I say, Power Word: Shield is a bad spell that you don't want to be casting. If you are using it, then Rapture is over 160 mana per second for three points, which seems like it's definitely a good use. But when if I didn't take it and didn't cast Power Word: Shield at all? Right now I'm a fairly convinced that this would make me worse off, but it's hard to be sure without a lot of analysis. Of course, I probably won't do that analysis for reasons I'll explain soon.
Borrowed Time - Going back to not casting shield very often, Borrowed Time might not be doing much. Hasting one spell by 14% every 15 seconds is an average of 1% haste for two talent points, which isn't spectacular. That's not really how Borrowed Time works, though. The 14% haste can be applied to multiple instants - where Penance counts as an instant here - and then to a spell with a cast time. Also, the 14% haste on a Renew is likely a 25% or 20% increase in the effect as well as a 14% reduction in the cast time. Some simple simulations are showing me that this is more than 1% haste per talent point. Still not great.
Strength of Soul - Reducing the Weakened Soul debuff duration seemed like a pretty good idea when Rapture had been reduced to a 6 second cooldown. At a 12 second cooldown, this talent is near useless even if you are casting Heal on the tank.
Train of Thought - It's far from obvious that this talent is a good one to take. How much mana it actually saves you depends on how often you cast Greater Heal. If you are using Inner Focus for Greater Heals on the cooldown then Inner Focus is worth 141 mana per second, which is a really good deal for one talent point. Train of Thought increases this to 159 mana per second, a gain of 18 mana per second, or 9 per talent point. If, however, you are casting three Greater Heals per 30 seconds, then this would increase the mana gain from greater heal to 211. So the two talent points were worth 35 mana per second each. If you are casting five Greater Heals every 20 seconds then the mana gain is 318 per second, and the Train of Thought talent points are worth 177 mana per second, or 88.5 each. The trick is, that they are only worth that additional mana if you were going to cast the Greater Heals anyway. Of course it does make casting those Greater Heals more attractive, so even if you substituting them only because of the talent it will still give some advantages.
Focused Will - 10% of my total health is presumably going to be more in Cataclysm than it was in Wrath. For example, I don't expect bosses with damage auras that tick every 2 seconds to do 10% of my total health. I do, however, expect this to trigger from occasional raidwide AoEs or from having a fire spawn under me. However, it only helps if another hit comes within 8 seconds. Ultimately I find it hard to believe this is going to be good for raiding.
So why did I make the decisions I made? As I indicated above, I think that Strength of Soul is probably going to do nothing useful at all. In fact, Weakened Soul might be a handy timer for me to know when to recast my shield, and reducing it may mean having to pay attention to more information without getting any benefit. There are several talents here that require analysis to figure out how good they are, but my intuition tells me Focused Will is the worst of them. It will depend on the structure of boss fights, and it might easily turn out to be a better investment than Inner Sanctum. For now, I'm going to have to go with my gut and I'll do the calculations when I actually have fight data.
I just trash talked a huge amount of talents and then elected not to pick ones that I thought would have no or virtually no effect on raiding. More importantly, I trash talked every talent that affect Power Word: Shield. Basically, I think Power Word: Shield is a terrible spell that only becomes castable because of Rapture. Assuming Rapture still interacts the same way it did in Wrath with large AoEs that hit the whole raid at once, Soul Warding will probably edge out Focused Will for utility. If they have fixed that bug then I'll probably switch those.
The real reason I take Rapture, Improved Power Word: Shield and Borrowed Time is that I simply can't avoid it. If Atonement isn't going to work on bosses, and I don't want Power Word: Shield talents, then there are only 24 talent points left in the tree. I have to pick something.
So why am I even discipline in the first place? First of all, it's because Penance, Divine Aegis and Grace are all insanely good and Holy just doesn't have anything with that kind of oomph. Secondly, it's because I feel like external tanking cooldowns are too useful to pass up, and Discipline gets two of them.
I'm not going to be writing for probably at least a week, maybe two. When I do come back I hope to have a little bit of data so I can answer a few of the following questions:
- How much better off am I using Rapture and casting shields than I would be if I simply didn't cast shields at all? (Even though this point is moot because you can't avoid taking PW:S talents)
- What is the real benefit of Train of Thought? Should you cast Greater Heals instead of Heals when you have it?
- How good is Mental Agility?
- How good is Focused Will?
- How many of my spells are hasted by Borrowed Time and how often is it boosting a Renew?
- How much damage is Inner Sanctum preventing?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)