Mana Tide Madness

I wrote before about Mana Tide Totem and how it seems like a large and meaningful anomaly in the current mana regen landscape.

Patch 4.0.6 significantly changed Mana Tide by basing the bonus off the Shaman's spirit rather than the recipient's spirit. I understand this was to prevent Mana Tide from being overpowered when used with temporary spirit buffs like Core of Ripeness. Preventing temporary spirit buffs from generating more than three times as much mana as they were intended to is probably a good thing.

Elevating the value of Spirit to obscene levels for Shamans was not.

If you are a Discipline Priest in 359 gear, gaining 100 spirit would give you about 5k more mana to spend over a 6 minute fight. For a Paladin its slightly less, only around 4.6k mana. Druids get 4.8k. Holy Priests, thanks to Holy Concentration get a whopping 6.5k. What about Shamans?

Ignoring Mana Tide, Shamans get around 4.6k just like Paladins. Mana Tide essentially multiples that extra 100 spirit by five for 16.8 seconds out of every 180 seconds, or 9.33% of the time. That's the equivalent of a 37.3% increase to your spirit. If spirit was increasing your mana by 4.6k without Mana Tide then it will be increasing it by 6.4k with Mana Tide.

No big deal, around the same as the Holy Priest. Except for the fact that the other people in your raid get the same bonus. If you are in a 10-player raid, your 100 spirit generates not only an additional 1.8k mana for you, but also for the two other healers. So the total healer mana from your 100 spirit is 9k. That's if the other two healers are also paladins or shamans. If one is a holy priest and the other is a druid then your 100 spirit generates 11k extra healer mana for your raid.

If you are in a 25-player raid with 2 paladins, 2 holy priests, 1 discipline priest and 1 druid, then your 100 spirit generates 19.1k mana.

So in 10 player raids a shaman might get around 1.7 to 2.4 times the benefit from spirit that another healer would get. In 25 player raiders, the number is more like 3 to 4 times the benefit in terms of total mana restored to the raid. Of course shaman are also widely thought to be one of the weaker healers in terms of throughput. That means that giving other people mana is probably better than giving yourself mana.

If other healers stack spirit as high as they can, reforging other stats to it and matching blue sockets with int/spirit gems, then shaman should be taking this a step further. Gem pure spirit, use spirit enchants in every slot (such as 40 spirit to chest rather than 20 stats), eat spirit food and drink a spirit flask. Tell your other raid members they can let a little bit of their spirit go in favour of throughput because you are the mana guy and they don't have to worry about it.

It may not be possible to directly compare throughput to mana stats, but when a mana stat that is desirable to other healers is four times as good for you as it is for them, there is no possible way that at throughput stat can keep up.

And still there is the problem that there is no analog to Mana Tide anywhere. More resto shamans means more mana for your raid. Less shamans means less. You cannot substitute anything, and you can stack as many as you want.

A Few More Comments on Mastery

This post is basically part two of yesterday's post so reading that first is probably a good idea if you haven't.

I finished off talking about the problems with a mastery rating that only affects one spell by saying that I hope the developers realize that the one spell mastery is the real problem and change that, rather than trying to change the power level of either the mastery or of Power Word: Shield when the problem rears its head.

Using Spell A and Spell B I just want to talk about why you can't solve the problem by tinkering with the numbers, but it has to be solved by redoing the mastery. In my example, Spell A is a two second cast for 20 damage and Spell B is a three second cast for 25. 25% of the time Spell A procs an instant cast of Spell B. I pointed out that if Mastery only affects Spell B and it is balanced with haste then it will get out of hand and eventually you'll just spam Spell B and mastery will be overpowered.

So lets compare how the numbers would actually work out. I was using the example of having 10 mastery which would give a 58.8% bonus to Spell B. First I want to show why this is "balanced" with haste. One mastery takes 1.4 times as much rating as 1% haste, so we should compare 10 mastery with 14% haste. If you do the rotation you are "supposed" to and cast Spell A until you get a proc, then use your proc, your basic rotation does 105 damage in 9.5 seconds, for around 11.1 dps. Put 14% haste you instead get 105 damage in 8.33 seconds, for 12.6 dps. If you get 10 mastery, increasing the damage of Spell B to around 40 then you get 120 damage in 9.5 seconds, again 12.6 dps.

The problem, as we noted, is that the mastery threw out the balance between the two spells and created a different rotation. The alternate rotation is worse with low levels of mastery and better with high levels. Once you cross over the threshold where it gets better, mastery becomes a dominant stat. At 10 mastery the spam Spell B rotation gives 13.3 dps, so it's 5.6% better than the rotation you are supposed to do.

What if we nerf mastery so that the rotation of spamming Spell B doesn't get out of hand? Easy enough to do. If reduce mastery by a little bit then we could find an equilibrium so that 14% haste and 10 mastery give the same dps. The problem is that this equilibrium would exist for those exact numbers only. If we wanted to reduce mastery so that 10 mastery gave 12.6 dps at most, then we'd need mastery to give 5.12% to Spell B per point.

But then what about a few tiers later when we have 15 mastery or 21% haste? The mastery option lets us spam Spell B for 14.7 dps while the haste option does only 13.4 dps. We nerfed the mastery massively but it ends up almost 10% better later on.

We could nerf mastery to make sure that spamming Spell B never became a real option, but that would mean making sure it never got above 36.9 damage per cast. If we know the most mastery people will be able to get in the expansion is 15 then we can set the value of mastery at 3.17%. So then how does 10 mastery compare to 14% haste? 10 mastery would give only 11.9 dps. It would result in overall dps being 5.5% lower than the haste option. Haste rating would be about 87% better than mastery for increasing your dps.

If instead of reducing mastery we reduce the spell, we'll either just recreate the problem in a more extreme fashion or we'll create a situation where the best way to play is to stack haste and just spam Spell A, ignoring the procs.

The numbers just don't work out. Even at a specific gear level, we can reforge, regem, re-enchant and get new items. Discipline priest mastery only really makes sense at extremely high crit levels. If we were critting 60% of the time then it could be affecting our non-shield spells more consistently. There would still be a significant imbalance in how it affected the spells, but it would be much less pronounced. On the other hand, if we could crit that much, why would we not just reforge our mastery into haste and stop casting Shield altogether in favour of spells that can actually benefit from crits?

Mastery for discipline priests, as it is, is unbalanced. In future tiers - or possibly right now in 25-player raids - it will go from being unbalanced to degenerate, and the only way they will be able to stop its degeneracy, without a redesign, is by making it useless.

One Spell Mastery

Suppose you were playing a dps class with two spells: Spell A takes 2 seconds to cast and does 20 damage. Spell B takes 3 seconds to cast and does 25 damage. Sometimes, however, Spell A gives you a proc that makes your next spell B instant. This would make for a pretty obvious rotation.

If you got 1% haste, you would do 1% more dps. If you got 1% crit you would do 1% more dps - but since critical strike rating takes 40% more rating to get 1% they might give you a talent that makes your crits do more to even out crit and haste. What should your mastery be? If your mastery was that you do 1.4% more damage per point, then it would be balanced with crit. Suppose, though, they thought that was boring, so they made your mastery only affect Spell B.

Spell B composes 23.8% of your damage, so if a point of mastery is supposed to increase your damage by 1.4%, it would have to increase the damage of Spell B by 5.88%. Haste, critical strike rating and mastery are all balanced.

There is a problem with this situation, however. Suppose you get 10 mastery. Then Spell B does 58.8% more damage. That means it hits for nearly 40 a shot for a three second cast. Spell A still only does 20 for a two second cast. Your highest dps rotation is just to cast Spell B instead of casting Spell A and waiting for procs. Furthermore, mastery is now *way* more powerful than crit or haste. You should ditch everything you can to stack mastery and blast away with your single spell rotation. The higher the tier your gear gets to, the more stacking mastery and spamming Spell B will outstrip a normal build.

Of course this is pretty easy to understand from a dps perspective. It's no wonder that no dps class has a mastery that affects only one of their spells. They didn't seem to realize, however, that this can have the same unbalancing effect on healing.

Discipline priest mastery doesn't literally only affect one spell, but it comes pretty close. Here is the percentage increase given by 100 mastery rating on my spells: Power Word: Shield - 1.01%; Prayer of Healing - 0.3%; All others - between 0.1% and 0.14%. Mastery is more than 10 times as effective at increasing Power Word: Shield than it is at increasing Atonement healing from Smite and more than three times as effective on Power Word: Shield as it is on Prayer of Healing - the only other spell that consistently affects. Compare this to how 100 intellect affects the throughput of my spells: Smite - 1.19%; All others - pretty close to 0.67%. I've talked about Smite scaling before, so I'll ignore that for now.

If I want to make my spells more powerful, I should obviously gem Intellect. Since it is also a better mana stat than Spirit, gemming intellect is the clear choice. If, however, I want to make Power Word: Shield and only Power Word: Shield more powerful, I should gem Mastery instead. Could I use the same theory applied in the dps example above, do nothing but stack mastery, and cast only Power Word: Shield?

Lets say I manage to get 90% of my items to have mastery rating on them reforge in the other slots. That would be 1974 mastery rating. Also I put mastery gems in all sockets (we'll go with two in a staff, chest, head and legs and one in other socket-prone slots) for another 560 mastery. I can get 115 from enchants and two 321 mastery trinkets. This is a total of 3291 mastery.

Of course my other stats would suffer badly. Sacrificing Intellect and Spirit for Mastery would really hurt my mana. But using the numbers from the PTR for Power Word: Shield, it would boost that one spell to 7.72 healing per mana and 25.7k healing per second. Right now my highest efficiency spell aside from Penance is Smite at 6.27 and my highest throughput spell is a virtual tie between Renew and Flash Heal at 17.4k.

Talking about the viability of this plan is hard to do. Let's start by asking an easy question: could I put out similar total healing numbers by stacking mastery and only casting Power Word: Shield? Each of my shields would be around 35.7k healing and shielding. Dividing the healing I did on a few bosses by that, I get the number of shields that I would have to cast to contribute the same amount of healing to the fight that I did on our last win.

Here they are: Halfus - 45.5 over 5:55; Double Dragon (Valiona and Theralion) - 120 over 8:38 (Not the cleanest kill ever); Ascendant Council - 71 over 6:47; Magmaw - 84 over 5:26; Omnitron - 89 over 6:24; Maloriak - 81 over 6:01.

So the highest rate I'd need to cast shields to keep up with my normal healing is one every 3.9 seconds, and a typical rate is one every 4.4 seconds. Would I have the mana to keep that up for nearly 9 minutes? I would actually have enough mana to keep it up forever. Assuming I can get a Rapture proc every 14 seconds, I would be very slowly gaining mana while casting at this rate.

So the final question is whether that distribution of healing would be viable for winning fights. You'll notice I didn't include some fights in my list, such as Conclave and Chimaeron. Healing those fights with shield alone would certainly not be feasible unless that shield was very big indeed. But casting nothing but shields is not necessarily a bad healing distribution for typical fights. Magmaw will always eat through shields with damage would have to be healed otherwise. Shielding Arcanotron's target and/or shielding everyone during Magmatron is fine. Shielding everyone before Maloriak does his fire breath would be a huge help. Shielding everyone on Magmaw and and Double Dragon would work out. Shielding everyone would work great for the important part of Council.

I don't think this is actually the right way to play a Discipline priest - not for 10-player raiding anyway. It may be precisely the right way to play a Discipline priest for 25-player raiding, and it will almost certainly be the right way to play for 25-player raiding in the final tier of gear where the difference between stacking mastery and having more reasonable stats will be more pronounced. Of course by then the crazy scaling on Smite will make Atonement very overpowered as well. Maybe bringing two discipline priests to raids will be a good idea after all, but more likely we'll see some hideous nerfs around at tier 2 or 3. I just hope that they realize that the problem is that they gave Discipline priests a mastery that only affects on spell, and no amount of tinkering with the power of that spell will really correct things.

Melee Hate

With the recent comment from Paragon on their Ascendant Council kill and the need to sit melee classes in favour of ranged, I expect a lot of people are talking about the problems with melee dps and how so many fights are designed to punish us for being near bosses or being near one another.

I'm actually not that worried about Paragon stacking ranged on a fight, because they would obviously stack whatever it took. If it came down to it they would bring 8-10 of a single class that was ideal for an encounter. But it isn't that one fight that is causing the problem, it is nearly every fight. The problem is not that developers have been going out of their way to make things hard on melee, it's that their entire toolbox makes things harder on melee.

To quote paragon: "Here's to hoping next tier of raiding won't favor ranged by design. Maybe even go wild and give some incentive to bring in melee, too."

What might incentive to bring melee look like? To be less ambitious, what might simply not favouring ranged look like?

Any ability that requires people to spread out, clump together, be far from the boss, move to a specific spot, or really to be anywhere at all favours ranged. Any ability that requires a switch of targets favours ranged. Any ability that makes an area dangerous or puts fire on the ground favours ranged.

There were fifty bosses in Wrath of the Lich King. Of those bosses 17 actively punished you for bringing melee, or for bringing more than one or two melee; 18 had mechanics that noticeably favoured ranged with positional requirements; 5 were pretty much the same for melee and ranged provided that you did not bring a group very heavily weighted towards melee; leaving 9 where there was no substantial difference and only one where it was better to bring melee. Even on the fight where I think melee were definitely preferred - Anub'Arak - that was because of "free" cleaves, a mechanic that has gone away.

The reason why ranged are generally better than melee is simple: being able to attack at range is better than not being able to. There is no arguing that point. A warrior must be 0-5 yards away from an enemy to attack, a mage must be 0-40. There is no compensation for the warrior for this disadvantage.

So what can be done to fix this? What encounter mechanics can make it so that we'll want to bring more melee to raids? I'm not sure there are any. If a mechanic punishes you for being 30 yards from the boss then the ranged will just stand next to the boss - this would be a hunter punishing mechanic, not a melee favouring mechanic. In order to avoid that, they have to put a reason why someone has to be 30 yards from the boss. In that case it has become a melee punishing mechanic. With mechanics like that a raid of 2 tanks, 3 healers, a rogues, a death knight, an enhancement shaman, a warrior and a feral druid just can't win - a pretty severe punishment. Best case scenario for such a raid is that a healer is performing the job that requires range and dodging whatever they have to dodge.

The only thing melee have going for them right now is that melee classes consistently have interrupts on 10 second cooldowns. But even then, shaman have a 6 second ranged interrupt, so this is not a clear advantage and it isn't a reason to favour melee.

If there are no mechanics that can favour melee, then what can be done to make it so melee is not worse than range? Should they do more damage? Unfortunately this would create a host of new problems. Suppose melee did 10% more damage than ranged and that melee hate remained the way it is. Take a boss like Kel'Thuzad who creates very difficult positioning for melee classes, and limits the number of melee you can bring before you run into problems. A 10-player raid only has 5 dps, so a 10% buff to one of them is nearly a 2% buff to the raid. If the boss has a six minute enrage timer than 2% is a difference of 7.2 seconds. So how much health does the boss get to make the enrage timer threatening? If they tune it so that you are supposed to have three melee and deal with the positioning then thats like cutting 22 seconds off the time that a group of ranged dps has to kill the boss. If they tune it so you don't need to bring melee then a group with good melee dps can beat the fight in much lower gear than was intended.

They could make melee do more damage, and rely on the melee punishing effects and the time they spend running around to cut it back to the same as ranged, but then melee classes do the same damage and require more skill to play.

I don't have a solution to this one. The current situation is that ranged can always be substituted in for melee and the reverse is not true. I don't think that is a healthy state for the game, but I really don't see what to do about it, since any advantage given to melee would just tend to create a problem in the other direction. The one option I can think of is to give all ranged classes s minimum range similar to that of hunters, but the consequences of that for PvP and solo play would be disastrous.

Mana Tide Totem

I did a little bit of work on mana over the past few days¹ and there are a few important conclusions that distinguish Cataclysm from Wrath. One is that Replenishment is no longer the ultra-important buff that it used to be. Of course you don't need a spreadsheet to figure this out, the calculation is pretty simple. If you have 100k mana and it gives you 1% of your mana per 10 seconds, then it is giving you 100 mana every second. In a five minute fight that's 30k mana. We all want 30k more mana to spend over five minutes, but we can manage without it more easily than we can manage without some other buffs. Of course you may have more than 100k mana - and if you are a discipline priest who is raiding you really ought to have well over 100k mana, but replenishment is now only about 60% to 100% better than the Mp5 buff given by Blessing of Might and Mana Stream Totam². It's a very powerful but probably not absolutely necessary buff.

Of course getting replenishment isn't that hard. Six different classes can supply it with one of their specs, so most raids should be able to access it. A significantly more powerful mana buff, however, is available to exactly one spec of one class.

Mana Tide totem increases Spirit by 350% for 12 seconds every three minutes. The 12 second duration can be increased by 40% by a talent to 16.8 seconds. That gives it an uptime of around 9.3%. Getting 350% more of a stat 9.3% of the time is pretty similar to getting 32.6% more of that stat all the time, if the gains can be averaged out. Of course this is actually the worst cast scenario for the totem. You get a Mana Tide every three minutes at least, but in a five minute fight, you probably get two, which is one every two and a half minutes. This would increase Mana Tide to a 39.2% buff to spirit. It's all a little odd given that they said there would be no buffs to spirit in the game.

So how much mana does this actually provide? In a five minute fight, using my current gear, it provides me with a little over 50.5k mana. Druids, paladins and shamans all get a little less than that, in the 45k-48k range. Holy priests get around 84k mana from it - making mana tide about a 25% boost to the mana available to a Holy Priest over the five minutes.

Of course this kind of bonus dramatically alters the value of your stats. If you have a shaman to drop the totem for you then spirit is about 60% better than intellect of paladins and shamans, nearly on par with intellect for druids and discipline priests and a whopping 100% better for holy priests at generating mana. Without it, those numbers decline dramatically with spirit being only 20% better than intellect for paladins and shamans and similarly worse for the others. This kind of difference should significantly affect gemming choices. As a discipline priest, I'm much more likely to match a socket bonus with a blue gem if the spirit is as good as Int at giving me mana than if it is only two-thirds.

And of course mana tide totem stacks. I don't think it literally stacks, but they can be staggered to increase the uptime. More restoration shamans means more mana.

Currently the most powerful mana buff in the game by far is available from one spec of one class only, and stacks if you have more of that spec of that class. This buff situation does not seem appropriate.

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1. I built myself a little Mana Calculator to play with. It's not very user friendly and the estimates for the mana gains for Water Shield are pulled out of a hat - two issues which I may correct in the future if I am interested in doing so.

2. In the first tier of Wrath raiding replenishment was about two and a half times as good as the Mp5 Buff. By the end it was four to five times as good.

Mind Sear

A recent blue post indicated that Shadow Priest AoE feels too low. I was pretty sure that Mind Sear was not strong enough, but I hadn't taken the time to really look into it.

We downed Maloriak on Monday, and for those unfamiliar with this fight, it involves an AoE phase where you need to burn down some high health adds with a +100% damage taken debuff before the debuff expires. Naturally, I turn towards them and hit Mind Sear.

My damage to the adds was very bad, around 12% of the damage done to them compared t0 16.7% for the shaman and 18.7% for the hunter.¹ Mind Sear ticks did around 13% less damage than earthquake ticks and, of course, hit all but one add instead of all.

But part of my low Mind Sear damage was most certainly bad play and incorrect gearing. Right now I have only one gear set, and I think of myself as healer rather than as a dps. As a consequence, almost everything I have has spirit on it or is reforged to spirit. I also reforge away as much haste as possible to get more crit and mastery - for single target and AoE healing respectively - since mana is still a larger consideration than throughput. This is not the ideal configuration for shadow dps, but, combined with play mistakes, it is especially bad for AoE.

Shadow Priest mastery is shadow orbs, a complex way of adding a percentage to virtually all damage we do. We have an 18% chance to get an orb every time we deal damage with Shadow Word: Pain or Mind Flay. Upon casting Mind Blast or Mind Spike the orbs are consumed, causing the spell to deal 1.25% more damage per point of mastery per orb and leaving behind a 15 second buff - Empowered Shadow - that gives 1.25% more damage per point of mastery (but not per orb) for all periodic effects.

With my relatively high mastery rating, Empowered Shadow is a 17% buff to periodic damage, including Mind Flay and Mind Sear. Unfortunately, I had Empowered Shadow up very little of the time when I was AoEing. What I should have been doing - and what I will do next time - is ensure that the last thing I do just before the add burn-down starts is Mind Blast the boss to refresh Empowered Shadow so I'll have it the whole time.

Having 100% uptime on Empowered Shadow during Mind Sear phases would have increased my Mind Sear damage by something like 14-15%. That would still leave me at the bottom of the AoE damage meters, but much less solidly at the bottom. It would also have made our AoE phases a little bit less tight.

Obviously Mind Sear is just not doing enough damage, but balancing it is actually really tricky. Given that there is no way to generate that buff while you are actively AoEing the question of where to balance Mind Sear compared to other AoEs is very tricky. If the switch from boss to adds is predictable and you have a 15 second or smaller burn phase to get rid of them then good play will give good uptime. If the adds come out an unpredictable times then uptime will be lower. If the burn phase is 20 seconds then uptime will be lower. If the burn phase is 10 seconds than good play becomes less important to getting good uptime and the predictability is less of a factor. Increase gear a couple of tiers and the difference between the buffed and unbuffed versions of Mind Sear are going to get larger and larger.

I think that right now Empowered Shadow might be a little too mind-bending just by itself, though improvements to my UI should do a lot to fix that. Despite the fact that it is complex compared to other masteries, it is probably not badly balanced, so I expect it will likely stay. Now that I know the developers think Mind Sear has some problems, I'll be really interested to see how they rebalance it given the complexity of the interaction with Empowered Shadow. Ideally I think the answer is to find some way to let Shadow Priests trigger or refresh the Empowered Shadow buff while AoEing, and changing Empowered Shadow to simply not affect Mind Sear is another, slightly less palatable option. Of course ignoring this problem is another option, since it can hardly be seen as the most pressing issue in the game, but as mastery levels increase, if this interaction is ignored it may be increasingly the case that Shadow Priests are either perpetually good or perpetually bad AoEers, or that their performance in AoE varies tremendously based on some very esoteric elements of the fight.

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1. The mage did 22% with Arcane Explosion spam, but there is no reason to compare yourself to the high outlier when you are the low outlier.

Sliver of Pure Ice

My item level is up to 348, but I am the first to admit that value is somewhat spurious. Item level takes the highest level item that you still possess that you have equipped in a slot at some point. As a result, you get credit towards both finger or trinket slots based on your highest level ring or trinket, even if you only have one of them and thus couldn't possibly use it in both slots.

In fact, my armory says that my item level is 348 but conveniently notes in brackets that I have item level 337 equipped. Why the big difference? It's Sliver of Pure Ice from Icecrown Citadel.¹

It's not that I've been extremely unlucky with drops and have never acquired a trinket from a dungeon. But I've never acquired a better trinket from a dungeon.

Case in point: I have a Blood of Isiset in my inventory. It's 69 levels higher, so it seems like it should be clearly better.

Blood has a 105 second internal cooldown and a 10% proc chance. Right now I'm casting a spell about every 2.5 seconds, so it should average around 25 seconds to proc again, giving it an overall cooldown of 130 seconds. So it gives 1512 spirit 15.4% of the time. That's equivalent to 232.6 spirit all the time. Spirit provides 0.1225 mana per second with my current intellect, so this is about 28.57 mana per second overall. Intellect provides 0.0733 mana per second with my current levels of intellect and spirit, so the 152 intellect is worth 11.13 mana per second. The use ability on the Sliver is pretty easy to work out, 1830 every 120 seconds is 15.25 mana per second. Looks like blood wins on mana by 2.49 mana per second, the equivalent of about 20 spirit.

Blood provides 252 mastery instead of 152 intellect. I haven't parsed any of my logs yet to get a good casting pattern, but we can easily compare these things for two of my most frequently cast spells: Greater Heal and Prayer of Healing. For Greater Heal, Intellect is around 6.5 times as good as mastery for increasing throughput. Furthermore, Intellect is consistent and mastery is random as it is dependent on criticals. For Prayer of Healing, aegis triggers every time, so Intellect is only 2.9 times as good as mastery. In the best case scenario, then, the Sliver is around 75% better in terms of throughput. If we converted the throughput from Intellect into master for a direct comparison, the Sliver would be around 189 master rating better. Bear in mind that this is being extremely generous towards mastery rating by assuming that I cast virtually nothing but the spell where is shines the most.

I don't want to directly compare throughput to mana, but if you asked me whether I wanted 189 mastery rating or 20 spirit, I think the choice is fairly clear.

The developers recently mentioned that they know that "secondary stats" are worse than primary ones. So spirit, mastery, crit, and haste are worse than Intellect. I think they may be a bit delusional, however, about exactly how much worse they are. This is spec dependent - I think Blood would clearly win out over sliver for a Holy priest - but 69 items levels for a trinket itemized for the same spec should guarantee a stronger item. Instead, the most important thing to look for on a trinket is whether it gives a passive bonus to Intellect. Item level comes second.

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1. It's also because I have my Runed Signet of the Kirin Tor equipped from a recent teleport to Dalaran.

Tol Barad

I had my first experience of trying to attack Tol Barad last night and it was very frustrating. It seemed just about as impossible to win on offense as it seemed to lose on defense. Obviously the zone can change hands, but it feels like the defenders have far too great an advantage in the battle.

Although it ignores some of the complexity of the zone, the analysis to see why this is is prety simple. In order to win, the attackers need to have more people than the defenders do in one location while at the same time having at least as many people as the defenders do in the other two. Given that the number of people on each side is supposed to be equal, this is a pretty difficult task.

The graveyards help the attackers in a way - the distance is always larger for the defenders, but this is greatly overwhelmed by the fact that the defenders have a shorter distance to attack a *different* building than the one they died at. Since the attackers already have to manage a noticeably higher unit count in an equal battle in order to have a chance of winning, they cannot have lots of extra people at uncontested bases. Whenever the horde reinforces the base where a fight is happening, it means the attackers move more people to that base. This means that the defenders can simply go for one of the other bases after they die, knowing the attackers couldn't have kept it at full strength.

But what's more, the Eye of the Strom-like capturing mechanic makes it impossible to put up a valiant defense. If there are five of us and ten of them then it doesn't matter how well we play, we are going to lose the base. Even if five eventually manages to beat ten, the other team has still bought themselves a lot of time and made sure the attackers can't get to three bases in the mean time.

Something needs to chance in the zone. Either make the buildings click based like AB flags instead of EOtS buildings is in possibility. Another is to get the attackers a real advantage from taking the towers. Or maybe just give attackers a general buff, or make it so that attackers count for more than omet defendesr while taking a building. Any of these might work, but the zone right now is just not working well.

Edit: I just defended Tol Barad last night in a real battle for the first time. I've defended with 10-12 people before, but this time it was around 30. I explained the strategy to my teammates: If the horde sends a large force to take a node, don't reinforce it when you die, simply go and retake another node after rezzing. The horde never managed to control two bases, for more than half a minute. I felt they were playing better than us in battles, and generally winning with equal sized forces, but it was hopeless for them. We even had a few people mining and picking herbs instead of helping.

So Much Mana

They just hotfixed in a huge buff to priest mana. Rapture was increased from 2.5% of mana to 6% and holy concentration from 20% more spirit regen to 40%.

A discipline priest will get about 4 rapture ticks a minute. Over a five minute fight, at 3.5% additional maximum mana per tick, that means about 70% of their mana bar restored. In my current gear, that would be around 67k more mana to spend over the fight, or about 16.3% more mana to spend.

I'm not sure why this change was made at this point in the expansion. It could be that the developers were getting a lot of feedback from priests that suggested that they weren't powerful enough or that they were constantly running out of mana.

This is one of those times where my experience doesn't seem to line up with the experience other people are having. I've certainly run out of mana while healing as discipline, but if mana is supposed to be something then running out of mana has to be a possibility. I was able to heal heroics as soon as I hit the item level 329 requirement, even if my mana management strategy was occasionally to just hope for more crits. On our Argaloth kill I was the top healer.

I think what's really going on is that the majority of discipline priests, and the development team, are stuck in a Wrath of the Lich King style of healing. Though I still find myself doing it occasionally, I have almost entirely trained myself out of the reflex of throwing a Power Word: Shield on anyone who takes damage. I never use Flash Heal for any reason. I only cast Prayer of Mending when the damage distribution on the fight makes it sensible. I spend the majority of my time casting Greater Heal and Prayer of Healing. Basically, aside from Penance, there is extremely little overlap in how discipline priests should heal now and how they did heal before.

Most of the time buffs are accepted with open arms, but I'm a actually pretty skeptical of this one. If they want me to cast Power Word: Shield, then giving me more mana for my one cast every 15 seconds is not what they need to do. They need to either make Power Word: Shield large enough to warrant its cost and to provide a real life-saving benefit, or they need to make it cheap enough to justify throwing out regularly. This change reinforces the idea that you should cast Power Word: Shield on the tank every time Weakened Soul wears out and never cast it otherwise. Power Word: Shield without a Rapture proc is just as expensive and ineffective. Power Word: Shield with a rapture proc is now a significant net mana gain. It is a rotational ability that keeps your mana up, and more closely resembles Life Tap than Wrath of the Lich King Power Word: Shield. When a buff like this happens, it makes me worry about what upcoming nerf is going to compensate.

The Archangel Roller Coaster

It's been a pretty wild ride for Smite priests since the first look at the Cataclysm talent trees. The smite sub-spec has gone from a nice little bonus, to extremely overpowered, to probably better than using Heal, to totally unplayable and now I don't really know what to make of it.

The recently Archangel from returning 3% mana per stack of Evangelism to only 1% mana per stack of Evangelism. Since we are probably going to have a little over 100k mana, that a difference between 15k mana returned every 30 seconds and 5k mana returned every 30 seconds. Of course the difference is even more dramatic than that in a sense. Smite costs over 3.5k mana and a full Evangelism stack reduces that by 30%, of just over 1k mana. If you need to rebuild your stack then you need to cast one smite and full cost, one 94% cost, one at 88% cost, and so on until you get back to 70% cost. That means you are paying the cost of 30% + 24% + 18% + 12% + 6% of an extra smite, or 90% of a smite. That's around 3.2k mana. So in reality, using Archangel only nets you around 1.8k mana. It also costs you about half a smite worth of damage and healing. It also gives you a 15% healing bonus for 18 seconds, but then again it also costs you a GCD. On the balance it is a net increase in healing, but I'm not sure it's worth taking.

This, apparently, made the Smite spec unusable. The solution they came up with is as follows:

Smite's scaling coefficient has been increased. The damage of Smite is now very similar to Heal in value. This change has been made to ensure the Archangel Discipline sub-specialization remains viable.

There is a really glaring problem with this. Smite already had a far higher coefficient than Heal. If you make Smite hit for about as much as Heal in tier 1 raid gear, then by tier 4 heroic raid gear it is going to hit for quite a lot more than Heal. At that gear level, Smite has throughput much closer to Flash Heal than it does to Heal, and it has better mana efficiency than Heal. This is a very problematic place for it to be.

With the current numbers, tier 1 Smite priests are going to be a little sub-par and probably will have too many mana concerns, while for end-of-expansion content they will be very noticeably overpowered - providing around the same healing as another healer would by spamming their fast high-powered heal and doing about half the damage of a real dps character.

If mana was the problem for discipline priests, perhaps they should have addressed the problem by lowering the cost of Smite, rather than by increasing it's effect. The disparate coefficients of Smite and Heal were already heading for trouble. Pushing them further apart is going to be a bit of a catastrophe.

Self-Healing

When I was looking to make a tank to support my priest in taking down old raid content for reputation and rare mounts, my goal was to find the tank that could do the most damage while being basically invincible. Block tanking was extremely powerful for old content, but focusing gear on maximizing block rating meant doing less damage. A Death Knight could do lots of damage while healing herself for 15% of her health between 4 and 5 times every 20 seconds with Death Strike. That meant every point of stamina on the Death Knight was 0.3 healing per second, which meant that with a couple thousand stamina I wouldn't have to worry about much of anything being able to kill me.

Before Death Knights, bears were the masters of self healing with Improved Leader of the Pack giving them a mere 6% health at most every 6 seconds. A far cry from the 3% per second given by death strike.

I've been analyzing self-healing done by various tanks to figure out which class to level as my old content raiding partner for my priest, and I've come up with the following.

A Blood Death Knight gets 23.6% more stamina from talents and abilities. It would be 29.7% in a raiding situation, but for two-boxing they won't get the blessing of kings/mark of the wild buff. The Death Knight should get about 0.141 Death Strikes per second¹. Against low level content they will heal for 10% of the Death Knight's maximum health plus a shield for half of that. In addition, from experimentation, each point of stamina gives approximately 0.032 extra health per second from blood worms. This totals to 0.294 health per second per stamina on gear.

A Warrior has self-healing in the form of Blood Craze and Enraged Regeneration. Warriors get 20.75% extra stamina without blessing of kings/mark of the wild. Blood Craze should have an uptime of around 29.5%² and will heal for 1.91% of the warrior's health per second thanks to Field Dressing. That gives around 0.56% of health per second or 0.068 healing per stamina of gear. Every three minutes a warrior can activate Enraged Regeneration³ to regain 38.16% of total health. That translates to an additional 0.026 healing per stamina on gear for a total of 0.14 health per second per stamina on gear.

Bears get mark of the wild and have a total of 51.6% extra stamina from buffs and abilities. Frenzied Regeneration is very similar to Enraged Regeneration. Bears don't get Field Dressing, but they do get a huge amount more stamina, so it comes out to 0.0252 healing per second per stamina on gear. Assuming bears are using abilities on the GCD, they should get a Leader of the Pack trigger every 9.89 seconds⁴ for 8% maximum health. In total, bears heal for 0.147 per second per stamina on gear.

Lastly paladins. Paladins don't get any healing based on their total health or stamina, Ardent Defender excepted. Their self healing is instead based on strength. Word of Glory gets around 11.5% of attack power and 19.5% of spell power to its healing effect per holy power used. Since paladins will have 5% extra strength from Blessing of Kings and get 60% of their strength to spell power, this means Word of Glory has a coefficient of around 36% on strength on gear per holy power. Talented this in increased by 79.8%. Since you generate one holy power every 3 seconds and retain it 30% of the time that you use Word of Glory, Word of Glory heals for 0.312 per second per strength on gear. If you choose to use Seal of Insight, that accounts for another 0.13 healing per second per strength on gear⁵ for a total of 0.442. Since strength is 1.5 times as expensive as stamina from an item point perspective, we'll divide this by 1.5 for comparison purposes and get 0.295.

Of course there are more factors to consider. A druids and warriors do not give up any damage to self-heal while paladins give up a lot of damage and death knights give up a little. For low level content the paladin's damage penalty from self-healing will likely be made up for by the fact that the self-healing is very controllable - that is, you'll only use it when you need it - and because a lower-level content paladin tank will be geared for damage rather than tanking because their self-healing relies on strength rather than stamina. Also, paladins are the only tank class that have base numbers attached to their self healing. With Protector of the Innocent, even a one point Word of Glory will have a base heal of around 7.5k, which even in top end gear should push paladin self-healing way above other classes.

In raiding content, a paladin tank will presumably not be able to heal themselves as much if they want to hold threat. Death Knights, however, give up very little to Death Strike as often as they can. Keeping up diseases will cost a death strike every 33 seconds, reducing Death knight self healing per stamina on gear to 0.238, but I doubt that it will be necessary to use the Blood Runes generated through Death Strikes for Heart Strikes in order to maintain aggro.

There are clearly two tiers of self-healing. Paladins and Death Knights occupy the upper tier while warriors and druids are on the lower tier. Of course in raids paladins probably can't self-heal as much and Death Knights don't have blocking or Savage Defense, so these things may even out in some ways.

But there are circumstances in raiding where this self-healing capacity may end up being dramatically overpowered. Most importantly, self-healing creates an extremely different dynamic in 10 and 25 player raids.

To look at self-healing in perspective, a Flash Heal has a healing coefficient of around 64.3%. For a Holy priest talents and specialization would increase this to 85%. With a 1.5 second cast time, this means Flash Heal heals for 0.625 per itemized point of intellect. Dividing by 1.5 to normalize with stamina, that's 0.458 accounting for criticals. And that's spamming Flash Heal, not using a sensible rotation. Using the atonement spreadsheet I already made to get an estimate of the benefit of one intellect on gear for a Discipline priest healing, it came out 0.388 per intellect on gear, or 0.259 when normalized with stamina.

If a tank is off-tanking an add that is supposed to be tanked rather than killed and uses a full self-healing rotation, then the difference between using a Death Knight versus a Warrior scales with stamina at about 60% of the rate that a healer scales with Intellect. Since healers get more of their base effect from spells than Death Knights do from base health and stamina, the difference would probably be in the 40%-50% of a healer actually healing. In 25 player, that would mean getting to bring 6.4 or 7.4 healers instead of 6 or 7; essentially a 6-7% bonus to your raid's healing. In 10 player it would instead be a 13% to 20% bonus to raid healing, since the number of healer shrinks but the number of tanks tanking the add stays the same. And this is assuming the Death Strikes always heal for 10% of the Death Knight's health. With the new rune system, the Death Strike can be timed to coincide with a fire breath or other similar attack. If the dragon breaths for 40% of the Death Knight's health - less scary than you think and plausible for an add - then a Death Strike after such a breath weapon would heal for at between 17.5% and 25% of the Death Knight's health, depending on whether other attacks landed near the same time. This could increase overall Death Knight healing per stamina on gear against dragon type bosses or other bosses that do a large hit every 12-ish seconds, to 0.392 even if only half the Death Strikes can come after breath weapons. Compared with warriors that scales as though there were a full extra healer in the raid.

I'm not convinced that Death Knights are the best tanks on account of their self healing. Without blocking they are going to take more damage, and normally they won't be able to realize their full self-healing abilities. But self-healing is a tricky thing to watch for in terms of tank balance. For certain fight mechanics, it can become extremely overpowered and make one kind of tank much, much better than the others. While I have lots of confidence in the play ability of my guild members, I doubt we would have ended up in the top 100 in the world for kills on a hard mode if Blood Death Knights had not been so overpowered on Vezax. If this particular feature of Death Knights does not make them overpowered all of the time, it almost certainly will some of the time, and I think guilds that have a Death Knight in their stable of tanks are going to have a noticeable advantage in working towards first kills over guilds that don't.

---

1. Thanks to Improved Blood Presence rune regeneration is increased by 20% which gives 0.12 Death Strikes per second from runes. With 30 runic power generated from rune based abilities every eight and a third seconds the Death Knight is generating 3.6 runic power per second. At one boss attack every 2 seconds and a 3.5 weapon speed the Death Knight would generate about 1.95 runic power per second from Scent of Blood. That gives one Death Coil every 7.1 seconds. 45% of Death Coils generate an extra rune and one extra Death Strike results from every 3 extra runes on average. That's one extra Death Strike per 48.1 seconds or 0.021 extra Death Strikes per second.

2. Since this is on taking damage rather than getting hit I use the more liberal estimate of one hit every 1.5 seconds. Blood Craze has a 10% chance to proc and lasts 5 seconds, so the chance to proc will be 1 - (1-10%) ^ FLOOR(5/1.5) * [1 - 10% * (5/1.5 - FLOOR(5/1.5))].

3. We simply ignore the need to be enraged since the warrior can just time enrage abilities properly.

4. Bear attack speed is 2.0. An extra attack every GCD means one attack every 1.167 seconds. Assuming a roughly 30% chance to crit that will give a proc every 3.89 seconds, plus the 6 second cooldown.

5. The coefficient on Seal of Insight is 15% for both attack power and spell power and it is increased by 6% twice for Divinity. It procs 15 times a minute, but this should be increased by around 13.3% from Reckoning based on an incoming attack every 2 seconds. It will probably be difficult to avoid having some haste, which will increase this further.

Note: Edited to correct the 1.41 Death Strikes per second error Ziggyny pointed out in comments.

Profession Perks

They replaced the bonus from Herbalism with something usable and potentially attractive. Rather than putting a short HoT on you, the herbalism bonus now grants you haste rating for 20 seconds once every 2 minutes. So it gives you an extra cooldown to punch, off the GCD. It still heals you for a nominal amount, but aside from soloing I can't see that mattering too much.

But there is a problem coming for profession perks in general, one that will make the former problem of herbalism not having a useful one for raiding seem minor. The issue is that different professions give you different options for what bonus stats you get. Every profession gives you approximately the same amount of bonus stats (or at least they are supposed to) but some give you one particular stat while others let you choose between stats.

Given the relative power of Strength, Agility and Intellect in cataclysm, professions that let you choose one of these stats will be far more powerful than professions that give you something like crit rating or haste rating. Using a parse of an old combat log, it appears that as things stand right now, haste rating is about 81% as good as Intellect for throughput, crit rating comes it at 28% (or practically useless). At the same time, Intellect is almost twice as good as Spirit for mana over a nine minute boss fight. It's more like 130% better if we drop it to five minutes.

Being more than twice as good as the other mana stat and around 25% better than the next best throughput stat at the same time means that getting 80 bonus points of something other than Intellect will always be far inferior to getting 80 bonus points of intellect. Since other classes are going to have similar relationships with Agility and Strength, I expect this means we will be seeing an awful lot of leatherworkers at max level in Cataclysm. Why leatherworking? Leatherworking not only allows give you the bonus 80 stat points in the form of an improved wrist enchant, but it allows you to replace the wrist enchant you would otherwise have taken with the stat you actually want. Sure, the maximum level bracer enchants give 65 haste or critical strike rating, and that is only replaced by 50 intellect, but in the healing priest example, 50 intellect is only barely behind 80 haste for throughput, and it has significant mana benefits as well, making it a fairly clear choice. For most dps classes I expect the 50 Strength, Agility or Intellect to simply be better than 65 of a rating.

This is just another case of how stat imbalance leads to problems. The conversion rates for ratings need another look to make sure we are interested in more than just one stat.

Push Nourish

As far as the history goes here, we thought at the time (and still think!) that the Resto druid wasn't going to be well served as a "I only care about hots and nothing else" healer. It's just too extreme a design. Any time when hots are good (by which I mean both individual encounters and periods in the game as a whole) the druid is going to dominate. Any time when hots are terrible, so will be druids. We probably, in retrospect, didn't push Nourish enough, because we still ended up in a raid healing situation where druids used Rejuv and Wild Growth and were loathe to use any other button.

I know there are a few topics that I go on and on about, and that I jump on every time they appear, but this really gets to me. The problem was most certainly not that they didn't push Nourish enough. The problem is that Wild Growth and Rejuvenation are too powerful, not that Nourish is too weak. Sure, if you'd made Nourish as good as Holy Light then druids might have cast it more, but how would that be a solution?

Rating Changes

We are taking a look at the ratings decay as you gain levels. Now that the talent trees have lost so much crit, haste and hit, they may be too steep.

That is a quotation from a response to a question about rage generation. The rest of the response is about using rage generating abilities and such and really isn't what I am interested in here. What I am interested in is how the decision about how much rating you need to get 1% crit, hit, or haste is made.

I think we knew this already, but its a little distressing to see it spelled out like this. Apparently they decide things in this order: 1. figure out how big the numbers are going to be on gear; 2. decide how large they want people's crit and haste percentages to be; 3. choose rating conversions that give the desired crit and haste values from the number of rating points people will have.

Absent in that process, is the step where they consider whether crit and haste ratings are good enough to even both putting them on gear. The problem is that if you know how big the numbers on gear will be and you know how much crit you want people to have in the final tier of gear then it is a straight calculation to figure out how many rating points it takes to get 1% crit, there is no room for the value of the rating to come in.

As I've pointed out before, the current rating conversion numbers are going to make it pretty much impossible for crit or haste rating to be useful at all. With an imagined scenario using Arcane Blast I came up with a valuation that put crit at 20% of spell power. But lets look at a more realistic scenario.

From my estimates, a level 80 mage in first tier Cataclysm raid gear should have about 6421 spell power (nearly 1600 less than the Priest because of Inner Fire). A level 85 fireball does 671 to 855 damage, or an average of 763 damage. Now I'm not sure that spell coefficients will actually resemble what they are now in many cases, but fireball isn't a bad bet to still work on the cast time divided by 3.5 model. Since the new fireball is a 2.5 second cast, that would mean that the fireball would do around 5702 damage, about 86.6% of which comes from spell power. It will actually be higher from mastery and talents, but anything that multiplies the entire damage of the spell affects damage from spell power and crit equally, so we can ignore it.

The mage will also have about 5,099 points in ratings. It will take 2611 rating to be hit capped, so presumably the mage will be devoting as much rating to hit as possible. Being a fire mage with big fire mage crits we'll assume that crit is supposed to be an attractive stat. So lets hit cap the mage (a little unrealistic, but that's okay) and split the difference 2:1:2 between crit, haste and mastery. That gives 995 crit rating which is 3.71% crit. Assume a base crit near 5% and a 5% extra spell crit debuff on the enemy. That brings us up to 13.71%. Since the mage crits for 2.1 times normal damage (as far as we know at this point, but this could be as high as 2.8 given current information I have available) the average damage of fireball with crit is around 6561.

So what happens if we gain 100 spell power vs. 100 crit rating. 100 spell power would increase the damage of our fireball by 82.2. 100 crit rating would increase our crit chance by .37% or about 23.4 damage. That puts critical strike rating at about 28.4% of spell power for damage for a fire mage. This is not the vision of bringing stats closer together that they spoke of.

Reevaluating ratings to achieve some goal for critical strike chance might improve this situation a lot. Ratings will increase about 63% over the course of the expansion, but if you stay hit capped then that means a much more than 63% increase to critical strike rating. If we end up with 8311 rating, devote the same 2611 rating to getting hit capped and divide in the same ratio then we end up with 2280 rating, more than double the first tier amount, for a total of 8.51% crit from rating, giving 18.51% crit total. Also spell power increases to 9767.

100 more spell power gives 85.9 more damage with these stats, while 100 crit rating gives 28.9 damage. At top tier crit catch up a bit to be worth 33.6% of a spell power. If they decide that mages critting roughly 30% of the time is a good amount, they could drop the rating required for 1% crit to 114, less than half its current value. Then crit would be worth nearly 79% of a spell power to a fire mage. Not bad, really. If spells in general go to 100% bonus crit damage instead of 50%, crit could actually surpass spell power for fire mages in end of expansion contant.

Which is a pretty nice thing to luck into for the developers, but from the process that used to make the decisions about how much rating it takes to get 1% crit, haste or hit, we know that it is just luck if the numbers end up being close together. Rating values should be set to make stats balanced against one another, because stats that are close in value are the right thing for the game. If doing this would end up meaning that players will end up with 150% crit, and it might, depending on how you set the values, then there are other knobs you can turn to fix that problem, such as increasing the base damage of spells, giving more innate attack power based on level, or just having players' base stats account for more of their damage than they do. In classic your base stats from your race, class and level might have accounted for a third of your total stat value. In wrath they aren't even a tenth.

The desired relative value of stats should determine the rating conversions. Something so arbitrary as rating conversions should not determine the relative value of stats. It looks like, for at least some classes, we might end up with reasonably balanced stats after all. Ultimately, though, I wouldn't expect non-red gems to auction for much over their vendor value.

13%

Some recent cataclysm previews have shown that the current 13% spell damage buff is going to be dropped to 8%. While this is a step in the right direction, they need to take another step before they are done.

As I pointed out, the 13% spell power buff gives approximately 8.5% more damage to a typical raid of mixed dpsers while the next best buff is around 3.2% extra damage to the same raid. But decreasing 13% to 8%, other things being equal, it will now give a 5.2% damage bonus to a typical raid, so about 63% more than the next best buff.

If they dropped it to 4% instead then it would be a 2.6% buff to raid damage, making it well above average in terms of raid buffs. At 5% is would still be the most powerful raid buff, but by a very small factor instead of by a very large one. I hope that cataclysm reduces this buff to 4% or 5% and gets it under control so that a raid without this buff can function, much as a raid without any other particular buff can.

Overhealing

Note: I talked to a shaman after posting this and realized where I had gone wrong with the shaman numbers; part of it was ignoring earthliving weapon and another part was just a lot of bad information about coefficients. The maximal shaman case presented here is much lower than it ought to be, and the single target case with earth shield should be higher as well, with proportionally higher mana efficiency since the output should be higher with no increase in cost. I generally think that shamans are the most reasonable class in terms of their throughput and mana efficiency, and do not tend to extremes. Also it is very important to realize that when AoE healing shaman get much closer to their ideal scenario much more often than other classes, but that's sort of what this post is about.

Valithria Dreamwalker brings up a great opportunity to talk about something that is totally insane about this game, and that is the unbelievable imbalance between the amount of healing that the different classes can put out. I composed healing profiles of each class using my own base stats. Bear in mind this means that all classes other than discipline priests suffer somewhat because they would have better itemization for their own healing spells, but ultimately we end up with near the same spell power and the other stuff matters somewhat but is a bit of a wash.

This is what happens when different classes direct the maximum healing they can an Valithria, in a stand-and-"nuke" fashion, before portal multipliers:

That is pretty substantially imbalanced. Paladins do a good 50% more than discipline priests. Of course, discipline priests are basically custom-screwed for this task by having a lot of their best healing being dependent on shields, which do nothing for Valithria. But the few oddball facts about Valithria don't really swing the balance. When you look at the same numbers, but this time applied to a person who is actually getting hit and taking damage (shields and trigger on damage effects matter), it doesn't look all that different:



This is assuming proper glyphing and talent spec for the task at hand. The main difference between this chart and the last one is that discipline priests move up above holy priests. Now lets look at the chart of the maximal healing scenario, the case where the enemies do damage in a profile perfectly suited to you and you do no overhealing:



Wow.

We are faced with some simple facts:

• Paladins can heal for at least 10%, or as much as 50%, more than the next best healer and can more than double other healers even when circumstances are equally optimal for both
• Druid mana efficiency is so high that if tree of life did not reduce the mana cost of their spells, they would still be the most mana efficient healer, leading second place by a noticable margin and close to doubling the mana efficiency of the worst healers
• Shamans appear to be heinously bad at AoE healing; I'm going to have to check with a shaman friend of mine to verify this, because it's hard for me to believe it's actually as bad as the information I have makes it look

But if all this is true, why doesn't everyone use paladins and druids only all the time? Why don't these healers that show up so well on the charts beat everyone on the meters all the time? Given that neither of these things happen, doesn't it seem likely that there is something wrong with my math?

The answer is overhealing! Overhealing is basically responsible for healer balance. The fact that bosses can kill your tank in a couple seconds means that everyone overheals a bunch in order to make sure everyone is topped up all the time. Druids preempt damage by throwing HoTs all over, Paladins cast Holy Light on people who can only use two thirds of the hit points when their beacon target is at full.

On a recent night of lich king attempts, my healing per second while active was 3330 while a druid in the guild healed for 3218 per second while active. A pretty minor difference, well within the margin of critical hit caused error and the discipline priest actually came out ahead, so those numbers don't immediately seem to bolster my case. My overhealing was 26.6%, so my raw healing output per second was 4536. The druid's overhealing was 70.9%. Go look at some logs, that is not atypical for druids at all. That means his raw healing was 11058, about 2.4 times mine.

Right now, paladins and druids have overhealing numbers that are really through the roof. There is simply no way to avoid them. And most of the time, that's fine. They are as good at healing when more than half their healing is wasted as priests are when none of their healing is wasted. But of course not every fight limits healing with player max health like this, and the more damage that goes out, the more the imbalance starts to show itself. There are quite a few fights that I feel as a discipline priest I am simply a liability because of my inability to deal out the healing numbers required. Anub'arak comes to mind.

I'm not saying that discipline priests are underpowered, because I still think priests are some of the best healers. The fact is that Power Word: Shield, with's it's instant speed, usefully large size, pre-healing power, and ability to play well with other heals is such a powerful tool that discipline priests are very meaningful in most situations. And, of course, in the vast majority of fights the strongest healers do just overheal their power away, leaving them close to par with their weaker compatriots.

But with the coming of Cataclysm, Blizzard has indicated that there will be a shift to a slower, more thoughtful healing game. A game where you have to try to choose the right tool for the job and where overhealing is something to worry about because you could run yourself out of mana spamming your biggest heals. In a game like that, these differences are going to be extremely pronounced. When the tank is in danger of dying in 5 seconds instead of 2, healers will be able to opt to play the game where the tank is in danger of dying within 3.5 seconds by just leaving the tank at 70% of their health. Compared to what we are doing now this will seem downright relaxed. At that point, noone will have to worry about overhealing at all and that druid raider in my guild will simply be 2.4 times as good as me.

Obviously there will be some pretty substantial changes between now and cataclysm, and I think they will rework some of these things. But I really don't think they are going to turn all this over before the expansion releases. Druids complained at the end of BC that they didn't have Flash Heal, then blizzard gave them Flash Heal and druids simply didn't cast it. Then the druid Flash Heal was made somewhere in the neighborhood of 50% better than the priest Flash Heal, for 20% less mana, and most druids still scoff at it, while priests spam Flash Heal all day long. Remember when Wild Growth was released on the beta? It was a better single target heal than holy light. We are going to have to wait for a lot of iteration before there is any semblance of balance, and sometimes iteration just pushes more and more in the direction of imbalance.

With 5 seconds instead of 2 to die, the difference between big heals and little heals, HoTs and shields, instants and channels will really start to wash out. The difference between their power and cost is going to have to even out a lot as well. Without priests getting a really substantial boost relative to the other classes paladins are just going to be casting Flash of Lights as big as our Flash Heals for half the mana and doubling their effect with Beacon of Light while druids leave HoTs on the tank that outheal our maximum single-target healing. Ten man raids will simply be choosing between bringing a druid and a paladin to the boss, or a shaman and two priests. At least shadow is doing competitive dps.