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.
Monday, December 20, 2010
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.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
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.
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.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Preliminary Results
The results are in. We've killed Argoloth so I have some preliminary examples of real raid healing. Did I meet the developer expectation of 50% healing from shields?
The right answer is not even close. World of Logs shows me getting 10% of my healing from PW:S and 25% of it from Divine Aegis. Their Divine Aegis numbers seems a little sketchy, however, since if you add up all the critical heals and Prayer of Healing heals I did in the entire fight and take 37.5% of that - my current return on Aegis thanks to mastery - it doesn't reach the amount of aegis absorbs that World of Logs calculated. In fact, I applied only about 80% of the shields that they say I used, and I know I didn't use them all. It wasn't until halfway through the fight that I clued in to the correct healing strategy to avoid wasting Aegis.1
So my real healing from shields was around 31%. On that fight I can get 100% shield usage if I play correctly, so we can use that number as an accurate representation of the amount of shields I would put out on a fight.
The reason that this matters, as I've noted before, is that mastery rating is tuned according to the amount of shields that discipline priests do. Mastery rating increases shields, so how powerful it is is dependent on what fraction of your total healing comes from shields. However, another change that has been made since I last did analysis on this is that Prayer of Healing always triggers Divine Aegis. That means that mastery is significantly more powerful than it would have been while critical rating is significantly weaker.
If I had 179.28 more mastery rating, I would have increased by mastery bonus from 25.12% to 27.62%, thus increasing my shields by just about 2%. That would increase my total healing and shielding by about 0.6%.
179.28 crit rating would have increased by critical strike chance from 19.06% to 20.06%. That means that 1.24% of my non-critical spells would instead have been criticals. Since my non-Prayer of Healing heals totaled around 166.6k, that would mean critting with an additional 1399.5 worth of heals. My effective critical multiplier is 1.5 plus divine aegis. Aegis is 30% times plus the mastery bonus for 37.5%. This gives a total critical multiplier of 1.5 * 1.375 = 206.25%. That means I would get an additional 1399.5 * 106.25% healing by critting with those heals for 2186.
Now for my Prayers of Healing, I get the Divine Aegis on the base even if I don't crit. That means that I only rack up 50% * 1.375 extra healing on a crit, or 68.75% of the base spell. While I did overheal with Prayer of Healing, this is largely due to the fact that the rogue was standing behind rather than in front of the boss, and so prayer of healing hits on him were largely totally overheal. I did 546940 healing with non-critical Prayers of Healing. If 1.24% of those were crits and those crits added 68.75% more to the total healing done then that would contribute 4644 extra healing.
The total extra healing from a 1% gain in critical strike chance, then, would be 6830. With just over 2M healing for the total fight, this is an increase of 0.33%.
These calculations show Mastery as a far better stat than critical strike rating. Of course this is contingent upon casting a lot of Prayer of Healing. What would these numbers look like if instead of making Prayer of Healing always trigger Aegis, they had simply decided to give Discipline Priests a talent to increase its effect of Prayer of Healing?
The buff for Prayer of Healing is contingent upon not getting criticals. If you get a critical heal then the buff does nothing. Let's say I averaged my critical strike and mastery ratings to eliminate my current reforging bias. Then I would be critting 17% of the time and my mastery would be 12, giving me a 30% increase to shields. At that point, the buff to Aegis to always apply to prayer of healing would be boosting the effect of 83% of my Prayers of Healing by 39%. The overall buff to Prayer of Healing, then, would be about 32%. What if they had just put in a talent that increases the effect of Prayer of Healing by 32%?
Then my shields would be only 19% of my heals, so 1 Mastery would be a 0.36% increase in healing. 1% crit, in this case, would be a 0.56% increase in healing, nearly three times as much as Mastery.
It would seem that Discipline priests require two different gear sets. One that is geared towards critical strike rating for single target healing and one that is focused on mastery for AoE healing. For now I might try to even out the two stats since I don't know what raids will have in store for me yet. Ultimately, these quibbles probably make very little different since both critical strike rating and mastery are fairly weak. In the best case scenario, if all my new secondary stat points went to mastery, an entire tier of new gear would provide less than a 2% healing increase from these ratings.
1. Meteor slash happens every 17 seconds, and Divine Aegis has a 12 second duration. Since meteor slashes alternate between two groups, a group will take one only every 34 seconds. Thus, if you spam three or four Prayers of Healing on the group when the slash hits, the Aegis will wear off before the next slash. If you space your Prayers of Healing out over the 34 seconds then you have the full Aegis from all of the prayers roll through to the next slash. You just have to battle against those Wrath-tuned instincts that tell you that if anyone is below max health you need to spam until they aren't. This should mean that a discipline priest can take care of meteor slash damage by themselves.
The right answer is not even close. World of Logs shows me getting 10% of my healing from PW:S and 25% of it from Divine Aegis. Their Divine Aegis numbers seems a little sketchy, however, since if you add up all the critical heals and Prayer of Healing heals I did in the entire fight and take 37.5% of that - my current return on Aegis thanks to mastery - it doesn't reach the amount of aegis absorbs that World of Logs calculated. In fact, I applied only about 80% of the shields that they say I used, and I know I didn't use them all. It wasn't until halfway through the fight that I clued in to the correct healing strategy to avoid wasting Aegis.1
So my real healing from shields was around 31%. On that fight I can get 100% shield usage if I play correctly, so we can use that number as an accurate representation of the amount of shields I would put out on a fight.
The reason that this matters, as I've noted before, is that mastery rating is tuned according to the amount of shields that discipline priests do. Mastery rating increases shields, so how powerful it is is dependent on what fraction of your total healing comes from shields. However, another change that has been made since I last did analysis on this is that Prayer of Healing always triggers Divine Aegis. That means that mastery is significantly more powerful than it would have been while critical rating is significantly weaker.
If I had 179.28 more mastery rating, I would have increased by mastery bonus from 25.12% to 27.62%, thus increasing my shields by just about 2%. That would increase my total healing and shielding by about 0.6%.
179.28 crit rating would have increased by critical strike chance from 19.06% to 20.06%. That means that 1.24% of my non-critical spells would instead have been criticals. Since my non-Prayer of Healing heals totaled around 166.6k, that would mean critting with an additional 1399.5 worth of heals. My effective critical multiplier is 1.5 plus divine aegis. Aegis is 30% times plus the mastery bonus for 37.5%. This gives a total critical multiplier of 1.5 * 1.375 = 206.25%. That means I would get an additional 1399.5 * 106.25% healing by critting with those heals for 2186.
Now for my Prayers of Healing, I get the Divine Aegis on the base even if I don't crit. That means that I only rack up 50% * 1.375 extra healing on a crit, or 68.75% of the base spell. While I did overheal with Prayer of Healing, this is largely due to the fact that the rogue was standing behind rather than in front of the boss, and so prayer of healing hits on him were largely totally overheal. I did 546940 healing with non-critical Prayers of Healing. If 1.24% of those were crits and those crits added 68.75% more to the total healing done then that would contribute 4644 extra healing.
The total extra healing from a 1% gain in critical strike chance, then, would be 6830. With just over 2M healing for the total fight, this is an increase of 0.33%.
These calculations show Mastery as a far better stat than critical strike rating. Of course this is contingent upon casting a lot of Prayer of Healing. What would these numbers look like if instead of making Prayer of Healing always trigger Aegis, they had simply decided to give Discipline Priests a talent to increase its effect of Prayer of Healing?
The buff for Prayer of Healing is contingent upon not getting criticals. If you get a critical heal then the buff does nothing. Let's say I averaged my critical strike and mastery ratings to eliminate my current reforging bias. Then I would be critting 17% of the time and my mastery would be 12, giving me a 30% increase to shields. At that point, the buff to Aegis to always apply to prayer of healing would be boosting the effect of 83% of my Prayers of Healing by 39%. The overall buff to Prayer of Healing, then, would be about 32%. What if they had just put in a talent that increases the effect of Prayer of Healing by 32%?
Then my shields would be only 19% of my heals, so 1 Mastery would be a 0.36% increase in healing. 1% crit, in this case, would be a 0.56% increase in healing, nearly three times as much as Mastery.
It would seem that Discipline priests require two different gear sets. One that is geared towards critical strike rating for single target healing and one that is focused on mastery for AoE healing. For now I might try to even out the two stats since I don't know what raids will have in store for me yet. Ultimately, these quibbles probably make very little different since both critical strike rating and mastery are fairly weak. In the best case scenario, if all my new secondary stat points went to mastery, an entire tier of new gear would provide less than a 2% healing increase from these ratings.
1. Meteor slash happens every 17 seconds, and Divine Aegis has a 12 second duration. Since meteor slashes alternate between two groups, a group will take one only every 34 seconds. Thus, if you spam three or four Prayers of Healing on the group when the slash hits, the Aegis will wear off before the next slash. If you space your Prayers of Healing out over the 34 seconds then you have the full Aegis from all of the prayers roll through to the next slash. You just have to battle against those Wrath-tuned instincts that tell you that if anyone is below max health you need to spam until they aren't. This should mean that a discipline priest can take care of meteor slash damage by themselves.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Gear Cubed
Cataclysm has succeeded in reintroducing mana as a resource for healers. How much mana your healer has is a major factor in whether or not your can win a fight. Because of this, dps paying attention to encounter mechanics has become important, because if they take more damage than they have to and the healer has to keep them alive, then the healer is more likely to run out of mana.
Our first few heroic runs were good demonstrations of this. I was drinking every two trash packs and our ability to beat the boss was very tied to my mana pool.
Three days later, I was never drinking and the idea of running out of mana on a boss was laughable unless we really, really blew it.
The difference was not that our dps got so much better at handling the encounters. My guild members are pretty competent, so when it became clear that we had to actually do things right we did things right. The difference is explained by how encounter survivability works.
In Wrath, healers didn't really think about mana and their heals were powerful enough to heal the tank to full very quickly, so tanks didn't worry about avoidance. All anyone worried about was whether the tank could live through a large burst. Survivability was pretty much all about the tank's health pool. Because of this, it scaled linearly with gear.
In cataclysm, the tank is not in danger of being bursted out because a heal can land unless they make a mistake with encounter mechanics. That means that avoidance is quite relevant since it decreases long term damage. Since it takes multiple heals to move a tank from low health to full health, the power of the heals is very relevant. Since it is plausible to run out of mana before the end of the fight, and more mana means the ability to cast more heals.
Instead of survivability scaling roughly with the stamina of a single character, it scales with avoidance * healing throughput * mana. In other words, it now goes up with gear cubed instead of linearly.
Adding 13 item levels was enough to turn heroics from a significant challenge into something pretty close to a cakewalk. Another tier of gear and heroics will probably be a daily chore to get Valor Points.
This is the formula that explains pre-Wrath gear check bosses. A gear check boss was one that was not that difficult provided that you had sufficient gear, but that became completely impossible below a certain gear level because your tank would simply die or your healers would run out of mana. Wrath had gear check bosses as well, but they were bosses that required a certain amount of dps gear to beat an enrage timer, not ones that relied on healer and tank gear.
These two types of gear checks are not mutually exclusive. Last night we downed our first Cataclysm raid boss and he had a tanking/healing gear check though the damage he did as well as a dps gear check by way of an enrage timer. Fights like this are extremely easy to overgear and trivialize. Of course it was a very simple fight, and the second boss we attempted seemed significantly less simple.
I hope that as we go forward with Cataclysm bosses we find fewer gear sensitive bosses and more skill sensitive bosses. So far I've seen an even split.
Our first few heroic runs were good demonstrations of this. I was drinking every two trash packs and our ability to beat the boss was very tied to my mana pool.
Three days later, I was never drinking and the idea of running out of mana on a boss was laughable unless we really, really blew it.
The difference was not that our dps got so much better at handling the encounters. My guild members are pretty competent, so when it became clear that we had to actually do things right we did things right. The difference is explained by how encounter survivability works.
In Wrath, healers didn't really think about mana and their heals were powerful enough to heal the tank to full very quickly, so tanks didn't worry about avoidance. All anyone worried about was whether the tank could live through a large burst. Survivability was pretty much all about the tank's health pool. Because of this, it scaled linearly with gear.
In cataclysm, the tank is not in danger of being bursted out because a heal can land unless they make a mistake with encounter mechanics. That means that avoidance is quite relevant since it decreases long term damage. Since it takes multiple heals to move a tank from low health to full health, the power of the heals is very relevant. Since it is plausible to run out of mana before the end of the fight, and more mana means the ability to cast more heals.
Instead of survivability scaling roughly with the stamina of a single character, it scales with avoidance * healing throughput * mana. In other words, it now goes up with gear cubed instead of linearly.
Adding 13 item levels was enough to turn heroics from a significant challenge into something pretty close to a cakewalk. Another tier of gear and heroics will probably be a daily chore to get Valor Points.
This is the formula that explains pre-Wrath gear check bosses. A gear check boss was one that was not that difficult provided that you had sufficient gear, but that became completely impossible below a certain gear level because your tank would simply die or your healers would run out of mana. Wrath had gear check bosses as well, but they were bosses that required a certain amount of dps gear to beat an enrage timer, not ones that relied on healer and tank gear.
These two types of gear checks are not mutually exclusive. Last night we downed our first Cataclysm raid boss and he had a tanking/healing gear check though the damage he did as well as a dps gear check by way of an enrage timer. Fights like this are extremely easy to overgear and trivialize. Of course it was a very simple fight, and the second boss we attempted seemed significantly less simple.
I hope that as we go forward with Cataclysm bosses we find fewer gear sensitive bosses and more skill sensitive bosses. So far I've seen an even split.
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?
Friday, December 3, 2010
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.
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.
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