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.
Thursday, January 13, 2011
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Rethinking Veiled Shadows
In my build I was taking Veiled Shadows because more Shadowfiend seemed more good. In fact, I think I was mostly taking it as a holdover from a time when the beta version of the talent was reducing the duration by 1 minute per point instead of 30 seconds per point. A shadowfiend every three minutes instead of every five is certainly worth two points. I am now less than convinced, however, that a four minute shadowfiend is worth the investment.
First of all, let's look at how much mana the talent gives us with a simple once-every-four minutes instead of once-every-five minutes analysis. Shadowfiend restores 30% of your maximum mana. In my case, that's 36000. 36000 mana every five minutes is 120 mana per second. 36000 mana every four minutes is 150 mana per second. So you get 30 mana per second for the two talent points. I haven't made a post about benchmarking talents yet, but this is clearly not that strong.
The real advantage of reducing the cooldown is not that it gives you 30 more mana per second if you cast it on the cooldown every time. It's that it allows you to get two shadowfiends in a fight where you would normally get one. If a fight is five minutes and you get to cast a second shadowfiend because of the talent, then that's 36000 more mana for the fight, or 120 mana per second over the fight. The question is, will Veiled Shadows actually do that for us?
I'll make this easy on myself to get a ballpark figure, and then talk about the complexities. First of all, I can ignore mana regeneration from any source that regenerates mana proportional to the length of the fight. So ignore spirit regen, Rapture, the Mp5 buff and Replenishment. When I talk about how much mana I am spending, I will be talking about how much I am spending above that continuous mana regen. I'm also going to assume I'm spending mana at a continuous rate.
If I get to Hymn of Hope once during the fight, then that will restore 9.2% of our base mana1 and a mana potion is around another 8.3% of my max mana. So I have around 114.5% of my base mana pool to work with. Just because I'd rather work out of 100%, I'll instead say that shadowfiend restores 26.2% of my augmented mana pool.
I wouldn't want to cast shadowfiend as soon as the fight starts because most of the mana would be wasted. The earliest you would want to cast shadowfiend is:
Where mana_spent is measured in percentage of augmented mana per second.
Veiled Shadows will give me an extra shadowfiend cast is the length of the fight minus t if between 240 and 300 seconds. We probably want to ignore at least those cases where the second shadowfiend doesn't last its full duration, so look at cases between 255 and 315 seconds instead of those between 240 and 300. Of course getting an extra cast isn't the only thing to consider. If Veiled Shadows is giving me an extra cast, am I actually going to use that mana? On the flip side of this question, am I going to have any mana left when it comes time to cast shadowfiend again? If this model has me running out of mana at the three minute mark, then it isn't a model of a winnable fight and Veiled Shadows is irrelevant.
So the amount of mana I have left when it's time to cast my second shadowfiend is:
And if we substitute in the above equation for t this simplifies to:
Which is pretty easy to work with. Our conditions above were that the second shadowfiend matters, so the amount of mana we have left should be less than the amount of mana we are expecting to spend in the rest of the fight, and also that we should actually have enough mana to get to the second shadowfiend without running out, so the amount of mana we have left is greater than or equal to zero.
Simplifying these two requirements, we get the following:
and
Substituting one into the other, we arrive at the conclusion that the length of the fight must be greater than 303 seconds in order for the second shadowfiend to be helping us. Basically in a five minute fight there is no way for the second shadowfiend to work out, and there are a lot of five minute fights. In the event that you are spending almost exactly 0.416% of your augmented mana per second, this talent would probably be very good, and maybe even necessary, but possibly not enough to make winning the fight feasible with your current mana.
Of course going over 303 seconds is no guarantee that the talent is working for you. We need it to not only be the case that a four minute shadowfiend is working for us, but also that a five minute shadowfiend would not be. Using similar analysis for mana expenditure per second, we can see that starting at around 379 seconds, the five minute shadowfiend starts being viable for a second use. The four minute shadowfiend won't be viable for a third use until at least ten minutes. Furthermore, the windows to take advantage of the extra shadowfiend are quite small. In order for the talent to be helping, you need to be casting your first shadowfiend between approximately 72 and 80 seconds into the fight. If you are casting it sooner - and not wasting it - then you are burning through your mana so fast that you have no chance of making it to the end of the fight. If you are casting it later then you are using mana at a slower pace and don't need the extra shadowfiend cast anyway.
The shape of damage on a given fight might alter these things. Veiled shadows might be useful on a fight like Halfus where you spend a lot of mana early on, then have a big lull. Conveniently, Halfus is also a six minute fight, which is where Veiled Shadows really has an opportunity to come into play. Use shadowfiend when you are still fighting the drakes and you might both get full effect out of it and have plenty of mana to make it to your next cast, which you might need because you are forced to heal up after the roars. This kind of high damage at the start, high damage at the end, lull in the middle fight, however, is pretty rare, and it is also a pushover that you don't need a special talent spec for.
Overall, I think I am just not hitting the window to make this talent work for me. The question is, where to put the other two points. For now I think I'll stick them back in Surge of Light, but with patch 4.0.6, both Improved Renew and Soul Warding present themselves as reasonable alternatives.
1. Hymn of hope gives 2% mana for each of four ticks. However, it also increases maximum mana by 15% for 12 seconds. Assuming you get all four ticks, that means that the second through fourth tick give 2.3% of your normal maximum mana, since your maximum mana will be higher, so it gives 8.9% of maximum mana. But also you have increased maximum mana for a total of 18 seconds from when the first tick hits you to 12 seconds after the last tick. That means 18 seconds of getting 15% more replenishment, which is 0.1% mana per second, which means 0.27% more mana maximum mana.
First of all, let's look at how much mana the talent gives us with a simple once-every-four minutes instead of once-every-five minutes analysis. Shadowfiend restores 30% of your maximum mana. In my case, that's 36000. 36000 mana every five minutes is 120 mana per second. 36000 mana every four minutes is 150 mana per second. So you get 30 mana per second for the two talent points. I haven't made a post about benchmarking talents yet, but this is clearly not that strong.
The real advantage of reducing the cooldown is not that it gives you 30 more mana per second if you cast it on the cooldown every time. It's that it allows you to get two shadowfiends in a fight where you would normally get one. If a fight is five minutes and you get to cast a second shadowfiend because of the talent, then that's 36000 more mana for the fight, or 120 mana per second over the fight. The question is, will Veiled Shadows actually do that for us?
I'll make this easy on myself to get a ballpark figure, and then talk about the complexities. First of all, I can ignore mana regeneration from any source that regenerates mana proportional to the length of the fight. So ignore spirit regen, Rapture, the Mp5 buff and Replenishment. When I talk about how much mana I am spending, I will be talking about how much I am spending above that continuous mana regen. I'm also going to assume I'm spending mana at a continuous rate.
If I get to Hymn of Hope once during the fight, then that will restore 9.2% of our base mana1 and a mana potion is around another 8.3% of my max mana. So I have around 114.5% of my base mana pool to work with. Just because I'd rather work out of 100%, I'll instead say that shadowfiend restores 26.2% of my augmented mana pool.
I wouldn't want to cast shadowfiend as soon as the fight starts because most of the mana would be wasted. The earliest you would want to cast shadowfiend is:
Where mana_spent is measured in percentage of augmented mana per second.
Veiled Shadows will give me an extra shadowfiend cast is the length of the fight minus t if between 240 and 300 seconds. We probably want to ignore at least those cases where the second shadowfiend doesn't last its full duration, so look at cases between 255 and 315 seconds instead of those between 240 and 300. Of course getting an extra cast isn't the only thing to consider. If Veiled Shadows is giving me an extra cast, am I actually going to use that mana? On the flip side of this question, am I going to have any mana left when it comes time to cast shadowfiend again? If this model has me running out of mana at the three minute mark, then it isn't a model of a winnable fight and Veiled Shadows is irrelevant.
So the amount of mana I have left when it's time to cast my second shadowfiend is:
And if we substitute in the above equation for t this simplifies to:
Which is pretty easy to work with. Our conditions above were that the second shadowfiend matters, so the amount of mana we have left should be less than the amount of mana we are expecting to spend in the rest of the fight, and also that we should actually have enough mana to get to the second shadowfiend without running out, so the amount of mana we have left is greater than or equal to zero.
Simplifying these two requirements, we get the following:
Substituting one into the other, we arrive at the conclusion that the length of the fight must be greater than 303 seconds in order for the second shadowfiend to be helping us. Basically in a five minute fight there is no way for the second shadowfiend to work out, and there are a lot of five minute fights. In the event that you are spending almost exactly 0.416% of your augmented mana per second, this talent would probably be very good, and maybe even necessary, but possibly not enough to make winning the fight feasible with your current mana.
Of course going over 303 seconds is no guarantee that the talent is working for you. We need it to not only be the case that a four minute shadowfiend is working for us, but also that a five minute shadowfiend would not be. Using similar analysis for mana expenditure per second, we can see that starting at around 379 seconds, the five minute shadowfiend starts being viable for a second use. The four minute shadowfiend won't be viable for a third use until at least ten minutes. Furthermore, the windows to take advantage of the extra shadowfiend are quite small. In order for the talent to be helping, you need to be casting your first shadowfiend between approximately 72 and 80 seconds into the fight. If you are casting it sooner - and not wasting it - then you are burning through your mana so fast that you have no chance of making it to the end of the fight. If you are casting it later then you are using mana at a slower pace and don't need the extra shadowfiend cast anyway.
The shape of damage on a given fight might alter these things. Veiled shadows might be useful on a fight like Halfus where you spend a lot of mana early on, then have a big lull. Conveniently, Halfus is also a six minute fight, which is where Veiled Shadows really has an opportunity to come into play. Use shadowfiend when you are still fighting the drakes and you might both get full effect out of it and have plenty of mana to make it to your next cast, which you might need because you are forced to heal up after the roars. This kind of high damage at the start, high damage at the end, lull in the middle fight, however, is pretty rare, and it is also a pushover that you don't need a special talent spec for.
Overall, I think I am just not hitting the window to make this talent work for me. The question is, where to put the other two points. For now I think I'll stick them back in Surge of Light, but with patch 4.0.6, both Improved Renew and Soul Warding present themselves as reasonable alternatives.
1. Hymn of hope gives 2% mana for each of four ticks. However, it also increases maximum mana by 15% for 12 seconds. Assuming you get all four ticks, that means that the second through fourth tick give 2.3% of your normal maximum mana, since your maximum mana will be higher, so it gives 8.9% of maximum mana. But also you have increased maximum mana for a total of 18 seconds from when the first tick hits you to 12 seconds after the last tick. That means 18 seconds of getting 15% more replenishment, which is 0.1% mana per second, which means 0.27% more mana maximum mana.
Monday, January 10, 2011
Inspiration versus Surge of Light
Inspiration versus Surge of Light was one of my least certain decisions when I was putting together a talent spec. When I swapped to Smite from non-Smite, it seemed like Surge would be better given that Smite does not proc Inspiration but does proc Surge.
Well, I have some real data now, so I can actually see how much physical damage was dealt to people in the 15 seconds following me landing critical heals on them. I'm working from our World of Logs reports, so it's a little cumbersome, but foolishly I haven't been running my own logs up to this point.
The result for Magmaw is that Inspiration would have prevented around 90k damage, and on Omnitron it would have prevented 139k. On both encounters I healed around the same amount, approximately 3.15M. So as a percentage of total healing, it was 2.85% on Magmaw and about 4.19% on Omnitron.
I calculated the expected number of Surge procs given the coming patch that will allow Flash Heal and Greater Heal to proc it. Surge did not fare to well, with only 3.5 procs on Magmaw and 2.9 on Omnitron. Even allowing that the free Flash Heal will be able to crit *and* will be substantially more likely to benefit from Grace, this is substantially less than the damage reduced by Inspiration.
Of course these numbers are pretty far from telling the whole story, given the very different ways that the two talents function. Surge gives a heal that takes my time to cast but that I get to personally direct. Inspiration is sort of a blanket over the raid, randomly reducing bits of damage. But I think in the intangibles category, Inspiration has a bit of an edge for a two reasons.
First, Inspiration does not take time to cast to extra "healing".
Second, while I would normally be in favour of benefits that I get to personally direct rather than benefits that are handed out at random, when the personally directed benefits are so heavily dependent on procs, they become very random. I can't make the best use of an instant cast, free Flash Heal if I can only use it three times a fight and if my windows to use it are only 10 seconds long. If those windows don't correspond to the best time to use it, then I am having to make decisions to direct it without getting the benefit of making decisions. In this circumstance, I'd rather have it just be handed out at random.
If the way in which the benefit is handed out is preferable and it's a bigger quantity of health over the fight then the choice is pretty clear. I'll be moving those points over in my build.
Well, I have some real data now, so I can actually see how much physical damage was dealt to people in the 15 seconds following me landing critical heals on them. I'm working from our World of Logs reports, so it's a little cumbersome, but foolishly I haven't been running my own logs up to this point.
The result for Magmaw is that Inspiration would have prevented around 90k damage, and on Omnitron it would have prevented 139k. On both encounters I healed around the same amount, approximately 3.15M. So as a percentage of total healing, it was 2.85% on Magmaw and about 4.19% on Omnitron.
I calculated the expected number of Surge procs given the coming patch that will allow Flash Heal and Greater Heal to proc it. Surge did not fare to well, with only 3.5 procs on Magmaw and 2.9 on Omnitron. Even allowing that the free Flash Heal will be able to crit *and* will be substantially more likely to benefit from Grace, this is substantially less than the damage reduced by Inspiration.
Of course these numbers are pretty far from telling the whole story, given the very different ways that the two talents function. Surge gives a heal that takes my time to cast but that I get to personally direct. Inspiration is sort of a blanket over the raid, randomly reducing bits of damage. But I think in the intangibles category, Inspiration has a bit of an edge for a two reasons.
First, Inspiration does not take time to cast to extra "healing".
Second, while I would normally be in favour of benefits that I get to personally direct rather than benefits that are handed out at random, when the personally directed benefits are so heavily dependent on procs, they become very random. I can't make the best use of an instant cast, free Flash Heal if I can only use it three times a fight and if my windows to use it are only 10 seconds long. If those windows don't correspond to the best time to use it, then I am having to make decisions to direct it without getting the benefit of making decisions. In this circumstance, I'd rather have it just be handed out at random.
If the way in which the benefit is handed out is preferable and it's a bigger quantity of health over the fight then the choice is pretty clear. I'll be moving those points over in my build.
Friday, January 7, 2011
I Feel Like a Paladin
Lots to digest in the patch 4.0.6 notes, but here's the big one:
Power Word: Shield now scales from 87% of spell power, up from 41.8%. Base absorb increased by 110%, from 3906 to 8136. Now costs 25% of base mana, up from 19% of base mana.
Now I think it was obvious that I was clamouring for some kind of buff to Power Word: Shield for while. That being said, I'm not sure that giving Discipline Priests a 29k on-demand instant heal is the solution to that problem. Compared to Greater Heal it would have 67% more throughput and 20% more efficiency without a Rapture proc. As before, Rapture procs are larger than the cost of the shield. Power Word: Shield would have higher throughput than a four target Prayer of Healing.
I guess the question is, what is Power Word: Shield supposed to be doing? There are three states is seems to be able to occupy: 1) High throughput and efficiency plus all the benefits of being a shield instead of a heal so cast it all the time instead of regular heals; 2) Mediocre throughput and low efficiency without a Rapture proc so cast it once every 15 seconds on the tank like clockwork; and 3) Useless.
The ground I think we'd like to see Power Word: Shield occupy is where we actually cast it on someone who is at low health when they are in danger of dying so that another heal can land, or on someone who is about to take massive damage to make sure they live through it, but that we don't cast it all the time as a staple heal.
I really see only one way to accomplish that, and I don't think anyone is going to like me for suggesting it: lower the duration. If Power Word: Shield only lasted 8 seconds then you wouldn't go around spamming it on people as a heal because it would fall off without doing anything too much of the time. If someone was low and you were worried about them dying before they got a heal, it would work just as well as it does now for that purpose - but would have an extra "hidden" cost that it might go to waste. If someone was about to take a big hit, 8 seconds would provide lots of time.
I'm now getting very nervous about what's going to happen to discipline priests. The more buffed you get, the bigger the nerf is going to be. Normally this kind of swing is reserved for paladins, who tend to either be overpowered or underpowered while priests have traditionally been in the middle. We may soon return to the days where discipline priests were a strange kind of healer: you are crazy if you don't bring one, and almost equally crazy if you bring two.
Power Word: Shield now scales from 87% of spell power, up from 41.8%. Base absorb increased by 110%, from 3906 to 8136. Now costs 25% of base mana, up from 19% of base mana.
Now I think it was obvious that I was clamouring for some kind of buff to Power Word: Shield for while. That being said, I'm not sure that giving Discipline Priests a 29k on-demand instant heal is the solution to that problem. Compared to Greater Heal it would have 67% more throughput and 20% more efficiency without a Rapture proc. As before, Rapture procs are larger than the cost of the shield. Power Word: Shield would have higher throughput than a four target Prayer of Healing.
I guess the question is, what is Power Word: Shield supposed to be doing? There are three states is seems to be able to occupy: 1) High throughput and efficiency plus all the benefits of being a shield instead of a heal so cast it all the time instead of regular heals; 2) Mediocre throughput and low efficiency without a Rapture proc so cast it once every 15 seconds on the tank like clockwork; and 3) Useless.
The ground I think we'd like to see Power Word: Shield occupy is where we actually cast it on someone who is at low health when they are in danger of dying so that another heal can land, or on someone who is about to take massive damage to make sure they live through it, but that we don't cast it all the time as a staple heal.
I really see only one way to accomplish that, and I don't think anyone is going to like me for suggesting it: lower the duration. If Power Word: Shield only lasted 8 seconds then you wouldn't go around spamming it on people as a heal because it would fall off without doing anything too much of the time. If someone was low and you were worried about them dying before they got a heal, it would work just as well as it does now for that purpose - but would have an extra "hidden" cost that it might go to waste. If someone was about to take a big hit, 8 seconds would provide lots of time.
I'm now getting very nervous about what's going to happen to discipline priests. The more buffed you get, the bigger the nerf is going to be. Normally this kind of swing is reserved for paladins, who tend to either be overpowered or underpowered while priests have traditionally been in the middle. We may soon return to the days where discipline priests were a strange kind of healer: you are crazy if you don't bring one, and almost equally crazy if you bring two.
Thursday, January 6, 2011
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.
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.
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
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.
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.
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.
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.
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