4.2 and healing (holy priest more specificly)

[aresius]

Well, im just wondering how (if?) the 200% crit heals will affect healing, more specificly on a holy priest (the healing class i play).
Maybe its early to be asking since its unlikely there would be many logs for theorycrafters to analyze and be sure X aproach is more effective healing then Y, but does anyone expect to be gemming or reforging some more crit due to the new crit buff? If so, in expense of which other stat? Does the meta healing crit affect the base heal value (and thus is unchanged) or the crit value (and now is doubled effect)?
I never took my healer as seriously as my tank, and am pretty lost when it comes to theorycrafting and even understanding why im doing what im doing when it comes to healing. I just read some guildes (namely alienas) and follow it, ctrl-c ctrl-v. Faced with the risk of having stat weights getting outdated with the patch, pretty much all i need to know is what changes and if anyone intends to post a updated guide.
thnx.

[Sebadoh]

For a Holy Priest, you can expect Crit to go from 'terrible' to 'subpar'. An extra 200% healing is very good, but still RNG and there are no crit talents to speak of besides Inspiration.

Mastery is nice, but given the fact that it hardly works with Renew you can expect it to be behind Haste in most situations. The big hurdle to Haste stacking so far has been mana, and obviously 4.2 brings higher level gear for more mana (unless there is seriously next to no spirit cloth in the raid, in which case I would rage).

I would reasonably expect the secondary stat priority to go Haste > Mastery > Crit.

[Serynn]

As it stands now on the ptr there are zero cloth spirit pieces that drop in Firelands raid. As for priests gearing, there is exactly one spirit item for each slot with the exception of two attainable items for the neck and hand slots. The last exception is that there is no spirit cloth belt in 4.2 at all.

http://thestoriesofo.net/2011/06/17/...oly-priests-2/ is a really great blog entry as to guiding us through what is going to be our gear options.

[Dyvine]

I did some testing on PTR for both Disc and Holy. Right now the 200% crit is pretty good. Keep in mind that when you crit, your Holy mastery Echo of Light healing kicks in for a rather nice HoT. Myself I have a pretty balanced stat for Mastery, Crit, and Haste. The biggest problem that I see right now on PTR is lack of mana regen. I really hope that they add some more spirit cloth drops than what they have currently. If they don't it almost forces us to take spirit gems, trinkets, enchants to keep a decent regen. I know that I will be keeping my Darkmoon Card: Tsunami on me for this entire tier of raiding. The other trinket will be Jaws of Defeat when it drops. Let's all pray for more Spirit, cloth drops.

[Quinafoi]

Also keep in mind...

Where x is the non-crit healing throughput (the healing that you would do if nothing crit).

Current Throughput =
x * (1 - Crit Rate + 1.5 * Crit Rate)

New Throughput =
x * (1 - Crit Rate + 2 * Crit Rate)

Difference =
x * (0.5 * Crit Rate)


Lets say your healing throughput is 15,000 HPS and you have a 15% Crit Rate (arbitrary round numbers). This throughput is your maximum, so it includes overhealing.
15000 = x * (1 - Crit Rate + 1.5 * Crit Rate)
x = 15000 / (0.85 + 0.225) = 13,953

Your new throughput would be...
HPS = 13953 * (1 - Crit Rate + 2 * Crit Rate)
HPS = 13953 * (0.85 + 0.3)
HPS = 16,046

A gain of 1,046 HPS or a 6.97% increase. The higher your crit is the larger the impact of the change will be. It has no change on how often you crit but simply the value of the crit when it occurs. So if you approximate the value of your crit today using a formula like this to determine what your throughput would be without any crits, then you can calculate what your throughput will be after the change is assuming nothing else changed.

This change will be roughly a 3-8% buff to all healers. This is just looking at this change alone however and not its interaction with other changes or class specifics.

[Quinafoi]

Crit also will still be a low priority stat for Holy. Simply put the buff isn't sufficient to make your worst stat good enough to compete with stats which were already valued much higher.

In regard to the Meta gem effect:
Revitalizing meta gems should cause your critical heals to heal for 206% of the non-critical effect.

[Skiderion]

I think the biggest problem judging secondary stats for holy is that right now they all kinda suck in specific ways.

Haste is good but unfortunately our mana can't scale to keep up. Maybe with every BIS and a titanic mana pool this gets better but I am not sure even all the best gear available in FL gets us to that point. A healer with no Mana and 2 minutes left in the fight is pretty worthless despite whatever amazing numbers they had the first 3 minutes.

Mastery is generally a bunch of overhealing. It can really crank up numbers in cases where the entire raid takes a massive amount of damage since everyone can't snipe the mastery HoTs but without some sort of light pulsing damage in a fight this is a lot of lost throughput. If this had existed in WotLK we would have been kings.

Crit, yeah it's pretty RNG and on top of that the theoretical througput compared to mastery isn't quite there. The interesting thing to me is that there is some synergy at work between crit and mastery but unfortunately with a talent spec devoid of cool crit procs it's hard to justify stacking crit. The best thing that can be said is that when you Crit a target you won't have the extra throughput sniped (but maybe lost to overheal).

I would really like to see Blizzard make crit a bigger part of the talent set for holy so that the stat becomes worthwhile since haste and mastery are simply better by math but not in practice. Perhaps come T-13 Haste stacking becomes the "right" way.

[Sebadoh]

This wouldn't be a perfect fix by any means, but I think they should change the Mastery to heal the same amount but over a shorter duration. Maybe 4 seconds instead? This would be better for burst (and saving lives) while also being harder to snipe.

[Ellóren]

Ok, now we've all listed why secondary stats suck - but these are the ones we have right now, so how do we weigh them?

In 4.1 it was Haste to a total (buffed) of 12.5% for the extra Renew tick, and Mastery after that. Is that the same, would you say?

[Daros]

Crit got buffed from :
"OMG! I dont even wont this piece of gear!"
to :
"Well .. will reforge it to something usefull"

As for other stats.. just go full out haste.
If you lack on mana, look for spirit, spell usage, pots, mana regen cooldowns and trinkets.

[Ellóren]

As for other stats.. just go full out haste.
If you lack on mana, look for spirit, spell usage, pots, mana regen cooldowns and trinkets.

When did this change? Is there any data to back it up?

[Ellóren]

When did this change? Is there any data to back it up?

No reply after nine days... I guess all priests have gone disc

[Raina]

Well holy priests need to reach the first break point which is 12.5% for an extra renew tick, lightwell from what I understand has its first break point at 16%. Now those were numbers were for last tier and I haven't had time to see if anything has changed. But at least reaching those numbers would be a good idea, beyond that would probably depend on playstyle, healing composition, boss mechanics, ect ect.

[Ellóren]

Well holy priests need to reach the first break point which is 12.5% for an extra renew tick, lightwell from what I understand has its first break point at 16%. Now those were numbers were for last tier and I haven't had time to see if anything has changed. But at least reaching those numbers would be a good idea, beyond that would probably depend on playstyle, healing composition, boss mechanics, ect ect.

Thanks for the reply. This pretty much confirms my earlier reply, and yet someone said to stack haste. To reach 12.5% it's not exactly necessary to "stack" so it will be interesting to monitor our numbers in the Firelands to see if Haste is worth more than Mastery now. From what I can see so far, Echo of Lights is high up on my healing charts so I'm kind of reluctant to give up a lot of Mastery. Time, and heroic modes, will tell.