Love is in the Air achievement guide
Lunar Festival achievement guide
Guide to the Darkmoon Faire
Blinded Iraq war vet raids with a little helpBobTurkey updates Priest theorycraft
by Eliah Hecht 
May 5th 2009 at 1:00PM
| Disc | Holy | |
|---|---|---|
| MP5 | 1.0000 | 1.0000 |
| Spirit | 0.3317 | 0.6397 |
| Intellect | 0.7853 | 0.7480 |
| SP | 0.6000 | 0.6000 |
| Crit rating | 0.3564 | 0.3763 |
| Stamina | 0.2000 | 0.2000 |
| Haste rating | 0.2925 | 0.3059 |
However, MK hasn't been seen around lately, and hasn't updated the information for patch 3.1, with its big changes to spirit and to Priest talents. Fortunately, a blogger named BobTurkey has stepped in and thoroughly reworked all the numbers, at great and interesting length. It's times like these that I really love the WoW community.
The overall discussion is in six parts, if you want to go through the gory details, but the end product is two sets of stat weightings, one for Holy priests and one for Discipline priests (the links are to LootRank lists for the corresponding weight scales). If, like me, you love Pawn, here are the Pawn tags:
( Pawn: v1: "Discipline31": Stamina=0.2, Intellect=0.7853, Spirit=0.3317, RedSocket=11.6824, CritRating=0.3564, MetaSocket=16.4913, HasteRating=0.2925, BlueSocket=9.2824, YellowSocket=12.5648, SpellPower=0.6, Mp5=1)( Pawn: v1: "Holy31": Stamina=0.2, Intellect=0.7480, Spirit=0.6397, RedSocket=11.384, CritRating=0.3763, MetaSocket=15.708, HasteRating=0.3059, BlueSocket=11.1016, YellowSocket=11.968, SpellPower=0.6, Mp5=1)
As you can see, the numbers are based on MP5 - one point of MP5 is worth 1, while (for instance) one point of Int is calculated to be worth 0.748 points of MP5 for a Holy priest. Nice work, BobTurkey. But what's with that name?
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
sturob May 5th 2009 1:14PM
And the great thing about WoW and theorycraft is that . . . just like in real life . . . understanding it won't necessarily help you play the game.
I got a shaman to 80 about 3 weeks ago, maybe a little more. I read through Elitist Jerks (love the site), specced resto, and started on my merry way healing. I took some of their advice, and decided their theorycraft didn't make sense on some of it. Any time there's dependence on the RNG, theorycraft'll only go so far.
Last weekend, I got to do heroic Naxx with a raiding guild on my home server. There were a bunch of healers, all of whom were in at least Naxx gear, most of whom had either full T7 or t7.5 sets. One of them decided to PST me their recount data on healing. Guess what? I was #3 (out of 7 for a couple of encounters) on HPS and had the least amount of overhealing. More importantly, I didn't lose any of my assigned healing targets. In my blues. Cool thing about the raid . . . I got 4 drops, serious upgrades, all in an evening.
I find theorycraft discussions interesting, but they're not the end-all be-all. Some players will benefit from understanding the theorycraft. Some mediocre players will think they have to understand it to function, and their play will probably either improve or deteriorate based on their adherence to theorycraft . . .
My experience has given me a new appreciation of WoW. Just like life, there's some art to it.
Stuart
Eliah Hecht May 5th 2009 1:15PM
True enough. There's an old WoW saying: "Skill > Gear > Spec." Knowing how to heal is much more important than having gear with the best stat allocation. But everything (skill, gear, spec) is a piece in the puzzle.
zarmy May 5th 2009 4:09PM
Not to diminish your achievement of doing a good job at healing for the first time taking your shaman through naxx (the world needs more shaman), but your lack of overhealing can be attributed to your gear. Its not the best gear you could get I would imagine, as such your spell power is lower than the other people.
If a tank is missing 1000 health, and you heal it for 900, yes the tank will live and you won't have any overhealing, if the same tank gets healed by someone with much better gear and gets healed for 1200, then ya, they will get a big overheal. Overhealing is only an issue if people start running out of mana. The new changes to wrath where all us healers only use our top rank spells and never downrank make overhealing a non issue when it comes to looking at meters.
darian May 5th 2009 4:44PM
Resto Shamans lend themselves to low overhealing in the hands of a good player. Thanks to Tidal Waves you can throw out single target heals extremely quickly without much worry that another healer will get there first.
In addition, Earth Shield, Chain Heal and Ancestral Awakening are "smart heals". The former will only heal when the target takes damage, and the latter two will specifically target the people who need it most. The only real potential for overhealing is the primary target for Chain Heal, or a poorly targeted/timed Healing Wave.
Meanwhile, Priests and Paladins will generally have a lot of overheal. Many of their healing spells will hit additional targets whether they need the healing or not, and Holy Priests specifically have a talent which refunds mana on overheals. I can't think of a reason for well played Resto Druid to have a lot of overheal.
So essentially, if you play your Shaman well it's not particularly surprising to find you have low overheal. It essentially boils down to avoiding heal sniping and carefully choosing Chain Heal targets. It sounds like you're well on your way there.
AyaJulia May 5th 2009 1:17PM
Hurray! I always thought DwarfPriest heavuly undervalued crit (0.06 wasn't it?) at the expense of haste. It's nice to see some new numbers. Thanks for passing it along!
AyaJulia May 5th 2009 1:18PM
*heavily. -.-;;
Eliah Hecht May 5th 2009 1:20PM
Yeah, I always felt like that crit number was low (and I think MK said as much in a comment somewhere). These seem better to me, on a gut-feeling level.
serf May 5th 2009 1:31PM
Where's the Sahdow love, Bob?
Eliah Hecht May 5th 2009 1:32PM
There's some extremely solid Shadow work being done over at shadowpriest.com; see for instance
http://shadowpriest.com/viewtopic.php?f=62&t=16992
Tweaky May 5th 2009 5:22PM
The CORRECT shadowpriest.com gear thread for 3.1:
http://www.shadowpriest.com/viewtopic.php?f=62&t=20419
masterraistlin May 5th 2009 1:44PM
I don't understand some of his numbers at all. I'm a raiding Disc priest that went up to Yogg on 10 man the first week and currently 10/14 on 25 man.
What I'm confused about on these numbers is the heavy emphasis on regen (mp5 = 1 and spirit = 0.33). I can tell you right now, over the past couple weeks I've swapped everything I have over to throughput since I have absolutely zero problems with mana ever; even when we don't have replenishment in the raid. Smart use of shadowfiend, Inner Focus, a mana pot, and watching the over-healing and I'm good to go (but these are all things I learned while raiding in BC as holy).
I don't remember where I found these numbers, but they make a whole lot more sense to me:
MP5 0.30
Spirit 0.15
Intellect 0.65
SP 1.00
Crit rating 0.480
Haste rating 0.59
zappo May 5th 2009 2:46PM
It's not emphasizing anything, it's using mp5 as a BASELINE. That's because it does exactly the same thing regardless of disc or holy. The value of spirit (and pretty much every other stat for that matter) changes depending upon your spec. And for instance spirit has considerably more benefit to holy, which weights everything else down in relation to it, so you'd think that just about everything else is not worth as much. That's not the case, it's just that your scale would be messed up because it's based on something that varies in benefits between specs.
Eisengel May 5th 2009 5:46PM
Well, that begs the question, if you don't want to compare against MP5, what do you want to compare against?
Trying to quantify healing output is somewhat impossible, since you have to model the boss and all the players in order to give that a meaningful number. For instance, your healing on Heigan is not going to be the same as your healing on Patchwerk, which is not going to be the same as the healing you do on Maexxna. They're very different fights that require very different types of healing. It is tempting to try to treat healing as reverse-DPS and compute some numbers for HPS, but healing depends entirely on the fight, the gear, and the skill of your group. MP5 is a stat that is about as insensitive to all these issues as you can get. MP5 is always MP5, and more MP5 is useful because it allows you to throw more heals... however gearing and gemming for healing is an ever-changing process that varies from healer to healer. Do you notice you need to get your heals off faster? Maybe you need more haste, maybe you need to cast more HoTs, maybe you aren't anticipating enough (pre-casting party heals on Loatheb?).
As nice as it would be to treat healing as reverse DPS, it really is impractical and depends entirely on the individuals you're healing and the encounter mechanics. Unfortunately in order to theorycraft, in order for it to mean anything, you need to have some kind of neutral rating or stat that you can compare things against... and MP5 is pretty neutral.
Riz May 5th 2009 1:44PM
i came
BulletzBill May 5th 2009 1:44PM
While its pretty impressive the way that people are able to break the game down into these complex formulas and calculation, part of me wishes that the exact math and algorithms behind WoW's gameplay was more hidden.
Wasn't it at one early point in WoW's lifespan that you couldn't see the exact amount of hitpoints a mob had, only the percentage it had left? Maybe I just didn't realize how to display it at the time, or didn't have the right addon, but it made WoW more of a "feel" game than a numbers game, and as a result was more immersive in my opinion. I know, I know, you really don't ever have to look the formulas and equations if you don't want to, and can still play the game just fine, but with the amount of theorycrafting that goes on now, WoW is feeling more like a 3D spreadsheet program then a game. Just takes away a little of the mystery and mystique of it all.
Percy May 5th 2009 1:47PM
These numbers are a bit messed up. The regen numbers are decent (spirit/int/mp5) but the output numbers are WAY too low (haste/crit). Also stamina is wayyyyyy too high, these numbers suggest that 1 stam is two thirds of 1 haste, this might mess up some of your gear values in close decisions.
If you followed this advice you'd be full of spirit and int gear with a huge mana pool and tons of regen but your output would be completely gimped. A greater balance is needed to be a good priest.
Jon Do May 5th 2009 1:49PM
Overall, this is quite interesting.
I am a bit surprised that for a Holy Priest MP5 is given the highest stat value. I don't value it so highly. I have little MP5 (focusing on Int and Spirit) and never run out of mana in a raid. MP5 gives only mana regen, while my Int also gives Crit and Spirit gives Spell Power. I drop Stamina to 0 in my lootrank because ilvl 213+ gear has all the Stam I need.
Also, for a JC, socket colors are less of a consideration because you have access to 3 special gems that can go in any color slot, so I leave that as neutral.
As for theorycrafting and recount (such as in a Naxx heroic run), there are so many variables. Each fight can be very different, each assignment (single target, raid, etc) is also different, and trash muddies the stats as well. I've done most Naxx healing roles on a priest, and while numbers are interesting, I'm happy if the boss is down. If the boss is *not* down, *then* we look through the combat log and recount for answers. I started Naxx 25 in heroic blues and crafted epics, and that was passable, but now in mostly ilvl 213 gear the heals are much bigger, the mana pool is much larger, crits more frequent, and casts are faster.
darian May 5th 2009 4:55PM
Realize that in terms of item budget, 1 mp5 costs 2.5 times as much as either 1 Int or 1 Spirit.
Realize that in terms of item budget 1 mp5 costs 2.5 times as much as either 1 Int or 1 Spirit and 3.6 times as much as Spellpower. If you normalize the values based on budget cost it looks more like this (for Disc).
Spellpower - .857
Intellect - .7853
Mp5 - .4
Spirit - .3317
But since players are never presented with the *budget* of the item, just the raw stats, those values are worthless for use in Pawn or on a site like WoWhead.
Cedrich May 5th 2009 1:56PM
Not sure on those Disc figures when it comes down to practical application. It seems to value Int extremely highly for the obvious reasons (Mana/Crit/Regen) but does not take into account two main things:
- Disc by nature is very mana efficient and reaches a point of mana stability (given the appropriate use of cooldowns) fairly early on gear-wise. After this point, Int for regen looses some of its desirability.
- Disc makes use of two 'bread and butter' spells. Pennance and Power Word: Shield. Pennance benefits immensely from crit yes, BUT PW:S does not benefit at all.
Both PW:S and Pennance scale very well with Spellpower, leading me to believe that perhaps SP should be valued slightly higher than the ranking has them now, if not on an equal level to Int.
Bear in mind I have no figures to back this up, this comes purely from my hands-on experience playing as Discipline. I'm all for being proved wrong by cold hard numbers.
Sardoc May 5th 2009 2:06PM
"Pennance and Power Word: Shield. Pennance benefits immensely from crit yes, BUT PW:S does not benefit at all."
Last I checked PW:S can crit too...