1. #1
    Deleted

    [Restoration] Crit vs Mastery vs Spirit

    Hello!

    I have reached a gear level, where I have a significant amount of secondary stats to juggle around, and was wondering what do you think about the value of crit vs mastery and spirit, and also the overall value of spirit. I'm currently sitting on ~40% mastery unbuffed, which makes it around 46% buffed, making the additive mastery modifier along with Naturalist ~1,56. Btw, is naturalist still additively added with mastery? It was in cata, before they removed it, so I assumed so.

    My current spirit is 11k, having reforged it all away, as its present in pretty much all gear. Do you think that's too low? I do run OOM sometimes, but I think the added throughput is more useful than having the possibilty to continue spamming a bit longer. What do you feel is a good level if spirit for yourself? Do you think even I oom sometimes, low spirit - max throughput might be a good thing?

    My current unbuffed crit is 16%, so add raid buffs to that it becomes something around 22-23%. I don't run the glyph of Regrowth at the moment, I have stampeding roar or innervate glyphed in place of that. So if we compare the two values, becomes easier to gain 1,23% crit through combat ratings than 1,56% mastery, for an average 1% more healing. Of course there are some variables that make it less simple than this, like the fact that shroom bloom can't crit (though the base healing of shroom accounts for quite a small amount of heals) and the fact that Regrowth has an additional 60% crit chance.

    Playing a resto druid, I personally don't share the opinion of the randomness of crits making the stat less valuable (you could argue more crit makes Regrowth actually more reliable), as hardly anything ever depends on having a single hot tick crit or not, and a lucky crit might as well save someone in a tight situation where slightly more mastery wouldn't, as it could be the other way around.

    TL;DR: When you get enough mastery, crit can become as valuable as mastery. Value of spirit seems a bit low at high gear levels. (at least for me).

    My 2 cents. You can click on my sig to find my armory. Feel free to comment if i'm doing something terribly wrong.(or even if I'm doing alright)
    Last edited by mmoc868d8cd30e; 2013-12-16 at 11:21 PM. Reason: Thank you

  2. #2
    Spirit level is a tricky issue because its highly subjective. But it also matters whether you are raiding 10 or 25? Do you have 1 or more resto shaman in your raid for MTT? Are you doing heroics or normals? All these will affect just how much spirit you need (usually 11-14k is a common range).

    As for the question does crit become more valuable as your mastery percentage goes up, yes. Where is that inflection point where it may be worth reforging for crit over mastery...you'd have to plug your gear into treecalcs or something similar to find out exactly where that might be. Since crit take 600 rating for a 1% healing increase, versus mastery's 480 rating, you'd like have to have a lot of mastery before considering it. (personally i prefer mastery's consistent bonus and wouldn't really think of getting more crit till at least 50-60% mastery)

    And as for naturalist, you know im not sure. It used to be additive with mastery's bonus but i think when it was removed at the start of MoP, and then later returned; it came back as a multiplicative healing bonus. But im unaware of any testing to confirm that.

  3. #3
    Deleted
    Quote Originally Posted by Keiyra View Post
    Spirit level is a tricky issue because its highly subjective. But it also matters whether you are raiding 10 or 25? Do you have 1 or more resto shaman in your raid for MTT? Are you doing heroics or normals? All these will affect just how much spirit you need (usually 11-14k is a common range).

    As for the question does crit become more valuable as your mastery percentage goes up, yes. Where is that inflection point where it may be worth reforging for crit over mastery...you'd have to plug your gear into treecalcs or something similar to find out exactly where that might be. Since crit take 600 rating for a 1% healing increase, versus mastery's 480 rating, you'd like have to have a lot of mastery before considering it. (personally i prefer mastery's consistent bonus and wouldn't really think of getting more crit till at least 50-60% mastery)

    And as for naturalist, you know im not sure. It used to be additive with mastery's bonus but i think when it was removed at the start of MoP, and then later returned; it came back as a multiplicative healing bonus. But im unaware of any testing to confirm that.
    I raid 10-man heroics, I'm personally 13/14 HC even though my guild has killed heroic garrosh two and a half weeks ago, I didn't fit into our first kill comp then. If it's a boss we 3-heal (Thok, Iron Juggernaut, Dark shamans), we have a resto shaman and a disc priest. On other bosses the shaman switches back to his main spec and I heal with the disc.

    I'm not really considering to actually reforge mastery to crit, but more like valuing crit mastery and spirit all exactly the same on gear, and taking whatever gear has the most secondary stats, even if the difference is small. I have reforged spirit to crit on my legendary cloak though, and taken the crit leg enchant, instead of the spirit one, because I feel like there are more situations where having extra throughput might have saved a life, in contrary to extra mana.

  4. #4
    Sounds like its working fine for you then

  5. #5
    Deleted
    Quote Originally Posted by Keiyra View Post
    Sounds like its working fine for you then
    Yeah, it's been fine, I just see pretty much everyone else running higher spirit levels than me, so that's why I was curious. I guess it was the same back in cataclysm too, healing hc ragnaros with ~1200 spirit, the lowest possible amount you could pretty much get with hc gear. Of course back then resto druid regen mechanics were a bit different, with all the max mana regen. Our paladin had twice the spirit I had back then :d.

    Will have to see how well my mana holds on garrosh, even though there are some quite high-damage phases so dropping any throughput doesn't really sound like a good idea.

  6. #6
    for practical purposes of upgrade, you can pretty much consider it to be an upgrade to take a crit piece instead of a mastery piece and not see any loss at any gear level, especially in full heroic gear where your mastery is well over 10k w/ the 13k haste already so the values of crit and mastery are close enough that if it has more int, it's easily an upgrade as far as crit versus mastery as from just getting more int
    for closer calls like warforged pieces and such, just consult tree calcs



    idk about taking less spirit, I take a ton (not like holy priest or anything, but still a lot), but then again, my co-healer isn't exactly great and I often need to be healing more targets for a bit less with rejuv than to be hitting less targets for more, but I'm not too the really far in parts (2nd half of heroics) yet and it also relies a bit on how good you are at using our really mana efficient heals like bloom and with moving lifebloom when the tank isn't really the person who needs it (like to the sniper target on naz, to someone w/ the dot on sha or shamans, etc.) as well as some other small things you can do
    this healing style often leaves me with a ridiculously high overheal% too, but it lets me feed my co-healer 1 or 2 innervates per fight and make sure everyone is alive rather than just those with a few stronger rejuvs rejuv

    so basically, because of the nature of rejuv, you'd probably get the most benefit out of switching depending on which fights require more healing on fewer targets or burst damage, crit would be stronger, like keeping just a few rejuvs up in the haromm group on shamans

    garrosh is probably kind of an exception as his damage is so high you're about just as well off getting rejuv on everyone starting about 4-6s or so before whirl popping genesis, and blooming shrooms w/ a WG, a swiftmend, a 2p bonus healing touch, maybe a clearcast proc regrowth, and 2-3 treants or an incarnation before that starts which is probably handled better with more spirit as you're going to have to be mana inefficient regardless (some people might use SotF, especially if they're doing that eating desecrates strat)
    especially since you have to cram all that in after you've just topped the tanks and mc victims off, fortunately, spirit shell makes every other whirl a joke for your comp, I'd also say to take NV and use that to cover whirls where you don't have shell if you're having trouble handling those

    and on fights where you need a bit less healing on more targets take spirit, just take a few pieces of gear you can swap between depending on the fight and what you need

    remember that the amount of healing you'll be sacrificing i.e. 1.2k spirit (about 2 rejuvs per minute, which is actually a lot, and healing gain as well as making sure that 2 more people don't die) for 2% more healing on your other heals, which will generally result in a small hps decrease, especially since with druids, a fair amount of that (30-70%, depending on the player and the fight) will be overhealing, and the opposite of taking more spirit results in an hps increase overall assuming the extra rejuvs can be used well and you're not taking such an insanely high amount of spirit that you're able to roll rejuv on 10 targets w/ extra mana and only getting more overhealing out of the trade-off
    Last edited by ryklin; 2013-12-13 at 09:19 PM.

  7. #7
    Quote Originally Posted by Demez View Post
    I raid 10-man heroics, I'm personally 13/14 HC even though my guild has killed heroic garrosh two and a half weeks ago, I didn't fit into our first kill comp then. If it's a boss we 3-heal (Thok, Iron Juggernaut, Dark shamans), we have a resto shaman and a disc priest. On other bosses the shaman switches back to his main spec and I heal with the disc.

    I'm not really considering to actually reforge mastery to crit, but more like valuing crit mastery and spirit all exactly the same on gear, and taking whatever gear has the most secondary stats, even if the difference is small. I have reforged spirit to crit on my legendary cloak though, and taken the crit leg enchant, instead of the spirit one, because I feel like there are more situations where having extra throughput might have saved a life, in contrary to extra mana.
    What I found was that 12k spirit was a bit low for progressing some bosses (esp. heroic Malkorok and Thok). However, now that these bosses are pretty easy with better gear and routine I reduced my spirit again, so IMO 11k should be fine if you're used to running low spirit.

    I completely agree with your crit assessment. Mastery is superior, but only a bit so higher ilvl always wins regardless of stats. I also think that the argument "crit is too unreliable" is invalid, because with the the number of healing ticks we do every second, it's simply a straight increase. So for reforge / gemming, mastery > crit, but the stat gains of higher item level are more important.

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by ryklin View Post
    remember that the amount of healing you'll be sacrificing i.e. 1.2k spirit (about 2 rejuvs per minute, which is actually a lot, and healing gain as well as making sure that 2 more people don't die) for 2% more healing on your other heals, which will generally result in a small hps decrease, especially since with druids, a fair amount of that (30-70%, depending on the player and the fight) will be overhealing, and the opposite of taking more spirit results in an hps increase overall assuming the extra rejuvs can be used well and you're not taking such an insanely high amount of spirit that you're able to roll rejuv on 10 targets w/ extra mana and only getting more overhealing out of the trade-off
    Actually the bosses in heroic SoO seem to favor the low spirit build (with some exceptions). Most bosses either have high-damage phases (and "healing downtime"), or phases where you don't heal the whole group (like spoils, shaman). In both cases, high throughput is stronger because you get the healing when you need it. Low-damage phases can be use to regen mana (healing mostly with LB, Efflo, CC). This is not true for all bosses, but I prefer to switch a regen trinket in for fights where I need more mana.

    Also, spirit doesn't give you very much. Losing a few rejuvs per minute is actually pretty laughable considering how many of those we put out. For example, on heroic Thok in the first 90 seconds I cast about 60 Rejuvs, a few more or less won't make or break the fight, while the added healing for all my heals is very strong (comparably little overheal).

    In the end, spirit need is subjective. But if you follow math, less spirit always wins in throughput, and most bosses require more burst healing than continuous spamming.

  8. #8
    yah, that's true with the first half/what I've seen so far in the the first 8 (which are honestly probably irrelevant to the actually tough bosses) my point above was more towards the nature of rejuv and spirit just letting us heal more targets at once for throughput from the base healing done and to not drop so much spirit he couldn't keep a decent # of people up because I thought he was considering dropping even more, and actually assuming your healing and I wasn't really sure if he'd be able to get through all the whirls w/ 10k which is a total of like 50 less casts over the whole fight compared to what most people are running because when I clicked his armory he had like 10k and it sounded like he was considering dropping more for this fight

  9. #9
    Deleted
    Quote Originally Posted by ryklin View Post
    yah, that's true with the first half/what I've seen so far in the the first 8 (which are honestly probably irrelevant to the actually tough bosses) my point above was more towards the nature of rejuv and spirit just letting us heal more targets at once for throughput from the base healing done and to not drop so much spirit he couldn't keep a decent # of people up because I thought he was considering dropping even more, and actually assuming your healing and I wasn't really sure if he'd be able to get through all the whirls w/ 10k which is a total of like 50 less casts over the whole fight compared to what most people are running because when I clicked his armory he had like 10k and it sounded like he was considering dropping more for this fight
    Unfortunately, it is not possible for me to drop any more spirit I have already reforged a tad over 6k spirit away, and gemmed for mastery, save for socket bonuses. I guess if I had the thok ring and norushen gloves, I could drop 1k more spirit but I don't think I want to unless I got some other big upgrades, 11k feels pretty much right at the moment. Will have to see how Garrosh goes on monday.

    Btw, do you have any thoughts on what's the "best" tier off-piece? Initially of course, whatever you might happen to get as warforged is going to win, but if we compare and look at the stats the Self-Reflecting Mask from Sha of Pride seems to have the biggest increase in secondary stats, having a total of 85 secondary stats more when comparing heroic to heroic with 2/2 valor upgraded. Of course if I were to get it hc warforged, the gains would be much bigger.

    Quote Originally Posted by Thalur View Post
    What I found was that 12k spirit was a bit low for progressing some bosses (esp. heroic Malkorok and Thok). However, now that these bosses are pretty easy with better gear and routine I reduced my spirit again, so IMO 11k should be fine if you're used to running low spirit.

    I completely agree with your crit assessment. Mastery is superior, but only a bit so higher ilvl always wins regardless of stats. I also think that the argument "crit is too unreliable" is invalid, because with the the number of healing ticks we do every second, it's simply a straight increase. So for reforge / gemming, mastery > crit, but the stat gains of higher item level are more important.
    Yeah, I can imagine that for Malkorok and Thok you might find yourself low on mana. I didn't have that problem back then as on Thok we had a resto shaman, disc and a shadow priest for mana cooldowns, which meant I could regen a massive amount of mana during kite phases. On malkorok we didn't have the resto shaman, but still, since we 3-healed it and also had a paladin tank, it meant that there was a decent amount of off-heals and self-heals, letting the healers focus on the raid, and very little on the tanks.

    I see you have the thok cleave trinket and the spirit trinket from blackfuse. For how much healing does that cleave account for you, how long is the jump range on the cleave? Also is the spirit mana return from the blackfuse trinket significant? Haven't you had the amp trinket drop for you yet, or do you just prefer those two on certain fights over amp trinket?


    PS: I want your mace
    Last edited by mmoc868d8cd30e; 2013-12-14 at 08:52 AM.

  10. #10
    Quote Originally Posted by Demez View Post
    Btw, do you have any thoughts on what's the "best" tier off-piece? Initially of course, whatever you might happen to get as warforged is going to win, but if we compare and look at the stats the Self-Reflecting Mask from Sha of Pride seems to have the biggest increase in secondary stats, having a total of 85 secondary stats more when comparing heroic to heroic with 2/2 valor upgraded. Of course if I were to get it hc warforged, the gains would be much bigger.
    Basically, as long as you're progressing, offset should be legs or shoulders, since you get those heroic pieces last. If you have access to everything, heroic warforged chest off Klaxxi would be my favorite off-piece, otherwise I'd just take the combination of 4p and highest item levels.

    Quote Originally Posted by Demez View Post
    I see you have the thok cleave trinket and the spirit trinket from blackfuse. For how much healing does that cleave account for you, how long is the jump range on the cleave? Also is the spirit mana return from the blackfuse trinket significant? Haven't you had the amp trinket drop for you yet, or do you just prefer those two on certain fights over amp trinket?
    Yes, although I'm rolling every week on Sha I never got the trinket (only have it on Flex and it's not worth it).

    The cleave trinket is really great on some fights, about 7-12% on Norushen, Galakras and Thok, and about 5% on Protectors. I use the Timeless trinket on the other fights because cleave is usually only 1-2%. I can only guess on the range, might be something like 10 yards. Definitely not more than 15 or it would heal a lot more on Thok.

    DSD mana regen is pretty good especially with 13k haste, it procs almost twice per minute. On my last Thok kill (6:45) it procced 13 times and got me (very roughly) about 180k mana, or 4k spirit equivalent (better check those numbers again since it's late...) I still consider this trinket BiS for this tier (better than amp), but well, I don't have either on heroic anyway.
    Last edited by Thalur; 2013-12-15 at 01:26 AM.

  11. #11
    Deleted
    Quote Originally Posted by Thalur View Post
    Basically, as long as you're progressing, offset should be legs or shoulders, since you get those heroic pieces last. If you have access to everything, heroic warforged chest off Klaxxi would be my favorite off-piece, otherwise I'd just take the combination of 4p and highest item levels.
    I think I'd actually rather use the nazgrim chest than the klaxxi chest, assuming I somehow had both hc wf. If you compare the two and sum up the secondary stats, you can see the nazgrim chest has 106 more secondary stats, and also has one more non-red gem socket, which allows you to gem more secondary stats. Sure it has crit, but as we discussed earlier, crit isn't a bad stat, and I'd say its very well "worth it" to swap it in if you gain over 100 total secondary stats in the trade (and favorable gem slots).


    Quote Originally Posted by Thalur View Post
    The cleave trinket is really great on some fights, about 7-12% on Norushen, Galakras and Thok, and about 5% on Protectors. I use the Timeless trinket on the other fights because cleave is usually only 1-2%. I can only guess on the range, might be something like 10 yards. Definitely not more than 15 or it would heal a lot more on Thok.

    DSD mana regen is pretty good especially with 13k haste, it procs almost twice per minute. On my last Thok kill (6:45) it procced 13 times and got me (very roughly) about 180k mana, or 4k spirit equivalent (better check those numbers again since it's late...) I still consider this trinket BiS for this tier (better than amp), but well, I don't have either on heroic anyway.
    Sounds interesting. I think i'll start coining thok from now on, seeing the cleave can be very useful. And the ring is an upgrade for me too. Will have to see if the siegecrafter trinket would be an upgrade from what I have now.

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