Solace Vs. Mindbender (Disc)

[TehCrab]

mindbender gives more mana than solace for me, by a pretty decent margin, but i find myself struggling to get to 5 stacks of evangelism without solace. purely do to not managing my cooldowns properly, but i end up doing more overall healing with solace than i do with mindbender, and i have a mythic chewtoy and mythic spirit trinket so i dont really have too many problems with mana anyway. also our tank healing is total crap so my penances tend to go full channel with little overhealing.

thats the reasons i use solace. obviously if i managed my penances better and our tank healing was where it should be id definitely use mindbender.

I'm in the EXACT same boat - I feel like I have more mama at the end of fights with Mindbender BUT I feel like I'm 'forgetting' it simply not gaining 5xEvangelism at the same pace while at the same time losing Healing Done.

Comparing logs between 'farm' with and without MB over the past 2 weeks, my Solace healing (obviously due to 2xOffensive + 1xDefensive/1xHoly Fire) is lacking and thus brining my overall healing down. Compared to when using Solace with Defnenaive Penances - looking at logs alone my Healing done by Penances has dipped from 7mil to 1-2mil depending.

Interesting to know its not me going mad!

[Squishes]

I'm trying to understand, you have your focus on boss for solace right? So why can't you just have the boss focused while using mindbender and have a macro for focus penance when you want to offensive and you can still mouseover penance for defensive. You don't ever have to de-target the tank that you keep target to cast on your focus.

Basically they're saying their macro forces the Penance to always be defensive unless they change targets: either it's targetting their mouseover or if there is no mouseover, it's targetting the tank (because they always have the tank targetted). But if they were to add a focus line into that, it would either never hit the focus because it would go to the tank, like so:
/cast [target=mouseover][][target=focus] Penance

or it would never hit the tank because of the focus, like so:
/cast [target=mouseover][target=focus][] Penance

Solace doesn't have this issue because it's always meant to be offensive.

[Java]

I'm in the EXACT same boat - I feel like I have more mama at the end of fights with Mindbender BUT I feel like I'm 'forgetting' it simply not gaining 5xEvangelism at the same pace while at the same time losing Healing Done.

Interesting to know its not me going mad!

Definitely not mad, I ran a lot of back to back solace/mindbender attempts. Every time i had lower healing with Mindbender but a little more mana.

[atilla]

Why 1/3 of this thread posts are misled by the wrongful assumption that max HPS on meters = best healer?
It is common knowledge from Vanilla that unlike the DPS, for healers raw healing meters are not most important - still important, but not on 1st, 2nd or 3rd... place.
For Disc Priests in MoP and WoD is double true - good player can always learn how to cheat meters and troll other healers - Heroic/Mythic Brackenspore preshielding before AoE is the perfect example.

But enough, lets back on Theorycrafting.

1. With zero haste.
Throughput nerf is 1.5/10-1.5/60 = 12.5%
As no way even in theory priest to go in raid with zero haste, i will dismiss further.

2. Reasonable haste - 20%
Throughput nerf is 1.5/12-1.5/72 = 10.41(66)%
Take in that Solace heals also around 25% of your best filler - lower this to 7.9%
Canceling penance after 2nd thick (for max throughput) gives virtually same healing as the best filler
Taking in account that Mindbenders use Archangel with only 3 stacks (2 extra stack simply not worth the GCD loss for bulding) we must take in account the 2 additional stacks with which EPoH is cast.
This is around 2.9% of best filler - so we go down to 5%.

Now - the part we missing. Solace gives 1600 more MP5 (with 20% haste, with 0% hast gives 1920) due to occupying GCD for Solace intead PW:S. Or if is equalized to total rotation - around 1400. 1400MP5 is equal to 600 spirit, which is equal to 6-7% more healing due to spending this item budged to other stats. Imagine changing autoclave for for throughput trinket.
Calcs are on 30 secs rotation: 3 x solace, 2 x penance (canceled after 3rd thick), 1 x EPoH, PW:S filler.
If you change rotation to: 3 x solace, 2 x penance (canceled after 3rd thick), 1 x EPoH, 2 x PoH, PW:S filler, you can squeeze another 1% more for solace, but this rotation is very situational - in very rare case can do 3 x PoHs without overhealing.


This gives you actually 1%-3% more healing for Solace vs Mindbender. This is specially true on fights with flat damage - Kromog, Gruul.
Does this 1%-3% worth the sacrificing GCD in damage bursts, when somebody is going to die, etc is another story. For me the flexibility that give me Mindbender is more important than the healing increase of Solace.

[Java]

Or you could hold off casting solace a few seconds when things get really bad. Plus you get the bonus of having penance free. A great spell when things are bad.

[Deleted]

My solution to the Solace/Smite/Penance targeting issue is:

- Dont macro Penance at all, keep the tank as your target and cast it defensive (to cast offensive, target mob)
- Since you keep targeting the tank, you can just /cast [@targettarget, harm] Smite (HF/Solace) and always grab the Tanks(or DPS) target as your offensive target.

[Deleted]

I tried to give the things discussed in this thread a try yesterday (on 7 bosses of Mythic farm) - and performed miserably on it. This might be due to me not playing it flawless, but also to some other issues not discussed exhaustively in this thread.

1. On Mindbender vs. Solace

This is an issue where our kind of quick calculation is flawed because to many critical assumptions are not controlled for.

(a) There are just a few fights where you will open with heavy mana usage. For sake of simplicity, we can assume that we are calculating for gruul, getting into fight with 5 Stacks of Evangelism, instantly pulling of AA and start blanket shielding. However, we will definitly have (when using) at least one proc of chew toy. Odds are, that in this situation mindbender is most likely to overcap our mana pool. At least more likely that solace is. We can however decide to pull of mindbender after 30 seconds into combat, stacking it with the second usage of AA+PI. (Also PI might be pulled of at the start of the fight depending on fight length to maximize it's utility or we might be using Mindbender 60 seconds into fight, pulling off PI at the start of the fight to stack both spells again 2 Minutes into fight). As you can see, talking of the opening phase of the fight, there are a lot of situations where the mindbender just gets obsolete in terms of mana-return.

(b) Fight length differs, and even with assuming that you pull off Mindbender within the first seconds of an encounter with a 100% effective mana return, you can not control for fight length. The fight might be 7:59, which is not unlikely to happen, leaving you with a whole minute of mindbender-waste. (You might also iterate this to whatever fightlength you like, but the odds are 1/4 that you will not have a fight length making "perfect" use of mindbender)
This is not about calculating for each situation where mindbender might be more or less usefull in the opening of the fight. But from (a) and (b), the whole point I try to make is, you can not act as if mana return from Mindbender is a continuous-linear function. It just is not. Mana return from Mindbender is heavily affected by opening mana usage of the fight and fight length. I am sorry that I can not make a good calculation to this, hence. It would require a proper theorycrafting framework using bootstraps with at least 1000 iterations to control for every variable.
However, putting all these assumptions aside, what we have is a heuristic decision horizon. Knowing that, given we have a fight length of aproximately a multiple of 1 minute, going into combat with heavy mana usage, Mindbender is the right decision. But this only accounts for a few fights in the current content.

All this might also be true for solace, but solace is used six times as often with a lower mana return. That brings it a lot more into direction of a cintinous mana return function, making the impact of fight length not as heavy.


2. On using Penance offensively

Since the release of WoD, the main discussion of Disc Priests (and the scorn we get from every other healer) is, that we do nothing more than blanket shielding. That our toolkit is crippled down to this single spell.
The math of using Penance 2x offensively (interupting the channeling with an additional PW:S) and 1x defensively per 30 seconds plus using mindbender (making space for 2.5 more GCD for PW:S every 30 seconds) giving us up to 9 additional PW:S per minute (!!!) is just overwhelming. So much numbers, so much potential.
I gave this a heavy try yesterday and was strict on not falling out of this pattern. It s***ed. My Tank heal droped down to being almost insignificant. My overhealing went under the roof (it boubled). So many shields that just ran out. So much waste of mana! (I can deliver figures for this if really needed, but doing a good comperative work needs a little bit more data). Also, the additional mana you get from this playstyle through mindbender plus leaving out HolyFire get's easily soaked up by PW:S. You might have more mana in absolute numbers, but taking Heal per Mana spent as a key figure, it drops.

My conclusion to this is: You can play this if you want to rank yourself for Gruul, Oregorger, Kromog, given you don't run out of mana. But you will have to tell your fellow healing mates that they have to keep more care of the tanks since you won't care and that you will instead blanket shield even more because you can and that you don't give a f**k about that they might be way more efficient in flat raid heal, but you will just push that into overheal.


If this post is not theoretical enough for your taste (and I myself usually like it very theoretical) I can deliver math. But for now, I feel like normative arguments are just enough to qualify this issue.

- - - Updated - - -

Regarding (2) of my previous post:
Yes, I am aware that you could also cast 3x Penance defensively + 2x HF, using MB. Or 1x offensively, 2x defensively and 1x HF. This is kind of cool, because you don't rely on casting Solace on cooldown. There are a lot of cases and combinations you could thereotically (and practically) use. If you want to calculate them all, you've got some exhaustive homework to do, probably just giving the same result: Whatver you do, it's a gradual decision making in two dimensions of a R², effective vs. efficient mana usage on the one hand, targetet healing vs. blank raidheal HPS on the other. You can't have it all. Which is good. It makes it less boring.

- - - Updated - - -

Probably really got to do some math on (1b) since my assumption of fight length is a little bit flawed, bacause the MB will return mana prehand. This would leave you sometimes with even more mana taking isolated minutes, if you just use 30 seconds of that minute but a whole worth of mana return from mindbender.

[Squishysib]

Heroic/Mythic Brackenspore preshielding before AoE is the perfect example.

Pre-shielding for incoming damage is trolling / cheating again... How?

[MegaVolti]

Pre-shielding for incoming damage is trolling / cheating again... How?

Because it's damage that gets healed by mushrooms (an encounter mechanic) anyway so pre-shielding (as long as a green mushroom is ready to pop) is pointless and thus cheating on the meters.

When there is "real" damage (e.g. no green mushroom to do the healing for you) pre-shield is of course absolutely fine.

[drivec]

I generaly like mindbender at this point but I wonder how the ticking dot effects trinket procs and weapon enchants over mindbender. just something to think about.

also does atonement have 2 chances to proc trinkets and weapon enchants? one from damage and one from the heal?


edit: after looking over a couple of logs I have defiantly noticed higher proc chances with solace over mindbender. But I don't know if this is only from solace or just better RNG. I really think this is worth testing so i will look more into it over the weekend but if anyone already has any info I would love to see it.

[Squishysib]

Because it's damage that gets healed by mushrooms (an encounter mechanic) anyway so pre-shielding (as long as a green mushroom is ready to pop) is pointless and thus cheating on the meters.

When there is "real" damage (e.g. no green mushroom to do the healing for you) pre-shield is of course absolutely fine.

On Mythic healing still needs to go out regardless if there is a green mushroom. Shielding is still not cheating.

[kheath812]

Because it's damage that gets healed by mushrooms (an encounter mechanic) anyway so pre-shielding (as long as a green mushroom is ready to pop) is pointless and thus cheating on the meters.

When there is "real" damage (e.g. no green mushroom to do the healing for you) pre-shield is of course absolutely fine.

so youve never done mythic brackenspore?

[Deleted]

On Mythic healing still needs to go out regardless if there is a green mushroom. Shielding is still not cheating.

so youve never done mythic brackenspore?

Even though this thread is not about Brackenspore, you're both wrong. Yes, healing is requried for Infesting Spores on Mythic. But the healing value of the Shroom is stronger than 3 stacks of the spores (23k HPS vs. 3x7k DPS) Thus, additional healing will only take affect from the 4th stack of spores. Every raidheal before, including preshielding, is wasted. Better keep stacking CoW on shrooms and Necrotic Breath tank.