What do you pick??.. - Eternal Flame or Sacred Shield (Prot)

[Deleted]

Some of you guys may have been wondering what would be the best thing to take?

Sacred Shield or Eternal Flame..


Well While Sacred Shield is an absorb and cannot cause overhealing. It is a Kinda a HoT Shield, if you haven't taken damage for 6 sec or the shield haven't been fully Absorbed, Sacred Shield will give you a new shield and that might cause lost Absorb which is just as good as any overhealing..
(+ ONLY 1 TARGET CAN HAVE A SACRED SHIELD AT THE SAME TIME)

If you like me have been thinking about taking Eternal Flame of that fact that not fully Absorbed Sacred Shields is just as good as any overhealing, then you are on the right path..

What exactly do the numbers have to say in this?..

Well let's take a look:






At first sight it looks kinda obvious what to take..

But what exactly was done to achieve these numbers on both spells? - You might ask..

Well First of All, The Gear is used was just the high level pvp gear - With Val'anyr, Hammer of Ancient Kings as main Weapon and Season 11 PvP Spirit Shield (Only 1H+Shield i had)

Eternal Flame was achieved by:
1: Full Vengeance (around 32.000 AP for me)
2: 5 Stacks of Bastion of Glory (A total of 115% Increase)
3: Avenging Wrath (+20% Healing Increase)
(No Seal of Insight. I forgot - but that's another 5% increase)

Sacred Shield was achieved by:
1: Full Stacked Vengeance (around 32.000 AP for me)
- Nothing else can increase it.


Sacred Shield Absorbed: 38.866 damage every 6 sec (I've seen somewhere that haste should reduce the time between Shield Procs in a future build, but that just decreases the time you have to Absorb it fully, before it's going to waste), It's a Total of 5 Sacred Shields for the full Duration witch equals to 194.330 Absorbed damage and again only if fully absorbed.

Eternal Flame Healed: 150.593 Direct healing when i used it followed by some decent ticks: 120.604 crits and 60302 non-crits.
- Just by looking up the my combat log the healing done equals an insanely amount of 1.055.123 Healing done. That's over 1.000.000 healing done from ONE SINGLE SPELL..And yeah Yeah yeah. I know that most of it will equal overhealing, BUT that will not even move Sacred Shield close to Eternal Flame - This is far more healing than Lay on Hands will ever achieve and that is on a 10 minute cooldown..
Eternal Flame have no cooldown you can keep it up all the time - and yes 30 sec duration is enough to get 5 stacks of Bastion of Glory again..
Eternal Flame was ticking every 2.89 sec for me as Prot



I think it's safe to say that Eternal Flame totally outruns Sacred Shield by more than just a bit.
- Yes i know that you won't be able to have Avenging Wrath up all the time to increase it, but even with 20% less on Eternal Flame, Sacred Shield will not even come close..


Ofc This is all only in the current state of the Beta.
- Eternal Flame can be nerfed or Sacred Shield can be buffed (maybe to work with Bastion of Glory?)

[tuesday the paladin]

Your comparison is flawed. You should only include the tics from Eternal Glory, the direct heal would be the same if you were using WoG with Sacred Shield. Also it's very unlikely you'll have an effective 50% crit rate, your average healing done by EF should be significantly lower when you average out the number of crits over time. And you won't have Wings up for every cast either, it's a 3 minute cooldown.


Also I could be mistaken but doesn't the theorycraft say on average you'll be getting a 5 stack of BoG every 40ish seconds?

With that said I do think the wog crit chance should be added back onto SS. wog is fairly weak for ret, holy seems more likely to take EF and would use LoD over wog in many cases if they didn't take ef, and it would make ss scale with prot mastery like the ef hot.

[Deleted]

your forgeting something else, SS only costs mana to keep going flame costs 3 holy power.

so you should compare SS + 3power wog vs flame.
isntead of your SS vs flame.

[zepyjoe]

Last i looked SS was FREE no mana cost...

As prot. SS a better choice (pve) If you have a holy pally in your group.

without EF you still have WoG

If you just compare the EF ticks to SS then SS looks better.

[Malthanis]

your forgeting something else, SS only costs mana to keep going flame costs 3 holy power.

They made it free of cost when they changed the SP scaling on it to 117%.

Last i looked SS was FREE no mana cost...

As prot. SS a better choice (pve) If you have a holy pally in your group.

without EF you still have WoG

If you just compare the EF ticks to SS then SS looks better.

It really wouldn't matter what that Holy paladin has, to be honest. As we've seen, standard encounter design has gotten to a point where everybody is taking some amount of damage, most of the time. That Holy paladin could very well have SS too, and be putting it on any of the other raid members.

The difference between the two will come down to encounter mechanics (like has been intended). If you know you'll be taking consistent damage, and the overheal on EF would be minimal or nonexistent, you'd use EF. If you don't care about wasted 'healing', you'll take SS. With no resource cost other than a GCD, any absorb amount lost doesn't have nearly the impact that overhealing from EF would.

[ipoststuff]

I think EF will be the winner on that tier for prot. The healing output is way bigger than the other two.

[Deleted]

Probably a bug but As far i test it Eternal Flame does not consume the Bastion of glory buff stack. Meaning once you get it up to 5 you are more or less garenteed to have all your following EF @ 5stacks too. AND you can benefit from the buffed direct WoG part of it every other finisher if you feel like it... Maybe even two finisher every three with enough hit/expertise/luck !
Then again, expect the bug to be fixed by release time

[Seani]

Taking ef over wog would take away your reactive heal. Self heals are meant to be reactive, similar to the dks deathstrike you want to use the heal in periods of heavy damage to counteract heavy burst damage. The healer is going to have enough healing to keep you up. The burst heal is a defensive ability, its not about total healing. Also the burst healing of a wog is great for aoe threat, Ef will also counteract that.

[underdogba]

Taking ef over wog would take away your reactive heal. Self heals are meant to be reactive, similar to the dks deathstrike you want to use the heal in periods of heavy damage to counteract heavy burst damage. The healer is going to have enough healing to keep you up. The burst heal is a defensive ability, its not about total healing. Also the burst healing of a wog is great for aoe threat, Ef will also counteract that.

The initial heal component of EF is sufficiently large to qualify as a reactive heal, WoG is just slightly bigger. In principle it is correct to differentiate burst vs throughput damage in this way, but the HoT portion of EF is simply too large to dismiss on flimsy general principles in that it does significantly counteract overall throughput damage.

The aoe threat consideration is complete nonsense, because by the time you would likely have enough HoPo to even think about casting either, you will already have had plenty of time to generate a large amount of aoe threat through normal damage mechanics.

In general the choice will probably end up being highly situational. Imagine for example a fight like Chimaeron in T11. In a situation like that, the "break" tank would obviously want WoG, but the normal hit tank would want EF for sure because it practically trivializes the mechanics.

[Seani]

The initial heal component of EF is sufficiently large to qualify as a reactive heal, WoG is just slightly bigger. In principle it is correct to differentiate burst vs throughput damage in this way, but the HoT portion of EF is simply too large to dismiss on flimsy general principles in that it does significantly counteract overall throughput damage.

The aoe threat consideration is complete nonsense, because by the time you would likely have enough HoPo to even think about casting either, you will already have had plenty of time to generate a large amount of aoe threat through normal damage mechanics.

In general the choice will probably end up being highly situational. Imagine for example a fight like Chimaeron in T11. In a situation like that, the "break" tank would obviously want WoG, but the normal hit tank would want EF for sure because it practically trivializes the mechanics.

Wog base heal is about 11.5-12.5k with 3 hp, EF initial heal is 4.5k or less; wog has quite a bit more burst healing. Also that burst healing will be significantly increased by bastion of light not to mention you will get the absorbs from sacred shield. The way I look at it we dont have the spell haste or crits to make ef reach its full potential. This test that the OP used was from a pretty weak opponent in a one on one encounter, I would need data from a raid fight to consider using ef based on numbers alone.

[underdogba]

Wog base heal is about 11.5-12.5k with 3 hp, EF initial heal is 4.5k or less; wog has quite a bit more burst healing. Also that burst healing will be significantly increased by bastion of light not to mention you will get the absorbs from sacred shield.

EF is also intended to scale w/ Bastion of Glory.

Furthermore, the raw magnitude of the heal is not the sole determinant of whether it's reactive nature is sufficient.

In practical play, just throwing out hypothetical numbers, a 50k reactive heal followed by a modest dot could be just as good as a 100k reactive heal in terms of buying sufficient time for normal healing throughput to be re-established. This is the same reason that while a greater health pool is always a good thing, in practical play you will find less benefit in burst scenarios once you typically go beyond a certain threshhold.

In real play we might find that EF is simply large enough to be good enough for this purpose, regardless of the size of WoG relative to it. There is no way to make these judgments simply on the basis of generalizations.