1. #1

    Why am I stacking Mastery (10 man/Disc)?

    As the title suggests, I am starting to question why I am stacking mastery. 90% (made up number) of all raiding Discipline Priests are stacking Mastery. To me this makes complete sense in 25 man raids where you aren't able to cap out Spirit Shell on the entire raid, but why is it so important in 10 man raids where you can easily hit the absorb cap?

    Raid buffed I have about 60% Mastery (I'm in the armory under the same name). It takes me three PoH casts on each of the two groups to hit the absorb cap for Spirit Shell. If I reforge/gem out of Mastery it puts me around 40%-45% Mastery raid buffed. It still takes me three PoH casts on each of the two groups to hit the absorb cap for Spirit Shell.

    The only time it seems like the mastery would be beneficial to Spirit Shell in 10 mans is if you're using it after the damage has already started so as to get the biggest absorbs per PoH cast as possible. I do my absolute best to always have Spirit Shell capped before the big "OMFG the raid exploded" boss ability goes off. If it's not capped it usually means I messed up... In which case I'll probably forgo using Spirit Shell and instead use AA/IF, PoM, and PoH spam (possibly with barrier) that way the CD on Spirit Shell still lines up with the next big boss ability.

    I understand Mastery also affects PW:S, but that doesn't seem all that amazing as I'm mainly just tossing it on the tank(s) for the extra mitigation and Rapture procs.

    I also understand that Mastery affects DA, but without the crit to back it up that seems negligible to me. :/

    It's starting to feel like both Crit and even Haste would be a better choice for me... I'm only 6/16 Heroic so far (all regulars cleared of course), so I don't claim to have seen it all... But is there something I'm missing here?

  2. #2
    Quote Originally Posted by fixall View Post
    I also understand that Mastery affects DA, but without the crit to back it up that seems negligible to me. :/
    The big gain, 10m or 25m aside, is DA from PoH. And in 10m, as you mentioned, it's easier to blanket the raid with absorbs than it is in 25m. So you are able to get a significant absorb up on the entire raid in under 5 seconds, AND you can do so under the effects of various CDs like PI, SS (separate topic, I'm sure), and AA. If you use (or macro) IF with a PoH cast, you're looking at a guaranteed crit that's going to put up not only big heals, but big absorbs. So even without a high crit chance, you're still getting big numbers from PoH spam across both groups.

    The real question is what comparable benefit you'd get from reducing your mastery and picking up more haste and/or crit. I don't know the numbers off the top of my head, but I'm pretty sure that you a.) need a lot of haste to significantly reduce cast times on your go-to abilities like PoH and single-target heals, b.) won't even notice a tenth of a second difference in cast time, and c.) won't be able to make up the lost throughput from dropping mastery. The same can be said for crit, IMHO.

  3. #3
    Because mastery will no longer affect spirit shell come 5.2

    That's why

    As well as mastery affecting Divine Aegis, PW:S, any heal that crits......

    That is why.

  4. #4
    After re-reading the tooltip, I decided I was retarded. For some reason I wasn't taking into account the non crit DA from PoH. Doh. Thanks for not flaming for the misunderstanding, lol.

  5. #5
    Deleted
    Quote Originally Posted by fixall View Post
    After re-reading the tooltip, I decided I was retarded. For some reason I wasn't taking into account the non crit DA from PoH. Doh. Thanks for not flaming for the misunderstanding, lol.
    If you don't feel that the fact that spirit shell gets stronger from it is worth anything it's still hardly worth stacking, the benefit mastery gives DA/PW:S is smaller than the benefit crit gives all your spells. This does mean that mastery is weaker in 10 man, I still consider having the option to use other spells between the PoH during shell, having more freedom when to use it (since two PoH's usually does the job) and to keep stacking it during the outgoing damage (pmuch everything but a few abilities will go out over a few seconds) reasons enough to prioritize it over crit (currently).

  6. #6
    Quote Originally Posted by Cookie View Post
    If you don't feel that the fact that spirit shell gets stronger from it is worth anything it's still hardly worth stacking, the benefit mastery gives DA/PW:S is smaller than the benefit crit gives all your spells. This does mean that mastery is weaker in 10 man, I still consider having the option to use other spells between the PoH during shell, having more freedom when to use it (since two PoH's usually does the job) and to keep stacking it during the outgoing damage (pmuch everything but a few abilities will go out over a few seconds) reasons enough to prioritize it over crit (currently).

    Our 10 man guild is on heroic Garalon (judging by last raids progress we should have a kill Sunday) and it is one fight in particular that I can see the benefits of stacking mastery as Disc. My assignment is to heal the ranged group + the kiter, so I spend the majority of my time casting PoH (and PoM) on the group and PW:S (and Penance) on the kiter, this obviously makes Mastery a strong stat. I use Spirit Shell basically on CD, whenever stacks are high or the timer lines up with crush. Because of the constant damage, SS begins to be chipped away the moment it is applied, which again makes Mastery a really strong stat here. I think this is one fight I'll continue to stack mastery on... At least until I can convince my Raid Leader to let me give Holy a try here. Yellow Chakra, glyphed rolling renews with Cascade/Heal refreshes and blue Chackra PoH/CoH + DI proc spam both sound like they would be amazing! I really, really want to give both specs a go here.

    However, on almost all the other heroic and non heroic boss fights I've encountered on 10 man other than Garalon (all normals, 8 heroic) I'm starting to lean back towards my previous statements.

    On most fights I'm easily capping Spirit Shell before the big raid damage ability goes out and could afford to lost 10%-15% Mastery without really any noticable effects to SS. And as you said the benefit you get from Crit (and I feel even from Haste) to all your spells outweighs the bonus to DA/PW:S you get from Mastery. But it's more than just that.

    I'm starting to notice that the better geared I get and the better my guild and I learn the fights, the more time I spend Smiting (and when tank damage is low, Penancing) the boss. As the ilvl of myself and my co-healer have crept up our healing spells have become much more effective, resulting in less casts needed to top up the raid. Which in turn results in me spending more time Smiting the boss. The same thing goes with fight knowledge. As my guild and I increase our raid cohesion and fight knowledge we have less avoidable damage going out, resulting in less time spent topping people off. My co-healer and I are also getting better at predicting the damage patterns of the fights which also results in less time spent topping off the raid. All this adds up to (you guessed it) more time spent Smiting the boss.

    As our ilvl and overall knowledge of fights increases, I see Crit and haste as possibly both being superior stats to Mastery after about 45%-50% raid buffed, 5.2 kind of solidifies this.

    Am I making any sense at all?

  7. #7
    in 10 mans you're going to be doing a lot of atonement as your healing filler unless your healing setup is something miserable like a dpriest and two mistweavers. atonement scales very well with haste.

    on garalon, you should be able to smite heal every time there's a back leg up that you can stand on. if you're having trouble on that fight in particular, take cascade and fire it off once garalon is in the air - the bouncing around it does while the raid is stunned can help turn a wipe into a near-wipe. also the enrage can be fairly tight if you don't either 2 heal or use lots of smite on 10.

  8. #8
    Quote Originally Posted by snaxattax View Post
    in 10 mans you're going to be doing a lot of atonement as your healing filler unless your healing setup is something miserable like a dpriest and two mistweavers. atonement scales very well with haste.

    on garalon, you should be able to smite heal every time there's a back leg up that you can stand on. if you're having trouble on that fight in particular, take cascade and fire it off once garalon is in the air - the bouncing around it does while the raid is stunned can help turn a wipe into a near-wipe. also the enrage can be fairly tight if you don't either 2 heal or use lots of smite on 10.
    No rogue so we are indeed 2 healing it. It was going pretty well once we got a our stategy down though. A couple sub 10% wipes cause we had a dps down and hit the enrage timer. By the end of the raid we had our movements cleaned up pretty well, so there shouldn't be many more "stood in fire" deaths.

  9. #9
    rogues are no longer super op/required for garalon - they fixed/nerfed how the cleave works on legs. our guild did 10s for xmas week, and we wound up 3 healing the first 3 bosses just so we wouldn't have to deal with wipes, and we still made enrage with maybe 20 seconds left. i did around 35-40k dps smiting (the rest of our dps were between 120-160k), spirit shelled when possible, and cascaded every crush. make sure people are still swapping to legs in p2, but having the dead dps was probably more of a problem than anything else.

  10. #10
    Quote Originally Posted by snaxattax View Post
    rogues are no longer super op/required for garalon - they fixed/nerfed how the cleave works on legs. our guild did 10s for xmas week, and we wound up 3 healing the first 3 bosses just so we wouldn't have to deal with wipes, and we still made enrage with maybe 20 seconds left. i did around 35-40k dps smiting (the rest of our dps were between 120-160k), spirit shelled when possible, and cascaded every crush. make sure people are still swapping to legs in p2, but having the dead dps was probably more of a problem than anything else.
    I wasn't talking about the bug where Rogues and fury Warriors could hit the body and both legs with cleave. I was talking about the strategy where you have a rogue use Feint before every Furious Swipe acting as the second "tank", which in turn enables to bring an extra DPS. But yea, I'm pretty sure we have it down and we'll have that kill tomorrow.

  11. #11
    3 PoHs to stack a shield? I can do it in one with inner focus and wings

    But yeah I've already made the swap to crit. I seem to be just spamming smite 24/7 any way

  12. #12
    Deleted
    I'm starting to notice that the better geared I get and the better my guild and I learn the fights, the more time I spend Smiting (and when tank damage is low, Penancing) the boss. As the ilvl of myself and my co-healer have crept up our healing spells have become much more effective, resulting in less casts needed to top up the raid. Which in turn results in me spending more time Smiting the boss. The same thing goes with fight knowledge. As my guild and I increase our raid cohesion and fight knowledge we have less avoidable damage going out, resulting in less time spent topping people off. My co-healer and I are also getting better at predicting the damage patterns of the fights which also results in less time spent topping off the raid. All this adds up to (you guessed it) more time spent Smiting the boss.

    As our ilvl and overall knowledge of fights increases, I see Crit and haste as possibly both being superior stats to Mastery after about 45%-50% raid buffed, 5.2 kind of solidifies this.

    Am I making any sense at all?
    You are making sense, but keep in mind that more time spent smiting most likely is due to the fact that your guild overgears/knows the encounter. I still doubt we'll spend 'that' much time atonement healing on most progression fights (which quite frankly is the only thing that really matters). That crit/haste will be superior to mastery in 5.2 in 10 man (and possibly even 25 man) seems quite certain, I see myself focusing on haste (and some spirit to make that possible) once 5.2 goes live.

  13. #13
    Quote Originally Posted by Cookie View Post
    I still doubt we'll spend 'that' much time atonement healing on most progression fights
    I've spent the last month or so breaking my Smite key, as a Heroic progression raider, currently working on Sha heroic (As you can see, on a 7% attempt all I really did was DPS). Sure it depends on fight, and depends on what your raid setup is, but I can say for certain that, at the moment the damage Disc deals is too powerful to ignore, you're basically harming your raid by not smiting as much as you practically can get away with (Atonement in itself is mostly fine, perhaps a bit too powerful. But it's the actual damage we deal that makes it too powerful).
    I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like more than half of you more than you deserve.

  14. #14
    Deleted
    ^That's why I said most. There will be fights where you'll constantly spam smite during progression but in the current content there are quite few (unless you'd run specific setups with 2.5/3.5 healers), and for these fights you should simply reforge/regem into the proper stats. In most fights pure atonement healing can't quite replace a 'true' healer, at least yet.

  15. #15
    Whyever would you do pure atonement healing as healer (and take your other spells off your bars)?
    It is good and it is our smart heal so I use it quite a bit. It also adds to savety since it chooses its target after the cast is complete, so unlike all our other casts which we would have to cancel and recast if someone made a mistake it just pics the right target. Its partition into many fast heals is also useful to even out the health levels of the raid in a way PoH can not (hopefully this sentence is understandable as there is a word in my language that I would like to use here if it existed in English at all -.-).

  16. #16
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    Personally, I have tried reforging to Crit, Haste and mastery. Besides for experiencing mana issues with reforging to haste, I noticed no major increase or decrease in Crit stacking or mastery stacking. In my play style, I feel either one is fine. It is worth noting that I have had more WoL ranking while crit stacking, and since I switched to mastery I have seen less and less WoL rankings. I am thinking it might be because my raid fell apart for a bit and I am behind in gear (no heroic gear at all.)

  17. #17
    Heroic Garalon down. With a top 40 Priest ranking to boot. I talked my RL into letting me go Holy for the fight and that made a HUGE difference. Holy + Mastery stacking (if you're using the Blue Chakra/PoH/CoH spam over the Yellow Chakra/Renew/Heal centric style of healing at least) is definitely win for that fight. Our main problems were with hitting the enrage timer, but with a couple adjustments that was easily fixed.

    To get back to the my original post... I tested it out all this week and I've decided for non progression fights I'll be going Spirit>Haste (to 4721)>Mastery>Crit. On fights that our guild have down very well, I see a pretty substantial hps increase on top of the extra atonement dps. It made switching to Holy much less painless (for the few fights that I actually go Holy for).

    I'll be sticking with Mastery for progression until 5.2, but for all others... Haste it is.

  18. #18
    I'm only just starting heroics modes, but so far so good. I don't stack mastery, I go hardcore crit, and I raid in a 25man environment. Spirit Shell get's bonus healing from crit % just like mastery, but crit also helps for atonement and divine aegis, which are most of my healing. Spirits of the Sun is pretty much carrying my mana regen so I suspect when 5.2 comes out I will have to switch some of it back, but right now I don't have any mana issues at all.

    http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...as/Gaia/simple
    http://www.worldoflogs.com/guilds/230830/

  19. #19
    I made up 16/16hm as Disc, 2healing almost all the fights and even so I just Smite the boss down.
    Int gemmed, crit reforged. In 506 gear its so easily to cap SS and DA stacking not so useful - attonement will heal them all. If not - more smiting please!

    Boss die because of DPS, not because of shields. If your dpsers wont die and dont spend their time to do your job (selfheal with First Aid) - you must Smite.

    What do you think I did on our 1st kill Heroic Sha of Fear and he had 1%hp? Yep, Smiting xD
    Last edited by Szer; 2013-01-11 at 06:14 AM.

  20. #20
    Deleted
    The more poh/pws you use > the more mastery will look good, until you cap aegis/ss, then it will slope down.
    The more atonement/gheal you use > the more crit/haste will be better, because mastery remains largely unused.

    Check what you use most and choose the stats the benefit the majority of your healing.

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