Disc: Crit > Mastery?

[ramaathorn]

I'm sure I'm not alone in being on the fence about this since 5.2. Of course, it's been mastery without question until now, but what about now?

Looking at some top level Disc's it seems they are moving toward crit, and I can understand.

Consider that a strength of Disc has always been low overhealing. Due to the potency of absorbs, our throughput was primarily effective. With the changes to mastery, it now lends itself to overhealing. Our choice of secondary stat primarily effects POH, atonement is probably a wash given that it's a smart heal. POH was a powerful application of mastery in the past due to it's application of DA, but suddenly it's party healing limitation makes it significantly more susceptible to over healing, which will only be enhanced by mastery.

However, crit now is the only way of guaranteeing a DA application, which 9 times out of 10 is effective. Also, there are obvious benefits that seem more intriguing then the flat buff of mastery:

• SS benefit is relatively equal since it normalizes crit in it's calculated shield
• Attonement crits ensure less potential for overhealing
• PWS crits are massive tank 'heals'
• Surely some more things you all will mention...

So what is the verdict here? Is crit the new secondary for Disc 5.2?

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Area 52 - Avrïllavigne <High Five>

[Dorfie]

Yeah, Crit > Mastery.

I've been running haste this week though to test it out, it feels good.

[QuasarLeginan]

From what I've been seeing top end priests do, and from what I've personally experienced, it does seem that crit is a far better choice atm. One of the primary reasons mastery was so good last patch was, as you said, DA was a consistent. Also, spirit shell was vastly more important last patch, but now with the mastery no longer buffing it, the use is more limited and far less frequent.

[jairash]

the use is more limited and far less frequent.

No (regarding SS as 25 men)

[QuasarLeginan]

No (regarding SS as 25 men)

Eh, I don't do 25s, but I could see the constant use being true in 25s... still nerfed however.

[HPLathus]

I believe on actual paper, crit pulls ahead slightly.

Personally, I don't think it's by such a large amount that it's going to break your game play doing either mastery > crit or crit > mastery.


I think both are extremely strong right now for disc healing, but provide different playstyle benefits.


Crit is going to emphasise the use of DA for obvious reasons, and increased atonment numbers.


Mastery is going to affect a broader amount of spells, and in multiple ways. My inner holy priest prefers mastery personally >.>




I think a good number to shoot for if you choose a heavier mastery build is 40% absorb 20% healing, then put your additional stats into crit.

[Deleted]

I'm sure I'm not alone in being on the fence about this since 5.2. Of course, it's been mastery without question until now, but what about now?

Looking at some top level Disc's it seems they are moving toward crit, and I can understand.

Consider that a strength of Disc has always been low overhealing. Due to the potency of absorbs, our throughput was primarily effective. With the changes to mastery, it now lends itself to overhealing. Our choice of secondary stat primarily effects POH, atonement is probably a wash given that it's a smart heal. POH was a powerful application of mastery in the past due to it's application of DA, but suddenly it's party healing limitation makes it significantly more susceptible to over healing, which will only be enhanced by mastery.

However, crit now is the only way of guaranteeing a DA application, which 9 times out of 10 is effective. Also, there are obvious benefits that seem more intriguing then the flat buff of mastery:

• SS benefit is relatively equal since it normalizes crit in it's calculated shield
• Attonement crits ensure less potential for overhealing
• PWS crits are massive tank 'heals'
• Surely some more things you all will mention...

So what is the verdict here? Is crit the new secondary for Disc 5.2?

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Area 52 - Avrïllavigne <High Five>

If you're managing your mana well try this priority Haste > Crit > Mastery. Awesome Burst healing and amazing for attonement healing/DPS

[HPLathus]

Haste as disc is the lesser of the 3. While it's a static improvement to healing, mastery and crit are going to be much more significant in your choices.

[Kalmah]

Haste as disc is the lesser of the 3. While it's a static improvement to healing, mastery and crit are going to be much more significant in your choices.

Care to back that up ? You state it like it's some definitive fact.

[Deleted]

I intend to go full haste eventually and possibly play around with the Lei Shen 100% crit trinket. Haste worked out quite well on Horridon Heroic when mana really wasn't an issue and dishing out heals asap was.

[Urumii]

Care to back that up ? You state it like it's some definitive fact.

There are pages and pages of discussion that backs this up on EJ. Haste is the best throughput stat, but requires much more spirit to support it. So essentially you need the overall stat allocation of haste+spirit to have a greater effect than mastery or crit alone.

[HPLathus]

Care to back that up ? You state it like it's some definitive fact.

What the above poster said, it's pointed out on multiple sites.

Haste is a guaranteed increase to healing, but does not improve our ability to absorb which is really the reason people bring disc priests. If you wanted a full out throughput priest with sheer raw numbers, holy wins by a fair margin.

[vanityking]

I like crit on my disc priest. See the largest portion of our mastery affects PW:S and Divine Aegis (which won't proc without crit) and since PW:S can crit now, I much preffer seeing it hit for 100k normally and 200k 1/4 of the time (I have 25%ish crit with my gear) than seeing it being boosted a little and criting much less often. I don't think the healing portion of our mastery is strong enough to justify losing 5%+ crit.

[Deleted]

Haste dramatically improves your ability to absorb holylathus. 10% haste before buffs = 16.6% increase in the amount of spirit shell you can stack. It also makes it easier to stack PWS before a burst and technically if you cast 10% more spells you will get 10% more crits and hence 10% more absorbs. Haste improves everything and it does so more than mastery and crit do. The main problem is mana. Having too much haste means you don't cast extra spells and hence you lose out.

Also very high crit rates (above 50%) completely change the game for disc. You can then start to bubble spam and build large aegis stacks, which we all know can be massively OP, in some fights but these kind of crit rates are not feasible. You can probably hit 40% crit rate, but that is not enough to return to bubble spam.

I like crit on my disc priest. See the largest portion of our mastery affects PW:S and Divine Aegis (which won't proc without crit) and since PW:S can crit now, I much preffer seeing it hit for 100k normally and 200k 1/4 of the time (I have 25%ish crit with my gear) than seeing it being boosted a little and criting much less often. I don't think the healing portion of our mastery is strong enough to justify losing 5%+ crit.

You are wrong, it does and the maths have proven it.

Balanced mastery and crit work better than anything else. Here is a table of what the optimal crit/mastery values look like:

crit                         Mastery		
0.195269321		0.208
0.205436921		0.228
0.215514874		0.248
0.225506222		0.268
0.23541387		0.288
0.245240597		0.308
0.254989059		0.328
0.264661797		0.348
0.274261242		0.368
0.283789725		0.388

20.8% mastery is baseline buffed. In rough terms for each 1% crit above 20% you should take an extra 2% mastery. This produces a small decrease in absorbs, but overall it produces more healing. As you can see you need more crit rating than mastery rating to hit the break points.

For example lets compare 39.65% crit and 20.8% matery with 28.4% crit and 38.8% mastery.

healing = base*(1+0.5*M)*(1+C*(1+M)) = base*(1+0.5*M)+base*C*(1+0.5M)*(1+M), where the crit part is the absorb.

With the full crit stack, you get base*(1+0.5*0.208)*(1+0.3965*1.208) = 1.632785088*base total and base*0.528785088 aegis

With the balanced mastery and crit you get base*(1+0.5*0.388)*(1+0.284*1.388) = 1.664665248 and base*0.470665248 aegis

Aegis drops by 11%, but overall healing and spirit shell increases by 2% and PWS increases by 6%. Aegis is 20-25%% of total healing or so, PWS is 10-15%, and spirit shell is 15-20% so a 6% on PWS is 0.6-0.9% extra healing, the aegis impovement is 11% of 20-25 is 2.2-2.8% extra healing and the the 2% spirit shell improvement is 0.3-0.4%. Thus you are basically looking at an increase in absorbs of somewhere around 1-2%. The extra mastery also increases the rest of your heals by 15%. Heals represent 40-55% of your total healing, so the mastery increase represents 6-8.25% increase in healing.

Of course all of this is before overheal, but even assuming that the healing value is halved due to overheal compared with absorbs you still end up with better results by taking balanced mastery and crit.

For PWS mastery is by far the better stat. If you prefer to have a random huge crit that can easily get wasted instead of a lot more healing then that makes no sense. Why would anyone choose to lower their healing just so they can get a big number occasionally. You don't need maths to tell you that that is a bad choice, its comon sense. If you traded all crit for mastery, so 17.15% crit and 56.8% mastery, then your PWS would overall heal for 9% more. Basically both your crits and heals would be 30% larger but you would get 9% less crits. It would be a serious lapse in judgement to choose 9% more crit over 30% more healing for all spells.

The worst part about crit is aegis being random now has significant overheal. It is not uncommon to see aegis having about the same overheal as PoH now and usually PoM has less overheal than aegis. The only spell with consistently very low overheal is PWS, which makes things worse for crit.

Basically balanced crit and mastery always work better than crit alone or mastery alone, no matter what your playstyle or the encounter. Basically your raid buffed crit should have the following relationship with your raid buffed mastery

C = (0.4+M*(3+M))/(4.8+3.2*M)

but a simpler rule is 2% mastery for every 1% crit above 20%.

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Incidentally I see a lot of ppl saying I increased my crit and I seem to do better. It is actually impossible to see the improvement, trading some mastery for like 5-6% crit at the best produces a 1-2% improvement (if you have too much mastery and too little crit). You will never be able to see it.

It is just the "placebo" effect.

[Purpleisbetter]

Trying Crit heavy and mostly full time attonement, it works, surprisingly well, but that's just for the attonement heavy style i guess.

As my priest is like my 3rd toon of choice, i have 0 priority on drops, so i'm looking forward to get the 100% crit trinket from LFR as soon as possible and see if it can be of any use.

I don't remember if the proc only on damage dealing abilities, and even by that i guess i should have enough time to 3xpenance+1Solace+1smite in these 4 seconds, sounds quite a huge burst heal and good damage too. On horridon at least, that is :X

[ramaathorn]

Yes ok, from a raw numbers perspective mastery is probably still better than crit overall. However, my original point was that it has always been a strength of disc to employ a low amount of overhealing compared to other raw healing classes due to absorbs (when used effectively) being primarily effective healing. The adjustment to mastery and crit with regards to DA seem to favor crit once overhealing has been considered. Given that most fights this tier thus far have us seeing some form of random-ish raid wide consistent damage, absorbs will continue to be effective 9/10 times. Thus, when calculating effect vs overall healing, it seems that crit will give greater benefit than mastery, and at this point I'm likely to be reforging before Tuesday!

Trying Crit heavy and mostly full time attonement, it works, surprisingly well, but that's just for the attonement heavy style i guess.

And if you've not been atonement heavy in this expansion until now, I would venture to say you're doing it wrong and you're the reason disc got nerfed in the first place! They wanted us to be using atonement as filler!

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Area 52 - Avrïllavigne <High Five>

[vanityking]

Crit also increased my dps for atonement, while mastery doesn't. I guess if you want to be the perfect disc priest of the world you could do all that Havoc, I like seeing my shield critting, which is why I will stick with it. lol

[Spotnick]

I went from spirit/mastery/haste/crit to spirit/crit/mastery/haste and it seemed to me to do much better. Obviously I also adapted my playstyle between both weeks, but I find that my atonement is crazy good since I have done that, as well as my dps obviously.

[balrok69]

I went from spirit/mastery/haste/crit to spirit/crit/mastery/haste and it seemed to me to do much better. Obviously I also adapted my playstyle between both weeks, but I find that my atonement is crazy good since I have done that, as well as my dps obviously.

That's true, it depends on your playstyle.
Haste oriented stats, are good for HPS burn bosses. Like Megaera.
There is no difference(only a bit) of healing about going to heavy mastery or heavy crit, but i could afirm that having more chances to fill a crit help a lot in most encounters.

[Deleted]

Crit also increased my dps for atonement, while mastery doesn't. I guess if you want to be the perfect disc priest of the world you could do all that Havoc, I like seeing my shield critting, which is why I will stick with it. lol

But mastery increases overall healing and crit makes it random. Consider this: With 25% crit what is the change that you get no crit on someone for 10 casts: The answer 5.6%. Even with 25% crit there is a non-zero chance of not getting a single crit in 10 casts. That means that if you are saying spamming a group to keep them alive through heavy damage for 30s you have a non zero chance of massively underhealing someone if you take too much crit.