Question about Disc Stat priority

[Deleted]

Just wanted to chime in here regarding haste;

Whilst there's a lot of good discussion about haste and spirit balancing and the affect one has on the other, I see a lot of discussion about going oom and the value of haste over a fight. Certainly an important point but healing isn't exactly like DPS in that regard.
Haste offers extremely high 'burst', as noted already, if mana wasn't an issue then there wouldn't be nearly as much discussion and I'm not intending to dispute any of that. However, one of the important things of being a healer is being able to deal with periods of heavy damage in a short time, which haste is very good at.

Consider that with 0 haste you'll go oom exactly as the boss dies but during your progress you're wiping to a 20 second transition phase due to a lack of burst healing, you aren't able to get enough shields out in that period of time. The standard argument (that I'm not disputing) is that adding haste won't give you any extra healing, since you'll simply run oom sooner. However, if you can shift some of that mana consumption into the transition phase to meet the burst requirements and not have people dying due to your reduced healing elsewhere in the fight then I believe that's a worthwhile tradeoff, even if it doesn't add any extra healing over the full duration of the fight.

[Myllior]

Actually, if you noticed, the people who find that Crit outperforms Multistrike are the same people who underheal to parse. They are the same people whose defensive Penance, Divine Aegis and Cascade have ridiculously low overhealing ratios(which in turn inflates the value of crit over MS).

I'll admit I hadn't actually considered that D: I do agree that farm logs tend to be less informative than those recorded during progression.

Having a quick look, I can find some super early logs where, for example, EAA PoH isn't used on cooldown (perhaps due to mana cost) and Critical Strike moves above Multistrike (e.g. Sarva's first kills of Blast Furnace and Blackhand; the 'Disc Opt Bound' sheets are the ones to be looking at). Considering the T17 4pc, this doesn't seem as likely to occur moving into the next raid tier, but it's worth keeping in the old thought bank, just in case you notice that the fights are better suited to a different healing style. Of course, not everyone progresses at that speed, so maybe plenty of people did have the mana to afford EAA-PoH on cooldown when they were/are progressing through the more difficult encounters; it really depends on how the individual Priest is deciding to heal.

I also made a mistake in my earlier post; where I said "However, due to Divine Aegis, even the most die-hard PW:S spammer and EAA user will want more Critical Strike rating than Multistrike rating", it was meant to say, "However, due to Divine Aegis, even the most die-hard PW:S spammer and EAA user will eventually want more Critical Strike rating than Multistrike rating". This is reflected in the 'Disc Opt Bound' sheets where, as the available secondaries increases, Critical Strike inevitably overtakes Multistrike. Of course, there are plenty of scenarios where such an overtake doesn't occur unless you have more secondaries than were available pre-stat squish, but as long as Divine Aegis-producing heals make up a significant proportion of you pre-secondary healing, I think there's a chance it might happen before the end of the expansion (...maybe). Of course, whether it will occur during next tier's progression probably has a much more individual answer.

[PosPosPos]

I'll admit I hadn't actually considered that D: I do agree that farm logs tend to be less informative than those recorded during progression.

Yes, they do still have value as a peek into what next tier would look like early on though. I don't disagree that Crit would surpass Multistrike overall next tier, given the ilvl increase would be fairly significant.

Having a quick look, I can find some super early logs where, for example, EAA PoH isn't used on cooldown (perhaps due to mana cost) and Critical Strike moves above Multistrike (e.g. Sarva's first kills of Blast Furnace and Blackhand; the 'Disc Opt Bound' sheets are the ones to be looking at). Considering the T17 4pc, this doesn't seem as likely to occur moving into the next raid tier, but it's worth keeping in the old thought bank, just in case you notice that the fights are better suited to a different healing style. Of course, not everyone progresses at that speed, so maybe plenty of people did have the mana to afford EAA-PoH on cooldown when they were/are progressing through the more difficult encounters; it really depends on how the individual Priest is deciding to heal.

Yes, the usage of EAA PoH is mainly hampered by mana cost. If you look at the damage patterns of BF and BH, you would notice that, barring fight length, they are actually fairly conducive for PoH casts(strong damage on the raid at fairly predictable intervals). Not to mention, since the raid is hovering below full health nearly all the time especially towards the end, you would notice defensive Penance and Cascade healing reaching a not-often-seen low overheal ratio.

Another thing to note is that the top progression guilds tend to do fights with lesser gear compared to the average progression guild, so as an example, Midwinter which is in the same server as I am cleared Iron Maidens with 686 average, whereas my guild has an average of 692 attempting the same boss, which is a given fact as the run-of-the-mill progression guilds are attempting the same bosses with lesser skill compared to the cutting-edge progression guilds and would probably have to clear the easier bosses a few more times before getting the harder bosses down.

So the ramifications of that is, as time goes by, the guilds progressing the same bosses attempt them with more gear on the whole, and to put this into perspective means that healers would be closer to the point where crit outperforms multistrike, but also have more access to gear and thus spirit to support a heavy PoH playstyle.

Also, such run-of-the-mill progression guilds, as a result of having attempting the same bosses with more gear, have the option to overheal said fights because the enrage timers would not be an issue even when dropping dps for a healer. I have seen many parses where guilds including mine just 5 heal H&F because they weren't going to hit any enrage timers and prefer the safety(even though the mechanics that are tricky to deal with are one shot anyway).

These factors affect crit's ability to surpass MS, and to significant extents.

I also made a mistake in my earlier post; where I said "However, due to Divine Aegis, even the most die-hard PW:S spammer and EAA user will want more Critical Strike rating than Multistrike rating", it was meant to say, "However, due to Divine Aegis, even the most die-hard PW:S spammer and EAA user will eventually want more Critical Strike rating than Multistrike rating". This is reflected in the 'Disc Opt Bound' sheets where, as the available secondaries increases, Critical Strike inevitably overtakes Multistrike. Of course, there are plenty of scenarios where such an overtake doesn't occur unless you have more secondaries than were available pre-stat squish, but as long as Divine Aegis-producing heals make up a significant proportion of you pre-secondary healing, I think there's a chance it might happen before the end of the expansion (...maybe). Of course, whether it will occur during next tier's progression probably has a much more individual answer.

I think that at this current point, crit *does* outperform MS, but only on very, very specific fights, raid compositions as well as gear levels. And when these factors do come together, the difference is rather marginal anyway. We are still currently at the point, as you have mentioned, where MS's versatility in all situations isn't going to be overtaken by Crit's weaker base but stronger growth curve.

P.S. As a sidenote for the BF/BH mana constraints part, I do believe that healers progressing on those fights now and in the future compared to when the raid just released would enter the fight with significantly more effective spirit overall, and it's not simply due getting more gear overall - recall the spirit trinkets buff as well as the 5 ilvl upgrade, those buffs are worth ~50-100 spirit each depending on the gear setup.