[Disc] Mastery > Int?

[Skaiya]

To put things simply, I've seen Mastery outweighing Int gains for both Heals and Absorbs.

For example, in my current gear with a 685 crafted ring. [157 Int, 94 Mastery, 111 Spirit] my PW:S sits at 55,404 and Cascade sits at 5,501. But when I switch to a 700 ring, [180 Int, 126 Multistrike, 111 Spirit] the value of my PW:S drops to 55,092 and 5,491 for Cascade despite a 23 Intellect gain. 45.35% Mastery to 43.99% respectively, but a gain of 4.94% to 6.85% Multistrike, when using the 700 ring.

This ties in to my question about the supposed "BiS" - does the small increase in healing by simply having Mastery on a piece outweigh the secondary gains of Crit(for Ring/Neck) and Crit/Multi(for shoulders, when compared against Mastery/Crit 685 crafted.) And if so, why? Multistrike and Crit are all theoretical/chance based gains compared against a flatline increase to healing - does the math average out where having more crit/multi will overtake the small gain in average healing?

I probably won't be able to answer this thread for about a week, as I'm moving houses. But I'm interested in hearing people's thoughts on this.

[Thirteen]

Unfortunately I can't answer your question since I don't play disc, but I can recommend you take a look at this spreadsheet by Myllior, and see if it helps out.

[VigilantRose]

For example, in my current gear with a 685 crafted ring. [157 Int, 94 Mastery, 111 Spirit] my PW:S sits at 55,404 and Cascade sits at 5,501. But when I switch to a 700 ring, [180 Int, 126 Multistrike, 111 Spirit] the value of my PW:S drops to 55,092 and 5,491 for Cascade despite a 23 Intellect gain. 45.35% Mastery to 43.99% respectively, but a gain of 4.94% to 6.85% Multistrike, when using the 700 ring.

The tooltip values don't include multi-strike/critical (and Spirit obviously doesn't affect them at all). So what you're observing is that gaining +23 Int at the expense of +94 Mastery isn't a good trade - which is not a surprising result given that Int is 'about twice' as valuable as secondary stats.

With multi-strike, your 685 iLvl PW:S has an expected value of 57681. With multi-strike, your 700 iLvl PW:S has an expected value of 61587.

This ties in to my question about the supposed "BiS" - does the small increase in healing by simply having Mastery on a piece outweigh the secondary gains of Crit(for Ring/Neck) and Crit/Multi(for shoulders, when compared against Mastery/Crit 685 crafted.) And if so, why? Multistrike and Crit are all theoretical/chance based gains compared against a flatline increase to healing - does the math average out where having more crit/multi will overtake the small gain in average healing?

Mastery is 'about 50% better' than Crit/Multi-strike for Discipline with current casting patterns. So the 94 Mastery on your iLvl 685 ring provides a similar benefit to the 126 Multi-strike on your iLvl 700 ring - but the additional Int puts the iLvl 700 over the top.

As for the argument of "random burst vs. consistent", that's a long-standing issue. There is likely some minor 'tax' on inconsistent healing, but as far as I know no one has been able to come up with a way to accurately predict what it will be and it appears to be small enough that we can generally disregard it.