Questions regarding Enhance playstyle in MoP Beta

[Deleted]

No, the math doesn't include Healing Rain. Healing Rain itself has nothing to do with Conductivity anyway, it merely has to be active to enable the talent. I'm judging the talent contribution only.

As for MW5 Surge during it - Conductivity is only a 20% conversion on heals. I don't know what Surge hits for with Healing Storm in PvE, but 20% of it spread among 10 or 25 people probably isn't going to be very significant.

I mean, if a Surge hits for 200k, then that's 40k going to Conductivity. That's a 4k heal per person in a 10 man and 1.6k heal per person in a 25 man. That would be a garbage healing amount with Cataclysm's health pools, never mind Mists. And I don't think Surge hits anywhere near that high, but I picked a very high number just to illustrate how little Conductivity does.

Its a 50% return on damage though, and if your going to ignore the Healing Rain then it actually has no downside (as all the downside is taken up by the actual use of the HR). Its literally just free healing if your already using HR anyway. If theres no massive burst healing or theres high healing the entire fight (and your using HR in it, which is a fair few fights) it could be very good. As Elemental its even better because (as I said) you can do ~75% of your normal DPS if not higher only casting LB, refreshing FS and using LvB in the 1 second downtime for HR, and if that is say 90k DPS, then Conductivity turns that it 45k HPS, PLUS the healing HR done so your now doing like 50k HPS. How is that bad?

Sure this is Ele, but Enhance can hardcast LB too, and they have SS to add to this damage. Its a bigger DPS loss for Enhance sure, but it is still an incredibly strong talent (its just not borderline TOO strong for Enhance, like it is for Ele).

[Deleted]

This might be off-topic, but does Ancestral Guidance heal ourselves too? (the tooltip doesn't mention it)
I'm wondering if it is suitable for leveling and soloing...

[Deleted]

This might be off-topic, but does Ancestral Guidance heal ourselves too? (the tooltip doesn't mention it)
I'm wondering if it is suitable for leveling and soloing...

Yes it does. When i was leveling on beta i would pull 5mobs and pop it. CL cleave them all and regen hp instead of lose it. AG is incredibly powerful

[Deleted]

This might be off-topic, but does Ancestral Guidance heal ourselves too? (the tooltip doesn't mention it)
I'm wondering if it is suitable for leveling and soloing...

It does. And it's pretty awesome.

I'm actually enjoying that tier of talents on beta.

Healing Tide Totem.
You have a raid wide Tranquility in Totem that you can fire and forget use every 3 minutes.

Ancestral Guidance
Or you have a Powerful AoE Melee Heal that scales with your gear / dps / skill every 2 minutes.

Conductivity
Or lastly you have a Weak AoE Melee Heal that you can have up 24/7 forever but at a cost of some DPS.

Personally I'm enjoying Conductivity the most. Because (and this is just me levelling, soloing and 5 manning):

1. It works very well with the Glyph of Healing Surge.
2. Throwing down MW5 Healing Rains is much more viable now. The healing is non-negligible. It ticks for 10K and Crits for 20K. And then of course bursts up a little when conductivity kicks in.
3. In 5 mans at least MW5 HR dropping has helped turn a few wipes or helped with healer stress.
4. It times nicely with MW5. By the time the rain has stopped you can MW5 another.
5. LB feels weaker so there feels like there is more reason to choose another MW5 spell than LB every time.
6. It feels like you are doing 20% of what a healer could do for 10% dps loss. Numbers off the top of my head.
7. It's always on. If you want it.

For raiding I dunno. You might be in a situation where having an on demand powerful heal is always better. You might never be able to sacrifice the LB DPS loss to keep Conductivity up.

But I think it's a playstyle thing. If you want to throw down MW5 HR a lot then Conductivity works well with it.

Plus it's one less button on my bar.

[Lavindar]

Conductivity is a passive AoE healing that can be keep up 100% the time, I think that is very good to have, unless you need burst healing, then take one of the other two, which is the design of the new talent system, I don't see the problem.

[Radux]

Conductivity is a passive AoE healing that can be keep up 100% the time, I think that is very good to have, unless you need burst healing, then take one of the other two, which is the design of the new talent system, I don't see the problem.

Well you can have it down 100% of the time, but (mostly speaking for Enhancement here) you'd also be giving up a ton of MSW charges, thus LB -> healing via Conductivity, to do so.

I really like the flavor of the talent a lot more than the other two, but for me it just doesn't stack up to AG or HTT in raw output.

And really, as a dps player, you shouldn't be gutting a large chunk of your dps (which LB is for Enh) to help out the potentially struggling healers, then I would personally have your raid pick up another healer.

Don't get me wrong. I understand the whole 'all roles should do anything to have success' thing. But if your raid completely relies on Enh/Ele having 100% uptime on HR/Conductivity, I'd say it's really inefficient.

[Deleted]

Yes it does. When i was leveling on beta i would pull 5mobs and pop it. CL cleave them all and regen hp instead of lose it. AG is incredibly powerful

Sounds good. I guess I'll pick AG over HtT (the moar you burst, the moar you heal ). Conductivity isn't really for me...

[Orrion]

Its a 50% return on damage though, and if your going to ignore the Healing Rain then it actually has no downside (as all the downside is taken up by the actual use of the HR). Its literally just free healing if your already using HR anyway. If theres no massive burst healing or theres high healing the entire fight (and your using HR in it, which is a fair few fights) it could be very good. As Elemental its even better because (as I said) you can do ~75% of your normal DPS if not higher only casting LB, refreshing FS and using LvB in the 1 second downtime for HR, and if that is say 90k DPS, then Conductivity turns that it 45k HPS, PLUS the healing HR done so your now doing like 50k HPS. How is that bad?

Sure this is Ele, but Enhance can hardcast LB too, and they have SS to add to this damage. Its a bigger DPS loss for Enhance sure, but it is still an incredibly strong talent (its just not borderline TOO strong for Enhance, like it is for Ele).

It isn't an incredibly strong talent for Enhancement. It's incredibly weak.

Did you or did you not read the last page where I did the math? It's a 50% return on damage, but only about ~23% of Enhancement's damage activates it (using the latest sim) and that's before considering that HR requires you to sacrifice most of your Lightning Bolts to keep it down for any length of time.

I raid 25 mans. By taking Conductivity in the first tier, I'll be providing less than 500 additional HPS per person in a best case scenario. That is absolutely pathetic when you consider everyone has several hundred thousand health. I don't care if it's "free" healing, it's still atrocious.

Also, you have to judge it against the other talents in the tier.. and they're better in terms of output when you need output.

[Lavindar]

It isn't an incredibly strong talent for Enhancement. It's incredibly weak.

Did you or did you not read the last page where I did the math? It's a 50% return on damage, but only about ~23% of Enhancement's damage activates it (using the latest sim) and that's before considering that HR requires you to sacrifice most of your Lightning Bolts to keep it down for any length of time.

I raid 25 mans. By taking Conductivity in the first tier, I'll be providing less than 500 additional HPS per person in a best case scenario. That is absolutely pathetic when you consider everyone has several hundred thousand health. I don't care if it's "free" healing, it's still atrocious.

You can't base the worth of a DD spec's healing on heath pool size, you have to base it on Raid wide damage.

Also, you have to judge it against the other talents in the tier.. and they're better in terms of output when you need output.

Yes, that how they should work, if you need heal on demand take the other two, Conductivity is a passive bonus that work all the time, you can't have it do more burst than the others.

[Endus]

The thing with Conductivity is you can't consider it based on a single HR cast. The benefit is how much more HPS you can push with it than you could with HTT or AG. This comes into play for fights where there's heavy raid damage and DPS isn't the issue, or fights where you're trying to cut a healer because DPS IS an issue, and you'll do better having one healer go Enhancement w/ Conductivity and do 40% of his HPS as well as 70% of the DPS he could normally pull.

Are you going to be doing awesome DPS and getting the proper benefit out of Conductivity? No. That doesn't mean it's useless, though.

[Radux]

Are you going to be doing awesome DPS and getting the proper benefit out of Conductivity? No. That doesn't mean it's useless, though.

Sure. Not useless, per se.

But given the amount of time and resources (gcd's) needed for Conductivity healing to even equal that of AG or HTT, it's just too much of a 'duh' moment.

[Teriz]

I personally prefer Ancestral Guidance in that tier. I don't like the idea of dropping constant Healing Rains as Enhance because it will eventually lead to a DPS loss in a raid situation. Also AG has a shorter CD than HTT but lasts just as long.

[Endus]

Sure. Not useless, per se.

But given the amount of time and resources (gcd's) needed for Conductivity healing to even equal that of AG or HTT, it's just too much of a 'duh' moment.

Yeah. I'm just saying I can foresee circumstances.

Like, if we describe HPS and DPS requirements for a boss in terms of "users", if a boss requires 2.2 healers of healing and 6.3 DPS (in addition to one tank) to beat Enrage at your current gear levels, if you go with 2 healers and 7 DPS, people die and you wipe. If you go with 3 healers and 6 DPS, there's not enough DPS to beat the Enrage. If one healer goes DPS and sacrifices half his DPS to provide 30-40% of his normal HPS, though, you beat the enrage and have enough healing.

I can see conductivity having uses for those kinds of swing circumstances, but I fully agree it's an awfully narrow niche.

[Radux]

I personally prefer Ancestral Guidance in that tier. I don't like the idea of dropping constant Healing Rains as Enhance because it will eventually lead to a DPS loss in a raid situation. Also AG has a shorter CD than HTT but lasts just as long.

The one difference is that unless you're doing some insane dps, HTT will do more healing to more people than AG.

[angeleg]

Thats why we have healers, if we resolved around doing dps and healing the raid at the same time you would have a point, but as a dps spec I would like to do that DPS, with throwing rain of healing here and there.

[Orrion]

Yeah. I'm just saying I can foresee circumstances.

Like, if we describe HPS and DPS requirements for a boss in terms of "users", if a boss requires 2.2 healers of healing and 6.3 DPS (in addition to one tank) to beat Enrage at your current gear levels, if you go with 2 healers and 7 DPS, people die and you wipe. If you go with 3 healers and 6 DPS, there's not enough DPS to beat the Enrage. If one healer goes DPS and sacrifices half his DPS to provide 30-40% of his normal HPS, though, you beat the enrage and have enough healing.

I can see conductivity having uses for those kinds of swing circumstances, but I fully agree it's an awfully narrow niche.

Do you have any evidence that Enhancement can even do 30-40% of a Restoration Shaman's output with just HR and Conductivity? That seems suspect to me.

Not to mention that Enhancement would only be doing that healing when the raid is grouped. That probably kills off the entire scenario for a 10m raid, or makes the niche even more impossibly narrow.

[Endus]

Do you have any evidence that Enhancement can even do 30-40% of a Restoration Shaman's output with just HR and Conductivity? That seems suspect to me.

You were establishing about 12.5k HPS from Conductivity. That, plus Healing Rain, and given that most healers aren't pushing their theoretical max HPS, and I figured it was something close to that range. HPS numbers are always significantly lower than DPS numbers, after all. Simulationcraft is still early on HPS valuations, but they have Priests in the 70k range for HPS, so if I assume a more typical 60k in real-time performance (sims assume everyone always needs healing and such), 30% would be 18k, meaning Enhancement needs about 5.5k HPS from Healing Rain to reach that mark, which I didn't think was unattainable if people are stacked.

The Enhancement profile has 26,708 Spellpower when raid buffed. Healing Rain heals for 2,170+(19.7% of SP) per tick per person, up to 6, so at that spellpower, we're talking heals for 7431 per person per tick. That's every 10s for 2s, so if we assume 12s between casts (to let the CD fall off and to re-cast), it's (7,431 x 6)/2= 22,293 healing per second while up, and ~18,500 HPS when you factor in cast time.

So I'd say we're well in the 30-40% range, since we're looking at about 31k, compared to 71k for priests in the sims. Assuming everyone can stand in it and the Enhancement player is keeping it down. It's just blanket AoE healing, too, which is garbage, but it might be enough to let you drop a healer for certain progression fights.

This is, of course, a flawed comparison and you could pick holes in details, but bear in mind, I'm just trying to show the napkin math that justified an offhand percentage I guessed at, and that I haven't included the impact of crits dealing more healing or the impact of Haste allowing for additional ticks, either.

Not to mention that Enhancement would only be doing that healing when the raid is grouped. That probably kills off the entire scenario for a 10m raid, or makes the niche even more impossibly narrow.

Yes.

I'm not arguing it's a good talent for Enhancement. I'm saying I can see niches of potential use, so it shouldn't just be written off wholesale, just relegated to "if that ever comes up" status.

I'm okay with one talent per tier being very "meh" for any given spec, when it's a class like ours, with three significantly different roles. Druids and Paladins will be having similar issues.

[Deleted]

I personally prefer Ancestral Guidance in that tier. I don't like the idea of dropping constant Healing Rains as Enhance because it will eventually lead to a DPS loss in a raid situation. Also AG has a shorter CD than HTT but lasts just as long.

Of course its a DPS loss. Its like Endus said though, if the amount of healing your putting out as a DPS means your able to drop a healer (theres a fair few fights that feel like you want to 2 heal on 10 man for the DPS but need to 3 heal to survive) then although your own DPS drops the raids DPS will skyrocket. That is the major benefit for me from Conductivity. The other benefit is for fights where your dropping HR anyway and thus its just free bonus consistant healing (which happens very often tbh).

Do you have any evidence that Enhancement can even do 30-40% of a Restoration Shaman's output with just HR and Conductivity? That seems suspect to me.

Not to mention that Enhancement would only be doing that healing when the raid is grouped. That probably kills off the entire scenario for a 10m raid, or makes the niche even more impossibly narrow.

The only fights where both DPS and Healing are needed in high amounts at the same time have stacked up phases, so thats not a problem. Even 10 man its fine, because the damage isn't based on number of targets. Even if its only you and the tank in the HR it will do the same HPS as if there was 25 people in it (minus the healing from HR itself).

As Endus said above, the talent is not nearly as good for Enhance as it is for Elemental but considering how different they are it was always going to be the case. It still has its niche though.

[Orrion]

You can't base the worth of a DD spec's healing on heath pool size, you have to base it on Raid wide damage.

Raid wide damage is related to health pool size. It has to be, for what I think are obvious reasons.

Anyway. If enough raid damage is going out to stress your healers, then Conductivity's measly contribution really doesn't matter. It's a drop in the bucket compared to the damage going out.

If so little raid damage is going out that Conductivity heals it.. well, you wouldn't be using HR in the first place. You'd be busy dpsing.

It's insignificant on both ends.. high raid damage will make the contribution unnoticeable, low damage means the circumstances needed to stop dps and drop HR wouldn't be met.

---------- Post added 2012-08-22 at 03:14 PM ----------

The only fights where both DPS and Healing are needed in high amounts at the same time have stacked up phases, so thats not a problem. Even 10 man its fine, because the damage isn't based on number of targets. Even if its only you and the tank in the HR it will do the same HPS as if there was 25 people in it (minus the healing from HR itself).

As Endus said above, the talent is not nearly as good for Enhance as it is for Elemental but considering how different they are it was always going to be the case. It still has its niche though.

I doubt a Shaman is ever going to drop HR to hit 2 people.

Better off hitting the tank with Healing Surges.

[Lavindar]

Even if Conductivity isn't as good to Enhance as to Elemental, it's going to be the better one if you don't need burst healing, as its passive, and if you don't need to drop HR already, the you will not need to use any of that tiers talents.