Heavy Mastery for Mediocre Holy Priests?

[rushm0r3]

Ogling Jhazrun's armory today for help with overcoming the seeming inherent mediocrity of holy priests, I was impressed with his heavy master stacking. I know he plays both holy and disc specs so maybe that's why he's stacked it, but does anybody think there's value in radically stacking mastery for holy priests? He even reforged out of our most beloved stat, haste, so that his base haste is 5.11% while his mastery is at a mindbending 44.73%.

[Izenhart]

He even reforged out of our most beloved stat, haste

Are you stuck in 2010?

Holy Priests go for mastery in MoP

[mixerii]

Making conclusions about stat priority from top players armory without knowing context is pretty bad idea.

[Deleted]

mastery scaling is just very strong for holy. With the final tier talents healing so much (and not scaling with haste) it really pushes the value of mastery up. Combine that with a raid group that is on the cutting edge of progression and healers that will be aiming to maximize the performance of their group instead of sniping heals from each other and suddenly mastery becomes a very attractive stat.

[Aevy]

HW:sanc is bad, Renew you don't really use it (not enough to go for the haste cap). Haste levels are so low they barely have any impact on cast times.
Mastery is the only option for holy - for disc u can try to stack crit.

[emni]

Yes, mastery builds can be strong, but aren't necessarily; it all depends on your spell usage, raid size and even which healers you heal with.

The reason for this is that holy allows for a variety of successful play styles, which leads to spell breakdowns for holy priests varying a ridiculous amount. If you check WoL, many of the top healing priests will achieve impressive healing numbers while having completely different spell usage.

As a general rule, if you find yourself using a lot of Renews, it might be a good idea to go for the 3039 breakpoint for unglyphed Renew and later 4721 for glyphed Renew. Renew benefits very little from mastery (only Rapid Renewal does), but hell of a lot from haste. Another spell that doesn't benefit from mastery is Lightwell/Lightspring, so if you find that a lot of your healing comes from this spell, it's a good idea to reach for the breakpoint to get more ticks from it (4716, but might as well go 4721 for Renew).

I've been personally experimenting with two setups: full mastery with Renew glyph and 3039 haste+rest mastery without the Renew glyph. There really isn't much difference between the two to be honest, but I'm leaning towards full mastery because it's still the best stat for disc and it saves me the trouble to reforge when I switch speccs. :P

[Benea]

I just went full mastery for now. I have spent way too much money experimenting, regeming, reforging over and over =P

[rushm0r3]

Are you stuck in 2010?

If by 2010, you mean the year we spent in ICC, then hell yeah, I've never left. Returning to a fast healing model like that would be more interesting than the glacial healing pace of Cata and MoP IMO. I don't know whether low haste levels really impact cast times, but I feel like they do. It's entirely subjective, but the more haste I have the better I feel. Suum cuique. At this point I think I'll stack haste till Derevka's breakpoint of 4721 for glyphed renew then go mastery.

[Deleted]

At the moment I reforge every haste and crit on my gear to mastery and I don't think this will change at all.
So I go unbuffed with nearly no haste rating 846 (1.99%), some crit rating 1352 (9.31%), mostly mastery 6045 (22.59%) and this plays out pretty well.

• Haste just brings HpS and lower casttimes, both are not important at the moment. HpM gain is completely ignorable, which is not good at the moment.
  It applies extra ticks for some spells which are more or less insignificant. Breakpoints are a nice little theoretical math thing, but with the current spell arsenal of the holy, they are just not that important... an extra tick for santuary... yea great -.-
  The only think that may be a nice to have is the extra lightwell tick, but it's currently in no way worth stacking that much haste.
  
• Crit just has too less benefits in HpS and HpM gain, especially when taking into account the randomness.
  
• Mastery is good HpM and solid HpS gain, so it just feels to be the best of those stats.

[notdryad]

He even reforged out of our most beloved stat, haste, so that his base haste is 5.11% while his mastery is at a mindbending 44.73%.

You should probably stop talking.

[Deleted]

He logged out as discipline, so the armory was set on his discipline spec. And as discipiline gets 20% free mastery, and that he got 24% mastery from gear, he then gets 44% mastery overall.