Holy Stat Priority

[Lostep]

I raid on a Resto shaman and my alt is a priest and for our alt raids I'm going to play holy don't tell me disc is better i don't care i enjoy holy more and its an alt raid where we will just clear normals and goof around.

On to the important stuff

Stat priority in cata was mastery #1 and i have done a little poking around the interwebs and have seen that now its haste <breakpoint of 4721> then mastery then crit but i see some derps on my servers who mains are obv holy and they are going full mastery. anyone wanna shed some light on this also if someone here does numbers what would the 4721 breakpoint as goblin be?

thanks priest friends

[Deleted]

it really depends on your play style. ive tried both, personally i find mastery better

if you spam renew, hit the haste breakpoints. it also makes lightwell very powerful.

if you use "real" heals ie, CoH, PoH etc, then go mastery

[Deleted]

Those "Derps" as you so kindly put it are choosing what it is in most cases, the most optimal gearing. Mastery stacking also allows seamless transition to Disc and for many of us, the ability to play both without reforging every other fight is rather useful.

Google haste breakpoints, there are several easy to find places that have tables showing exactly what is required.

As Barry said, the 4.7k ish breakpoint can be great as holy, however unless you are pushing serious progress levels I doubt that additional lightspring tick will see much EH and even then only on selected encounters in the odd 'omg' moments. Personally, I view the additional renew tick(s) as being far less valuable since if you choose that playstyle you will more than likely want to be in Serenity and refreshing-this can be exceptionally strong but overall mastery is more consistent, in more encounters.

[Danner]

For a holypriest, haste is still the best throughput stat around. Ideally 1% haste is 1% more throughput, and it gives better reaction time to boot, which saves lives. The problem with stacking massive amounts of haste is that you can and will run yourself oom. In a game environment where mana is a primary and limited asset, that makes haste stacking less lucrative.

By comparison, mastery is free extra healing. And that makes it - at least for now - a very awesome secondary stat. On paper, mastery is right up there with haste in value-per-point, but in practice you will find that it has a serious flaw in that almost all of it goes towards overhealing. For any other healing spell, playing with a 60%+ overheal ratio would be the sign of a really crappy healer. For mastery, it's par the course. This does put some limiter on how good mastery really is, in practice. That said... I stick to mastery primarily right now, for mana reasons.

Crit is honestly not a bad stat when you look at those downsides with the other stats. But it is still suffering from being less values per-point than the other two stats. And this too is very often just going towards overhealing, though less so than in the ICC days.

IMO, either combination of secondary stats is workable. It mostly depends on your healing style which is "the best for you".

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To look at the haste breakpoints for DOTs and HOTs, you need to look at how much haste you need to get just above halfway to the next breakpoint. For renew, you have 4 ticks in 12 seconds baseline. To get 5 ticks in 12 seconds, you need 5/4 = 25% haste. But you only need half of that to actually get the 5th tick, meaning the haste % breakpoint is 12.5%. For renew. Other hot spells have other breakpoints!

Haste % is visible on your character sheet if you hover over your haste rating. The magic number to look for is 12.5% if you're aiming for that extra renew tick at least. This figure already includes the goblin racial.

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To calculate haste% theorycrafting, it's basically all multiplicative all the way. You take your haste % from gear, and multiply by all sources of haste.

If you have say 10% from gear, 1% from the goblin racial, 5% from raidbuffs and 20% from power infusion, that ends up as

1.10 * 1.01 * 1.05 * 1.20 = 1.39986 = 39.986% haste.

Basically, you are going to need to counter that old breakpoint by dividing it by 1.01. If your pre-goblin breakpoint is 4721 rating (I don't know if it is!), then your goblin breakpoint is 4674.26

[Deleted]

The only thing I'd take issue with there Danner, is the overheal you quote. Sure this may be the case on easy content and farm, but then again, gearing barely matters for those.
When MSV first launched I was haste stacking, trying desperately to get to 4721, but we had horrid drops and on arriving at WotE HC I was still under 480ilvl and could only attain it by gemming haste.
So, looking at the damage patterns I decided to give mastery a shot. Result: ~2% overheal and <5% on EoL.

Of course not all fights are like this, but my experience with mastery stacking is that for many progress encounters, it works surprisingly well.

[Deleted]

@Danner
I disagree that haste is better for throughput than mastery. In a situation where there's 'some' downtime that will let you be selective with spells the first spell (for me) that gets cut is PoH, if my lvl90 talent + CoH will be enough I'd rather be using those, both of which mastery benefit far more than haste. Even with PoH, haste will let you land the spell faster, but unless you need to cast another spell immediately after (in order to keep up with damage, not just top people up) then haste just isn't needed.
Mastery also offers more HpM which haste does not (other than reaching HoT breakpoints).
In terms of haste breakpoints, no argument here than getting another tick on lightwell is excellent. I've found very limited use for HW: Sanc so far this tier, the extra throughput for the mana cost just hasn't been warrented imo. Renew is a playstyle one but I find myself casting it very rarely outside HW: serenity (think, tsulong day phase) in which case it's refreshed anyway.

For me I'll continue to go for mastery since it offers more HpM without the RNG element of crit. I rely too much on my instant casts with downtime in between for haste to offer me it's full potential.

[Lostep]

1.10 * 1.01 * 1.05 * 1.20 = 1.39986 = 39.986% haste.

Basically, you are going to need to counter that old breakpoint by dividing it by 1.01. If your pre-goblin breakpoint is 4721 rating (I don't know if it is!), then your goblin breakpoint is 4674.26

You're a God among men

Don't forget this is an alt but I remember hearing something like mastery is shitty now because it doesnt effect something that it did in DS and only haste will scale with it.

[Deleted]

You're a God among men

Don't forget this is an alt but I remember hearing something like mastery is shitty now because it doesnt effect something that it did in DS and only haste will scale with it.

That would be HW: Sanctuary. I rather underused spell these days. It costs a lot, does decent healing for the cast time but ultimately the healing from it is quite insignificant (I see <1000 ticks...)

[Danner]

Haste vs mastery is a hot topic indeed. They both have upsides and downsides.
Ask Mr Robot and Icy Veins both suggest haste though, and I agree with them.

And yet I gear for mastery right now. For me it's down to that my heals never feels weak, and I rarely have trouble landing heals in time. But mana for me is always tight. So I made the conclusion that I need mastery more than I need haste, in order to lower my mana consumption. But what is right for me may not be right for you. I also suspect that my preference will change once I get into HC gear.

But priests on both sides are very passionate about this debate, and as a person who has been on both sides of that coin, I would like to claim that both approaches work. Even running down the middle ground by going a bit of both works. To my surprise, I have also found that crit isn't horrible this time around, though it's still worse than mastery in most usecases.

[Mazi]

I've been stacking Mastery. Most of the fights cater to Mastery with constant damage going out and I haven't had any issues keeping up in healing. It also carries over to Disc very well.

[Sunna]

Especially early in gearing (which is likely where you'll be if you're doing goof-around alt raids) I prefer mastery. Mana can be really rough as holy so getting extra healing for free from mastery is really strong.

[PhillieB]

I do miss haste stacking especially on those non-serendipidous(?) hasted PoH + GH casts but I have found as well mastery stacking to be working out better for me than stacking primarily haste which I did going into this tier.

[Mythricia]

Sitting at very close to 10k Mastery, I feel slow as a slug, but it makes for a powerful Mastery HoT (30.7%) for Holy, and makes transitioning to Disc (Heal/Heal specced) very easy. It really depends on the fight, but at the moment I have no problems running myself out of mana, so, it's Mastery for the foreseeable future as far as I'm concerned.

I used to run with the very first Renew breakpoint for Holy, but kind of found Renew to be weaker than I'd like, I just didn't end up using it enough to justify the stat budger spent on getting more Haste. Nowadays I run with as little haste as I can in favor of Mastery, for both specs.

[HPLathus]

Almost all of the theorycrafting sites say mastery and holy are very close in terms of numbers.

With that said, they each yield different play styles. Haste will make more use of renew, where mastery will have a broad use of spells to keep echo of light a primary source.

Either one is good tbh, it's all about your personal play style.

However, haste will always require more mana regen, where as mastery will not require as much.

[Deleted]

However, haste will always require more mana regen, where as mastery will not require as much.

This is a myth that should really stop being repeated. The player may mean a haste build requires more regen, the build itself does not.

Oversimplified example: Damage incoming is X, Greater heal heals for X (conveniently :P) Why does casting it 1 second (or whatever) more quickly require additional regen? It does not.

Don't get me wrong, I love haste builds, but there is always an fairly set amount of incoming damage requiring healing up. There are likely 2 fundamental reasons why people choose haste builds. Either, to snipe and make themselves look good, or to actually enable that heal(s) going out in time to save someone.

If you play poorly, then yes having a high haste build, rather than a n other secondary stat, will require additional regen. In itself, high haste does not affect your mana consumption, you the player do.

[Deleted]

What Mazi said.

Basically, if you run holy/disc (like me) then its mastery all the way, I have a grand total of 0% haste selfbuffed (Mind that my guild is not progression heavy as we sit at 16/16 normal)

Its not that surprising that during encounters where raid damage is constant (garalon), the mastery hot is usually my top heal.

[fixall]

As other have said... A lot depends on your play style. I would also throw in there that it depends on what class you'll be healing the raids with. For instance, Holy mastery is a bit weaker when running with a Paladin as their mastery bubbles will snipe your mastery hot.

I think the majority of healing Priests stack mastery for two reasons... One (again as others have said) it makes switching to Disc MUCH easier as the stat priority is basically the same. The second reason is I think Holy Priests gave it a go with the 4721 glyphed Renew breakpoint (mainly to get the extra lightwell tick) but found they just didn't have the mana to support it at lower gear levels. I'm a bit past 490 ilvl and I'm just now getting to the point where I think my I might give that breakpoint another go.

Up until now my general strategy has been to take all the spirit I can get my hands on (while using hybrid spirit gems for good socket bonuses), hit the first haste breakpoint for unglyphed Renew (3039), and then stack mastery from there.

On the other hand... We're getting ready to start heroic Heart of Fear which I'll be running almost exclusively Discipline, so I may just forgo haste altogether and stack mastery and crit as I only use renew with the Borrowed Time buff.

Lastly... Here's a nice chart with the haste breakpoints for both Goblin and non.

talesofapriest.com/resources/haste-breakpoints

The Goblin breakpoint for a glyphed Renew is 4253, while the Goblin breakpoint for a nonglyphed Renew is 2588.

[twistedmynd]

I do agree breakpoints can be a significant boost to throughput and efficiency, but it has to be under the right circumstances. Renew has always been something that people blindly stack haste to get to that breakpoint, but I evaluate how much that additional tick will heal during the fight. In this tier, I feel it's best to look for opportune PoH's rather than use sanctuary or renew for aoe. For spot healing, I'm rolling more single target heals instead of renew.

So I'm avoiding haste for now. You might see me going for the Lightspring breakpoint when it becomes possible, but for now I'm downing encounters, ranking on farm content, and keeping people alive as holy with pure mastery: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/6794980143