Disc Priest 10 man, Mastery or Crit??

[Lithios]

So im a disc priest and i heal 10 man. Here is my armory.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...thios/advanced

Currently ive been going all towards mastery. Stacking mastery so that i can powerword shield. Most of the fight i use PW:S and pennace and then maintain Angel with smite/holy fire. AoE healing with Prayer and use PoM to feel in the gaps. Yea I just heard about glyph of weakened soul a few days ago. Also workin on professions. But my question is do you think I will do more HPS reforgin and socketing crit? Currently im comfortable on mana using PW:S.

[Deleted]

2/13 HC Disc here, 534 ilvl. I went all out crit (running with 11,2k spirit), sitting at 12,6k crit rating, which results into about 37,5% crit raidbuffed. Have to say i'm quite atonement heavy.

[Funknotic]

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2/13 HC Disc here, 534 ilvl. I went all out crit (running with 11,2k spirit), sitting at 12,6k crit rating, which results into about 37,5% crit raidbuffed. Have to say i'm quite atonement heavy.

What gems and trinekt do you use?

[Deleted]

red : int/crit
yellow : full crit
blue : spirit / crit

Using the SPA trinket & unerring vision of Lei Shen, although thats only because we have a sever lack of healing trinkets drop in ToT, & all of our caster dps had it / didnt want it.

[Bremmon]

If you are atonement healing go crit.. If you are a bubble spammer go mastery. The short and sweet answer.

[Vicarious]

If you are atonement healing go crit.. If you are a bubble spammer go mastery. The short and sweet answer.

short sure, but incorrect.

read this please: http://www.healadinne.com/HealNotes/5.2Disc.html

[Lithios]

Ive been crit since readin the numbers. Def loosens up my rotation and makes my atonement better for sustained medium damage. Pushed 71k on toes 10 today.

[Dracodraco]

short sure, but incorrect.

read this please: http://www.healadinne.com/HealNotes/5.2Disc.html

While the math is correct in a case of zero overhealing, it doesn't consider a "real" scenario, where crit means more absorbs, meaning less overhealing. The two stats are close, yes, but unless you full out PW:S spam (in which case, you'd go for a spirit heavy build to be able to maintain that playstyle for the entire fight), then crit will be better in a "real" scenario than mastery, simply due to overhealing.

[Deleted]

I agree. Healadinne´s page is math wise correct, if you go for the largest output not considering "wasted overheal" by the actual heal. In a real life (lol) raiding scenario however, it is not (always) desired to have those large base heals. In low healing periods of fights I rather help dps via smite/pen/sol and do that bit of healing required - while I put a lot of DA on people. If I had a large "sustained" base heal and lower % crit - I would just overheal into the void (aka wasted mana as I see it) but with "smaller" base heal due to "lower" mastery and more (not larger) crits I will get a lot of DA that in effect enhances my co-raiders Health pool as long as the DA is there or is refreshed. As I see a raiding group, the healers depend on each other to keep the raid alive - My primary role as a Disc is to mitigate, not to heal everything up after the damage has hit.
Personally I like to have a bit of Mastery - but I still stack Crit. I am not into HC yet. Just got 12/12 last week, but it suits my playing style and how I like to play my Disc. Ilvl 532, with 9,5k spirit with LMG and LFR Horridon. Unbuffed I have 10% haste, 19,6% mastery and 29% crit.

[Vicarious]

While the math is correct in a case of zero overhealing, it doesn't consider a "real" scenario, where crit means more absorbs, meaning less overhealing. The two stats are close, yes, but unless you full out PW:S spam (in which case, you'd go for a spirit heavy build to be able to maintain that playstyle for the entire fight), then crit will be better in a "real" scenario than mastery, simply due to overhealing.

It is assuming a real scenario though, he just says first here's whats best for PW:S spam here's whats best for SS here's whats best for atonement and regular healing. They're all different numbers that you could use but unless youre reforging every fight you can take note that at the very end he says for a balanced setup for most every situation that could present itself you want to be 8 crit % over your mastery % raid buffed. I tried to keep it at least 6% higher tending towards 8%.

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I agree. Healadinne´s page is math wise correct, if you go for the largest output not considering "wasted overheal" by the actual heal. In a real life (lol) raiding scenario however, it is not (always) desired to have those large base heals. In low healing periods of fights I rather help dps via smite/pen/sol and do that bit of healing required - while I put a lot of DA on people. If I had a large "sustained" base heal and lower % crit - I would just overheal into the void (aka wasted mana as I see it) but with "smaller" base heal due to "lower" mastery and more (not larger) crits I will get a lot of DA that in effect enhances my co-raiders Health pool as long as the DA is there or is refreshed. As I see a raiding group, the healers depend on each other to keep the raid alive - My primary role as a Disc is to mitigate, not to heal everything up after the damage has hit.
Personally I like to have a bit of Mastery - but I still stack Crit. I am not into HC yet. Just got 12/12 last week, but it suits my playing style and how I like to play my Disc. Ilvl 532, with 9,5k spirit with LMG and LFR Horridon. Unbuffed I have 10% haste, 19,6% mastery and 29% crit.

If you read the whole post he isn't saying stack mastery as you imply by saying wasted overheal. He(or she) suggests exactly what you do to maximize DA and synergy between crit and mastery to get a strong boost to SS and PW:S while still providing the most to your non CD healing, mathematically the point of intersection for where one is better than the other for total effect is that 8%.

[Syri277]

he specifically says that mastery benefits pws more than crit (which rarely overheals if used right) . these days I'm stacking mastery and my top heal is pws and SS is usually second. my overhealing is really low because I'm spamming pws most of the time by literally blanketing the raid before heavy damage periods if SS is on cd(12.5k spirit). I fully understand the logic behind overhealing in other spells but if the things I mostly do are shields (SS and pws) mastery imo is better.
anyway it depends on your play style, if your gear can't support pws spam or you care about your dps you might want to go crit.
Edit: my ilvl is 542, though spamming is not hard when you reach around 530ish Ivl.

[Deleted]

With overhealing on BOTH heals and aegis taken into account and the fact that mastery also buffs aegis, it is quite clear that both stats are equal unless you stack too much of one.

Taking balanced mastery and crit is better for everything except your DPS. The differences are not very large though so lots of ppl consider that justification for going crit. The idea that aegis is better overall for healing because it is absorbs is not supported by either the math or looking at the logs.

The idea that atonement is a decent source of aegis is only partially valid in 10man. In 25man it is invalid. The biggest and only consistent source of aegis is your level 90 talents and PoH.

[Deleted]

I have been discussing this with another dpriest in my guild, and tried to compare our logs.
He is 535 going full crit, I am 531 trying to go crit=mastery, what we found out is that crit gives you an overall higher hps through atonement, but the healing is slightly less addressable, while my setup gives higher raid survivabilty through a better PW:S and SS once you learn the timers.
At the end of the day, he's doing way better on the normal fights we have on farm, but I am ahead on the heoric fights we are progressing on right now (2 different groups with similar progress).
The stats are very close.

The idea that atonement is a decent source of aegis is only partially valid in 10man. In 25man it is invalid. The biggest and only consistent source of aegis is your level 90 talents and PoH.

Pretty accurate, but the 2 time we went for the 25men in order to drop a bit of TF gear he destroyed me on the logs just through better atonement: his direct atonement healing was the first source of hps while mine was aegis close to SS, and his overall was 10ish% higher.
Fun part, we were way overgeared for normal progression, our healing was close to 70% of the total, and the other healers were just derping around watching our epenises grow.

[Vicarious]

I have been discussing this with another dpriest in my guild, and tried to compare our logs.
He is 535 going full crit, I am 531 trying to go crit=mastery, what we found out is that crit gives you an overall higher hps through atonement, but the healing is slightly less addressable, while my setup gives higher raid survivabilty through a better PW:S and SS once you learn the timers.
At the end of the day, he's doing way better on the normal fights we have on farm, but I am ahead on the heoric fights we are progressing on right now (2 different groups with similar progress).
The stats are very close.


Pretty accurate, but the 2 time we went for the 25men in order to drop a bit of TF gear he destroyed me on the logs just through better atonement: his direct atonement healing was the first source of hps while mine was aegis close to SS, and his overall was 10ish% higher.
Fun part, we were way overgeared for normal progression, our healing was close to 70% of the total, and the other healers were just derping around watching our epenises grow.

it would put it more into context if you said 10 or 25 man for the first bit (overgearing 25 normals with 2 disc priests healing low damage with atonement doesn't mean anything) and also either way having 2 disc priests in one raid is limiting both so the numbers aren't so great to compare

also although mastery will be better for PW:S spam pretty much no matter what that isn't going to be more than a fifth of your healing even if using it more than you probably should be.

0.3+0.8C=M

So when your heal mastery is equal to 30% plus 0.8 times your crit percent, crit rating factor and mastery factor are equal. More mastery would mean crit is stronger, less mastery would mean mastery is stronger. So for optimizing for PW:S we want to keep these two quantities in the above equation about the same.

just optimizing for PW:S you will still need some crit just not as much but I can't imagine not wanting to omptimize for the other 60-80% of your healing more effected by a better balance of crit as mentioned in that linked page

TL;DR

For our regular heals (pretty much everything that [isn't] PW:S), you want to be keeping your crit percentage, after all buffs, about 7-8 percentage points ahead of your mastery. The more precise formula to follow would be:
C=0.11+0.9M

[Deleted]

Neither of these look quite right to me as the balance point. The formula for crit% (with all buffs) is

(0.4+M*(3+M))/(4.8+3.2*M), where mastery refers to your fully raid buffed %mastery expressed as a fraction of one.

This definitely predicts the max HPS balance point

@vicarious: Crit never becomes better than mastery for PWS. The balance between crit and mastery is for heals and SS

@noskillz. That is a bit anecdotal and hard to judge, what fight are you talking about, what was the spell selection and so on. And what do you mean he destroyed you.

If you have 25% crit and 30% mastery then your aegis will be 0.25*1.3*1.15 = 0.37375 of your healing (before mastery)

If you have 30% crit and 22% mastery then your aegis will be 0.3*1.22*1.11 = 0.40626 of your healing (before mastery) i.e. 8.7% more.

There is no way he is going to "Destroy" you just from the increased aegis alone. Its a playstyle

In contrast your PWS will be 1.25*1.3 = 1.625 vs 1.3*1.22 = 1.586 i.e. 2.5% more and you will also have a similarly higher amount with spirit shell.

All this is before even considering overheal on aegis, because crit is affected by both partial overheals (though much less than mastery) on aegis and complete overheal, while mastery is only affected by partial overheals, since complete overheals are simple equivalent to a crit rate suppression. Since aegis from atonement tends to be small partial overheals on aegis are much less likely.

If you saw large differences it is probably down to playstyle/luck/assignment/position rather than anything else.

The simplest way is to extract your PWS and aegis heals from a fight from the log and check how much return you are getting from each stat.
The other way is to do the same fight a few times with high crit or balance/crit mastery and see what the outcome is.

[Deleted]

@noskillz. That is a bit anecdotal and hard to judge, what fight are you talking about, what was the spell selection and so on. And what do you mean he destroyed you.

If you have 25% crit and 30% mastery then your aegis will be 0.25*1.3*1.15 = 0.37375 of your healing (before mastery)

If you have 30% crit and 22% mastery then your aegis will be 0.3*1.22*1.11 = 0.40626 of your healing (before mastery) i.e. 8.7% more.

There is no way he is going to "Destroy" you just from the increased aegis alone. Its a playstyle

In contrast your PWS will be 1.25*1.3 = 1.625 vs 1.3*1.22 = 1.586 i.e. 2.5% more and you will also have a similarly higher amount with spirit shell.

All this is before even considering overheal on aegis, because crit is affected by both partial overheals (though much less than mastery) on aegis and complete overheal, while mastery is only affected by partial overheals, since complete overheals are simple equivalent to a crit rate suppression. Since aegis from atonement tends to be small partial overheals on aegis are much less likely.

If you saw large differences it is probably down to playstyle/luck/assignment/position rather than anything else.

As I said in our 25men farm fest he was doing a 10% better than me (i.e if I was doing 100k hps, he was at 110k), we were stomping through the fights bacause, as I said, we were overgeared and farming TF gear with no assignments and scumbagging a bit.... that 10% could just be a bit of luck and the lower itemlevel I have, I was just surprised to see Atonement healing so high on his partial logs on a 25men environment, knowing it's not that effective.
We are currently farming Jin'rokh/horridon/ji'kun and Iron Qon heroic on 10m, and I'm surprisingly doing better than him on all the fights (yes, Horridon too)

[Vicarious]

@vicarious: Crit never becomes better than mastery for PWS. The balance between crit and mastery is for heals and SS

Crit isn't better if you are assuming a crit will be wasted shielding but that is irrelevant unless you are only casting that one spell and even then crit does have a place for shield spamming assuming the full shield or most of it will always get used even if it crits. For every other spell the stats synergize together and there's no point not getting them balanced. The more mastery you have the more each point of crit is worth to you and visa versa thats just how it works for all spells, some to a greater degree than others because of the spirit shell calculation being different etc. If I have 50% mastery and I crit with PW:S its going to be like a lay on hands amount on that shield, obviously that's a good thing in heroic fights so I want that to happen more even if its not quite a lay on hands but is more reliable hence the balance point, fairly straightforward logic.

As I said in our 25men farm fest he was doing a 10% better than me (i.e if I was doing 100k hps, he was at 110k), we were stomping through the fights bacause, as I said, we were overgeared and farming TF gear with no assignments and scumbagging a bit.... that 10% could just be a bit of luck and the lower itemlevel I have, I was just surprised to see Atonement healing so high on his partial logs on a 25men environment, knowing it's not that effective.
We are currently farming Jin'rokh/horridon/ji'kun and Iron Qon heroic on 10m, and I'm surprisingly doing better than him on all the fights (yes, Horridon too)

its hard to find any meaningful info from the 25 normals with 2 discs in the raid and from 10 man you're going to see atonement being more of your effective healing of course so not much of what you have said has much to do with you or your other disc priest's stats I would wager

[Deleted]

Crit isn't better if you are assuming a crit will be wasted shielding but that is irrelevant unless you are only casting that one spell and even then crit does have a place for shield spamming assuming the full shield or most of it will always get used even if it crits. For every other spell the stats synergize together and there's no point not getting them balanced. The more mastery you have the more each point of crit is worth to you and visa versa thats just how it works for all spells, some to a greater degree than others because of the spirit shell calculation being different etc. If I have 50% mastery and I crit with PW:S its going to be like a lay on hands amount on that shield, obviously that's a good thing in heroic fights so I want that to happen more even if its not quite a lay on hands but is more reliable hence the balance point, fairly straightforward logic.



its hard to find any meaningful info from the 25 normals with 2 discs in the raid and from 10 man you're going to see atonement being more of your effective healing of course so not much of what you have said has much to do with you or your other disc priest's stats I would wager

The formula for PWS is (1+mastery)*(1+crit)*base

dPWS/d(crit rating) = dPWS/d(crit)*d(crit)/d(crit rating) = Base*(1+mastery)*1/600

dPWS/d(mastery rating) = dPWS/d(mastery)*d(mastery)/d(mastery rating) = Base*(1+crit)*1.6/600

The balance point is when dPWS/d(mastery rating) = dPWS/d(crit rating) ==> (1+mastery) = (1+crit)*1.6 ==> 1.6*crit = mastery-0.6 ==>

crit = (mastery - 0.6)/1.6.

This is the formula for the crit/mastery balance point for PWS. Now considering that you have a base crit of 15%, there is no amount of mastery you can obtain that will make the crit balance point go above 15%. No matter how much mastery you stack it is still better for PWS than crit. With 50% mastery the balance point is at negative crit rating....

Your logic fails for the very simple reason that mastery gives you a bigger PWS overall. If all you did was spam HPS you would avoid crit and just stack mastery, because that would give you not only a higher average PWS, but also less variation. You don't want a humongous heal sometimes and a weak punkarse heal some of the times.

[Vicarious]

If all you did was spam HPS

I assume you mean spam PW:S? Either way needing some crit doesn't mean you cant get that from int and the raid buff. You make it sound like you'd want zero crit if you could have it, and no matter what math you do if it says negative crit = good then it isn't very realistic or in the realm of logic. No one has ever won an argument of logic with math to prove it wrong when the subject isn't directly and literally math itself. Do you really not see my point taking it to the extreme(an extreme fast approaching next tier) of a high power word: shield crit being able to be made more reliable at a cost that doesn't lead to deaths on average? I don't know what your goal is I guess; ranking? healing meter numbers? percent of overall healing as power word: shield? If your concern was being the most effective at saving lives in the raid spot you're in (and I usually assume this until told otherwise about healers posting here in this forum)then I don't see your point, you ignore the bit I touched on saying "... I can't imagine not wanting to optimize for the other 60-80% of your healing more effected by a better balance of crit..." as well.