Holy Priest, Haste or Crit

[drew09]

Just hit 80, wondering haste or crit.
Or if there is a haste soft cap what is it? and should i get it before i think about crit

[harky]

Short answer: Haste is better than crit.

Long answer: Haste has 3 softcaps at 655, 965 and 1,269. However, even when at one of those softcaps haste is still better than crit. When first starting out your priority is to get your Spellpower and mana regen up to par and worrying about the other options is secondary. Your main priorities when first starting out should be Int and SP.

[Callypso]

Could you elaborate a bit on those soft 3 caps? I've been trying to find a thread that explains it in a bit more detail but can't seem to find anything that isn't outdated by 2 tiers of gear. (maybe i just suck at the search function)

[Danner]

We had a big argument over this two weeks ago during the haste vs spellpower debacle, but...

The gist of it is that all holypriest heals and styles are affected by haste. Only a few holypriest heals are affected notably by crit, and the renew style couldn't care less about crit if it tried. As a holypriest, you need to use all styles sooner or later, and gearing for haste is ultimately going to help you in every aspect of the game. Gearing for crit is not.

At 1269 haste and standard raidbuffs, you will hit the 1.0 second GCD. All your instants and 1.5sec cast times will at this point no longer benefit from additional haste. But all your heals with longer cast times - and notably Prayer of Healing - will. Stacking haste beyond this limit makes a lot of sense if you spam PoH a lot. If you stick to renew only, then stacking haste further is rather useless.

I don't know about the 655 and 965 haste caps. They stem from the plusheal boards, but I don't know what they represent. There was some talks over there that if you hit 865 haste, then you can fit 5 GCDs inbetween a CoH cooldown, but seriously, you shouldn't cast that heal on cooldown anyway if you ask me, so that's a weird criteria for a soft cap anyway. Care to enlighten me on this one, harky?

Other soft caps might be related to how many renew's you can keep up at a time. I don't know the numbers, I don't really care too much either. I mainly use PoH to be honest

[Callypso]

Thanks for the clarification Danner

[Zeuq]

965 the amount of Haste where you can get 14 GCDs in 15s. This is important because Renew is 15s, so that lets you roll 10 Renews and still use 4 of those GCDs for CoH/PoM CDs.

I'm less sure on 655, but from some quick crunching, it looks like 662-663 will let you get 13 GCDs in 15s, which means you can roll 9 renews. Isn't 655 actually a Disc Haste cap for GCDs or GHs between Penance CDs or something?

[harky]

Yeah, my bad. 655 is in fact the Disc one. ~665 is the Holy one (it's really 663 as you mentioned).

They deal with how many GCDs per Renew as well as how easily you can line up CoH and PoM. Though you must keep in mind that under normal raid circumstances PoM should only be cast once every 10 seconds, while CoH in most fights should not be used every cooldown due to its healing compared to Renew. PoH is figured into these caps partially because when these softcaps matter you will almost never be casting Flash Heal, which means PoH takes 2 GCDs.

It should be noted that this has absolutely nothing to do with some sort of healing 'rotation' at all. It's simply a measure of how much crap you can do within a logical timeframe.

As Danner mentioned there are other softcaps depending on what you use as a rotation. Because the Renew playstyle is the current dominant playstyle that's what I'd go with. There's virtually no benefit to the CoH based times because of PoMs mechanics. Using a CoH soft cap will reduce healing from PoM by delaying it, or wasting part of it.

[Azyoulike]

Yeah, my bad. 655 is in fact the Disc one. ~665 is the Holy one (it's really 663 as you mentioned).

Huh? What caps for disc at 655? BT cap is much lower.

[harky]

And anyone who cares about the BT cap is either very uninformed, or has been level 80 for less than a couple of days. It only takes 154 rating.

655 is the point at which you have 6 GCDs between Penance cooldowns. It's the first major point of worth with Haste as Discipline. More importantly it allows you to start using GH as a primary heal by allowing 3 GH + 1 GCD per Penance cast, which allows you to use PoM every 10, keep Renew up and keep Weakened Soul up without causing cooldowns to be wasted excessively.

The major points for Discipline at 655 (3x GH +1) and 1,012 (full GCD cap / 4x GH). The BT cap only applies to shield spam meaning the only fight you can even claim it's all you need is LK25H, but even then that only applies until P3. Not that there's much to worry about once you make P3 since you have essentially already won the fight.

[Callypso]

This is turning out to be a very informative thread! Thanks to all of you

[Calsong]

Crit is a very strong stat for you until 25-30%. After that, its all about haste.

That said, Intellect is your best regen stat and Spellpower is your best output stat. Look for haste and crit in gear, not gems.

[Deleted]

I believe haste and spellpower are pretty even throughput stats at high end gear, but haste will always win over crit.
Healers want reliability in their heals, not hoping for a crit to save someone.

[Deleted]

not disagreeing with anything above.

but the OP said (s)he'd just hit 80
without being able to see you toon, i'd say go for crit. assuming you're in normal questing/dungeon items (rather than crafted/BoE bought by another character) then your main concern is going to be being able to keep up through a heroic dungeon/t7 raid. crit is a good way to do this as holy, it gives more healing per mana than haste, it also allows talents to proc such as SoL or holy conc. which save you mana.

Yes, in t10 gear raiding ICC haste is the way to go for holy, but that's assuming you have a good base set of stats already.
no point being able to cast 2sec PoHs if your oom after just a couple

[Zeuq]

not disagreeing with anything above.

but the OP said (s)he'd just hit 80
without being able to see you toon, i'd say go for crit. assuming you're in normal questing/dungeon items (rather than crafted/BoE bought by another character) then your main concern is going to be being able to keep up through a heroic dungeon/t7 raid. crit is a good way to do this as holy, it gives more healing per mana than haste, it also allows talents to proc such as SoL or holy conc. which save you mana.

Yes, in t10 gear raiding ICC haste is the way to go for holy, but that's assuming you have a good base set of stats already.
no point being able to cast 2sec PoHs if your oom after just a couple

The thing is, getting enough Crit to get to 25-30% raid buffed isn't difficult in anything beyond T7 level gear, with anything beyond that. With how easy it is to get gear these days, it really isn't worth focusing on Crit because, as soon as you focus on it, you'll probably be at the point where you can achieve that level of Crit without even trying. Yes, the OP is a fresh 80, but farming heroics is still doable to get T9 gear pretty quickly, and in either case, he'll need to grab whatever upgrades he can in the process, regardless of whether it's Haste or Crit. It's after that point, when one has achieved a basic amount of level 80 gear that any discussion of Haste vs. Crit is really meaningful, and at the point, Crit flatly loses out.

[Deleted]

Crit is RNG, Haste is not. Nuff said...