Haste? Crit? Mastery!?

[Fairy]

Hey guys!

I got into a debate with another resto shaman yesterday about which stat is more useful. In my opinion I go Haste > Crit > Mastery, he goes Haste > Mastery > Crit. From what I seen on forums, and my own personal playstyle crit is the way to go, but he is also pretty much equal to me in terms of skill and numbers with his mastery build. What are your guys opinions?

xo

[Anzen]

Hey guys!

I got into a debate with another resto shaman yesterday about which stat is more useful. In my opinion I go Haste > Crit > Mastery, he goes Haste > Mastery > Crit. From what I seen on forums, and my own personal playstyle crit is the way to go, but he is also pretty much equal to me in terms of skill and numbers with his mastery build. What are your guys opinions?

xo

As you approach 50% mastery, the value of it starts to drastically drop (since your mastery will generally start over-healing reducing effectiveness below that of another secondary stat. I can't say stacking mastery in current tier gear is a good idea at all, though will be a viable gearing strategy at lower item levels.

The general trend for resto shamans nowadays is Int > Haste (to slightly over X preferred breakpoint to account for latency) > Crit > Spirit > Mastery.

[Deleted]

It also depends on your playstyle and the other healers you raid with. Since mastery is useful when the person you heal is below 50% health its not a useful stat if your raid is over 50% most of the time. If you let people get lower in HP before healing them mastery will work a lot better than in a group where ppl are on full health.

Therfore I dont think its a right or wrong but most of us has turned to crit instead (even more so with those OP priests making sure that almost no one takes damage)

[Deleted]

As you approach 50% mastery, the value of it starts to drastically drop (since your mastery will generally start over-healing reducing effectiveness below that of another secondary stat.

The value of mastery doesn't drop after 50%. It's just as bad before 50%, not that it matters since you can't really drop below 50% in SoO gear anyways. If anything mastery produces less overhealing than other stats, due to its inherent nature of not having much of an effect on high hp targets.

I'm partial to haste(15316) > crit > spirit reforge but it might not be best depending on your specific situation. Anyhow, I feel that stat allocation matters very little. Proper cooldown usage and striving to fill every GCD with a meaningful cast will improve your performance to a much greater degree than shuffling some stats around.

[Anzen]

The value of mastery doesn't drop after 50%. It's just as bad before 50%

If anything mastery produces less overhealing than other stats

Can't say I agree with this at all.

[Deleted]

Landing a 200k heal on a target that is at 500k/600k hp will produce a 100k overheal. If we have, say, 50% crit chance and 0% mastery, average overheal will be 150k. With 89% mastery (39% base + 50% from stats) and 0% crit, the overheal will be 117k. (Someone check my math please.) Your turn, provide a concrete counter-example where mastery produces more overhealing than crit.

Not that any of this matters. We are in agreement that mastery is an inferior stat to stack. Bigger overheals are actually better, AV being the main reason.

[Anzen]

Well you would need to include things like Ancestral Awakening which (for the most part) would count as effective healing because of how it works, lowering the percentage of overhealing you do. Though I can't say it's a fair example that you chose to heal someone on almost 90% hp to show that mastery does less over-healing (which obviously it would at that hp), I say save this for a different topic since we both agree on basically the same stat priority; answering the OP.

[Koor]

There isn't any threshold at 50% mastery. If we have x% mastery, someone at zero HP will get a heal bonus of x%, and someone at 100% HP won't get any bonus. In between it just scales, nothing special about 50%.

Mastery is a great stat for progression. During farm or when overhealing content its value decreases, but then it doesn't matter anyway.

[Anzen]

There isn't any threshold at 50% mastery. If we have x% mastery, someone at zero HP will get a heal bonus of x%, and someone at 100% HP won't get any bonus. In between it just scales, nothing special about 50%.

Mastery is a great stat for progression. During farm or when overhealing content its value decreases, but then it doesn't matter anyway.

Of course there isn't a dynamic breakpoint of sorts, that amount actually came from a lot of sims done in the past.

Vixsin, probably one of the resto shamans out there, explains it better than I can.

[Deleted]

Though I can't say it's a fair example that you chose to heal someone on almost 90% hp to show that mastery does less over-healing (which obviously it would at that hp), I say save this for a different topic since we both agree on basically the same stat priority; answering the OP.

As I said, you're free to come up with your own counter-example. But ok, lets drop it.

[Anzen]

As I said, you're free to come up with your own counter-example. But ok, lets drop it.

Genuinely made me laugh. Since you're so persistent; fine I'll do all the math when I get home and am actually awake.

[Deleted]

Crit is only worth taking if you have the amplifier trinket from Sha of pride. There is math to back it up but cba to find it now. Im running 48%crit fully buffed and according to RSS(resto shaman stats - great addon btw) crit is a bigger through put increase on all fights in SoO heroic. The only fight im currently putting on mastery gear is for thok for big ass healing tides and restorative mists (around 70% mastery) i havent actually checked the % of throughput for mastery on that fight yet but it feels better atleast.

In short i would say it depends on the fight and what healing team you have. I always raid with 2 disc priests on progression( my life sucks i know) and i believe that running a mastery build in these conditions would be utterly shit. I rather have my ancestral awakening doing more healing since smart heals is king in 25man raids.

[Koor]

Of course there isn't a dynamic breakpoint of sorts, that amount actually came from a lot of sims done in the past.

Vixsin, probably one of the resto shamans out there, explains it better than I can.

The graphs there show that there isn't a fixed breakpoint. It says:

"Likewise, if Mastery versus Crit had a single breakpoint, you would get the same value when you compared the point of intersection between two lines. But, as I discovered through my analysis, the point of intersection for the Mastery-Crit combinations that I looked at varied".

That's true. But it's also true for every stat - the more we have of a stat, the less valuable it is to increase it, so it's important to balance stats rather than go one stat only. But there is no magic point, the value decreases as 1/(1+x).

Also, care has to be taken when analyzing the top graphs which show lines from 0%M+100%C to 0%C+100%M as the labels are somewhat confusing. This 100% on the graph there is *not* 100% crit or 100% mastery on the character armory. Rather, it's the relative percentage of point allocation from the 4000 secondary points used in that analysis at the start of MoP. With current gear levels we can allocate much more points through reforging and regemming.

[Anzen]

Of course there isn't a dynamic breakpoint of sorts, that amount actually came from a lot of sims done in the past.

Vixsin, probably one of the resto shamans out there, explains it better than I can.

The graphs there show that there isn't a fixed breakpoint. It says:

"Likewise, if Mastery versus Crit had a single breakpoint, you would get the same value when you compared the point of intersection between two lines. But, as I discovered through my analysis, the point of intersection for the Mastery-Crit combinations that I looked at varied".

That's true. But it's also true for every stat - the more we have of a stat, the less valuable it is to increase it, so it's important to balance stats rather than go one stat only. But there is no magic point, the value decreases as 1/(1+x).

Also, care has to be taken when analyzing the top graphs which show lines from 0%M+100%C to 0%C+100%M as the labels are somewhat confusing. This 100% on the graph there is *not* 100% crit or 100% mastery on the character armory. Rather, it's the relative percentage of point allocation from the 4000 secondary points used in that analysis at the start of MoP. With current gear levels we can allocate much more points through reforging and regemming.

I'm confused... you literally just quoted me saying there isn't a specific breakpoint. Then went on to use text from the site I linked to prove what I had already said. Like I don't even...

If you had looked at the graphs you would have seen that generally, across all delta's mastery started to fall below crit on average at 50%.

I feel like I'm arguing with myself, I wouldn't be surprised if you quote me in a second then tell me mastery looked weaker above 50%.

As I said, you're free to come up with your own counter-example. But ok, lets drop it.

Someone is on 50% hp, and for the sake of rounding, they have 500k total health.

I heal them for 300k, without factoring stats, overheal is 50k.
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With 50% crit, I heal them for 450k on average, average overheal is 200k. I also have Ancestral Awakening heal someone for 30% of my critical heal 50% of the time (because of my crit chance) which works out as 90k extra effective healing on average. Therefore, I heal for 540k on average, average overheal is 200k.

37% of my healing is overheal.
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With 50% mastery + 39% base, I heal someone for 432k on average, average overheal is 182k.

42% of my healing is overheal.

And unlike you, I didn't need to make my example heavily biased to one side.

Your turn

[Koor]

I'm confused... you literally just quoted me saying there isn't a specific breakpoint. Then went on to use text from the site I linked to prove what I had already said. Like I don't even...

If you had looked at the graphs you would have seen that generally, across all delta's mastery started to fall below crit on average at 50%.

I feel like I'm arguing with myself, I wouldn't be surprised if you quote me in a second then tell me mastery looked weaker above 50%

50% what? The X axis there isn't mastery, it's target HP. Also the 50% mastery in the legend there, is *not* 50% mastery on the character armory.

You said in an earlier post:

As you approach 50% mastery, the value of it starts to drastically drop

Which simply isn't true. The page on the site you link doesn't support it, if anything it just says the opposite.

[Anzen]

50% what? The X axis there isn't mastery, it's target HP. Also the 50% mastery in the legend there, is *not* 50% mastery on the character armory.

You said in an earlier post:



Which simply isn't true. The page on the site you link doesn't support it, if anything it just says the opposite.

Sorry, you win. I'm throwing in the towel.

[Koor]

I heal them for 300k, without factoring stats, overheal is 50k.
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With 50% crit, I heal them for 450k on average, average overheal is 200k. I also have Ancestral Awakening heal someone for 30% of my critical heal 50% of the time (because of my crit chance) which works out as 90k extra effective healing on average. Therefore, I heal for 540k on average, average overheal is 200k.

37% of my healing is overheal.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
With 50% mastery + 39% base, I heal someone for 432k on average, average overheal is 182k.

42% of my healing is overheal.

And unlike you, I didn't need to make my example heavily biased to one side.

You can't directly compare 50% crit to 50% mastery since the rate of secondary points conversion differs. If you take 320 yellow gem, a crit gem will give 0.53% crit, and a mastery gem will give 1.6%.

[Anzen]

You can't directly compare 50% crit to 50% mastery since the rate of secondary points conversion differs. If you take 320 yellow gem, a crit gem will give 0.53% crit, and a mastery gem will give 1.6%.

This would only prove my point even further and was something I wasn't willing to bother working out.

[Deleted]

And unlike you, I didn't need to make my example heavily biased to one side.

I concede that your counter-example is valid.
In my raids at least, landing a chain heal crit (and therefore no AA) with 100k overheal on someone is much more common than landing a single-target heal crit with 50k overheal. YMMV

[Tiberria]

I concede that your counter-example is valid.
In my raids at least, landing a chain heal crit (and therefore no AA) with 100k overheal on someone is much more common than landing a single-target heal crit with 50k overheal. YMMV

Of course it does. It's because no one in their right mind is casting a single target heal in the first place if it's going to overheal more than 20% or so. Chain Heal 100% overheals are much more common, because casting CH as a filler is the most effective thing to do 95% of the time, and even if it's only effective on 2-3 targets.

As far as mastery and breakpoints, there are HP% breakpoints below which the secondary stat value of Mastery (per itemization point, not per Crit/Mastery%) exceeds the value of Crit. Those breakpoints are generally around 35% on heals that proc AA (i.e. all single target) and 65% on heals that do not proc AA (all AOE healing). There is no functional breakpoints in the value of Mastery in terms of your Mastery % rating. It's pretty much linear/binary; if Mastery is better for you at 10% Mastery rating, it will still be better for you at 90% Mastery rating. The "50% mastery rating breakpoint" thing is something that I think Icy Veins or Noxxic or someone wrote in a guide at the start of T14 and a lot of people who don't understand how the stats work took that as some break point to gear around. It's completely illogical and there is no such thing.