Wynthea

Spell Haste: Why You Don’t Need It

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slowdown
Image courtesy of andrewatla

A few words on Spell Haste: I can tell that Spell Haste is going to be the next big epeen-measurement stat. There are a couple of reasons behind this, the biggest one being that Sunwell fights are so demanding that Spell Haste is indispensable to heal all the incoming damage. The thought process runs something like this: If it’s good enough for Sunwell, it’s good enough for everyone, right? In fact, the more you have, the better you must be, right? Nope. Of course not – if that were true, I wouldn’t have a reason to post.

Sorry, I missed a left turn at Albaquerque. What is Spell Haste? Simply put, Spell Haste allows you to cast the same spells – faster. 15.67 of Spell Haste is a 1% casting-time reduction. Haste can also decrease your global cooldown to a minimum of one second. (That’s at something like 475 – effectively haste-capped. At this point, I’m not entirely sure it’s even possible to stack up that much spell haste. It certainly isn’t possible without running your other stats into the ground.)

As cool (and useful in Sunwell) as Spell Haste is, there are a lot of reasons it just doesn’t live up to the hype:

Sloppy Healers

Once in a while, some misguided soul will compare healing a raid to playing whack-a-mole. Maybe it’s accurate for your first few raids – before you figure out much about game mechanics and set up your UI properly you might have no idea who was going to take damage next. This is probably why you see so many entry-level wws reports showing an abundance of Flash Heals; the healers just aren’t experienced enough to not play a reactive game. But good healers know their fights, know their raid-mates, and know their raid frames well enough to start a cast before damage happens. Giving those same, inexperienced healers spell haste before developing their other, more relevant stats first, simply reinforces that gut reaction o-m-g-he’s-gonna-die-i-gotta-toss-healz-nao mentality. Spell haste won’t make inexperienced (or bad, for that matter) healers better, but it will train them to think faster is better – when really, planning ahead and paying attention is better.

Opportunity Cost

Flash back to Economics class with me: Opportunity cost is the cost of resources that must be given up in order to obtain other resources. You’ll notice a pattern with pre-Sunwell Spell Haste items – to get the haste, you have to give up mana regen.

Exception: Brooch of Nature’s Mercy, which is worth farming Eagle Boss in ZA for its Spirit alone.

As you’re working your way through content, you have a lot to think about in terms of stat-balancing. Your +healing must be high enough to handle the incoming damage, you have to have enough regen to last the entire fight, and you have to have enough Stamina so that you can actually do some healing. If you’re not to the point where most of your slots have few upgrades, you probably don’t have stats to spare. If you think you do, you probably don’t have enough regen. These other stats are so important for T4, T5, and BT/Hyjal content that giving them up for a stat that is not required is foolish. Wait to stack Spell Haste until you really can afford the cost to your other metrics.

Running Out of Mana

One thing that I notice most often with premature Spell Haste stacking is that casters run out of mana.

Quickly.

Why?

Bear with me. (Warning: I like easy math, so I’m using VERY rounded numbers and assuming no Quartz, Lag or other fun stuff)

Say I have a 10k mana pool, and that each Greater Heal costs 500 mana. This means I can throw out 20 of them before I go out of mana. But, I also have 250 Mp5. Each of those 20 casts took 2.5 seconds – a total of 50 seconds.

So I accrued 10 full ticks of my Mp5 – an extra 2500 mana.

An extra 5 Heals. An extra 12.5 seconds of casting.

Which, thanks to the magic of Mp5, bought me ANOTHER 1094 mana.

ANOTHER 2 casts, ANOTHER 5 seconds – and I’m done. (Because that only bought me 250 mana, which added to the 94 I had left over isn’t enough to cast another heal for this experiment.)

So TOTAL, my 10k mana pool and 250 Mp5 bought me 27 heals over 67.5 seconds. (There is a FABULOUS mod called Dr. Damage that will show you all of this in a tool tip.)

If my G.Heal hits for 6k, I just healed for 162,000. But what if we trade regen for S.Haste? Okay, now I have a 10k mana pool, each heal costs 500 mana, so I still get to throw 20 of them before I go oom. But NOW, each of those 20 casts took TWO seconds. So NOW, it only took 40 seconds. Which means I only got 8 ticks of my Mp5, which is now 200. So I only got back 1600 mana. An extra 3 heals. An extra 6 seconds of casting. Only 300 mana back. Suddenly, I’m done. (Sure, I could wait 1 second, and buy a 24th heal but then i’m REALLY done – and it takes me longer to get back in the game, because my regen is less.) Total: 23 heals over 46 seconds. 138,000 healing. Down 24,000. Down by more than my Main Tank’s pool.

For what? To get that 138k out fast enough so that it’s overheals? Because in 95% of the raiding-game, you don’t need to throw ’em out that fast to keep up with the damage, so they would be wasted. But you’re not chain-casting? You’d have more time to regen mana? Great. Then you really don’t need the Spell Haste.

Lack of Available Gear

Another reason not to fuss over Spell Haste too much is how little gear there really is out there with Spell Haste on it. WoWhead lists 29 Priest-friendly healing items with Spell Haste GAME WIDE. Of these, 16 drop in SW, 1 in Hyjal, 2 in BT, and two require Hearts of Darkness. So unless you’re very wealthy or your guild is working through advanced End-game, you have 8 options total – and a few of those are for the same slots!

Not Fully Developed as A Talentable Stat

As Priests, we have a couple of talents that reduce the casting time of certain spells. Could be divine fury, could be shortening up our Mass Dispel or Mana Burns. But, there is no far-reaching talent option to truly take advantage of this stat wholesale. Yet. I anticipate that WotLK will bring a lot more viability to this stat as a whole, with the introduction of talents like Improved Holy Concentration. The new content will probably require a decent amount of Spell Haste, but, as currently implemented, the fact that Spell Haste gains no help from any available builds further decreases the value of gaining it as compared to other stats – spirit or +heal – that DO gain multipliers from our available talent trees.

Sunwell fights are a holy-crap-did-you-see-that-by-the-skin-of-our-teeth kind of experience. I know a guy who, before the 2.4.3 nerfs, was spending nearly 1,000g on Mu’ru attempts PER NIGHT. (Scrolls, haste pots, elixirs, repairs, etc. He’s actually leveling an herbalist just to take the pressure off.) The best comparison is to old-school Naxxramus. You just don’t do Sunwell unless you’re really dedicated to the game, and long after WotLK comes out, veteran raiders will be swapping stories about how hardcore the fights were, and what a mind-bender it was.

Luv,
Wyn

Deep Thoughts, by Wynthea

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I am truly blessed in that I have always managed to have consistent friends to group with in the game. My Human Priest leveled with a darling Paladin, and a Warrior has always had my back on my Troll. In fact, if I ever need to run an instance or three, all I have to do is find a willing Druid, Pally, or Warrior, and announce that the two of us will be running _____. I don’t think it’s ever taken more than 5 minutes for us to get our DPSers and go. This has lead me to a startling revelation about our class: Priests do have pets. They are called Tanks. I believe this should be added to our official class description.

Luv,
Wyn

Myth: It Doesn’t Matter As Long as the Boss Dies

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does-matter

It’s time for a good, old fashioned rant.

“It doesn’t matter, as long as the boss dies.”

Oh, but it does matter. It matters a lot.

It matters if you AFK trash.
It matters if you wipe on a farm-content boss.
It matters if people die unnecessarily.
It matters if the fight drags on for double its usual length.
And it matters because “as long as the boss dies” is the dumbest quote EVER.

Think about it. I understand the need for bio breaks, and taking an announced absence is a perfectly legitimate way to get a drink of water, relieve yourself, and be that much more focused when you return. But when you have a couple of raiders who consistently AFK their way through everything that doesn’t drop loot, it adds stress and resentment to the pressure cooker that is a raid. It’s lazy and inconsiderate. Worse, it sets a terrible example for not just new recruits but everyone else in the guild.

Anyone who’s ever wiped on a “Farm” boss can tell you that it is infinitely frustrating when that happens due to sloppy mistakes and lack of attention. It wastes valuable time, leads to full-on burnout, and can make a guild feel stunted and unsuccessful. Slacking off here can cause major problems, and even if the boss dies on the third try, that’s 30 minutes to an hour of 25 people’s time. Not to mention repair bills, wasted consumables, and loss of morale and momentum.

Okay, so say you didn’t wipe. Say the fight just lasted 12 minutes instead of 7. That’s only 5 minutes extra (Nevermind that it’s really 5×25.) Wrong. When fights double in length, the impact is the same as a wipe, just on a smaller scale. Consumables, cooldowns, and resources are STILL wasted, and more likely than not, players will die needlessly. Not to mention that’s 5 minutes worth of Arrows and Bullets. And you now have a raid-mentality that knows it’s in for a rough night, since the bosses aren’t dying smoothly. Beyond that, if you’re a guild in the position of both farming content AND making progression runs, the sooner you can get the old content finished the more time you can spend on the new stuff. Eating up minutes and hours when you have 14 bosses to get through before you can even get to the fun stuff is “srs biz”.

More than anything, I hate that this quote as it seems to embody the ultimate in epic-greedy laziness. As if there’s no difference between the boss dying in an unspectacular way vs. dying efficiently, with everyone putting out 100%. The reality is at the other extreme – the only thing the two events have in common is the dropping of loot. And if loot, rather than progression and improvement is your focus, I want you the hell out of my raid, out of my guild, off my server, and away from my game. Go play EverQuest with Jimmy.

Luv,
Wyn

WoW Resources for the Wyn

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tools
Image courtesy of woodsy

I’m a tremendous advocate of using all the tools available to evaluate and improve your toon, your gear, and your gameplay. (It’s how I first met Matt!) Hands-down, the most valuable resources for learning to play are other players willing to share their experiences. Even with access to some great minds, though, it helps to know what questions to ask to get the most bang for your buck. Besides that, I’m an information junkie. These are, in no particular order, some of the resources that have helped me the most in my quest for Priestly perfection.

Be.Imba.hu – The first online character auditor. Takes a look at your gear, the available gems, enchants, and add-ons and gives you a solid opinion of what stats are best for you, and what level of content is appropriate. I’ve found it a little cut-and-dry, but a very useful place to start.

GankBang – The armory, comparative. Wanna know how you stack up to the other Priests on your server? Wonder no more. Great tables, which you can organize by stat, show you how you compare. Be aware that you may need to manually update or add players.

warcrafter – The ultimate armory sandbox. Load your character, change enchants, gems, or see what your stats would be if you were in full T6. (Or T3!) Now you can REALLY find out if +6 stats or +15 spirit to chest is a better idea.

Arena Points Calculator – Arena points calculator. Plug in your rating, guesstimate your points. Hooray!

WoW Reputation Calculator – Tells you how much rep you need to hit the next level with any Burning Crusade faction. And tells you how many instance runs it’d take to earn it. This gem has helped that 21000 rep look much, much more manageable, and helped me make decisions of which instance to run for max. rep reward.

Warcraft Realms – Statistic crawler for all realms. If you feel like your faction is hopelessly outnumbered… it just might be. This sucker breaks down all kinds of information – and is especially helpful if you need to know when it’s time to start recruiting from off-server.

WoW Character Watch – Allows you to stalk anyone and everyone. Really great if you want to follow up with an applicant or a former guildie.

Edit: I dunno how I forgot this one, but Mapwow is Google-based maps for WoW. It shows herbalism nodes, mining nodes, and a million other VERY handy things.

WoW Web Stats – Upload your combat log for a bird’s eye-view of what really happened. Have a few different people from the same raid do it for extra well-rounded-ness and you have a hell of a tool for improving not just your own gameplay, but the synergy of the entire raid.

Love forums? Two you should check out are the official Blizzard Priest forums (No, Really!) and Elitist Jerks. (I have another favorite that Matt launched a while ago which you are no doubt already familiar with.)

Here are my favorite threads from the first two:

Lux et Umbra  – The greatest intro-to-priesting guide I’ve ever read. I have stolen so, so, so much from her….

Elitist Jerk’s Holy Raiding Compendium – Required reading for any Priest wanting to raid.

Another great guide written by DwarfPriest – it’s a work in progress, but holy cow, what a piece of work

I left off things like the Armory, WoWhead, Bosskillers, and WoWwiki. If you’re reading World of Matticus, and you DON’T know about those sites, you should’ve spent a little more time getting to know Google.

Luv,
Wyn

P.S. I gotta stop letting Matt write my headlines!