Seri sez: Mount changes coming!

The news is spreading like wildfire through the WoW community: The level requirements for mounts are changing again. In the “next major content patch”, according to CM Zarhym, not only will the basic land riding level requirement be lowered to 20 (from 30), the “epic” land riding skill will be lowered to 40 (from 60). Basic flight? 60 (from 70, or 68 for Druids).

This, in and of itself, is pretty mind-boggling. But wait, there’s more! The cost of riding training and mounts are also changing! How much can you expect to pay for entry level riding and a mount on your level 20 alt?

Are you sitting down?

5g.

Yes, that’s right… 4g for training and 1g for the mount. Journeyman riding (aka “epic” riding) at level 40 will cost 50g and 10g for a mount.

Yes, that’s right… you will soon be able to buy “epic” riding for less than the cost of the original riding skill in vanilla WoW.

What was that sound? Oh, don’t mind that… it’s just a collective groan from millions of players that worked their asses off to grind out 80g for their riding training by level 40… and that wouldn’t even get you a mount! I don’t even want to think about the countless hours I spent cobbling together funds for “epic” riding on multiple characters. 500g was a lot of cash back when you had to compete with CGFs for every resource node or profitable-to-farm mob in the game. But we did it. Why? Because the level 40 mounts were slow as hell, that’s why. At least the next generation still has to put up with Gimpy the one-hoof-in-the-glue-factory pony for 20 levels too. Granted, those 20 levels will go a lot faster with the experience changes implemented to expedite leveling. (Argh!)

Don’t get me wrong… I think making riding more accessible is probably the right thing for Blizzard to do. They have to make leveling easier for folks, but I can’t help but reminisce about the good old days when men were men and sheep were scared. Honestly, these new kids don’t know how good they’ve got it. Back when I was a noob (yes, I was a noob at one point), you had to slog through crocodile-infested swamps picking herbs (or <insert your gathering skill here>) until your fingers bled, then haul them back to town (on foot, uphill both ways) to sell for a measly pittance on the Auction House. Heck, I’m not even sure if we had flight points back then.

Man, those were the days.

But I digress. The winds of change are blowing and we’re all standing downwind.

Speaking of drafts… flight training. I mentioned the level reduction, right? There’s more. Although the cost is remaining the same, they are making flight trainers available in Hellfire Peninsula rather than (or in addition to) Shadowmoon Valley. (I can’t imagine why, the thought of level 60 characters riding out to SMV to pick up their flight training is rather entertaining.) This means that players will be able to reduce their flight training costs through reputation! Of course, a brand new 60 stepping through the Dark Portal isn’t going to have a lot of rep with Honor Hold/Thrallmar, but by the time they get ready to train “epic” flight (which is still 5000g, btw) they probably will.

Entry level flight speed is also changing from 60% to 100%, which I think is a shame. Really, everyone should have the experience of riding a flappy something or other across Hellfire Peninsula at a ponderous blimp-like pace. I still remember buying epic flight on my farming character before a character I actually played regularly just to make farming a little less likely to grind my teeth into dust. I guess it’s a good thing I’m not a game designer. Of course, if I had been I probably wouldn’t have made it so tedious to begin with… as it is, I’m only stricken now with the urge to inflict past suffering on others. It’s only fair.

But I’m not bitter or anything.

What do you think about the upcoming changes?

Jov sez: That’s great, now work on your overheal

Back in Vanilla-WoW, the dividing line between the “good healers” and the “bad healers” wasn’t usually so much a matter of keeping people alive (since, apparently, even bad healers could be carried for that) but that little overheal number.

TBC, with it’s limitless regen and bottomless mana pool seemed to take the stance “overheal doesn’t matter as long as your assignment lives and your mana holds out.” The TBC attitude has definitely carried over into Wrath raiding, and with encounters like Naxx, it was easy to slip into a zoned-out buttonspam while you smacked around the various loot pinatas for purples.

In short, it made us sloppy, where we’ve a lot less room for sloppiness in Ulduar and, presumably, moving forward.

What is Overheal?

Overheal is any healing which occurs over the healing needed by the target (effective healing).  This can be caused by spell selection (which is pretty easy to control if you’re paying attention) or crit (which is somewhat more difficult).  So if Roguechick is down 4k health, your flash hits for 6k and your greater hits for 12k, your flash will have lower overheal (6k heal – 4k deficit = 2k overheal vs. 12k heal – 4k deficit = 8k overheal).

Why Overheal?

Overheal is symptomatic of several things, meaning there’s no one answer.  It could be there are too many healers for the encounter (leaving 8 healers fighting to get their heals off first because the fight only needs 7).  It could be your healers aren’t familiar with an encounter so are reactively healing (4 healers going “oh crap, that mage took a ton of damage *healheal*) rather than proactively (I know Mage is gonna take a big clump of damage here, so I’m going to pre-shield/ProM/get flash ready.)  It could just be the spammy nature of some of the fights (And in P2 Mimiron, I do nothing but spam PoH on g2 and 3).

Some classes and roles are more inclined toward overheal in general.  Tank healers, specifically (pallies and Disc priests) tend to face situations where tanks can be gibbed at a moment’s notice, so tend to adopt the spam-heal-and-let-it-land approach, and often see very high overheal numbers (over 60%)  It’s currently a fact of the game, but at the same time, that’s 2/3 of your mana wasted.

Why not overheal?

As I somewhat touched on above, mana is the primary issue.  Through potion sickness, and the regen coefficient nerfs of early 3.x content, to the more recent hit to OoC regen outlined in Zusterke’s posts of last week, we can’t count on the bottomless mana pool sticking around.  I’m not meaning to turn into a “Blizz is hitting healers with the nerf bat” poster, but I get the strong feeling that this is a trend which will be continuing for some time.  I feel this is backed up, in part, by a post from Ghostcrawler just 3 days ago.

We want healing to be less spammy and more deliberate, but that won’t work until overhealing matters. To get to that point, mana regen has to matter but the risk of the tank dying in two boss hits also has to be chilled out.

In other words, tank healing is likely to get less finicky, but the nerfs to regen aren’t finished.

But how do I stop?

First of all, I don’t want to come down unilaterally hard on overheal and say “all overheal is bad!!!11″  For the most part, as the game stands currently, any overheal that your gear can support isn’t by itself bad.  In some situations (the above-mentioned tank healing, for example) it’s a requirement.  What the overhealing metric is good for is giving you a direction you can improve on.  Yeah, it’s great that you’ve officially gotten Freya on farm; now work on better spell selection and less zoning out to whack-a-mole and getting your overheal below 40%.

Tea with Zusterke part 3: Conclusions

A few weeks ago, we ran the idea of having Zusterke (of PlusHeal fame) do a post outlining the actual math part of regen to answer all of your priesty questions. Thankfully, since the Snark Mavens do very little in the way of hardcore mathcraft, he said yes. This is the final part of his results.

Some Considerations for Holy Spirits

We’ve seen that the optimal ratio turns around 600 spirit for 1300 intellect. But we have also seen that we can easily take 200 spirit or intellect more and keep a fairly balanced score. This gives us some room to tailor our regen stats to our likings, without risking a severe penalty in our regen. So let us examine the factors that impact our balance:

• Lowered FSR: Some fights have phases and breaks in the healing. This can increase the value of spirit notably (say, 800 spi v 1400 int).
• Higher FSR: hard fights can be very demanding and rip away that chance on a regen break, decreasing the value of spirit and changing the ratio a few points in favor of intellect. But such fights also diminish your chance on a hymn of hope or it can make relying on Replenishment, shadowfiend etc more risky. In short: our balance favors more intellect but a healthy spirit basis becomes ever more important.
• Higher Crit: if you like a lot of crit, then you may score higher uptimes for holy concentration. This can easily up your HC time by 20% and really give spirit a push.
• Single target spam: if you spam a lot more single target heals, you will have more chance to proc holy concentration and up your spirit regen notably.
• Raid synergy: some raiding guilds really try to min max their raid groups. This means you really rely on some of your manabar based regen effects!
• Hymn of Hope + Shadowfiend: if you have the chance to use both together, do it! The 20% increase of your max mana effectively increases the performance of your shadowfiend by 20%. This tips the balance a bit in favor of intellect. But a fight that can allows such a break is likely to have a lowered FSR time.
• Shadowfiend + Bloodlust/Heroism: Bloodlust increases the haste of your fiend, giving more hits and thus more mana. This is a superb way to make your intellect count!
• Hymn of Hope + Replenishment: the increase of yout max mana increases the effect of your Replenishment. This favors stacking a bit more intellect.
• Spirit as backbone: when problems come your way, spirit will be your savior. When your group is sub optimal, your cooldowns got burned too early (or messed up!), or the guy providing replenishment bubble hearthstone’s out of Patchwerk, your intellect based regen drops like a stone. Intellect gives great synergy with the group, but that makes the group its lifelink. Having a healthy base of spirit can back you up under those odd circumstances.

There are probably a dozen more considerations that could manipulate the balance between intellect and spirit but I think I summed most of them here. Feel free to comment on more ideas!

Conclusion

It’s been a long post but I think we’ve reached some interesting conclusions for both the holy and discipline priest.

Discipline priests still gain the most out of intellect. In fact, it is unlikely that spirit will ever catch up with intellect as regen stat. Still, spirit beats mp5 for discipline priests with more than 1.1K intellect, which is definitely an eye opener for some!

Holy priests can still stack spirit and intellect with to a 6:13 or 8:13 ratio in favor of intellect and do just fine. Having more spirit will provide a great backbone in your regen model (and SP bonus!), but having more intellect will do great in min maxed raids. In fact, the optimal ratio has a couple of hundred points of leeway. With the current itemization in 3.1, I recommend going for intellect+spirit gear and gemming for intellect whenever you need more regen! I’m still a big fan of a healthy spirit basis, but intellect is definitely our biggest regen stat for now.

Whew! Y’all still there?  Thank you all for your patience in this really awesome discussion.  And again, huge thanks to Zusterke for putting it together for us.  I hope this was helpful to all of you (I know I learned a lot!)  And remember: if you’d like to continue discussion on this, consider heading to PlusHeal and opening it up to the community at large!

Tea with Zusterke part 2: Versus

A few weeks ago, we ran the idea of having Zusterke (of PlusHeal fame) do a post outlining the actual math part of regen to answer all of your priesty questions.  Thankfully, since the Snark Mavens do very little in the way of hardcore mathcraft, he said yes.  This is part 2 of his results.

MP5 vs Intellect

Round 1: Disc priests
It is quite easy to prove that intellect is better than mp5 for disc priests. If we take into account the stat cost of mp5, then we need to compare 1 intellect with 0.4 mp5. We have seen that our manabar regeneration alone provides more mp5 per point of intellect, so intellect clearly wins.

Round 2: Holy priests.
For holy priests, we only got 0.3403 mp5 per point intellect from manabar based regen. So, Intellect is 0.0597 mp5 short to beat the stat mp5. This is where the contribution of intellect in our spirit regen kicks in:So, we need a minimum amount of spirit to support our intellect. This condition is very easy: for 1000 intellect, we only need 308 base spirit or 324 spirit unbuffed. It is fairly safe to assume a holy priest will have that amount of spirit and thus intellect beats mp5.

MP5 vs Spirit

When we inspected the value of spirit in our regen model, we found it evolves with intellect. When comparing spirit to mp5, the evident question we will bump in is not “if” spirit will beat mp5 but “how much intellect” is needed.

Round 1: Disc priest
It has been debated many times whether Disc priests should take spirit or MP5. We know that the value of spirit scales with intellect, and so it is reasonable to assume that spirit may outscale mp5. Let’s check when that happens:

Round 2: holy priest
The value of spirit is not limited to its regen for holy priests, thanks to spiritual guidance. Still, it remains primarily a regen stat. We compare 1 spirit with 0.4 mp5:Given 1065 intellect unbuffed, spirit can beat mp5 when raidbuffed. Starting raiders without sufficient intellect on their gear may find mp5 slightly more performant at first, but spirit will gradually outscale mp5 by the time they leave naxx 10m and the spellpower bonus from spirit makes the stat preferable quite early in the content.

Intellect vs. Spirit

With the introduction of manabar based regen in WotLK, intellect climbed to one of the most potent regeneration stats. For disc priests it was considered the most favorable regen stat, while holies tried to balance it with a fair amount of spirit. With the changes in 3.1, spirit regen lost some ground and manabar regen gained some. Let’s see how the balance evolved.

Round 1: Disc Priest
For disc priests, we ‘guess’ that intellect still outscores spirit and we try to prove it. We compare their values:Does this make sense? Like… any sense? It does! Basically this comparison tells us that we can stack a boatload of intellect before spirit catches up. For example, with 0 spirit, the optimal value for intellect is 2025! Well, intellect clearly wins this one!

Round 2: Holy Priest
For holy priests, the balance between intellect and spirit was far more delicate in 3.0 than for Disc priests. Typically a 1:1 ratio was considered optimal. For 3.1 we relate the value of intellect by the value of spirit. If it is above 100%, intellect is more valuable than spirit and if it’s below 100% then spirit is more valuable than intellect:

At this point, the formula doesn’t seem to make much sense.. at least it doesn’t to me. But we can put it in a spreadsheet and work out the ratio for various stat levels:Keep in mind that these are basestats and thus spirit should be a tad higher. Still, it’s quite clear that spirit has lost some considerable ground to intellect! That is, for 20% HC Uptime, 90% FSR and no specific synergy with your manabar regen abilities. Do check that other ratio’s, with some more spirit or some intellect also score quite well as optimal (less than 10% difference).

Stay tuned tomorrow for the final part of this guide. Zusterke will wrap everything up and give those tl;dr math-haters out there the bottom line.

Tea with Zusterke part 1: The Groundwork

A few weeks ago, we ran the idea of having Zusterke (of PlusHeal fame) do a post outlining the actual math part of regen to answer all of your priesty questions.  Thankfully, since the Snark Mavens do very little in the way of hardcore mathcraft, he said yes.  This is part 1 of his results.

Stat Wars

There are two challenges about theorycrafting. The first part is the theorycrafting: how to examine and calculate what you need. The second part, is translating it into human language. I found that part 2 is often more challenging and requires more patience than part 1. When Joveta kindly asked me if I would give a shot at explaining our regen model in human language, I accepted the challenge. I leave it to the faithful readers of Snarkcraft.com to judge whether I succeeded.

The regeneration model of WoW has seen a lot of changes with patch 3.1: spirit/intellect regeneration was nerfed outside the five second rule, the shadowfiend is buffed, Rapture and Holy Concentration have changed. The regeneration model is so complex it almost obscures the effectiveness of our regeneration stats and leaves us guessing how to gear. Unfortunately there is no straight answer as circumstances and gear level have a great impact on our regeneration model. So, I’ll try to tackle some of these problems and provide a more detailed answer.

Manabar Regen

WotLK introduced several abilities that grant us a fixed % of our maximum mana over a period of time. Some of these have changed in patch 3.1 so we’ll go over them one by one.

Replenishment
Replenishment is now available for frost mages and destro locks. This makes the availability of Replenishment more reliable and ever more important to take into account.

The regeneration offered by Replenishment remains the same. It offers 0.25% of your manabar every second, which is 1.25% of your manabar every 5 seconds. But it is optimistic to consider it fully effective the whole time. At plusheal, we observed that the effect of Replenishment does not work 100% because refreshing buffs or missed refreshes can diminish the amount of ticks you get. You can easily verify this in any WWS parse (see image).

Having checked dozens of WWS parses, it seems Replenishment ticks 75-95% of the time (see screenie). I consider 85% an average which yields me: 85%*1.25% = 1.0625% of my manabar as mana every five seconds.

Shadowfiend
The shadowfiend was buffed in patch 3.1. It now delivers 5% of your maximum mana per attack, rather than 4% per hit. It can total to 60% of your manabar over 5 minutes which is equivalent to 1% of your maximum mana per 5 secs.

Hymn of Hope
Hymn of Hope changed a lot in. While it is still a channeled spell, it choses 3 targets randomly every 2 seconds. The spell is quite situational and unreliable when used. Therefore, I will not use its regen in this theorycraft.

Mana Tide Totem
The mana tide totem yields 6% mana every 3 seconds for 12 seconds. With a 5 minute cooldown, this gives about 0.4% of your maximum mana every 5 seconds. In my guild we tend to give this totem to dps, rather than healers, and I’ve read from several players that I’m no exception. I will not include it in this theorycraft, but for those who are interested in it: it yields 0.06 mp5 per point of intellect.

Rapture
Rapture is a fundamental regen talent for any Disc priest. It can yield 2.5% of your mana, every 12 seconds, when a shield is absorbed. However, timing this shield consumption is hard to control. Let’s add a few seconds as safety line and assume it procs every 15 seconds on average. This corresponds to shield spamming the main tank who will absorb his shields anyway. In this case, we get 2.5% every 15 seconds or 0.8333% of your maximum mana every 5 seconds.

Our maximum mana can be calculated as follows:We can calculate the percentage of maximum mana per 5 seconds we get for both Disc and Holy priest. We can use that percent to calculate how much mp5 per point of intellect we get from manabar based regen but here we must take into account the bonus on intellect accordingly: Mental Strength for Disc and Blessing of Kings for both Disc and Holy. We get:

Spirit Regen

Our spirit/intellect regen changed a lot in patch 3.1. The base regen of spirit and intellect was nerfed by 40% but our regen while casting from meditation was increased to 50%. As a net result, we get the exact same amount of regen while casting but notice a considerable nerf in our mana regen while not casting.

To make matters more complex, Holy priests now get Holy Concentration: a regen buff that depends on crit. The uptime of Holy Concentration can vary wildly depending on playstyle and healing assignment so I won’t go into details about it for now. Perhaps this may interest some in another guest post, if fate, Seri and Jovi will be so kind. For now, I recommend to check your WWS parses to see what uptimes you obtain from Holy Concentration.

These values probably like an odd mix of Thalassian and Chinese so let’s simplify them. We assume 90% time spent inside the five second rule and for holy priests we add 20% Holy Concentration uptime (see image). This is a bit pessimistic but it’s better to play safe. Holy priests tend to have a notably higher mana consumption when raidhealing and most raidhealing spells do not trigger holy concentration.Taking into account buffs from talents and Blessing of Kings, we get:

These formula’s do not reveal immediately the value of intellect or spirit. But it does reveal an important property of both:

Spirit evolves with the amount of (/square root of) intellect you have.

Intellect evolves with the ratio it has with spirit.

Stay tuned tomorrow for a special Wednesday Snarkcraft. Zusterke will cover the Int vs Spirit debate. Thanks for reading and a special thanks to Zusterke for putting this thing together!