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Klaphood

Stat priority a.k.a. Crit/Mastery vs. Haste?

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Hey fellow Priests!

 

The question is in the title and it's killing me! I can't even seem to find more than one or two opinions about it at all! (Let alone threads who are older than a year)

 

Which is "better", Crit>Haste>Mastery or Crit>Mastery>Haste, which most of the item level 585+ people seem to have? Or even Haste>Crit>Mastery?

Is there even any priority that is flat out "better" than others? (Rhetoric question) If not, I would like you to share your opinion on why you think it's x>y>z or y>x>z for you... or whatever! It's driving me nuts!

 

Why do so many priests use crit prio btw.? The only reliable explanation on this topic and disc prios in general that I've found is from askmrrobot, and the blog basically says they're even. And it also has been updated for 5.4. But still, I do see haste priests only so rarely... why is that?

I prioritize haste, since askmrrobot suggested it, "if you feel like you can manage your mana well" and because "it's also strong for atonement healing/dps".

Both of these criteria fit for me, so I chose that way. But I'm getting more and more sceptic these days, since, like I said, I only get to see crit/mastery ones most of the time.

 

I claim to know most if not all of the basics about how stats work, what they affect and so on, and I have also read a lot about how to play discipline etc. So please try not to talk about these things and consider them as the foundation of this discussion.

 

Just tell me what priority you like and use, and why.

 

THANK YOU! smile.png
 

Edited by Klaphood

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This question was posted a while back from someone who was trying to get more haste for an almost exclusive Atonement strat.  The answer was still the same in both examples of that role being a full time dps that offered free heal(3rd healer) and the role of a full time second healer.

 

Crit>Mastery>Haste is the priority because so much of SoO gear has Mastery on it.  You'll be reforging out of spirit and haste (depending on your RNG gear drops) to get more Crit to try and keep up with the default Mastery.  The output you will gain by switching those swing points from Haste to Crit will benefit you more than if you went Crit to Haste.  Even in the example of the pure Atonement role the result was the same.  We are far enough into this xpac where you can go all the way in each direction and compare the logs against one another since no one know their play style better than they do.

 

Steve previously mentioned Adinne's Calc Spreadsheet on a separate post and it offers a purely theoretical view on the output difference if you want to load your toon up to it.

 

I hope this is some of what you were looking for and that you'll get other responses going forward.

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Oh, thank you sooo much, Gwenymph!

This is a great first response and I think it might be exactly the information I have been missing on! I never knew nor even thought about how the stats were distributed over our current tier's gear, I just thought it must have had something to do with SoO.

By the way, I'm sorry if my English isn't perfect, I'm not a native speaker. ^^'

Oh and sorry that I have to ask, but I forgot: Which items had random stats on them again? The trash loot?

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Which items had random stats on them again? The trash loot?

As far as i am aware there are no random stat gear items this tier.

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I can't think of any random stat gear from SoO.  The most recent random stat gear that comes to mind is the Timeless Isle tokens.

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Why would you want haste as disc?

There are two reasons you actively stack haste. It will either a) increase the throughput of your hots at certain breakpoints or b ) it will increase the healing you can do in a certain timeframe by reducing your cast time.

The former point is somewhat odd, but nonetheless very relevant. Due to the way hots currently work they gain extra ticks at certain breakpoints that serve as a mana-free increase to your healing much like mastery and crit otherwise increase the potency of your heals. This is also why you see shamans, druid and monks stack haste. It's mana-free increases to their main spells.

The latter is similarly straightforward on its face. The more haste you have, the more spells you can cast. But not all spells benefit equally from this. Cooldowns for example are not by default reduced by haste, meaning the utility of haste is limited for these spells since it will only affect the following GCD or reduce its cast time, not allow you to cast it more often. This means you only stack haste for the purpose of casting more of spells without a cooldown. This is normally negligible for healers since our mana is our practical limitation. Increasing HPCT by reducing the cast time is costly as you will need a proportionate increase to your spirit, making the healing increase cost both spirit and haste. It is therefore normally more pofitable to increase the potency of each cast than it is to cast more spells. This is more of a concern for DPS for whom mana isn't a concern.

So what can haste do for disc?

We do have a couple of breakpoints, but none are really desirable. We never use Renew and the ticking dot on holy fire doesn't heal for enough to warrant gearing for it. Additionally most of your healing will come from abilities that have a cooldown(PoM, Penance, HF, L90 talents, SS). In fact the only spells we have that benefit from haste is smite and PoH -- your filler spells. And as it was mentioned above, increasing the healing of those spells by reducing their cast time is a very costly affair.

For some it may be worth it, but that's not the case for disc. While smite and PoH are decent filler, they do not make up a very significant portion of your healing when looking at what each individual cast brings. Most of your healing will instead come from cooldowns unaffected, or only indirectly affected, by haste. Smite and PoH(as your filler) are only worth using if another spell won't come off cooldown while you're casting it. Otherwise you're better off not casting that smite and instead wait and cast the other ability when it comes off cooldown.

This essentially means you should only stack haste if it allows you to get off another smite, not simply reduce the cast time of it. It needs to be enough to cast another smite, otherwise you end up with the same base result -- that you're better off not casting smite, but wait instead. I haven't computed those breakpoints and I doubt it'd be easy to model, nor that it would it be worth it. We're talking significant amounts of haste, haste that only benefit one smite while hurting every other ability that you have(including the smites you would cast anyway) with the crit and mastery that you're losing out on. Focusing only on the output of that extra smite ignores that you will also see a benefit to your existing smites mastery and crit -- stats that will also increase the potency of all your haste-unaffected abilities.

So the short of this is that haste is absolutely terrible for disc. It doesn't benefit out primary spells in any way since it doesn't affect their cooldown. The only spell it affects is our lowest priority that heals for a little portion of our total healing, is not worth casting if it conflicts with other abilities and stacking haste for it is hurting the potency of every other spell that you cast.

Some will probably argue that you should be stacking haste for burst healing. Being able to cast flash heal faster means that you might be saving someone that would otherwise die. I can't really see the logic here. Discipline doesn't have non-cooldown abilities that are great at getting people topped off. It's something that's simply not our niche and why waste stats trying to do a role you're not suited for? Add then that discipline has terrific smart-healing that will automatically target the low-health targets faster than you can react on your own, I don't really see how discipline gains anything from stacking haste to save someone's ass.

Focus your stats on crit and mastery instead. Those will benefit *all* of your spells, including your filler. because of the itemisation in T16 you want to focus everything on crit. Reforge to crit whenever it isn't already on the item, otherwise to mastery. Gem misty wild jade for blue gems, potent vermilion onyx for red and smooth sun's crystal for yellow.

TL;DR Haste is bad for disc considering the opportunity costs

Edited by steve
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Thank you, steve. I will explain why I chose to gear for haste, since I really didn't do it too specifically in my starting post (this was on purpose though, because I wanted to start the thread without giving away too much from my side).

 

The first reason why I did it was pretty simple: I read the Discipline guide on this site (I love all your guides btw. so THANKS for that! (: ) and the stat priority part was referring to askmrrobot for stat prios and, like I mentioned earlier, the reasoning for haste over the other alternatives fit perfectly for me. And they are supposed to be up to date -> supposedly even for SoO gear and the high natural haste on it! So I wonder... why do they recommend it? It's even "higher" on their list than the crit>mastery>haste build. (Hell, they even call crit>HASTE>mastery the "default build"!?) They seem to claim DPS and "arguably" overall healing is better with haste, IF you knew how to manage your mana well. (quote)

 

Another reason is the fact that I am sometimes being put into Shadow spec for my raid whenever we only need two healers and a little more DPS. And (thank GOD, no sorry, BLIZZARD, this will be over in the next expansion) it just sucks (sorry for the language) to collect every piece twice, just to be able to play your class [to it's fullest]. So that made sense to me, IF haste was a viable, a fully acceptable alternative to crit.

 

It really sounds like it isn't though. And this is like I said something I get the impression of more and more the longer I play and the more other priests I get to know which seem or at least claim to know what they're doing.

 

But thanks so much, your explanation seems very right and convincing. I reforged etc. and played crit/mastery today for the first time. I feel it's alright, I just have to get used to the comparatively verly slooooow cating time. :D

Oh and, but doesn't haste lower the cooldown of "small CDs" like PoM, Penance and Holy Fire?
What does it lower the cooldown from then? Nothing? ( Sorry for this nooby question unsure.png )

Edited by Klaphood

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So I wonder... why do they recommend it? It's even "higher" on their list than the crit>mastery>haste build.

I think the ordering in the list for Mr Robot is alphabetical. They also state a max output build.

PVE: Default

PVE: Haste

PVE: Max

 

IMO

Default build states better for 10 man because you want haste to be able to get optimal casts of spirit shell on both groups

 

Haste build "gives best burst" faster PoH if you could call it burst. Not really a great build.

 

Max output build, name says it all really.

 

 

 

Oh and, but doesn't haste lower the cooldown of "small CDs" like PoM, Penance and Holy Fire?

What does it lower the cooldown from then? Nothing? ( Sorry for this nooby question unsure.png )

It doesnt lower the cooldown but for spells that "tick" it can affect the tick speeds and amounts.

As Steve mentioned we have renew and holy fire that have a large enough "tick" to look at haste and they dont warrant enough of our throughput to worry about gearing haste for thier effect on those 2 spells.

 

Dont get too hung up on the Mr Robot pre set builds. They are great as cookie cutter style builds but ultimately Mr Robot is a tool and must be used by the player. Adjust the wieghts and settings to get the build you need.

 

Happy Killing :)

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Let me preface this comment by saying how other than being a member of this site I'm not affiliated with it and I'm not talking on their behalf.

 

AMR for healers is a long and annoying affair. The defaults for healers are often wrong in one way or another. For shamans it doesn't list their most attractive haste caps by default, you have to tick healing rain and healing stream totem in the sidebar to show them, and the default haste cap is 12.5% for a spell that isn't a major throughoput gain. For discipline it wrongly suggests haste as contributing to our healing, when in fact it will be detrimental. For mistweavers it doesn't differentiate between haste caps but simply suggests one static one, when you'd usually seek the lowest you can get without being over it. It overvalues trinkets like NBI in general and TAGT for disc.

 

The only build that's even remotely useful for discipline is the "Max output build", but the description is misleading, and spirit is greatly overvalued. And that build was only ever included when they realised the error of their way. Why other builds still exist are it is not default I don't know. I have no idea why Icy Veins would point people to that site without mentioning those defects. It's incredibly frustrating having to spend a lot of time to remediate AMR's inflexibility towards updating their site.

 

With that said, AMR is a great optimization tool. If it is given correct weight it will do whatever it can to optimize accordingly. The fault lies with its defaults.

 

If you intend to use AMR for disc, I'd suggest weights like:

 

Int: 1

Sp: 0.81

Crit: 0.8

Mastery: 0.65

Spirit: 0.51

Haste: 0.4

 

 

Oh and, but doesn't haste lower the cooldown of "small CDs" like PoM, Penance and Holy Fire?
What does it lower the cooldown from then? Nothing?

 

For some classes it affect smaller cooldowns due to class-specific passives. Paladins for example see Holy Shock, Crusader Strike and Judgment have their cooldown reduced by haste. The only cooldown that is indirectly affected by haste is penance since every smite reduces its cooldown by 0.5s. This is only relevant if you can get off another smite though, which puts us back to the fact that you will not want to aim for that.

 

 

Default build states better for 10 man because you want haste to be able to get optimal casts of spirit shell on both groups

What is optimal here? You should be able to easily snuggle in 4 PoHs under Spirit Shell with the help of Borrowed Time, any haste would be towards a fifth or sixth PoH, but wouldn't 2 casts per group be enough?

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Alright, thank you, Brewmonksta! smile.png

 

I had really thought, Haste affected some cooldowns as well. Good to know!
Yeah, I set up my Spirit on askmrrobot, but other than that, maybe I just trusted it a little too blindly. ^^

It's a great tool though!

 

Edit: Oh, and thank you steve. Could you maybe explain the part about Mistweaver's haste cap(s) a little more? How do you find out which is the lowest haste cap you can get? Does this mean they also disregard Haste over the other two stats? I'm asking, because I usually only play healer and it's quite sad to hear that AMR isn't best for this specific role.

 

And thanks alot for the weights!

Edited by Klaphood

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Could you maybe explain the part about Mistweaver's haste cap(s) a little more?

Without derailing the thread too much :P

 

Mistweavers have Renewing mist breakpoints where the haste allows extra ticks and the duration of the HoT allows for better coverage.

If you are under a cap you miss the tick and the length of ReM and jumps of it are out of sync, similarly to over the cap.

 

Crit is the main stat for a MW so you want to hit the highest possible breakpoint whilst maintaining enough crit to have healing throughput and mana tea generation.

 

AMR by default puts you on the lowest breakpoint so you then have to test the builds by altering the breakpoints and reviewing if you are sacrificing too much of your crit to reach the break point and then deciding on the weights you want.

 

There are alot of threads and info on the mistweaver stuff on the monk forums around Mr Robot and weights and how to actually drive the Mr Robot site so if you want some more specifics then head over to the monk forums :)

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Yeah, I think so. Thanks though for the short explanation.^^ I knew about breakpoints, but no more.

 

Thank you again guys, I think my question has been answered and more than that. I should know where to go if I have more questions! Thanks alot, honestly I never had expected to get that much help. smile.png

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