Holy Trinkets!

WoW!  What a whirlwind Panda Land has been!  I have more to post then I have time but I want to start here: TRINKETS!  I am seeing mixed data and opinions on trinkets for healing so I wanted to clear it up using the best data we have.  Here is the chart:

Look but no touch! Raid for months first!

Blue had some posts about the proc chances and the internal cooldowns (ICD) on the new raid trinkets so I took that data plus my own data from raid this week to come up with stat averages and give them total stat weights.

My data for Price and Barrel are from 10 minute Elegon Fights plus I used in-game Spirit and Combat Regen numbers to come up with a spirit value for the mana gained by Price of Progress.  As a neat fact I was gaining 50k mana per attempt from Price during our 9.5 minute Elegon wipes @ 5% .  Edit:  We are now 6/6.  Same proc rate though.

As you can see Price and Barrel are close.  Vial is your best choice for heroic dungeon trinkets and then if you pick up a DMC you will have a great trinket till Terrace of Endless Spring or Heroic Emperor which will be at least 1 month away (maybe 2-3 months for kills) but if you are going to drop 60k on a trinket know it WONT be BIS in this tier.

Why no Pickled Egg trinket? At 904 int and the importance of regen right now a haste proc just isn’t that valuable.

Edit:  Added Alchemy trinket.  Fixed math errors. Added Raid Finder Loot.

Haste and Eternal Flame: HoT Break Points

I did this for Sacred Shield so I should do this for Eternal Flame.  I will Start with the graph:

Step Chart!

As you can see every 10% haste we get an extra tick of the EF HoT on the 5′s (i.e. 5%, 15%, 25%, etc).

Along with the step wise increase in the number of ticks the actual duration of the HoT oscillates up and down a 1/2 tick of 30 seconds.  Thus some times it will be 31+/- sec and sometimes 29+/- seconds in length.

Here is the full data:

Lots of Numbers!

I personally don’t think it is worth setting your haste numbers around an extra tick of a small hot.  But if you did if you hit the break point where you just get that extra tick you also benefit from a longer duration by 0.77 (100% haste) to 1.43 seconds (5% haste).

Holy Paladin DPS: Rotation Guide for 5.0 and Prepping for Challenge Modes!

I put together a guide to Holy Paladin DPS after I did some testing on different rotations.  The simplest rotation ended up being the best which is great for doing a DPS/Healing Combo for the upcoming speed run challenge modes.

Extended Recap:

• Holy Shock > Harsh Word > Denounce.
• Other Rotations that involve 2-handers, Crusader Stike, and/or Seal Of Truth fall flat due to lack of expertise, limited melee damage, or spell power penalty for a 2-hander.
• Holy Shock/Harsh Word and even Denounce are close to dps per cast so it is more important to do something than it is to nail the rotation.
• I needed Divine Plea to slow myself from being OOM and could only sustain about 3 minutes of DPS thus our DPS will come at a Mana Penalty even with the 5.0 changes.

Stacking Eternal Flame with Holy Avenger

Need new content!

A Return to the Sacred Shield and Eternal Flame Debate

I spent a lot of time playing with numbers this past week to model Sacred Shield and Eternal Flame so I could make an informed decision about which to pick overall or when one would be obviously better than another.  I had so many numbers and tables it was utterly useless and confusing.  I thought I had a good grasp on the situation but the more number I had the harder it got to pick a clear winner.  I stopped trying to model it and went to the raw data and I feel good about my conclusion:  Sacred Shield is better better than Eternal Flame even when it isn’t.

Always better even when it isn’t?

I got new data from this weeks raid of 0% Dragon Soul on Heroic 10 man.  This week I used Eternal Flame for the clear.  I went to the logs and quickly found Logs combined the direct Eternal flame heal (Word of Glory) with the hot.  So if poked around till I could seperate out the heal over time component.  I made a chart to find out the overall healing per 30 seconds and then used that to compare to my Sacred Shield raid from the previous week.  Unfortunately I did a poor job at modeling Sacred Shield and I had to go through the data again to figure out actual up-time and over-healing.  I took the fight length and figured out how many Sacred Shield ticks there should have been and used that as an up-time rather than what WoL had which was skewed by shields being fully absorbed early.

So many datas!

As you can see the average puts Sacred Shield clearly over Eternal Flame.  There is variation however and Eternal Flame ends up above Sacred Shield on Morchok, Zon’ozz, Hagara, and Madness.  Why?:

• Morchok: 2 people taking damage at 1 time in large spikes favors 2 Eternal Flame hots.
• Zon’ozz, Hagara, Madness:  My up-time on Sacred Shield sucked due to range and sucking.  Sacred shield was abnormally lowered by my fail.

Where Eternal Flame should excel is multi-hotting players when there is raid wide damage but the problem is Light of Dawn is much better unless it is only 2-3 characters but due to holy power restrictions I found I could not keep 2 Eternal Flames ticking regularly and do my normal healing job.  If all I had to do is keep Eternal Flame ticking sure, but that doesn’t keep the raid alive better than using our more powerful aoe healing skills.  Thus I found Eternal Flame distracting and if I can only really keep 1 hot/shield rolling I would rather due the passive once that heals for more.  Three cheers for Sacred Shield:  Sacred Shield!  Sacred Shield!  Sacred Shield MACRO WITH Beacon of Light!!! WHAT?

2 for 1 win!

How to pick between Sacred Shield and Eternal Flame

Eternal Flame versus Sacred Shield pisses me off.  One is hot on a spell you already use, the other is a whole new passive spell.  They both scale and both have fights that might prefer the other.  Right?  How do you pick and why.  I decided to take this question on with raid data and spread sheets.

What I did:  Raided 0% Buff Heroic Dragon Soul with Sacred Shield talent.  Opened up my raid logs here and here.  Made a spread sheet that tracked sacred shield total healing, up-time, and over heal for each fight.  Then I looked at my Holy Power production, LoD usage, and Word of Glory Use.  I then ran the numbers on Eternal Flame and Sacred Shield healing.  I took the averages and applied it to a “per 30second/per cast” average and then compared hypothetical healing per fight.  Here it is:

WTB Panda Land

What is my conclusion?  They are pretty near identical when played passively.  Over the course of the raid if you just played like you normally do with Eternal Flame or with Sacred Shield you might vary only 100-300 hps (of 30k averages…).  However, if you are able to minimize over-healing and weave up to 2 Eternal Flames at a time you could achieve a real difference.

Next week I will raid with Eternal Flame and will see how the numbers pan out.

Sacred Shield And Haste Scaling

Sacred Shield is a funky spell.  When Scaling with Haste it sometimes is more than 30 seconds, sometimes less than 30 seconds and never tells us how many ticks it is doing per cast.  I ran some numbers and here is the graph:

10% – 30% – 50% – 70% – 90% our are magic numbers?

So basically this is how it works:  Sacred shield has a 30 second base with 5 ticks at 6 seconds each.  As our haste goes up the tick time goes down.  After there is enough time to get 5 ticks plus a 0.5 tick, 1.5 ticks, 2.5 ticks etc. in we get an extra tick.  So the total Sacred Shield time can be up to 1/2 a tick longer than 30 seconds or 1/2 a tick shorter than 30 seconds.  Haste is not linear in how it scales so we get some funky numbers around 30 seconds.  Here is the full chart I used to figure this out:

More Chartz

So should we care about the haste break points?  No.  Why?  Because how often we refresh SS will only vary by a few seconds and more haste is faster ticks no matter what.  So Haste is a great thing for Sacred Shield all the way through and no amount of haste will be “wasted”.

 

Holy Paladin 5.0.4 Single Target Healing and How to Pick Light of Dawn or Word of Glory

Level 85 – iLvL 408 – No Raid Buffs

Here is what you need to know about the above chart:

1. Heal per second rankings for a single heal: Word of Glory > Flash of Light > Divine Light > Holy Shock > Holy Light.
2. Using Light of Dawn to heal the tank is about as good as a Holy Shock and 55% less effective than WoG.
3. For sustained damage you can do Divine Lightx2 – Holy Shock – WoG at a mana usage rate almost equal to Holy Light spam and you do the same HPS as a pure DL then WoG spam.  So use Holy Shock!
4. Flash of light spam with WoG is 20% more healing than DL spam but 40% more mana.

To recap:  Use WoG for spike damage to single targets, LoD is far too low even with beacon.  Don’t Skip Holy Shock!       For insane damage use Flash of light only if you cant keep up with DLx2/HS/WoG rotation because the later mentioned rotation is really sustainable and almost like Holy Light spam.

BTW if you use any of the 4 CD’s Paladins have (Guardian, Holy Avenger, Divine Favor, Avenging Wrath) you can equal or better FL spam and keep up your sustainable mana rotation.  Smart CD use > FL panic attacks.

Holy Paladin 5.0.4 AoE Healing Rotation Video

Using the info from the spread sheet below I put the rotation in action.

The New Holy Paladin AoE Healing Rotation Patch 5.0.4

Assumes 6 targets with ilvl 408 gear and no raid buffs.

With the changes to Light of Dawn (360 degree arc!), Holy Radiance (no more heal over time), and Holy Shock (after Holy Radiance Holy Shock heals the value of the heal split between those within 10 yards of the person healed) we have a new AoE healing rotation.  Without CD’s the best healing per second AND healing per mana is a Holy Radiance x2, Holy Shock, Light of Dawn rotation.  The only thing that beats it is using Holy Avenger (every Holy Power ability creates 3 Holy Power and 30% more healing)  and weaving Holy Radiance and LoD.  So there is no reason to spam Holy radiance anymore and don’t skip that Holy Shock!