The Raid Warning boys were joined by some of the biggest names in the Priest community. We fielded questions from listeners, visitors to the PlusHeal forums, ShadowPriest.com, and our community wiki on EpicAdvice.com. Some were drunk, some were hungover, but everyone had a great time and provided lots of great info!
EDIT:
4pc Tier10 changes got you down? Call the Raid Warning Rant Line: 707-602-RANT (7268)
Featuring:
Shadow Priests
Fox Van Allen of Wow.com
Jonny of This Is Outcasted
Xenoaurora
Holy Priests
Matticus of World of Matticus
Aliena of Tank Spot
Derevka of Tales of a Priest
Discipline Priests
Thespius of World of Matticus and Raid Warning
Avalonna of Tales of a Priest
Lilitharien of Divine Aegis
The Podcast is available via:
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RSS
Mininova.org
Also don’t forget to check out last month’s Wild Shots Hunter Roundtable
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Holy section was good! As a shadow priest was a little disappointed with that section. Answers such as crit vs. haste were, quite frankly, incorrect and misleading (point for point haste wins by a substantial margin except in very rare situations, like double Reign of the Dead, and even then haste still wins by a bit); beating the dead horse of having Unique Snowflake Utility for shadow priests is simply tired. I don’t know the backgrounds of the speakers on the shadow segment, but I felt it could have used a voice of greater experience like Aliena in the holy section.
I would be quite interested if you could give me a reference on the math indicating the benefit of haste over crit. I do a bit theorycrafting myself and I would love to see the works on it.
AFAIK SW:P does not benefit from Haste though the other DoT’s do. Crit, however, has a 100% damage bonus to all spells that shadow uses. Now.. Haste is a strong throughput stat in mathematical terms because:
– 1% Haste = 1% throughput, mathematically speaking
– Haste requires less rating than crit.
However, such maths often neglect other factors:
– Mind Blast has a cooldown and thus there is a reduced benefit of haste for that spell.
– Haste increases manacost, the most eagerly neglected factor of haste. I think BobTurkey once added this factor into his calculations and it dragged down the value of Haste completely.
– It relies on additional spellcasting which is subject to many other factors like lag, fps, fight mechanics and player skill. Of course, we could just diss players who don’t use it properly, but even the elite players may find it hard measure that aspect of themselves.
– The benefit of the glyph of Shadow is often neglected or undervalued.
Never the less, maths comprising most factors will probably yield an optimal balance between crit and haste for various gear levels. That behavior is unescapable.
I’ll make a wild guess that those 2 ratio’s are less than 10% apart from eachother. If so, it is likely that a player will end up gearing for more haste since there is so much crit available from other sources like talents, enchants, intellect and raid buffs. The haste acquired from raidbuffs will impact less factors, because of its multiplicative nature (though the diminishing return from haste and the reduced effectiveness on MB should still be in effect).
So, considering those factors, I have reason to doubt one stat can be canonized as superior. If maths and theories exist that go deeper than my own and manage to prove me wrong, then I would be very interested in them!
Having some balance of crit and haste is always preferable because DPS increasing stats feed off of each other; the more of one you have, the better the other is. However, in all but the most extreme cases, this effect can be safely ignored because you’ll always have some balance of the two stats. In every single slot where it’s available, given equal ilevel, you want the piece that gives both crit and haste, so you’ll always have good amounts of both. The difference, then, comes when you pick between haste and crit on the odd spirit or hit piece you find, and for gemming yellow slots with ametrines.
shadowpriest.com and elitistjerks.com’s scaling factors, derived from Simcraft, currently approximate crit as worth .88 spellpower and haste as about .98 spellpower per point of rating for an “average” priest. The most recent version of Simcraft shows for my priest, who is geared in majority 264 with a couple 277s and 251s, haste as .89 and crit at .78 spellpower. You can of course upload your own profile in and get personalized numbers. The point is, on average, haste is approximately 10-15% better than crit, point for point, mathematically. Formulas are available if you wish to research them.
To cover your non-mathematical points:
–Mind Blast has a reduced benefit from haste but that is factored into calculations. In addition, at high enough gear levels and with 4pt10, you drop Mind Blast from your rotation entirely. I no longer use it at all unless Replenishment is needed. Shadow Word Pain is one of our lowest damage spells and so while it doesn’t benefit from haste, it only has so much effect on the calculations.
–Haste does increase mana spent, but mana is very, very far from an issue for a shadow priest in almost every fight in the game; every priest should have Imp Spirit Tap and 3 minute shadowfiend which should be enough anyway, but then you can also spec Focused Mind if you still run low, and you can disperse on phase changes and other such forced DPS stop times. If you’re running oom as a spriest you’re simply doing something wrong.
–Glyph of Shadow should always be active anyway because you still have plenty of crit on your gear. In addition, even with lower crit %, getting more spells off will affect Glyph of Shadow uptime anyway. It’s a wash and not worth discussing.
–The effect of additional spellcasting, especially with 4pt10, and how it interacts with latency, player skill, etc is pretty much the only issue worth bringing up. My argument is this: in an extreme situation of haste stacking compared to crit stacking, the difference in your cast times will range between .25 seconds to .5 seconds between all of your spells. This isn’t a huge change and shouldn’t dramatically affect your innate skill, and I seriously doubt it ever would affect it enough to outweigh the mathematical superiority of haste.
Alright. I think we are looking at the same model but from a different side. Given 0 crit and 0 haste and the choice to distribute 4000 rating as you wish, you would probably be best investing in both crit and haste even if you’d take, say 2600 hasterating and only 1400 crit. Is haste ‘better’? It is in the sense that you’d want more haste than crit but it is not unconditionally better. Now, your gear choices may limit the options, obviously… and this is where your point is likely true: with the gear choices available, you’ll probably want to gem haste or go for haste on the odd spirit item. That’s a good conclusion, but it is important to note the starting situation. Imagine a holy priest focusing on haste (which isn’t unheard of) then it wouldn’t be odd if he should focus on crit more on his +spirit+haste gear at the start untill he gets the necessay +haste+crit items.
If I check the crew’s answer on that question at 7:20 – “General numbers from Shadowpriest.com and EJ read that Spellpower pretty much equals Haste although it slightly depends on how much haste and spellpower you have, so it’s very possible that is has more benefits than crit”. Then I can’t help feeling it’s in line with your numbers: “derived from Simcraft, currently approximate crit as worth .88 spellpower and haste as about .98 spellpower per point of rating”
What part am I missing? I’m no pro on Shadow so if I’m not seeing it.. it’s probably because I’m missing something (apart from common sense, but that’s off topic
). You seem to know this stuff quite well!
I made the comment after I had listened to the rest of the podcast and exact details had faded. After re-listening to that one spot again, the speaker does mention haste is near equal to spellpower, but as a whole the answer focuses far too much on crit. It’s a strange, strange situation if — again given equal ilevel — anyone could ever use crit more than haste in game.
You can make a theoretical argument too where having 8000 spellpower and 0 crit and haste would be better, but it’d never happen in game; and since everyone has easy access to 245+ gear now, pretty much everyone will have a decent balance. The talk of “haste cap,” which would never happen on a spriest (during bloodlust and other haste buffs that’d cap Mind Blast you go to pure Mind Flay), and the talk of latency, really have no place in the discussion. The “sliding scale” will never tip in the direction of crit with any “real” gear set. It’s overcomplicating things and planting weird ideas in the heads of the kind of newbie shadow priest who might benefit from listening to the podcast.
As a side note on my second listen, the talk of Mind Sear being a “trash padder” is nonsense. It’s an absolutely amazing tool for a number of bosses. Glyph of Dispersion gets a little lip service but the spell itself is disparaged multiple times in the podcast when the fact is skilled usage of it on bosses like Festergut, Sindrigosa, and Lich King can lead to sizable DPS increases, to say nothing of the additional defensive allotments.
Actually no, I don’t think 8000 SP and 0 crit and haste would beat any other combination. But I do get your point and I fear we’d trail into a pointless debate if I keep hammering on it
I really think it’s too bad you are disappointed on the Shadow part. I enjoyed the part and I feel I learned from it. But I’ll admit that is ‘coming from a healer’ as Shadow was little more than vacation trip for me. I don’t think the podcast was detaied in exact math terms per se, but that is hardly the goal of a podcast IMO. If I need the exact numbers, I can go to EJ or Shadowpriest.com, knowing both were mentioned. Podcasts are capable of letting people speak and get their vision across far better than a blogpost can but it does risk trailing into a debate that may be considered ‘less crucial’ to the listeners.
I’m very pleased that Raidwarning has asked them questions regarding their view on things because it is, perhaps, the single one thing I find hard to obtain on the net. Numbers are far easier to get across on a post than such things and to have this open discussion from such a cast… just wow!
Ah well! I’ll just sip another beer and listen to it again when drunk. Knowing this crew, I’m bound to find deeper meanings and messages sent to the drunken mind.
I thought all the segments were very cool. I think the shadow section just had more weighted questions towards cataclysm is all whereas the disc and holy had more on raiding and dreamwalker fights so you didnt get to hear about the spriests skills as much. Playing a shadow priest myself I do understand that haste is greater than crit but fox had a good point that with a bad comp haste might not scale as well. Also well it might be beating a dead horse I agree with xeno that if you are going to take away a (unique snowflake) aspect than shadow priests will continue to have a right to gripe until they are scaled better on the damage meters.
It was a lot of fun ont he show, and I’d love to take part in it again. Should make it a regular feature.
I’d really love to do a healcast or something, once a month, but ugh, I wish I had the resources and the knowledge to do so.
I like this idea! We could run with with it, maybe….
Oh please,make it so! This would just about rock my world.
Anyone know what the name of the intro song is?
Its a bootleg remix done by The Bloody Beetroots called “Goose – Black Gloves”
Had a great time. Thanks for having me, gents.
Everyone remember to do a itunes review of Raidwarning on itunes!
I love this podcast, and I wish it was a regular thing. Thanks!
Really enjoyed listening to this despite not being a Priest good work guys!
I would really like to hear a Resto Shaman round table sometime if you guys plan on doing this again in the future
Shadow guide was definitely lacking, I heard spriests in a podcast!!! and now that I listened I’m a little disappointed. The issues talked about were definitely not anything a very experienced spriest would even get anything out of, especially if they keep on top of theory crafting but I would have to agree with their expectations for Cat as far as our talent tree goes.
F*** MAGES!!!
Are you planning to do a round table event for each class?
It really depends on how much of a community there is for each class. We’re by no means experts (which is why we don’t make the round tables about us, or talk much for that matter), so we try to gather as many people who know and talk about the class as we can and build a show around them.
The hunters and priests shows just came together from people we’ve heard of in the community and their input. By all means, if there’s enough support for a class we’ll create one. We just don’t want to make a “round table” that’s just us and a few uninformed guildies. It doesn’t benefit anyone really.
So yeah, if there’s one you’d like to see made, forward suggestions to RAIDWARNINGPODCAST@GMAIL.COM and let us know the class and maybe a few key members of the community we can contact.
Great job on the round table event, it’s awesome to be able to listen to a great priest podcast.
Regarding the discussion about Mind Sear ( around 20:00 to 22:00 min in the podcast), I think that the shadow priests listening to this also have to keep in mind that you usually lose dps by only spamming Mind Sear on a pack of 3-5 mobs. Mind Sear is a great area damage ability but it’s normal that it doesn’t do as much dps than different abilities from other classes. That dps “loss” should be filled by keeping your dots on all the targets from that group and, used in conjunction with Mind Sear, should greatly improve your dps on small groups if the enemies live for more than 30 sec. I hope that this can help some shadow priests manage those 3-5 mob pulls a little better!
I just stumbled over your post and the moment I saw the “Power Word: Fail” I had to ROFL. This alone is a reason to browse your site
Philip
Would have like to hear more on how haste affects priests talents i.e dropping points from MB to increase uptime on MF. But loved the PC.