Chuggin' along, healing heroics, flailing with limited success at raid bosses (Nomnomtron still refuse to fall over).
There's a lot of moaning about on the various fora concerning how hard this expansion is on healers. I think I've made my stance pretty clear on that (it isn't really, assuming your group can collectively outwit a catfish), but as I recently got my druid to 85 and started healing the odd normal dungeon to gear up for heroics I realised one other large factor that may be influencing my position.
My main, being a shaman, has many more tools to help out of the group is less than stellar; short cooldown interrupt, offensive purge, and a potentially long-duration CC (taking this opportunity to once again say how much I hate that I'm forced into enhancement subspec, making these utilities less reliable than I'd like). Add some totems that sometimes help (earthbind, grounding), and I'm actually pretty confident of my ability to cover for DPS or tanks that may lack in several departments. There are limits, of course, but just being able to take up a little bit of the slack helps immensely whilst pugging.
Of course, I don't have the priestly ability to move people out of fire, but such is life.
Now, I consider my resto druid. Being able to remove poisons is a lovely thing, and cyclone and roots are useful in a pinch. But that's basically the extent of the utility provided. Now if I end up with a group of marginal window-lickers, all I can do is heal through the uninterrupted spells/undispelled mob buffs/un-CC'd caster mobs setting fire to my face from afar...
Oh, and battle res. My experience with this from an outsider perspective is that it gets used to raise a DPS in the middle of a raid boss fight, therefore preventing me from reincarnating later when I take a fire bath.
Basically, I feel that I lack tools as a druid. All I can do is heal, and I'm not even convinced I enjoy that under the new healing regime. The joyous mobility of druid healing now comes with a hefty mana price-tag, whilst simultaneously punishing the use of any cast-time heals on a target without a HoT thanks to the mastery. Synergy: you are doing it wrong.
Underlying all this is the nagging suspicion that neither healing spec is actually that great when it comes to raw throughput. However, I'm absolutely positive that my (in)competence and gear are far larger factors in determining success right now. By the time such theoretical concerns as maximum sustainable throughput become significant, things will be patched to Hades and back.
Taking a positive stance, kitty is still lots of fun. Mmm, bleeds.
Monday 24 January 2011
Tuesday 4 January 2011
Back on the Wagon
Despite all attempts not to cave in, my shaman is back in Cataclysm. Slightly behind the crowd and only just into heroics, the healing game is an interesting beast right now.
For one thing, healing is still very easy iff your DPS and tank are competent. The days of saving bads standing in fire - over. Or at least put on hold, pending better gear and familiarity with the new palette of healing tools.
One thing I'm particularly interested in is the new relative ordering of stats for healing. Mastery in particular is quite tricky, as it depends on conditions outwith your gearing strategy to a large extent and this makes it hard to model.
As I'm messing around with Clojure at the moment, I decided to whip up a little 'healing simulator' that spam-heals a single target taking damage with some simple profiles, using a minimal priority setup for healing spell selection. Whilst this is in many, many ways incomplete and buggy, I thought the results were interesting enough to leave them here (and when I iron out a few bugs, I'll post the code somewhere too).
I used my shaman's base stats as of a day or two ago, in a mixture of pre-heroic blues and a smattering of heroic and rep items, and then simulated after adding a hefty chunk of one stat - 1000 ratings worth, although the ordering seems consistent for smaller increases and after changing the base stats somewhat.
First, bumpy damage. This attempts to model somewhat low, consistent damage, with periodic large spikes, which fits a number of fights if painted in sufficiently broad strokes.
Next, essentially random damage. This is some kind of nightmare scenario, where the tank's relative health is completely unpredictable from one GCD to the next. The simulator, unphased, simply makes its best guess as to an appropriate heal from one moment to the next.
So, immediately it can be seen that in this very crude scenario, intellect is king for e-HPS. It also lowers MPS, by allowing efficient heals to do more of the heavy lifting and having some tiny effect on Improved Water Shield procs. Considering it'll improve spirit-based regen and replenishment, intellect is looking really quite tasty.
Next up, haste is a good throughput stat, but that throughput comes at considerably increased MPS. So far, so unremarkable, although it's interesting that intellect appears to provide a stronger bonus to effective healing under the new healing model.
Mastery is surprisingly not-bad. It's not quite as good as haste, but it's not far off, and doesn't have a downside. Sure, it does nothing for you when you're healing people at full health, but in that situation so does every other stat - they just generate extra overhealing. Considering the variance I'm seeing in the results, it has negligible impact on MPS, although a smarter sim could probably save more mana here.
Crit is, to a surprising degree, not a great throughput stat. It does provide a decent chunk of mana saved, and the bonus of Ancestral Healing can't be underestimated, but it still feels underwhelming.
The result of all this: it's probably irrelevant. I'll wait for some actual raiding experience to inform my iteration of the simulator, but healing really isn't a problem suited to this kind of thing. Still, the braindead results do at least convince me that 'haste-stacking uber alles' is out of the window for the foreseeable future, Mastery is probably not that bad (I think I'll stop reforging it, although the JP stuff has a ton), and intellect is currently looking delicious.
AH uptime, pretty realtime graphs, and some priority-queue optimiser are things I'd like to add to the sim. I'll see how that goes; for now I need Earthen Ring rep!
For one thing, healing is still very easy iff your DPS and tank are competent. The days of saving bads standing in fire - over. Or at least put on hold, pending better gear and familiarity with the new palette of healing tools.
One thing I'm particularly interested in is the new relative ordering of stats for healing. Mastery in particular is quite tricky, as it depends on conditions outwith your gearing strategy to a large extent and this makes it hard to model.
As I'm messing around with Clojure at the moment, I decided to whip up a little 'healing simulator' that spam-heals a single target taking damage with some simple profiles, using a minimal priority setup for healing spell selection. Whilst this is in many, many ways incomplete and buggy, I thought the results were interesting enough to leave them here (and when I iron out a few bugs, I'll post the code somewhere too).
I used my shaman's base stats as of a day or two ago, in a mixture of pre-heroic blues and a smattering of heroic and rep items, and then simulated after adding a hefty chunk of one stat - 1000 ratings worth, although the ordering seems consistent for smaller increases and after changing the base stats somewhat.
First, bumpy damage. This attempts to model somewhat low, consistent damage, with periodic large spikes, which fits a number of fights if painted in sufficiently broad strokes.
| Bumpy | Intellect | Mastery | Crit | Haste |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| e-hps change (%) | 9.56 | 5.06 | 4.34 | 7.75 |
| mps change (%) | -1.61 | -0.56 | -2.34 | 6.62 |
Next, essentially random damage. This is some kind of nightmare scenario, where the tank's relative health is completely unpredictable from one GCD to the next. The simulator, unphased, simply makes its best guess as to an appropriate heal from one moment to the next.
| Random | Intellect | Mastery | Crit | Haste |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| e-hps change (%) | 8.09 | 5.67 | 4.24 | 6.92 |
| mps change (%) | -1.76 | -0.16 | -2.82 | 6.28 |
So, immediately it can be seen that in this very crude scenario, intellect is king for e-HPS. It also lowers MPS, by allowing efficient heals to do more of the heavy lifting and having some tiny effect on Improved Water Shield procs. Considering it'll improve spirit-based regen and replenishment, intellect is looking really quite tasty.
Next up, haste is a good throughput stat, but that throughput comes at considerably increased MPS. So far, so unremarkable, although it's interesting that intellect appears to provide a stronger bonus to effective healing under the new healing model.
Mastery is surprisingly not-bad. It's not quite as good as haste, but it's not far off, and doesn't have a downside. Sure, it does nothing for you when you're healing people at full health, but in that situation so does every other stat - they just generate extra overhealing. Considering the variance I'm seeing in the results, it has negligible impact on MPS, although a smarter sim could probably save more mana here.
Crit is, to a surprising degree, not a great throughput stat. It does provide a decent chunk of mana saved, and the bonus of Ancestral Healing can't be underestimated, but it still feels underwhelming.
The result of all this: it's probably irrelevant. I'll wait for some actual raiding experience to inform my iteration of the simulator, but healing really isn't a problem suited to this kind of thing. Still, the braindead results do at least convince me that 'haste-stacking uber alles' is out of the window for the foreseeable future, Mastery is probably not that bad (I think I'll stop reforging it, although the JP stuff has a ton), and intellect is currently looking delicious.
AH uptime, pretty realtime graphs, and some priority-queue optimiser are things I'd like to add to the sim. I'll see how that goes; for now I need Earthen Ring rep!
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