Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Priest T10 4pc bonus... worth the hassle?

Ever since the stats/bonuses for the Priest's T10 set were released, I have been trying to decide whether or not I like the 4pc bonus. Keep in mind, while I do respec Holy for a fight here and there, I primarily raid as Discipline.

The bonus reads as follows:

"(4)Your Circle of Healing and Penance spells have a 20% chance to cause your next Flash Heal cast within 6 sec to reset the cooldown on your Circle of Healing and Penance spells."

Upon first glance, you may have the same initial reaction that I did in thinking that it'd be really cool to have my Penance CD reset after a flash heal.

After thinking about it over the last few weeks, I've come to the conclusion that there are two major problems with this set bonus.

1.) It relies on a proc in order to reset a Cooldown, on a key spell. This is a problem because any priest worth his/her salt already knows how to play well with those set cooldowns in place, and works around them.

I'm not saying that I would ever complain about my Penance CD being reset... but the problem comes when people start relying on or getting used to that Penance CD being reset.

If you get too used to that Penance CD being gone 20% of the time, and then change out some gear... your tanks or raid members may not be too pleased with you.

Personally, I've never been one to rely on procs. Like any other proc in the game, it'll be nice when it happens, but you should always plan on playing as though the proc isn't there... and just react when it is.

2.) The amount of "wasted" stats on your gear you need to go through in order to get the 4pc bonus.

As I said above, I primarily raid as Discipline. As such, it is my opinion that Spirit, as a stat, is completely worthless. (as a priest raiding current content, keep in mind)

As a Discipline priest, aside from Meditation, there are no talents that benefit from high Spirit. With the way the game is setup right now in terms of raiding, and gear, Mana is not enough of an issue to stack your spirit in order to benefit more from Meditation. You'll get spirit from other sources, there's no need to stack for it. As Discipline, it should be very rare that you ever find yourself outside of the FSR to actually benefit from straight Spirit regen. Meaning, that unlike Holy, Spirit does not increase your spellpower, nor does it noticeably increase your mana regen.

As Discipline, most of my mana regen comes from Rapture, and my PW:S being absorbed.... thus making Intellect, a much more valuable stat. Intellect increases my mana pool, making Rapture return more mana. Intellect also increases critical chance on spells, making Divine Aegis proc more often, providing more damage prevention. Intellect also passively increases your mana regen, along with spirit.

My point is, in order to receive the 4pc Tier10 bonus, you have to be wearing four of those pieces (duh). At the lowest ilevel, the priest T10 items have 406 total Spirit on the items. Granted, you don't have to wear all five pieces, but at the lowest, the gloves and shoulders, both have 71 spirit... that's a lot of what I would consider a "waste" of a stat, just for a 4pc bonus that I consider pretty mediocre.

Now, the 2pc T10 bonus is pretty nice, and worth the spirit, but the 4pc just isn't worth it for me... Especially when you look at some of the Frost Emblem items, and Ashen Verdict crafted items that don't have the spirit, but have both Haste and Crit on them... two stats I value much more highly than Spirit.

8 comments:

  1. I agree with this. I don't think I'll be shooting for the 4p bonus. My problem with it is that in order to get any benefit from the proc, I will have to actually NOTICE it procs while in the heat of battle.

    While I'm pretty good at using my Penance every cooldown,the cooldown isn't so extremely long that an extra second or two here and there is going to make a difference, because it is not uncommon for me to be busy bubbling or moving or casting when my Penance comes off cooldown, and therefore waiting a second or two to use it.

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  2. I don't know which addons you use while playing, but I believe Power Auras will allow you to set it for that proc (if you do ever want to try the 4pc bonus)... making it much more "flashy" and making it easier to notice when it does proc.

    I utilize it for tracking Surge of Light procs when I'm holy, and it works great.

    Here's a link to the addon on Curse if you want to check it out (if you don't already use it).

    http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/powerauras-classic.aspx

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  3. Which 2pc are you considering? I doubt I'll be getting 264 or 277 tokens for quite some time. The dropped shoulders, the crafted lefts, the frost gloves and frost chest are all pretty darned good.

    I guess I need to compare them to the 251 t10 and see which hurts me the least.

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  4. @sriggins

    The 2pc bonus for priest healing t10 is

    "Your Flash Heal has a 33% chance to cause the target to heal 33% of the healed amount over 9 sec."

    A 33% chance to cast a free HoT on a Flash heal is pretty nice.

    I agree though, that there are better items out there. The tier items, due to the amount of spirit on them, are pretty low on the me-willing-to-spend-frost-badges-on-them food chain. Once I have the other items I want from badges, a couple of the Tier items would still be considered upgrades for a couple slots, and would fill in nicely until I'm lucky enough to win a dropped item.

    You also need to have the 251 Tier pieces before you can get the higher ones, even if you have a dropped token... so I'll likely end up spending the badges on them eventually anyway.

    The set is great for Holy, imo, and since Holy's my off-spec, it can't hurt to have some decent gear for it.

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  5. How can you even contemplate these bonuses as any good? It's the worst tier gear a priest has been shown (Holy or DISC). 2pc bonus is utter worthless, it's a "free" renew which btw heals for way less than an actual renew. Worthless.

    4pc bonus is utter worthless as stated in prior comments, think about it.

    Most of all it relies on PROC or RNG if you will, with the earlier bonuses you knew exactly what you got and when.

    It's the worst set ever designed for a priest (healing) - go for non-tier items, so much better and way more worth it at this very moment.

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  6. @ Mr./Ms. Anonymous

    Did you even read the post you're commenting on? The whole point was how the 4pc bonus was NOT worth getting, for the exact reason you listed... because it relies on the RNG.

    The 2pc however, may not be as nice as some set bonuses in the past, but it's not bad either.

    I have not personally had a chance to test out the 2 pc bonus, because the 251 ilvl T10 pieces aren't better than my current gear for disc, but according to wowhead, and other sources, those that HAVE tested it have seen it do 4+% of their total healing done.

    4% healing, for FREE, is a pretty nice chunk of healing. It's about as useful as the increased healing to PoM or the 10% crit to PoH that T9 and T8 gave for set bonuses, and by far more useful than the extra jump to PoM that T7 gave.

    Set bonuses are not supposed to be game-changing. They are supposed to be nice bonuses to gear that you wouldn't get if you didn't use the set.

    Are they always worth the stats you may have to give up instead of using other gear? No, which is the sole point of this post. The point of the post is that the 4pc bonus is NOT worth having to wear 4 pcs of T10, vs the other gear available, in my opinion.

    Obviously you agree. The 2pc however, I don't feel is as bad as you're making it out to be. It's better than 10% crit on PoH (which also relies on the RNG), and about as useful as 10% increased healing on PoM.

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  7. 10% crit on PoH is as you stated a RNG. But with a higher chance of actually happening, simply because it's a AoE healing spell which means it actually has a increased chance of happening since it's across multiple targets with individual crit chance. Hope that made sense.

    And it was 20% increased healing on PoM which is a fair chunk and outways 10% crit on PoH. Empowered Renew bonus aswell was very good, as renew in it self is quite a imba HoT (with glyph). Again, RNG but a "glorified" RNG (20% crit and above friendly). And improved Aegis to DISC was just golden.

    And yes, I did read what it was about - hence stating pc4 is utter useless which everyone with any knowledge of priest would know, for the simple reasons already mentioned in post itself and by random comments.

    I merely commented because some people were trying to justify it. If anything I don't agree with that it could "mess" up the healing rotation. What healing rotation? Priest are highly situational and should heal from a pre-emptive perspective (think pre-emptive is the word (knowing when damage hits)) and DISC is all about keeping shields up and mitigating damage. Missing the penance cd reset is just down to slacking. :)

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  8. I've been playing a Holy Priest since Day 1 beta (Nov 2004). Look me up at Daddypriest, on the US-Windrunner server. I've given these T10 bonuses a lot of thought and offer this for this priest community's consideration.

    At present, I'm a Renew/Empowered Renew monger. I focus almost strictly on raid healing, leaving tank healing to the Paladins and rolling Lifeblooms from Druids.

    I've not tried the T10 bonuses yet, but the following is a portion of my own theorycrafting, and I'd appreciate any useful feedback.

    In my view, the T10 bonuses would not only require a Holy Priest to completely alter his/her healing rotation, it would require that other healers in the raid compensate for those changes as well. Here's my reasoning.

    The T10 bonuses are designed to go together. Looking at the 2pc proc, this would entice a Holy Priest to switch to a Flash Heal-PoM-CoH spam rotation. The 4pc proc introduces another element into the Flash Heal spam. I use Power Auras to show when CoH is available. So, a can foresee a 4pc T10 rotation going something like:

    CoH, Flash Heal, PoM, Flash Heal, Flash Heal ... repeat (when CoH is up). Between the raid-oriented healing of CoH and PoM, and the Flash Heal residual HoT, I can see this being a style of "Blanket Healing" - just a different style that Renew blanketing. Now, the Holy Priest isn't casting Flash Heal solely for the healing itself, but also for CoH cooldown proc. In essence, this turns Flash Heal into a pro-active, rather than a reactive heal (not unlike Renew).

    A couple of things fall out from this line of thinking.

    First, I can envision that a priest relying on 2pc and/or 4pc T10 bonuses would probably favor haste (over, say, crit or spell power) much more than a T9-build, Renew priest. After all, the entire rotation depends on getting Flash Heals out as quickly as possible (both for the residual HoT and to induce the CoH proc as often as possible).

    Second, using this build and healing style causes the Holy Priest to compete (perhaps the correct word is "overlap") much more with the role of the Holy Paladin. Earlier, I mentioned that switching to this rotation would cause others to have to alter their healing styles as well. This is what I meant. I can imagine a 4pc T10 Holy Priest competing much more for heals on the tanks and creating unwanted over-healing against the Holy Paladins (and the Resto Shaman who are undoubtedly pushing Chain Heals through the tanks or melee). Moreover, the pressure on Resto Druids' Rejuvenation blankets (on fights like Blood-Queen Lana'thel) goes up considerably because the Renews aren't cycling through the groups as they once were.

    Taking it all into consideration, I'm still dubious of the T10 priest bonuses, but I can at least see what Blizzard was trying to accomplish by designing the 2pc and 4pc T10 bonuses to work together.

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