Holy - Part Two - Gearing

In gearing a healer of any variety, there are two stages: regen and throughput. Basically, you gear for and gem regen until you have enough mana to get through 90% of encounters (there is no situation where you'll never, ever run out of mana if you look across all fights, I refuse to believe it). After you no longer have mana issues assuming you use your CDs, stop stacking regen and even replace gems and enchants for increasing your throughput. Having to use Shadowfiend and Hymn of Hope to get through a fight doesn't mean you need more regen. You only need more regen if you can't get through the fight AFTER you use Fiend and HoH (and mana pot). If you never, ever use Fiend, drop regen or evaluate if you need to cast more spells. It's wasted throughput you could be gearing for or wasted mana you could be using.


"Gearing" in these terms is somewhat less flexible than some people think it is. All of your gear is going to have spellpower and intellect on it. The variables are in spirit (usually there), and whether the piece has haste or crit (some have both!), and in how you gem and enchant.

Many new priests often ask for stat caps for Holy, and the short answer is that the only one I know of is 30% crit. Past 30% raid-buffed crit you still receive a regen benefit from HC and SoL procs, but you get less of them per percent of crit after 30% making it somewhat "meh" after that point. As Holy receives no real haste from talents (Serendipity stacks rather high), there is no real haste "cap" for priests. GCD cap (50% haste raid buffed) requires 1378 haste rating, which is not something I think is easily obtainable even in ICC gear. I'll discuss this more in the "throughput" section of this entry.

Holy is irritating sometimes as it is the least mana efficient healer in the game, so don't feel so bad if you have to gear and gem for regen while your resto druid friend is putting SP gems in every slot. The need to gem for regen should abate around the t9 level.

How to "gear" for regen
+Make sure all, or the vast, vast majority, of your gear has spirit on it. MP5 often gives similar amounts of regen, but has no scaling with raid buffs, does not give you spellpower, and the crit/haste/sp pieces without spirit are a regen loss if often a throughput gain.

+Focus on getting 25-30% raid-buffed crit. You can consider getting more, but it has a diminished effect in Holy Concentration uptime after around 30%

+Make sure you have the best versions of all the regen talents (Healing Prayers, Surge of Light)

+Gem sp+int gems in red slots, pure int gems in yellow slots, int+spirit gems in blue slots, and use Insightful Earthsiege Diamond as your meta. If you are a tailor, put the Darkglow enchant on your cloak. Do not gem pure spirit, or gem spirit outside of a blue socket. Do not gem crit, as it's not a good enough stat for Holy, and you need a stupid amount of rating to hit 1% in comparison to other ratings.

+Use a Distilled Wisdom flask (+65 int > ~30 mp5)

+Consider using +16 intellect to wrists rather than +30 SP, even if the ilevel benefit doesn't quite add up. (I'd call this a last resort of regen gearing)

+Don't use +45 spirit to weapon. It's not worth the regen or item point benefit versus +63 or +81 spellpower.

+Do not use the mp5 versions of head and shoulder enchants. The amount of mp5 they give is just too small compared to ~0.25% crit, and even while you're gearing for regen, you will want to spend as few item points on crit to reach your goal as possible.

Why intellect?
The short answer is: CDs and Replenishment. Replenishment, Hymn of Hope, Shadowfiend, and Mana Tide Totem all give mana returns based upon your max mana pool, which is only affected by your intellect. Intellect also has a place in the spirit regen coefficient, so it also benefits Meditation-based regen. Assuming all CDs and Replenishment, Intellect is worth over double the mp5 benefit of pure spirit, it is just mostly invisible regen outside of combat log parses. Lastly, it also gives you a small amount of spell crit, another regen stat.

Remember:
Too much regen and you're wasting gem slots to no real beneficial healing effect. How much regen you need depends on healing style and healing comp. A guild that uses five healers often needs more regencentric healers than one that uses seven. Your need to stack regen wanes very quickly in the 245 ilevel range from pure stats on gear, even in high mana usage set-ups, assuming a decent amount of regen talents. It's hard to watch that beloved mana pool decrease, but remember that that mana pool is effectively wasted and you could be making your heals hit harder and faster with those same gem slots. Spell mana cost is a static value, so there is a point where it is difficult to run out of mana (but what point that is depends on the healer in question).

Does stacking spellpower or haste have a regen effect?
The short answer is "no." The longer answer is that this is an apples to oranges scenario. SP and Haste are throughput stats, and the gains from both could only be considered regen oriented if you had enough SP to cast less spells (basically instead of needing two Flash Heals, for example, to heal damage, you only need one) or enough Haste to heal burst raid AoE and then take a mini-regen nap (of reduced effectiveness post 3.1) during fight lulls. Neither of these two scenarios are feasible through gems, enchants, and gear selection. While I don't suggest stacking haste for starting priests (because regen is a first concern, and crit and/or spirit pieces are going to be better overall), the main reason SP and Haste have a negative regen effect is because they are socketed and enchanted for over regen options.

Now, with all of that on the table, no amount of regen will save you from poor play. Massive overhealing (i.e. you're bored and everyone is pretty much full), meter padding (these guys are down 500 HP, time to CoH or Flash Heal), and bad spell selection (lol Gheal spam) are all things that will negatively affect your regen and may make you think you need more.

Throughput:

Gearing and gemming for throughput doesn't necessarily come up in a Holy Priest's life until much later gear levels. It is probably the most mana inefficient spec in the game, and that kinda sucks. However, if you're finally at the point where you have more mana than you can reasonably spend, it's time to change focus.

There are two strong throughput stats we have at our arsenal: spellpower and haste. Both do different things (obviously), even if both boost our HPS. Spellpower makes spells hit harder, and with Holy's high coefficients, it is very beneficial. Haste makes our spells hit sooner and make the GCD faster. To put things in a mathy way, spellpower is a linear increase, and haste is a scaling percentile, meaning they complement one another for max HPS gain. But, to reduce this gearing to math is somewhat problematic when it comes to real world healing scenarios. This isn't DPS where the idea is to max DPS as much as possible.

As you never have to pick between spellpower and haste on your own gear, what this amounts to is that in a throughput set, pick up as many haste pieces as humanly possible while keeping your gear updated with the content, then gem for either SP, Haste, or both.

As for how to gem, this is difficult to really pin down. Many Holy spells are instants (and haste doesn't make PoM jump faster or Renew tick faster) or short cast time (FH and BH are both a base of 1.5 and reducing that to 1.0 takes 50% haste, or something like 1378 rating). It is debateable whether or not digging up ~200 rating is going to add to any useful reaction time to frontloaded spells past a certain point, but it will make Flashes hit sooner, and if you can get use out of a reduced GCD then it will be beneficial (i.e. you're like me and spam hit the next instant during the GCD =x).

Prayer of Healing gets the most benefit from haste stacking, since it is a 3.0 cast time spell. While ideally you want the spell primed with a Serendipity three stack, there are going to be times that casting it with no stacks, with one stack, etc is going to be the best thing to do and you want it to be as fast as possible during this period. Having spells hit faster will help stabilize your raid while other 25 man raid healers use their own heals (WG or Rejuv tick, Chain Heal hits, etc).

My RL hyperbolically says that he wants the Holy priest to "save the raid" and stabilize it until the other heals hit, and that he doesn't care about an extra ~200 healing per target, though I'm not sure if the 0.1 second difference is really that huge in the end. We have all seen in our careers that person who died because the heal was a few miliseconds too late, however (and the haste haters see no one die to that, and see them all die because the heal didn't hit hard enough. However, I've rarely seen raiders die by 200 HP or survive by 200 HP which is the difference we're discussing per heal, most die by 2000-5000 because they didn't get the one or two heals that would have saved them... or they did something stupid). It is unfortunately very hard to model.

The best advice I have for this is: if you feel that your spells are not hitting fast enough, gem for haste. If you feel they are fast enough, but don't hit hard enough, gem for spellpower. If you are running out of mana, go back to the regen gearing section.

Spellpower is just spellpower, but it makes a big difference once properly gemmed for, and without haste, the extra SP often amounts to fluff. As a guideline, 500-600 haste seems to be the cutoff when your instants get the most bang for their haste buck, but stacking more haste is never bad as it IS a throughput increase, especially for PoH outside of the Serendipity 3 stack (the haste benefit is applied after the haste on gear, meaning that if you can hit 50% haste raid buffed, it should apply 86% spell haste to PoH and Gheal).

Overall, though, I'd say that SP is important, but more beneficial to single target healers (making your heals hit bigger to counteract big hits) and haste is more beneficial to raid healers by a small degree (heal cascade starts sooner while damage is ongoing). This summary judgment is based on the priest class, especially holy priests, as, for example, holy paladins stack haste to hit soft cap with JoP and all the regen they can get their hands on for many builds, but are still single-target healers overall.

Gearing:

+Still keep 25-30% raid buffed crit. You'll gain anywhere from 6% to 9% crit from full raid buffs as Holy. Crit is still a throughput stat of sorts, even if it is unpredictable, and you do not want to give up Holy Concentration regen and SoL procs even as you gear for throughput.

+Look into cloth pieces and weapons that have sp/crit/haste and no spirit. Yes, the DPS cloth. Don't go nuts replacing all your spirit gear with these pieces, but they are a throughput increase as long as the net SP loss from the spirit isn't too high, and help you maintain your crit while still stacking haste in the same slot.

+As for gems, you do have options. Only go for Haste or SP socket bonuses. For reds, use either SP+Haste or pure SP, for yellows pure haste or haste+sp, for blues haste+spirit or sp+spirit. If the socket bonus is terrible (+6 spirit? Really?), stick pure SP or pure haste in all the gem slots. I will not make a summary judgment on haste versus sp for gemming, as both have their place. I personally tend more toward the SP side of gems and getting the majority of my haste through gear choices, though if I were close to cap, I would push as many haste gems as possible.

+Use a Flask of the Frost Wyrm

+Be willing to still make some regen concessions. My gear is entirely gemmed for throughput aside from the Insightful meta gem and Darkglow cloak enchant, but I still use a Spark of Hope as I found the regen benefit to be noticeable when it was gone (it's worth anywhere from 100 to 250 mp5). I also still have a Pandora's Plea around when I'd like the extra ~75 mp5 and minor amount of crit.

Common Questions and Complaints:

Haste makes you go out of mana sooner!
This is not entirely true. It doesn't make your spells more expensive, it only makes your heals hit sooner, and that means that you can cast more heals in the same time period as someone with no haste, which does overall spend more mana. It's the "cast more heals in the same time period" that's the tricky thing in terms of regen, and part of why I don't suggest it for starting priests (that and there isn't a lot of spirit+haste gear until raiding so it will not give you regen at a time where you probably need to stack some regen the most).

How much haste do I need?
This is something to feel out on your own. In reality, you will likely end up with a metric ton of haste as gear level increases since 30% holy crit is trivial to achieve, and there is little benefit for having more of it as a raid healer.

I've seen priests with upwards of 1000 haste rating (more high ilevel haste gear than myself and pure haste gems), but that's something you need to work toward if you want to skew your gear that strongly in that direction. You'll also only get a lot of benefit out of haste if you understand your latency since it works in the milliseconds of cast time reduction, though the "hitting people sooner" aspect is still useful when milliseconds matter (which is most fights). Most people I see building more balanced sets (i.e. no crit/haste/sp pieces and not digging for as much haste as possible) end up with at least 500 once they hit the 245 ilevel gear, if not more. 400 was the bandied about "easy to hit once you get going" number bandied about in t7/t8 content.

Crit is better than haste for throughput because it's ballin' and heals for 150%!
Crit is an unreliable throughput increase and therefore impossible to really model very well as a throughput stat outside of a single target environment. I have no way of knowing whether that 150% heal from a PoH crit will hit the lowest person in the group or the one person in the group that's already full (there's always one! Damn shamans!). Haste, and spellpower for that matter, are reliable throughput increases that are always present.

Plus, the whole hitting sooner versus hitting harder debate. The crit hits harder than the higher spellpower by a factor of a lot (that 200 more healed becomes 1000-3000 more healing done, which is much more substantial), but, again, you have no guarantee that it will occur when you need it most, and there is no way to get your crit high enough to guarantee it, even if you completely gut your haste. Basically, when it happens, great, but there's no way to guarantee it, so it remains this weird combo throughput/regen stat to Holy priests.

Higher ilevel gear is always better.
This is true; it has more stats and more spellpower. Basically, as a healer, the only stat we can't use is hit, so our BiS list generally is made up of the highest item level pieces possible in a place. However, if I don't need more regen, rendering the stats useless, and I don't feel like trading 40 haste rating for 20 SP and a socket until the equivalent haste piece drops in the dungeon as I'm at 30% crit, I don't see the harm.

Obviously, you want to upgrade your gear as soon as possible, but this argument seems to say "bid on gear willynilly just because it's higher ilevel with no respect to stat balancing" and this can result in a set over or understacked in crit which is never good.

The higher ilevel gear is better, but what's even better than that is actually planning out your gear and making a gear list so that you get the stats you want at the highest ilevel possible without screwing yourself on gear priority by spending all your DKP or Loot Council clout and then realizing your stats are poorly balanced. Just grabbing an upgrade for upgrading's sake also means you could have taken a useful piece from someone that could have used it for the longer haul (though I find my BiS list is often similar to that of the warlock's. Ha. Ha. Ha.).

If you end up making a gear list, which I highly suggest, don't look at all the gear at once. Look at the gear in sequence. Normal mode progression > hard mode progression > ultimate BiS list. Waiting for a piece off of Algalon while your guild is still working on normal Yogg-Saron isn't very intelligent and can hurt progression if you hold onto older gear for too long when the gear you want is out of the immediate or short-term reach of your guild. You know more or less how your guild will progress in a certain raid, so base your list on that. And remember that badge and crafted gear are guaranteed drops if a similar piece is out of reach.

Oh, and trinkets are stupid and immune from this argument (best regen trinket in the game for a holy priest..... is ilevel 219 and nothing I've seen so far for ICC compares in terms of regen).

NEXT TIME: What buttons to push!