On Haste, Crit, And Other Secondary Stats

Ah, the haste-crit conundrum. I'm not going to say I was completely avoiding talking about this, but I was completely avoiding talking about this. However, it comes up a lot and so I want to share my thoughts on the situation thusfar and attempt to give folks some sort of basic idea. Now, I've said it before and I'll say it again, I'm not really a big math person. I'll let the folks over at Elitist Jerks handle the math, and I'm going to focus more on what their numbers mean, and the practicality of them. We will go over numbers, but I see no need to reinforce the math they've already done, so any rating conversions are pulled from there.

My goal here is to just give you at least an idea of where to begin when looking at gear, particularly for reforging purposes. So to achieve that goal, we are going to take a look at haste, crit, mastery, and spirit. Let's look at what they do, how they interact, and what gives you more bang for your buck.



If you're a well versed Holy Paladin just looking for some haste and crit advice, feel free to skip on down, I know this post is a little long.

Mastery

First thing, let's check out our new stat, mastery. This one changes class to class, and that keeps it kind of interesting. While some classes stack it, Holy Paladins tend to avoid it, and I want to look at why.

What it Does

Our mastery is one that is pretty simple in concept, and sounds a lot better than it is on paper. Here's a link straight to what it does: Illuminated Healing. Seems simple right? Free shields sounds pretty awesome. So why don't we want to stack this?

We have to look at the way the shields work. When you cast a spell, a shield is placed on your target. This, we get. But, what we need to take into consideration is this: what if there is a shield on the target already? With how many instant casts we have and how quickly we are firing spells off, there's a good chance that the boss hasn't swung yet, thus, not using the shield already on the target. So, when we hit them with another heal, it doesn't place a second shield on the target, and it doesn't stack with the old one. This means that any unused shields are effectively wasted, pretty much the same thing as overhealing. So what DO they do if there's already one on them? It's pretty simple.

If the new spell is bigger, i.e the old shield was from a Holy Light, and I then cast a Divine Light, then the shield is overwritten by the new spell. So say my Holy Light hit the target for 5k, and put on a shield for 500. Before the boss swings again, I cast a Divine Light for 15k. The shield for 500 goes away, and a shield for 1.5k goes up. The 500 shield was wasted.

Let's take the reverse, using the same example. Let's say I cast a 15k Divine Light, putting up a shield for 1.5k. Then, before the boss swings, I cast a 5k Holy Light. Since this new heal is smaller, the shield for 500 doesn't happen,  and the shield for 1.5k has it's duration refreshed. Still, the shield for 500 was wasted.

It's also worth noting that not all of our spells will even proc it. Radiance will not, Beacon will not, Protector of the Innocent will not, and Enlightened Judgements will not. Beacon is the big one here.

How well does it convert?

Pretty well actually. Just going to use the numbers from the EJ compendium since they did it nicely, using 100 rating. 100 mastery makes your shields about .7% bigger.

What do we do with it?

Reforge it. So many of the shields will be wasted with our quick casts, and shields altogether have been devalued a bit with the new healing model.

Spirit

What it Does

The basics of spirit are simple. It restores mana. It restores different levels in and out of combat, and doesn't scale with any lasting buffs. It also works directly with intellect. The more int you have the better spirit works for you. It also gives us hit rating through Enlightened Judgements, which is important due to the mana we get from Judgement.

How well does it convert?

This is complicated mathematically. The basic answer is it doesn't matter how well it scales, you need it so you're going to suck it up and stack it anyways.. The complicated answer, from EJ:

Mp5 In Combat = 0.0025 + Spirit * Sqrt(Intellect) * 0.0083625

I don't like math near enough to really care about that though.

What do we do with it?

Stack it. If there's no spirit on the piece and you find yourself even coming close to having mana issues, reforge to it.

Haste

It's not an accident I'm putting this before crit. I want to justify what I have to say about crit, at least to a degree. 
 
What it does

Haste does a couple things. First, it lowers the global cooldown. Second, it makes your spells cast faster. Third, it can add extra ticks to Holy Radiance. This third reason is the big one right now. Haste is our big throughput stat.


How well does it convert?

Because haste does several things, let's look at all 3 individually.

Cast Speed

Again, let's use 100 rating. 100 haste provides .78% spell haste. Meaning, 100 haste makes your spells .78% faster. It takes a lot to see a real difference.

GCD (Global Cool Down)

The GCD is a big limiter in our actions right now. It defaults to 1.5 seconds, and can be lowered to 1 second via haste. Basically, this means that all your spells that are affected  have a shared cooldown of 1.5 seconds before haste. To lower it down to 1 second, you would need 3489 haste rating, or about 27.24% according to Elitist Jerks. That is assuming full buffs, so that is a ton of haste. Not easily obtainable right now.

Radiance Ticks

The easiest way to explain the scaling here is to take a look at part of the table on the Elitist Jerks Compendium.  I've cut out the extra buffs, we're going to focus on the static things only, so we are only assuming you have your judgement buff up, the speed of light talent, and the 5% raid haste buff, which you should always have. Let's take a look at the table:

From Elitist Jerks

The first and 4th columns are what concern us here. The first is how many ticks of radiance you will get, and the 4th is how much haste you need to make that happen.

The first extra tick should be easy, beyond that, it gets much more difficult.

What do we do with it?

This answer will probably vary a bit and I'm sure there will be some argument in the comments, but here's what I recommend based on my experiences raiding thusfar and how the cast times line up.

Don't stack it. You really don't want to stack anything but spirit, you want to ditch mastery and find a balance between haste and crit. Striking that balance requires you figuring out just how much haste is useful to you. let's be realistic. You won't get your casts very short with current gear, and a hundredth of a second probably won't make or break a fight. And the gcd cap? You won't hit it.

So what I would do, is use the table above, and figure out which tick of radiance you can get to. Have about 1200 haste? I'd recommend reforging out a little bit since you won't get that 14th tick. Able to hit the 14th tick (1860 haste) if you reforge to haste? Go for it. the lower cast times are just gravy. Use the table and radiance ticks as a guide. Get to the closest radiance tick. If you're over one slightly, no problem, it's still working for you. Extra haste is good. But, if you're feeling low on another stat, don't feel too bad about reforging it some.

Crit

What it does

I'm sure you understand what a crit is if you're reading this, so I won't explain that. But, let's look at why this stat isn't as bad as it was in the past.

In WOTLK, I jokingly referred to critical healing as critical overhealing. When mana didn't matter, we were spamming so hard we didn't really care if it crit or not, and the extra healing from criticals was overhealing quite often. Now, that's not so much the case. A crit is healing you don't have to do, so it saves you mana, and gets the target topped off quicker. But this is just the general usage. It also does a few more things for us since it can proc additional effects.

Infusion of Light makes your next DL or HL faster, and since we shock mostly on cooldown, this should proc quite a bit.

Conviction is the other nice thing crit does for us, but it's worth noting that even with crit chances as low as 15% this should still be up about 90% of the time. Since PoTI and Radiance can proc this, it won't fall off often. World of Logs can be used to monitor it's uptime if you're concerned about it.

How well does it convert?

Not well unfortunately. 100 crit provides about .56% spell crit.  We also get spell crit from intellect, but it takes 649 int to get 1% int. But, it's still not completely terrible.


What do we do with it?

This kind of depends on where you're at. I've started reforging a bit of haste to crit since I had more than I was actually noticing. Use your own judgement here. If you have a crit/haste piece and need some spirit on it, but don't want to part with the haste, reforge it. Reforging has given us some flexibility, so take advantage of that. As healers, we have quite a bit more flexibility to play to preferences.

Hopefully this will clear things up a tad, and as usual, hit the comments or shoot me an e-mail with any questions.

/bubblehearth