Penance Priest

Since we have agreed that (by and large) tier gear is for chumps (or early adopters, you poor things) (or 10-man tank healers, ok?), that leaves many of us with emblems to burn on other upgrades. What do you want to spend them on? Which cloak? What about the trinket?

Well, as we all know, there are different needs for different occasions, so as beautiful as that black dress might be, you’re definitely not going to wear it out to dinner with my folks. In other words, there is no single absolute recommendation for anything (except in the negative). Everything always depends on everything else – the gear you’ve already got, the gear you have access to, your role in raids, etc. I know my caveats get boring, but they bear repeated repeating.

Nevertheless, I’ve decided to at least comment on the current emblem purchases, since emblems do you no good in your pocket. I’ve also listed some of the other (non-emblem) options that you will be considering. See the full 3.3 gear list for details. A case could be made that this is not in fact a real post, but just a rehash/reorganization of that list. To that I say poo.

Lastly, I’ll include my own gearup plan, which is finally becoming focused.

Cloak

Drape of the Violet Tower, Volde's Cloak of the Night Sky (50 emblems)

Violet is nicely itemized for disc. If you don’t have a 264 cloak, and don’t expect to get one, this is a great solution. But if you have an offspec that you share gear with, Volde will definitely be better for you, since both holy and shadow prefer spirit to mp5. Cloaks were the first emblem purchase for many priests.

Competes with VDW25, Saurfang25.

Belt

Circle of Ossus (60 emblems)

Haste gear is too easy to come by this expansion. If you already have a 245 belt, I wouldn’t bother with this. Even if you have the nice haste/crit 232 from HoR5, I’d still pass on this badge belt. It’s nice for holy priests, and not so exciting for disc.

Competes with Putricide10, Marrowgar10, Festergut25, Marrowgar25.

Chest

Ermine Coronation Robes, Meteor Chaser's Raiment, Crimson Acolyte Raiments (95 emblems)

Ok, here is where things get interesting. Chest! You’ve got three badge options, each costs 95 emblems. Ermine has crit/spirit, MCR has crit/haste, and T10 (shadow!) also has crit/haste. Only buy the shadow robe if you’ll be upgrading it with tokens; the 264 version is nearly identical in stats to MCR, and if you’ll be upgrading it to the 277 version, woweezowee. (That’s my current plan.) If you’re a strict shield-spammer, Ermine is probably a good bet; spirit is crap, but it’s better than the haste on MCR once you hit the cap. (The haste cap for shield spam is 147, which you get practially by walking through the door.) MCR (and the shadow tier robe) is perfect for tank healers. Tough choice.

Competes with Sindragosa10, Blood Princes10, Blood Princes25.

Gloves

Gloves of Ambivalence, Gloves of False Gestures (60 emblems)

Same issue here. You have a great set of crit/spirit gloves and a great set of crit/haste gloves. Both are delicious; depends mainly on your raid role (tank or bubblespam).

Competes with T10, Rotface10, Blood Princes25.

Helm

Crimson Acolyte Hood, Crimson Acolyte Cowl (95 emblems)

Two tier pieces. Crit/spirit (healing tier) and crit/haste (shadow tier). Same dilemma, largely determined by your raid role and offspec.

Competes with BQL10, Saurfang10, Gunship25.

Shoulder

Crimson Acolyte Shoulderpads, Crimson Acolyte Mantle (60 emblems)

Crit/spirit vs. crit/haste. Sound familiar?

Competes with Festergut10, Trash drop.

Legs

Crimson Acolyte Leggings (95 emblems)

Meh.

Competes with Festergut10, VDW10.

Trinket

Purified Lunar Dust (60 emblems)

PLD just got a spell power boost, which brings the trinket up to par for its function. If you don’t have Solace and at least one other solid trinket, you should definitely consider this as a very respectable purchase.

Competes with Solace, Marrowgar10, Gunship25. (The BQL25 trinket is better for PvP than PvE IMO.)

Crafted gear

Lightweave Leggings, Leggings of Woven Death, Sandals of Consecration ($$$$)

Don’t spend your emblems on these just yet. If you have the gold to burn, get them ASAP. But emblems are just too useful a commodity, and in too short supply, to spend on these expensive items. Your benefit-per-emblem is low.

The Paolo Plan

For what it’s worth. As you can see, I don’t really have urgent plans to spend my frost emblems. After I buy my last piece of shadow tier gear I can think about upgrading gloves or maybe cloak.

Head & shoulders: Aiming for two-piece T9.258. I have the 245s, and we should start killing Anub on heroic this week. I doubt many other raiders will be as committed to T9 as I am, so I have a decent shot at getting the 258 tokens. If I couldn’t upgrade to 258, I wouldn’t plan to keep T9.245 gear. (No frost emblems needed.)

Legs, boots: crafted. I already have both of these, and have openly admitted my insanity for purchasing the hit boots in my last post. I still think it was the right move. So sue me. (No frost emblems needed.)

Chest: Shadow tier, used for both shadow and discipline. With the amount that I’m playing shadow, this makes perfect sense, as the chest will be upgraded to 277 at some point. I could also have made a case for using the shadow shoulders for healing, but the T9 head & shoulders look like keepers for me. (Frost emblems already spent – no more needed.)

Gloves: False Gestures for 60 emblems. Not in a huge rush, as Lifeless Touch are still quite strong. After I complete my shadow 4-piece set (OMG!) these will be my next purchase.

Bracers: Bejeweled are not in urgent need of upgrading. Rotface25 drops nice bracers, but not really worth spending capital on at this point.

Cloak: My Ony25 cloak is still excellent. (See a pattern? All those 245 crit/haste pieces are winners!) Upgrading is a low priority; my last emblem purchase will be Volde if I haven’t gotten one of the other 264 cloaks.

Belt:  I have Heroic Cinch. I’ll upgrade to one of the boss-drop crit/haste belts, but nothing else.

Trinkets: Solace (I have already). If I don’t get Solace (heroic) or Abacus, I’ll eventually buy Lunar Dust. But no rush for me on this.

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EDIT: As you can see, my comments on T10 were written prior to the changes in March. The new set bonus is massive for 25-man bubble-botting disc priests. The rest of this article is basically irrelevant now :( Except Gentle Giant. They still rock.

 

We need to start planning our emblem purchases, so it’s time to start looking generally at where the set bonuses will be taking us, what compromises we’ll need to make, and whether or not those compromises are worth it. This is not going to be a complete exposé on the value of the Tier 10 set bonuses, but a broad-stroke look at the cost of going tier. Stay with me, this is long! But hopefully there’s something in here you can chew on; I know the whole issue of gearing up for T10 has been bugging me for a while.

As usual, if you come expecting a single, final, absolute recommendation, you will be bored, disappointed, and end up sending me hate mail. Bail now.

The bonuses

Just for review – here are the T10 set bonuses for healing priests.

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

(4) Your Penance spell has a 20% chance to cause your next Flash Heal cast within 6 sec to reset the cooldown on your Penance spell.

Apparently there was something in there about CoH too, but who gives a hoot about holy anyway? (Lol at you dual-speccing traitors. Shame on you!)

For shield-spamming raid healers

You, my friends, are SoL. (And that’s not Surge of Light.) On a recent jaunt to ICC, I was on shield spam duty for the night, and Flash Heal made up a whopping 2.7% of my overall healing for the night. Obviously, since both the 2-piece and the 4-piece bonuses are tied to Flash Heal (and/or Penance), you certainly won’t want to make any compromises to get the set bonuses, which are basically crap for you. Get whatever gear you want, including tier pieces if you like.

That’s about all there is to say for shield spammers. The tier bonuses are largely irrelevant. But I feel bad, since you came here hoping for a real post. So, as my gift to you, for coming here planning to spend some time reading tons and tons of words, I offer you some music instead. Enjoy this window into 1978 British prog-rock bliss. If my calculations are correct, this was around the time your parents were dating, plus or minus.

This is one of my favorite bands. Consider it a sneak peek at my playlist, which is on whenever I can spare the brain cycles for music while I’m healing. Look up the albums Freehand and Interview for more deliciousness. Yes, they're goofy to watch.

For tank-healing foos

Clearly the bonuses are aimed at tank healers. Both the hot and of course the Penance cooldown reset will be throughput boosts. How beneficial will they be exactly? Hah! You shall not receive the glory of mathematical analysis in this post. Instead of looking at the benefits, we’ll be looking at the opportunity costs of using the tier pieces. For those of you not familiar with the term, “opportunity cost” simply means: what do we give up, relative to getting non-tier BiS gear, to get the tier gear? The actual cost (in emblems, for example) might be the same for tier gear and non-tier gear, but there’s a stat tradeoff that we want to look at carefully.

My own thinking

Treat this as a disclaimer, or as deep thoughts on the matter, or as the ramblings of a lunatic fool. But we all come with our own context: the gear we’re wearing now, the role we’ll be playing, the availability of upgrades, etc. Here’s my context, and how I expect it will affect how I relate to the new tier gear.

First, as you know, I just transferred servers and joined a new guild. How will that affect my role? Who knows. I might be needed more as a shielder than as a tank-healing support healer. So until that’s resolved, I’ll be moving slowly on tier pieces.

Also, I might be raiding as shadow quite a bit more now. Which is fine, I love shadow. And it turns out that several of the shadow tier pieces are BiS for disc as well, although they count as offset from that perspective, since those set bonuses won’t exactly proc on heals.

And, like many of you, I have two pieces of T9. I don’t plan to drop that bonus any time soon! In an ideal world, I’d find a way to have two pieces from each tier.

Lastly: I’m fascinated by the new 4-piece bonus. It’s not clear yet how it will translate in practice, but I love the fun factor of it. It’s a weak version of the other proc-based items they’ve added to the game (Nibelung, Trauma), of which I am a BIG fan. I’m kind of peeved that there isn’t a weapon that summons a healing Val’kyr; that would be just about the biggest win in the game. But you get the idea: the reset on Penance, while not something you’ll be able to rely on, will still be awesome to use. If I’m going to be tank healing, I will try to find a way to make the 4-piece bonus happen. I just like the idea of it, and if it’s not the perfect or absolutely optimal setup, I’m ok with that.

Three sample gearsets

Below are three 5-piece gearsets. They are made of all 264s; nothing higher for now. The first gearset uses four tier pieces plus the BiS item for the fifth piece. I chose offset legs for this experiment, although one could certainly look at gloves, or even the robe as your offset piece. The reason I chose the legs is that they are craftable (and more importantly, purchasable with cash), which means I won’t necessarily have to wait to accumulate additional emblems before getting them crafted. YMMV, of course.

The second gearset uses two tier pieces and three BiS offset pieces. For this set, I picked the two tier pieces with crit (head and shoulders), then picked the best offset pieces for tank healing.

Oh, all the offset pieces are crit/haste. I’m maximizing tank-healing throughput for this experiment.

Lastly (I hope you saw this coming) I created a gearset which ignores tier pieces altogether, and just grabs five BiS pieces. And yes, two of those pieces are shadow tier gear.

Here we go:

You can see the comparison on this Wowhead page, which gives a great presentation of the tradeoffs I’ll be discussing below.

There are lots of debatable choices I just made. For example, why the crit pieces instead of the haste pieces in the 2-piece gearset? Why the offset legs instead of the gloves in the 4-piece gearset? These questions are valid. But for now, as you’ll see, all this is secondary to the main tradeoff we see in this comparison: regen.

What do we lose in order to get the tier gear?

Check out the Wowhead link above for a very nice presentation that I won’t reproduce here.

I’ll start by using the 0-piece BiS gearset as a reference. Going to the 2-piece gearset, we lose 156 haste and 16 crit, but gain 172 spirit. (And, of course, the 2-piece bonus itself.)

Going from the 2-piece gearset to the full 4-piece gearset, we lose another 100 haste, 64 crit, and 25 spell power, but gain 180 spirit (and the 4-piece bonus). (I’ve put red gems into the two extra slots we get, just to keep things simple.)

The full tradeoff from the BiS gearset to the 4-piece gearset is a loss of 256 haste, 80 crit, and 25 spell power, and a gain of 352 spirit, plus the two bonuses.

So returning to the debatable points I just mentioned: no matter how you pick your pieces, the tier gear will give you more spirit, and the BiS offset pieces will give you more throughput stats (crit/haste). The throughput stats can be adjusted towards crit or haste by making adjustments to the gearsets above, but in the end, it’s a tradeoff of throughput versus regen.

I expect this was not a big surprise, now that we look at it. After all, I’m defining “best in slot” as those pieces with maximum throughput stats, and the spirit on the tier gear is most definitely not a throughput stat.

About that regen

Ok, using the BiS gearset loses us 352 spirit that we would have gotten from the tier gear. For my current unbuffed setup (600 spirit, 1400 int), this translates to approximately 100mp5. There are ten gem slots in the BiS gearset (eight slots in the 4-piece gearset). Using a healthy dose of intellect in those slots would not quite make up the difference, but it would make up enough. If you’re stacking throughput stats, you damn-well better have enough mana to make use of all those big & fast heals!

So… go for the BiS gear, lose the spirit, and gem intellect. Not bad…not bad at all.

And the 2-piece

Not known yet whether or not the hot will stack. This matters a bunch. This question should be resolved soon, as enough emblems become available for early-adopters to get this bonus and test it out.

In conclusion

The BiS throughput gear costs you a bunch of regen, which you can (and will probably have to) recover by using int gems. The benefits of the tier bonuses are as yet undetermined. Until we know about the hot stacking, and until we can get a real-world sample of how the 20% Penance reset works for a tank healer in ICC fights, we can’t put pen to paper and come up with the perfect analysis of tier vs. non-tier.

And the real conclusion is that I have no conclusion. I’m stumped. I’d like to have it all! As I said, the 4-piece bonus appeals to me on levels that go beyond pure min-max throughput. But max throughput appeals to me as well, not to mention the fact that gearing up with BiS throughput gear is perfect for shadow play as well. I don’t expect everyone will share my opinions in this matter, and that’s fine. Hopefully I’ve given you some food for thought as you make your own way in this early phase of tier 10 gearup.

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My producer just informed me that we have a guest in the studio for today’s blog. I’ll be interviewing someone who would like to discuss my post on stats for discipline priests. To be frank, I’m a bit surprised it’s taken this long to find someone to rebut that post, since I fully expected that it would generate more heat than it did.

Would you like to introduce yourself to my readers?

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My warlock is level 73 now, and I haven't played him in months. But he's never been anything other than affliction, even when common wisdom said that there were much better leveling specs. The slow-burn style of using damage-over-time spells to devour and destroy your target really hooked me. I still find dots thrillingly demonic; a far more insidious way to kill than the dull and obvious BAM-BAM style of shadow bolting, or other direct damage spells. Like choking instead of stabbing.

I have a dark spot inside, I'll admit. It's why my first toon was a warlock in the first place.

Ok, back on track. Nightfall is one of those talents that you either love or you think is a waste of talent points. Me, I love it. What happens is that you're doing your thing, minding your own business killing some bad guy or other, then suddenly you proc a free shadow bolt. Afterwards, you go back to doing whatever you were already doing. No fuss, no muss. You aren't building your rotations around it, and when it procs you don't lose your focus. Just bolt & back to business.

What's the point, you ask? Is this now a warlock blog? Hardly. But I wanted to bring up Nightfall in the context of our new, hot-off-the-press, still-in-development T10 set bonuses.

The two-piece goes like this: After your Pain Suppression wears off, your target has 10% increased healing received for 10 seconds. Sure, sounds good -- softens the hard edge of our badass tank-saving cooldown.

The four-piece bonus is what's making people all hot around the collar. Your Flash Heal has a 15% chance to reset the cooldown on Penance.

There are two ways to look at this random proc.

1. Facerolling your way to tank-healing victory

On one hand, you could see it as a suggestion (or a push, or a demand) to adjust our tank-healing to the faceroll rotation of Penance/Flash/Flash/Flash. Your Penance might be up again after five Flashes, or maybe the set bonus will proc and you'll restart the rotation sooner.

The math on this is ugly. (Who wants to know about mean time to success on bounded geometric distributions? I mean, other than me?) Suffice it to say, if you do the faceroll tank rotation, you'll shorten the cooldown on Penance about 1.3 seconds on average. That's not much. Your HPS will go up, but not necessarily in comparison to a more robust tank-healing system than includes shields, Greater Heal, and PoM as needed. Those spells aren't part of our set-bonus rotation.

In other words: do not use this set bonus as a playstyle-changer. The Penance/Flash rotation will not work well, I can promise you that. It just doesn't provide enough benefit to warrant such a radical adjustment to your playstyle. And if you've recently broken your four-piece T8, you'll know what I mean when I say that you do NOT want your natural healing responses dictated by a set bonus.

2. Nightfall

Ah, the pieces are falling together. You see, the way I envision the four-piece set bonus (assuming it goes live in this form) is much more like Nightfall. You'll be on your merry way, healing the tank in your favorite instance, and BAM, Penance is up! Ooh, a cookie! Omnomnom, and back to business.

This is a set bonus. A bonus. Bonus. It is not the game-changing playstyle-affecting gear-choice-dictating hell that we went through in T8. (Yes, I really hated it, despite how good the bonus was.) Everyone loves a nice little boost here and there, even a moderate boost like the T9 two-piece. And personally, I love how this proc will work as a random blast, like Nightfall. We'll see what it's like in practice, of course, but in theory, yum.

Postscript

A PvP-playing friend of mine once was commenting on why he thought I loved PvE so much. One factor is that there's a bit of the gambler's thrill involved. Will my loot drop from this boss...? Will I win the roll...? You wait with bated breath. After having executed whatever skill-maneuver was needed, you rely on the luck of the dice to determine whether or not you win that coveted item.

I'm sure this neuro-psycho-chemical reaction is not unique to me. You could dumb it down to "random procs are fun!", and that's true, but I think they're a key part of the appeal of the game. And it's an area in which Blizzard has certainly excelled.

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