The Joy of Spreadsheeting

This is not gonna be a fun post for me because, well, I goofed. I made some seemingly innocuous changes to the spreadsheet a while ago that caused it to be less accurate than it normally is (which, for the record, has never been anywhere near 100%), and it’s taken me a while to figure out that there was a problem and then finally fix it.

The short answer is that the spreadsheet has been overvaluing crit since 7.1 was released. In this updated version, you’ll see stat weights that look way off. Specifically, crit is much lower and haste is much higher; this is due to several reasons. The first is the previously mentioned changes that caused crit to be inflated. Second, I had been manually reducing the weight of haste by 10% because of its adverse relationship with mana; I’m no longer doing that. Last, stat weights are going back to what appear to be much more reasonable values, but everyone has been under the impression that crit was so powerful, so they have gravitated toward gear with lots and lots of crit. This makes crit look weaker than you would expect simply by virtue of having so much of it and so little of everything else. By comparison, the other stats will be higher than expected until stat distribution evens out a little more.

Legion Spreadsheet Math!

Everyone is super excited about spreadsheets, right? Right?! Well, if you aren’t, then maybe this post won’t be as interesting for you, but at least it will be exciting for the rest of you.

Holy Paladins were enabled on Alpha a few weeks ago, so there’s still a whole lot to discover and even more that could potentially change. I have a working spreadsheet that I’m fairly satisfied with, but I’m holding off on releasing it into the wild until we’ve had a chance to do some raid testing and I can see what realistic overhealing and casts-per-minute will look like for each ability.

These numbers are not necessarily indicative of which talents and abilities we’ll end up using in Legion, but they’re fun to look at in the meantime; just remember that this is all preliminary and more than likely will change before Legion.

Throughput versus Efficiency

One of the major changes in Legion is that there will no longer be spirit on items. We have a base regen that is four percent of our total mana every five seconds and we may be getting more mana regeneration through trinkets, but I think they’re still working on how trinkets are going to work for healers in Legion. This means that an ability’s healing-per-mana (HPM) is going to be more significant for longer than it has been in previous expansions.

In making the spreadsheet, I was surprised to see how incredibly efficient Judgment of Light is. At 28.14 HPM, it’s almost twice as efficient as the runner-up, Holy Prism, at 15.17.

Nothing in this graph is too shocking. Holy Light is still our most efficient filler spell, but it is notable that Light of Dawn is more HPM than Holy Shock. This is also assuming we hit 5 people with Light of Dawn, something I haven’t been able to reliably test.

While our new ability, Light of the Martyr, is cheaper than even Holy Light (7.5% of base mana compared to Holy Light’s 10%), the effective healing of Light of the Martyr is very low due to the damage we inflict to ourselves in the process.

It’s interesting to note that when we take Stoicism as our Tier 75 talent, Light of the Martyr becomes more mana efficient than Holy Light, but we also lose our unbelievably economical Judgment of Light.

The Eternal Debate: Selfless Healer vs. Eternal Flame

Now that Selfless Healer has gained more widespread popularity among Holy Paladins, I’ve seen quite a bit of discussion about whether or not Selfless Healer is actually good for progression or if Eternal Flame should really be the only talent we choose when we’re trying to kill a boss for the first time. Personally, I think that both Eternal Flame and Selfless Healer are usable on any encounter, but I want to try to clarify some of the key points in the discussion.

I have yet to see anyone argue against Eternal Flame’s viability, so the discussion is mostly about whether or not Selfless Healer is good for progression. Fair warning: this post is fairly dense, so I’ve added a summarized version at the bottom.

Before I get into everything, I want to point out that this discussion exists because there are some factors that are subjective. Some of the points of contention just don’t have a great answer and you’ll have to form your own opinion about them.

Here are what I think are the four major arguments in the debate against Selfless Healer

1. Eternal Flame does more healing than Light of Dawn
2. Selfless Healer is a difficult or clunky rotation and has lots of nuances that require perfect play to truly be effective
3. The buff from Selfless Healer just leads to more overhealing
4. Selfless Healer requires too much buildup and people might die in the process

 

Rise of the Selfless Healer

In my previous post, I touched on the Selfless Healer talent and how it felt clumsy and led to overhealing.  I do still think that Selfless Healer is a little awkward, but I was wrong in assuming that the talent wasn’t an option for currently raiding Holy Paladins. So wrong.

A Holy Power Spender By Any Other Name

The first thing to discuss is why we haven’t seen Selfless Healer at all this expansion. A big factor is the power of Eternal Flame vs. Light of Dawn.  Historically, Eternal Flame has been the strictly superior option as a Holy Power spender in comparison to Light of Dawn.  The main reason for this is because Light of Dawn has an abysmal 15% transfer rate for Beacon of Light whereas Eternal Flame has 50% — the same as most other heals. When you consider that most Paladins take Beacon of Faith for raiding, that gap becomes 30% of Light of Dawn compared to 100% of Eternal Flame.  Beacon of Light is often the biggest contributor to a Holy Paladin’s healing and one of the most compelling aspects of a Holy Paladin’s toolkit so it’s easy to understand how the Beacon transfer disparity between the two spells would influence a lot of thinking.