Kainhighwind

Cool post and good read, though I would've liked to see a bit more math or examples to really flesh out the differences.

That said, I do agree fairly strongly with your overall hypothesis that Disc Priest and Resto Shaman are, at present, far ahead of the pack in terms of benefit-per-point from Mastery, though I would even argue a bit more for Resto Shaman above all the rest.

Really, I think the issue, at least on the surface, is that three classes have time-sensitive effects (Holy Priest, Holy Paladin, Druid) and the other two do not. Obviously both the Holy Priest & Pal are precisely timed windows of 6 seconds, whereas the Druid is slightly reverse in that it requires pre-emptively HoTing in order for a follow-up heal to get bonus, but again there is a time investment (it just occurs at the front end for Druids and the back end for Holy Priest/Paladin).

It could be said that things change when the numbers increase, so a brief look at that:

We already know that the first tier of raid gear (iLevel 359ish) will give about ~160-280 Mastery rating base for pieces with Mastery present (depending on the slot and relative value assigned to Mastery for the item), so with reforging and gemming, it is fairly easy to foresee a situation where a players are reaching pretty high Mastery totals quite early on. Even if we assume 15 slots (ignore ranged and use only one weapon slot), and we further assume not all slots have base Mastery, it still seems likely a player could find 12 out of 15 slots with Mastery base. With a low ballpark average of 200 Mastery per slot, plus 40% reforge of another ~64 per every slot, we're looking at 200 * 12 + 64 * 15 = ~3360 Mastery Rating. Level 85 Combat Ratings have 179 Mastery Rating for 1 point of Mastery, so our ~3360 bonus is 18.77 Mastery Points, which I believe is rounded down in the case of Mastery so 18 Points. That plus the base of 8 Mastery Points means 26 Mastery Points, which would give each healer spec these Mastery bonus percentages:

Resto Druid: 32.5%
Holy Paladin: 26%
Disc Priest: 65%
Holy Priest: 32.5
Resto Shaman: 65%

With those kind of numbers, things get even more out of whack than at base values. Obviously at first glance you look at 26% for a Paladin versus 65% for a Shaman and think "wtballs" but of course the Paladin has that percentage on every heal whereas the Resto Shaman will only average half his number (assuming average heals land on targets at 50% health). Moreover, obviously absorbs are always more powerful than heals (save unique mechanics that deal with player health pools, which I know of at least one already seen in Cata raid bosses), but it isn't that simple, because it comes back to the time-factor. Six seconds just isn't enough time for an absorb for a Paladin or HoT from a Holy Priest to do anything significant. Whereas the Disc Priest bonus is a constant, and if 5 years of WoW damage-to-healing-ratios has taught us anything, it is that reliable incoming damage and outgoing healing are by far preferred over random or spikey jumps on either end.

I really think the Paladin and Holy Priest Mastery bonuses need a simple duration effect increase, something like 9-10 seconds seems appropriate. It still wouldn't be 100% reliable to have an effect, but that's fine -- at least that has a reasonable chance to absorb (Pal) or heal (Priest) follow-up damage on non-tanks as Kain eludes to.

I think Druid Mastery is decent, though it suffers a great deal when covering any sort of unpredictable "Spike" damage, far more than any other healer, as blanket HoTs on the raid are a thing of the past for Druids based on current mana values and gear. Obviously 30 or 60 second "big AE" phases will be HoT blanketed, but normal raid spike damage will almost never provide a Druid with any benefit from Mastery, as healing a big spike by starting with a HoT would be retarded in 99% of cases. The only situation it would likely arise is casting Regrowth (Druid's "fast expensive heal" and following up with a cheap Nourish which would get the Mastery Bonus).

Having said all that, while I like that Blizzard is trying to get away from the "niche" roles for healers in Cata, I think all experienced raiders will agree that no matter what, one class/spec will always be better suited for a particular role in a given fight. Even though I would like to see changes for Holy Priest/Paladin, even if they change nothing going into Cataclysm, raids will just assign people appropriately and it won't matter -- Druid will tank heal and Shaman will Raid heal; Pal will Raid heal and Disc Priest will Tank heal; etc.

Oh, and before I forget...

Originally Posted by Kainhighwind

For all intensive purposes

Nope.

Originally Posted by Kulldam

With a low ballpark average of 200 Mastery per slot, plus 40% reforge of another ~64 per every slot, we're looking at 200 * 12 + 64 * 15 = ~3360

Can't reforge an item to have more of a stat it already has on it. In your hypothetical example, the most mastery rating you could get after reforging would be (200 * 12) + (64 * 3) = 2592. Still a decent number, but eh.

From looking at the math on the way Deep Healing works, as well as reading some reports from shamans beta testing the Cataclysm raid content, I think it's being overrated a bit. As you touched on, the amount of listed Deep Healing bonus healing % the shaman gets is 100%/(target's current health%). In other words, if your Deep Healing is, say, 40%, you only gain +40% healing if the target is at 1% health, +20% healing if the target is at 50% health, +10% at 75% health, etc. One can argue that even +10% healing is a big gain, and in a vacuum, I agree. However, there are two problems, when you look at the real situation:

1) Deep Healing affects only direct heals, not HoTs such as Earth Shield, Earthliving, the HoT portion of Riptide, or Healing Stream Totem. This means it's really only particularly useful for either tank healing or for Chain Healing raid members after AoE damage takes them all low. I read a shaman post about healing one of the raid fights in the Cataclysm beta where the entire raid is literally taken down to 1 HP each, and he said he still didn't feel a big difference in how quickly he was able to heal the raid.

2) When compared to stats such as crit or haste or potentially spirit, I don't think mastery holds up well for shamans. Crit synergizes particularly well between various resto talents, giving the usual 150% heal value regardless of target health, then an additional 30% of the 150% to whatever target is lowest health (which may or may not be the same person), and THEN returns mana via Improved Water Shield. Crit now also applies to the Riptide HoT and Earthliving HoT (and always has for Earth Shield). Crit and mastery even have the same rating cost per point (and crit gains benefit from partial points, not just whole numbers).

Obviously, I'll play around with different setups once we're running the heroic 5 mans and raids, but my current plan is to reforge any mastery I can to crit, and any mastery/crit pieces to haste/spirit depending on what I feel I am lacking. Naturally, mastery is the best stat for Elemental DPS and crit is the worst, so all my gear will be screwed up for one spec or the other. I may end up reforging all mastery just to make the gear useful for elemental and see what happens when I heal!

Originally Posted by Dux

Can't reforge an item to have more of a stat it already has on it. In your hypothetical example, the most mastery rating you could get after reforging would be (200 * 12) + (64 * 3) = 2592. Still a decent number, but eh.

Ah I forgot about that, good call. So then we get 22 Mastery Points instead of 26, or:

Resto Druid: 27.5%
Holy Paladin: 22%
Disc Priest: 55%
Holy Priest: 27.5
Resto Shaman: 55%

Originally Posted by Dux

1) Deep Healing affects only direct heals, not HoTs such as Earth Shield, Earthliving, the HoT portion of Riptide, or Healing Stream Totem. This means it's really only particularly useful for either tank healing or for Chain Healing raid members after AoE damage takes them all low.

Okaaaaay... and tank healing or Chain Healing the raid from AE/Spike damage is what, 95% of what you're doing? ><

Obviously I'm exaggerating to make a point, but the topic is really how useful various healer spec Mastery bonuses be in typical situations. For example, there aren't many logs available, but here is a log for a Cataclysm Raid against Argaloth: http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/e...?s=1910&e=2201

Note that, even ignoring all the extraneous glyph bonuses here and there, which I won't pretend to know if Mastery effects, just looking at the core direct healing abilities, the Shaman's direct healing accounts for 71% of his total healing. And this boss isn't even the boss that drops the raid to 1 HP frequently, which would obviously cause Mastery-affected heals to produce even higher percentages of overall healing.

That is a staggeringly high percentage, and the key here is Mastery effects like the Disc Priest or Shaman can be relied upon, and even beyond that, the Shaman Mastery is great because it's effectiveness goes up the more it is needed -- it takes the core "Smart Heal" idea Shaman healers are used to and adds onto it even more, providing that extra boost exactly as it is required, which is insanely powerful.

On the other hand, for the Paladin Mastery, for example, while the actual EFFECT triggers off 100% of healing (rather than say 70% of Shaman healing), the key point is the effectiveness of that Mastery itself. Again, because a smart Shaman will tend to focus healing on targets lower health first, they will tend to gain more than 50% effectiveness from Mastery, but law of averages is a bitch, so we'll just assume 50% as a base, so 27.5% using our above example numbers. Therefore, we can easily figure out the actual effectiveness of the Mastery bonus with a bit of simple math. For the below, we're using our 55% Mastery assumption (averaged to 27.5%):

Code:

DIRECT_HEALING_PERCENTAGE = BASE_DIRECT_HEALING * (1 + MASTERY_BONUS_AVERAGE) / TOTAL_HEALING
or
0.71 = BASE_DIRECT_HEALING * 1.275 / 1348679
thus
BASE_DIRECT_HEALING = 751029

EFFECTIVENESS_OF_MASTERY = BASE_DIRECT_HEALING * MASTERY_BONUS_AVERAGE / TOTAL_HEALING
or
EFFECTIVENESS_OF_MASTERY = 751029 * 0.275 / 1348679
thus
EFFECTIVENESS_OF_MASTERY = 15.31%

We can easily see, in the above fight, if our Shaman had equivalent of 55% Mastery Bonus, that was providing 15.31% of his total overall effective healing. That's a huge percentage. Even if we assume he only had, say, 40% Mastery bonus, that still makes the bonus from his Mastery provide 11.83% of his total overall effective healing.

Now if we look at something like the Paladin Mastery, the issue really stands out:



There we see effectiveness percentages for Paladin Mastery of: 2.2%, 0.7%, 0.1%, and 0.1% on various encounters. Unfortunately World of Logs doesn't track Paladin Mastery absorbs yet and I can't find examples from level 85, but percentages are percentages, and suffice to say those are paltry gains to be sure.

Now, the Armory has been all kinds of buggy lately, so I can't say for sure, but we can probably safely assume this Paladin isn't stacking Mastery and thus has the base 8 Points, or 8% Absorbs (and unfortunately it's impossible to math out his Mastery % from just those screenshot numbers since we don't know which particular heals triggered the particular Absorbs that were actually effectively used).

Still, the real issue is that, due to the time-sensitivity of the 6 second shield, even a higher percentage of Mastery will barely boost effectiveness, since the vast, vast majority of Absorbs expire before they are used, so even if the Absorb is 200 or 300% larger than it would be with a base 8% Mastery Bonus, the actual effectiveness is still nil.

Originally Posted by Dux

I read a shaman post about healing one of the raid fights in the Cataclysm beta where the entire raid is literally taken down to 1 HP each, and he said he still didn't feel a big difference in how quickly he was able to heal the raid.

I'm sorry, but using this as an example of anything short of anecdotal opinion is foolish and clearly this guy is an idiot. His "feeling" is irrelevant, as the numbers do not lie. If every single initial heal after that big spike drop is boosted by, say, 40% from Mastery, that's still 40% more healing! Then maybe the next heal is a 30% bonus, and the next a 20%, and the the last a 10% bonus before the target is full. Regardless of what some douche on a forum says about how it "feels", taking that bonus away would be a flat drop in effectiveness and getting a target back up would take more GCDs and more mana in all cases.

Originally Posted by Dux

2) When compared to stats such as crit or haste or potentially spirit, I don't think mastery holds up well for shamans. Crit synergizes particularly well between various resto talents, giving the usual 150% heal value regardless of target health, then an additional 30% of the 150% to whatever target is lowest health (which may or may not be the same person), and THEN returns mana via Improved Water Shield. Crit now also applies to the Riptide HoT and Earthliving HoT (and always has for Earth Shield). Crit and mastery even have the same rating cost per point (and crit gains benefit from partial points, not just whole numbers).

Obviously, I'll play around with different setups once we're running the heroic 5 mans and raids, but my current plan is to reforge any mastery I can to crit, and any mastery/crit pieces to haste/spirit depending on what I feel I am lacking. Naturally, mastery is the best stat for Elemental DPS and crit is the worst, so all my gear will be screwed up for one spec or the other. I may end up reforging all mastery just to make the gear useful for elemental and see what happens when I heal!

It is definitely true that there are many stats to figure out now between Crit, Haste, and Mastery, but I think it's foolish to so easily discount Mastery. Also, while the conversion rates for Mastery and Crit are the same Rating per point, obviously there's a second conversion that happens for Mastery where you're getting that 2.5% per Point rather than 1% from Crit.

The key thing to remember about Mastery compared to Crit, which is something I keep saying but is really the key here, is that for Shamans Mastery is reliable healing. You will soon become accustomed to the feeling that when you heal that guy at 80%, it does X and when you heal the guy at 30% it does Y and will adjust the heal accordingly.

Crit, on the other hand, is much more prone to overheal, which of course means every single time your heal lands and the 50% crit bonus is overheal, all that Crit Rating was completely wasted (barring the outside benefits that you mention, such as Water Shield). If we're talking, say ~3580 Crit Rating (20% Crit), during that heal, that entire bonus is wasted. More importantly, for 80% of all heals, all that rating is wasted. Equivalent Mastery, on the other hand, would always provide effectiveness, which in this case is 50% Mastery Bonus, or 25% average. That is a straight healing effectiveness bonus of ~13-14% and is completely reliable, which is key. It is far better as a healer to know it will take 3 GCDs to heal someone up with Mastery than to sometimes get lucky and get them healed in 2 GCDs but in most cases use 4 GCDs with a Crit build.

Moreover, once Mastery gets high enough, healing a lower health target will actually OUTHEAL the 50% bonus from a Critical, un-Masteried heal. That fact alone should be enough to make the advantages of Mastery pretty clear.

Obviously these stats are not mutually exclusive and will synergize together nicely, but based on what we've seen so far, certain healer Masteries seem exceptionally strong compared to other weaker ones as Kain pointed out, and hopefully Blizzard will recognize these discrepancies in the near future.

Or we could just continue the trend and all bitch that, "No, MY class is the least powerful!"

Ah, I didn't mean to imply that Shaman mastery was bad or the weakest. I agree that shaman and disc priest are the best, precisely because they are more reliable. I was mostly referring to the idea that shaman mastery was so good that it would trump all other stats, which I don't agree with. On the contrary, I think resto shaman is the best of all the healers hahah. A big part of that is the talent/stat synergies that I was trying to stress.

Originally Posted by Blizzard

Mastery: Illuminated Healing now absorbs 10% of the amount healed, up from 8%. Now lasts 8 sec, up from 6 sec. Each point of mastery increases the absorb amount by an additional 1.25%, up from 1%.

Booya!

It just dawned on me today that Illuminated Healing actually got buffed twice over in the latest beta build, with the 30% buff to the base healing of all the holy pally's spells providing additional absorbs as well. Go go pally rangers!