Gear & Stat Choices (Warning: Huge Amount Of Text)

Gear & Stat

Choices

Warning: The Following Is Relatively Unorganized
And Way Too Long (Over 1100 Words)

Read At Your Own Risk

Part 1: Wounds & Toughness
And The Flaws Of The Almighty Graph

The following is aimed far more at Rune Priests / Zealots than any other class. I understand that being a Melee Hybrid such as Warrior Priest or DoK changes things quite a bit.

Calculations, graphs, ratios and comparisons. I love them all. However, there are some things you simply cannot calculate. On paper, graphed, or broken into a ratio, on a healing class Toughness appears to be at least on average better than wounds. There are of course the calculations showing that wounds improves the value of toughness, and toughness wounds. Making the assumption that toughness on a healer has an elevated value as you can restore your own health, and toughness makes it more difficult to take away that restored point (have I lost you with my run-ons yet?), many healers have taken to searching out toughness at the expense of wounds, blindly following where raw numbers lead them.

However, I would like to point out, you CANNOT graph or calculate a stat based on the possibility of a Witch Elf/Hunter or Sorc/Bright Wizard is lurking around that rock you are planning on hiding behind. Math is wonderful, and I am not surprised to hear that toughness is better than wounds across an extended fight, but here is what you need to keep in mind:

Diminished Value: The higher the damage, less the % reduction of wounds. As the damage-per-hit increases, the power of toughness becomes exponentially insignificant. As your wounds decrease to be replaced by toughness, the odds of you surviving the duration of a stun or silence, also decrease.

Toughness helps with sustained. I can handle sustained. It is BURST that is the true fear of a pure healer. Can you survive the stun/silence combo of that Witch Elf? Can you survive the double-crit followed by the 1800 damage morale of many glass cannons? You MUST… MUST MUST MUST first acquire enough wounds to be able to SURVIVE initial burst. When you’re corpsed, suddenly all that willpower does not seem so critical.

I dont care what an amazing healer you are, or how you never make mistakes etc… Let us pretend for a moment that you are the Uber-God-of-Priests/Zealots that you claim to be. Thats great. Really. But that is NOT going to stop you from getting silenced or stunned… or both. Test and decide for yourself what a stable wounds value is before you blindly follow the ‘almighty graph’.

Leading into Part 2, I will say that while considering this, you must also consider that MOST STATS also have a value of some sort to a healer. I know that initiative is highly ineffective, but it is SOMETHING. Think outside the box, and if you have the option of 3 willpower or 12 initiative, at least pocket this item. Such a thought process will lead to surprising results:

 

Part 2: Gear Choices
And Breaking The Mold

The following is based on Rune Priests. However, you may find something similar on your own class. Dare to challenge the norm, Warrior Priests & Disciples!

Allow me to preface with: I use Discipline, and Oath Rune of Iron (Willpower Buff).

You may have noticed by now, that our gear as Rune Priests as we progress seems to get only marginally better in Willpower, wounds and toughness, and Mythic seems to have seen fit to grant us large jumps in intelligence as an alternative to this small jump in willpower. In a fit of extreme boredom, and with gold burning a hole in my pocket, I decided to EMBRACE CHANGE (more as a joke). Sacrifice 6 willpower and 10 wounds for 12 intelligence on my ring? I’ll take two, thanks!

I’ll spare you the item-for-item detail, and fast forward to the end.

In the “horribly itemized” RR gear, as well as some random greens and a decent blue staff… Let me just say, in VERY easily acquired gear, I had:

Combo Set
741 Willpower
691 Wounds
489 Intelligence

Keep in mind that I dont go cheap as far as talismans, and I used permanent above. If you are serious about wearing a set, then gold should not factor into your choice of items. If you have played a priest to 40, you will understand the comparative value of those numbers. If not, let me tell you that my healing gear has:

Healing Set:
850 Willpower
671 Wounds
Roughly 250 Intelligence

We are looking at moving from (mostly) very solid blue gear, to misc vendor greens and a couple of blues. The result: 250 int in exchange for 100 willpower. There are two things you should consider before crying “But, 100 willpower is a lot of healing!”

1) Diminishing Value: The more willpower you get, the less of a percentile impact it has on your healing done. 100 willpower when I have say, 300 previously, may be a 15-20% jump in healing (You have to account for base healing). 100 willpower when you have 750… not so great. It actually comes out to about 5% on my largest heal. That aside, you also have to consider that every level-up, the base healing of your abilities increases, decreasing the percentage of healing gained through stats. These are all factored against Rune of Restoration, which takes more from willpower than any other spell we have. Factor willpower into HoTs, and suddenly 100 seems a whole lot less important

2) Survivability: A dead healer is a healer no longer. I realize this does not apply to INT (Well, sometimes – see: disrupting Rune of Sundering) but it does apply to many other stats that I will not continue into further detail on.

However, this is not my recommendation as a primary set currently. Healing is role #1. This setup would be my main if say, I had a healing set of all green quality items instead. It is a sign of things to come. Perhaps, in a solid set of Rare or even Epic items there will be minimal healing lost or even none, in exchange for a large chunk of intelligence. 

I wanted to introduce the line of thought that I believe Mythic has followed, so that when we start collecting better blues, and perhaps some epic gear… we may look at it under a different light.  Less of the “Lose 3 willpower for 15 int? F- YOU MYTHIC!”

If you can take anything from this post, it ought to be that this is NOT World of Warcraft. You dont lose all semblance of usefulness in one aspect of the game just to make strides in another. It would appear that Mythic wishes to break the mundane roles of “healers heal, and that is all.” (See: Warrior Priest, DoK)

I said that to say, GG Mythic, apparently the joke is on me! And thank you Mythic, for at least making an attempt to give me some sort of viability outside of healing without forsaking the primary role of my class.

Embrace change and dare to step beyond the boundaries of the past.  This is Warhammer.