I’m considering respeccing holy/disc for holy nova in a few levels and one of the things I’m dreading is not being able to cast it that much because of how mana intensive it is.
This got me wondering about end game gear and how much spell power adds up and got me wondering whether it’s possible to use spell damage to the point that it’s worth using, say rank 1 arcane explosion and just being able to spam it indefinitely.
Plus damage allows you to downrank spells, but dont expect to be using rank 1 spells.
People used to have multiple versions of spells bound depending on the situation, or if they needed a soft threat throttle.
What is that bullet point from? Patch notes? I’m not entirely sure what it means but I do recall that at one point spells were changed so that they were more likely to be resisted at lower ranks (so shamans could no longer spam rank 1 Frost shock to keep someone chilled)
Looking at the various ranks of holy nova, it looks like the spell does become increasingly mana efficient as it ranks up, so it would require a certain amount of spell damage to offset that.
What percentage of spell power do instant cast spells get from gear? 1/3?
It wasnt supposed to be a bullet point. Was supposed to be + damage.
The problem with instant cast spells is the +spell power modifier is very low so if you have +100 spell damage it will not make your holy nova do 100 more damage and as you down rank spells the effect gets even lower (not sure the exact %). Overall though as your gear gets better you will get stats and spell damage and you will just have to do some testing to see how much benefit you are getting from the spell damage/healing. I know druids would use lower level healing touch all the time in vanilla as it was more mana efficient and a faster cast time.
Oof, I’m reading that the coefficient for holy nova is 7.14%
So even if there were no penalty to lower rank spells, it would require 247 +spell damage gear to make rank 1 holy nova equal to max rank holy nova (without spell power) in terms of mana efficiency (the damage per cast would still be lower of course.)
That’s not really worth striving for, and I’m not even sure what the max +spell damage looks like with the best possible gear.
I was only looking at the damage component of holy nova, and the healing would be even harder to bring up to par because the base numbers are almost twice as high.
Oh well!
Rank 1 holy nova is useful for knocking rogues out of stealth, or killing illusionary npcs.
Holy nova will always be a fairly inefficient spell.
But yes, downranking once you have spell power/healing is a very good idea.
Different spells have different breakpoints.
For most standard heals, increasing your +healing will change which rank of the spell is the most efficient for you to cast.
However, for most dps spells, this is not the case. No matter how much +damage you layer on, your efficiency will always be low->high and your dps will always be high->low. There’s no ‘breakpoint’ for you to hit.