Chiming in here to detail something I’ve tweaked and will likely continue going onto shadowlands. I have evidence to support that mastery stacking can be a viable Holy Priest build that’s viable in both M+ and Mythic raiding. One of the primary reasons why I focused so heavily on mastery is that it fundamentally changes exactly how a Holy Priest approaches healing.
With extremely high mastery, Echo of Light no longer becomes a mere afterthought, but instead is far more formidable, able to top off people in M+ with 2 gcd (flash and renew) and continue moving on with DPS. The most important impact, however, is it turns every impact heal you do into a pseudo druid HoT. This comes with key significant changes in how you can approach encounters.
You can utilize Heal to ramp up Echo of Light on a tank before a pull, which is nearly free if you have talented Enlightenment. Guardian Spirit and Serenity on a tank will not only stabilize, but provides effective healing over a prolonged duration.
But, perhaps the biggest change is that it gives me greater dps windows. The prolonged healing by Echo means that there are decent windows of time where it’s maintaining healing on whoever is hurt and i can continue to dps. It’s also not rng reliant as crit, nor as bland as versatility.
I’m going to be continuing this in Shadowlands, potentially turning it into a mastery/haste due to the addition of diminishing returns and hoping to make use of the new renew talent.
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I like that your thinking for yourself.
Too often atm i see people “whats the best this, whats the best that” and people dont think for themselves, they are sheep.
I dont know if your way works but at least your experimenting and trying things and maybe it works and can help other priests out.
Question tho, without the stat amps to jack mastery up will it still work
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Might not work in shadowlands since Renew no longer has an instant healing when you apply it and the HoT effect does not proc Echo.
In my current gear, it’d drop down to 57% healing conversion without the corruption amps. Still a large amount to have, and point for point, gives more echo healing than verse gives healing bonus. In BFA, it’s roughly 57 mastery rating per 1% echo vs 85 versatility rating per 1% bonus healing/damage. Crit is too rng reliant for my tastes.
I do think it’ll still be effective in Shadowlands, just will have to do some tinkering when it comes to diminishing returns. But, I am going both mastery/haste in shadowlands to scale renew a bit harder. Renewed Faith also does affect Echo so that’s a big bonus.
I rarely used renew for the echo except when spamming it to remove grievous when the group is in motion to the next pack. I’ll be focusing on mastery/haste to scale renew and picking up renewed faith to also bolster renew and echo.
I’ve seen this firsthand in a pug Mythic raid where another Holy Priest was running 150% mastery (tons of 12% mastery corruptions + 900 mastery corruptions that have like a 50% uptime). It turns Echo of Light into a significant portion of your overall healing and it’s baffling when you look and see 50% of their healing is Echo of Light at 18 million and the next heal they did was only 2 million. It looks like they’re just generating Echo of Light out of thin air, but it’s the obscene amount they have.
It’s completely memes for raid healing especially on dot heavy fights where your echo of light starts ticking for like 25-50k. Echo of Light basically becomes your primary source of healing instead of just an added bonus. This entire playstyle is only a thing simply due to corruptions allow you to pump secondary stats.
When it comes to M+… versatility is a superior stat because it also boosts your damage output and reduces how much damage you take. High versatility can basically mean you can do like 30-50% more damage than somebody without. Also, the added benefit of Versatility is it also bumps up your Renew healing which is usually my main-source of healing for topping people off.
Throughput is really what mattered for healing in M+ though because with Spirit of Preservation essence, procs, etc. you can run a 75+% crit rate on Flash Heal easily. You can double-tap people for like 500k heals with Flash Heal + Serenity. Having a good amount of haste also means you can pew-pew and respond to threats faster. The more Surge of Light procs you can fish out the better…
Mastery I feel is like on the bottom end of priorities for M+ because it tends to overheal a lot. It’s different then raid healing where you’re basically able to douse the entire raid in obscene amounts of echo of light to pump the healing meters to the moon. M+ you’re in the race for the timer and having a healer able to pitch in an extra 30-60 mil in a dungeon can make or break timers.
I don’t know what’s going to be the gear meta for priests come Shadow Lands. I figure it’ll be the same mastery/crit/haste/versatility in stat priority for raid healing and probability versatility/crit/haste/mastery for M+… I plan on running actual proper sets for everything instead of the hodge-potch I got now.
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I keep seeing the echo overheal mentioned a lot, but one thing that always baffled me is the assumption that I’m spending extra mana to generate that overheal, and not that overheal coming as a natural consequence of high mastery. The only time this really applies is if I’m ramping heal on the tank prior to the pull. But, heal barely costs any mana.
As for damage, I routinely break 30mil as Holy, and that’s with pugging all my M+. Holy Nova is far more dps than smite when there’s more than 2 targets and independent crit chances, but only under those conditions. A big positive is that it also maintains some healing and echo of light after it.
As for raiding, it’s extremely effective against raid wide damage ticks as it effectively slows the pace the raid takes damage and allows people to stabilize. For raid wide burst damage, I’m having significant success timing Halo or using Hymn if assigned to that right before the damage occurs.
Still, mathematically, you get more % per rating point out of mastery than versatility, which is why I’m kinda finding the argument towards high versatility or high crit to be substantially less applicable to shadowlands.
Be that as it may, I started playing retail in April and although I don’t quite have a set M+ team, and I’m currently in the 2nd string/benched/alt/pug mythic raid group for the guild I recently joined, I’m happy with my progress and I endeavor to experiment more with the build.
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Echo of Light for me tends to overheal more than it actually heals because it’s usually like 23% of my healing and 37% of my overhealing. Mastery in M+ is like putting all your eggs in your healing department when really it’s a balance between damaging & healing because you’ll spend at least over half of your time in a dungeon flinging out big PP smites and holy novas. I can get 95% mastery though between procs.
If you can pump out 30 mil with low versatility. Just imagine what it’d be like with 50%!
I’d be spending more time with maintenance healing without echo however.
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It’s hard to honestly say because let’s say you dropped down to 30% mastery from 90%, but went from 0% versatility to 50%… your direct healing output will be basically the same… and your damage output would increase a lot. You’ll also gain the benefit of taking 25% less damage from boss mechanics.
just a reminder with stats in SL, there is ramping up diminishing returns after 25%. Something to keep in mind.
Correct… that’s why I’m waiting for SL to launch to get a feel on what the itemization is going to be like because we’re going from basically super powered back to being weak again.
Yeah, I’ve taken this into account. Stacking mastery up till 40% then boosting up others before going further is what my plan is, if possible. The initial start when secondary stats are low is where i’m going to be focused on Mastery/Haste.
This has already taken into account DR for shadowlands. Without the stat amps, verse would be 22%/11% bonus healing/damage and DR.
Without stat amps, I’d still be at 57% echo healing.
You arent going to get close to 40% first raid tier so im presuming your talking later in the xpac. I had a look at the raid itemization and it was a bit sucky lol
There’s ways to approach 40%. Namely Kyrian Combat Meditation or Night Fae Grove Invigoration.
Will still be stacking it at the expansion start.
Mastery has always been important, no? I think at one point I did the math and point for point crit is slightly better, but mastery was always right up there.
Depends on who you ask and for what purpose. Also depends on when you attempt to stack it at the potential detriment of other secondaries.
It’s roughly 60 rating per 1% for crit, 57 rating per 1% for mastery. I opted for mastery because I prefer the consistency. Sure, crit averaged out over long periods may be slightly more healing, but it’s still too RNG for my preference.
Also, there are those gameplay changes I mentioned. You can fit quite a bit of proactive healing depending on the situation with large echos. For instance, in underrot, I time divine hymn to release 1 tick prior to tantrum for the sake of building an Echo. I can also build up lots of prayer of healing prior to it for some sustained healing during that phase if the fight drags out longer.
The benefit of crit is that you double dip with mastery. A crit on a spell will result in that much extra mastery. That is why it’s more efficient to get crit and mastery in roughly equal amounts.
One thing I noticed with mastery is that you can get a ton of it from just azerite trait + trinket procs alone. With that 900 corruption mastery item (which has like a 40% uptime) I can easily get up to 95% mastery when everything procs.
All very true. However, the downside of crit, especially in an environment without stat amps, is that it’s very RNG reliant.
Between haste/crit and haste/mastery, the benefits even out.
You mentioned that you can dps more and let your hots tick. However, your dps output plummets due to mastery doing nothing for it.
It’s the similar story with haste crit. You get bigger heals but you will need to heal more often as there isn’t not a lot of buffer after the initial heal.
It’s a zero sum game. It’s just whether or not you prefer front loading or backloading healing and whether your group can utilise this.
Overall though, you are better off front loading healing in m plus as there are far more bursty damage rather than rot damage.
Having said that, Anything higher and both stat strategy will play second fiddle to haste/vers where survivability reigns king.