So what is it going to be? I find the Mastery + Vers build to not be that viable. Corruptions made it possible, but it’s not the case now
Haste + Crit
Haste + Vers
Crit + Vers
Mastery vs Vers
I feel that this should be clear because crafting Flash Concentration is a big deal, and I have seen many priest running it with mastery and crit, which are raid stats. This is to avoid regret after crafting the item.
I myself going base 20% haste and then full crit vers.
Right now I’m at 24% Crit 20% Haste and 9% Vers, Though I have ToP crit trinket that gives me 900+ crit and HC denathrius trinks which give me quite a lot of crit, so yea I’m mostly stacking crit.
Haste is ok but you will not reduce Heal casts for that much because of FC. And for me smite is an already fast cast spell so no need to bring it down from 1.2s to 1s.
Crit on the other side as how I see it lets you get big FC heals which lets you top all your teammates through ToL talent and with a single 5stacks heal crit + resonant words is kinda like a Serenity cast. It also makes you hit big Holy fires crit and smites and if you’re Venthyr Mindgames can crit for like 14k which is really nice.
Today I did a Halls of atonement 15 and I did 1.6k dps so Crit stacking seems good for dpsing too.
why 20% haste if it is not that good? by those metrics you would be better stacking crit and vers for dungeons. You should have 24% crit, 20% vers and 10% haste, lol.
My FH and Smites are 1.3 seconds…lowering them to 1.2 will change nothing.
This season has prideful, mana is fine. You just have to react to damage in time. If you can react with 10% haste then go with it. Personally, I prefer 15% at least.
Because having haste is good too. Get to cast faster Smites and Holy fires, makes your renew tick faster, also your Divine hymn.
Haste isn’t bad, so I just plant myself at 20% to get that extra .1 cast speed and then full crit > vers.
I also have big Crit trinkets like I can get close to 50% crit when I have both active (Denathrius trink has 30s internal cd and ToP trink has a 2 min cd so I have them active very often) that comes handy for big dps or when I need big heals.
I started with crit then I starting doing PvP with my shadow spec and haste gear dropped. I kept it on my holy to test… I can say that crit > haste.
However as a consequence my crit & haste are almost dead even at 17%, so it seems to work well. I do remember doing heals when my crit was low and I would run out of mana sooner.
You know RNG is RNG right? You can’t choose which gear you get, you have to play the cards you are delt… if you don’t get more crit what are supposed to do , cry? You just use whatever you can. People say ALWAYS get higher rated gear which supercedes stats… now you expect people to move stuff around, you think this is Pandaria and we can reforge?!?
I personally aim for 15-20% haste, 20-25% crit, and stack versatility over mastery. Mastery is your least desirable stat because it overheals more than it heals most of the time since you usually pump people to 100% fairly in 1-2 casts. Versatility also increases your damage output.
Flash Concentration is your BiS for M+ and your entire playstyle is built around it because FC Heal is a really strong single target heal (especially once you add in Trail of Light).
Generally, any stat you have that’s much lower than your other stats will be very valuable for your next chunk, so if we could wave a magic wand and have all stat combos of Flash Concentration we’d just throw on whichever our highest ilvl gear starves us of at the time lol.
Because that’s unreasonable, a safe bet for right now is vers plus x. The added damage reduction of vers in particular being fantastic for keys and, best of all, free for its budget. Scales with damage, is consistent and upfront.
Haste is likely great thanks to how mana efficient Holy is feeling with FC atm, and how haste in general picks up for healers in keys thanks to drinking opportunities.
Crit and mastery are still great, mastery having less desirable mechanics and not scaling with damage, but good bang for its budget for healing throughput.
So probably vers+haste? Either way, I wouldn’t OCD over it tooo hard if you can help it, won’t make a noticeable difference in the long run xD
One technique I’ve learned in M+ though that helped increase my overall dps by 50% is by doing this.
On the initial trash/boss pulls I always SWP as many mobs as I can. Most trash packs are 3-5 mobs.
If I’m not able to SWP all the mobs because I have to heal the tank I cast a SWP on the other mobs inbetween my heals.
I always set my tab target to the first mob I SWP’d or the one that is about to fall off soonest.
I try and keep a high uptime on SWP throughout the trash pulls… 90% uptime is desirable.
I modified a WeakAura to give me audio alerts when all my SW:P’s fall off existing targets because sometimes I forget to refresh if things are getting crazy.
I cast other offensive spells if I’m able too. Divine Star, Holy Fire, Chastise, Smite, Holy Nova, etc.
Just keeping SWP up on the mobs all the time helped me boost my damage output from 800-1000 dps on avg to 1300-1500. I think with some tweaking and practice I can push even higher.