Elune's Spirit Guide (21/25/5 Night Elf Priest)

[Roxanne Flowers 15]

A little more time, a couple more levels ... and a few extra questions wanting answers.

So I've gotten my Night Elf Priest through Wetlands minus doing the Elite Quests (I'm deferring those to go do Duskwood and the remainder of Ashenvale before circling back for them) and have reached Level 32 on my Priest.  Got to run Blackfathom Deeps and was able to DPM may through rather than playing Healbot since for some reason I was able to pull a group together which had 3 healers in it and someone else wanted to play the medic for us, so I got to toss around Holy Fire and Starshards on everything and it was beautiful.

Anyway, the reason for this update post is because (as always) I've been wondering if I've gone perhaps a bit too far in my pursuit of maximal Starshards spell support in my build, and if it might be prudent to invest in some additional flexibility in my build strategy.  The result is still a 21/25/5 mix of talents (because that's "obligatory" to get Divine Spirit, Spiritual Guidance and Spirit Tap) but with a slightly different structure.
 

Level 60 Priest (21/25/5)
 

Discipline (21 points)

Wand Specialization - Rank 5/5
Increases your damage with Wands by 25%.

Silent Resolve - Rank 5/5
Reduces the threat generated by your spells by 20%.

Improved Power Word: Fortitude - Rank 2/2
Increases the effect of your Power Word: Fortitude and Prayer of Fortitude spells by 30%.

Improved Power Word: Shield - Rank 2/3
Increases the damage absorbed by your Power Word: Shield by 10%.

Martyrdom - Rank 2/2
Gives you a 100% chance to gain the Focused Casting effect that lasts for 6 sec after being the victim of a melee or ranged critical strike. The Focused Casting effect prevents you from losing casting time when taking damage and increases resistance to Interrupt effects by 20%.

Inner Focus - Rank 1/1
When activated, reduces the Mana cost of your next spell by 100% and increases its critical effect chance by 25% if it is capable of a critical effect.

Meditation - Rank 3/3
Allows 15% of your Mana regeneration to continue while casting.

Divine Spirit - Rank 1/1
Holy power infuses the target, increasing their Spirit by 17 for 30 min.

 

Holy (25 points)

Healing Focus - Rank 2/2
Gives you a 70% chance to avoid interruption caused by damage while casting any healing spell.

Holy Specialization - Rank 5/5
Increases the critical effect chance of your Holy spells by 5%.

Divine Fury - Rank 3/5
Reduces the casting time of your Smite, Holy Fire, Heal and Greater Heal spells by 0.3 sec.

Holy Nova - Rank 1/1
Causes an explosion of holy light around the caster, causing 28 to 33 Holy damage to all enemy targets within 10 yards and healing all party members within 10 yards for 52 to 61. These effects cause no threat.

Blessed Recovery - Rank 3/3
After being struck by a melee or ranged critical hit, heal 25% of the damage taken over 6 sec.

Inspiration - Rank 3/3
Increases your target's armor by 25% for 15 sec after getting a critical effect from your Flash Heal, Heal, Greater Heal, or Prayer of Healing spell.

Improved Healing - Rank 3/3
Reduces the Mana cost of your Lesser Heal, Heal, and Greater Heal spells by 15%.

Spiritual Guidance - Rank 5/5
Increases spell damage and healing by up to 25% of your total Spirit.

 

Shadow (5 points)

Spirit Tap - Rank 5/5
Gives you a 100% chance to gain a 100% bonus to your Spirit after killing a target that yields experience. For the duration, your Mana will regenerate at a 50% rate while casting. Lasts 15 sec.

 

The changes here from the original build plan are the inclusion of Inner Focus in Discipline (at the expense of 1 talent point from Improved Power Word: Shield) as well as dumping Improved Renew in favor of Improved Healing as well as swapping out Spell Warding for Healing Focus and 3/5 Divine Fury.

Doing additional napkin math showed that the difference between 2/3 and 3/3 Improved Power Word: Shield was probably going to amount to "not much" in terms of added protection.  5% of 942 damage absorbed is only +47.1 added to the damage shield at Rank 10, and with a 0.1 spell coefficient, even with +800 spell power (just for easy numbers reference) that would be a mere +80 damage absorbed and 5% of 80 is a paltry +4 added to the damage shield (assuming the talent also applies to spell power boosting and not just the "base" value only) ... meaning that at endgame each talent point is worth somewhere in the neighborhood of being +50 damage absorbed per Rank 10 casting, which at Level 60 damage levels (versus elites) starts feeling like a rounding error versus a single hit.  Certainly Nice To Have™, if you can afford the points for it, but if you can't it's not a make or break situation for a build strategy.  In this case, +100 absorb instead of +150 absorb is worth the tradeoff, I'm thinking.

Originally, I was also thinking that Inner Fire would be a waste on a build where the main spell to be using (Starshards) doesn't, and won't ever, crit ... meaning that the +25% chance to crit is useless if casting Inner Fire before Starshards.  However, the "cast for free" aspect would still be useful in a Starshards rotation, I'm now realizing, as a way to recover LOTS of mana while continuing to cast Starshards, simply because Starshards is a 6 second duration channeled spell, meaning at least 3 ticks of full Spirit mana recovery while continuing to chain cast Starshards.  This is because Starshards imposes its mana cost at the beginning of the spell, and after 6 seconds of casting the 5 Second Rule of casting has already expired, meaning that if you channel for the full 6 seconds you've already gotten in 1 mana recovery tick at full Spirit recovery rate.  Cast Inner Fire and then cast Starshards again right after and you're looking at another 6-8 seconds worth of full Spirit mana recovery because you haven't spent any mana to cast spells since the FIRST casting of Starshards.  Combine that with a Spirit Tap proc (if you can get it) and on a Spirit heavy build strategy like I've been talking about all along you can use Inner Fire as a sort of "backdoor" way to cast a Poor Man's Innervate™ on yourself while continuing to generate damage using Starshards.

Again, using Inner Fire to augment Starshards is a less than optimal option but it is not as "worthless" an option as I'd at first assumed.  There is some synergistic potential there for mana management that is worth getting ... and that's before recognizing that the Inner Fire + Prayer of Healing combination (or even Inner Fire + Greater Heal) gains significantly in value when including the +25% chance to crit (and another +5% from Holy Specialization) producing a proc from Inspiration to raise armor protection, in addition to the casting cost rebate.

In aggregate, it feels like these alterations in build strategy offer more in the way of flexibility (mana management, healing utility) than they "cost" overall in terms of maximization of specialization towards extreme Damage Per Mana efficiency through use of Starshards as the primary offensive spell.  It allows the build to be a better supporting role healer and adds some options and synergies that otherwise wouldn't be present.  So at the present time, this is the (new and improved?) build strategy to Level to 60.  Overall, it feels a bit better "balanced" than previous strategies I've posted in this thread, which all along has been about the Learning Process of figuring out what works (and why) through the experience of actually playing the game again.

http://db.vanillagaming.org/?talent#bVgrs00oZbxuIc0VZx

[Roxanne Flowers 15]

So my Night Elf Priest just reached Level 34 (yay!).  I went to train and respec and then after switching into a 0/25/0 build to completely fill out 5/5 Spiritual Guidance, I went to go and look at my Wand damage in the character screen and found ... well ... this ...

... and I was just like ... "Wait, what?"

How is having +36 Spell Power (from 144 Spirit divided by 4 equals 36 thanks to Spiritual Guidance) winding up SUBTRACTING damage off my Wand?  Why is it that 30-57 damage turns into 1-24 +36 damage when Spell Power gets added in ... especially since that calculates out to being 37-60 damage (1+36 to 24+36), but then the Damage display is showing 32-60 instead of 37-60.  What kind of math is going on behind the tooltip calculator shown here?

And then, just to do a cross-comparison, I tossed in a different Wand that I'd just gotten off the Worgen in the Woods quest (since I hadn't disenchanted or sold it yet), and it seemed even weirder.

Okay, I get that the 25% of Spirit as Spell Power calculation is an Integer based calculation (144/4=36.0 vs 143/4=35.75=35 for the display) ... but Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is going on with the damage calculation for the Consecrated Wand?  1-6 +35 winds up being 36-41 damage, not the 20-38 damage advertised on the item, but then the Damage display shows 22-41 instead of 36-41 so ... HUH??

There has got to be some legacy vanilla source that figured this out over a decade ago.  Anyone know where to find it?

[Roxanne Flowers 15]

Okay, so I have a hypothesis for what's going on with the Wand damage tooltip display, but it requires suspension of disbelief in Wrong™.

So there's different caclulations going on in different places for different things, is the explainer I can come up with.  Obviously I haven't exactly got a wide variety of cases to choose from in my data sample, but the following notion is congruent with the results.

For Wand minimum damage, take the actual weapon minimum damage and then "normalize" the Spell Power over 10 seconds (DoT behavior precedent) while also factoring in weapon speed.  You wind up with something that looks like:

Base Weapon Minimum Damage + (Spell Power / Weapon Speed / 10) = Minimum Damage displayed on Character screen (drop fractions)

Plugging in the values known, we get the following:

Gravestone Scepter: 30 + (36/1.5/10) = 30 + 2.4 = 32
Consecrated Wand: 20 + (35/1.2/10) = 20 + 2.92 = 22

As shown above, the Gravestone Scepter and Consecrated Wand show that they have a damage output of 32-60 and 22-41 respectively, so the minimum damage matches observation (assuming the character sheet calculations are correct in the first place).

For Wand maximum damage, do something almost exactly the same as the minimum damage, except drop the weapon speed divisor, like so:

Base Weapon Maximum Damage + (Spell Power / 10) = Maximum Damage displayed on Character screen (drop fractions)

Plugging in the values known, we get the following:

Gravestone Scepter: 57 + (36/10) = 57 + 3.6 = 60
Consecrated Wand: 38 + (35/10) = 38 + 3.5 = 41

As shown above, the Gravestone Scepter and Consecrated Wand show that they have a damage output of 32-60 and 22-41 respectively, so the maximum damage matches observation (assuming the character sheet calculations are correct in the first place).

So that makes sense of the 32-60 and 22-41 displays for damage, but doesn't make any sense out of the hover tooltips showing 1-24 +36 and 1-6 +35.  In this case, I'm reasonably sure the cause is bad/lazy programming on Blizzard's part.

The two Wands shown have minimum damages of 30 and 20 respectively, but the Spell Power being added exceeds both of these values (36 and 35 respectively).  The mousehover tooltip must be doing something absurd, like SUBTRACTING 36 from 30 as well as subtracting 35 from 20 ... getting a negative number ... and then just assigning a value of 1 to the minimum damage if Spell Power exceeds the base minimum damage of the Wand.  This ought to then be why both Wands show a minimum damage of 1 in both hover tooltips.  Even when factoring in the 32-60 and 22-41 displayed damage values, 32<36 and 22<35, so in both cases the minimum damage in the hover tooltip winds up being 1.

The maximum damage calculation must then also be similarly compromised/borked/poorly implemented (presumably by Blizzard).  In this case, we can confirm that the game is simply working backwards from the maximum damage display of 60 and 41, straight SUBTRACTING the Spell Power and then using the result as the maximum damage value in the hover tooltip.  Thus ... 60-36=24 for the 1-24 +36 display ... and 41-25=6 for the 1-6 +35 display.

Which is just ... Whacktastic ... on multiple levels.