# Dousing the Flame?

Late last night, it was announced that we’d be seeing some hotfixes during server maintenance this week.  There were two announcements concerning protection paladins.  The first was a nerf to the RPPM proc rates of the intellect legendary cloaks (caster and healing), which was probably warranted.  My own testing suggested that using the caster legendary cloak was about a ~7k DPS increase over using the melee DPS legendary cloak.  While I wouldn’t equip it on a fight that seriously challenged my survivability (for example, Garrosh Hellscream, where both of our kills involved at least one cloak 1up proc), it was certainly fun for padding meters on more trivial survivability tests, especially encounters with adds:

Yeah, this is fair and balanced.

Disclaimer: I didn’t blog about this for a few reasons.  First, I was so busy last week that I really didn’t have time.  More importantly, I was also pretty sure it would get fixed pretty quickly, and didn’t want to encourage players to drop 7k gold on an extra cloak that was likely to be useless in a week or two.  Most players doing serious heroic progression were already aware of the trick, even though they may have been playing coy about it in the hopes that it didn’t get fixed.  But with that many top-tier players using the intellect cloak, Blizzard was bound to see it sooner rather than later.

However, the more important change is a significant nerf to EF:

Eternal Flame’s heal-over-time effect is increased by 50% when used on the Paladin (down from 100%).

That’s a pretty substantial nerf, reducing the effectiveness of the HoT by 25%.  So it’s worth re-visiting the Eternal Flame vs. Sacred Shield debate to see which is the more intelligent choice.

You may remember we went through this prior to patch 5.4.  And while the conclusion there was that EF was solidly better across the board, we were also looking at a very limited sample of gear sets.  Since then, I’ve noticed that the results vary a lot from character to character.  So in the wake of this nerf, I felt it was worth doing a more complete assessment of the two talents to see how they scale across gear sets.

Simulation Setup

Each of these simulations is 50k iterations and pits the player against the T16Q boss, with all other options left at the defaults.  For the “pre-hotfix” data I’m using the latest release version of SimC (540-2).  For the “post-hotfix” data I’m using the trunk of SimC, so it’s an early preview of 540-3, but should be essentially identical to version 540-2 for our purposes.  Except, of course, that I’m tweaking the Eternal Flame coefficient in the post-hotfix version to simulate the new behavior.

I’m using the T15H, T16N, and T16H profiles that are already set up in SimC, with minor modifications. I set them all to use the same glyphs and talents:

Talents: Unbreakable Spirit, Light’s Hammer
Glyphs: Focused Shield / Alabaster Shield / Divine Protection

Since it’s not clear which of our level 75 talents is preferable, I decided to sim both Divine Purpose and Holy Avenger so we could compare them.  After I finished the second round of simulations (post-hotfix), I realized that I should probably have included Sanctified Wrath, so I went back and ran those sims as well.  I didn’t have time to revert the EF nerf and run them again to get pre-hotfix results for SW, but it probably doesn’t matter much since those results aren’t relevant going forward anyway.

Since the T15H profile uses an older action priority list, I’ve retrofitted it so that it’s using the same one that T16N and T16H use, with the addition of the Lao-Chin’s Liquid Courage /use command from the existing T16H profile.  The actions for each profile are therefore:

actions=/auto_attack actions+=/blood_fury actions+=/berserking actions+=/arcane_torrent actions+=/avenging_wrath actions+=/holy_avenger,if=talent.holy_avenger.enabled actions+=/divine_protection actions+=/eternal_flame,if=talent.eternal_flame.enabled&(buff.eternal_flame.remains<2&buff.bastion_of_glory.react>2&(holy_power>=3|buff.divine_purpose.react)) actions+=/shield_of_the_righteous,if=holy_power>=5|buff.divine_purpose.react|incoming_damage_1500ms>=health.max*0.3 actions+=/crusader_strike actions+=/judgment,if=cooldown.crusader_strike.remains>=0.5 actions+=/avengers_shield,if=cooldown.crusader_strike.remains>=0.5 actions+=/sacred_shield,if=talent.sacred_shield.enabled&((target.dot.sacred_shield.remains<5)&(cooldown.crusader_strike.remains>=0.5)) actions+=/hammer_of_wrath,if=cooldown.crusader_strike.remains>=0.5 actions+=/execution_sentence,if=talent.execution_sentence.enabled&cooldown.crusader_strike.remains>=0.5 actions+=/lights_hammer,if=talent.lights_hammer.enabled&cooldown.crusader_strike.remains>=0.5 actions+=/holy_prism,if=talent.holy_prism.enabled&cooldown.crusader_strike.remains>=0.5 actions+=/holy_wrath,if=cooldown.crusader_strike.remains>=0.5 actions+=/consecration,if=(target.debuff.flying.down&!ticking)&(cooldown.crusader_strike.remains>=0.5) actions+=/sacred_shield,if=talent.sacred_shield.enabled&cooldown.crusader_strike.remains>=0.5

I’ve also added another gear set, which I’m calling “T16F” because F is a fun letter and this is my blog so I can do what I want.  The T16F gear set is identical to the T16N gear set, but with the 4-piece set bonus artificially turned off using the option:

tier16_4pc_tank=0

This gives us a benchmark to see what gear upgrades alone do, i.e. if you used off-set pieces instead of the tier pieces.  It also lets us get a clear comparison of exactly how important that tier bonus is.

All of the html results from these sims can be found here, in case you want to analyze them yourself:

Side note: I need to find a better way to host these, since clicking on one from google sites ends up downloading it rather than simply displaying it in a new tab.  If anyone knows how to get that functionality from google sites in a bulk fashion (i.e. not having to set up a “New Page” for each report), please let me know.  Alternatively, if anyone has a good suggestion for a different host, I’m open to other options.  I may eventually just host them on sacredduty.net if that ends up being the easiest option.

Results

In any event, here are the results in table format for easy comparison.  First, the relevant stats for each of the gear sets:

Raid buffed stats of each gear set
Set STR STA Health Melee Haste Spell Haste
T15H 18210 54069 903k 31.99% 38.59%
T16N/F 20517 55605 925k 39.47% 46.44%
T16H 25720 68677 1108k 48.86% 56.31%
Set Mastery Dodge Parry Block Spell Crit
T15H 19.71% 7.77% 24.79% 32.38% 10.13%
T16N/F 26.91% 5.24% 26.68% 38.27% 10.24%
T16H 33.19% 5.35% 31.76% 42.99% 10.78%

Next, let’s look at the pre-hotfix results that tell us how things stood before Tuesday:

Results pre-hotfix
Gear L75 L45 DPS TMI
T15H DP SS 248k 8200
T15H DP EF 245k 650
T15H SW SS 245k 16000
T15H SW EF 243k 1200
T15H HA SS 250k 15000
T15H HA EF 248k 890
T16F DP SS 272k 640
T16F DP EF 269k 65
T16F SW SS 270k 1300
T16F SW EF 267k 85
T16F HA SS 277k 1100
T16F HA EF 274k 79
T16N DP SS 272k 640
T16N DP EF 279k 34
T16N SW SS 270k 1400
T16N SW EF 275k 32
T16N HA SS 277k 1100
T16N HA EF 281k 26
T16H DP SS 305k 37
T16H DP EF 311k 18
T16H SW SS 302k 51
T16H SW EF 306k 12
T16H HA SS 312k 39
T16H HA EF 315k 10

This data is pretty straightforward.  The T15H gear set, which has both 2T15 and 4T15 set bonuses, clearly favored Eternal Flame by a huge margin in all configurations.  It’s just grossly overpowered compared to Sacred Shield.  This is consistent with what we saw in the previous post with Slootbag’s gear set, though even more pronounced.  At that gear level, it seems that Divine Purpose + Eternal Flame is the best overall combination of talents for pure TMI minimization.

And that ordering continues as we increase the gear level.  Note that by upgrading from T15H to T16F, we get an overall reduction in TMI, so the raw stamina gain has more than offset the loss of the set bonuses.  It’s possible that a hybrid set that used only 4 pieces of double-upgraded heroic T15 would match or exceed the T16F performance, but probably not by much, if any.  Either way, EF still dominates in T16F gear.

Turning on the set bonus has no significant effect on SS, but makes a fairly big difference with EF.  It’s hard to tell that from these results because the TMI is so low already that the difference looks small, but remember that TMI is an exponential scale.  So reducing it from 65 to 34 is similar to reducing it from ~2k to 1k; in both cases you’re getting around a factor of 2 improvement, which is around a 5% reduction in maximum spike size.  I’m hoping to update SimC with a more complete T16 boss set so that we have harder-hitting bosses to pit ourselves against, but I haven’t had time yet.

The T16H data is not very illuminating, again because the TMI values are pretty small.  The T16Q boss has become trivial at this point, but EF still holds a strong lead over SS, even though the absolute difference doesn’t look that large.

So all in all, this is pretty good evidence that EF was overpowered across the board.  Which is basically what I said in the last post on this topic:

It feels like the 30% Sacred Shield nerf or the 40% Eternal Flame buff would have been sufficient to make the two equally valid choices in that talent tier.  But the combination of both effects seems to just swap the two; rather than Sacred Shield being the hands-down, no-brainer choice that all paladins take, 5.4 just puts Eternal Flame in that spot.

So the next question you’d want to ask is whether a 25% nerf is enough to bring it back into line.  So let’s look at that data:

Results post-hotfix
Gear L75 L45 DPS TMI
T15H DP SS 248k 8200
T15H DP EF 245k 2200
T15H SW SS 245k 16000
T15H SW EF 243k 4000
T15H HA SS 250k 15000
T15H HA EF 247k 3100
T16F DP SS 272k 650
T16F DP EF 269k 120
T16F SW SS 270k 1300
T16F SW EF 267k 220
T16F HA SS 277k 1100
T16F HA EF 273k 210
T16N DP SS 272k 630
T16N DP EF 278k 40
T16N SW SS 270k 1400
T16N SW EF 275k 44
T16N HA SS 277k 1100
T16N HA EF 281k 37
T16H DP SS 306k 37
T16H DP EF 311k 18
T16H SW SS 302k 51
T16H SW EF 306k 12
T16H HA SS 312k 39
T16H HA EF 315k 10

The answer here seems to be, “not quite.” But the results are a lot closer.  For the T15H and T16F gear sets the two talents on the same order of magnitude, but EF is still ahead by a factor of 4, which is about a 13% reduction in spike size.  It could probably stand to be nerfed some more to bring the two into line with one another.

That said, the results are close enough that you could feasibly choose either one, especially if the encounter gives you reason to prefer absorbs more than usual.  I still think EF is a solid default pick here, but you won’t be gimping yourself too badly by using SS.  While this is assuming perfect play, but very simple EF usage (refresh whenever BoG > 3 stacks and remaining duration is less than 2 seconds), so the EF results aren’t that strongly dependent on player skill in this case.  A skilled player may be able to make even more effective use of EF in practice by timing it to react to damage rather than blindly refreshing.

Regardless, once 4T16 enters the mix, EF pulls solidly ahead again.  The T16N/H gear sets show the same clear preference for EF that we saw in the pre-hotfix data.

Yesterday I tweeted that SS might have a slight advantage in the absence of 4T16.  After looking at the results more closely, though, I realized I had left a stray “emergency EF” conditional in the action priority list, which was artificially making the EF results worse.  If you recall from the post where we looked at Sloot’s character, these sorts of emergency WoG conditions were always a net loss in TMI (as in, they made you more susceptible to spikes, not less!).  They also hit EF harder than SS because you’re not just voiding 3 seconds of Shield of the Righteous coverage, you’re also over-writing a strong EF with a weaker one.  With that stray conditional, EF was slightly behind SS; removing it put us back in the situation we see in this data.

Conclusions

So, in short, EF is still very, very good, even after a 25% nerf.  Arguably still your go-to talent in that tier, and definitely your go-to talent once you get 4 pieces of T16 gear. While SS still lags, the gap has narrowed enough that it’s at least a reasonable alternative, if not on equal footing.  At the risk of giving anyone at Blizzard any ideas, they’re going to have to nerf EF harder if they want the two to be almost equal in performance for tanks.

Narrowing the gap has certainly made it more likely that SS would excel on a boss-by-boss basis, though.  As we mentioned last time, a boss that tests instantaneous effective health (ala Talon Rake) might still favor SS, and that’s even more true now that it’s not so far behind.  Though honestly I can’t think of many (any?) in normal-mode T16 encounters.  In fact, I ran with EF for every fight this week, with one exception: Paragons of the Klaxxi.  And that was a special case due to the particular boss I was tanking (Rik’kal – I found that juggling holy power for EF was more of a pain than usual when SotR had to be up on every Injection, so I went with the passive, no-HP-cost talent option).

I could imagine using it for heroic Immerseus…. but I didn’t.  And as we saw at the beginning of this post, heroic Fallen Protectors wasn’t threatening enough to make me want to wear the tanking cloak, let alone worry about which talent was best.  I have heard that some of the later heroic bosses are hitting tanks for 700k under certain circumstances, which may end up being a situation where Sacred Shield thrives.

The other conclusion I came to from this is that I really need to finish the automation scripts I’ve been working on.  Hand-editing and running each of those sim configurations one at a time is a giant pain in the ass.

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### 35 Responses to Dousing the Flame?

1. Zaephod says:

In regards to opening the link in a new tab, in your tag, put: target=”_blank”

That’ll at least open it in a new tab.

• Zaephod says:

ok, didn’t know you had html code turned on. link goes from

or if that doesn’t format correctly…

 click here to click here 

• Zaephod says:

Try number 5, third was rejected due to invalid security token

#LESS THAN SIGN# a href=”http://www.google.com” #GREATER THAN SIGN# to
#LESS THAN SIGN# a href=”http://www.google.com” target=”_blank” #GREATER THAN SIGN#

of course, the shouting is to indicate that those should be replaced with valid starting and ending characters in html. obviously, my previous efforts got squashed.

• Theck says:

I’ll give that a try, but I think that’s addressing a different issue. target=”_blank” forces a link to open in a new window, but that’s not really the problem I’m trying to solve. When I click on one of the links in a google sites file cabinet, it literally downloads that file and then opens the *local copy* in a new tab. Which is fine, but ideally I’d like it to just open the remote copy (which is, after all, an html file!) as if it were just any regular webpage.

• Zaephod says:

Yeah, I misunderstood what you were wanting. After looking at it some more, and even playing with the links on the Google page, the behavior you’re seeing is because the server is serving up files through a file handler rather than a web server. (It’s writing the html file as a stream to the response rather than sending the resources as a web page, if you want the quick technical version.)

Ergo, I don’t have any suggestions on how to get around it using that site to host the html files. Sorry about that.

“At the risk of giving anyone at Blizzard any ideas, they’re going to have to nerf EF harder if they want the two to be almost equal in performance for tanks.”

You’ve predicted the future way too many times now. I almost want you to start lying in these posts. I feel like there is some intern at blizzard just hitting refresh on your page over and over waiting for the moment he can say “it’s up! okay here’s what we should change next.” The drastic talent and glyph swings lead me to believe they do a lot less internal testing than they claim… Trial and error might be a better description.

Pre nerf bat, several abilities felt obviously overpowered while others were so weak/bland that it left few real options. Now it feels like they’ve nerfed everything so hard that most of the talents and glyphs seem underpowered.

I like and hate eternal flame. It’s useful when you are one healer down and cycling through cooldowns or throwing out some support heals but I see more spikes than I was used to with sacred shield pre nerf.

• Jackinthegreen says:

I would have preferred it if buffing SS had been said instead of nerfing EF, personally. Buff SS 10-15% and it seems like they’d both be useful relative to each other and to the content. From the sounds of it based on trawling through various forums SS is feeling a bit weak, and that’s accounting for perception of it from its nerf and EF’s buff.

• Tengenstein says:

But there are so few encounters that really challenge tank survivability. Tanks for the most part are already nigh unkillable and already in a place where pumping out more DPS is more important to gearing that staying alive, becuase unless the tank/raid cocks up he’s gonna stay alive anyway.

• Angelflavor says:

I was thinking the same thing. If we are trying to make them even then there no point to aways nerf. them. A small buff to SS could work too.

3. Raed says:

Off topic, but Theck are we using Tier 16 ret chest rather than the prot chest piece like we did last tier?

• Thels says:

General consensus seems to be to use the nontier Mastery/Haste legs, as they have one socket more, and our legs are the poorest itemized.

Note that there are very few leg pieces in SoO (zero “tanking” ones and two “DPS” ones), and that the non-tier leg pieces are favorable for almost all Strength users (all but prot warriors?), so they might be hard to get your hands on. There are the craftable leg pieces, but they kinda suck.

• Theck says:

As Thels said, while the Ret chest *is* very well itemized, we’re going to want 4-piece. It’s a bigger gain to replace the poorly-itemized Prot legs with the excellent Garrosh haste legs than it is to replace the average Prot chest with the great Ret chest.

4. Schroom says:

How much can I trust my statweights from the actuel Simc with pre-nerf EF? are haste and mastery and stam still right, relative to each other? or do I have to wait for the next version in order to be able to choose the perfect gems and reforges for my toon?

• Thels says:

Mastery, Haste and Crit all probably took a minor drop due to EF becoming less effective. I doubt however that it would have any serious effect on the weights. Order is likely to remain the same, though there is a chance that the relative value of secondary stats in comparison to stamina now changes.

• Theck says:

You’ll have to wait until the next version to get completely accurate numbers (540-3 should include this, not sure when it’ll be released but probably by the end of this week since there were a number of hotfixes). But the ordering won’t change. Thels’ insight is exactly what I would have said – everything drops a little.

5. Thels says:

I’m a little confused. For T16F + SS + SW, how can the TMI go up, if we add the set bonus? Aren’t these set bonuses supposed to make us more survivable.

For T16H, the nerf doesn’t affect TMI in the slighest, not even so much as a single point. Is this because our survivability is already so insanely strong, that the nerf’s just negligible?

I guess this also makes clear that HA is simply all out better than SW for survivability’s sake. Comparing HA to DP is a little trickier, as you can use HA on demand. Especially in a fight where you only tank half the time, HA (and SW) are getting a lot stronger. Do the T16 sets in this test contain the cooldown reduction trinket?

I’m not so convinced that SS is so awesome because it’s an absorb, since it’s very hard to have it up on demand. If you want to have it up at a specific moment, you need to actually let it fall off/click it away, and then cast it X seconds beforehand, and then hope a regular melee doesn’t eat it away already.

• Theck says:

I think you’re comparing T16F+SS+SW to T16N+SS+SW, yes? The difference there is just rounding. I rounded to two significant digits in all cases just for clarity (because it’s easier to compare 14000 to 3000 than 14958 to 3234 – just less mental processing). I believe those results were right around 1350, so one was probably 134X and got rounded down while the other was 135X and got rounded up. You can check the actual html files if you like, but I’m pretty sure that’s what happened because I remember thinking about that when I was recording the data.

I think your conclusions about HA/SW are correct. This suggests that HA is simply better for everything – more versatile, higher dps, better survivability. SW is not terribly behind in any category though, so it’s not a *bad* choice either. And of course, on a fight with a high-DPS burn phase every 3 minutes, it could very well be the best choice. The T16 sets in this sim do indeed use Vial as one of their trinkets (I believe I set them up to use Vial and Thok’s Tail Tip since that’s our best-looking haste trinket, barring the intellect proc one).

Many of your arguments against SS could be applied to EF too. We can’t easily make the EF tick happen on demand, though we can obviously re-cast EF. But when juggling BoG stacks, that may mean reducing your long-term survivability (lower EF ticks) for a dubious short-term gain (a chunk of health, but costing a SotR if you don’t have 4T16 and 3+ BoG). The fact that EF ticks so quickly (~2 seconds) nullifies a lot of the timing concerns, though a ~4 second SS is pretty potent. All of that said, most of the advantages of absorbs (avoidance scaling, preventing damage rather than tanking and healing it) are baked into the simulation. The only advantage that isn’t baked in is the psychological effect on healers, which is tough to account for anyway.

The T16H set is so overgeared for the T16Q boss that the nerf almost doesn’t matter. They’re solidly out-healing the T16Q boss already, so most of the EF nerf just reduces overhealing, having little practical effect on the sim results. Version 540-3 should have new TMI bosses to help support 16H gear sets. For reference, the T16N10 boss hits harder than T16Q by a fair margin (iirc, 1.25M raw damage per swing rather than 1.1M).

• Theck says:

Oh, completely forgot about your DP comment. IMO the choice between DP and HA is a bit of personal preference. Both are good, but give benefits in different ways. For example, I tried using HA for Garrosh last week, thinking it would be better since it’s a tank swap fight. However, I was completely wrong. The tank swaps are on 15-20 second intervals, and he spends large amounts of time not meleeing (casting things). I found that HA meant I was invincible for one 15-second tanking excursion, but left me woefully under-defended during the next two or three. After my cloak procced several times in one encounter this way, I decided that HA just wasn’t up to snuff for Garrosh. DP gave me much more flexibility, because while I couldn’t control it, it gave me the few extra SotRs while tanking that I needed to give my healers breathing room.

• Thels says:

Yeah, I never said HA was better than DP, just that they’re a lot harder to compare than HA and SW, which work more or less the same. It will indeed depend on the encounter which talent is favorable.

As for SS vs EF. What I meant to say, was in regards to SS being able to keep you alive from an attack that hits for slightly more than your HP. While true, it does require SS to be up at the right time, so while it’s an advantage, it’s only a very minor one, as you might get unlucky with the timing on your bubble, and a simple melee or dot would eat the shield before the massive attack.

6. Charlemagnus says:

I would just like to ask, with regards to the current EF nerf, would Divine Purpose be a better choice over HA or SW with T16F or 2 and 4 set T16 gear, or does this just apply to 2 and 4 set T16H?

• Theck says:

It’s hard to say, because the T16N gear set is already down in the double digits, which is where it becomes hard to make meaningful comparisons. Remember that T16F is basically T16N with 4-piece turned off. The 2-piece is present in both gear sets.

Personally, I’d take whichever makes you feel more comfortable. I tried out SW for a while last week and really didn’t care for it. I ended up going back to Divine Purpose for the majority of the rest of the instance, because I’ve really come to love that play style. I do miss HA as the extra cooldown, though, and have swapped back for specific fights.

7. Thorill says:

Since reading the excellent input of your work I happened to note what I think is a typo which may confuse a reader or 2 in below paragraph: “Since it’s not clear which of our level 75 talents is preferable, I decided to sim both Divine Protection and Holy Avenger so we could compare them. ”
I think its supposed to be Divine Purpose and Holy Avenger?
Anyways thanks for your awesome blog posts and theorycrafting, it is very enlightening.

• Theck says:

That is indeed a typo. I’ll fix it. Why do so many of our abilities have to be abbreviated “DP”?

8. Keres says:

With the trouble that Bliz is having, balancing out our level 45 talent teir it almost makes me wonder if it would not be better to add a bit of extra function to SS to change it from EF to boost its attractiveness, without making it just a difference between Absorbs vs Healing/HOT.

Right now we have Selfless Healer, which gives decent off-tank support with a free, and boosted heal if used on others, while performing our normal rotation(granted the talent is much weaker than the other two), SS which gives a refreshing absorb every few seconds and EF which gives a direct heal with a HoT.

At this point if they buff the absorb amount of SS much it will clearly be the winner in all cases, except fights were there is a large hit( say 80+% of a tanks health) every 30 seconds of the fight. In which case EF will be superior.

Since tanks are now concerned about person DPS now they could add a damaging effect to SS, leaving EF alone in its current (post nerf state) and have clear choices between the three. SH(Off-tank support), SS(absorbs with a damage component) or EF (Highest HPS option for highest survivability).

This just off the top of my head but say the damage option is “If the Absorb is removed before its full duration damage equal to the total absorb amount is dealt to all targets within 5 yards as holy damage.” Say with 150k AP(base plus Vengeance) which granted is on the low end, that would be an absorb of (240+(75000 SP from GBTL x .819)) or 61665 every few secs based on haste. I don’t have time at the moment to figure out the DPS gain of such a bonus to SS, but it would compete with the raw healing potential of EF without just being a fight between absorbs or healing.

• Thels says:

If one of them would do DPS and the other 2 would not, it would be a no brainer for Ret instead… Right now Ret can choose between Selfless Healer to help out when needed, or Sacred Shield to pop when all abilities are on CD.

• Keres says:

Perhaps, though unless the Ret pally is going to be getting hit often enough to break every absorb the damage effect will be too low of a gain to compete with…even with that line of reasoning any dps gain would be a dps gain worth going for.

Only way I can see to break it for Ret as a DPS option, aside from just saying it is for Prot only, is to only have the Damage effect kick in only if the absorb is broken from non-area-effect damage.

Kinda convoluted, though granted it wouldn’t be the first talent to have caveats and addendums to reduce the effect for certain specs.

9. Çapncrunch says:

Not related to the EF change, but I noticed something a little confusing when I was running some sims earlier today (unrelated I was dissappointed to find that after some 100k simulations both of the 535 timeless trinkets are pretty lousy for us, even full upgraded they both came out inferior to the 510 rising winds). Anyways what I noticed seemed to be a little discrepancy regarding Divine Protection uptime, primarily in regards to the Unbreakable Spirit talent. In the damaging abilities section it lists Divine Protection as being used 15.4 times and a 30.15s interval, which fits the 30 second cooldown interval in a ~450 second fight. However, down in the buffs section, it only lists a 17.54% uptime (and a 60.3s interval), when the uptime should be closer to 33%.

I’m not sure if it’s misusing the ability or not, but there does seem to be a conflict in the feedback from the sim, so I figured I’d point it out. (guess it’s worth noting that this was with the 540-1 build).

• Çapncrunch says:

After having upgraded to build 540-3 I still see the same discrepancy between the abilities and buffs lists.

• Theck says:

Good catch. The divine protection buff was independently getting a 60-second cooldown, which was preventing it from being activated more often than that. Just committed the fix, should be included in 530-4.

10. Lottick says:

I’m not sure what a good alternative hosting would be, though. Maybe this: https://developers.google.com/drive/publish-site

11. Brommith says:

One of the things I’ve been looking at in regards to EF is that I find it has immeasurably useful raid utility. On several occasions while our other raid tank is fending off the boss because of stacking mechanics I’m constantly using my HoPo on EF to HoT up our softer raid members or to just save dying DPS. While I am tanking the boss, however, I tend to isolate a lot of my HoPo expenses on myself unless I’ve gathered a DivPro proc and I can afford heal-bombing another raider with it.

What are your thoughts in this regard?

• Çapncrunch says:

You can use SS on the other tank when he’s tanking, or other raiders (won’t heal them but will help buy them time until the healers get to them), as well as casting WoG. Plus, SS will be just as effective on them as it’d be on you, whereas EF will be significantly weaker when you use it on someone else as the hot will not benefit from the 50% self-cast bonus, also it won’t benefit from bastion stacks when used on others which will also make it significantly weaker. Overall, the upfront heal (which you’d be able to do with WoG without EF) will be roughly half as big as a 3 bastion stack on yourself (mastery dependent) and the hot will only be about a third of what it does for us (again, looking at 3 stacks and mastery dependent). Compared to a 5stack EF the upfront heal is only about 40% and the hot around 25%.

So I really don’t think it gives that much more raid utility over what could be done with SS and/or WoG.

• Theck says:

I don’t think blanketing the raid with EF HoTs is really an effective use of Holy Power under most circumstances. If you’re tanking, you’re just sacrificing survivability to help do a job that actual healers are better at anyway. If you’re off-tanking then it’s a question of whether the extra raid healing is more beneficial than the extra DPS from SotR.

I don’t bother with EF blanketing, personally. Part of the reason I play a tank is so that I don’t have to stare at raid frames. So I tend to be biased against any play style that ends up encouraging me to do so.

• Thels says:

Indeed, healing the “raid” is something I often do during Scenarios (as well as 4 DPS dungeon runs), since I’m often the only one with a heal button, but outside of that, the healers are much better at it.

A life-saving LoH on the other hand…

• Brommith says:

Rather than blanketing the raid, I’ve seen myself shift only to HoTing up players who are subject to DoTs that tend to be a pain to deal with or just to pad mana from the healers. A few good examples would be during Sha of Pride when players have to deal with 1 or 2 stacks of Mark of Arrogance. While healers do dispel it, the CD tends to be problematic and healers have to wait before they can get another dispel. Couple that with only one healer per cast getting the Gift of the Titans debuff, I see a some merit in using it in that matter. Another I’ve noticed is just using it on players suffering from Garrote if I don’t have a BoP handy to simply purge it off.

So, rather than blanketing the raid, would there be more value in narrowing its use to soften the damage on specific dots or mechanics? For the record, I’ve seen my EF heal crits on the initial cast go into 236K on fellow raid members.