In the Tradition of MMO Mudflation Fuckups...

[Merusk]

+Heal/ dam gear is just plain broken.

Yeah, you need to be doing BWL on a regular basis to encounter this kind of fuck-up but WOW that's a biggie.  When I started seeing so much +dam or +heal gear out there (to "fix" caster vs melee imbalance)  I thought it was a little odd.  Now we see the fruits of just piling-on effects without analyzing it.   Priests that spam level 20 spells all day with mana impunity.. and mages who can spam low level small mana cost spells for high level damage.

Oops.

[Lt.Dan]

You'd think that someone would ask "If some chucklehead goes to crazy lengths to get every item like this, how bad will the game break?"  Cos if we know anything about MMOGs, we know that some chucklehead will.

[Malathor]

This is not broken, at all. Yes, priests can trade cast time for mana efficiency. There is nothing new about that. The thing is that this is not a tradeoff that a priest is going to want to make in any high-end encounter, where the rule is that spike damage on the MT is a far far greater problem than healers running out of mana.

Between consumables, innervates and healing rotations, there is no raid encounter in the game where a balanced number of properly geared healers should be running out of mana.

[Zane0]

Hmm.  This is valid way to go for mana efficiency, I spose.  I guess I had to think a bit, since the traditional way to priest spec, at least in my mind, is to stick with rank 6 or 7 flash heal and aim for mana/5.  Under that method, +healing benefits are halved, and spiritual healing gives a better bonus because of the higher base.  In my experience with BWL y'see, the bosses can deal out 6000+ damage in less than 2 seconds, so you don't necessarily want to heal more; it's about staggering priests who spam fast, 1000ish point heals with CTRA cutoffs over long amounts of time.

That said, this still applies to MC, and in the long term, strategies and bosses will probably change again, so the situation could become rather interesting later on.

Not exactly conventional entertainment, but I'll bite. *shrug*

[Fabricated]

Thank the lord I will never ever do MC or BWL.

[Sogrinaugh]

The thing is, this is bullshit, i tested it right before i made this post

I went into durotar, and used level 1 frostbolt against a mottled boar.  Base castime for rank 1 frostbolt is 1.5 (so thats 43% of +dmg gear).  I tote 303 total + dmg gear.  So my rank 1 frostbolt should have gotten +129 damage.  Instead, it did 73ish damage, so thats about +50 damage, out of 300, or 1/6th damage bonus.  rank 1 Fireball got even less for some reason.  Vs a level 9 mob.  To put that in perspective, i do more then that with a melee strike from my Inventor's Focal Sword.

[Kail]

Base castime for rank 1 frostbolt is 1.5 (so thats 43% of +dmg gear).  I tote 303 total + dmg gear.  So my rank 1 frostbolt should have gotten +129 damage.  Instead, it did 73ish damage, so thats about +50 damage, out of 300, or 1/6th damage bonus.  rank 1 Fireball got even less for some reason.

I believe +Damage effects scale down with the minimum level of the skill (from what I understand).  People in that thread allege that the cutoff is around level twenty, where skills gain full effect from +Damage/+Heal gear.  Under that, you'll see a reduced effect.  That's why they're always going on about "Heal rank 2;" it's trainable at level 22, so it's the lowest rank Heal that gets the full bonus from +Heal items.  It's also maybe why your rank 1 fireball (which is a level one spell) was seeing less of a bonus from +Damage gear than your rank 1 frostbolt (which is a level four spell).  If you cast a rank five fireball, or a rank four frostbolt, you should see the full effect.  I think, anyway.

[Merusk]

It's also allegedly cast time.  That's why they're using Heals (Which scale up from 3s) vs flash heals (which are always 1.5s)

Upon further review I don't dobut it's just some uberguildie using math gymnastics to try and get talents altered in a way more favorible to his point of view.  The same thing that happened with Shaman & their heals in EQ.  (OMG look a shaman with unlimited mana can heal for more damage over time than anyone else.. if we ignore spike damage, etc, etc.)

[Chenghiz]

+damage (and I assume +healing) gear adds its full effect on spells with a 3 seconds or greater casting time. Any spell cast faster than that will get only a fraction (based upon its cast time) of the effect, down to half effect for 1.5 second casts. Instant-cast spells are assumed to have 1.5 second cast time for this calculation.

[Zane0]

I believe it's 3.5 for +healing. 

Effectiveness of +heal = [Cast Time] / 3.5 * [+Heal amount]

1.5 / 3.5 = 0.43 - the percentage +heal effectiveness for flash heal, incidently.

[Hoax]

Knowing that (which is old news) I'm really surprised that the best pvp gear currently seems to be +dam/healing/effect gear.  I know on my priest I was casting instants 75% of the time if not more.