Priest Theorycrafting - Introduction (Part 1)
v3.1
It happened. I think I’m a theorycrafter now. Do I get an achievement for that?
This started out as a little project to calculate the effect of the outside-five-second-rule nerf that happened with 3.1 and snowballed into this wall of text. It ended up being a complete reworking of DwarfPriest’s excellent post from pre-3.0.2 regarding gear stat weightings. These posts also contain some potentially useful information on calculating the value of some of the new priest talents, such as the reworked Rapture. I’ll post this in parts and then link to them permanently from Priestly Resources in the navigation above.
This tome is aimed at healing priests of both flavours. If you are interested in math and theory crafting there will be heaps of text for you to scrutinise and offer constructive criticism on. If you don’t care for that sort of stuff here are a pair of links to gear lists using the numbers I have learned:
The basic premise of these weightings is attempting to equate all gear stats relative to MP5. So 1 MP5 = 1 MP5, but how much MP5 is 1 haste rating worth?
Assumptions
As always when creating my model I needed to make a number of assumptions. I will mention these again, where relevant in each section, but I will cover the bigger ones here at the onset.
- Mana regeneration is based on the caster spending 80% of their fight time inside the 5 second rule.
- Stats, where required, are based on Turkelife’s current stats at time of writing. This is about a T7.5 gearing level:
- Discipline
- Intellect 1092.5 (950 base + 15% for Mental Strength)
- Spirit 795 (750 base +6% for Enlightenment)
- Spell power 1950
- Holy
- Intellect 950
- Spirit 787.5 (750 base +5% for Spirit of Redemption)
- Spell power 2146.875 (1950 base + 25% of spirit)
- Discipline
- Fight length is 6 minutes (360 seconds)
- Flash Heal is used whenever the spell cast is required
- Spell power co-efficient 81%
- Base heal is 1880
- Mana cost 621 (assuming talents and glyphs)
- Over-healing is assumed to be a flat 30%
I have ignored raid buffs generally, so you won’t see mentions of Blessing of Kings and the like. The reason for this is that, even though they do affect the weightings they are confounded within the general interaction of stats and talents. After the initial regurgitation of information I will look at some different gearing levels and how these affect the weightings. I’ll chuck some raid buffs in there.
I’m sure that I have made at least one error with my calculations (I found a few just writing these posts), so please let me know of any you notice.
Posted in Priest 
