Heh, as long as I’m getting my numbers sorted out, anyone have an estimate on the expertise cap? I realize that this varies from boss to boss by their dodge numbers, but is there a rule-of-thumb number?
(Also as far as I can tell there’s no haste cap and the armor penetration cap is so high I’m basically never going to have to worry about it, right?)
I’m seeing 205 (6.25%) expertise for DPS and 492 (15%) for tanks .
The haste cap is dependent on your spec and class and how much haste will benefit you to get attacks within a GCD. There was an ArPen cap introduced recently at 100% but you can’t make it there.
The number I have seen is 214 expertise rating (~26 expertise) to avoid dodge and 460 (~56 expertise) to avoid parry. For melee DPS dodge that’s all you should need if you’re not attacking from the front. DKs have some talents in each tree that grant expertise (not expertise rating - the conversion is ~8.2 rating for 1 expertise, which grants a 0.25% reduced chance of dodge/parry).
Not sure about DKs but hunters have a soft hast cap to get Steady Shot under the GCD. After that it only affects white damage. I think for melee DPS it only affects white damage anyway, but I could be wrong about that.
And yes, my understanding is that there is no armor pen cap (or at least it’s unreachable) and that the benefits actually increase faster the more you have.
ETA: Not sure why aktep’s numbers are different. You should probably attempt to verify at elitist jerks or the wowhead forums or something.
My numbers for expertise came from a post from a former guild’s website but I don’t know what their source was. I’ve never played any expertise stacking classes so I’m not sure about it.
Spell hit cap is 17% for 100% against a level 83 mob (see also raid boss).
Improved Faerie Fire or Misery give 3% to the raid. The alliance scum get another 1% from having at least one Draeni in the raid. In TBC, you only cared about getting to 16%, because you always had a 1% miss chance.
Warlock’s Suppression, Mage’s Precision, and Ele Shaman’s Elemental Precision all give 3% hit when talented. Balance Druids get Balance of Power for 4% (and it’s cheaper too). Arcance mages can take Arcane Focus for 3% more, but only to Arcane spells.
Assuming you’ve got a hit debuff in your raid, a caster is going to need between 7% and 14% hit from items.
Haste soft caps at getting your main nuke to 1second, or getting the GCD itself to 1second whichever takes more haste. Beyond that, it still reduces casting times, or increases white damage, but a 0.59second nuke costs you the same amount of as a 0.99second nuke. AFAIK, it’s not possible to reduce a 2.5second cast time nuke to 1.00seconds or less with current gear. Certain talents, buffs, and procs seem to get you close enough that your latency becomes a factor (bloodlust + backdraft + Embrace of the Spider proccing = yummy).
I’m bad at letting things go, especially when someone gets all supercillious because I’m supposed to know that *he *knows that topping meters in total heals and HPS isn’t an actual measure of what class is the best healer. 
Hmm… I guess I need to check elitist jerks and see if haste affects the cooldown on death knight runes, because that’s the main slowdown in my dps output.
(At the moment, I tend to go frost strike/plague strike/blood strike/scourge strike/blood strike/death coil (or gargoyle if it’s a boss & not on cooldown)/ sit around for a bit while scourge strike comes back/ss/bs/ss/bs/dc/dc/back to beginning. Doing area dps, I have a much less solid grasp on my rotation. Ideally I either need my runes to come back a bit quicker or to up my runic power generation a bit so I can fill in with another death coil in the early going.)
A preliminary search indicates that haste does not affect runes. Sorry. Most of the information I found seems to indicate that haste is not a particularly useful stat for DKs (unholy ones especially) - just one to take as it comes. But I don’t play a DK so I don’t know for sure.
Tom Scud, AFAIK the only way to speed up your runes is to get Imp Unholy Presence. You can also take Reaping, which will cause your Blood runes to come back as Death runes after a BS/BB, but that doesn’t speed up the cooldown, just turns the rune into something more useful to you.
Exactly. As I’ve explained, when discussing a raid, I tend to work under the premise that the decisions made about a raid are smart ones. Or at the very least, not objectively stupid. Likewise, when I speak about raid issues, I presume that people have a proper understanding of what stats are important and what they mean.
How was I to know that he doesn’t know how to adjust his damage/healing meters to properly record information? Barring that, how I was to know that his raid leaders, or at least he, lack the ability to manually adjust data to get a proper view of what the data are saying?
So, I several times clarified the point that it’s only effective healing which is at issue, which I think isn’t an unreasonable assumption to make in the first instance. Clearly, he either didn’t think of it, or finds it unreasonable. I suppose I could have adjusted for that, but as I said, I tend to go with the presumption of proper understanding and wise choices. In this case, I was mistaken and that’s my own fault. But in previous encounters when I delineated things more thoroughly, that was seen as pedantic and condescending. Welcome to hell, damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
While we’re on the subject though, he also doesn’t seem to take into account that I several times clarified what should have been obvious in the first instance, exclusively for his own benefit. That he’s not reasonable enough to accept that is beyond my control. Also, he seems to repeat the lie that I’ve asserted I’m the best healer, even despite my assertions to the contrary.
I merely said I have the highest numbers on the meters (you know, the ones he claims are completely useless, except in cases where they’re useful presumably), and later clarified, for his own edification, that we’re discussing only effective healing.
For what it’s worth, I’m generally among the last on the list for overhealing, and I manage to keep my mana up without requiring an innervate (some fights I do require it, but that’s the exception not the rule). So, I suppose the argument can be made that among my raiders, I am the best healer (which might explain why I’m tasked for all the unpleasant, difficult tasks - the leaders know it’ll get done, and well). But I’m not one to make that argument. Though my targets rarely die, it’s quite acceptable for me to let one die because they’re low on the priority list for the raid. A tank healer doesn’t have that option, which is why those healers, above everyone else, is first on my priority list.
They can’t always move immediately, or dispel something from themselves, or whatever. Thus, I have a macro for each one of them so that I can drop an “oh shit” spell on them to give them more time to finish their cast on the tank and then move. I also have a macro set for their target to use the same “oh shit” spell so they can move without having to worry their target will die. Each fight dictates which person gets it, but it’s something we healers discuss well before the fight so that they know which way what’s happening.
So, am I a great healer who’s a benefit for any raid? Yes. But that isn’t alone because of my skill or talent; it’s a byproduct of proper coordination among the healing staff, and is owing to the degree of trust we each have in each other, while also factoring in each healer’s individual weaknesses.
For instance, when I raided on my shitty computer, we pretty much worked around the fact that in 25 mans I had 5 fps and movement wasn’t my strongest suit. I have a new machine (hi there, Alienware.com and your $3500 machines). The point is that healing is a collaborative effort, but even among that if a certain healer is constantly out performing other healers who are in a similar role, that begs the question as to whether they’re great, or the best, at what they’re doing.
I’ll leave that decision for the raid leaders and the healing class leader (oh wait, that’s me) to determine.
ashman, you seriously work from the assumption that most people who play WoW are smart about meters? Clearly, you haven’t talked to the vast majority of the WoW population. I know that *I *know how to read and interpret them (at least for the things I’m knowledgeable about, like Warrior tanking), but I don’t assume that anyone else does until they demonstrate such. So pardon me for not realizing, without any other context, that you are such a paragon of healing.
Also side note: I’m a she, not a he.
Well, if you want to work under the premise that everyone else is an idiot, so be it. I decline the invitation to do so even if most people eventually prove themselves so to be.
You have demonstrated a lack of understanding about meters in general, but would it have been fair for me to go into the conversation thinking you’re ignorant of the subject? Or should I work from some baseline view that people are generally not retarded? I choose the latter, largely because of my upbringing.
He, she, great. That I’m a paragon of healing? Well, perhaps. But it’s not really relevant. Let’s say that instead of me doing so, I know of other priests who can do the same regularly. We might as well be talking about them. I only used myself because I’m more familiar with me so I can speak with greater authority.
There are other healers who can do the same, even some druids and shamans. I’m sure. I just haven’t met any of them.
I’ve demonstrated no lack of understanding about meters–I’ve demonstrated a disdain for people who use their position at the top of them to show how “great” they are at DPS or healing, because often it’s the case that those people are topping the charts by doing other stupid things, and their DPS/HPS is no real indication of their performance.
My objection was, and always has been, that all you did was talk about your position on the top of the charts as an argument as to why Priests are the best healers. You have yet to actually give me *any hard data *or forumlas comparing a Priest to any other class with comparable gear in a comparable role.
Heh heh. People seem to want me to heal on my bear tank or my moonkin or my shadow priest or my enhancement shaman. I can do it, but not as efficiently as someone who specced for the role. My attitude has always been as follows:
You contacted me, I didn’t contact you. I wasn’t in the “looking for group channel”, I didn’t whisper you. You need the run, I probably don’t. You need me more than I need you. Get in my shit, I will hearth and leave you to fail.
Usually, the only meter I care about is the Omen threat meter. Threat can trigger wipes if the wrong squishy person stays at the top too long. On my squishies I watch threat so I stay under the tank/tanks. On my bear or warrior I watch threat to feel comfortable about my control of the fights.
However, this past weekend I was on my hunter, doing the Thaddius fight (heroic mode). We wiped and wiped and wiped. I was usually the first one to drop.
The meter told me that it was not my fault. I was repeatedly dying to “friendly fire”. Someone ELSE was screwing up on the polarity switches. That made me feel less angry, as during the ordeal I had been blaming myself.
Well, dang. I take idiot warlocks personally, for some reason. With that kind of gear, if he wants to raid destro, he needs to drop Soul Leech and pick up Suppression. Having done that he should trade his Immo Glyph for Life Tap. That should up his dps, assuming he using a standard 0/13/58. And, assuming the raid has another source of replenishment.
SteveG1, I’ve never understood why someone would invite a non-specced healer to an instance, except, maybe, to keep a lowbie alive while they were being run through it by a high/max level toon.
ETA: Winning Omen: A great way to leave the raid. 
There’s nothing “retarded” about not being a meter expert. If you’ve read any of the thousands of messages in this thread and its predecessor before you joined in, you’ll know that we have everything from casual questers to power levelers to PvP twinks to hardcore raiders participating. For the majority of those people, damage meters are a curiosity at best.
You need to get over your attitude that your way of playing WoW is the only way of playing, and you really need to back off of the insulting rhetoric and “fighting words.” You haven’t quite come out and directly insulted Shot From Guns, but you’re dancing dangerously close to the line.
WoW is a game. This is a fun forum for discussing games. Just chill a bit, okay?
Hate that. I have exactly one character dual-spec’d (my priest - who is both Disc/Holy for tank healing and Holy/Disc for raid healing…) and the rest of my characters will have to cope, somehow, with having only one spec and only one “change of clothes.” Don’t beg my bear-tank druid to heal; it’s not gonna work.
My husband was playing his low-60s warrior out in Hellfire Peninsula when he got a group begging him to tank. He said in many ways, ‘you don’t understand, I’m Arms-spec.’ He was told, ‘we understand, please just get out your shield, go defensive, and try this with us?’ After painful progress followed by miserable failure, he just got out his 80 tank pally and ran them through, because they were being so pleasant about the whole struggle.
Should I raise your blood pressure more by noting that he doesn’t have Soul Leech or an Immolate Glyph?
You’ve obviously not had to rely on PUGs much recently. It’s distressingly common to be short a healer or a tank and have the choice of (a) sitting around waiting for someone to show up on someone’s friends list/guild/in LFG or (b) going with someone off-spec and just eating the occasional wipe. I wound up healing SM: Armory with my on-spec but under-level priest (only level 30) for a group the other day after they’d been spamming Trade for half an hour asking for a healer.
Fortunately for that run the tank was level 39 and the group was very organized and handled the pulls beautifully - I only had to drink once.
(Oh, and they didn’t know to back away from the boss’s whirlwind, but my mass-heal worked ok for that.)