A bit of heat and talent

Over on Ego’s site, there’s a bit of heat developing because she didn’t consider Inspiration to be mandatory. Since I’m one of those fanning the flames by agreeing with her, I decided to pull the hotpoint to my blog, making a fuller discussion.

I’m going to object to Inspiration being mandatory on two bases. One, already mentioned on Ego’s site, is that priests do not crit well, and a ‘mandatory’ that relies upon crits is flawed. The second – one I’m actually going to start with first – is that it’s a waste of points for main tank healing at Kara and above. In other words, the major argument — it’s “For the Big Boys especially” — is wrong.

Armor is capped at 75% mitigation. A Kara or better main tank is approaching the armor cap (with buffs, etc), and even when out of kara will have over 60% mitigation. That 25%… isn’t. It’s 75% minus the tank’s mitigation value. Most main tanks with whom I work – and we’re just starting SSC – are well over 70%, which means for my tanks I’m adding, well, 0 to 3% in my case.

And a quick perusal of main tanks of post-kara guilds shows they tend to be in the same ballpark. Which means the argument that it’ll make a huge benefit for the main tank in later levels is mistaken.

Now where it WILL make a difference is when you’re healing tanks that are extremely unlikely to see that armor cap. Up to level 60, in fact, the arguments can work — they’ll get almost the full value of the buff when it procs. Which brings us, of course, to the second issue – the one which I’ve argued in the past.

Priests should not rely upon crits. There are classes that should, and do, rely upon them. These classes do not have to choose between wasting the effect and doing too little. These classes have multiple talents that benefit from crits in ways that enhance their role. And… they are able to push crits to acceptable levels of occurrence without hampering the rest of their performance. Indeed, for classes such as rogues avoiding crits actually hampers their output.

Priests, on the other hand, are not crit oriented. There are only two talents in the healtree that require crits to trigger, and only one is beneficial to the healer. The gain from it is very nice, but situational.

In many ways, the issue is the reason damage meters for priests – for all healers – are poor tests of skill. We’re about quality, not quantity. Crits complement quantity nicely, as there will be plenty of hits with which to generate the extra benefit of the crit. But priests – we want to place the heal that’s needed when it’s needed. We cannot count on that crit ‘now’, and so it’s automatically a waste.

And since crits are so antithetical to effective healing, I am averse to saying a crit-based talent is a mandatory choice for anyone.

Now let’s be straight here – I think Inspiration is a very nice talent. And if I’m casting about for a few more lower tier places in which to place points so I can support the higher levels, this always gets at least a look – usually a point or two. But it’s not reliable, and therefore I cannot recommend it as a ‘mandatory’ talent choice.

Note that this doesn’t even consider the arguments of consistency. That being: if you insist a crit-based talent is necessary, it behooves you to work to make it useful on as close to a regular basis as possible. Thus talents in Holy Spec become necessary, along with gear that’s spell crit and int instead of heal and mp5. Oh, not exclusively, but if it’s really that important, it’s important to adjust the weighting of your selections.

I think Inspiration is a good talent on which to spend a point or two when you’re done with the ‘gotta have’ talents. But it’s pretty much worthless for top level players, and it relies upon an untrustworthy event, and between the two I cannot consider it a mandatory talent.

~ by Kirk on November 12, 2007.