Holy Paladin Mythic+ Conduit Selection Reavaluation

Ask Mr. Robot
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When looking at holy paladin gearing strat today, it is suggesting for mythic + that I pick “Resplended Light” (the one that does the splash heals from holy light) and “Enkindled Spirit” (causes 3 Light of Dawns to have increased healing during your Aura Mastery window).

Im curious as to why those options are being picked for a mythic plus build. Raid build yeah but not sure about mythic plus due to never am i healing with holy light. just too slow. sometimes i do cast but its usually a flash of light and its on beacons to generate holy power fast for a word of glory. As for the Aura Mastery one, since its on a 3 minute cooldown and light of dawn just doesnt do much in mythic plus, its not quite used. If i am going to spend on anything im spending on Word of Glory, especially since im using beacon of virtue because it spreads way better than light of dawn ever would plus has the benefit of offering a shield on someone when i use it.

Can you guys explain why those choices for mythic plus? Because like i was saying i think its switched with raid healing.

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Snapshot ID: 59b125f376314fe9b299a7b2d1fa95f7

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Its also worth noting that the 2 rank 5 conduits i have for those slots are what i think would be better over the rank 4 ones its choosing, for mythic plus at least.

Those would be:

  1. “Focused Light” - Holy shocks crit chance increased 7% (yes i know it already has baseline 30% but still would think its better than holy light thats never really used)
  2. “Ringing Clarity” - This one is tricky. Most times my Divine Toll does top people but when using this paired with beacon of virtue its an instant 1% to 100% easily…with extra shields from my shock barrier legendary. Again i would think this would have higher rating in mythic plus than the Aura Mastery one.
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If you are not using Holy Light at all, then the suggestions from our gearing strategy will not work as well for you. A lot of holy paladin throughput is tied up in Holy Light, so it is a significant reduction in output to not use it. If you have the mana and don’t need to use it, that’s cool, but you’ll have to manually adjust the value of the conduits with the customize feature.

There are many ways to successfully heal. We give advice that works for one viable way to play the game. You can look at the rotation section of the guide to see the set of rules we base our suggestions on. If you play like that, the suggestions the optimizer gives by default will be good. If you play in a very different manner, you could set up the simulator to play that way instead and set up your own simulations to test out builds.

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Ok…I get the whole concept of different ways of healing…but we are talking about mythic plus here, not raid healing. You dont use holy light. Its just too slow. If you were to use it, you would lose out on healing and people have a greater chance of dying. Mostly because its not the casting spells or generators that do our healing, its the holy power spenders that do and how you use them and holy light is our slowest possible generator. Even if you were to use it, say you cast maybe 5 times in a dungeon run…you are choosing that over other conduits for spells that are actually used as often as you can.

So sure, there are infinite ways to heal, but you are choosing possibly the worst most dangerous way to heal above others and thats where its not making sense, since it means something is wrong with your simulator or the people who are supposed to be in charge of paladin theorycrafting and thus means most likely other things are wrong as well.

Are you guys not taking the different content into consideration when designing these strategies? Who on your team is playing paladin right now that is suggesting this, and what is their reasoning behind it? I’d love to see the data and know how it is you guys are coming to these conclusions for these suggestions and why the simulator is set up the way it is for this content.

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I do the paladin strategies. We are taking into account the different content - we specifically have a script for raid healing and script for mythic+.

In the mythic+ script, the player is already using all the high priority spells as much as possible. We assume you are in melee and there is one other melee player, so you can heal 3 people with Light of Dawn. That may or may not be your case, but we have to make some assumptions to ever get a result. If you can heal 3 people, Light of Dawn is a better use of Holy Power than Word of Glory.

As far as Holy Light usage - that logic comes into play when the simulator is looking to “fill”. You could use Flash of Light on a beacon target to get holy power, but instead I have found the healing output is much better using Holy Light to heal and using Crusader Strike for Holy Power when no one needs heals. In a movement-heavy situation, I could see the slower Holy Light falling out, but you end up getting less from your mana.

In a raid healing situation, I favor using Flash of Light on beacon targets for holy power when there are infusion of light procs available. This is because Light of Dawn becomes very strong in a raid situation and makes the loss of Holy Light healing worth it.

Of course you have to adapt to your situations and your group. If possible, you would want to use Holy Light to maximize healing. If that is not possible in the situations you find yourself in, then, like I said above, you would want to adjust the gear accordingly. I know at very high keys it is common to be using Holy Shock and Word of Glory for a large % of total healing done. Especially because 3x ranged is “meta”, Light of Dawn is seeing less usage. Still… that’s not what maximizes your healing. I get not wanting to use long-cast spells, especially when you are in melee range.

I’ll be doing more work on the healing strategies moving forward, as I am always tinkering with the healing for fun. Right now I have a build up there that gets theoretical maximum healing output from your available mana. You can look at that in two ways: 1.) That’s not how people play so it is useless. Or, 2.) I should see if I can play this way because it does a lot of healing. I bet you can guess where I usually fall :wink:

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Im sorry but this doesnt make sense. You dont use holy light because of how long it takes not only to cast it but the gcd following for at best 1 holy power. You are talking about over 3 seconds to generate 1 holy power and using a spell that we dont have inherit buffs on, like holy shocks built in baseline 30% crit. We are talking about a difference of gaining just 1,200-1,300 heals extra per cast for the extra 1 second it takes…this playstyle would explain why you want mastery so much because you better be getting something for how long you are spending on it especially when dropping that much haste. Ultimately though your time is better spent on other abilities to help you fish for Awakening procs to get you free wings more often…the faster you can generate holy power the more uptime you can be in wings. Its also why other guide favor haste more.

But lets take a step back for a minute and look at my original statements on conduits where you were talking about light of dawn usage. Ignoring opinions or feelings on the matter, lets look at the numbers for differences between the conduits and why im confused as to why AMR would be choosing Ekindled Spirits.

Ekindled Spirits increases 3 light of dawns by 39% every 3 minutes if used on cooldown.
-Normal light of dawn usage heals a target for 1,900 with my mastery set by AMR.
-Lets imagine we have 3-5 people standing exactly on top of each other when it is casts, so best case scenario.
-That means 5,700 - 9,500 healing normally per cast,
-multiply that by 3 and you get 17,100 - 28,500.
-With the buff it means 23,760 - 39,600.
-This makes a difference and value of 6,660 - 11,100 every 3 minutes.

Now lets look at Ringing Clarity:

  • Ringing clarity gives just slightly less than 2/3rd chance at casting 3 extra holy shocks on main target every minute if used on cd
  • Holy Shock heals for 2,900
  • 3x Holy Shocks comes to 8,700
  • 3 minutes worth comes to 26,000 extra healing if procced 3 times
  • Lets add in the most likely scenario that out of the 3 times it casted it only procced twice…thats 17,400 extra healing vs unlikely best case scenario of the other at 11,100
  • This doesnt even include the baseline extra crit of holy shocks which causes each holy shock to heal for roughly 6k heals right now

Now you can say that Light of Dawn hits more targets so its more useful and Ringing Clarity only effects main target…The problem with that statement is I am running Beacon of Virtue talent so its spread and its a near guarantee group to full health every time its pressed. You guys are saying that you are basing these decisions off of data and simulations and thats why you go against pretty much everything the rest of the world says about this stuff, but when doing the math and looking at the data and actually playing it…i just dont see it. Maybe you can help justify this example and explain more?

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I get the impression you’re not really sure what’s going on here @killerpirate, you’ve made a heap of posts recently and I assume you’re still learning.

All of the recommendations Best in Bags gives are based off simulated data, there’s no feelycraft or napkin math involved.
You setup your talents and BiB gives you a “solution” based on the pre-simulated data.
If you don’t like the result you can lock items, conduits or soulbinds in or go further and push it towards secondary stats you prefer, you can also weight the conduits in differently. I know you’re aware of that as your snapshot has the conduits weighted, although they’re all rated the same so it hasn’t really done anything.
The more you modify it the more distorted the results will be.

As Swol has mentioned you can run simulations yourself to test things out.
I ran a couple of simulations from data loaded via your snapshot.
7,468 HPS 1.13 Ally Deaths - your gear as imported
7,782 HPS 0.36 Ally Deaths - BiB default result

So BiB is getting slightly more healing and a lower chance of anyone dying.
It’s set to be a +10 Tyrannical Bolstering fight, the seasonal affix isn’t implemented.

I ran those sims with the log option selected so you can dissect it to see what it was doing.
However before that you probably (should?) want to know what the script is doing.
There are two scripts involved, one is for the encounter and the other is the character one, the rotation logic or APL, if that naming helps you frame them in your mind better.

If you look in the Theorycraft Wiki you can find both. The easiest way to get there is to click the view/edit link next to where you start the sim.
image

Mythic+ healing script which is quite well commented so you can work out what is going on.
You’ll notice that it is modeling the Moroes encounter from Return to Karazhan.
This fight was chosen as it’s very hard to heal when it’s at the limit of your gear and group. Eventually you’ll run out of mana and wipe if the group doesn’t kill him quickly enough.

Now you know what the script does you can modify the player script to try and get a better result.
If you do I am quite confident that Swol will incorporate your improvements and the data will be recalculated so it works in BiB for everyone.

To do that you click the Copy link at the top of the page, then you can modify the decision making steps in the script to mimic how you play. You can then see if you can make it better than Swol’s default.
Whether you like the encounter script or not is irrelevant as it’s the same for each APL you test against it, this is the missing piece that WoW healing tools have been missing for a long time.

It is possible to modify the encounter script but it is not as easy to do as the APL, the learning curve is very steep and I mean VERY steep. I modified the old Heroic script for Garothi Worldbreaker, first boss in Antorus, to model the Mythic changes as I was interested to see how I was performing on the fight, also the rest of the raid but it was mostly a learning exercise for me.
It was pretty accurate but it took me a long time to get working, much longer than it took to beat but I kept at it to better understand how the simulator worked.

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Ok…thats a pretty long response that completely ignores the math i just presented you. Great job. Can you guys please stop doing that now and actually respond to the things im posting? It gets pretty frustrating that i had to take the time to break down the math for you guys and you just completely ignored it…again.

So unless you can explain the math and why you are choosing to go against it, or why the simulator is choosing to try and generate 10 holy power when im capped at 5, then yes…it is “feelycraft”.

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Here take a look for yourself: Not Available

First thing right off the bat is it tries to generate 7 holy power. Later it uses Divine Toll when at 5 holy power, thus attempting to generate 10. The rotation and structure of the simulator seems broken, so any output is going to be broken…no matter what changes you make to gear, stats, damage, any variable.

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I didn’t write the holy paladin logic so Swol could give more detail, but at the beginning it’s not trying to “generate 7 holy power”. There is logic on the holy power spenders to not use them unless there is some actual healing to be done (allies are below some threshold % of health). If they aren’t below that, it doesn’t cast the spells as most or all of the healing would be wasted.

For divine toll, the logic seems to be favoring using that whenever you could get good healing out of it, and not delay it. One could probably play around with putting a line above it to be sure to dump holy power just before casting it – not sure how much of an impact that would make, but could try it out.

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See…thats a problem. Because it means its ignoring the talent Awakening which would give wings if you use it. Its just wasting the talent.

As for Divine Toll…use a spender, drop it to 2 then use it. so you waste 2 holy power. much better than wasting 3 which means a spender is wasted.

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Here is an example. You have a conduit that buffs word of glory to provide a shield on cast. If you were to cast Word Of Glory, you not only get a shield on the tank or whoever you casted it you also get the chance for wings. Wings giving you extra holy power through hammer of wrath as well as incredibly boosting your healing. If you dont spend it, you dont get the shield and you dont get the wings proc. Thus lower uptime on wings and increased damage going out that you have to then heal up.

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Also @yellowfive if you look at it, it is doing dps to generate the extra holy power (hammer of wrath / Crusader Strike)…it could have just spent the holy power on SoTR if it wanted to dps and then go back to dpsing to generate more holy power and be just fine and it would have had enough. So either way you look at it, its just wasted holy power due to rotation.

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Thanks.

I’ve read the other thread now too and it has become obvious that you actually know more than you’re letting on. You know how to run a sim and you know about the log feature in it.
The paladin you’ve linked is an LFR hero who’s managed a +7 yet you type like you’re a cutting edge player with an agenda, it’s almost like you’re trying to bait a reply from someone so you can call them out and troll or make fun of them.

That doesn’t help anyone.

If you’ve found a bug post about it, as you eventually did above, and someone official will look into it and fix it if it is a bug.

In the time you’ve spent posting on the forum you could have modified the APL and tried to get a better result from the simulator. I didn’t respond to the math because I’m not at all familiar with paladins, I’d have to go and learn about them and look the spells up. I’m not invested in it enough to check, it would be much easier for you to tweak the APL and show that your way is better. :wink:

If you can’t get it to do what you want, or it doesn’t make sense you can post asking for help. You can link to the changes you’ve made and describe what you’re trying to do. You will get a reply, it might not happen in the time frame you’d like but that’s how forums work. We’re not all available at the same time, I’m in Australia and should have gone to bed six or seven hours ago!
The AMR team intentionally set the wiki and simulator up in a way that users can share the URL to boss scripts, APL or even changes to the spell data being used. It’s set up this way so the data is included and ambiguity is avoided.
That was we don’t need to waste time describing each step we took to make changes to X get to where we want but now it doesn’t work how I want but I don’t know why could you please make the same changes and see if it works for you, hopefully this crazy run on sentence demonstrates why the links are useful.

It’s clear from what you’ve posted that you can string words together in a constructive way, we’d all benefit from a different approach to a possible bug.
Have a look at some of the posts from Sienss about Shaman, he was busy trying to improve the APL before the beta had settled down. I’m pretty sure he’s French so he’s translating to post too, all to try and improve the spec he’s playing. He’s also done some Mistweaver tweaking too!

The AMR team is small and in a project this large bugs are inevitable, reporting the bugs helps everyone. As the saying goes, Many hands (eyes) makes light work.
The bug situation is the same for SimC too, but I’ve got no idea who/how to report bugs in that and it’s too hard to follow so I moved on.

Edit. oh there were extra posts I didn’t see. I don’t think it’s set up to “fish” for procs, while I know there are people who play that way I’m quite sure a greater percentage of players don’t do that, even if they’ve read about it I’d be surprised if many could do that. Given the heroic team I’ve been playing with doesn’t spend any brain cycles on making sure they’re standing in the correct spot advanced concepts like that won’t be happening.
I do think it would be worthwhile adding a note in the guide section if the simulator shows that it is worthwhile though.

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oh look, another pointlessly long response that ignores the posts yet again. lol. let me guess…math too hard for you to figure out so you try to find some other angle to insult and hope i dont notice you cant respond to the topic at hand? Then say im baiting someone? Does that typical deflection technique usually work for you?

My post is pretty straight forward. Explain the decision making that goes against the logic, math, and common sense. You guys say there is data that backs it up and explains it…prove it and show it, dont just talk.

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I am not a holy paladin expert (I write the simulation and optimization engines, not the specifics of the mechanics for every spec), but I have been having these kinds of discussions with people for over a decade now.

The things that you mention certainly sound good “on paper” – they seem like quite plausible things to consider when playing. They are the sort of things probably worth testing out in the simulation – it would be quite easy to modify the rotation to do so. But I’m gonna tell you right now… you may be surprised by how little (if any) impact some of these things will have.

For example, in one case you’re talking about a tradeoff between holding some holy power until allies take damage and missing a single opportunity to trigger a 15% chance proc… it is not obvious at all which of those choices comes out ahead to me. Thus the simulator.

It’s pretty common to feel like wasting any amount of resources is the “wrong” way to play, but it’s hard to really say unless it is put to the test in a rigorous way. I’ll see if Swol has the time to try out a few of your suggestions (unless you want to try them out yourself) and post findings.

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Ignoring a talent though is a wrong way to play. Like the casting Divine Toll at 5 stacks. There isnt a good reasoning for that. The dps one, sure…its dps and an argument can be made on priority there. But the other stuff no. The no regen of mana and thus heavily valuing mana causes issues as well.

But there isnt much that can be said, or has been responded about, when looking at the math i posted about conduits which is what i made the thread about.

In the end what i am alluding to is why for healers the simulator is telling you, and the rest of us, to stack so much mastery. Because if you play the way the simulator is set up to play, and ignore stuff like the specs playstyle or the mana or for some reason the simulator when set to +10 has npcs hitting non tanks for only 5% health and thats just not the case this xpac, then yea you need mastery to make up the healing when you have to spam stuff. Raise the haste and sure the mana becomes an issue because you are spamming and getting apparently no in combat regen, nor drinking between pulls, and you arent playing the spec properly but instead trying to force heal through it.

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As said before – we can try out some of these things and see what happens. I think that you are drastically overstating the effect of these things, but we can’t know for sure until we test.

The current logic does not “ignore” a talent at all – all you need to do to make maximum use of that talent is use light of dawn and word of glory with near-maximum frequency over the course of a fight. I highly doubt that any logic change to the rotation is going to make a significant impact in that regard – but as said above, we can certainly test the theory.

We can’t do these tests instantly of course – and we’re currently working on many other things simultaneously. You might need to wait a day or two for the results of such tests, especially with the weekend.

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I know it may not seem that drastic, but with the example up above with the conduits its definitely within the difference of a dead player and a living one and a wipe in a dungeon vs not, especially when taking into account the talent Beacon of Virtue being used.