The Red Mage

The idea of Holy DPS has been around for a good while now and there are plenty of posts written on the subject that will be more well thought out than this one but I contend that 90% of the fun of this game is puzzle solving. Use this approved strat, AMR your gear, follows these rules...that's not my style.
I will concede that it is a good idea to review these commonly accepted "right" ways to play if for no other reason than much of the theorycrafting ground work and testing will have been done for you and provides a good way to see ideas that turned out to be absolute rubbish.

So...our group is working on Garry 10N. Now the accepted approach is 1 tank 2 heals, 1 tank 1 heal, 2 tanks 1 heal, or 2 tanks 2 heals. 2 tanks 3 heals is viewed as pure insanity and I can see why. Phase 2 and the dream phases need fast execution in order to minimize the nasty mechanics which they can produce. Short dream and phase 2 fights are highly successful.

But damit if we simply wanted to follow everyone elses advice we would join cookie cutter guild and be done with it. Now I will admit that we had/have some serious flaws in general play but current scrutiny from community eyes has encouraged people to shape up. Tonight we saw multiple P3s and had a low teens wipe as well. In the spirit of embracing my RLs desire to have a nice healing pad but also put out some nice DPS...and have fun while doing it I have forgone Disc and looked into the Holy toolbox for something I can enjoy playing and still achieve our goals. Is it optimal? Hell no. Are we making it harder than it should be? Hell yes. Do we care? Only if our current playstyle will deny us a kill and tonight we saw that better handling of  P3, speeding up of dream phases and P2, and pushing ourselves just a bit further will definitely lead to a kill.

And so here I am, tinkering with the Red Mage.


The ground work for Holy DPS has been lain by others much more competent than myself. A simple google search will lead you to their threads and while I am leaning off the work they did I will not be linking it here mainly because I'm a very lazy person.

Red Mage revolves around the Holy Priest's Chastise Chakra and it's ability to make shadow spells efficient and meaningful while continuing to provide healing utility in spades.
Red makes shadow and holy spells hit for 50% more damage and reduces the mana cost of smite and holy fire by 90%...essentially making them very close to mana neutral (not quiet but close). This also effects HW:Chastise and your T90 talent.

In addition you stack evangelism while smite spamming giving you an additional 4% damage and 6% mana reduction to smite and holy fire and stacking up to five times (20% mo damage, 24% less mana).
The theory for all of this has already been done for us so our question is simply what we want to shoot for with stats.

Stat Questions...ask them NOW (get it...stat?...no?...awww thats funny )
How much Haste should we aim for?
Which is better Crit or Int?

Mastery and spirit don't matter too much and we can live off the background amounts from gearing.

The final question would be more prominent if I had Norm or even flex shoulders or helm and that is how much value does the 4p add to HW:Chastise considering we are using CoH as a healing CD?


So haste. Smite begins life as a 1.5s cast time while our other spells are instant. We might also consider ticks of HF but would need to judge those verse the lost Int/Crit to reach the break points.

Basically we want to reduce the GCD to 1s, the lowest it will go the problem is we have 2 traniseint haste boosts during this fight; lust and power infusion.
We could soft cap haste so that we are only at 1s while both are in effect, or we could do it for one or the other.
My issue with capping for both is that lust is only in effect for 30s out of what is for us a 600s fight, or 5% of the time we are casting. Further complicating this is the idea that we may not have PI active at the time Lust is popped. The same argument could be applied to setting the cast time for just lust.
PI on the other hand lasts 20 seconds and can be activated every 120s giving us a full minute forty of active time. This seems a better soft cap. To reach 1s we need 50% haste with PI active...but what about our soft cap without it active? PI is added multiplicatively and so we get something like this:

X*1.2*1.05 = 1.5 or X*1.26= 1.5 and finally X= 1.5/1.26 = 1.19047619 or simply 19% haste rating which is 8075 pure haste from gear.

Haste Soft Cap 8075

Cool, now we need to examine the relationship between Int and Crit in order to decide how to gem and reforge and perhaps get some stat weights for those two as well.

Int feeds spell power which gives our smite umph while crit gives a chance for its damage to double. In other words crit rises in value as int rises in value, the harder we hit the more damage we do the bigger we crit....when we crit and that there is the rub.
We should be able to cast hundreds of smites over the 10 minute encounter and so statistically speaking our damage should go up as a factor of our crit percent. For example 45% crit should mean that we end up doing 1.45*base damage. So 1% crit gives us 1.01*[dmg+(coff*sp)] further more 2531 Int gives us 1% crit while 600 crit rating also gives us 1% crit. We also get some extra crit from raid wide bonuses and such but as far I as I can, and this is where I always get bogged down, all we are interested in is

INT*[ 1 + (int/2531)+(crit/600)]   or 160 points from a gem will either give us 1.27 more damage as crit or 10.11 more damage as Int. I feel I'm missing something here but it looks right. Int increases both spell power and crit (albeit by a small amount) while crit only raises the chance for double dmg....int makes the base INT go up and adds to crit, so that is strong, crit on the other hand makes only crit go up.

So 7:1 ? Then why is int valued at 2:1 and 1.x:1 in gems. I'll look into that more later but for now I know that crit is good but int is better.

I'm confused but I get this out of AMR

http://www.askmrrobot.com/wow/gear/70ea616e-ea32-44a5-ab3b-ac33cb2568d7

Anyhow, more to come