Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Trauma: Horrifyingly Bad, or The Awsome?

I got a gorgeous mace last week, Trauma. I know people are talking shitty about the proc, the proc-rate the number of targets it hits and all that, but it has one really big upside…you have to do nothing extra for it to activate.

As a healer I think that’s much, much better than any stat they can give you. I’m normally casting so much that my hands are never sitting still, and though I have a tendency to run out of mana, I really wouldn’t want to work more buttons into my already busy healing life, so yes, procs are pretty.

There’s just one thing that makes me very sad about this mace…it stinks for disc priests.

Let me tell you what I’ve read about this mace:
  • It has a proc chance of 1%
  • It’s supposed to be adding up to about 3% of your healing (in theory that is)
  • In practice most logs show about 2% average, where druids score a little higher, and nonhotters a little lower
  • It says that it will hit the target you were healing, and then ‘friends’ around it
  • ‘Friends’ means party only, some say
  • ‘Friends’ means it’s completely bugged and it doesn’t always hit the right people, other say
  • Some say that it’s inconsistent, and sometimes hits the person on the other side of the room while missing the person next to the target
  • It scales with spellpower, but very, very minimal

Lot of things that are ‘being said’ eh? And not all are too positive.

Well, instead of getting all too negative about what all sorts of people said (since people do like to be negative about all this), I will talk about what I have experienced during raiding so far.

The first round of testing was in holy spec. We did the first 4 bosses in ICC10 and I had some difficulty keeping people up since I'm not used to holy, but hey, I had to give my new mace a chance, right?

Plague and Blood Council were done in discpline, because I wanted to know if it really was as shitty as people suggested it would be.

The logs I used to check this included the new boss in VoA10 since we actually had WG and figured we would try to get some gear for our 10s. 

So we had a total of 8 bosses.

So here's what I found out:
  • Throughout those wings the total healing done with 'Fountain of Light' was 0.6% of my total healing
  • In holy spec, on bosses, the highest I managed was 0.5%
  • In disc spec, on bosses, the highest I managed was 0.4%
  • It doesn't proc on Glyph of Power Word: Shield
  • Echoes of light (the proc from Althor’s Abacus) is healing for about 5 times as much
  • Fountain of light is unselective and with this does a lot of overhealing
  • It doesn’t proc of absorption (sounds logical I know, just figured I would mention it)
  • It doesn’t proc of shadow healing
  • There is no funky animation or anything
  • It does hit everybody in the area of the person that is receiving the effect
  • The average effective healing per tick was about 57
  • I had a total of 2171 ticks
  • 522 ticks were on boss fights (the other ones were me spamming holy nova like crazy on trash to get my mace to proc)
  • The average overhealing was about 75%
  • There were 9877 chances for the mace to proc, it procced 362 times, that is 3.6 %
Overall Conclusions:
  • The procrate is not high enough, or
  • The healing done by it is not high enough, or
  • The radius should be larger, or
  • The healing should be smart, or
  • Some combination of the above
  • It should proc on Glyph of Power Word: Shield. It's completely bogus that it doesn't and that disc is once again left in the cold with this.
  • It should have an animation. Why the hell do the dps weapons/trinkets have valkyr, zombies, and transformations attached, and do healers get shipped off with a proc that is not visible at all, and the mace itself isn't even pleasing to look at.
  • Last Word is doing millions more healing than this mace does and that's a tanking weapon -_-
Is Trauma worth putting your DKP points on? You decide.

I'm still thinking that a proc that I have to do absolutely nothing extra for is pretty, but seriously Blizz, you could've put a bit more attention into this one.

9 comments:

  1. I won't be spending anything on this weapon unless it gets a major buff. It just seems wrong that a trinket proc outperforms a weapon proc by so much. I think the Bryntroll (dps axe) proc also outheals the Trauma proc. :(

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  2. The wife has this weapon as a resto shaman and I can say that the proc rate is very nice when she is assigned to raid heal. On Rotface basically she can't see her screen because of all the numbers ticking away. Haven't really documented the numbers yet. But I have to say the dkp she spent for it is more then worth it. (Sorry didn't notice this thread til now, doing a lot of back reading on blogs I missed due to STO).

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  3. For shaman it seems to do really well indeed, as for druids. But if they want to call this a healer weapon they should stop leaving disc priests out of the loop. Orrrr....start making specific stuff for us.

    I'm not entirely a healer, I'm an absorber and preventer, but still that shouldn't mean I'm just left out.

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  4. This mace has dropped only once for us and it went to a shaman. I was sorely tempted to get my hands on it as a holy priest, but to answer your closing question: I opted to keep my priority points in the EPGP system to get my Sanctified token instead.

    I figured I'd look around for more info on this mace before spending PR on it. That said, thanks for the post. It was informative!

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  5. Thanks, glad you took something out of it.

    It does seem that the procrate has gone up slightly, but as a disc priest I still see it proc way too little it feels like.

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  6. I just got this on my holy pally and have only used it once in a 25m and I LOVE IT. It procs off of all my heals and even my glyph of holy light! I wanted it just to see how well it would do but now i cant see myself replacing it.

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  7. Definitely appreciate the effort you put into the numbers on this. Looks about right from what I've found as well. I'm a holy paladin and tbh, I'd like to see either a bit stronger healing proc or a more frequent proc. Personally, I just took it for the SpPwr upgrade since I was able to afford the haste/crit loss with the other gear I had. Also, when Holy Light spamming on the Lich King fight it does seem to be moderately effective when everyone's grouped.

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  8. I'm a holy priest and I only use this weapon on fights where people tend to be in a little tighter and don't move so much. Other than that, I use "Frozen Bonespike" I can't give up the stats unless the very low proc rate is going to go on a lot of people at once. With that said, even as a holy priest, I almost want to stop using it completely unless they up the proc rate, reguardless of the situation.

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  9. As a holy priest the trauma/sundial weapon off-hand combo is a far worse choice than say... Mag'hari Chieftain's Staff. The amount of SP you gain with the trauma/Sundial combo is around 35sp over the staff plus you will get a bonus 4k to 5k worth of heals per boss fight from the trauma proc.

    BUT you're sacrificing about 3% casting time from haste loss...about another 40mp5 while casting, and a couple of gem slots.

    If you don't have the Sundial or if your guild isn't able to get anywhere near Sindragosa in 25man then the Trauma becomes even more useless as there aren't any decent off-hands that will replace enough of that mp5 and haste to make using the Trauma worthwhile.

    So, priests, instead of pulling your hair out trying to get the Trauma and Sundial get the Mag'hari Chieftain's Staff from ICC10 and that will hold u until you get the Dying Light in 25man ICC....

    But none of this will matter in a couple of months when cata launches

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