Alacrity - Little effect on sustained HPS

[CaseyTheRetard]

(02-09-2012 02:07 AM)pogues Wrote:  I will have to try some things out with my trooper (sadly, there is no good post on these forums for a Combat Medic) and see if they jive with these Scoundrel findings.

Obviously the exact numbers will differ, but a lot of the basic theory holds true for BH|Trooper. Increasing Alacrity allows you to burn your resources faster, but it doesn't really provide additional resources to burn. Effectively, you get more time to use your "free" filler ability (Rapid Shots|Hammer Shots). BH|Trooper don't even get the miniscule energy return from their filler that Operative|Scoundrel do from talented Diagnostic Scan.

[Coriolis]

As Casey said, if you're resource limited and your "free" heal (diag scan/shots) is bad, then alacricity will be bad for you, and BH/agent are both in the same boat on that. I'm guessing sorcerers are similar, since they actually lack a free spammable heal (I guess you could argue innervate+consumption as a free heal but that is cooldown limited). On the flip side their effective resource pool is larger then ours so on fights where there are breaks in healing (obviously SOA but also things like foreman crusher and the puzzle droid which only require heavy healing occasionally), they may not be as resource-limited as us.

[Oramac]

(02-09-2012 02:07 AM)pogues Wrote:  (sadly, there is no good post on these forums for a Combat Medic)

I'm working on putting together some info for BH/Trooper at the moment. I'm no mathlete, so it'll be more of a Tips/Tricks/Observations list but it is in the works.

This Alacrity issue is something I've been playing with for a while as well. I'm inclined to agree with you about it being more of a PVP stat, and useful for burst healing rather than sustained healing.

[Enki]

So 1.1.3 will nerf surge. Obviously this will have an impact on the alacrity vs crit/surge discussion. Will this move us towards power as a dominant stat?

[Blade Leader]

The issue that I see is that surge would still be the secondary enhancement stat of choice, since all enhancements are combinations of endurance, one of crit/power/defence and one of surge/alacrity/accuracy/absorption, and crit would synergize with surge better than power.

[ghost333]

here is what i was using for the rakata alcrity gear so i can get out the most of it.
http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#401Mff...ZGbbkrMb.1

as u can see this is an energy reg based build.

now i am not sure how much more HPS u can get but we never had problems on nightmare, also i hlp a bit on dps.

[kashya]

(02-12-2012 08:34 AM)Enki Wrote:  So 1.1.3 will nerf surge. Obviously this will have an impact on the alacrity vs crit/surge discussion. Will this move us towards power as a dominant stat?

I wouldn't say that it would obviously impact it, yes surge has been brought more inline to the other stats. However they still did not fix the issues with alacrity.

The change to surge shouldn't effect the use of alacrity too much. Depending on your healing style, if you are good at predicting damage and the usage of big slow healing spells, crit/surge/power, will still be better for you. If however; you want to save the person who stood in the fire that needs quick healing. Then alacrity could be more beneficial.

As for power, it has always been a viable stat, as it effects everything you do.

[Azaranth]

(02-16-2012 04:08 AM)kashya Wrote:  

(02-12-2012 08:34 AM)Enki Wrote:  So 1.1.3 will nerf surge. Obviously this will have an impact on the alacrity vs crit/surge discussion. Will this move us towards power as a dominant stat?

The change to surge shouldn't effect the use of alacrity too much. Depending on your healing style, if you are good at predicting damage and the usage of big slow healing spells, crit/surge/power, will still be better for you. If however; you want to save the person who stood in the fire that needs quick healing. Then alacrity could be more beneficial.

That's a good summary. I think we sometimes get too caught up in the discussion of perfect healing rotations, are rarely discuss the real world implications of these stats.

A perfect, sustainable healing rotation is sort of a fantasy. To actually pull it off, you need the following to all happen:

1. The tank's incoming damage needs to be equal to or greater than your healing output with this rotation. Otherwise, you're just wasting resources on overheal.
2. The raid must not be taking damage such that you need to alter your perfect healing rotation to compensate.
3. The encounter must not require you to move, or interrupt any of the abilities in the perfect rotation.
4. You must have minimal lag.

In reality, this just doesn't happen often.

Please don't take this as me dismissing the value understanding the ideal rotation and how our stats factor into it. I simply mean to point out that this perfect healing rotation is more theoretical than anything else. In application, many, if not most, Operation encounters require you to heal then move, then heal then move. The practical value of Alacrity is really hard to document.

[Kuramasu]

(02-18-2012 04:23 AM)Azaranth Wrote:  That's a good summary. I think we sometimes get too caught up in the discussion of perfect healing rotations, are rarely discuss the real world implications of these stats.

A perfect, sustainable healing rotation is sort of a fantasy. To actually pull it off, you need the following to all happen:

1. The tank's incoming damage needs to be equal to or greater than your healing output with this rotation. Otherwise, you're just wasting resources on overheal.
2. The raid must not be taking damage such that you need to alter your perfect healing rotation to compensate.
3. The encounter must not require you to move, or interrupt any of the abilities in the perfect rotation.
4. You must have minimal lag.

In reality, this just doesn't happen often.

Please don't take this as me dismissing the value understanding the ideal rotation and how our stats factor into it. I simply mean to point out that this perfect healing rotation is more theoretical than anything else. In application, many, if not most, Operation encounters require you to heal then move, then heal then move. The practical value of Alacrity is really hard to document.

I feel that the "perfect sustainable rotation" is more of an ideal than a fantasy. A sustainable rotation is really any rotation where you energy spent = energy gained from DSing. Sure, healing is reactive and you can't always cast exactly what you want, but that's why your rotations should be flexible. As operative, we don't have a rigid order we have to use our abilities in. Movement doesn't affect us a lot since large part of our core rotation is instant anyway. (SP and KP) I think most of us understand the theoretical nature of a rotation, but as you said they help us understand how to heal better. If we know what is ideal, it give us a goal to shoot for.

On the subject of alacrity, its benefit to long term healing is so weak I really advise against stacking it. The surge nerf had weakened it some, but its still very useful. Alacrity give a decent raw HPS increase at a given increment, but does nothing to improve HPE, which means it hardly increases overall healing. You mentioned how operations often require significant movement. While this is true, that shouldn't stop you from healing. We have more than enough instant abilities that we should be able to continue healing and often not even break our rotation when moving. It could just be my playstyle, but I personally don't see much benefit from alacrity for our class outside of pvp.

[Elladril]

This thread has convinced me that I wasn't wrong to stack alacrity. I had been thinking about re-tooling until I read the discussion here.

It'd be a different story if there were power/crit enhancements, but there aren't. The choice is essentially between power/alacrity, power/surge, and crit/surge. I find surge to be largely useless for so-called sustained healing, as when everything is going smoothly, large crit heals tend to be overheal.

And for emergency burst healing - where surge would be our best stat in terms of throughput - I feel it's more important to land a smaller heal more quickly. And emergency situations or mistakes by players on new content can occur very quickly - I wouldn't want to have to pop my alacrity relic first.. that would kind of defeat the point of landing the heal quickly. I use the crit/surge relic for much the same reason as others are using the alacrity relic - when a shit-storm occurs crit and surge become more useful as they're less likely to overheal.