WHM Best in Slot Discussion PVE

[Nettle]

Apologies if this is a bit long, but SS gets a bad rap by people who don't understand the value of it and I feel the need to explain with the power of logic why some people choose it.

Issue 1 - SS is a minor increase (psst, but so is det!)
The first fallacy I see all the time is that spell speed is a minor increase, so let's go determination for HUGE HEALS! Hate to break it to you, but determination doesn't really add much either. Generally speaking...

(approx) 5 det ~ 1 mind ~ 1.5-2hp per 400 potency cure at 50. It seems to be closer to 1.5hp, but I'll round to 2 to be generous.

A pure determination BiS with SS secondary is 315det, 417ss (+58 det over SS BiS)
A pure SS BiS with det secondary is 257det, 493ss (+76 SS over det BiS), also has +5 piety

58 det / 5 = 12 mind rounded = +24hp / cure rounded with 2hp (this is realistically about 20hp/cure) compared to SS BiS
76 ss = -0.076s to your GCD compared to det BiS

This gives us a general idea of what we're actually debating. +25hp/cure vs -0.08s to your GCD and +5 piety. So with that out of the way...

The pure healing throughput, or HPS, between the two, is actually not all that different. The problem is, HPS is a stupid metric

Issue 2 - HPS is overvalued
Let me try to explain why.

When you are chipping away at a big number via DPS, say a 500k boss HP pool, you've got a lot to work down. If you assume we have a not unreasonable 250 dps for 4 dps classes, we're looking at 1000 DPS. Let's compare that to 900 dps, assuming our lovely dps lab rats do 225 dps each.

500,000 / 1000 = 500 seconds of damage time to kill
500,000 / 900 = 556 seconds of damage time to kill. Dropping 10% dps takes it a full minute longer. DPS increase is significant over a significantly large health pool that needs damaged.

Now let's look at heals. The big difference here is that you are healing a MUCH smaller health pool than a dps is damaging. Let's say a 6500hp PLD with a healer doing 1000hp cure and 375 regen ticks which is roughly 525 HPS (1000/2.5 + 375/3). Let's say the tank is at 1k health with 5500 to heal + 4000 done during this healing, and anything more is overheals because the tank is topped.

9500 / 525 = 18.10 seconds to heal

Now let's assume a BiS det healer doing 1025 cures and 385 regens, which is roughly 538 HPS.

9500 / 538 = 17.65 seconds to heal.

The det healer only gets there .45 of a second faster via better HPS, and this isn't even factoring in faster heals for healer 1. This is assuming an equal GCD of 2.5 seconds for both. Regardless, the point I'm trying to show is The smaller your capped limit is (9500hp to heal vs 500k health to damage), the less the "per second" metric matters. HPS is a bad metric, especially because it has to contend with overhealing (in which a DPS has no equivalent).

So why pick spell speed?
Let's go back to our last example and say we have 9500 HP to heal up, and lets assume for simplicity that we are using Cure only. We will use our previous example with a SS healer doing average 1000 cures against a det healer doing average 1025 cures.

9500 / 1000 = 10 cures with 500 hp overhealing
9500 / 1025 = 10 cures with 750 hp overhealing

Same amount of cures for both healers. Huh. The SS healer is also going to get there 0.8s faster.

Det can win in this situation if it rounds out that extra 250hp evenly, ie 10250 hp to cure. However, this will generally not happen more often than it does, due to the margin of 250hp cured vs 1000hp cures (25%). The larger the extra hp cured is, the more it weighs towards Det. However, det is currently not significant enough a difference to make that up.

The big reason I like SS
I don't see healing as HPS. Anything that isn't OH S&#! isn't hard to handle, and a good majority of that OH S&#! is from spike damage on a topped off tank followed up by an auto attack. Its those situations that you need that heal, and you generally need that heal before the next auto whacks your tank. A 25hp bigger cure isn't going to be a difference if it's a hair too slow. A cure that comes in even only marginally faster to beat that next auto can save a fight.

The bottom line
iLevel is still king. Weapon damage and mind is king. The difference between det and SS is minor (and slightly in SS favor if I may say after all the above), so stop calling SS trash. However, either option is still totally viable.