Alacrity is appallingly useless for healers.

More importantly.

How would alacrity be a better stat? How would it be improved?

Haste wasn't the dominant pvp stat in WoW lol...
In Cataclysm Paladins use 0 haste in PvP...Shamans use very little...druids use none...priests MIGHT use haste, but that's mainly for mana burns.

Math and testing doesn't dictate anything you've said about alacrity in PvP. If your heal cast is 2 seconds and you get interrupted at 1.9 seconds you just lost that whole heal, regardless of how much crit/surge/power you had. If your cast was 1.89 seconds that cast just got off.

The problem is you're confusing PvE math with PvP math. As I've already said you can't quantify the value of alacrity in PvP. I'm sure you'll never understand that, and I'm OK with that, but please stop telling every healer to avoid alacrity in PvP. It's bad advice.

It's simple really: Alacrity needs to be cost neutral. Ideally it would reduce the GCD too, but honestly, even making it so that your abilities always had the same Effective Cost on cast would make it much much more appealing.

Alacrity doesn't increase Heat/Ammo cost unless you let it.

Yes, you get less regen per cast because the cast is faster but nothing is stopping you from waiting out the last .2~.3 seconds anyways.

No, this doesn't make Alacrity pointless because your heal still landed earlier than otherwise. It doesn't help your costs, but it doesn't hurt unless you let it. Alacrity gives you the option of faster HP per Second at the cost HP per Ammo, it doesn't force it on you.

It isn't the best stat for healing. Power is better, I agree. However, it is still amazing for PvP when you're playing against players where you have to juke interrupts. That .2s smaller window is considerably noticeable.

Also, PvP fights are usually much shorter than PvE engagements, so resource management is less of an issue than actually keeping someone alive.

For PvP I run the Alacrity Relic with the Tech Power Adrenal. Alacrity is also pretty good for Supercharged Power Shot/Charged Bolts spamming.

I think some of the guys here would think if you can spell slow yourself 50% that'd be a great ability since you can spam your biggest heal nonstop now that it takes 4-5 seconds to cast, ensuring you always regenerate enough resources before you finish the heal.

In PvP you're not playing against some kind of machine that has infinite precision like PvE. A heal that takes 2s is easier to interrupt than one that's 1s, while in PvE the enemy is completely indifferent (they'll never attempt to interrupt either, and if they could interrupt they can interrupt a 0.1s trivially). In this game's PvP, DPS generally outpaces HPS, so burst healing is really important because you're generally going to lose in a war of attrition, so you better be able to keep people alive when it counts.

By the way, haste on a 1.5s casting spell doesn't increase your regen picture at all because the GCD is 1.5s as well. If you haste a 1.5s to 0.1s, you still spend the next 1.4s doing nothing waiting for GCD, so the regen situation has not changed.

/claps

Thanks for making my points. I completely forgot about how good alacrity is during supercharged. I've never tried an alacrity relic, but it sounds like it would be interesting during supercharged.

**And Astarica, you're wrong about haste affecting the GCD on casts/channels. It does. If you have a 1.4 second cast or channel the GCD is also reduced. Haste doesn't affect instants though.

I wasn't referring to PvP, I played a PvE Shaman when Haste was the go-to stat, so I was naturally drawn to alacrity initially.


Really? Playing with a Champion Alacrity set, and then buying a second DPS set, gutting those mods and adding a couple level 51 Crit/Surge mods and observing better results doesn't constitute testing? Well better call Science. Turns out they've been doing it wrong.

The two are not the same, but the problem I've been stressing over and over and over is that is how wide the disparity is between the value of Alacrity and the other healing stats is right now. Even if you assume it to be much more valuable because of it's PvP applications (which I'm not denying, and never have, even I maintain 11% alacrity), at the end of the day a healer has one concern: Keep them alive. This translates into putting as much healing on the board as possible in as short a time as possible. So here are a couple other things for you to consider

1) You WILL get interrupted in PvP. No amount of Alacrity will save you from all interrupts. Nor will you always be fast enough to save a dying teammate. Once someone sees you, interrupting you will become a top priority for them. So saying "Alacrity will help you avoid interrupts" is hocum. I may force a couple extra burned interrupts on completed spells, sure but mostly the result is they interrupt my second spell instead of my first one. I'm spellspamming after all. This is PvP.

2) Accepting that interrupts will happen, you are now responsible for making the heals you do get off as effective as possible. For that, mathematics IS effective. You CAN measure how one point of a stat affects the heal that got into the field and Alacrity in this regard is laughably inferior to Crit/Surge/Power.

Are you saying that casted heals need to be affected by alacrity more? And that Hot's need to be affected by alacrity by making the dot tics fasters?

This whole discussion is about PvP healing so I could frankly care less what you preferred on your PvE shaman and why that somehow made you want the same stat for PvP here.

Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal. Just because I prayed yesterday then won the lottery it doesn't mean praying won me the lottery.


I'm not disputing the value of the stats in a vacuum. But PvP isn't a vacuum.


How did you get from someone knowing you're a healer makes alacrity "hocum?" I just don't see the logic from point A to point B.

Let me give you a scenario.

Scenario A - Your heal takes 5 seconds but heals 15k.
Scenario B - Your heal takes 1 second but heals for 2k.

Mathematically Scenario A wins every time if you're left alone. But what if you're being interrupted, knocked back, stunned, etc? Then Scenario B wins because you have a much better chance of getting off the fast, small heal than the slow, big heal.

Without wildly imbalancing the game, Alacrity needs to positively affect regen, albeit only mildly so. I will use Advanced Med Probe as an example here

Initially, Advance Med Probe takes 1.5 seconds to cast. Assuming you're at the top tier regeneration level (5 heat/second or .60 ammo/second) that means that Advance Med Probe's Effective Cost can be measured as followed

Base Cost - (Cast time*Regen) = Effective Cost

So in the case of an unmodified Advance Med Probe it would look like

2 - (1.5*6) = 1.1

So it essence, it costs you 1.1 ammo over the duration of the cast. Now let's assume you have 20% Alacrity, so that AMP goes off in 1.2 seconds. The new equation reads

2 - (1.2*6) = 1.28 ammo

So over the casting window, the same Probe now costs 16% more to cast. Increasing Alacrity needs to yield the same result as the first equation. Just spitballing the math it would look like

2 - 1.2x = 1.1
2 = 1.1 + 1.2x
.9 = 1.2x
.75 = x

or in layman's terms: For 20% alacrity, you need a 25% buff in regen WHILE CASTING to remain cost neutral. That last bit is important, because otherwise your regen rates skyrocket so enormously as to make the stat a god stat.


As to the other portion: Currently Alacrity doesn't affect instants or HoTs which is why Scoundrels and Ops hate it so much. Even without the regen change, making it so that HoTs tick faster and so that the GCD on instants can drop below 1.5 seconds would at least make it a mildly appealing option for them, especially since their main shortcoming as healers is a poor toolset for dealing with large spikes of damage. Not affecting the GCD is so backwards too, because currently, if an ability has an activation time of 1.5 seconds, and you use Alacrity to shorten it, you can immediately move onto your next ability. So as with our AMP example, if the cast time is 1.2 seconds, for some odd reason you can follow up with your next ability 1.2 seconds after casting AMP, but NOT for example if you casted Bacta Infusion (which will make you wait the full 1.5).