Alacrity is appallingly useless for healers.

Do you... not juke interrupts? Right now PvP feels like Wotlk PvP, where if your heal was ever kicked you died.

Right now, if my non-cooldown heal gets kicked, I may not immediately die but I fall really far behind in terms of keeping someone up. A second kick is pretty much death.

3v2 situations where 3 DPS are on me while I'm Guarded and being Taunted for, I will not die unless I am kicked. If I get kicked, I die. Alacrity helps a lot.

Math is useless without logic and that's where you're failing. The probe costs the exact same amount of ammo. Alacrity simply shortens the interrupt window and gives you an extra .3 seconds to do something else. The only thing alacrity ever costs you is the stats you would replace it with.

THIS
IS
PVP

I wanted it for healing in general because I'd had good results before, so it was a jumping off point. I was only illustrating that I wanted it to be good here too because of past experience, that's all.



Which makes your "evidence" just as anecdotal. At least some portion of what I do is reinforced by reproducible testing.


Nor is it Calvinball or Whose Line Is It Anyway where everything is made up and the points dont matter. Stats have predictable reliable expected outcomes on the value of your heals and currently Alacrity has such a damaging effect on your healing throughput, which offsets some of it's otherwise valuable PvP application.

Because you WILL get interrupted. It's unavoidable even if you're at the Alacrity cap. It's the nature of PvP. When people see healers standing unharassed, a lot of interrupts knockbacks and damage tend to come your way. Assuming Alacrity saves you from interrupts isn't necessarily good thinking. If you're chain-casting, the interrupt will still interrupt something, it will just be the next heal. If you're not chain casting, you have to hope that your opponent is furiously mashing his interrupt key towards the back end of your cast and wastes it while you do nothing. Otherwise, his interrupt is still available, and will simply be applied to your next spell.

First of all, delicious, you just acknowledged that we get knocked around like cushions, validating my point RE: Alacrity and Interrupts. Second of all those unrealstic scenarios don't do any good here because they aren't something a real PvPer will ever have to choose between. My big heal checks in at 1.78 seconds and my little heal checks in at 1.34 seconds. The values I need to compare then are how much healing throughput do I sacrifice to bump it to let's say, 1.5 seconds and 1.15 seconds (25% alacrity, as opposed to the 11% I run currently)

Since you're curious, let's take a look:

Assuming NO diminishing returns (which is untrue, but to demonstrate the skew, I will give you the benefit of the doubt), moving from 11% Alacrity to 25% Alacrity would take an additional ~391 points of Alacrity.

That same 391 points (assuming Alacrity has the same item budget as other like stats) put into Power (since Power doesn't have diminishing returns for real, we'll use it as the example) would make my heals go off for ~166% (I run about +650 Power currently) of their current value, and all I have to trade for that MASSIVE buff in output is to learn to play smart enough to find two to three tenths of a second. For the curious, two tenths of a second is faster than the average human reaction time. I know sometimes those two tenths of a second are big, but the disparity in value is even more enormous. I save more lives suddenly healing like I'm one and a half people than I do healing like one particularly fast one.


If the gap were smaller, I'd advocate more alacrity, but it's so comically large, such that even though I can't optimize a 1:1 trade on stats, even with some loss involved I still come out ahead!

Yes, it's true, the window is shorter and you're now free to do whatever, but your Ammo pool is still the same size. If you rush more med probes you end up bankrupted (the only other skill Alacrity has any effect on), and your only other realistic option is Hammer Shot, which will have a negative impact on your overall throughput.


It being PvP doesn't change the underlying mechanics by which spells are cast.

If you're chaincasting to keep up (which you likely will be in the event 3 people want your bones), all Alacrity has done is timeshift the interrupt to your next spell. Juking interrupts is only possible for so long. As a healer you WILL get interrupted, stunned, knocked back and otherwise interfered with in PvP. Alacrity will help you beat certain interrupts to the finish line, but it will not magically rescue you from being interrupted. Your best case scenario is in a splitsecond race you get the cast off, STOP casting, eat the interrupt because they overcommit to it, and resume casting.

Rolling a commando instead of a sage that spams AoE heals has a negative impact on your overall throughput. Healing people other than yourself as a commando has a negative impact on your overall throughput. Interrupting cappers has a negative impact on your overall throughput. I could continue but I'm sure you get the message...

It's the ability to save lives and complete objectives that count and that is something you simply cannot quantify.

Either way, in no shape or form does alacrity make any ability cost more ammo. Ever. Period.

That you like non-sequiters? Not that any of this is relevant or deserves a response but I chose Commando before anyone had a firm grasp on who was ahead of who in the Class Balance race. I'm glad you see my inability to see into the future as a shortcoming.

As to the former, yes, yes you can. Saying my ability to save lives is not in any way dictated by my stat choice and maximizing the benefit I earn from those stats would imply that I could just as easily run with Cunning instead of Aim and I would somehow be as good.

As to the latter: Completing objectives routinely depends on my ability to perform the former so that my opponents and not my teammates, end up dead.


Effective Cost of ammo matters because with sufficiently high Effective Cost, I have shortened the window in which I am an effective healer, because either I

A) Spammed to empty.

or

B) Stopped casting during the precious seconds Alacrity supposedly bought me, meaning my heals were hitting for less the entire time than if I had just used some other stat.

Alacrity also buys you fractions of a second in reacting to teammates getting bursted. When the average human reaction time is 0.2 seconds, Alacrity removes it.

Tell me that isn't significant.

It is! I'm not debating that, I just want you to consider the opportunity cost of buying that .2 seconds. I did some math a couple posts up that indicated that the same .2 seconds I bought with Alacrity could result in a 66% increase in the amount the heal goes off for.

Imagine it like this:

If you had a switch that let you choose between that .2 seconds and that 66% increase in healing at will, there are certainly situations where you'd choose the speed, but I've found it more often beneficial to take the more powerful healing. Since reality dictates that you may only choose one, it makes sense to choose the option that will benefit you the most often.

Sometimes (and the state of PvP currently should readily demonstrate this to anyone) all that matters is bringing the biggest stick to the fight and putting up the largest, gaudiest numbers you can. Alacrity cannot help you do that effectively on any scale that compares to what the other healing stats will bring to the table.

It's not irrelevant because the point is that overall throughput and effective ammo cost has little to do with the ability to save lives, being effective or winning at all in PvP. Just like overall damage done has little to do with the effectiveness of ending lives.

And no, you cannot quantify the effect alacrity has on saving lives in PvP. At all. Because it's not a static environment.

The rest of your post I already addressed when I wrote that the only cost of alacrity is the stats you would replace it with. Whether alacrity is worth it or not at all isn't even the point. The point is that the logic used when evaluating it is flawed when it comes to PvP, because thinking you can quantify something that is inherently unquantifiable is silly.