1.3.6 Final Patchnotes

The servers are down, the patch is being updated. It doesn't seem like they have listened to the massive amounts of negative feedback about the new mechanic. I think many people who don't play a Runepriest, or even Runepriests that haven't tried out the new changes will be suprised how disappointing the new mechanic is. You can read the full patchnotes here. Nothing seems to have changed from the previous versions. At least the sovereign sets are something to work towards!

Runepriest

Balance Changes:

Due to the nature of the changes in this update, all Runepriests have had their Mastery and Renown training refunded. Please visit a trainer to relearn these abilities. 

* Efficient Runecarving: This Tactic will now heal your defensive target for 50% of all direct damage dealt. On PTS this only worked when under Rune of Breaking (see below).

* Immolating Grasp: Fixed an issue in which this Tactic did not always function correctly in conjunction with the Tactic "Potent Runes".

* Master Rune of Adamant: Increased the Action Point cost of this ability and removed the build time.

* Master Rune of Fury: Increased the Action Point cost of this ability and removed the build time.

* Master Rune of Speed: Increased the Action Point cost of this ability and removed the build time. 

Master Runes increased by 10AP to 35AP/cast.

* Rune of Breaking: This new toggled ability is available at Rank 1. While toggled off, this ability converts several damage-oriented stats on items (Intelligence, Magic Power, and Magic Crit Chance) into their healing-oriented counterparts (Willpower, Healing Power, and Healing Crit Chance) at 50% of the original values. When toggled on, it will do the opposite, and convert the same healing-oriented stats on gear into their damage-oriented counterparts at 50% of the original values.

Bug Fixes:

* Grimnir's Shield: Fixed an issue in which this ability did not correctly reduce all incoming damage types.

Other

* Hierophant's Grace: This proc buff will now hasten casting speed by 25%.

You can see screenshots of the new sovereign sets in my previous post.

My take? 

Whoever suggested these changes, didn't stick to Mythic's idea of the Runepriest, nor did they please any Runepriests. Zealots are positively fuming about these changes!

Lets have a look at NateL's understanding of our class:

One of our long-time concerns regarding the Runepriest and Zealot careers is that they ultimately become more limited than other Healer-archetype careers. This is because the other healing careers have their Mastery paths sorted by role - people who play those careers make a decision about the role they want to play, then specialize in the corresponding Mastery path and gear up appropriately. Runepriests and Zealot, however, have their Mastery paths sorted by delivery vehicle ("direct", "over time", and "area", essentially) and then have both offensive and defensive abilities together in each Mastery.  Since there's obviously no such thing as "gearing for direct", though, Runepriests and Zealots then have to decide again whether they want to be offensive or defensive and then gear appropriately - the net result being that even within their chosen Mastery, half of their abilities are ineffective.

 Now compare this to the patchnotes:

Efficient Runecarving gives our direct damage spells a lifetap component. IT IS IN OUR DOT/HOT TREE! Sorry for shouting, but the ignorance of this change is mindblowing.

Rune of balancing/breaking. This mechanic renders half of our abilities truly ineffective by negating all of our Int or Willpower. A Runepriest in the new full DPS sovereign gear is still behind par in DPS terms. Now HALF that power and we still wouldn't push out effective DPS. Go back and read Nate's last sentance. I don't believe this change has addressed this issue at all.

Now when we are geared for healing, we do less damage if we throw out a DOT than we did before. We also get a higher chance for our silence and stagger to be disrupted.

There are a few occasions when this new mechanic will allow you to push out more DPS without changing your armour set, but nearly all will be situations when there are no enemy players around. I can do more damage on TOVL Boss 5 urn. I can throw out more DPS on undefended keep doors or on objective guards. I can do more DPS to the NPCs in the city sieges. If there is a sole enemy player running away and not threating my group I can help kill him slightly faster with my inadequate damage, but only once every 30s.We don't even get to twist in and out of DPS stance using HOTs and DOTs because the value is calculated from our current stats every tick.

As they have made the change, it is unlikely we will ever get a more interesting mechanic. I have seen so many interesting ideas around our Runes that will never come to light. The best we can probably hope for are changes to this mechanic:

1) There is no need for a 30s cooldown. We are so far from being effective in both areas that we don't need to be restricted in this way. If the values were increased, as discussed below, some restriction of the sort may be applicable
2) Our stats shouldn't be negated.You are taking stats away from us and replacing them with 50% of their value. Isn't that just called a nerf?
3) The 50% conversion isn't enough. It needs to be upwards of 70% for our spells to come close to being effective. Even at 100% we wouldn't have true parity because of the next point.
4) We need the right tactics to be effective in either mode, and these can't currently be changed in combat. Many of our tactics are bugged or worthless. No tactics are balanced around the delivery methods of direct, over time or area - they don't improve both our heals and our damage at the same time. Dual faced tactics that perform differently under each rune could go a long way to addressing some of our issues.

5) The glowing hands of doom. Does it really need to be made so obvious to the enemy that we are unable to self heal or the role we are performing in our groups?

1.3.5 Runepriest Heal Change Analysis

13/6/10 - It seems the spreadsheet wasn't multiplying the base heal value by the group multiplier. This skewed the results for Blessing of Valaya and Rune of Serenity somewhat showing them as less efficient and less powerful than they really are. Fortunatly as the review mostly focuses on GG I only have to correct a few sections annotated in red. BoV values still seem a little low compared to casts on my character but it shouldn't make too much difference to the overall analysis.

Right I've finally got round to updating Stormblazer's Healing Charts to take into account the Runepriest changes in patch 1.3.5. You can see my efforts here. Take note that I have only tested this for my mastery build of 13 Grungni and 11 Grimnir, but should give most people a vague idea. Onto the analysis.

The big change in 1.3.5 was the changes to Grungni's Gift. The base heal amount increased roughly 35%  from 200 - 270HP. The AP cost was massively reduced from 30 to 15.

GG is useful for 3 things: Spam healing on a target to keep them alive, spam healing on yourself when being attacked and healing on the run. Pre 1.3.5 the AP cost to spam heal GG would quickly leave you out of AP, especially if you didn't yet have a high crit pool to regain AP through our tactic Restorative Burst. Post 1.3.5 with the reduction in cost of AP an almost constant spam of GG is possible even with a relatively low heal crit of 25%.

The increase to the base heal makes it more effective in actually outhealing incoming damage. However with any focused damage on a target you will need backup. The benefits of GG is that you can get that first heal in instantly allowing time for group heals or other healers to swop targets.

Here are some statistics (based on my char) of the changes to GG.

Healing per Second (including Crits) increased from 384.4 to 465.4 HP/s. 
Healing per AP increased from 19.2 to 46.5 HP/AP.
Healing per Second per AP increased from 12.8 to 31 HP/s/AP.
Efficiency Scaling (hp/ap/100wp) doubled from 1 to 2 - for each 100 Willpower your HP/AP increases twice as much.

Now to compare this to the other effective single target heal - Rune of Restoration (Rune of Mending doesn't come close):

HPS is 465.4 compared to RoR's 774. A big difference of ~300HPS.
HP/AP is 46.5 compared to  42.4. Grungni's has become more efficient - slightly.
The big change comes in when we compare HPS/AP - GG has 31 compared to RoR's 17.

But lets look at the other benefits:

More likely to proc Blessing of Grungni (+25% healing) due to more casts.
More  likely to proc Restorative Burst (+40AP/3s) due to more casts.
No knockbacks.
Castable on the move.
You get your first two heal (~1300HP)s in the 2.5s before RoR can land. This keeps that character up for the all important group heals or other healers to switch targets.

RoR only useful if you are precasting on someone who is going to take large amounts of damage and you know you aren't going to be hit. It's less efficient now (a lot more so with the tactic proccing regularly). I can hardly think of a reason to use it even in PVE. I don't think I will ever use it again in RvR - and I didn't use it much beforehand.

One of our abilities has stayed quiet up till now - Blessing of Valaya. It has 415HPS not that far below Grungni. Yes it's HP/AP is only 19.2 and it's HPS/AP is a terrible 6.4 but that is only for a single target. These numbers grow huge if your whole group is taking damage, and even if they are not you have a very large chance to proc Restorative Burst (on any of the 6 people you heal) making the HP/AP and HPS/AP much more efficient. You also don't need Line of Sight which has loads of tactical advantages, from hiding behind rocks or standing at a different floor in a keep.

The downsides? Knockback on casting, slightly shorter 100yards range, unable to cast it on other members of the warband, and if casting reactively it might not land in time to save a player due to the 2.5s cast time. The majority of the time this should still be your bread and butter heal - as dull as it is to find a bush and spam cast.

Rune of Serenity

The changes to Rune of Serenity aren't as noticable. The base percentage to healing has roughly doubled from 300 to 600. However the effect of willpower seems to be reduced from 0.4 HPW to 0.3. This is unconfirmed as I admit my testing hasn't been conclusive.

Despite this if landing on 6 players this becomes our most efficient heal (156HP/AP) after Rune of Regeneration (93HP/AP) and Blessing of Valaya (6man -75HP/AP).  Unfortunatly it isn't a very noticable heal because it doesn't always land on those in need. I like to cast it in keep raids and in scenarios as it doesn't cost much and should net some renown leech from other group it bounces to. I try and cast it when another group has taken damage but can't really tell how effective it is. It is now quite an effective heal to use in PvE as you can be sure it is acting on people when the group is taking AOE damage.

1.3.6. Runepriest DPS Changes?

In patch 1.3.6, we want to make further improvements upon the Zealot and Runepriest careers. We wanted to give options to the healers that train a mastery path for a delivery method rather than a playstyle.

When thinking of changes, we kept coming back to one thing: “HARBINGER OF DOOM” (BIG FOR EFFECT). I can already tell the Zealots are cringing and thinking, “What is that crazy person doing to my Harbinger?” The meat of the change is that Harbinger of Doom becomes an active toggle. You start in “healing mode” by default and by activating the toggle you switch to “damage mode”. This will allow Zealots to pick a Mastery path for the type of abilities that they want, without being forced to then pick again between damage and healing. While the actual effect of the toggle is still being discussed, we are leaning towards flipping magic to healing and vice versa to achieve this goal. Some of you are probably saying, “What about Runepriests? I didn’t hear him say anything about Runepriest!” The plan is to mirror this ability on the Runepriest career as well."

Source: May 2010 Producers Letter

Hmmm, the jury is out, any increase to our DPS has to be a good thing but the fix lacks originality. The Runepriest is in need of a decent mechanic either new or building upon master runes or oath runes. Our mastery lines could also use a bit of life. The new effect will probably just be called 'Rune of Anger' and give a character glow effect... Hope they at least remember to flip heal crit to magic crit as well!

War Mechanics and the Runepriest

 I struggled to find a good breakdown of the mechanics in Warhammer here is what I have found so far relating to the Runepriest.

Action Points:
Characters regenerate 25 AP per second in game when not in global cooldown from using an ability.  Items that give +AP regeneration increase this value. So +5 AP regen is a 20% boost to action point regeneration.

You do not regenerate AP when casting a spell even if you are outside of your GCD. The GCD as far as I can tell is 1.5s, possibly a little less.

To make the most of AP regen you have to pause casting, or instead of spam casting, wait a second between casts to allow for an AP tick.

Morale:
Builds in combat.
Lowers outside of combat.
Using any morale ability will eat your whole morale bar even if it is just the first tier morale ability and you have all abilities available.

Player Attributes:
The cap for players at level 40 is currently 1,050. Source.
After this it takes 2 points to effectively increase that stat by 1 point.

Willpower
Willpower / 5 = Increases Healing Per Second.
Willpower / [(Level * 7.5 + 50) * 13.5] = +% Disrupt spells

Healpower
Healpower / 5 = Increases Healing Per Second
This stacks over the soft willpower cap at 1050 for no penalty. You are also likely to get more healpower than willpower because it is a cheaper stat due to not contributing to +%Disrupt. 

Intelligence
Intelligence / 5 = Increases ability damage DPS
Reduces chance for spells to be disrupted. Unable to find a formula.
*Doesn't seem to increase chance to crit as described.*

Toughness
Toughness / 5 = Reduces damage by X DPS

Wounds
 Wounds * 10 = Extra Health over default increase per level.
Wounds renown talents cost twice as much as other points so avoid buying those. However wounds is one of the strongest survivability attributes for RvR and you may wish to stack lots of it, including talismans.

Initiative
[(Level * 7.5 + 50) / 10] / Initiative = base % to be critically hit.
Initiative / [(Level * 7.5 + 50) * 13.5] = +% to evade.

Weapon Skill
Weapon skill / [(Level * 7.5 + 50) * 13.5] = +% to parry.

Armor
75% * (Armor / (Level * 110))

The cap at Rank 40 is 4400 - the character sheet tooltip shows 100% physical damage reduced, meaning the maximum 75% physical damage mitigation from armor. Armor works after Toughness mitigation.

Magical Resistances
Resistance Value / (level * 42) = % Resistance
Soft cap at 40% or 672 (Lvl40). After this it looks like it drops in effectiveness by a third. Source.
Hard cap at 75% but if you go over this value resistance debuffs will affect you less or not at all. Not confirmed.

Parry
Chance to parry melee attacks

Dodge
 Chance to dodge ranged attacks

Disrupt
Chance to disrupt magical attacks

Crit
Healing Crits - Base healing crit is thought to be 10%. Crit heals land for 150% of the base.

Damage Crits
There is no base chance to crit, but there is a base chance to be crit. This is determined by your initiative (see above). Your +crit% items are then added to that players chance to be crit to work out the final value.

See this thread on WarhammerAlliance.com for details.

Absorb Shields
Shields like Rune of Shielding and Ancestor's Echo absorb their stated amount of damage. They work after toughness is deducted from the damage but before armour/resists are calculated.