#build:

The title of this blog post is named after the Pareto principle, aka the 80/20 rule, which observes that “20 percent of your activities will account for 80 percent of your results.” WoW class design generally follows this principle, as evidenced by high-impact cooldowns and fire mages. If you play spriest, I’m sorry. Every healing spec has a variety of different healing spells available in their toolkit, some of which are more or less efficient. Effective use of your most efficient heals will net you far more HPS (and cost less mana!) than spamming your less efficient heals. With external mana you could do both, but at the cost of dps globals and lower overall contribution to the raid group.

80/20 applies to gearing and loadout too. As BfA has added more and more build customization systems our build options have also gotten more complex. Besides stat, talent, trinket, and azerite choices, we now also have to make choices for essences and corruptions. The objective is to optimize this in a way where your build runs the most impactful choices to maximize composite HPS and DPS.

If we want to talk about “point for point” value, the dps proc corruptions are insane. I’ve repeatedly seen them being compared to Legion legendaries both in terms of RNG acquisition and power level. Tuning on specific corruptions continues to change but it’s safe to say that even dps specs are willing to drop lots of ilvl in order to obtain dps corruptions. It’s even more pronounced for healers, since our baseline DPS isn’t as high. Thus a dps corruption will account for a larger % DPS increase for a healer.

What about leech and stat procs? If you don’t have leech already, the leech corruption can seem quite attractive. Until you remember that it’s still possible to get leech as a tertiary stat without it costing corruption. I would say that taking leech corruption is acceptable if you’re truly low on leech, but it’s not ideal from an overall raid benefit point of view.

Corruption stat procs suffer from the same issues as regular stat proc effects on trinkets etc. that make them unattractive to healers - the unreliable timing of procs. They might not proc when you want it to proc. Thus the value is somewhat difficult to quantify, but is unlikely to consistently benefit healing.

So we are deciding between impactful HPS (leech) that is obtainable outside of corruption (through tertiary leech), questionably impactful stat procs, and impactful DPS corruptions.

Contrast this with essences. DPS essence options for healer specs are extremely limited and generally consists of Crucible, C&S, Visions, and maaaaaaybe Formless Void in specific circumstances. Healing essences, on the other hand, are highly impactful and offer effects that corruptions can’t replicate - mana from Lucid, on demand burst from ERT, extra mini raid CD from Ward or LBI..

If you wish to optimize both healing and damage, it is my opinion that running dps corruptions and healing essences/talents is now the way to go. Back in EP, if you wanted to do DPS you ran Crucible major and dps trinkets. Corruptions are completely passive, meaning there is little to no GCD opportunity cost - assuming that you’re ABC and weaving in some dps here and there. For how little you’re giving up, the amount of DPS you’re gaining is huge. In fact, it frees you up so much that you can emphasize healing more and further fine tune your healing setup & choice of major essence to better suit the encounter. As disc, whose healing requires the investment of GCDs to spread atonement, this means I can ramp more, or more flexibly, while still doing as much dps as if I hadn’t spent all those globals ramping but had no corruption. The end result is gaining a lot of DPS without losing much (if at all) healing, or gaining healing without losing DPS - can you really say that some unreliable stat procs are better than that?