Holy Paladin: Ineffable Truth post-200%

Ineffable Truth is a powerful option for Holy Paladin with its combination of rotation alterations and increased wings uptime pushing it squarely into pole position. It’s strength is inarguable but is there a “too much”? Are we really going all in or can a more balanced approach compete or even beat it? We’ll be looking specifically at 200% IT plus stat amps and 290% IT here. Comparing 90% IT to 200% is an exercise left for another day. The article below is designed for a more advanced audience than a typical article on the site but it’s hopefully still an easy read. You can skip to the conclusion at the bottom if you want a shortcut.

 

Calculating Wings uptime

Wings uptime is a function of both our average Vision of Perfection and Ineffable Truth procs. Combining both is challenging to do with a simple mathematical formula so we took a page out of SimC’s book and simulated it in C++ instead. Big credit to Bastas (the hero behind HSW) for helping with this step. Send me a private message on discord if you’d like the script. It can calculate uptimes for all levels of IT including imaginary sets like 900%.

The math below is as friendly to IT as possible, if you leave wings off cooldown or don’t run Lights Decree / Avengers Might then your numbers will drop.

 

Wings Uptime in numbers

The difference between 200 and 290% IT is an extra ~4.175% wings uptime. Over a six minute fight this should be a little over 15 seconds of wings (360 x 0.04175).

Wings as a healing modifier

This part of the equation depends on our crit chance and how much of our throughput is made up of Holy Shock casts but generally we’re in the ballpark of a 55-60% healing increase. In my example I’m using a 20% crit chance and 30% HS allocation for a 1.58 healing multiplier. I’ve included some other stat lines in the table below so that you can fine tune the accuracy for your setup. In the set that I’m using in my example we get 2.4% throughput just from spending more of the fight in wings.

There is an inherent assumption here that our healing is reasonably flat. That is rarely the case in reality but perfectly matching the results to a given fight causes a large increase in complexity for only a small increase in accuracy. Just keep in mind that the numbers above are more of a floor than a ceiling. 

Extra Holy Shock casts

Spending more time in Wings gives us extra Holy Shock casts through the fight through Sanctified Wrath. Nice and straightforward. This is a great opportunity to enter your own logs since there are a thousand factors that lead to how many, and how hard your Holy Shocks hit. I averaged 20 N’zoth logs and then compared them to the raw intellect math to end up with ~3.7 free Holy Shocks with an average cast of 273,250 for the sake of our example (including the resulting Glimmers). If repeating this at home make sure you deduct the wings bonus healing from your figures so that you don’t double dip with what we just did above. The articles common metric is percent healing so we’ll convert our free Holy Shocks by dividing their healing by our fight length and then by our total HPS. It should represent around a 1.7-1.8% healing increase.

Avengers Might

You can ignore this section if you’re not running the traits but they needed to be included in some form. Double 490ilvl Avengers Might with an additional 4.175% uptime is worth ~74 flat mastery. If you’re not rocking the Mythic pieces yet then it’s slightly less, but not enough to impact our conclusion. The formula for converting a secondary stat to throughput is discussed below and we won’t repeat it here. With a 3.4 Mastery stat weight and 17500 intellect we should be seeing a gain of around 0.799% (I think we can round this one to 0.8%).

Adding up the bits and pieces

So our sum total is a 4.9% healing increase. That’s quite good value for corruption in general. We are happy with this result and certainly wouldn’t feel it was corruption misspent. Let’s see how our amplifiers compare.

 

The Competition: Expedient & the Stat Amps

We’re mostly focusing on Expedient here but you can sub in your amp of choice. Most of the time it’ll be Expedient or Masterful because it’s tough to get enough Versatility – even when including Conflict & Strife. Pick based on which stat you have more of on your gear – remember to include Avengers Might if in use. You should also include haste buffs like Formless Void, Dragonscale / Vita and so on. Converting X stat to throughput is a lot easier than it was for our Wings uptime and we can include it all in one tidy table. Remember the score to beat is 4.97%.

The 36 corruption not spent on Ineffable Truth buys us 21% of our chosen amp (12 + 9 for a cost of 35). We’ll use a Haste stat weight of 3.6 below and keep the same 17500 intellect as we did for Avengers Might.

So we have a breakpoint at around 2100 haste where the amplifier pulls ahead. This isn’t a very difficult number to reach, especially when you include raid buffs and procs.

 

To conclude, stacking Ineffable Truth past 200% is not an optimal choice for progression raiding on average. It isn’t weak, and those deep in farm who fancy a chance at a high swing will find occasional brilliance. It is the patch of the extreme and there’s nothing wrong with embracing that. However, it is tough to ignore the numbers and the amplifiers are ahead. The amplifiers also benefit from their reliability which gives them the double tick necessary for a recommendation.