+Damage or Healing Spells

Lets say you just bought a cloak and it has say +25 damage or healing. does that mean that the spell you cast will have +25 more damage or healing... I wish.

Here is the Blizzard calculation that I found on the forums.

Actual Benefit = (Advertised Benefit) * (CastingTime / 3.5)

So, lets say you are a shammy hitting some stupid pally with Lightning Bolt level 10. Your spells says the aveage damage is 448. Now you put your new fancy-pants cloak on, this is your calculation:

21.4 = 25 x (3.0/3.5)

So, you nail that pally for 470 damage, on average.

So, you will get a nearly all of the benefit, this is because the cast time is long.  The cast time is capped at both ends.  For the formula you can not  input a cast any longer than 3.5 seconds or any shorter than 1.5 seconds.

This may seem to hose you on an instant case, say Earth Shock, but  if you think about how many more times you could cast Earth Shock, it all works out in the end.  Basically DPS is not effected by cast time, over the long haul.  But if get the drop and open with a long cast then hit with instance casts you are in better shape.

This also works for healing.

Now this equation gets modified for DoT or HoT or AOE or Channeled spells.

There seems to be a penalty factor for these spells, AOE for instance gets only 75% of the calcualated benefit, DoTs and HoTs get the bonus for each tick they heal or damage.

From experience I would say that, for a healer, more mana is much more important that  +healing. My reason is simply, agro. If you drop a big heal and that heal has a lot of bonus on it, your threat level will rise much faster than if you drop lots of smaller heals.

So, healers think about being in the fight for the long haul and keep your gear looking pretty.

Rob