If you're a caster class, you probably know all about the five second rule by now. It simply stops your mana regeneration when you're casting and for five seconds after your last cast of a spell. It was implemented fairly late in the beta to stop the abuse that was occuring - Priests with high enough spirit were able to engage in long battles without ever running out of mana. Combined with the removal of drinking in combat, the high-level instance game was greatly altered for casters. They had to pay a lot more attention to mana usage than in the past, and emphasis started moving off of spirit in favor of intelligence at that time. I remember the inital reaction - that bosses like Archadeus in Uldaman would be impossible - until people adjusted their strategies to promote mana conservation.

However, I'm noticing a small - really small - movement back to spirit again. This is coming mostly from players who have been level 60 for quite some time and engage in a regular basis on raids for the Molten Core and Onyxia. We've seen MongoJerry and Lissa go at it on these boards in the subject of int vs. spirit for Priests. Priests do have a talent that allows for 15% of the normal mana regeneration rate to work while in the five second rule. However, the question is, is that enough regen to be worth it? Which is better, spending the 30 points in Discipline talents to max that out, or saving those points for the Holy tree if you want to be a "pure healer"?

This is something I'm toying with myself - my level 50 Priestess on Stormrage just respec'ed to be fully Discipline based (31 talent points) with the other 20 in Holy (eventually). I'm trying out the spirit-emphasis build.

What I expected is that I'd take a hit in my effectiveness. For solo and short-term battles, this is true. However, I've never used a solo-friendly build, eschewing shadow talents for holy/disc talents. What I gave up was the handy Spirit Tap (double mana regen after landing a killing blow, and 50% mana regen under this effect if under the five second rule - for 15 seconds) for soloing, so I solo a little slower now. However, for long battles, the mana regen and higher spirit is helping me out a good deal.

Last night I took on the Divino-matic Rod quest in Zul'Farrak. For those unaware, this is a brutal quest that involves defending a group of prisoners against an incredible gaggle of trolls (about a hundred) that keep coming in waves. The battle can take a long, long time. I found my spirit and mana regeneration while in combat to be helpful in this fight. Over the course of the battle, my 15% regen (about 10-11 mana per tick) added up to hundreds of extra mana to work with, alongside my higher regen when not casting from my Divine Spirit (a talent-based spirit buff, the "uber" spell of the Discipline tree).

The problem many people have is that long-winded battles like this are too few and far between. Fights tend to end too quickly for additional regen to matter in terms of immediate survival. I haven't been to raid instances yet, but I've seen videos of Onyxia fights and how they can run a course of an hour plus. Being unable to drink in combat, regen becomes so critical. A Priest is only useful if a Priest has mana - unlike the other caster classes, who can choose to stop casting spells, if a Priest stops casting spells, people die. This puts extreme pressure on Priests to maximize their ability to cast spells. Thus the huge debate on Intelligence (ability to cast more spells in a short time frame) vs Spirit (ability to cast more spells in a long time frame).

But what about Mages? With Mages, intelligence is clearly the primary stat. Mages are about burst damage, especially when soloing - with no real ability to heal themselves, Mages must kill fast or die. But in groups, things change a bit. For starters, Mages cannot just blow everything away at first glance - they have to learn to hold off and wait for aggro to be built up on tanks. Also, Mages need to have situational mana for Polymorph and Frost Nova protection.

I've seen some level 60 Mage players telling their brethren to keep Spirit in mind, because it can greatly reduce the aggregrate downtime that plagues the class. No, it won't prevent you from having to drink, but it will decrease the time you're sitting around drinking *over the long haul*.

The reason Spirit is so widely dissed, I believe, is because its effects are much harder to quantify than the other stats. Spirit's benefits can only be measured over a period of time - over the course of many fights and its correspondent reduction of total downtime, or over the course of a single long fight where managing the five second rule allows a caster to stay in the fight longer and not become a spectator. It's very easy to say to load up on Int items because the extra few hundred mana lets you cast more spells. An increase of mana regen of 5-10 points a tick seems minor and pointless by comparison. But over the long course of time, and especially for super-long fights in raid instances, my belief is that spirit is a vital stat for casters and does not deserve the negative karma it gets.

One thing I think needs to go is the soft cap on Spirit. The stat has a cap where diminishing returns start kicking in, and with the five second rule in place I believe it is unnecessary. Current thought is that the cap is around 300 Spirit, which is obtainable by level 60s with decent equipment.

As I play longer with my Discipline based spirit-heavy build, I will look to update this thread with my findings. Your thoughts?

-Bolty

I had heard rumors that spirit was going to be "fixed" at a future date to be more useful. My question is has anyone heard any confirmation from Blizzard that this is going to happen? I've been wondering how useful spirit would be for a tanker pally like me for awhile. At Beta close it was very useful as I could regen my mana quickly enough to allow me to use consecration and multiple seals in a long fight to keep aggro on myself with Zaira spamming fireballs. In retail however I haven't seen spirit to be as useful and found it hard to come by on mail and plate. So I've been favoring Intellect and Stamina on items.

Quote snipped for brevity.

For a caster druid, spirit is highly useful, because the pattern of attack includes roughly 10 second breaks between casting bursts. Hykim's build is roughly equal in int/spirit/stamina, so it is neither spirit-heavy nor spirit-deprived. It will probably lean more to spirit in the future.

Druids also have a 15% regen in combat talent. I've got it at 9% now, and it has only rarely made a difference. I think it was rather a lifesaver in Uldaman, but not significant in soloing.

The kicker will come in 5 levels (or upon respec) when the Restoration talent Innervate enters Hykim's talent structure. This multiplies mana regen by 5 and allows it to continue through casting. The duration is 20 seconds and the cooldown is 6 minutes. Since it's castable on others, I see this as a wonderful way to prolong the mana supply of the primary healer. The talent works best with high-spirit builds.

I'm tempted to respec the next time Hykim does an instance with another healer, or before Hykim does Zul'Farrak in any case, to see if the extra endurance is worth the loss of offensive power.

I agree that Spirit is going to be an important class for raid bosses, and if you talk to those who do those things on a regular basis spirit is a definite part of their equipment.

However, if you look at the Conquest strategies that they shared, you'll see that
1) All their priests use flash heal exclusively
2) They get around the issue by 'brute force' They have 9 healers on the main tank plus 4 for the off tanks? That's a ton

I don't know that I would build a full discipline build, but it seems like a flash heal-centric build is in order, with improved crit and armor bonus to help offset the lack of mana efficiency. If you are getting 10-15 heals per second and you have priests that crit 15% of the time then ONE will crit on average 90-95% of the time within the 15 seconds.

Spirit is of situational usefulness before raid instances, and I think you could switch out a few items in those situations to up your mp/tick, but it takes a lot of ticks to make up for +1 int being 15 MP when the evidence seems to be that +3 SPI is only +1 per tick and at 15% is only 0.15 per tick.

Consider a theoretical choice between 50 SPI and 50 INT. 50 INT is 750 mana and 50 SPI is 16.7 per tick after 5 seconds and 2.5 per tick while casting and before the 5 seconds withthe 15% bonus.

In casting it takes 300 ticks (that's 15 minutes) to make up for the 750 mana you would get with the INT. If you consider just the non-casting time regen, a total of 2 minutes 15 seconds. Considering you're going in and out of casting the break even is somewhere in-between, but it's clear to see how little the in-combat regen affects the equation when it takes 15 minutes just to make up for the equivalent amount of +INT.

So spirit almost always loses out when you're considering a 5 man because there aren't battles that last so long that actively pursuing +SPI items are worth it. It's simple math to figure out why. Raid bosses last long enough that you definitely run out of mana and need to regen. In these cases the 5 second rule and crit% still make INT somewhat important, but spirit is important as well.

Spirit might need a small boost to regen rate, but I think it needs something else. Make the top tier disc talent more significant, or make the in-combat regen more significant, or make it the crit stat for priests, do something so that priests want spirit. It should be the primary stat for priests, Blizzard needs to do something so that it is, because right now it's only a real consideration if you're fighting raid bosses.

What are mages going to do for mana? Warlocks can pull mana from their pet as an affliction build (imps regen ~200 mana per 5 seconds), or they can life tap and get a renew for mana, but mages just have to wait out the regen. I hope their wand skills are polished!

I think Spirit is part of the equipment because it's a marginally beneficial stat after INT and STA and is more useful than say STR for a caster.



With enough SPI you can see rapid mana regen. MOTW + BOK + Divine Spirit does give significant returns, however BOK is restricted to the Alliance side and you only need 1 Priest with DS to buff all the healers on the raid. It wouldn't surprise me if the Conquest guys do utilize SPI buffing for the downtime reduction, but again, more than 1 Priest with DS is overdoing it.



If you want a FH centric build, you may want to consider using Spirit of Aquamentas + Choker of Enlightenment + MC Cloak which all offer a flat 25 mana discount to all spells cast. This gives you a total of 75 mana off each spell cast and makes FH more efficient than GH HPM wise.

I'm just curious how you can get a Priest's heals to crit 15% of the time? Mark of the Beast and Holy Spec only seem to work on damage spells and not healing spells, so AFAIK heals are still restricted to the 5% base crit.



Indeed. It's not so much the lack of longevity of 5 man fights but the burst healing it requires. SPI cannot be as important as INT as long battle regen is restricted and the group requires constant healing. If they wanted to tailor such events to give SPI some clout with the current mechanics, damage would need to happen in bursts with long periods imbetween so that healers could actually not have to cast for prolonged periods in order to regain mana. However, due to the general lack of predictability of damage and the constant needs for heals, dispels, disease cures, etc. it really isn't possible for significant regen to kick in between heals to make SPI an advantageous stat. In raid instances with healer rotations, this is actually possible, but with supplemental skills like Innervate, Mana Spring/Tide totems, etc. group dynamics play a greater role than SPI does as well.



Completely agree, and as mentioned before, even against raid bosses, skills from other classes can eclipse the need for SPI, which makes the stat even less desireable.

Then of course, being able to drink once combat is done makes SPI useless as a downtime reducer as well.

The only real use I got out of SPI was when soloing my Priest as a full shadow spec. SoA + high SPI gear + Spirit Tap made downtime pretty non-existant after level 56. I also happened to try out a Heavy Discipline build (with Divine Spirit), only to find out that the Shadow spec still outperformed it when soloing. When in groups, I may have ended up with more mana with the Disc spec, but I still needed to sit and drink afterwards, and it didn't make a significant difference during group combat. The return on investment just wasn't cutting it. However, now that I am tri-specced for instance/raid running, soloing has become rather painful compared to the old days.




Most mages I know get Evocation, which although on a 10 minute timer, I am very envious of. Getting a huge burst of mana at will, even during combat, even though it's on a timer, is a very nice talent to have. Then there's always the hope that some Shaman has specced Restoration high enough to have Mana Tide Totem, or a Druid has Innervate.

Spirit is useless junk.

That's my thought. Naturally, I have no intention of leaving it at that. I could make a case for spirit being junk for all classes, at least up until Molten Core (which I haven't gone into yet), but I'll stick to mages for now.

The argument, I think, isn't between Int and Spirit. Intellect won that battle long ago. The debate seems, at least for cloth casters, to be between Spirit and Stamina as secondary stats.

I've made the argument at least twice so far in-game that even if Blizzard abolished the five-second rule, spirit would still be a tertiary stat for mages. Mana regeneration is nice, no doubt about it, but it just isn't important enough. Solo mages, obviously, need to outlast the enemy in order to win. Reduced downtime is in the "nice but not necessary" category. This is especially important in soloing elite quests. Naturally, in a solo situation you're casting constantly and can take battles at your own pace. No one's going to dispute stamina as a secondary for a soloing mage.

Then there's group play. This is where spirit is supposed to shine, and the pro-spirit arguments I've heard generally fall along one of two lines.

1) Spirit helps in really long battles. If the priest goes OOM we're all dead/if the mage or warlock goes OOM they're pretty useless.
2) With my high spirit, I get another (Flash Heal/Fireball/Shadowbolt) in only seven seconds! Even if I do go OOM, I can get healing/blasting ability back very quickly!

There's only one anti-stamina argument I've heard with any regularity, which is:

3) I shouldn't get aggro anyway, and if I don't get aggro then extra stamina doesn't help.

I would argue that all three of these points are invalid.

To 1), I would say...yes, it sure does seem like Spirit will help in long battles. Question: where are these long battles? With the possible exception of the Divino-matic Rod battle (and you can drink in the middle of that if you're careful) even the end-game instance boss battles don't last anywhere near any significant length of time. Emperor Dagran Thaurissan, the last guy in BRD, is definitely end-game content, and yet his fight is over one way or another in four to five minutes. Raids? Take Nathanos Blightcaller. Raiding him is pure chaos, where you only hope to stay alive when he pops out his horde of skeletons. No one even lives long enough to go OOM when the skeletons start killing you at the rate of one a second. It sounds like only Onyxia and the MC might have some use for spirit, and you can compensate for that by, as Conquest seems to do, putting more healers on the main and off tanks.

Argument 2) seems predicated on the assumption that without spirit equipment, you have no or negligible mana regeneration. Not exactly. My level 60 human mage has a base spirit of 129, and it's hard to avoid at least +50 spirit even when specializing in Int/Sta items, just because good caster blues also tend to have spirit. So you get your spell in nine seconds instead of seven. You could say that builds up over time, except that when you're OOM there really isn't a lot of time. Since you're OOM, the fight must be very near to over, probably under thirty seconds.

I find 3) the most amusing, because otherwise reasonable people who understand that things go wrong will throw that belief away in this case only, to believe in an unrealistic illusion of a party where the squishies are never aggroed. In effect, they'll adopt a build which is the equivalent of throwing your hands in the air and giving up the moment the plan turns slightly sour. Recently, I've been running BRD, and to my knowledge I cannot recall ONE fight where neither the mage or priest got aggro. Only in the pulls where there were no elites did only the mage get aggro. In all others - ALL others - the priest was hit at least once, usually many times, and frequently went down to 50% health. All the mana regen in the world is going to do you no good if you run out of health first. If you're dying with blue left in your bar, you don't have enough stamina.

Mages have particular situations, especially in later-level instances, that make stamina so much more valuable than spirit. Mages' single-target damage is not spectacular; we rank third overall in being able to deal out hits to single targets. What mages are used for in end-game stuff is area of effect spells, which means Improved Arcane Explosion. Without a doubt, the use of IAE makes things better, but it also ensures the mage a heaping dose of aggro. You are absolutely 100% guaranteed to take hits as a mage, and so stocking up on health is a priority, not just because it helps you last longer, but so that the healer has a little leeway on how and when to heal you. Without hit points, the healer has to toss shields and flash heal rapidly to avoid an extremely quick death.

The second point for mages is that we have an extraordinarily diverse number of ways to regain mana. We can drink mana potions, like everyone else, but we also get to conjure a mana gem to use as a consumable during key battles and, if not being attacked, can even use Evocation to restore 70-80% of your mana in eight seconds. For a mage, going OOM takes a while, and even a low rate of damage can overwhelm a mage's base 1500 hit points at level 60 very rapidly.

Basically, I find that stamina is far more useful to mages than spirit, mostly because of the way the system is set up. Mages have to be able to take hits, period, and spirit just doesn't measure up.

From my experience with dozens of Onyxia raids in the beta and a couple of Molten Core raids in the release is that having tons of spirit or int isn't all that crucial, because good raids are designed with healer rotations in mind that give you plenty of time to regen mana -- whether you have 250 or 350 spirit. I would much rather emphasize fire resistance first to ensure my survival from the occational attacks that get thrown my way (e.g. aoe stuff, the tank gets knocked to the side while fighting Onyxia and I get some of her breath thrown my way, or when Onyxia takes off and shoots fireballs at random targets). After fire resistance, then I'd put on a mix of int, spirit, and stamina gear, depending on what equipment I have. It's rare that I run out of mana in a raid group. It's far more crucial to survive the occational bumps in the road in any fight ("RULE ONE: THINGS GO WRONG"). After all, I can't heal if I'm dead.

Regarding mages, mana is even less important than for priests, because in most raid situations, the hardest part is trying to convince mages to cast *less* so that they don't pull aggro off the main tank. It is perfectly fine for a mage to take a break for 10-15 seconds at a time, fire a volley of 3-4 shots, take a break, etc. Spirit gear helps more than int gear in this situation, but frankly I would prefer it if mages gathered more defensive gear -- fire resistance and stamina gear -- so that they wouldn't die the first time Onyxia looks in their direction or the first time one of her fire Warders does one of its aoe fire blasts.

I believe Holy Specialization affects all holy spells, including heals (If I am wrong, and it only affects Smite, Holy Fire, and Holy Nova, then it is utterly useless).

Also, I believe the chance to crit with spells is tied to intellect, not fixed at any percentage. Unfortunately the game does not display spell crit chance anywhere, only melee crit chance, so it's hard to tell.

The worst part about it, is that tailoring gives you almost no items with intellect/stamina, and I hear the epic mage sets are focused on int/spirit too.

<3 Skandranon.

To Tal: The rumors you've mentioned are, right now, nothing more than that (rumors). As a frequent reader of Blizzard's WoW forums, I can say that all "we" know about what's going on at Blizzard's end as far as spirit is concerned is that Blizzard has acknowledged that many people think spirit is an underpowered stat and that they are "looking into" the situation.

As far as my opinion on the whole situation, I think Blizzard needs to do something to improve spirit as a stat for all classes in some way. Spirit often works its way on to all gear, even that intended for the two classes without mana. Considering almost no builds or players across all classes ever consider spirit as a primary stat, I'd say there's something wrong. It seems that spirit has no "one-to-one" value compared to the other "main stats" of any class (i.e., a mage or warlock, for example, would never trade intellect or stamina for spirit at a one-to-one ratio), barring a few exceptional builds.

Here's a random thought I had on this issue. In general, spirit is often thought of as a "priest" stat -- at least it was back in the beta and many priestish items in the game still emphasize spirit. So, maybe they should exaggerate this and make spirit benefit priests more than other classes -- the way that agility does more for rogues (and to some extent hunters) than other classes. Perhaps make spirit work at double the rate it does now for priests. It actually makes sense. Warlocks have all their mana pools so tend to emphasize stamina anyway. Mages can emphasize int, because they can use their free drinks to recover mana fast. Why not give priests a break and let them recover mana quickly in their own fashion using spirit?

I guess I don't understand why spirit would be improved only for priests and not for mages and warlocks. It seems like a change like this would just screw up cloth itemization even more than it already is.

I'm just trying to create some seperation between warlocks, mages, and priests. Actually, warlocks are already seperated, since most level 60 warlocks throw nearly everything into stamina already. I know some warlocks who have more health than some fully decked out warrior tanks, and I don't know of any high level warlocks who ever complain about their mana pools.

So, really, it's an issue of seperating out mages and priests more. I'm thinking, why not make int a strong mage stat and spirit a strong priest stat. That was basically how it was for most of the beta anyway before last minute changes were made to spirit and in-combat drinking that caused everything to go haywire. Mages already have their free drinks, so why not let priests have some extra mana regeneration to compensate?

But mage water isn't soulbound. Any class can benefit from it, including priests. It's not really a meaningful comparison. I just don't see why there's any reason to separate how the stats work for the casters.

Edit: Also, spirit at least has an in-combat effect. Drinking in combat is impossible.

Sure, in groups mages hand out water. But for solo play, it's hard to get your hands on summoned water because you can't mail it.

I don't mind priests having significant spirit buffs, or maybe even extra bonus from spirit, but I think first and foremost it needs a buff across the board. It needs to be useful for mages too, if more useful for priests.

And even if spirit were buffed to the point of unbalance, I'd still want a freakin choice on int/stamina gear from tailoring and epic sets.

If you're in Thousand Needles, sure. If you're in Ironforge or Crossroads, for example, it's usually not that hard to find a mage who will conjure water for you. It helps if you say you'll pay for it (it doesn't have to be much).

We'll give you spirit if you give us stamina

I don't want Vita-sorcs all over again.

I totally agree, spirit has to have a reason somewhere, and priests make the most sense. Give Priests some reason to want spirit, even if it's not double the regen, give them something, SOME reason to want spirit. Make mana pool dependent on spirit for priests, make spirit affect crit chance, make spirit do something else or something better than it does now. Having it priest specific also makes sense as priests are by nature spiritual.

The current itemization shows that Blizzard thinks spirit is important for priests and mages as the class set items for those classes are pretty spirit heavy. As a result, all the caster classes roll on the blue set Warlock items (Dreadmist set), and blue set priest and mage sets are thrown aside. Epic set items are class specific, so that doesn't happen, but still all caster classes are going for wither primary INT/secondart STA or vice versa. Adding a reason for a class to have spirit suddenly opens up two more kinds of items (INT/SPI and SPI/STA) as at least somewhat desirable.

As pointed out, melee classes have this diversity by making STR the primary stat of some classes and AGI the primary stat of others. Doing so for casters would not only make sense, but improve the itemization mechanics.

But that's the thing: spirit WAS important until just about a month or two left in beta (correct me if I'm off on the timeline). Blizzard saw how with enough spirit, Priests were too uber, and came up with a way to nerf it.

They didn't have time to adjust the items accordingly.

-Bolty

Even if stamina only gave 5 hit points per point - that's half what it does for everyone else - it would STILL be a better choice for mages. It's simply what game design forces on to us mage players. If you don't want mages to build stamina, then complain about the instance design.

Why do people feel that having all items be class specific is a good thing? I keep hearing people complain about "item X is a mage item, but warlocks keep rolling on it" or whatever. A priest item is whatever works well on a priest. Period. As far as I'm concerned having to make hard choices is what makes this game fun. If a given leather item is great for a hunter because it has scads of agility (the trade off being the much lower armor) that's a nicely balanced item that works for hunters. It is not a "rogue item". Making an eigth of the items only useful for priests by creating an uber stat they can't live without does not help the game.

On the other hand, making it so that all the characters like the same item means that there will only be a few items everyone wants and everything else in the game is "junk." I like having variety so that different people like different items and fewer items are considered junky.

All the more reason to improve spirit for everyone as much as for priests. That way, mages and maybe even some warlocks will at least want to consider getting spirit. Also consider that if priests were the number one reason spirit was nerfed in the first place, why would they buff it more for priests than for other classes?

Priests weren't the reason for the "nerf." The main reason for the change as stated by the developers was that they wanted spirit to be different from intelligence. The way it was before, spirit was numerically about five times less effective than it is now but it would work all through combat. In addition, one could also drink in combat. Effectively, spirit and intelligence were equivolent stats in that they both increased your effective mana pool during a battle. Priests tended to hoard +spirit items, because it was difficult for them to sit down and drink for any length of time and because they needed to have a large effective mana pool when fighting tough bosses. Mages, on the other hand, tended to focus a lot on +int items and then drink in combat, since they could regen mana fast that way, and nobody's going to die if a mage takes a break for a bit.

What the Blizzard developers decided to do was to seperate out int, spirit, and drinking. Int, as always, increased your mana pool and they numerically increased its effectiveness from 10 mana per point to 15. Then, spirit had its numerical effectiveness *increased* dramatically (five times!) but made it so that it wouldn't work until five seconds after you cast your previous spell. In effect, spirit took over the old role of drinking in combat. Finally, drinking was disallowed in combat, so it was changed so that drinking was only there to reduce the downtime between fights -- and drinks were improved somewhat in the process.

I thought these were good changes. The problem that people are experiencing, however, is the fact that because these changes were introduced so late in the beta -- like less than a month before retail -- the numbers haven't been properly tweaked to make them work. In particular, spirit should really be doubled in its effectiveness for everyone and maybe even more for priests (or maybe give priests bonuses to healing ability for more spirit?). In addition, drinks need to be improved dramatically to compensate for the large mana pools of level capped players. I now have to drink twice to regen a full mana tank, and that's a long time to hold up an instance party.

By the way, Bolty may have been mislead a little by some earlier discussions. First, no priest or any member of another class ever had enough spirit to be able to chain cast their spells for little or no effective cost. I had one of the highest spirit numbers in the beta -- well over 350 spirit -- and I ran out of mana all the time. The comments from the Blizzard developers on this was that they were worried that this could be a problem in the *future* when more powerful items would come out. As people collect elite sets and as higher level raid instances get introduced with their more powerful items (legendary items anyone?), one could imagine someone putting together a set of gear with 700 or even 1000 spirit on it. At that point, you could have the situation where someone could chain cast their spells for little effective cost.

Getting back to this, my understanding is that you about +1% chance to crit for every 30ish intelligence. So, if you have 300 intelligence, that gives you +10% to crit rate over whatever the base rate is plus your gear and talent choices. I also believe the 5% crit rate is a myth, as I believe Lem and I did some tests with rogue crit rates and it seemed like the base was only 1%. If the 5% number is real, maybe that's like the minimum crit rate. That is, maybe the game does some calculations that say, "If the calculated crit rate is less than 5%, then give the person a crit rate of 5%."

These are much more agreeable changes. I'd like to see spirit improved for every class. Doubling might be a little excessive, but I think a 50% increase over the current rate would be a great start. Rather than simply give priests more of an extra mana regeneration bonus from spirit, I think it'd make more sense to give them some form of improved healing from spirit (perhaps by having spirit increase the critical effect chance of healing spells rather than intellect).

And, like you said, drinks really do need an improvement. Food probably does as well, with high stamina builds giving characters more health than can be resoted by the best food in a single eating.

And before all that, Blizzard needs to remove or significantly increase the purported soft cap on spirit (assuming it exists). What better way to gimp an already mediocre stat than to soft cap it at a relatively easily obtainable level?

This post served no purpose in a discussion about spirit vs int. Please refrain from dong this. Thanks.

It's been my understanding that Blizzard designed spells to crits much less than weapons. Generals concensus seems to be that it takes about 100 in to produce 1% crit chance. My checking with the DPSplus addon of Cosmos seems to confirm this when I check my Mind Blast stats. The Gloves of Spell Mastery have a good example of such a discussion of spell crit rates.


There are two thoughts on this subject. Some people belive that Spirit has a softcap at 300 and follows a formula of (Spirit/3=mana regen), this will fit most regen figures Cosmos reports. However if you use (Spirit/4+13=mana regen) then the data Cosmos reports seems to fit nearly all instances. Other classes have a different +x, Warlocks recieve +7 I belive.

Personally I'm inclined to think that Spirit is not softcapped, mana (and health) regen increases at a linear rate based on your spirit. You do however have diminishing returns, but that is because your overall mana pool increases much faster than your Spirit regen rate.

When I first started playing WoW (at release), I thought it was a great idea to make non-combat regen ridiculously fast. That way it wouldn't unbalance combat, but you also wouldn't have to sit around doing nothing waiting forever to regen. Little did I know, that was just the early game misleading me. Now it takes me quite a long time to regen a full bar, even with good food/water.

I guess they wanted to make certain classes/builds kill faster but have higher downtime, for an overall balance of kill/recovery time... but it's still very boring sitting down, and I still feel mislead by the early game. I wish they considered this an important issue in their early design, because I think at this point it'd be hard to make faster food/water without disrupting the balance. Higher maximum recovery at the same rate wouldn't hurt though.

Your timeline is in the right area. It was not just priests that were getting a great benefit out of it, the mage could too if they were not blinded by wanting mega INT. My mage had just prior to that change done an Uldaman run and throughout the whole thing I had only to stop and drink 5 or 6 times. During many fights I was actually able to recover mana faster than I was expending in casting spells. It was just a matter of which set of spells I was using; low mana cost spells while tank built some aggro and I gained mana then switch to a quick burst of higher spells to wipe the current target burning only a moderate amount of mana. Then just repeat again for the next mob that was part of the same pull.

"...and came up with a way to nerf it."
The problem is in a sense the same as it usually is with the Blizzard development team. The over compensated when appling a fix. In this case they slapped a diminishing return if you tried to really max out spirit AND reduced the amount of recovery you did get for a set amount of spirit AND added the no mana recover in fight and for 5 seconds after the fight. Too many different things done to reduce spirit in one pass, such that it turned the stat into almost a joke for its usefulness.

I know the feeling. I've always been kind of disappointed in how the gameplay shifts between the early game and the late game. I've noticed I'm strongly affected by "altitis" in WoW just because I really enjoy the gameplay at the low levels.

If you see your role in the raids (MC) as a primary healer, I think that a Discipline/Holy build would be great. The higher your spirit, the less healers would be needed for healer rotations. Flash heal and Renew will probably be the healing spells you'd use most often with a bit of group healing trash mob AoE if your group consists of primarily melee.

IMHO, mana regen is king in the raid game. The longer the fight, the less of an advantage int becomes. I am assuming you will still have a decent amount of int regardless. Although your healer rotation groups may have enough healers to keep the main tank forever, the secondary target system that many MC mobs have can add some unexpected randomness. The fights are generally longer such that I feel spirit would help to deal with it better.

However, your stat decision need not be limited to int and spi either. There are also various mana restoration gear that ignore the 5-second rule. Using gear such as a Resurgence Rod and Ghostweave armor you can get around 70 mana/restoration tick with blessing of wisdom (or a little less with a shaman).

I feel sta for priests provides little benefit beyond being able to live a human bomb blast or the fire DoT + silence debuff. IIRC, even the entrance giants hit my 60 rogue with about 22% damage mitigation for 1.4-1.7k per hit (regular attack). It takes so much stamina to increase life expectency a few seconds that I don't think it's worth it for non-heavy armor classes beyond a point.

I've found the following site to be a useful resource on MC which you can check out if you're interested. It's a spoiler to the zone though as it details mob/boss AI and map positions.

http://conquest.teamgbu.com/strats/moltencore/why.php