Originally Posted by
Worshaka
Personally I think SP is a poor stat to gem as Holy, to a large extent all your heals hit more than hard enough that extra sp results in upping your OH rate, not your effective heal rate. I'd argue that spell selection has fare more of an impact on a Holy Priest's throughput than their SP. The amount of SP you incidently get from Spirit, Talents, Gear etc is more than enough. However, for very select encounters you may want to up your SP for max throughput, i'm talking some Uld Hardmodes and Algalon but to me these are an exception to the rule.
I'm personally not a fan of gemming for pure Int either... I understand that Int is technically a better regen stat than spirit but it's not by an amount that is significant and Int is not buffed in any way in the Holy talent tree. Spirit on the other hand is increased by 5% and provides SP. Spirit also becomes much better than Intellect when you can escape the FSR for prolonged periods, think Mimiron. To me, spirit is a fare better min/max stat because it provides both regen and throughput rather than just one or the other. Having said that I don't think you should ignore Int, I tend to use the int/spirit gems when I can and I do prefer items to have a lot of base Int on them. Again encounters like Vezax heavily favour int but again this is an exception to the rule.
Early on mana an be a bit of a handful to manage but any decent raid will have some druids to prop you up with innervates and to a large extent they go wasted anyways. 1 or 2 innervates is more than enough to see you through even most hardmode encounters (in my experience) even with modest gear. Again I don't think it's a liability to the raid because in my experience those innnervates are barely used anyways... i've yet to see an encounter where dps is tuned to the point a feral druid couldn't shift out and give you one so again I don't see an issue with your regen being propped up with innervates. Perhaps if you are doing 10man content without one you need to prioritise or maximise regen to the nth degree if you have constant problems but my holy offset gear has been up to the task, even including 10man Algalon.