Spirit.

[Bloodystump]

Has anyone tested to see if there is a soft cap on this? With the way spirit could be abused from future gear, I'm thinking Blizzard may have plans to smack the nerf stick against it if it gets out of hand. Especially with the recent increase for holy priests. As it is right now, I'm stacking spirit and have reached 4k combat regen, more with a shaman or other mana regening classes. I can see that with gear upgrades it's growing rapidly.

Any thoughts?

[Lysdexic]

If you have a lot of leftover mana at the end of the boss fight, what good did any of that spirit do you? It hurt you actually, because that spirit could've been intellect/haste/mastery instead.

The recent buff to HC/Rapture might get reverted in a patch or two however. I think you might have a point there about regen getting out of control.

[LatexHealz]

Regen is not out of control.


Also, the idea of "Extra mana is bad" is such a silly thing to say.


You need to ensure you have extra mana in case something bad would happen, and you needed to recover, oh say.. melee not moving out of aoe fast enough and you have to PoH a couple times to get a group back up.

Regen > All

Regen = More healing done

Regen = More chances to recover from ocrap moments

100 extra int/spell power is not going to make a huge difference in your spells when you have 8000 spell power and 100k mana.


The idea of having extra mana = bad comes from wrath,

Wrath you spam healed like no tomorrow or people died.

Times are different now, its back to the way wow used to be.


HARD.

[Casimir]

If you have a lot of leftover mana at the end of the boss fight, what good did any of that spirit do you? It hurt you actually, because that spirit could've been intellect/haste/mastery instead.

The recent buff to HC/Rapture might get reverted in a patch or two however. I think you might have a point there about regen getting out of control.

Depends on how you healtoo. Was it a fight where whole group was sitting around 50% stressing your ass out, people almost died, buuut you had enough mana leftover, cause you healed with your very efficient heals ( also very weak heals ) If you had used that left over mana to heal more with lets say expensive heals, flashheal as example, you will keep the whole group alive a lot easier, and that thanks to the extra spirit.
If you got mana leftover you really should go into that battle with a different mindsetting the next time. We are far from having enough Regen imo, makes me sad people already saying they got enough regen. If your being very conservative sure you got enough regen, but the point of regen is that you can be way less mana conservative too. makes things easier.

[silverhope]

I was wondering the same thing my priest is at 2400 spirit unbuffed (rolling with spirit gems and enchants) you cant go off "oh i ahve mana after a boss so i need less spirit" cuz everyboss is different and imo trash is harder to heal than bosses most days.

I think I'm going to try and get 3k spirit and see how that is. I would rather never run oom with crazy spirit than +1k hps with crit/int

[Lysdexic]

I keep deleting my posts because of my laptop's scroll pad, it's the most obnoxious thing ever.

There's a single philosophy that applies to just you, as a healer, and to your whole team of healers: The boss does a certain amount of damage over the course of the fight. The fight will basically never be longer than a certain time (i.e. 5-6 minutes). This certain amount of damage, the incoming raid damage determines how many healers you need. If the incoming damage is 100k dps, and each healer can do 10k hps, then you need 10 healers.
Having more healers than that is a waste because it means you could bring more dps (which makes the fight shorter and means you need less healing anyway).
This is why some guilds run with 4-6 healers (which is more optimized) compared to others running 6-8.

The same thing applies to you. You only need to put out X healing until the boss enrages. Yes that varies even between attempts, so you can just slap on a margin of error +/- m. X+m is the most damage a boss could do (bad RNG, people are a little slow on moving). If you have a lot of extra mana even after that worst case scenario, you're wasting stats.
You can argue that bad things always happen and your melee always take a ton of damage. That means they're bad and need to get replaced.
You can argue that 100 more int/haste isn't incredibly significant, well neither is 100 spirit.

[Kelesti]

A very well written post, Lysdexic.

Healers may have a little more wiggle room than DPS when it comes to itemisation, but there's no reason why min/maxing doesn't apply to us as well.

[Firehorse]

If you have a lot of leftover mana at the end of the boss fight, what good did any of that spirit do you? It hurt you actually, because that spirit could've been intellect/haste/mastery instead.

The recent buff to HC/Rapture might get reverted in a patch or two however. I think you might have a point there about regen getting out of control.

I think at the end of the fight the question should be did anyone die besides the boss, not how much mana you have at the end of it

[Kpoof]

Regen is not out of control.


Also, the idea of "Extra mana is bad" is such a silly thing to say.


You need to ensure you have extra mana in case something bad would happen, and you needed to recover, oh say.. melee not moving out of aoe fast enough and you have to PoH a couple times to get a group back up.

Regen > All

Regen = More healing done

Regen = More chances to recover from ocrap moments

100 extra int/spell power is not going to make a huge difference in your spells when you have 8000 spell power and 100k mana.


The idea of having extra mana = bad comes from wrath,

Wrath you spam healed like no tomorrow or people died.

Times are different now, its back to the way wow used to be.


HARD.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but first off, WoW has never been hard and neither has healing. WotLK healing was harder then Cata healing due to the insane spike damage and in the scenario where you stop to cast and move out of something, people die. That was harder then todays healing where if you die, you have time to release and run back in to continue healing. That's not hard.

[Kelesti]

I think at the end of the fight the question should be did anyone die besides the boss, not how much mana you have at the end of it

Take into account why they died, and if more output would have saved this person.

Rawr.

[Deleted]

I don't believe that having surplus spirit is a waste of stats.

For any encounter there is a minimum stat requirement. this is the point that with a perfect group, played perfectly, with the best possible RNG you'll end the fight with 1 person alive with 1hp and the boss dead. Really, that's never going to happen, so you need more stats for that slight lag, the not perfect RNG, then even more stats for your average raiding group. Then even more stats to end the fight with everybody alive. The stats you have past that point are used to recover from mistakes, a DPS died in fire, the fight goes on longer, you need more mana = spirit. An interupt was missed and there's some heavy damage coming in, you need more throughput, there are so many 'possibly' scenarios that saying any 1 stat is useless because on 1 try you ended with a bit extra mana etc was only true because of that specific instance. next time you might not be so lucky.
On the flip side i agree, if you're consistently finishing every encounter with a large % of your mana pool left, no mana pots used and no sfiend / HoH but half your raid is dead. maybe picking up some more throughput is the way to go.

It seems there are 3 ways to gear yourself:
gear enough spirit to last the expected encounter time then stack for throughput
or
gear enough throughput to deal with the boss mechanics, then stack spirit to cover mistakes.

I would imagine that most healers generally get enough spirit and throughput to last encounters quite early on, what harm is keeping a balance between the 2 from that point on?

[Sny]

Just gear for enough Spirit until you feel comfortable in a variety of encounters after doing them a few times. If people aren't making mistakes and you're oom, you probably need more, if people are and you're oom, then it's most likely their problem.

[muto]

Sorry to burst your bubble, but first off, WoW has never been hard and neither has healing. WotLK healing was harder then Cata healing due to the insane spike damage and in the scenario where you stop to cast and move out of something, people die. That was harder then todays healing where if you die, you have time to release and run back in to continue healing. That's not hard.

Have you healed Cataclysm Heroics yet as a Priest? I'm guessing not, because there are a lot of encounters where tanks and DPS both, are taking insane spike damage at the same time. I mean hell the arcane trash right before Isiset hits the tank harder than most of the Heroics bosses will. General Umbriss hits like a MAC Truck too if the purple trogg gets to the boss. Saying that when and if you die you have time to run back and continue healing is the silliest thing that I've heard all day. Why should you die to begin with actually? Healers should have the best awareness of anyone. And good luck with that Heroic Stonecore trash if you don't have CC.

[XyroN]

Intellect is better than spirit, point for point. You should stack int, not spirit. Spirit is a very weak stat atm, intellect however is overpowered.

[Shoelace]

Didn't they end up nerfing Spirit-based regen in 3.1 or something because Priests and Druids were over the top?
Then again, they nerfed Water Shield in 3.0.8 and Illumination around 3.2 too.

The moral here is: if it's too much, it'll be fixed. However, I think that implies that people ignore regen stats. If you're stacking regen stats and getting too much regen, that's not a problem. If you're ignoring regen stats because you can do just fine without them (especially in the lower tiers), thats probably a problem. As you can see, they nerfed Paladins recently for this very reason.

[Arlee]

Didn't they end up nerfing Spirit-based regen in 3.1 or something because Priests and Druids were over the top?
Then again, they nerfed Water Shield in 3.0.8 and Illumination around 3.2 too.

Yes they did which made things slightly wonky for us for a little but. However, I think (and I could be wrong here) this has changed again since there is no more mp5 on gear. At the very least I feel like I am getting a lot more regen off of spirit than I used to be.

Someone mentioned earlier that in some heroics dps and the tank are taking a ton of spike damage. From what i have seen most of the time when this occurs it is because people haven't moved out of the avoidable damage.

The other thing on regen vs int is more int causes you to have more spell power (your heals heal for more when you cast them and you in turn may have to cast fewer heals) and a larger mana pool (you get more mana returned from things like replenishment) while all spirit does for you is helps you to have a stagnant amount of mana regen. Which is important, but there is no need to go overboard with.

[Shakalager]

Intellect is better than spirit, point for point. You should stack int, not spirit. Spirit is a very weak stat atm, intellect however is overpowered.

?? Good luck stacking all that Int when you're ooming.

Which is important, but there is no need to go overboard with.

Edit: True, you don't need to go overboard with Spirit, but if you completely ignore it then you will run out of mana. Both Intellect and Spirit are important to healers, finding the right balance is the thing.

[Zeuq]

?? Good luck stacking all that Int when you're ooming.

Intellect is superior. It may not provide as much mana as Spirit, but by providing Spell Power and even a little Crit as well, it is a more efficient stat. As such, stacking more Spirit may give your more mana, which will let you potentially cast a few more inefficient heals, Intellect will make all your heals hit harder so that you may not have to cast those inefficient heals and, when you do, they'll hit harder too, so you can cast fewer of them. As such, you want to get as much Intellect as possible for the same reason you want to use efficient heals, because it's the most efficient stat point for point.

Regardless, it's a pretty silly argument anyway because Intellect vs. Spirit really only comes into play with gemming and perhaps a couple of enchants. This is all the more reason why you should focus on getting Intellect in those opportunities, because it can't be increased through reforging. It would be one thing if, at every choice for Spirit there were a choice for Intellect, and so we could gear for straight Intellect and ignore Spirit, but we can't. Most of the time, it's really Spirit vs. Mastert/Haste/Crit, which is a completely different argument. And it's entirely possible to get Intellect over Spirit at those few possibilities and still get plenty of Spirit. As such, if you need Spirit, it should come at the expense of the less efficient stats, not the more efficient one.


At the OP, I'm not too worried about it right now since, unlike before, Spirit now affects all healers. However, unlike before, it now affects Holy Priests specifically a lot more than any other class. I really would prefer it if they found ways to rework other healing classes regen mechanics to work a lot more off of Spirit (eg, Rapture instantly returns the amount of mana you would regen through spirit over the next 10s or something) so that, if mana gets out of control, they can nerf Spirit and it hits all healing classes roughly equally.

[Lysdexic]

Intellect is superior. It may not provide as much mana as Spirit, but by providing Spell Power and even a little Crit as well, it is a more efficient stat. As such, stacking more Spirit may give your more mana, which will let you potentially cast a few more inefficient heals, Intellect will make all your heals hit harder so that you may not have to cast those inefficient heals and, when you do, they'll hit harder too, so you can cast fewer of them. As such, you want to get as much Intellect as possible for the same reason you want to use efficient heals, because it's the most efficient stat point for point.

Regardless, it's a pretty silly argument anyway because Intellect vs. Spirit really only comes into play with gemming and perhaps a couple of enchants. This is all the more reason why you should focus on getting Intellect in those opportunities, because it can't be increased through reforging. It would be one thing if, at every choice for Spirit there were a choice for Intellect, and so we could gear for straight Intellect and ignore Spirit, but we can't. Most of the time, it's really Spirit vs. Mastert/Haste/Crit, which is a completely different argument. And it's entirely possible to get Intellect over Spirit at those few possibilities and still get plenty of Spirit. As such, if you need Spirit, it should come at the expense of the less efficient stats, not the more efficient one.


At the OP, I'm not too worried about it right now since, unlike before, Spirit now affects all healers. However, unlike before, it now affects Holy Priests specifically a lot more than any other class. I really would prefer it if they found ways to rework other healing classes regen mechanics to work a lot more off of Spirit (eg, Rapture instantly returns the amount of mana you would regen through spirit over the next 10s or something) so that, if mana gets out of control, they can nerf Spirit and it hits all healing classes roughly equally.

This post wins approximately 17 internets. I bolded the parts I thought were exceptionally sexy.

[Zeuq]

I'm glad someone else agrees with me. It's kind of frustrating to see DPS reforge everything into Hit, and Holy Priests go all out to get Spirit, which is supposed to be the Healer equivalent of Hit, and yet, Disc, Druids, and Paladins don't value it at the same level. It's not hard to imagine ways to adjust their regen mechanics to work more off of Spirit, hell, they did it with Mana Tide. Worse, with the idea of DPS needing more Hit in higher raid tiers, Healers will continue to need more regen, but Priests will still be forced to stack more Spirit to do so, where the other classes will get quite a bit more from the natural Intellect on their gear.

Don't get me wrong, I fairly well like where Priests are, I'm just worried that as gearing progresses and mana potentially becomes an issue again, the first thing Blizzard will do is nerf Spirit regen, which will necessarily hurt Holy Priests more than any other healing spec. Why not just give all healers the same sort of Spirit goal in the same way that all DPS now have identical Hit caps?