Anyone else thinking resto (10m) is quite broken?

[Zues]

Anywhere around 9k mana basically means you can do a RT + GHW combo almost endlessly, so 12k would only be super useful if you wanted to spam HS all raid long (since it also ensures mana longevity through crits). IMO, obviously have no math/spreadsheets to prove that. But most people would rather go into haste or something instead.

[Tiberria]

Anywhere around 9k mana basically means you can do a RT + GHW combo almost endlessly, so 12k would only be super useful if you wanted to spam HS all raid long (since it also ensures mana longevity through crits). IMO, obviously have no math/spreadsheets to prove that. But most people would rather go into haste or something instead.

Riptide and 2 GHW every 6 seconds consumes the equivalent of 32,000 mp5, and that is WITH the T14 2pc. There is no way in hell that is sustainable. With 14,100 unbuffed Spirit, I am only at 16,122 combat regen with Water Shield up. There is no way that food, flasks, MTT and trinket procs more than double that, and there is no way that any combination using GHW or HS as the filler/spammable spell is mana sustainable. When you also consider that you pretty much need to use Healing Rain/ULE on CD, you are looking at the requirement for about another 9000 mp5.

Whatever way you spin it, there is no currently attainable Spirit level at which you will be able to forgo Healing Wave/Lightning Bolt/standing around casting nothing as part of your regular spell selection. The more Spirit you have, the more HW/LB/standing around can be replaced with HS/GHW/CH. Until you are at the point where those spells can be used exclusively as fillers (between obviously using HST, HR-ULE and RT on CD) and even 16,000 raid buffed Spirit puts you nowhere near that point, Spirit will continue to scale your output more than any other secondary stat.

[Zues]

Obviously there's no realistic situation where you literally stand around and chain cast your costlier spells, hopefully that's not how it came off as something that realistically happens.

[Schadow]

I don't have any math to back this up, simply because there is no way for it. I can't do any literations with it, since it's just an idea.

After one and a half hour of trying to figure out what the cast time will be of Chain Heal with 11490 haste, I still do not know what the cast time is. If anyone can get the right cast time for me, that will be really appreciated (or tell me what I'm doing wrong).

This is supposed to be the formula: New Cast Time = [Base Cast Time / ((( 1 + (Haste Rating / 425 x 100 )) x 1.05)] where as 425 is the rating conversion. But no matter what, if I put the value of 11490 in the haste rating and execute the formula, the New Cast Time will become 0,00088 sec cast time, which I find really hard to believe.

[Gendori]

Ouch, sorry

[Deleted]

This is supposed to be the formula: New Cast Time = [Base Cast Time / ((( 1 + (Haste Rating / 425 x 100 )) x 1.05)] where as 425 is the rating conversion. But no matter what, if I put the value of 11490 in the haste rating and execute the formula, the New Cast Time will become 0,00088 sec cast time, which I find really hard to believe.

=Cast Time/((Base haste in %/100+1)*(short term cd/100+1)*1.05raidbuff
you are multiplying the haste% by a 100 instead of dividing, it's already a percentage after /425

or just use this spreadsheet i had for tsulong:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/...tVjJOMGc#gid=0

[Gendori]

Care to expand on that?

Sure, There's lots of problems with stacking so much damn spirit. The Most egregious being that you are completely neutering your Heals when you do so, Im not just talking a little, but by like 10% or maybe more. Our secondary Stats have FANTASTIC Synergy, and NONE OF THEM SHOULD BE IGNORED. Ill just start by explaining My weights and why I chose them

Spirit to 6K> Haste to 5700>Mastery to 50% (about 5100ish)>Crit

Spirit & Crit- 100 Points of Spirit is worth Approx 57 MP5 When you are casting Healing Wave, & Greater Healing Wave, 100 Points of crit is worth 42 MP5, Riptide and HS is 29.5 MP5, and Chain Heal is about 9.8 MP5. Lets say you are using a good Mix of these spells in your normal rotation (I tend to use HW a Lot as filler) Ill be conservative and say With my mix of heals 100 Points of crit is going to be around 25 MP5. So In PURE REGEN TERMS ONLY, 2 Points of Crit=1 Point spirit (almost). Now then Factor in the fact that Crit is Probably your second best throughput stat on top of it (haste is slightly better), and I wonder why a lot of shamans are ignoring Crit. Instead of taking 10000 Spirit, Take 6000, and add 4000 crit, Its like Having 8k Spirit anyway (which is a lot), with the bonus of having 4000 crit!

I will have NONE of the argument that More Spirit helps your mana tide and conversely your other healers. OTHER HEALERS ARE NOT BALANCED AROUND YOUR MANA TIDE, While shamans are balanced around the fact that they have Mana tide available. It is a Bonus, they get what they get, Period. You need to be thinking about your character alone while you reforge

Haste- I also see a lot of Shaman Completely Ignoring Haste Past 871. This is horrible. Ill give you a concept I never hear people bring up when they argue against haste. NOT HAVING A DECENT AMOUNT OF HASTE CAUSES YOU TO OVERHEAL MORE. Yes its true, while your slow heals are taking forever to land, one of your other healers has likely already topped off that person. Druids have Rejuv, wild growth, swiftmend and Lifebloom is a crazy fast HoT. Pallies have instant heals. Shaman have.....cast times. Also, take a look at this spreadsheet http://www.totemspot.com/vb/entry.php?b=41 Tjose are your breakpoints, I dont know about you, but I want an extra tick of Healing Stream and Healing tide, Yes if you hit that Number EXACTLY lag can eat up that extra tick, so go over it, go over it so much that you reach the next breakpoint, Riptide. I dont know about you guys, but riptide is always in my top 3 healing done, an extra tick is a No brainer, Again, Go over the cap to account for lag, 5700 will do the trick, this puts you at about 25% raid buffed. Now your heals have some teeth

Mastery-Not Much to say here, Get it to 510oish (about 50%) then reforge out of it. Mastery soft caps at 50%

If youre doing all of this and STILL having mana Issues, heres some more stuff to try

Glyph of Totemic recall- This Glyph is really really powerful, if you use it right you can get back well over 100k more Mana back a fight than Unglyphed, Simply recall your Healing stream and Elemental totems at the last second, youll have gotten the full (or almost) the full benefit of them for a cost of ZERO mana. Healing stream totem is expensive....14.1K mana thats 2/3 the cost of a healing rain, its not cheap, Fire and Earth elementals cost over 16k Mana, again, theyre expensive! So make sure youre recalling them

Glyph of Water Shield-Learn Which fights favor the Glyph over thse which dont. The difference in mana Can be huge.

Glyph of Telluric Currents- Good Synergy with Unleashed lightning. Good for sneaking in some lightning bolts during movement. Lightning bolts provide about 240 MP5 with this glyph while you are casting them.

Glyph of healing wave- If you have nothing to glyph for a certain fight, this is free extra healing, take it and dont apoligize

And finally the last thing I want to touch on is The Glyph of Riptide. I HATE GLYPH OF RIPTIDE WITH A PASSION. Why? The Best part of riptide is its Initial Heal, it has great synergy with our single target heals. The HoT on Riptide is actually kinda weakish. So what the Glyph essentially does is turn riptide into a Weak Rejuv. Spamming riptides is a sure way to Go OOM and find yourself lagging behind your other healers. Instead, Use the cooldown on riptide to your advantage, Instead of spamming riptide and sitting on stacks of tidal waves. Cast riptide and USE those stacks, Tidal waves is meant to be USED Not sat on! A good simple rotation of Riptide-(G)HW-(G)HW-Choose your spell-Riptide is extremely effective, and heals a surprisingly high number of members of your raid in those 6 seconds.

Now if the fight is Just so heavy movement that you cant get a heal in edgewise, MAYBE i will glyph riptide, But then Ill come to my senses and just use SWG effectivley and unglyph it again =)

[Gendori]

Ouch, sorry

[Puupi]

We killed some more bosses yesterday with our main and alt groups and I just gotta wonder how undertuned shaman is. On Twin Concorts we had a very melee heavy raid (2 tanks+3melee dps) and I was able to keep Healing Rain on them almost all of the time (meaning the encounter is kind of perfect for shaman, HR was like 25% of my healing) and still I healed 20k more HPS on my 500 ilvl monk than my 516 ilvl resto shaman. The gap between shamans and others is just huge

[Waterisbest]

We killed some more bosses yesterday with our main and alt groups and I just gotta wonder how undertuned shaman is. On Twin Concorts we had a very melee heavy raid (2 tanks+3melee dps) and I was able to keep Healing Rain on them almost all of the time (meaning the encounter is kind of perfect for shaman, HR was like 25% of my healing) and still I healed 20k more HPS on my 500 ilvl monk than my 516 ilvl resto shaman. The gap between shamans and others is just huge

Now you're just making me sad

[Seriss]

Now you're just making me sad

*hugs* I'm sad too. It's been a while since I last felt like such a waste of a raid spot and so unhappy while raiding. T8 and T12 spring to mind. It's like no matter how hard we try, we're still behind, and whenever something doesn't seem right, everybody either looks at the shaman, or you feel like they should. And you feel bad when someone points out that class x would be better for that encounter or that someone else should heal it because they're more mobile and bring better stuff than you do.

And the worst part of it is that, whenever you're 3-healing stuff, the other two healers are busy comparing their e-peens and you're just standing there, mentally raising your hand, whispering to yourself "hey... guys... I'm here too... remember? You once were glad that you had me."

Mere days ago, I was still confident that it would be hard but manageable if you had enough experience with resto shaman and healing. Because we're used to having it harder and being more reliant on our raid positioning nicely. But with every passing day, I doubt myself more.

When my raid leader told me that I would be healing Council of Elders next ID for the rekill, I was burying my face in my hands because when I was there for a large amount of attempts, I felt like I lacked something vital, no matter how I approached the encounter.

These days, I'm feeling like I had to hammer a nail into the wall using a screwdriver.

[Deleted]

Guys/girls, complaining and being upset in the MMO forums its generaly pointless, even tough you are absolutely right

Go go to the oficial forums (especialy if you are in the US) and make a post about it because unless the issue gets visibility it will only get fixed in 5.3 (like druids were only fixed after a whole patch 5.1=>5.2 ...)

[Tiberria]

I will have NONE of the argument that More Spirit helps your mana tide and conversely your other healers. OTHER HEALERS ARE NOT BALANCED AROUND YOUR MANA TIDE, While shamans are balanced around the fact that they have Mana tide available. It is a Bonus, they get what they get, Period. You need to be thinking about your character alone while you reforge

Then, you are being selfish and detrimental to your raid, especially if you raid 25M and basically saying that you only care about your personal throughput. It's close to being the equivalent to double dotting heads that aren't being focused on Megaera or Protectors that aren't being focused on Protectors of the Endless.

1. The extra mana that the entire raid gains from Mana Tide means that the ENTIRE RAID gains more per itemization point from Spirit than you would ever be able to make up in personal throughput gains that you think you can get from Haste/Crit/Mastery

2. Resto Shaman are significantly behind all other healing specs this tier in almost all fights and all raid sizes by a magnitude of 20-35%. It is inherently stupid and selfish to make gearing decisions that buff your personal throughput and reduce the potential throughput of other healing specs that are 30% stronger. It doesn't matter whether they are balanced around it; the indisputable fact is that every healer can do more throughput with more mana, and you are reducing the total throughput of your raid by going to a low Spirit build.

3. It isn't like that extra Spirit/mana is wasted for the Resto Shaman either. You just need to adjust your playstyle to account for having higher regen, which means more aggressively pushing Healing Surge/Greater Healing Wave/Chain Heal casts (between HST/ULE-HR/RT of course). You can be more aggressive, replace more Healing Wave/LB/stand around doing nothing casts with higher throughput casts and can be less conservative with overheal. It requires an adjustment, but if you manage to the regen that you have, you are likely to do as much or more output than someone with a low Spirit build would do.

4. I strongly challenge the idea that Haste is highly valuable outside of breakpoints. The reality is, haste is nearly completely wasted and a terrible throughput stat if 5% haste doesn't mean you are casting 5% more spells. If your mana regen holds you back and forces you to cast less or cast HW in place of GHW/HS/CH, that haste is completely wasted and would be better used as Crit/Mastery/Spirit. Also, I don't think single target heals are that large of a source of overheal. Even fully reforged out of haste, you are at a 1.4-1.5 second cast on GHW/HW with Tidal Waves up. That is already faster than the cast time single target direct heals of any other healer. I don't generally have high overheal on GHW/HS/CH; almost all of my overheal comes from Healing Rain/Riptide HoT/Earthliving, which are relatively uncontrollable sources.

[Gendori]

Then, you are being selfish and detrimental to your raid, especially if you raid 25M and basically saying that you only care about your personal throughput. It's close to being the equivalent to double dotting heads that aren't being focused on Megaera or Protectors that aren't being focused on Protectors of the Endless.

1. The extra mana that the entire raid gains from Mana Tide means that the ENTIRE RAID gains more per itemization point from Spirit than you would ever be able to make up in personal throughput gains that you think you can get from Haste/Crit/Mastery

2. Resto Shaman are significantly behind all other healing specs this tier in almost all fights and all raid sizes by a magnitude of 20-35%. It is inherently stupid and selfish to make gearing decisions that buff your personal throughput and reduce the potential throughput of other healing specs that are 30% stronger. It doesn't matter whether they are balanced around it; the indisputable fact is that every healer can do more throughput with more mana, and you are reducing the total throughput of your raid by going to a low Spirit build.

3. It isn't like that extra Spirit/mana is wasted for the Resto Shaman either. You just need to adjust your playstyle to account for having higher regen, which means more aggressively pushing Healing Surge/Greater Healing Wave/Chain Heal casts (between HST/ULE-HR/RT of course). You can be more aggressive, replace more Healing Wave/LB/stand around doing nothing casts with higher throughput casts and can be less conservative with overheal. It requires an adjustment, but if you manage to the regen that you have, you are likely to do as much or more output than someone with a low Spirit build would do.

4. I strongly challenge the idea that Haste is highly valuable outside of breakpoints. The reality is, haste is nearly completely wasted and a terrible throughput stat if 5% haste doesn't mean you are casting 5% more spells. If your mana regen holds you back and forces you to cast less or cast HW in place of GHW/HS/CH, that haste is completely wasted and would be better used as Crit/Mastery/Spirit. Also, I don't think single target heals are that large of a source of overheal. Even fully reforged out of haste, you are at a 1.4-1.5 second cast on GHW/HW with Tidal Waves up. That is already faster than the cast time single target direct heals of any other healer. I don't generally have high overheal on GHW/HS/CH; almost all of my overheal comes from Healing Rain/Riptide HoT/Earthliving, which are relatively uncontrollable sources.

This entire Post contradicts Itself, Ill go through Point by Point, But before that, please don't call me selfish. I havent called anyone else names....

1) I will argue that The entire raid does NOT get more Point for Point of spirit. Why? Does every single Healer in your 25m Raid end Every single fight without a drop of mana? No? Then youve basically just given them Mana from Mana tide that they dont need, since they ended the fight with mana. Again, I will go back to my original Point. The other healers are Not balanced around the fact that you have Mana tide available. It is a BONUS, Just Stormlash totem is a Bonus to DPS, Like Skull Banner is a bonus to DPS. Its Not required, Its a Bonus thats nice for the other healers to have. An extra 4k spirit on 2 or 3 mana tides does not make a huge difference in the mana Pool of your healers. Meanwhile that 4k Spirit can be reforged to crit (While Providing half the regen for you that 4k spirit would have given you anyway)which is arguably the best throughput stat in the game for Shamans. Im not advocating not reforging into ANY spirit at all, But I've seen this same tired argument over and over about mana tide and your other healers. You can't have it both ways. You cant provide infinite mana to your raid AND THEN come here and complain that Shaman are so terrible. You've neutered your own healing, its no wonder you feel that Shaman suck, because you caused that by making poor choices.

2) Resto Shaman are not 25-30% behind the other healing specs, More Like 15% behind Holy(priest), Druids and Monks, Pallies and disc are slightly better. This 15% is not insurmountable. I feel Shaman Healers have one of the highest Skillcaps among healers since our toolkit is so diverse, and with the Legitamite Choices that we have. Too often when we make Choices, we focus one what we DIDNT take, rather than what we gain out of it. I make the CHOICE to carry less Spirit and More Crit, The gain is I am competitive with my other healers, The Loss is that they have slightly less mana, that they didnt need anyway. Its not being Selfish. Do you think your other healers are gearing Around YOUR mana tide? I assure you they dont. You can claim they do, but they dont. The argument that we suck so we might as well give em a Nice mana Tide is Dumb. I'm not a Mana Battery, Im a Healer, Im competitive, I want to be useful, I want my class to be fun. Im not a mana battery, and WE ARE competitve, despite the community's thoguhts.

3)Techically you are right that the extra spirit isn't wasted, However its no wonder you have to cast lots of big heals. You've stacked so much spirit that your heals hit like a wet noodle, causing you to use more and bigger (and more expensive) heals, and faster, when if you would have Reforged to take advantage of all the synergy to begin with, maybe smaller (and less expensive) healing would have done the trick.

You also dont take into account for the fact that Spirit is not the Be all end all for our mana regen, we have Other tools that give us mana Back, some can give us huge returns that a lot of spirit cant touch, Like totemic recall and Water Shield Properly Glyphed/Unglyphed, and how crit gives us a sizable return on our mana as well through resurgence

4)I never said that Haste was super valuable outside of breakpoints. In fact In my post I said I reforge haste to 5700....why? Because I get an extra riptide tick, thats called a breakpoint, so I reforge into it, then stop, Im comfortable with that amount of haste, it gives me plenty of space to fill in between riptides, where lower levels of haste do not for me. The Only Point Im trying to make is that the community seems to stop way before then, at the HTT HST breakpoints, I'm not sure why, Riptide is always one of my top 3 heals done, so Im grabbing the breakpoint. I will argue though that haste is a LOT better as a throughput stat outside the breakpoints than most people give credit for. Im not hearing the argument that the .1-.2 seconds of cast time that you can shave off make a difference, thats laughable. Over a 7 minute fight it makes a huge difference, go tell a dps that those .1-.2 seconds dont matter.

Also a little Known gem, the More haste you have, the More MP5 returns you get from crit. Why? Because youre casting heals faster, thats more chances you have for resurgence to proc. Ill make up a number just for easy Math's sake, lets say you have 20% haste and 100 Points of crit, Resurgence will give you about 20 MP5 for that 100 Points of crit. Now lets say you have 26% haste. Resurgence will now give you 26 MP5 spamming healing wave per 100 Points of crit, The return you get from Resurgence is Directly Proportional to your haste in MP5 terms, so as you can see adding more haste does not quite drain as much mana as you think if youre spamming single targets, Since your resurgence will return that much more mana directly proportional to your haste

[Puupi]

3)Techically you are right that the extra spirit isn't wasted, However its no wonder you have to cast lots of big heals. You've stacked so much spirit that your heals hit like a wet noodle, causing you to use more and bigger (and more expensive) heals, and faster, when if you would have Reforged to take advantage of all the synergy to begin with, maybe smaller (and less expensive) healing would have done the trick.

I just want to point out that Greater Healing Wave has "double"(approximate) the coefficients for spellpower and mastery when you compare it to Healing Wave. You do need to have regen (be it spirit, crit or the combination of two) high enough to use GHW often instead of HW. In t14 our combat ratings were still so low so we were "forced" to use Healing Wave a lot. I've had some lucky drops this week and my ilvl is up to 517 (13800 spirit, 6800 crit + tailoring cloak enchant) and now I can finally fill more with GHW. Your statement is true (in its own sense), but so is the OP's you referred to.

Remember, healing can't be simulated as it is always rng, reactive and situational. One should also note that your combat ratings should be somewhat balanced. If you stack HPS, you lack regen. If you stack regen, you lack HPS. That's just the way it is.

[Tiberria]

It's a pretty basic principle that healers have two main ways of increasing their output
1. Get more regen so that you can cast more spells and more expensive spells
2. Get more throughput stats so that the spells that you cast hit harder
Both are perfectly acceptable choices that require different play styles. That said, Resto Shaman (especially in 25 man) are left with the additional issue that choosing option 1 also buffs the rest of the healers in the raid while choosing option 2 actually decreases the regen of the other healers in the raid. As such, a 25 man Resto Shaman should generally be looking to stack Spirit and make Option 1 work. Not only are you able to do about the same throughput as you would do with a low Spirit build; it is also better for the raid as a whole. Dismissing that (as a 25 man Shaman, 10 man I can see more of an argument) is just being selfish and inflexible.

With enough regen, you can also replace GHW with HS almost completely, especially once you drop T14 2pc. Without that set bonus, the HPM values of HS and GHW are not that far apart, and HS with Tidal Waves is significantly more HPS, and around 0.3 seconds faster, making it significantly less likely to get sniped.

I am up to 15,746 unbuffed Spirit now, not including heroic Spirits of the Sun, tailoring cloak enchant, or including 1600 raid buffed Spirit from using 600 Spirit food and 1000 Spirit flask. Until they revisit Resto Shaman throughput, I am going to continue going for max Spirit gear selections, which will possibly include passing on T15 4pc in favor of offset pieces with extra sockets (T15 2pc will still be virtually mandatory).

[Schadow]

Remember, healing can't be simulated as it is always rng, reactive and situational. One should also note that your combat ratings should be somewhat balanced. If you stack HPS, you lack regen. If you stack regen, you lack HPS. That's just the way it is.

But there should be a balance where we can at least be on par with HPS while not oom'ing ourselves halfway into the fight and this is exactly what we miss. We can either go full HPS and go oom in 2 minutes or do shit healing, but continue'ing that for 8 minutes (if not longer). And by the looks of it, no one seems to know the answer.

Even with Glyph of Totemic Recall, I am unable to keep up with mana while having to put out enough healing to be on par. I have no intention to dominate the healing meters, but being way below is in no way any good.

Somebody else state to post on the official forums, I would love to, but I'm perma banned for voicing my opinion before (although in a less nicer language). I see a lot of walls of text in this thread, somebody calling the other selfish, but there is one point I would like to know.

@Gendori: I believe you stated that everything beyond 10k+ spirit is a waste of spirit, why is that? Spirit is our main regen tool paired with water shield, it is not influental with crit that requires both rng and continous cast (hence why I still despise crit to see as a mana regen tool).

We are still young in the tier, I honestly believe the 4piece set bonus will be the bandage aid for 10-mans, yet I do not see any solution for our hps in 25-mans. Haste? Crit? Mastery? We can use our standard rotation like we used in T14 on some fights, yet not all. Plus even more that Healing Rain gets reduced by more then 6 people, so it's still not an optimal usage.

Further even more, you are all talking about casting hw and ghw in 25-man, but that can only work on either tanks or people with a debuff. We had chain heal as our filler, it was even changed to become a smart heal and no longer target pets, totems and guardians, it should be at least doing the same amount of hps (full jumps combined) as a ghw, seeing the cost of it.

I know that there were in the early pages that people requested a buff for chain heal. Why not make the cast reduction of HW and GHW granted by Tidal Waves also count for CH? This still requires that we use Riptide and it is not a significant change in our rotation. Just an idea I had last night.

[Crashdummy]

Yes, with the buff resto druids got we are officially and undeniable at the very bottom of the healing specs, specially in 10 mans where our healing rain often dont get enough people.

Resto druids were near us pre 5.2 but they recived the buff they deserved.

Hopefully, Blizzard realizes how bad we are now.

---------- Post added 2013-03-12 at 10:56 AM ----------

Well i disagree with the statement that Resto Shammies are weak. Could the class get a buff to bring it inline? Sure.
But what if T16 is again a Stack up and AoE heal style of instance, then we are overpowered or too strong again. Shamans are too good in PvP, thus we feel that in PvE.

I dont mind being the healer with lowest HPS and lowest Healing Done. I do mind if my raid is dying because of it.

And tell me, who will the guy creating the pug blame when they wipe and they see the shaman doing 35% less healing in that 10 man pug? Are they going to analyze logs or just kick that "awful shaman healer"?

Shaman are in a very bad place in 10 mans, and that will cause a lot of problems for those that are not in organized guilds and rely in pugging.

Its one thing being 5% behind, its a completely different thing being 30%+ behind like shamans are now in 10 mans.

[Pitkanen]

Some people prefer Crit > Spirit after a point because they are fine with the raw number of "larger" tank heals they can put out, and would prefer to increase the size of their major sources of healing (riptide/HR/HST/HTT) rather than increase the frequency of their fillers. Mathmatically, at least at the 10-12k spirit mark, Crit should provide more overall (20-30%) personal throughput than spirit, and that math was done before the HR cost nerf which was effectively a ~1.5-2k spirit difference.

As someone who does 25's though, that 20-30% effectiveness gap is overwhelmed by the 6*18% of spirit bonus from mana tide.

[Tiberria]

I am getting close to the Spirit level where I have a hard time burning enough mana. Once I see how heroics are and how mana draining they are, I might consider switching to Spirit/Mastery or Spirit/Haste instead of Spirit/Crit, because the Resurgence mana return becomes less significant of a factor. The obvious issues are (1) Mastery stacking only beats Crit stacking if the raid is sitting below 65% HP for a significant portion of the fight (which it wasn't in T14 - we will see in T15 heroics). (2) Haste stacking only really becomes significant if you push past breakpoints. I would think the 7613 breakpoint (1 extra tick of HR and RT above what we get at 871) would be the first worth stacking haste to. You can go to 5676 for just an extra tick of Riptide, but I don't think RT is a significant enough portion of our output to be worth stacking haste just for that breakpoint.

The Spirit for Mana Tide for raid benefit argument is a whole lot more compelling in 25 man than 10 man; in 25 man it is affecting another 4-6 people. In 10 man, it only affects another 1-2 people, and personal throughput in 10 man is significantly more important.