Too much spirit?

[fm_gatekeeper]

I've got a question about gearing my shaman healer and I was hoping somebody here could help me out.

I just bought my shaman a new trinket with valor points today to replace her alchemist's stone, and I noticed that with this trinket, she now has 3400 spirit

Comments

[hooves]

I made room for TC just to give it a go to try to it out. It sounded interesting, and having a way to get back unlimited mana is always a bonus, y'know?

TC isn't for everyone, though-- so I do suggest grabbing it and queueing for a few guild groups (or heroics) to test it out. *ANY* time I'm not hitting someone with a heal, I'm moving out of Bad Stuff or I'm tossing out a LB to get back some mana.

I think why I enjoy it is that I don't have to rely overmuch on in-combat regen, and on a longer-ish fight I can spam my Greater Healing Wave + Riptide + Chain Heal and Healing Rain and then when the heavy-hitting mobs are dead (or the heavy hitting phase on the boss is over) I can throw out LBs and end the fight with plenty of mana to go on to the next pull right away. <--And if not, I still manage to not run out of mana during the fight. This has enabled me to heal through a lot of Stupid.

And while people say not to heal Stupid, sometimes I just want to get the dungeon over with, and I don't want to deal with convincing the DPS to kick the squishy tank because THEY have no idea that he's squishy and because the tank hasn't died, they don't believe me, etc etc.

[fm_gatekeeper]

I tried out my new TC spec in a LFR group today (got my four piece, yay!) and I'm... still undecided. The ability to regen mana was nice and it kept me from getting low on the final boss (a HUGE plus since I'm OOMed there before) but at the same time there were some fights where I thought I could have done without it. I'm still deciding which option I want to go with long-term.

[hooves]

Glad to hear you gave it a whirl!

Yeah, there are times where I don't need it, but there are also fights where it's just good to know I have the ability to restore a bit of mana here and there. Movement-heavy fights especially, because you want to drop mana tide at an appropriate time (and preferably in a nice fat group of other people) but that can be hard to do if phases shift quickly and/or your timing is off.

In the raid finder I use it a lot on the slime boss-- I DPS down the slime along with the group while tossing heals on the tank if they're taking damage (but usually the other healers aren't DPSing and pick up my moment of slack, there).

This way I have full mana, can run back to the boss with the tanks, drop healing rain for the stacking, and DPS the mana stealer thing too to let me drop another healing rain to keep people up before it releases everyone's mana.

But there are some fights where you just might not need the boost. However, I find it's worth having because having the /option/ to get mana back whenever you want is just too handy not to use.