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]

However much spirit regen makes you feel comfortable is what's important. It varies per person, but I would guess that over 3k is ...possibly too much. I was comfy ~2k spirit but I like having more (2.4k or so now I think!), and I'm also a Telluric Currents shaman so I can get mana back without having to rely 100% on spirit regen in a fight.

[fm_gatekeeper]

I've been thinking of speccing into TC since the patch dropped but I'm still undecided... if I do I can definitely get rid of some of that.

[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

[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.

[jadecat9]

My spirit hovers around about 3000, and I very very rarely have issues with mana, with water shield, mana tides, etc (and that's w/o TC).

I've been reforging more to other stats like crit, mastery, haste...depending on what I think I'm short for more powerful & faster heals.

Here's her armory:http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/duskwood/Mafdet/simple

You might want to play around with reforging some of your spirit into those other stats, depending on your playstyle.

I initially went the way of spirit/mastery, but am trying to even out with crit/haste.

[fm_gatekeeper]

I would like to hit the second haste breakpoint... maybe I'll channel some spirit into that.

[troll_huntress]

Regen vs. throughput isn't really a question others can answer for you.

For the content you're doing, do you find that you're going OOM and that's causing people to die? Then you need more regen.

Are you finding that you always have a ton of mana and would maybe like your spells to just be bigger? Then reforge/spec out of some regen and get more throughput.

[fm_gatekeeper]

Yeah, I know it does really depend on the content--for 5 mans I think I could definitely get rid of a LOT of spirit but then I zone into LFR and I'm barely treading water on some fights. I've yet to heal a normal 10 man with my current gear level so maybe I'll wait and see what it looks like there.

[hooves]

I like TC for LFR a lot. People sometimes fail at healing the tank so I can use my big heals on him, drop healing rain puddles, and on, say, Mr. Ooze Guy, I can TC my mana back to full easily.

[halfpastfish]

for LFR, I use a build with 2/2 TC, and 3/3 Focused Insight as well. FI improves the effectiveness of the next heal cast (and works on Healing Rain, which Unleash Elements does not), but more importantly it also lowers the mana cost by 75%. After making the switch, I found my mana issues in LFR basically disappeared and my healing done went up as well. I changed the spec without changing gear at all, fyi.

For my normal (5mans and occasional 10m Firelands and BoT/BWD) build, I didn't use TC since 2200-2400~ ish spirit was enough to get me through any Zul dungeon.. that didn't have a bunch of repeated catastrophic failures, anyway- though the high end of 2400 i managed most of those fine, usually!. Of course, healing is VERY much skill/personal preference based, so it's pretty much impossible to say 'exactly this much of this, and this trinket' :]

[sufferedwell]

I'd start gemming/enchanting for int over spirit before reforging. You have a lot of hybrid gems where the bonus isn't worth it if you don't need the regen.

[chershey]

This. Both my main (arcmage) and my resto follow the rule of always using pure red int gems unless the bonus is 20int or greater.

Which of the three other secondary stats you hybrid gem, ench, and reforge to depends on play style and the content you're running. I started out stacking spirit and haste pre-zg/za to hit the 2k-ish threshold. My casts happened plenty fast enough but I couldn't sustain them with so little crit and to a lesser extent mastery. Since 4.3 I've been shooting for the 916ish mark and stacked spirit, then crit, then mastery. The abundance of crit eliminates the need for mastery for the most part. Without so much haste I feel more comfortable using HSurge, which even with the lower haste still ticks in at about 1.3s; that combined with the extra mastery I have from itemizing it over haste will almost always give me enough tank HP buffer to give a big, long GHW afterward.

[hooves]

Or unless you need a gem for the meta requirement. I need another yellow and have all pure int gems now. LOL. I'm waiting for shoulders to see what I really should swap out.

[fm_gatekeeper]

That's a good point, I can definitely switch some of those out.

[regen]

I think you can cut back on a lot of Spirit, especially since you run with Heartsong on your weapon. MTT took a bit of a nerf a while back so acting as a mana battery isn't really worth it - definitely not for LFR at least.

This is my shaman and I gear for the 2005 Haste breakpoint before stacking other stats. I use Telluric Currents so my Spirit is much lower than yours even factoring in my DMC: Tsunami trinket. I use that set-up to heal both LFR and my guild DS raids.

[fm_gatekeeper]

I've been considering shooting for the 2005 haste breakpoint and speccing into TC--maybe I'll try that.