Why am I talking about spirit again, you ask?
Several reasons.
First, Blizzard’s almost asinine propensity to putting spirit on nearly all cloth gear. Sure, this makes sense, if every cloth wearing class could make good use of it. Priests and warlocks of all specs, for instance, can make ample use of spirit.
At the very least, a percentage of spirit is turned into spell damage, and then worked into core mechanics from there. Life Tap, anyone?
Mages, then, are the unique one. The only benefit spirit provides is to mana regeneration, and then only when the mage is using glyphed mage armor or has invested at least 18 points into the arcane tree. Preferably all at once.
And… well, actually, that’s it. Just mana regeneration. Albeit a higher percent than other classes get (holy freaking crap 80%?!) it still only caters to a group of mages, rather than all.
That’s the second reason.
ALL priests, regardless of spec, benefit from spirit. ALL warlocks, regardless of spec, benefit from spirit. Unless they’re stupid or ignorant, I guess. Whatever, let’s assume these priests and warlocks have the ability to read WoWWiki at the very least.
Touching on moonkins for a bit, even they get a little spirit to spellpower conversion thingy. There’s only one moonkin tree, however bloated it may be, so it can also be said “all” moonkin benefit from spirit.
What’s the common theme here? ALL members of these classes benefit from spirit. All of them get spellpower, in addition to whatever else is there. Moonkin have to go into the resto tree, I think, to get any spirit based mana regeneration. Again, moot point, they’ll be in there anyway for Master Shapeshifter.
Let’s assume they do.
So what does spirit provide, then?
For priests, it provides additional spellpower and is the foundation of their mana regeneration.
For warlocks, it provides additional spellpower and is the foundation of their mana regeneration.
For mages, it provides some mana regeneration that some mages can take advantage of.
Anyone else see a problem here?
Spirit needs to be useful to the entire class. Not all mages are going to use glyphed Mage Armor, not all mages are going to invest 18 points into the arcane tree.
In fact, I am willing to bet gold that the majority of mages will use Molten Armor and spend no points at all in the arcane tree. At least, in the foreseeable future.
Why? Well, mostly it’s because heavy fire builds are the best for DPS. Not by a little, I’m talking at least 15% better, usually in the 20% or more area. Frostfire Bolt is KING, even beating out standard fireballin’ specs.
If you still like arcane and frost, fear not! You’ll give those dirty elemental shamans a run for their money.
(Note: the author would like to offer his most sincere apologies for the preceding sentence. Please don’t take away my Totem of Wrath.)
Let’s ignore priests for now. Let’s pay attention to warlocks.
Blizzard, it seems, handled the spirit issue very nicely with warlocks.
The first notable difference is that warlocks have very clearly defined armors.
Warlocks, like mages, have two types of armor. (Shut up, you, Ice Armor doesn’t exist. I CAN’T HEAR YOU LA LA LA LA.) However, unlike mages, one can clearly be considered for PvP, and the other one is for raiding.
Demon Armor provides extra armor, and increases the effects of health regeneration stuff (Drain Life, Siphon Life, Haunt, potions, etc). Obviously for PvP, as it would serve no purpose in a raiding environment.
Enter Fel Armor, which provides a flat boost to spellpower, allows 30% of spirit to count as spellpower, and regenerates 2% of that warlocks maximum health every 5 seconds.
Can it be used for PvP? Sure. But it is, by far, the superior of the two when it comes to raiding.
It isn’t nearly so cut and dried when it comes to mages.
Mage Armor provides 30(50)% of mana regeneration to continue while casting, and halves the effect of any harmful magic effect.
Molten Armor provides a 3(5)% boost to critical strike chance, reduces the chance to be critically hit by 5%, and deals fire damage to attackers.
Both armors are equally good in PvP and PvE content. Which one the mage ends up using depends on personal taste, spec, gear and content.
If a warlock uses Demon Armor, spirit is useless to them. That’s fine, there isn’t any spirit on PvP gear anyway, and that armor would only be used in a PvP scenario.
If a mage uses Molten Armor, spirit is useless to them. That would be fine, if it was a PvP specific armor.
I hope you see the point here.
Spirit on mage gear is a very serious problem, and has been for a very long time. It’s spending item budget on something that will provide zero benefit.
There was an exchange on the forums that went something like this:
- If anything about mages is going to be nerfed, it’s their mana regeneration.
- How can you nerf 0 mp5?
There have been plenty of suggestions on what to do about spirit.
Basically, they all boil down to a very simple suggestion: either make spirit universally beneficial, or get rid of it.
Dear Euripides… I have a request, now that you’re talking about the non- benefit of spirit…
The thing is that I find it extremely difficult these days to decide what’s an upgrade and what’s not.
I’ve been wading through tons of posts at EJ, trying to grasp how to evaluate dmg/hit/crit/haste… but I’m still a bit clueless. Couldn’t you please put together a rough guide about stats for raiding mages in WoLK? You’re an awesome guide maker, I know for sure…
best of regards
your follower
Larísa
I agree with this post and maybe with the amount of spirit on gear we should see some benefit outside the Arcane Trees 30% regeneration (Which is shamefully aweful for PvE).
It would be great to see a Spirit > Spell Power conversion however knowing Blizzard it’ll either never happen or they’ll put it too deep in Arcane to splash in for. Another option I can see them doing is putting 5% Spirit conversion to Mind Mastery as well.
As for making more use of the spirit regeneration Spirit provides, we’re quite unique in a class that we get Mana Gems to compensate for the 3-5% crit Armor. I did my first 25-man last night (clearing two and a half wings) and I don’t see my mana being an issue with the 2-piece T7 (AKA Serpant Coil-Braid) and 31.5% crit.
At the moment though I’m quite happy with the position Mages are currently in and would prefer to see not too many heavy changes. Frostfire has really excelled my expectations and although this is only the beginning of our raiding content I do hope Mage scales well, unlike TBC.
So… you don’t want the high mana regen to sustain Fire-spec’s insane high cost? You’d rather get a measly 3-5% crit from Molten Armor? I agree that the talents for getting increased mana regen are too far in the Arcane tree, and they may look at that and fix it. Right now, though, its too early to tell how spirit will work out for mages. I’d settle with the insane mana regen that spirit provides for mages (and yes, fire mages should definitely take the glyph AND the arcane tree talents). Frost is probably the only tree that doesn’t need spirit as much, but then again, they have the water elemental to regen their mana.
I think the only benefit from spirit is evocation, and can be a bit usefull, since in raid u got like 18k mana pool, or more, a little bit spirit is really not bad.
Anyway with a good raid spec is hard to run out of mana, unless u need to do serious AOE dmg.
I disagree and here’s why:
For the dps caster classes, trying to mix spirit into their gear often turns out to be counter productive to the role goal. For the majority of gear, you have a choice: crit/hit or spirit. It’s rare that you can get both Crit and Spirit on the same piece of gear. (For proof, run a wowhead search)
Now, here’s the explanation on why I disagree with your complaint:
When min maxing as a damage class, beyond mana regen (which is a baseline ability now), the bonus spellpower from a couple pieces of spirit gear that are thrown in (lets say.. 150 Spirit from 3 pieces of gear – a low end estimate) is fairly minimal compared to the effects of a statwise equivalent amount of crit rating, which would stack on your exisiting crit gear. Why? Spellpower is a linear stat and Crit is non linear. ie: the more crit you have, the more effect additional crit becomes. In this case 150 Spirit = 150 crit rating (look at equivalent gems to see blizz’s itemization) = 3.27% equivalent crit percent (not rating). How much =Spell Power would the various classes gain from wearing an extra 150 Spirit?
Fel Armor bonus for Locks? 45 additional Spell Power. Not impressive.
Shadow Priest’s Twisted Faith is only 10%, which is a 15 additional Spell Power bonus.
Boomkins and deep Arcane Mages get 15% from Improved Moonkin and Mind Mastery. 22.5 additional Spellpower.
My understanding after all of that is that the only reason to wear spirit gear as a mage is if you’re continuously running out of mana while using mage armor just to keep up your dps throughput while using all of your mana return CD’s. If that’s the case then you’re either undergeared or the encounter is not tuned well enough or your teammates are not doing their job correctly. Arguing for a (maximum) 30% equivalent in Spell Power from a stat that only a few dps caster talents/abilities (across all dps caster classes) take advantage of is probably not worth your while. As such, for DPS caster classes, spirit IS universally useful. As in, it’s not.
Deep disc priests suffer from this problem as well since the talent that converts a % of spirit to spell power is in the middle of the holy tree and they won’t have enough points left to get it.
Thus, they only get the 30% mana regen while casting from spirit, which typically isn’t as much as they would get from strait mp5. They can sometimes use DPS oriented cloth gear as an alternative if it has haste/crit instead of spirit, but a good portion of this gear has spell hit which would be more wasted stats. Ideal gear for them would have loads of intel, crit, spellpower, and mp5 with a little haste sprinkled in.
They are the only class and only one spec of it that would benefit from this gear type and sadly it doesn’t really exist for them. Add in the fact that DK tanks are the only tanks where extensive use of shields is adviseable (PW:shield, divine aegis) and the spec is pretty much religated to a pvp niche. It’s a shame because deep disc has a lot of good synergy and things like grace and penance are really interesting and fun.
My only disapointment in WoTLK so far is that in their effort to homogenize as much gear as possible and make all classes filling a certain role want the same or very similar gear, Blizzard ended up giving several class/spec combos a raw deal thanks to the new itemization not suiting them very well. One can only hope that in the not too distant future they will either add more gear options for people to really use the full potential of these specs or they will adjust the specs so that the current gear suits them better.
Yea. On my blog I did a bunch of math with a random mage’s stats in my guild. The possible mana regeneration he could see was actually slightly impressive, but of course it meant you’d have to go into the arcane tree and get arcane meditation, and glyph for mage armor (and unfortunately actually use it).
He had 380mp5 out of combat.
So, he would have 266mp5 while in combat.
Over say… a one minute encounter,
he would gain 3192 mana.
(266mp5 x 12= 3192mana per 60 seconds).
Also a interesting sidenote, you get 4284 mana minute with BoW.
(An additional 1092mp60 from wisdom)
Essentially, you’d get a Runic Mana Potion every minute
But skipping out on 5% crit…. sucks…
A little more funstuff. I did math on mp5 gained from master of the elements too. It turned out, again assuming my math was correct, 2.35mp5 per 1% crit chance.
Also I kinda copied that from my blog and edited the words a bit. So if all the sudden im talking to “you”(the reader) and then him “the mage who’s stats I used”, I am sorry. Never was one to enjoy revising
An extra 3.5% crit would give you 3.5% more damage (assuming you have one of those crit bonus doubling talents). If you have 1285 spellpower, an extra 45 spellpower would ALSO give you 3.5% more damage (more if you have a talent that increases the effect of spellpower on your preferred nuke). It’s only when you get above this spellpower number that the crit is worth more. (Though admittedly that’s not really hard.)
Using spirit-plus-damage-conversion instead of crit is a matter of sacrificing some dps to get better regen. Using spirit-wthout-damage-conversion instead of crit is a matter of sacrificing A LOT of dps to get better regen. If I have to do one of those, I’d prefer the former.
And, yeah, I’m assuming Arcane Meditation or Mage Armor. Spirit makes no sense for any damage-caster class unless they have something to give them while-casting regen, since they can’t play with the FSR like healers can.
Also, like to add that my crit mp5 from master of the elements was what you’d get spamming fireball. Of course, thats not all your going to be doing, so it would deviate from there.
Bah–my math is wrong (for spellpower–it depends on the base damage of the spell, among other things) but the point is still valid–whether X% crit or +Y spellpower is more of a damage boost for you depends on what your current spellpower/crit is.
I’d also like to add that Focus Magic is nice.
It makes the blow of Molten Armor not being there
a little less painful.
The Focus Magic thing is true, especially if you use it on, say, an Elemental Shaman, which helps them keep that 5% crit buff up for as long as possible.
@ Chu – it doesn’t need to be impressive or actually do much. It needs to do something so that the stat itself isn’t completely wasted.
Priests, warlocks, it does something, no matter how small the bonus may be.
I’m not arguing for a 30% conversion, I’m arguing for the stat to do something for all mages, regardless of spec. It doesn’t have to be a spellpower conversion, it doesn’t even have to be anything different from what it is now – just so long as it is useful to all mages.
@GC – the problem is that most mages are min/max type people at heart. As such, they won’t spec 18/53/0 or something to the like, as that spec is inferior to FFB. They won’t use Mage Armor, as they will be avoiding spirit at all costs and going for crit and using Molten Armor.
@ Larisa – I’ve got an idea for a post along those lines. A sort of “mechanics you need to know” type thing.
New post going up shortly, with a whole truckload of stuff on high to improve the spirit situation.
@ Larisa, the (very) general rule to follow when evaluating gear is hit (to cap) > spellpower > haste > crit > anything else > spirit. I’m sure Euripedes’ post will explain in greater detail, but this is a quick hint for the interim.
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