Spirit and HealingFollow

This requires a little backstory before I get to the questions.

Now that I've reached around 1700 heals and when fully raid buffed I have around 360 mp5 while casting, I've started to become curious if there is a level of whether I should be gemming healing/spirit gems or just go straight healing. This is my armory. Right now it seems last I logged on I was playing around with my feral set and apparently forgot to swap it out for my chest piece, which is the Shimmer-Pelt Vest, I have the 15 spirit enchanted on it. I, no matter what raid I've done with my guild ever get the totem love, they all say my mana regen is too good for it.

This all comes about though, from the first time I experienced Halazzi in ZA. The first time we encountered him with a successful downing I actually had to use innervate and quite a few mana pots, it was around 5 mana pots and I believe I had around 300 mp5 while casting. I was lucky enough to get the Shimmer-Pelt Vest so obviously it increased my healing power and spirit. But last night we went up against Halazzi again and to my surprise I ended the fight with only using 2 mana pots, around 2000 mana and I didn't have to pop innervate.

I run with a priest healer and a shammy healer, so obviously shammy is on raid and priest on main heals and I get stuck somewhere in the middle between raids and main heals.

I only have 2 gem slots atm, and I have the 18 healing and an 8 spirit. So my question is this, is it more beneficial to have slightly lower healing and higher spirit so I can last longer through fights and possibly save the innervate for my priest healer, whom btw has around 2.1k healing and a freakishly huge hps, or should I gem more healing?

Or, and this may be the kicker, is it that we're more experienced in running za and I'm just getting better at healing efficiently? I love to toot my own horn :D

At 1700 +healing and 360 mp5 while casting, I'd say that you are probably over-itemizing for spirit at the expense of your +heal. Just as an example I currenly have 2080 +heal and 330 mp5 when fully raid buffed.

Given your level of mp5 I would gem for pure +heal. The only reason to deviate from this is if you have a socket bonus that requires a blue or yellow gem, that would compensate for the loss of +heal from a red gem. The genral consensus is to never gem for pure spirit. If you need a blue gem slot, pick up either Purified Jagal Pearl or Royal Nightseye.

Keep in mind though that the level you should choose to stack mp5 is dependent on several things. If your raids dps is low you will want to stack more mp5. Low raid dps means more time casting, which means more mana usage. Also if you are focused on raid healing rather than tank healing you will want more mp5. When raid healing a druid often "wastes" mana on purpose by using siwftmend and regrowth quite often and refreshing lifebloom stacks early. If you are solely tank healing, just stack +heal as this will give you the most benefit to your HoTs.

I would have to agree with most of the other posters that have said that you have over-itemized for spirit and should probably reconsider going for more +healing. However, with that said, it largely depends on the role that you are filling for your guild. If you are designated "the spirit tree" (the one that's put in the tank group for the Tree of Life aura), then you should be stacking spirit, in which case the high MP5 is understandable. Also, if you're doing a large amount of raid healing and are not able to drop out of the FSR very often (if at all), then spirit may be a better choice for you than straight +healing. Even then I don't think I'd ever gem for pure +spirit. Red and Blue sockets get the Purified Shadow Pearls.

If neither of those cases applies to you, then I would go more for +healing, as you're not likely to have mana issues, but the added healing would be nice. Also, there are ways to regain mana duruing a fight (i.e. chain potting, shaman totems, innervate, etc.), but there aren't really any good ways to do the same with +healing aside from the standard raid buffs. For this situation, I'd strongly consider using pure +healing gems (the best you can afford) in all sockets, unless there's a really good socket bonus.

Hope that helps.
-Camel

WTF does that mean?

Edited, Jul 26th 2008 12:17am by DukyFrodo

GCD - Global Cool Down, the 1 second between instant spell casts. So in truth they technically became "instant cast spells"

Ahhh i guess i misunderstood what you meant by "no gcd for lifebloom". It wasn't the acronym that threw me. I thought you meant that you didn't have enough time to use lifebloom because.... well, I didn't understand why you wouldnt be able to use it!

my mistake

I'll explain this a bit.

I enjoy outhealing people and when I'm badge farming kara with my group its not that they're taking much damage at all, none of the dps really ever drops below 80%, except the lifetapping warlock. But anywho, with all the haste I'm getting I'm tossing out heals a lot faster than I can regen. With a 3 stack of lifeblooms w/o haste I can regen around 350ish mana every 5, so I'm basically not ever running out of mana, and if I'm keeping up two 3 stacks I'm sitting at the right amount to not lose mana as well. But when I have the haste I tend to throw out lifeblooms on everyone because A: I think it's fun, B: I like watching green numbers going everywere, C: I want to beat the god damn priest with 2.1k heals and the shammy with chain heal.

Basically, when I have the haste I cast way more than I should and I eventually run myself oom.

Haste is god imo. My buddy, the lifetapping warlock, has the haste meta gem, blade of wizardry and quagmirran's eye along with most of his gem slots with haste gems or spell hit gems. Throw in the drums of battle and heroism from time to time and its absolutely insane. He generally averages 1000-1200 dps in raids. Plus he's an aoe freak the first time we attempted to do hyjal in the first 8 phases he was averaging around 5k dps, god bless Seed of Corruption w/o a cooldown.