Spirit?Follow

mana regen

Indeed. It's also decent for longer lasting fights when you find yourself needing to save a pot cooldown for something else, so you put up Mage Armor instead of Molten armor. Though I haven't found a fight where this is an issue assuming you have a shadow priest, the mage armor thing is pretty nice on ZA bear runs and Hyjal AoEing to minimize downtime.

In WotLK, many classes are getting damage or healing scalability with Spirit. Mages, as of this point, are not one of them. We did at one time, however, have a talent that gave crit based on spirit. That would have been nice to see make it into WotLK live.

that alone is likely why mage damage is not being linked to spirit directly. i consider it the most un-exploitable strength of the class. since mages don't have mana problems right now, and arcane remains a gimicky under-performing tree, spirit remains far down the list of important stats for us. in my secret fantasies, i wish they would give us an efficient, spammable, arcane bolt spell and fold up some of the bloat in the arcane tree. you know that room in your grandparent's house where all the junk, trash and memorabilia accumulates? that's the arcane tree.