Locks and SpiritFollow

My wife has been lvling her walock recently, and has been told that spirit is a stat that she needs to stack. The problem is that no can tell her why she needs to stack spirit now. What added benefits would she get from Spirit, other than better regen? She is full affliction, and i didnt see anythig mentioning spirit in that tree. Possibly another tree? I havent played my warlock since the first week of WotLK, so i cant answer this for her. Any and all information would be appreciated.



Edit: Fat fingers = Bad typing

I put spirit beneath crit myself. For the simple reason that gear with hit/haste/crit and SP is more than likely gonna just come with spirit. Sure if I see a piece that has an unusually high amount of spirit I may see if it can fit in, but honestly, Spi just kinda comes on it's own.

What about the changes to DoTs? Wouldn't the ability for them to crit make us want to stack crit over haste (for Affliction anyway)?

I'm affliction lock and as far as I know, it is due to a few things.

1. fel armor - Surrounds the caster with fel energy, increasing spell power by 100 plus additional spell power equal to 30% of your Spirit. In addition, you regain 2% of your maximum health every 5 sec. Only one type of Armor spell can be active on the Warlock at any time. Lasts 30 min.

2. Glyph of Life tap - When you use Life Tap, you gain 20% of your Spirit as spell power for 20 sec. (especially in combination with the warlock t7 bonus - Casting Life Tap grants you an additional 300 spirit for 10 seconds.)

the old one responded to any buff/debuff that affected our crit that was on us, it wasn't affected by buffs/debuffs on the target that affected crit, so 'was almost identical

Well, I'm in a similar situation to your wife. Leveling affliction.

The advantage of leveling as affliction is self healing in combination with life tap. Kills a little slow but reduces downtime greatly. What spirit does is it buffs lifetap and gives spell power through the lifetap glyph.

As a lock you use lifetap as a replacement to your mana regen and you resort to healing effects to feed hp for lifetap (Healthstone, Potion, Bandage, Lifedrain, Siphon Life and, of course, a healer).

So you stack stam because you need a large HP pool for lifetap and your healing effects. Then you should stack spell power, spirit and int. If you're doing fine with the mana you shouldn't sacrifice other stats for int. Int is good for PvP because you want to have enough mana to do things without doing more damage to yourself when you're already taking plenty of damage from other sources.

Trough 1-60 base stats give a lot of spirit, so I pick gear with spirit but I don't concentrate on it, I try to concentrate on stamina and spell power instead.

For PvE at least, right?

The whole stamina fetish we've been seeing dates back to old World of Warcraft (history lesson incoming) where Warlocks relied on stamina more than anything else, even intellect. Of course, this was back when spell damage - known now as a fusion between spell healing and spell damage called spell power - had not yet been introduced, where critical ratings were obtained through stacking insane amounts of intellect and hit rating was nothing but a twinkle in a developer's eyes.

Stamina gave Warlocks health. Health kept the Warlock alive and allowed him to increase his mana pool through Life Tap. We had little to no self-healing abilities (pre-Haunt, pre-Fel Armor, pre-Death Coil) and relied on a pretty heavy health pool to get the most out of Life Tap. The more health you had, the more times you could use Life Tap before getting risky low on health and needing healing attention.

Stamina also kept us alive in PvP where health was a direct indicator of your lifespan. Resilience had not yet been invented.

Affliction Warlocks mainly went Affliction for Dark Pact. This allowed the Warlocks to not only convert health into mana, but also leech mana from their gimp. Err, imp. Unlike other Warlocks, Affliction Warlocks became an endless source of damage, not needing to rest and requiring very little healer attention compared to Demonology/Destruction Warlocks.

Nowadays, stamina is only really needed for tanks and in PvP since Warlocks now have many ways to regenerate health, making health regen on par with health loss from Life Tap. And with many classes now having mana regeneration talents that affect entire raids, mana issues are nothing like they were in the old days.

Ah.. the good old days. Sometimes I miss them. Spell power? Does not compute. Five digit health/mana numbers? Propostrous. 3,000 health is more than any spell caster will ever need.

We are talking about leveling, not raiding. And my above post was about the 1-60 range, my warlock hasn't reached the 60+ range yet.

And in reality you shouldn't stack anything, what you should do is balance the stats.

- spell: this is what you want the most, the more the better, but you'll need to keep raising the other stats to match with your spell.
- stamina: your hp pool has to be large enough to hold the incoming self healing effects and keep you alive after you have just lifetaped.
- int: just enough so that you don't have to break your rotations with lifetaping for going oom.
- spi: is not a concern, but it makes your lifetaps larger and gives you a buff from the lifetap glyph so it is a helpful stat.

At levels 1-60 you'll find that base stats give a lot of free int and spi, and caster items will make int and spi easy to keep up (in excess in fact). However you get almost no sta from base stats, and most caster items will have little or no sta. So you'll have to look for abundant sta from your gear whenever you can.

When you get to outlands stamina becomes automatically abundant and this will cause a change of priorities.




Edited, May 25th 2009 1:52pm by xorq

Actually, what happens in the 1-60 range is that even with decent amounts of stamina on my gear I keep overhealing because my HP pool is very small, lifetap takes 1/4th of my hp and a lifedrain with siphon up fills 1/3rd, something like that. It takes me 2 lifetaps to open up space for a lifedrain so that it doesn't overheal and those 2 lifetaps are almost 50% of the hp pool. If I had no stam on my gear then 2 lifetaps would be like 70% of my hp.

Spell I don't gimp much because I don't totally prioritize stamina, I balance it with spell. But you don't really see many good spell items until you get to about level 50.

Int however is a complete non-concern. I took int and I feel I got more than necessary. My mana pool atm is almost double of my hp pool, it's larger than I can fill by lifetapping my full hp pool (with imp lifetap). And in reality I don't see a need for it to be larger than the HP pool, I just need it to be large enough to hold the mana from 2-3 lifetaps. The base stats give so much int already that I could do with very little extra int from gear. The real casting resource is HP, the mana pool is just a buffer trough which you keep transferring your HP so that you can use it.

Sadly you don't really get sta-spell items at lower levels. Most are sta-int, spi-spell, int-spell. So balancing sta with spell is mostly in balancing sta-int with spell-int. With some luck I got some items that have stamina and spell in them.

And you don't get haunt in the 1-60 range, you get it at 60. But if I did have haunt with the hp pool the sizes you get in the 1-60 range, it would be near impossible to not overheal.

Then there's that I'm a serial BG-er even while leveling. So I'd go for a lot of stamina anyway. But still, it's getting me overhealing.

How can your Siphon Life only return 54 health when you get Haunt hits of 2000?

The siphon life talent heals you for 40% of each corruption tick(The Siphon Life talent only affects corruption. You may have confused it for Pandemic, ability to crit, which affects corruption and UA). At level 80 in heroic/10-man gear my corruption was ticking for over 1,000, so each time it ticked I would get around 400 life back. This will be a constant stream of numbers throughout fights due to corruption always being up. The only oddity being when corruption crits thus making your siphon life heals crit so you get roughly 800 health back.

Haunt will heal you for the exact amount of damage it does when it lands. If it hits for 1,800 it will come back to you and heal you for 1,800. Haunt will come back when the target dies, the debuff wears off, or you re-apply it to any target, only one target can have your haunt on it. For example, you attack a mob with haunt(1,950 dmg) and dots, as soon as the haunts off cooldown you taget mob #2 and cast it on him. As soon as the spell hits the second mob your haunt from the first mob comes at you, cutting the debuff short, and heals you for 1,950 hp.