---

Q u o t e:


I'll be honest: you've completely lost me.

You want us to heal less often. You want us to heal more deliberately, if you don't mind me putting words in your mouth.

What you basically want to do is add in another degree of difficulty. It's not just "bar goes down, bar goes up", it's "bars go down, which bar goes up". That's fine. And, to be honest, that's what most smart healers do anyways, but you want all healers to act like smart healers.

The underlying problem isn't "we want to design something different". You could design your situation in any number of ways. Loatheb, which you seem to dislike, is a perfect example. Yes, we have infinite mana bars for that fight. Guess what? Doesn't matter. We need to coordinate, heal and prioritize. I have let blood DKs die in that fight and, well, sucks to be them (plus, they have enough self-healing they should've known better). All the mana in the world doesn't help then. The fact that we have to stand around doing but mana regen isn't a defect: it's the point of the entire fight. When you're adding in some other complicating aspect to the fight, you don't have to make sure that all the previous burdens still exist at their previous strength.

There are dozens of perfectly acceptable mechanisms by which the same goal could be achieved. Debuffs that decrease the efficiency of your healing after each cast so you have to rotate healers. Bosses that over prioritize healing aggro. Forcing us to run out of range of a constantly moving boss (explosion-style debuff). Bosses or adds with a mini bacon of light (you heal the group, it heals the boss). Fights like the end of the Nexus (require constant movement). Casting time debuffs that also affect the GCD (to avoid DPS issues, you could have "increases cast time by 100% and spell damage by 100%").

Hey, look! All of those things accomplish the same goal of "stop, pause, think, prioritize" without changing a fundamental metric. On top of that, when you have frenetic healing fights, which you will because developers are lazy and frenetic fights are easy, healing classes haven't been gimped.

My point is that I, as a shaman, don't care about spirit. But I do care about other healers and you guys (Blizzard) shouldn't take the lazy way out and chop classes apart because you think every raid has replenishment and replenishment is oh-so-neato. Talents that rely on spirit, like Spiritual Guidance and Tree of Life, will be decimated because no one will use spirit anymore, be forced to stack int and get a pocket ret pally. Yes, every class will be homogenized and I'm sure that makes figuring out how much DPS your new boss puts out (and the amount of heal per second per mana that groups will need to use over the course of the enrage timer) easier. That doesn't mean that you should do it. That doesn't mean the game has gotten "better", just like giving everyone the same "press here to heal" on a set cooldown wouldn't improve healing (but think how easy it would be to construct encounters then!).

And, from a personal, greedy standpoint, I know exactly how this will play out.

Blizz will nerf spirit. Priests and druids are forced into not healing anyone but the tank and people who are supposed to take damage (webbed, ice blocked, etc.). Raids start picking up an extra shaman or two because chain heal on the tank is fairly mana-efficient, they don't use spirit and a CH/Earthliving glyphed shaman can accidentally heal for quite a lot if there's a bit of accidental splash damage. Blizzard notices that and nerfs shaman to the ground. Now all healers are equally forced to manage mana, raid damge, positioning, cooldowns and are basically blamed for being incompetent when the number of wipes spike.

If you want to take a look at and refine something, look at replenishment, look at your own lack of creativity and look at the ways in which you've changed healers. Don't start messing around with core aspects of classes because you're bored and you think that good healers are having too easy of a time using the mechanics of their class. Nothing good lies down that path.

---

QFT

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Q u o t e:


this is the first tier of content.. it's the karazhan of wotlk.. the difference being magtheridon, gruul, etc took some coordination. i REALLY hope that content becomes more challenging requiring faster reactions and aggressive healing, like you said.

---

I could only wish this tier was hard as Karazhan. I wiped more for my first Shade of Aran kill than my first Sarth+3D kill. Seriously.

Yes, part of the "infinite mana" problem is that the fights are stupidly short and stupidly easy. Even Sarth+3 does really challenge my mana, it only forces me to use both Innervate AND a pot. We clearly have too much mana, but it is a difficult question as to how fix it. This FSR business just seems wrong-headed to me. ooFSR regen is not a major factor while raiding, while it IS a major factor outside of raiding. It's almost exactly the reverse of what needs to be done. We need a lot less mana during raids and, except for paladins, more mana while soloing and a LOT more mana in PvP. What we are getting is a bit less mana in raids, less while soloing, and a LOT less mana in PvP.....

It is not just replenishment though....it is a whole plethora of stacking buffs that just make too big of a difference between "raid buffed", "self-buffed", and PvP-geared.

---

Q u o t e:
I'll be honest: you've completely lost me.

You want us to heal less often. You want us to heal more deliberately, if you don't mind me putting words in your mouth.

What you basically want to do is add in another degree of difficulty. It's not just "bar goes down, bar goes up", it's "bars go down, which bar goes up". That's fine. And, to be honest, that's what most smart healers do anyways, but you want all healers to act like smart healers.

The underlying problem isn't "we want to design something different". You could design your situation in any number of ways. Loatheb, which you seem to dislike, is a perfect example. Yes, we have infinite mana bars for that fight. Guess what? Doesn't matter. We need to coordinate, heal and prioritize. I have let blood DKs die in that fight and, well, sucks to be them (plus, they have enough self-healing they should've known better). All the mana in the world doesn't help then. The fact that we have to stand around doing but mana regen isn't a defect: it's the point of the entire fight. When you're adding in some other complicating aspect to the fight, you don't have to make sure that all the previous burdens still exist at their previous strength.

There are dozens of perfectly acceptable mechanisms by which the same goal could be achieved. Debuffs that decrease the efficiency of your healing after each cast so you have to rotate healers. Bosses that over prioritize healing aggro. Forcing us to run out of range of a constantly moving boss (explosion-style debuff). Bosses or adds with a mini bacon of light (you heal the group, it heals the boss). Fights like the end of the Nexus (require constant movement). Casting time debuffs that also affect the GCD (to avoid DPS issues, you could have "increases cast time by 100% and spell damage by 100%").

Hey, look! All of those things accomplish the same goal of "stop, pause, think, prioritize" without changing a fundamental metric. On top of that, when you have frenetic healing fights, which you will because developers are lazy and frenetic fights are easy, healing classes haven't been gimped.

My point is that I, as a shaman, don't care about spirit. But I do care about other healers and you guys (Blizzard) shouldn't take the lazy way out and chop classes apart because you think every raid has replenishment and replenishment is oh-so-neato. Talents that rely on spirit, like Spiritual Guidance and Tree of Life, will be decimated because no one will use spirit anymore, be forced to stack int and get a pocket ret pally. Yes, every class will be homogenized and I'm sure that makes figuring out how much DPS your new boss puts out (and the amount of heal per second per mana that groups will need to use over the course of the enrage timer) easier. That doesn't mean that you should do it. That doesn't mean the game has gotten "better", just like giving everyone the same "press here to heal" on a set cooldown wouldn't improve healing (but think how easy it would be to construct encounters then!).

And, from a personal, greedy standpoint, I know exactly how this will play out.

Blizz will nerf spirit. Priests and druids are forced into not healing anyone but the tank and people who are supposed to take damage (webbed, ice blocked, etc.). Raids start picking up an extra shaman or two because chain heal on the tank is fairly mana-efficient, they don't use spirit and a CH/Earthliving glyphed shaman can accidentally heal for quite a lot if there's a bit of accidental splash damage. Blizzard notices that and nerfs shaman to the ground. Now all healers are equally forced to manage mana, raid damge, positioning, cooldowns and are basically blamed for being incompetent when the number of wipes spike.

If you want to take a look at and refine something, look at replenishment, look at your own lack of creativity and look at the ways in which you've changed healers. Don't start messing around with core aspects of classes because you're bored and you think that good healers are having too easy of a time using the mechanics of their class. Nothing good lies down that path.

---

You have nailed it right on the head. Pity we wont see a response to this statement, thats not how blues roll.

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Q u o t e:
Spirit is a great regen stat depending on your class. Many players never get out of the fsr until they overgear the content at which point mana really isn't what is slowing you down. I predict many players won't notice a difference especially on shorter fights like Arenas or trash.

---

This statement really confuses me. So the problem is that ooFSR regen is too good because we overgear the content (or it's too easy initially). As a solution you're going to leave iFSR regen the same to fix the problem while lowering ooFSR regen, which we don't get if our gear is at the right level for the content (or simply punish the better players that can get ooFSR even with hard content)? You still want spirit to be a great regen stat but want it to be worthless compared to int because spirit is too good.

I'm not saying running out of mana is a problem right now but I don't understand the justification. You used the example that Loatheb is too easy because we have time to regen; however, in 10 man with 2 healers, no replenishment, no pallys for wisdom, and no shaman for mana spring, I can still (pretend to) dps almost the entire time I'm not healing and not go OOM. Seems to me like the problem is not with OOFSR regen.

Basically, I do not understand how these announced (or potential?) changes solve the mana problems in any way. We're supposed to not spam but lose the reward for not spamming. I really only see these as a way of punishing priests and druids (= less fun) by forcing us to drink between trash pulls (has mana ever really been a problem on trash?) and have a terrible time soloing and in BGs by not getting mana back in combat breaks or between mobs. We already have a difficult time with mana in long arena matches against shaman and pallys. Yes, we probably won't notice the difference at this point because damage is so high that many matches are decided before we really get to use our mana. However, if higher resilience plays a role in future seasons as expected in bringing healing skill and strategy back to arenas, won't these proposed changes be hurting us even more?

---

Q u o t e:
I'll be honest: you've completely lost me.

You want us to heal less often. You want us to heal more deliberately, if you don't mind me putting words in your mouth.

What you basically want to do is add in another degree of difficulty. It's not just "bar goes down, bar goes up", it's "bars go down, which bar goes up". That's fine. And, to be honest, that's what most smart healers do anyways, but you want all healers to act like smart healers.

The underlying problem isn't "we want to design something different". You could design your situation in any number of ways. Loatheb, which you seem to dislike, is a perfect example. Yes, we have infinite mana bars for that fight. Guess what? Doesn't matter. We need to coordinate, heal and prioritize. I have let blood DKs die in that fight and, well, sucks to be them (plus, they have enough self-healing they should've known better). All the mana in the world doesn't help then. The fact that we have to stand around doing but mana regen isn't a defect: it's the point of the entire fight. When you're adding in some other complicating aspect to the fight, you don't have to make sure that all the previous burdens still exist at their previous strength.

There are dozens of perfectly acceptable mechanisms by which the same goal could be achieved. Debuffs that decrease the efficiency of your healing after each cast so you have to rotate healers. Bosses that over prioritize healing aggro. Forcing us to run out of range of a constantly moving boss (explosion-style debuff). Bosses or adds with a mini bacon of light (you heal the group, it heals the boss). Fights like the end of the Nexus (require constant movement). Casting time debuffs that also affect the GCD (to avoid DPS issues, you could have "increases cast time by 100% and spell damage by 100%").

Hey, look! All of those things accomplish the same goal of "stop, pause, think, prioritize" without changing a fundamental metric. On top of that, when you have frenetic healing fights, which you will because developers are lazy and frenetic fights are easy, healing classes haven't been gimped.

My point is that I, as a shaman, don't care about spirit. But I do care about other healers and you guys (Blizzard) shouldn't take the lazy way out and chop classes apart because you think every raid has replenishment and replenishment is oh-so-neato. Talents that rely on spirit, like Spiritual Guidance and Tree of Life, will be decimated because no one will use spirit anymore, be forced to stack int and get a pocket ret pally. Yes, every class will be homogenized and I'm sure that makes figuring out how much DPS your new boss puts out (and the amount of heal per second per mana that groups will need to use over the course of the enrage timer) easier. That doesn't mean that you should do it. That doesn't mean the game has gotten "better", just like giving everyone the same "press here to heal" on a set cooldown wouldn't improve healing (but think how easy it would be to construct encounters then!).

And, from a personal, greedy standpoint, I know exactly how this will play out.

Blizz will nerf spirit. Priests and druids are forced into not healing anyone but the tank and people who are supposed to take damage (webbed, ice blocked, etc.). Raids start picking up an extra shaman or two because chain heal on the tank is fairly mana-efficient, they don't use spirit and a CH/Earthliving glyphed shaman can accidentally heal for quite a lot if there's a bit of accidental splash damage. Blizzard notices that and nerfs shaman to the ground. Now all healers are equally forced to manage mana, raid damge, positioning, cooldowns and are basically blamed for being incompetent when the number of wipes spike.

If you want to take a look at and refine something, look at replenishment, look at your own lack of creativity and look at the ways in which you've changed healers. Don't start messing around with core aspects of classes because you're bored and you think that good healers are having too easy of a time using the mechanics of their class. Nothing good lies down that path.

---

QFT!

edit: added rant in a following post.

I'm a glutton for punishment, hence why I'm still holy...but how about it? I'd love to see an excellent response to this...I couldn't have began to say this any better...I just gon't get this.....if GC said that he likes Spirit as a regen stat, why ruin it? And correct me if i'm wrong here....The idea of the tanking changes in 3.0 and subsequent patches was to help avoid a class shortage crisis...so everybody could AoE tank. No more canceled raids due to lack of specific tanking class (ala Prot paladin and Hyjal). BUT this change although intended to inspire some homogenization of healing.....................will cause holy priests and resto druids to reroll, respec, or quit. These changes can be likened to the dilemma of an alcoholic....they quit one problem but start doing another drug....So Priests and Druids...drop spirit as a sought out stat and stack intel and beg to be thrown in with a replenishment. Have we fixed a problem? No. But you also cannot fix what is broken. A core group of raiders with all Best in Slot items will roll through Heroic Naxx with little problems. I thought that's why "hard mode" and Heroic: Glory of the Raider was implemented. This phenomenon happened at the end of 2.4.3 when guilds had their best in slot gear for Sunwell! Speed Sunwell Plateau clears. It will be inevitable that a raid instance will be cleared faster and faster as gear gets better and better.

If legitimate challenges to proposed changes won't work...how about this,
Don't ruin my spec, PLEASE. *puppy dog eyes* I have cookies.

---

Q u o t e:


I'll be honest: you've completely lost me.

You want us to heal less often. You want us to heal more deliberately, if you don't mind me putting words in your mouth.

What you basically want to do is add in another degree of difficulty. It's not just "bar goes down, bar goes up", it's "bars go down, which bar goes up". That's fine. And, to be honest, that's what most smart healers do anyways, but you want all healers to act like smart healers.

The underlying problem isn't "we want to design something different". You could design your situation in any number of ways. Loatheb, which you seem to dislike, is a perfect example. Yes, we have infinite mana bars for that fight. Guess what? Doesn't matter. We need to coordinate, heal and prioritize. I have let blood DKs die in that fight and, well, sucks to be them (plus, they have enough self-healing they should've known better). All the mana in the world doesn't help then. The fact that we have to stand around doing but mana regen isn't a defect: it's the point of the entire fight. When you're adding in some other complicating aspect to the fight, you don't have to make sure that all the previous burdens still exist at their previous strength.

There are dozens of perfectly acceptable mechanisms by which the same goal could be achieved. Debuffs that decrease the efficiency of your healing after each cast so you have to rotate healers. Bosses that over prioritize healing aggro. Forcing us to run out of range of a constantly moving boss (explosion-style debuff). Bosses or adds with a mini bacon of light (you heal the group, it heals the boss). Fights like the end of the Nexus (require constant movement). Casting time debuffs that also affect the GCD (to avoid DPS issues, you could have "increases cast time by 100% and spell damage by 100%").

Hey, look! All of those things accomplish the same goal of "stop, pause, think, prioritize" without changing a fundamental metric. On top of that, when you have frenetic healing fights, which you will because developers are lazy and frenetic fights are easy, healing classes haven't been gimped.

My point is that I, as a shaman, don't care about spirit. But I do care about other healers and you guys (Blizzard) shouldn't take the lazy way out and chop classes apart because you think every raid has replenishment and replenishment is oh-so-neato. Talents that rely on spirit, like Spiritual Guidance and Tree of Life, will be decimated because no one will use spirit anymore, be forced to stack int and get a pocket ret pally. Yes, every class will be homogenized and I'm sure that makes figuring out how much DPS your new boss puts out (and the amount of heal per second per mana that groups will need to use over the course of the enrage timer) easier. That doesn't mean that you should do it. That doesn't mean the game has gotten "better", just like giving everyone the same "press here to heal" on a set cooldown wouldn't improve healing (but think how easy it would be to construct encounters then!).

And, from a personal, greedy standpoint, I know exactly how this will play out.

Blizz will nerf spirit. Priests and druids are forced into not healing anyone but the tank and people who are supposed to take damage (webbed, ice blocked, etc.). Raids start picking up an extra shaman or two because chain heal on the tank is fairly mana-efficient, they don't use spirit and a CH/Earthliving glyphed shaman can accidentally heal for quite a lot if there's a bit of accidental splash damage. Blizzard notices that and nerfs shaman to the ground. Now all healers are equally forced to manage mana, raid damge, positioning, cooldowns and are basically blamed for being incompetent when the number of wipes spike.

If you want to take a look at and refine something, look at replenishment, look at your own lack of creativity and look at the ways in which you've changed healers. Don't start messing around with core aspects of classes because you're bored and you think that good healers are having too easy of a time using the mechanics of their class. Nothing good lies down that path.

---

/Applaud. Eloquently put. I'd like to see GC's response to this, as it states a lot of our concerns.

---

Q u o t e:
Spirit is a great regen stat depending on your class. Many players never get out of the fsr until they overgear the content at which point mana really isn't what is slowing you down. I predict many players won't notice a difference especially on shorter fights like Arenas or trash.

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Damned straight i wont notice it in arenas. As a priest im already lolstinged, or two shot to last more than 5 seconds... mind you im sure the hunters shamman healer will be loving it....

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Q u o t e:
To make this change, we are reducing mana regeneration granted by Spirit across the board.However we are also boosting the effects of talents such as Meditation that increase regeneration while casting. The net result should be that your regeneration while casting will stay about the same, but your not-casting regeneration will be reduced. This change will have little impact on dps casters, since they are basically always casting.

---

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Q u o t e:
Spirit is a great regen stat depending on your class. Many players never get out of the fsr until they overgear the content at which point mana really isn't what is slowing you down. I predict many players won't notice a difference especially on shorter fights like Arenas or trash.

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Umm....Now i'm really confused!

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Q u o t e:
/Applaud. Eloquently put. I'd like to see GC's response to this, as it states a lot of our concerns.

---

Thank you, it sounds odd, but I get an sense of satisfaction that people have agreed with me enough to quote my wall of text. Rereading it, it's amusing how much more forceful (with a touch of righteous anger) it sounds than what I intended.

That being said, at the end of every GC post I like to imagine him saying "I'm out", dropping the mic and exiting stage right. It's understandable: 90% of the posts that follow are somewhere between "ZOMG U R A IDJIT!" and "I'm disagreeing with a blue because I have a problem with authority".

To play devil's advocate, I can understand why he won't respond in this thread anymore. In part, it's because the concerns being voiced are valid (or so I like to think). I don't see many points that really can be argued, at least from my original post, and he can't really join the "nice arena ratings scrub" forum cacophony. Perhaps he could assert that his choice of Loatheb was ill-conceived and he meant a different fight, like Thaddius, where you're getting out of the 5SR running as you switch polarities and a random clearcast proc ends up giving you a boat load of mana as you're OO5SR for a looong time (allowing you to handle swapped-charge damage far too easily, though that's a defect with clearcasting and not spirit in general). Same with the Heigan dance, where bad healers who couldn't heal and run were getting mana OO5SR while good healers were penalized for being multi-taskers. Then again, ironically, the current mechanisms achieve the stated goal of being more deliberate when healing (waste my mana/cooldown on that guy who might not catch up to us and die anyway or keep myself out of the 5SR?) in those cases.

The other reason why he would have difficulty responding is that the heart of my post is that there are other boss-related mechanisms that create the desired effect without decimating spirit-related talents since spirit, as a further diminished stat, will be replaced with intellect + replenishment. First, to validate my point, the math behind stacking int is pretty simple:

+16 Intellect (Brilliant Autumn's Glow) is 240 mana. Replenishment gives .25% per second for 1.25% per 5 seconds or 3 mp5. That you have 240 bonus mana to spend can also be expressed as mp5: the amount of additional mana you had to use per 5 seconds. In a 5 minute fight, you had 240 mana per 300 seconds or 4 mp5 for a total of 7mp5 per +16 int gem. In a 10 minute fight (about most enrage timers in Wrath), you get 2 mp5 for a total of 5mp5 per +16 int gem. The number goes higher if you have a mana tide totem (about an extra mp5 per +16 int: 24% of 240 is 57.6 mana per 5 minutes) or get refunds from the increased crit associated with intellect (directly for shamans and paladins who are already stacking int; indirectly through Serendipity for priests).

+16 Spirit (Sparkling Sky Sapphire), at 1k intellect using the 3.0.8 EJ formula [ mp5 = 5 * (.001 + .005575 * Spirit * √Int) ], will give you 14mp5 while not casting. Checking this previous couple of pages of this thread, most are under 1k or already stacking int instead of spirit (Thronril), which means that this is in the ballpark at current gear levels. 14.1mp5 * 30% (Meditation and the druid talent) = ~4.2 mp5 per gem while casting, which GC said should remain constant through a talent buff.

While spirit, given an infinitely long fight, is the better regen stat, most Wrath-length fights showed a bonus with intellect for pure mp5-while-casting mana. Even if you do the math stacking 1000 intellect for a total of 2k int, you've only just equalized the mana gains over a 10-minute fight from additional spirit (5.99 mp5 per +16 spirit gem) to that returned from a group stacking additional int with mana tide used twice (5.96 mp5 per +16 intellect gem).

Good, deliberate healers were using the 5SR to get mana back, making spirit more valuable over both long and short fights. This worked well with their talents, which were spirit based, and gave them a distinct feel. Druids were HoT machines who let their HoTs carry through splash damage and used the ticking HoTs to gain a few valuable seconds outside of the 5SR here and there. Priests were big healers who could heal, renew, shield, PoM and then look for other targets, letting the damage be mitigated or automatically healed to gain a few valuable seconds, perhaps a lot more if Clearcasting proc'd (again, a defect in Clearcasting, not spirit).

(oops, I'm more long winded than intended)

Back on point, though, while my list of "ways to create interesting healing fights" was by no means extensive, GC can't exactly come in here and proclaim "Those are the fights we're making!" or "We'll never make fights like that!" without... you know, ruining the surprise of the dungeons in 3.1, 3.2, etc. I do hope to have fights like the ones described by myself and others (the reverse boss, weakened by the Lich King, who only regains his sanity when his health fully returns... the fight where mobs get "linked" to players such that damage to the mob heals the player, reversing everyone's roles... there were a lot of good ideas), because some new ideas (rather than bigger and better damage auras) would freshen up healing.

I do feel for GC, since he's basically the designated complaint receiver who everyone yells at. I hope (though without any way to verify) that these ideas and concerns are being passed along, even if he doesn't give every thread a blue "come in here to yell at me!" icon or make a new post that encourages five "First?" posts followed by everyone repeating what they said on page 3 of the thread in the hopes he'll read it again and give them a personal reply. While posting here is cathartic, I've taken a "wait and see" approach to whether or not they'll actually go through with this idea (which I still believe to be bad) or take the feedback under advisement and tune healing during encounters in the other ways suggested.

I have a feeling the oofsr regen is the American way to fix things that may look unfair to someone else like Shamans and Paladins. The whole idea is based around the ability to time Clearcast with any +spirit on use trinkets and get even more mana. First off this leads to other consequences that may be deadly to some players. Secondly, why did you bother giving classes that use fsr to they advantage clearcast abilities (same goes for +spirit on use trinkets). And finally the words "most won't notice any changes" makes me think why bother with the nerf in the first place.

I personally don't care about the changes, while being in a raid setting as I do what I have to do and never watch for that clearcast. I am a meter !**@! thus spam heals here and there all the time, even if the player is at full health. I play a druid and my job kind of requires me to do that, that way I prevent any unexpected damage. But those times when I decide to farm some mobs for meat or some other things, and spend less time sitting on my ass to gain mana will change drastically. Same goes for battle grounds.

300% mana regen while not casting due to how spirit works means that it is always better to have some healers spamming while others do nothing and to rotate in a 25 man raid.

The fact that this isn't done the majority of the time already is that we are on introductory raids and it isn't needed.

Spam casting for 2 minutes then going afk and putting another healer on follow for 1 minute to regen mana in a rotation != fun. Choosing when and how to heal all 3 minutes is playing.

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Q u o t e:
Couple of points...


3) This change won't change the relative values of Int and Spirit. Int was already a good regen stat (in part because it provides other bonuses).
/snip/
If Spirit was good for you before, it will still be good for you. If the only reason it was good for you before was because you took a lot of out of FSR breaks, well 1) again I am skeptical, and 2) yes, under that specific situation you will notice a nerf to your regen.

---

It matters a fair amount for Druids because of how much Innervate was based off this formula, any drop in how much mana Innervates gives you will directly alter your "value" of Spirit and to a lesser degree Intellect.

If you ignore Innervate then you are right that nothing changes really, however I have a dark feeling that Innervate might be converted into a max mana system like every other classes abilities which will cause Spirit to drop like a stone below even the values of MP5.

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Q u o t e:
Couple of points...

1) I was trying to argue (perhaps too politely) that the notion that healing was fun when smart people could take healing breaks to allow for out of five-second-rule regen was a little bit of rosy nostalgia. The way expert raiders handled that was by healer rotations or stopcasting macros, and I don't seriously think a lot of people long for the return of those. (No doubt some do.) Sunwell and similar content were tuned to where you couldn't realistically stop casting for regen anyway. If you are stopping now, it's because Naxxramas is easy. On challenging content, all 4 classes already spammed heals pretty consistently. That meant the out of FSR breaks came mostly from clearcasting procs or encounter mechanics that forced you to pause. When that happened, mana felt limitless. As I've said, we would rather shift back a little (A LITTLE) from GCD-constrained healing to mana-constrained healing.

2) It sounds like some of you are saying that even on challenging content without replenishment and without leaving the FSR your mana is infinite. I am a slightly skeptical of such claims, but we'll see what happens in Ulduar. We think you will run out of mana sometimes, particular on very hard fights or if you aren't playing at your best, even with replenishment. Similarly, we feel like the paladins are noticing the Divine Plea change in PvE. If you aren't, then perhaps you are an amazing healer, or perhaps Naxx isn't challenging you much. Now, if it turns out regen is still just too good, then replenishment would definitely be our next target. But we don't think we're far off. This isn't a "to the ground" scenario.

3) This change won't change the relative values of Int and Spirit. Int was already a good regen stat (in part because it provides other bonuses). However, you are rarely ever choosing between a +100 Int chest and a +100 Spirit chest (though you might be with gems). More to the point though, the regen formula is SQRT of Int * Spirit * a constant. We are just lowering the constant. If Spirit was good for you before, it will still be good for you. If the only reason it was good for you before was because you took a lot of out of FSR breaks, well 1) again I am skeptical, and 2) yes, under that specific situation you will notice a nerf to your regen.

Overall, our goal is not to make healing more difficult across the board (though we do want mana to matter more). Our goal is to make healing more interesting.

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A problem you don't seem to be understanding however is how little priests actually care about spirit right now. It's horrible, and int gives you way more bang for your regen buck than spirit. This is a two fold problem: 1) A stat that's in copious amounts of all of the priest armor isn't desired as it's very weak, so priest armor itself is weaker in comparison to say healing mail/plate, and 2) spirit gems and enchants simply aren't used at all. I mean, cmon here, spirit is supposed to be a priest's primary stat. Why is it horrible? Why is the only thing it's used for is regen, when in comparison something like int gives crit and mana, agility gives attack power and crit, etc. It's another stat on our armor that we have no control over diluting stats we'd much rather have. It was already the weakest stat in this expansion, and 3.1 is making it weaker? What about the +spirit trinkets with on use +spirit procs? If they WEREN'T meant for those clearcasting moments, what are they for?

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Q u o t e:
Couple of points...

1) I was trying to argue (perhaps too politely) that the notion that healing was fun when smart people could take healing breaks to allow for out of five-second-rule regen was a little bit of rosy nostalgia. The way expert raiders handled that was by healer rotations or stopcasting macros, and I don't seriously think a lot of people long for the return of those. (No doubt some do.) Sunwell and similar content were tuned to where you couldn't realistically stop casting for regen anyway.

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You clearly don't get how Holy Priests were playing then, or what many of us would like to see a return to. It wasn't about not casting, it was about the combination of a)not casting, b)using 'buffering abilities like HoTs/PoM/PS:S, and c)intelligently manipulating our Holy Conc/trinket proccs and various mana cost reduction/spirit increasing abilities to increase mana regen.

It was fun, it was interactive, and it rewarded skill. The current regen model is neither of those, and it doesn't reward skill. Holy Priests are being forced into the kind of mindless boring spam that's long characterized Paladin healing. A play style they've been complaining about for years. Why would you want to encourage that? It's not fun, and to force it on a class/specc that was once the complete opposite of that is incredibly disappointing.

And nobody's stood around taking healing rotation breaks since early MC, and no one here is arguing for a return to that.

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Q u o t e:
You clearly don't get how Holy Priests were playing then, or what many of us would like to see a return to. It wasn't about not casting, it was about the combination of a)not casting, b)using 'buffering abilities like HoTs/PoM/PS:S, and c)intelligently manipulating our Holy Conc/trinket proccs and various mana cost reduction/spirit increasing abilities to increase mana regen.

It was fun, it was interactive, and it rewarded skill. The current regen model is neither of those, and it doesn't reward skill. Holy Priests are being forced into the kind of mindless boring spam that's long characterized Paladin healing. A play style they've been complaining about for years. Why would you want to encourage that? It's not fun, and to force it on a class/specc that was once the complete opposite of that is incredibly disappointing.

And nobody's stood around taking healing rotation breaks since early MC, and no one here is arguing for a return to that.

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/agree with Odes


If you you are so against spirit and how it works why dont you guys just get rid of it and give priests and druids a int to spell power talent.

Do we have any better water coming in 3.1 because I don't want raid members waiting around between trash in raids / heroics when you nerf our outside regen. Give us something like 5% water.