02-15-2005, 07:22 PM
Spirit is useless junk.
That's my thought. Naturally, I have no intention of leaving it at that. I could make a case for spirit being junk for all classes, at least up until Molten Core (which I haven't gone into yet), but I'll stick to mages for now.
The argument, I think, isn't between Int and Spirit. Intellect won that battle long ago. The debate seems, at least for cloth casters, to be between Spirit and Stamina as secondary stats.
I've made the argument at least twice so far in-game that even if Blizzard abolished the five-second rule, spirit would still be a tertiary stat for mages. Mana regeneration is nice, no doubt about it, but it just isn't important enough. Solo mages, obviously, need to outlast the enemy in order to win. Reduced downtime is in the "nice but not necessary" category. This is especially important in soloing elite quests. Naturally, in a solo situation you're casting constantly and can take battles at your own pace. No one's going to dispute stamina as a secondary for a soloing mage.
Then there's group play. This is where spirit is supposed to shine, and the pro-spirit arguments I've heard generally fall along one of two lines.
1) Spirit helps in really long battles. If the priest goes OOM we're all dead/if the mage or warlock goes OOM they're pretty useless.
2) With my high spirit, I get another (Flash Heal/Fireball/Shadowbolt) in only seven seconds! Even if I do go OOM, I can get healing/blasting ability back very quickly!
There's only one anti-stamina argument I've heard with any regularity, which is:
3) I shouldn't get aggro anyway, and if I don't get aggro then extra stamina doesn't help.
I would argue that all three of these points are invalid.
To 1), I would say...yes, it sure does seem like Spirit will help in long battles. Question: where are these long battles? With the possible exception of the Divino-matic Rod battle (and you can drink in the middle of that if you're careful) even the end-game instance boss battles don't last anywhere near any significant length of time. Emperor Dagran Thaurissan, the last guy in BRD, is definitely end-game content, and yet his fight is over one way or another in four to five minutes. Raids? Take Nathanos Blightcaller. Raiding him is pure chaos, where you only hope to stay alive when he pops out his horde of skeletons. No one even lives long enough to go OOM when the skeletons start killing you at the rate of one a second. It sounds like only Onyxia and the MC might have some use for spirit, and you can compensate for that by, as Conquest seems to do, putting more healers on the main and off tanks.
Argument 2) seems predicated on the assumption that without spirit equipment, you have no or negligible mana regeneration. Not exactly. My level 60 human mage has a base spirit of 129, and it's hard to avoid at least +50 spirit even when specializing in Int/Sta items, just because good caster blues also tend to have spirit. So you get your spell in nine seconds instead of seven. You could say that builds up over time, except that when you're OOM there really isn't a lot of time. Since you're OOM, the fight must be very near to over, probably under thirty seconds.
I find 3) the most amusing, because otherwise reasonable people who understand that things go wrong will throw that belief away in this case only, to believe in an unrealistic illusion of a party where the squishies are never aggroed. In effect, they'll adopt a build which is the equivalent of throwing your hands in the air and giving up the moment the plan turns slightly sour. Recently, I've been running BRD, and to my knowledge I cannot recall ONE fight where neither the mage or priest got aggro. Only in the pulls where there were no elites did only the mage get aggro. In all others - ALL others - the priest was hit at least once, usually many times, and frequently went down to 50% health. All the mana regen in the world is going to do you no good if you run out of health first. If you're dying with blue left in your bar, you don't have enough stamina.
Mages have particular situations, especially in later-level instances, that make stamina so much more valuable than spirit. Mages' single-target damage is not spectacular; we rank third overall in being able to deal out hits to single targets. What mages are used for in end-game stuff is area of effect spells, which means Improved Arcane Explosion. Without a doubt, the use of IAE makes things better, but it also ensures the mage a heaping dose of aggro. You are absolutely 100% guaranteed to take hits as a mage, and so stocking up on health is a priority, not just because it helps you last longer, but so that the healer has a little leeway on how and when to heal you. Without hit points, the healer has to toss shields and flash heal rapidly to avoid an extremely quick death.
The second point for mages is that we have an extraordinarily diverse number of ways to regain mana. We can drink mana potions, like everyone else, but we also get to conjure a mana gem to use as a consumable during key battles and, if not being attacked, can even use Evocation to restore 70-80% of your mana in eight seconds. For a mage, going OOM takes a while, and even a low rate of damage can overwhelm a mage's base 1500 hit points at level 60 very rapidly.
Basically, I find that stamina is far more useful to mages than spirit, mostly because of the way the system is set up. Mages have to be able to take hits, period, and spirit just doesn't measure up.
That's my thought. Naturally, I have no intention of leaving it at that. I could make a case for spirit being junk for all classes, at least up until Molten Core (which I haven't gone into yet), but I'll stick to mages for now.
The argument, I think, isn't between Int and Spirit. Intellect won that battle long ago. The debate seems, at least for cloth casters, to be between Spirit and Stamina as secondary stats.
I've made the argument at least twice so far in-game that even if Blizzard abolished the five-second rule, spirit would still be a tertiary stat for mages. Mana regeneration is nice, no doubt about it, but it just isn't important enough. Solo mages, obviously, need to outlast the enemy in order to win. Reduced downtime is in the "nice but not necessary" category. This is especially important in soloing elite quests. Naturally, in a solo situation you're casting constantly and can take battles at your own pace. No one's going to dispute stamina as a secondary for a soloing mage.
Then there's group play. This is where spirit is supposed to shine, and the pro-spirit arguments I've heard generally fall along one of two lines.
1) Spirit helps in really long battles. If the priest goes OOM we're all dead/if the mage or warlock goes OOM they're pretty useless.
2) With my high spirit, I get another (Flash Heal/Fireball/Shadowbolt) in only seven seconds! Even if I do go OOM, I can get healing/blasting ability back very quickly!
There's only one anti-stamina argument I've heard with any regularity, which is:
3) I shouldn't get aggro anyway, and if I don't get aggro then extra stamina doesn't help.
I would argue that all three of these points are invalid.
To 1), I would say...yes, it sure does seem like Spirit will help in long battles. Question: where are these long battles? With the possible exception of the Divino-matic Rod battle (and you can drink in the middle of that if you're careful) even the end-game instance boss battles don't last anywhere near any significant length of time. Emperor Dagran Thaurissan, the last guy in BRD, is definitely end-game content, and yet his fight is over one way or another in four to five minutes. Raids? Take Nathanos Blightcaller. Raiding him is pure chaos, where you only hope to stay alive when he pops out his horde of skeletons. No one even lives long enough to go OOM when the skeletons start killing you at the rate of one a second. It sounds like only Onyxia and the MC might have some use for spirit, and you can compensate for that by, as Conquest seems to do, putting more healers on the main and off tanks.
Argument 2) seems predicated on the assumption that without spirit equipment, you have no or negligible mana regeneration. Not exactly. My level 60 human mage has a base spirit of 129, and it's hard to avoid at least +50 spirit even when specializing in Int/Sta items, just because good caster blues also tend to have spirit. So you get your spell in nine seconds instead of seven. You could say that builds up over time, except that when you're OOM there really isn't a lot of time. Since you're OOM, the fight must be very near to over, probably under thirty seconds.
I find 3) the most amusing, because otherwise reasonable people who understand that things go wrong will throw that belief away in this case only, to believe in an unrealistic illusion of a party where the squishies are never aggroed. In effect, they'll adopt a build which is the equivalent of throwing your hands in the air and giving up the moment the plan turns slightly sour. Recently, I've been running BRD, and to my knowledge I cannot recall ONE fight where neither the mage or priest got aggro. Only in the pulls where there were no elites did only the mage get aggro. In all others - ALL others - the priest was hit at least once, usually many times, and frequently went down to 50% health. All the mana regen in the world is going to do you no good if you run out of health first. If you're dying with blue left in your bar, you don't have enough stamina.
Mages have particular situations, especially in later-level instances, that make stamina so much more valuable than spirit. Mages' single-target damage is not spectacular; we rank third overall in being able to deal out hits to single targets. What mages are used for in end-game stuff is area of effect spells, which means Improved Arcane Explosion. Without a doubt, the use of IAE makes things better, but it also ensures the mage a heaping dose of aggro. You are absolutely 100% guaranteed to take hits as a mage, and so stocking up on health is a priority, not just because it helps you last longer, but so that the healer has a little leeway on how and when to heal you. Without hit points, the healer has to toss shields and flash heal rapidly to avoid an extremely quick death.
The second point for mages is that we have an extraordinarily diverse number of ways to regain mana. We can drink mana potions, like everyone else, but we also get to conjure a mana gem to use as a consumable during key battles and, if not being attacked, can even use Evocation to restore 70-80% of your mana in eight seconds. For a mage, going OOM takes a while, and even a low rate of damage can overwhelm a mage's base 1500 hit points at level 60 very rapidly.
Basically, I find that stamina is far more useful to mages than spirit, mostly because of the way the system is set up. Mages have to be able to take hits, period, and spirit just doesn't measure up.