The Five Second Rule

[MongoJerry]

All the more reason to improve spirit for everyone as much as for priests.  That way, mages and maybe even some warlocks will at least want to consider getting spirit.  Also consider that if priests were the number one reason spirit was nerfed in the first place, why would they buff it more for priests than for other classes?

Priests weren't the reason for the "nerf." The main reason for the change as stated by the developers was that they wanted spirit to be different from intelligence. The way it was before, spirit was numerically about five times less effective than it is now but it would work all through combat. In addition, one could also drink in combat. Effectively, spirit and intelligence were equivolent stats in that they both increased your effective mana pool during a battle. Priests tended to hoard +spirit items, because it was difficult for them to sit down and drink for any length of time and because they needed to have a large effective mana pool when fighting tough bosses. Mages, on the other hand, tended to focus a lot on +int items and then drink in combat, since they could regen mana fast that way, and nobody's going to die if a mage takes a break for a bit.

What the Blizzard developers decided to do was to seperate out int, spirit, and drinking. Int, as always, increased your mana pool and they numerically increased its effectiveness from 10 mana per point to 15. Then, spirit had its numerical effectiveness *increased* dramatically (five times!) but made it so that it wouldn't work until five seconds after you cast your previous spell. In effect, spirit took over the old role of drinking in combat. Finally, drinking was disallowed in combat, so it was changed so that drinking was only there to reduce the downtime between fights -- and drinks were improved somewhat in the process.

I thought these were good changes. The problem that people are experiencing, however, is the fact that because these changes were introduced so late in the beta -- like less than a month before retail -- the numbers haven't been properly tweaked to make them work. In particular, spirit should really be doubled in its effectiveness for everyone and maybe even more for priests (or maybe give priests bonuses to healing ability for more spirit?). In addition, drinks need to be improved dramatically to compensate for the large mana pools of level capped players. I now have to drink twice to regen a full mana tank, and that's a long time to hold up an instance party.

By the way, Bolty may have been mislead a little by some earlier discussions. First, no priest or any member of another class ever had enough spirit to be able to chain cast their spells for little or no effective cost. I had one of the highest spirit numbers in the beta -- well over 350 spirit -- and I ran out of mana all the time. The comments from the Blizzard developers on this was that they were worried that this could be a problem in the *future* when more powerful items would come out. As people collect elite sets and as higher level raid instances get introduced with their more powerful items (legendary items anyone?), one could imagine someone putting together a set of gear with 700 or even 1000 spirit on it. At that point, you could have the situation where someone could chain cast their spells for little effective cost.