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SitePriests — Examine Your Spirit Stat!
One of the good things that I’ve heard recommended to a number of people — and a practice that maintain myself — is to go through your monthly statistics. In particular, it’s been said that you can help get ideas for future posts by looking at the keyphrases used on search engines that somehow end up being directed to your site. I’ve no shortage of ideas for future posts1, but I thought that it was a pretty nifty idea.
Ignoring the phrase “sex for epic flyer” that somehow got my site hit two times, at the very top of my list is the following phrase: “does spirit increase priests healing“. Now, as I pointed out earlier in “Does She Come Pocket-Sized?”, my raid often refers to me as the Spirit Goddess. I adore Spirit, which is probably why my current raiding healing priest is a human with Spirit of Redemption. As such, even though I have a veritable slew of articles that I could flesh out and post, I’ll cover that topic this evening.
Does Spirit increase priests’ healing?
The short answer is it depends.
Let’s take a moment to consider the Spirit stat, shall we? Spirit is probably the least understood stats that any individual can posses and, prior to 2.4 when World of Warcraft switched to Spirit-based mana regen system, it was the one that very few people even cared about. You see, Spirit has only two basic impacts in the game:
- Spirit allows you to regenerate health outside of combat, and
- Spirit allows you to regenerate mana while not casting.
The mechanics of health and mana regeneration aside, Spirit didn’t have a lot of weight pre-2.4. In fact, the only classes that favored Spirit were druids and priests2 due to a number of talents in their trees — and that further depended on build and playstyle. Since I know next-to-nothing of druids and yet am a self-proclaimed priestaphiliac, we’ll explore what impact Spirit currently has on priests.
Deep in the Holy tree there is a talent called Spiritual Guidance. This fifth-tier talent allows priests to increase their spell damage and healing by up to 25% of their Spirit stat. So, for example, my perky priestess currently has an unbuffed Spirit stat of 655; if we were to apply Spiritual Guidance3, we’d find that Csilla’s Bonus Healing and Bonus Damage has increased by approximately 164. That’s slick, isn’t it?
Now, looking at the Discipline tree, there are two talents that allow us to derive benefit from Spirit. On the third tier there is a talent called Meditation that allows any priest specced in this talent to regenerate up to 30% of her mana while casting. Furthermore, placing three points in Meditation will allows you to to acquire Divine Spirit and then subsequently Improved Divine Spirit which would allow you to increase your damage and healing by a further 10% of your Spirit stat. In the previous example I pointed out that Csilla currently has 655 Spirit; with two points in Improved Divine Spirit I gain 66 Bonus Healing and Bonus Damage, meaning that I’ve managed to snag an additional 230 for both.
And that’s unbuffed. With full raid buffs and consumables, I’m usually around 1,000 Spirit.
While I won’t be going into the mechanics of the new Spirit-based mana regeneration released in patch 2.4 tonight, I will say that — as the name implies — it relies heavily on Spirit. For example, given my current Intellect and Spirit stats (518 and 655 respectively), I have 695 mana regeneration while not casting without applying the benefits I gain from MP5 on my gear. In fact, the benefit is so high that I gain approximately 1.06 mana regen per point of Spirit I add beyond this point. And, with Meditation I get 30% of that mana regeneration while casting — leading to a whopping 209 mana every five seconds while casting.
Still not convinced about the power of Spirit? Look at a post that I made earlier this week while in Hyjal Summit. Lady Jaina Proudmoore has a delightful buff4 called Brilliance Aura that increases the Spirit of all friendly units within 30 yards by 100%. In other words, I was touting 1,741 Spirit with full raid buffs and consumables. With that buff applied I was just five points shy of 2,200 mana regen. My Bonus Healing was over 2,500.
If that doesn’t convince you, I don’t know what will.
How can you increase your Spirit?
Having learned the incredible benefit of Spirit to priests, you might be interested in learning how to acquire more Spirit. I approve!
We won’t go into gear which has high Spirit; you can easily check loot lists to see what you can grab that has Spirit. However, there are a number of talents that you can spec for that allow you to increase your Spirit. As we noted earlier, Divine Spirit in the Discipline tree can allow you to increase your Spirit to up to 50. Furthermore, the fifth-tier talent Spirit of Redemption has the added benefit of increasing your total Spirit by 5%. The druid’s Mark of the Wild will increase your Spirit by 14 — and by 19 if he has rank 5 Improved Mark of the Wild. An Elixir of Draenic Wisdom will further boost Spirit by 30 for an hour. And, of course, a number of foods will increase your Spirit as well.
Of course, for those who are truly interested in boosting their Spirit, there’s the ultimate sign of obsession: roll a human priest. The human racial bonus is, believe it or not, The Human Spirit which increases her Spirit by an almost inconceivable 10%. What was once considered a laughable racial bonus in light of other races has now become one of the largest boosts to healing-specced priests.
