12Jun

Blizzard Stole My Spirit!

Tuesday evening following our somewhat successful raid on Mount Hyjal, I spent quite a while discussing with a fellow healing priest in my raid my recommendations on socketing his gear.¹ While I may have convinced him — and my beloved raid leader — the overwhelming benefits of Spirit in a post-2.4 mana regeneration system, a question came up while I was describing the talents and racial I possess that help bolster my Spirit stat.

As I outlined in my post Priests — Examine Your Spirit Stat!, there are a number of ways to increase your Spirit. Two of the ways represent what I considered the more dedicated end of the spectrum. The first merely required spending a single point in the Holy tree to acquire the fifth-tier talent Spirit of Redemption, which increases a priest’s Spirit by 5%. The second was by far the most obsessed way of increasing Spirit: it required rolling a human priest in order to take advantage of the human racial, The Human Spirit. This previously mocked racial prior to patch 2.4 actually increases a human’s Spirit stat by a full 10%. Between the two, that is a hefty chunk of Spirit that can be applied towards Bonus Healing and mana regeneration.

My raid leader’s question related directly to this talent and racial. He asked,

Does Spirit of Redemption and The Human Spirit stack with the Spirit acquired from gear?

Now, I blithely assumed that the answer was a resounding yes; I mean, Blizzard loves Spirit, right? Why else would they have put this previously neglected stat in the game only to give it that huge buff in patch 2.4? However, reconsidering my answer yesterday morning, I had to wonder if that was in fact correct. Do the two combine for a full 15% increase to all of the Spirit found on my gear? Or is there some other shenanigans going on that I just wasn’t aware of?

So yesterday afternoon, I logged into the game intending to discover this answer. After finding a quiet and isolated corner of the Mage District in the human capital New Stormwind², I removed all of the armor, equipment, weapons, and other items on my character to get a base reading of her Spirit. From the image below, we see that Csilla has a mighty 174 Spirit unbuffed.

Pretty impressive, no?

The next step was to start adding gear and buffs in order to get a variety of numbers for comparison. I jotted down quite a few combinations of gear to acquire Spirit numbers; I recorded:

The amount of Spirit that I had on the gear, gems, and socketing bonuses;
The number of Spirit that the tooltip claimed was added to my Spirit; and
The total Spirit according to my stats.

An hour afterwards looking at the numbers I had recorded, I was confused. I had two theoretical scenarios. In the first, the racial and talent bonuses were added up and then multiplied to the Spirit found on my gear, resulting in a 15% increase. In the second, the two shared a multiplicative relationship; in this case, I should have seen a 15.5% increase in Spirit.³. However, I wasn’t seeing any of these.

Could I be that wrong? Or was I getting wires crossed somewhere? Maybe there were just too many things to factor in. So, to make sure that I wasn’t crazy, I hit my local trainer and dropped all of my talents. Yes, my beloved Spirit of Redemption — and its 5% increase to Spirit! — was gone, but now I could see for myself how The Human Spirit applied to my gear. In the table are just a few of the numbers I recorded:

Added Spirit	Expected Spirit	Actual Spirit	% Increase
Average % Increase			1.095
110	121	121	1.100
160	176	176	1.100
198	217.8	217	1.096
217	238.7	238	1.097
245	269.5	269	1.098
278	305.8	305	1.097
303	333.3	333	1.099
353	388.3	388	1.099
375	412.5	412	1.099
406	446.6	446	1.098
424	466.4	466	1.099
435	478.5	478	1.099

In other words, I was getting more or less what I expected: a 10% increase to Spirit on the gear I equipped — just as the tooltip for The Human Spirit read. However, I started to notice something and started comparing the Expected Spirit from gear with the Actual Spirit displayed on my character sheet. And then I got cranky. You see, I had expected the calculations to round up as necessary, favoring the player. Instead, the equations seem to truncate the number to the ones place. In other words, in many of the examples I was losing up to 0.8 Spirit.

As I told a friend⁴, this cannot stand! Blizzard’s callous disregard for my Spirit stat saddens me immensely! By truncating the number, they’re taking Spirit from me. As I told my raid leader, there will be buckets of blood and bones shall litter the streets of Azeroth until this is rectified.

Blizzard stole my Spirit; I want it back.

A discussion that I plan on sharing on this site sometime in the near future ↩
I don’t care if I was out-of-character or not; I was not going to have my perky priestess get naked in public! ↩
I guessed that it would actually be 16% because I assumed that the equation would round up to the next highest whole number — silly me ↩
Apologies for the rather small size; I was in Windowed mode at the time so that I could easily switch out gear and write down the effects ↩

Responses

Sorry to hear about the spirit issues. Hopefully blizzard can get if fixed up and keep us all happy.

Siarahs last blog post..I can kill Prince, do I get an extra credit?

Siarah said,

13 June 2008 at 7:34 am

This in interesting … I will have to check further into some of the other classes. I know that warriors have always stacked 1 point over the uncrushable point because they always assumed the game round up.

My main being a hunter, I have always stacked my hit to 143 instead of 142 because I assumed the game rounded up, purhaps that is not the case afterall.

Thank you for bringing this up. :o)

Knurds last blog post..Priests: A Superficial Gear Review

Knurd said,

13 June 2008 at 1:16 pm

Siarah - Haha, it’s not quite something that needs to be fixed. It’s a matter of how they round. One Spirit won’t kill me, though it’s funny to joke about how horrified I was to learn of it.

Knurd - Actually, 142 is the rounded up number. To get 1% of hit, you need 15.77 Hit Rating. Against a boss (who is assumed to be level 73 for the purposes of calculations), you have a base 10% to miss with full weapons skill. Since there is an inherent 1% miss no matter how much you stack Hit Rating, you need to get 9% to be unmissable. That’s 141.93 Hit Rating — which, rounded up, is the magical mystical 142 number!

Cynras last blog post..Blizzard Stole My Spirit!