Since Blizzard gave us our love patch in 1.10, I've been using heal rank2 in basically every instance environment at a cost of 172 mana and healing for about 1300 with raid buffs.

My gear and talents are in my profile, but really I was wondering really whether Spirit is becoming more and more of a useless stat?

I remember the days when priests used to heavily rely on flashheals and spirit with healing rotations on most of the BWL encounters, these days I can sit through a whole instance spamming rank2 heal and not going OOM for absolutely ages, and never when drinking combat pots.

With my gear, I have been focusing heavily on MP/5 gear and +healing, I think atm I have a really good balance but I am looking for advise, particularly when it comes down to spirit. Is it turning into a useless stat to have? Should I look to go for purely mp/5 and +healing gear?? Why bother with spirit when in 99.9% of encounters I never go outside of the FSR, unless it is using innerfocus to give me a few seconds grace and I can spam heal2 forever with the current gear I am using?!

It seems to me that the +spirit gear is no way as good endgame as the +healing and spirit gear, however naxx does seem to drop more spirit gear of a half decent quality.

I get called an overhealer all the time by my guild, but I think it is a very naieve attitute to take when most of the wipes that occur on new content happens when the MT gets a nasty damage spike and dies, then wipes the raid.

I really would appreciate comments on this, I am wondering if really I should be going for a balance or whether I would be more effective getting stacking massive amounts of +healing and MP/5 gear.

http://ctprofiles.net/386391

If this really is your heal style, then yes, spirit is not as important as mp/5. I don't use heal2, I use GH3 if I'm healing the MT and Flash Heals if I'm on DPS duty. I end up being outside the FSR quite a bit on many fights even in AQ40. Twin Emps is a classic example. If you are just spamming Heal2 over and over without actually paying attention to how much health the tank has, you are either going oom very fast, or using a metric ton of potions to keep yourself going. Using GH3 and interupting it if the tank is high on health allows me to heal the tank in a timely fashion if he takes a spike, but also get alot of use out of my spirit regen. So it comes down to style of play. For me, spirit is alot more usefull than mp/5.

Overhealing to a certain extent is required to prevent spike deaths, but there is such a thing as to much. If you are going over 40% overhealing, you really need to re-evaluate your healing style, imnho.

Overheal only matters if a) you really should be healing someone else rather than spamming heals at a person on full health or b) you go oom.

If you are chain healing an MT, get 50% overheal, yet never run out of mana then I see no problem. Also maybe I just react too slow, but ive lost count of the number of times shortly after mana conserve became broken where i was self cancelling alot, and just after I cancelled (but before the heal would have landed) my target took a large chunk of damage. To me the 'safer' method is to just never cancel, and stick to a cast you cant oom on. You then can throw in a pws or flash if the incoming dps to your target goes up significantly.

There's obviously no definite answer, it depends on your healing style. You have clearly built your gear around continuous healing so it's no surprise that this works out better for you. The "best itemisation" (wrt to ilvl) in the game currently favours mana tick so it's sorta decided for you. Not sure why, could be because mana tick favours paladins/druids/shamans more or because Blizzard have stated that they don't want people to have to be a specific spec to defeat an encounter (and mana tick is spec independent).

The benefit of continuous healing is that it can be done on the fly. Burn out and rotate maximises the benefit of spirit but requires some organisation and isn't so flexible; but there are other benefits - i.e. wanding for mana back during a regen cycle. My guild plans to equips all our paladins with Ashkandis so that they can keep up Judgement of Wisdom on bosses.

Whats wrong with EM it you use it well. (only shows party members)

Well fundamentally I agree that spirit is less relevant than it used to be.

From a main tank healing perspective getting a constant influx of moderate heals is much safer than a more spaced out stream of big heals. With everyone spamming low rank heals, there are fewer spirit ticks than we used to get.

When you take into account the mp5 that has been added not only in gear but in inexpensive consumables (mana oil/mageblood) spirit has really fallen from grace.

I am quite pleased to see no item level allocation wasted on spirit in the new shaman set.

As long as your are keeping your group and main tank alive, then your play style works. Overhealing is needed somewhat to prevent spikes killing people.

I used to be a M/5 whore like yourself (OP), then started really looking at how I heal, and why I do things the way I do. I was up around 1000+heal with 90m/5, and 230 spirit and decided to experiment a little - currently I'm at 800+heal, 79m/5, and 340 spirit, and with using HR2 constantly, and just on/off cancellations, my mana stays ridiculously high on fights, and when I factor in buffs, Mana Oil, Sagefish, etc - Its almost impossible for me to go oom just spam casting HR2, not to mention I can hit 4-5 DPS with a Renew (say an ill timed exploding bug or something) and resume flash spamming a tank for a few seconds to stabilize, then go back to HR2/GhealR2, and i'll be FM within a short while.

It does all come down to preference, and your guilds make up in the end, it wouldn't help if everyone healed the exact same way.

Does anybody else not feel that the mechanic for healing is just broken, everybody scales the heals down so far now it feels like the game is being cheated...then again I am a mage...

It makes healing more interesting. If you are only using one rank of heal, healing gets monotonous pretty fast. But choosing the best rank of a heal for any given situation keeps me on my toes, and paying more attention to whats going on rather than pressing one button over and over again while tarteting the main tank. Also, Heal rank 2 crits are the best thing ever, l2000ish health for 172 mana makes all that +healing seem worth it.

Healing mechanics are almost as stupid as hunter mechanics. At least our gear upgrades make us better.

On overhealing: I've hit 80% overhealing on a few BWL fights, because there's honestly no reason to ever interrupt Heal2. It might as well not cost any mana, and there's always a slight chance that the person might happen to take some damage right before it lands (which actually happens fairly often with tanks). I don't think I've even used a major mana pot since 1.10 came out, simply because I don't run out of mana anymore. I've considered moving up to a higher rank of Heal as my primary heal, but I have no trouble keeping a tank up by myself that other competant healers in my guild need help on (i.e. Frank bugholder), and according to Recap I'm usually at or near #1 on health healed adjusted for overhealing.

It really does feel like cheating though, until I remember that paladins can do the same thing for half the mana.