Ok, Im not new to the forums.. been reading these forums since Vanilla.

But I do have a question. As of right now.. early raiding as a mage what is the best spec to be?

Ive tried fire.. it seems like you raelly need higher end gear to play fire.. so Ill consider fire to be a higher end raiiding spec for now.. Its good for 5 mans but frost seems nice for 5 mans too.

My guild is currently making attempts on Magmaw and Omnitron, and fire is completely gimped. maybe 1/5 times is my dps/damage actually nice on the attempts we make. Arcane is doing a lot better over my attempts with fire. I hav enot tried frost yet. So if anyone has some advice for me I would greatly appreciate it =).

i am not sure about you but i never use healing touch

You should. In Cata there is a time and a place for all our spells.

Mastery is a 1.25% HPM boost per percentage point fully utilized. Which of course it isn't, however I have no problem utilizing it 70+% of the time by making sure another hot is on the LB tank when I refresh, and doing most of my raid healing by following WG hots. So that means Mastery is close to 1% throughput and HPM per 1%.

In contrast Crit is .50-.55% HPM per 1%. It really is a no brainer, you'd have to be a terribad healer and only utilize Mastery around 40% of the time in order for crit to be better. Some people have made the case that crit effects all spells, while mastery is situational, but that's not an accurate way to look at it. Crit has A CHANCE to effect all spells. While mastery is Guaranteed in cases where it comes into play.


As to the throughput vs regen, I like how Tofuu put it. In most cases adding regen is the best way to add throughput. If you don't need more mana, then you don't need more throughput either. Your guild needs to do harder content, and or roll with less healers.

This will apply the vast majority of cases, though I'm sure people can nitpick and find the odd case where throughput>regen. A fight where you are rolling 3 LB stacks for most of it is a good example. Even there however, if you start refreshing with Healing Touch, and using WG + 1-2 RJ's every rotation you'll oom.

If you aren't needing to refresh with Healing Touch, then you don't need more throughput and Genesis vs Moonglow is irrelevant. Do it on Heroic and or with less healers.

Make sure you get all regen talents, and have spirit on all gear. This whole tier. If you want to dual spec 2 pve specs you can play around with other setups for certain fights, but the above will hold true for most if not all.

I am specced the below, and will be after the patch as well. Yes I miss Nature's Cure. I have it in my pvp spec which I use for heroics. However, thanks to blizz and our insane resto bloat, I don't feel I can justify it in a raid. Let a healer with less bloat dispel.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Yes Efflorescence and Living Seed are both terrible budget and hardly worth it. Yes they shouldn't be linked as they have nothing to do with each other. I do think they are just barely worth it in most cases, though a 10 man raider may disagree. I suggest looking at your healing breakdown after every fight, every wipe as a matter of habit.

An average of Tuesdays 6 boss kills for instance has

Efflo at 5.9%, and Living Seed at 2.4%.

In order for BotG to be better than even Living Seed, Rejuv would need to be what, around 40% of your healing. (Comparing 3 vs 2 pts.) Perhaps after the patch it will be, however they haven't announced they are unlinking them so its irrelevant. It won't be better then Efflo.

However, GotEM will scale much better, if RJ is more than I'd guess 40% of your healing it will be point for point better than Efflo. So after the patch 2/3 efflo and 3/3 NB and 3/3 Gotem may be the best option.

Edit: I thought [spell]51180[/spell] was how you linked spells/talents. Worked on other forums. If somebody could send me a PM with where I went wrong I'd appreciate it.

Could you explain the double-pot trick? Is it just pre-poting or something else?