I've been told the same. Spellpower is the dominant gem style atm, int coming up as the common 2nd runner. (gogo paladins with 32k unbuffed pool)

Virtually all my gems are spirit or spellpower/spirit hybrids. And I've still yet to put Nourish on my bars. I get by just fine.

Yes, gem spellpower only except for meta requirements or perhaps occasionally a socket bonus.

If you have enough mana regen to support gemming full Runed Cardinal Rubies, than it is optimal in a min/max situation to do so. "Enough" mana regen is A little hard to define though. If your mana hits 0 as the boss dies, you're spot on. If you're out of mana four minutes into the fight with innervate and your mana potion both on cooldown, you need more regen. It's impossible for another player to look at your gear and know what your mana situation will be in a raid though, since mana management is more influenced by your playstyle than by your gemming.

Your arrogant peer is not necessarily "wrong," he's just a bit overzealous. With many of the socket bonuses for ToC being spellpower, you can gem more conservatively, and still maintain a competitive level of throughput.

For example, let's assume a chest piece with one red socket, and one yellow or blue, with a socket bonus of 9 spellpower. You have two options. One is to gem Runed in both sockets to gain 46 spellpower. The second option is to gem Runed and Luminous/Purified to gain 44 spellpower and 10 intellect or 10 spirit(which in itself gains a few spellpower as well). The loss of 2 spellpower to gain 10 intellect or spirit is potentially worth it, although the decision is more subjective than objective.

Look at the socket bonuses before you make your decision. 9 and 7 spellpower socket bonuses make the difference in throughput negligible. 5 spellpower and lower, or no spellpower at all, are better to ignore.

No. Although Big Bang is labeled as physical damage it ignores all armor so an Indestructible Pot won't help you at all. If you're talking about 10-man you're looking at 80k - 30% = 56k dmg with Imp Barkskin. So unless you get a PS or something you will certainly die.

Personally, unless the socket bonus is not one of Spellpower, Spirit, Int, Haste, I gem to activate the socket.

Red/Uncoloured - Runed Cardinal Ruby
Blue - Purified Dreadstone
Yellow - Luminous Ametrine

With the complete variability of healing in fights, I don't like to focus on one aspect too much. The same fight may see you OOM if something went wrong, or riding easy the whole way through depending on what happens.

As for your peer, the concept that we're "Spirit" based is completely inaccurate these days. Innervate is no longer spirit controlled, and regen consists of Spirit and Int together. We get more benefit from gemming Spirit than we would from say MP5 or Crit, but we get similar returns from Int. Spirit is slightly better in that we get the spirit multiplier talent, and it gives us bonus spellpower, but in order to keep regen up you need significant Int as well, and SP/Haste gems may also be desirable especially coming into 3.3. I know I'll be considering replacing Luminous with Reckless if my mana can survive it.

Does the talent Improved Faerie Fire give 3% crit to all casters or just the Boomkin? I've been unclear on the issues with others considering how Blizzard is with tooltips.

It increases the hit chance of all casters; however, it only increases the Boomkin's critical hit chance. (the critical strike chance of YOUR damage spells)

I apologize, after reading that quote, it sounds like I am advocating burning your mana as fast as possible in all situations, which I don't. Let me clarify.

If you have zero mana at the end of the fight, you have optimized your potential throughput, for that particular fight, relative to the mana regen you currently have. That's it. Nothing more. I'm not saying you should gem for each specific fight, to make sure you go oom as the boss dies. I was simply referring to a perfect theoretical situation.

Independent of the differences in fight lengths and mechanics, a situation like this will almost never happen, because as you mentioned, things won't always go as planned. You might lose a healer who tunnel-visioned in fire, you might lose dps who were too busy killing scarabs to see Anub'arak steamroll right through them. Only the top end guilds will have raids that go off with absolutely zero mistakes, and even they have off nights.

Think of mana management like wealth management. You want to have enough money when you retire to last just until you keel over from sleeping with the 3 hookers you bought and thought you could handle. Anything left after you die is wasted. However, you do want to have a little bit of a cushion in case only 1 or 2 of them show up.

Similarly, you want to have enough mana to last until the boss dies, but you want to retain a cushion in case something goes horribly wrong.

Hopefully that makes a little more sense.

I've recently tried changing things to maximize my output in a few hard mode fights. This includes popping berserk very early and then trying to find a sequence of moves that maximize damage during berserk. I seem to have found a fairly good sequence, and was wondering if other people might have their own thoughts or suggestions (and if not, perhaps they can find this useful). Obviously, this is also very close to the approach I use on XT's heart phase.

Fight start
feral faerie fire
mangle
(slight pause for energy)
berserk
savage roar
rake
shred to 5 cp
rip
shred to 5 cp
savage roar
shred to 5 cp, also rake after old rake goes down
ferocious bite (if you got to 5 cp)
(berserk ends)
tiger's fury
shred in preparation for next rip

I've found it lets me get in a ferocious bite without interrupting my rip cycle most of the time. Sometimes I don't get enough omen procs and crits to manage the last run to 5 cp, though, and I forgo the bite, as I found doing the bite after tiger's fury left me too low on cp and energy and my rip took forever to get back up.

I haven't had a problem with threat as yet (good tanks, misdirects and tricks), but I don't get hysteria either, which could require me to hold off a bit longer.

From what I've read, some people prefer to use TF up front, before the berserk, but I find it's very useful afterwards to allow me to get enough cp to keep the rip up.

I would do the savage roar before waiting for energy. 33% less dmg with your autohits is a lot.
Otherwise this looks quite good.

You should avoid using Savage Roar while Berserk is active. SR does not get the 50% energy discount.

EDIT: the above is wrong, SR gets 50% discount.

I do: mangle -> SR -> rake -> (shred if too much energy) -> TF -> berserk