Staves will tend to grant you a chunk (20-30) of additional stats (Int/Spi/Sta) in a trade off for pure SP (30-40) which already put you off from wanting them generally. The final nail in the coffin for them comes in the fact they tend to itemize Staves recently with pure crit whereas MH+OH tend to have a mix of crit/haste/mp5 which is a much better result due to crit performing so poorly.

You no doubt would have noticed a lot of Druids (as well as other classes) using Icecore Staff which was for the most part down to the haste instead of crit (not to ignore that it was decently itemized) and at the general level of getting it you needed some extra Stamina for future hardmodes.


For what it's worth the MH+OH combo beats the Tribute staff (Clemency - Items - Sigrie) from ToCrusader and you will get a pretty decent balance of haste/crit (as in not having too much excess haste) without trying to game the items for the best balance so you don't really need to think about much beyond what has the most SP.

It is not a personal preference. A personal preference is gemming to get socket bonuses when you have to use a luminous/purified to get a spell power gem socket. Insightful is at least 3 times the effective item budget that Ember is. Also, if you changed your gem in your pants to yellow you would get more overall stats as well (7 spell power is worth picking up in a socket bonus for almost any gear level we can achieve, as you lose 4 spell power for 10 spirit, but 10 spirit is worth 2 spell power, so really you lose 2 spell power for the regen of 10 spirit). Getting the yellow however you would have to change the gem in your belt, which I admit would be an ever so slight loss (6 spell power for 10 intellect). The fact that you'd lose a grand total of 33 spell power is swamped by the fact that you'd gain more mana than that mana tide you're taking up that could go to someone who could put it into more throughput (priests or dps).

Eventually our gear will reach a level that we simply can't use the mana and then Ember will become greater than Insightful. However, that time is not now.

I slept on it, and I still don't get your argument. You're saying that you SHOULD take the Mana Tide so that you can gem Ember Skyflare which gives about 33 more spell power, i.e. 1% throughput, and that's the biggest benefit to the raid? I'm sorry, but it's complete nonsense, there is always someone who will get more out of mana tide than a druid, we're basically the lowest mana class that actually has to think about it (excluded ret palas and enhan shammies since they have very good ways to get mana back easily). Only hunters get less than us but they can turn that directly into quite a bit more dps (by using viper less). So we should be giving mana tide to someone who can get more than 1% throughput out of it. If you took absolutely no regen from raid i.e. you've got 70%+ uptime on rejuv for rogues/kittys and you've got a high uptime on WG on them, AND you take no innervates, mana tides or anything to up your mana AND you're outhealing the druids that do need those mana regens (since if your mana regen is that much higher, then your spellpower has to be), THEN you can think about dropping Insightful for Ember, otherwise you're just doing it wrong.

So I have seen a few druids on my server testing out a crit heavy spec and gear as resto. Has anyone tried this? or have any data on it. I still feel that haste is my best buddy in the whole world and suits my playstyle to a tee. I have lightly browsed the forums for any conclusive evidence to the crit craze I have been seeing but haven't come across anything.