I suspect that for any difficult fight, we'll use sprint armor over inner fire. I'll gladly give up a few hundred spell power for 15% runspeed, especially when movement is the one thing that kills DPS. Or at least switch armors during the fight. The points in Improved Inner Fire might not be as useful as you think.

Looking at the updates, it would have been very amusing if you could get Chakra in the first tier of the Holy Tree, then you could splash for both Evangelism and Chakra, and get a massive boost to your shadow damage. IT would, however, mean losing the Archangel effect.

A quick question for those in the beta: is Evangelism on an internal CD? If so, that makes it a lot weaker for splashing for from other trees.

EDIT: looking at this talent build, I notice it's missing Dispersion in favour of PI. Is that really favourable (regen & snare-immune vs. haste & cost reduction)?

Except for the part where you can't get PI, because you must spend 31 points in one tree before you can spend any points in another tree. That build only has 29 in Shadow, and you can't really buy anything in Tier 3 at all because you only have 10 points to spend.

In other news, i'm waiting to hear GC come back re: 5-sec Mindflay with "We're feeling it out." I know that they've stated that Mind Flay won't have the latency problems it has today, but I know that a 4-5 Mind Flay is just going to feel LOOOOONG.

Keep in mind that with the channelled spell changes your mindflay will always be between 4 and 5 seconds, no matter your haste level. We won't have the current situation of a '3 second' spell that sometimes takes 1.5 seconds to channel. Compared to our 1 second gcd atm 5 seconds will indeed feel like an eternity.

Separately, I struggle to see how this longer mindflay will mesh with the statement that mindflay won't suffer from latency issues.

There are two latency issues that currently impact mindflay. Firstly, those playing on high latency inevitably have the problem of variable latency (jitter). This makes it impossible to clip spells accurately (even using quartz or similar) since latency at the start of the spell will be different from when the spell is clipped. This becomes worse as spell channels become longer, and becomes more of a problem, since you will want to stop channelling early more often. I don't see any way for blizzard to change this without fundamentally changing channel behaviour. You still need to be able to break your channel early, and get the benefit from the portion you channelled. Perhaps they have, I would be impressed.

Secondly, the spell queue implemented sometime in BC doesn't work with [nochannel] macros. Since the channel check is done client side, your client won't send the next spell until the mindflay is finished. I suspect that this problem is the one that Blizzard has fixed when they say that mindflay won't suffer from latency in the future. So it's feasible that you won't suffer unduly from latency if you cast a full mindflay into another spell.

However, since mindflay is our lowest priority spell, it's always going to be beneficial to stop channelling early and cast a higher DPCT spell, and so this fix will do nothing. In order to realize a benefit from this change there needs to be some incentive for casting a full mindflay. Perhaps you don't get the effect from Evangelism until the end of the cast? If mindspike was higher DPCT than mindflay-without-evangelism, then this would incentivize players to cast full mindflays when there is a five second window, and use mindspike otherwise.

So the spirit tooltip still displays the values according to the formula on live?

If I understand you correctly and the MP5 column represents the mana regeneration you actually have in beta, then I'd say it's too early to put much effort into the formula as the results really look unreasonably huge.

Also, if spirit actually provides less regen than int, no sane priest will be using spirit gear in Cata except if he really cannot get anything else. Having int provide +healing as well as more regen than spirit means we will use dps gear and socket/enchant int for more regen.

As this is very different from the designers' stated intentions, I'd say this really is far from final.

Did you test if the MP5 values are what what you really get?

Carnath:

What level is this data for? Untalented?
I get a good fit (less than one error for each of your data points, other than int=542 and int=645, (check again?) using

Spirit regen = spirit * sqrt(int) * 0.0167

Total regen = spirit regen + 265.27 + .75216*(int-11.96)^.99957

Edit1: With that formula, spirit>int for regen when your Int is over (roughly) 2030.
Edit2: Line above values spirit way too much. Working on a fix.
Edit3:

The breakpoint for spi>int changes with the amount of spirit you have. For the numbers in the table, at 2000 Spi and 3800 Int, a point of spirit is slightly more regen than a point of int.

If the numbers in the table were out-of-combat, we'd expect them to change in-combat. Traditionally, Meditation lets you keep 50% of your spirit regen in combat, and Dreamstate (linear int-based regeneration, WotLK Druid-Balance talent) does not change in combat. If you apply those assumptions, spirit is better than int at about 2k spirit/10k int.

As the poster below me pointed out, current raid-based regen mechanics (Replenishment) as well as starting Mana, benefit only from Int.

This is, however, only regarding the spirit-based regen. Even if all other int-based sources (shadowfiend, hymn, replenishment) are switched over to another mechanism (like % of spirit based regen), the break even will be at significantly higher value than that due to the initial mana pool contribution of int.

If this is true, then Mindflay is being changed to basically be a channeled dot, and when you recast it it should just pick up where it left off as far as ticks go, so you almost never lose DPS by clipping it. I think the idea behind 5s Mindflay is that you'll basically always clip it except for the case where on live you'd cast 2 in a row without 4pc t10 (which is somewhat rarely).

If Mindflay really does work as advertised, then the only downside to clipping will depend on its mana cost.

As a more general comment on the updated trees, I'm still disappointed that Darkness exists as a talent. Does any other class still have "you do 6% more damage" in their talent tree? I feel like I only had 2 free points to spend that weren't for DPS talents, and they went into Phantasm.

Edit:
Link

Guess that's the end of that.

I tested my regen rate, it took ~1' 06" for my 38493 mana bar to fill up after respeccing. This shows ~2900 mp5, though I admit this test isn't perfect, and I'm open to try something a little more scientific if you can think of a way. I am currently showing 2225 Intellect, 913 Spirit, and 2644 mp5.

Mana regen in combat and out of combat are listed at the same value for Holy/Disc. The 'Spirit tooltip' column is from the tooltip when I mouse over my spirit value on my character sheet, which says, "Increases mana regen by 720 per 5 seconds when not casting." I am tending towards trusting this value since the tooltip values for my healing spells are correct to the integer for spell heal ranges, and they update based on your current spellpower, talents, and procs. Also, Holy Concentration gives an exact 15% increase to this value only, not to your total mp5. Which means, as your formula suggests, we are getting the majority of our mp5 from another source besides spirit.

I did exactly what you are describing after looking at the numbers, reforged as much of the spirit off as it would let me into either haste or crit, and gemmed pretty much entirely all +20 intellect. I still used 10 int/10 spi for a blue bonus of 9 SP, and 12 sp/10 int for +4 int or +5 SP bonuses.

This data was for level 81, Holy specced.

That Mind Flay change sounds very similar to the pro-rated dot tick idea that was passed around. As long as the mana cost is cheap enough, I don't particularly mind if I have to interrupt it then. But 5 seconds still feels like an awful lot. How many other casters base their rotations around a spell with a cast time of even 4 seconds? The closest I can think of is Balance Druid, which have a pre-talented base 3.5 second cast time nuke.

Drain soul is a 15 second channel on live, you'd treat it more like auto-chaining a 3 sec casting time nuke than a mind flay or drain life type situation.

I'm fairly sure the new dot clipping rules only apply when you actually overwrite your dot/channel. If you just go about interrupting your mindflay whenever you like to cast other spells you'll still lose ticks. Since the target won't have your mind flay debuff on it when you go back to channeling it will start over again, just as it does on live. The newer dot clipping rules will only affect mindflay where you would cast it back to back and by allowing you to not 2 clip your mindflay at all by just refreshing your dot before you start the mindflay cast.