Raid Rx: Throughput, regeneration and secondary stats

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4-15-2011 @ 4:16PM

Finnicks said...

In my raid group, we have two druids (myself and another) and a shaman healing.

At the beginning of our raiding adventures, I was a "Spirit stacker" and Ganjja (the other druid) was an "Intellect stacker".

I had something like 2500 spirit and 85k mana, and he had something like 1800 spirit and 110k mana.

As we were first learning encounters, he was going OOM a great deal faster than I was, but had stronger output until that point. He was convinced that more mana meant more regeneration because Innervate scales with maximum mana, but was finding that his lack of spirit-based regen was preventing him from stretching his mana to the end of the encounter.

Meanwhile, my output was a little weaker, but I was having relatively few mana issues. Of course, once he would go OOM, we would loose a lot of our raid healer capability and wipes would follow in those cases due to my weaker personal output.

As raiding went on, the two of us have slowly shifted to a more balanced approach. I regemmed to Intellect and started only keeping spirit in blue slots (was using a lot of Int/Spirit gems in red slots and mastery/spirit gems in yellow slots). He started enchanting, reforging, and gemming for more spirit (using Int/Spirit in blue slots instead of gemming straight int, for example).

He still had more intellect than I do, and I still have more spirit than he does, but now he lasts much longer and my throughput is much higher: I generally do the most healing in encounters out of the three healers now, and my mana lasts longer.

TL;DR: Don't stack intellect or spirit. In general, a balanced approach is your best bet. Spirit is your #1 secondary stat as a healer (surpassing mastery, haste, and crit), but if you can put intellect on it, do it. That means red slots get Int, yellow slots get Int/(haste/mastery/crit) or pure int, and blue gets (Int/Spirit). Enchant for int whenever possible. And reforge for Spirit whenever possible.

4-15-2011 @ 4:44PM

Darren said...

Going OOM is often as much or more playstyle and spell choices than the stats on your gems. In my raids we have 2 holy paladins. The other has superior gear to mine by a decent margin (probably 4-5 ilvl higher) yet my throughput is almost always much better. As a result I usually have to make much higher use of my mana regen cd's. Although it's rare that I'll go OOM prior to the end of a fight, I'll often be very close at the end. The other Paladin will have 50%+ most of the time by comparison... though he does 10% less healing during the fight. I'll spam my strong heal and big aoe where he hits a lot of holy lights that are cheap. We both gem int though, no spirit unless it might be a sweet socket bonus.

I guess in a long round about way, what I'm saying is that what you're seeing may not be int v. spirit. IMHO int is always the better choice though as it provides throughput and regen (evne if its less regen). Perhaps your other healer was going OOM not simply because of spirit but also with your lower throughput, he felt forced to use more expensive heals to get the job done while he could. If both of you had high (int) throughput (and didn't heal snipe) maybe you'd find that both of you casting less, but more powerful spells, neither went OOM.

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