Who's the man???

Great conversation on Spirit benefits and shortfalls.

Spiritual Guidance: The spirit debate -
Every Sunday, Eliah or Elizabeth will bring you their thoughts on the Priest class with Spiritual Guidance. Whether it's keeping your fellow players alive or melting their faces, you can read about it here!

This week, we've got a special episode co-authored by your two Spiritual Guidance writers, Eliah Hecht and Elizabeth Harper. In the course of emails around the WoW Insider bullpen, we noticed that there were some differing perspectives on the utility of Blizzard's favorite Priest stat, Spirit. So we decided to sit down and hash it out the old-fashioned way: an IM debate. Both of our mains are priests in a similar situation. We're Holy-specced and raiding somewhere around the middle of Karazhan. So considering how similar are gameplay niches are, it's interesting to note the differences in our opinions. On with the show, and do let us know what your take is.

Eliah Hecht: So. It's going to be a complicated issue, because you've got a lot of different kinds of priests to worry about...Holy vs Shadow, leveling vs raiding vs PvP...My take on it is that Spirit is paramount for all leveling specs, and for raiding holy priests, and not so much for the other spots on the grid.

Elizabeth Harper: See, I'm of a couple of minds on it for leveling. On one hand, you get more benefit from less spirit at lower levels, so leveling, I think you get more out of it. But it's still an issue of practicality -- leveling up, i'll grab spirit if it happens to be on something I otherwise want. But the size of mana and health pools is still more important. (And if you have spirit tap, a little bit of spirit can go a long way)

Hm...I disagree there. I got a lot of my priest leveling philosophy from a particular thread (registration requried) in the worldofwar.net forums, and it holds spirit to be the most important stat, and alleges that mana pool and life pool are basically totally irrelevant.

The theory goes like this: When you're leveling, you're grinding much of the time. You'll be constantly losing health and mana by casting spells/getting hurt, and constantly gaining it back by regeneration. Only at the beginning of a grinding session is it going to matter at all what your max health/MP is. After that, regeneration is the key. It's the same argument for raiding priests: raid fights are long enough that having some extra mana in your mana pool is only going to let you cast one or two extra heals, whereas some extra regen, from Spi or mp/5, will get you much more.

I agree with the idea in theory -- but not in practice.

I guess I shouldn't be too surprised since he looks to be about my age. But it's nice to see politicians with a good sense of imagination.

Took this from the forums... It is so true I had to make sure it was immortalized here.

- You're told that your class' primary role, healing, is overpowered, and shouldn't be performable in a PvP environment.

- Every ability you get either places a debuff on you, damages you, has a 5 minute cooldown, or costs 4000 mana to cast.

- The guy in plate standing next to you can heal with double your efficiency.

- You spec into Shadow with shadowform, and do DPS competitive with the holy priest who is spending half his time DPSing and half his time healing (which in itself is half of what the real DPS classes are getting)

Well, I finally got my staff. I can hardly believe it. When I first started playing I never would have dreamed I would get this kind of gear. I owe it all to a great guild. Thanks NR. Now I need to come up with this for the +55 to healing enchant. I also need to start hunting down stuff for the Truefaith Vestments. I have the pattern but no materials. I know I can fish up the Essence of Water but farming the Living Essence is just too boring. Perhaps with some DM runs on Wilgron. Together the 2 Epics will give me almost +250 healing making a total of over 500 with my other healing gear.

+55 Healing Enchant

4x Large Brilliant Shard,
8x Greater Eternal Essence,
6x Living Essence,
6x Essence of Water,
1x Righteous Orb

Requires: Runed Arcanite Rod

Truefaith Vestments

12x Bolt of Runecloth
10x Mooncloth
4x Righteous Orb
4x Golden Pearl
10x Ghost Dye
2x Rune Thread

Here is Wilgrin's new build.

Level 60 Priest (21/30/0)

Discipline (21 points)

Unbreakable Will - Rank 5/5
Increases your chance to resist Stun, Fear, and Silence effects by 15%.

Robes of the Guardian Saint
Mantle of the Oracle

The Oracle stuff is truly UBER. I can't wait to get some of that AQ gear...

Blizzard has released the 1.10 Priest Talent Updates. Very interesting. I can just imagine what the "Lightwell" will look like (those light shafts from the lunar festival may have been a "beta"). Exciting nonetheless. It really looks like the Holy Tree has been completely redone. Even the Shadow tree has some nice rearranging.

Nice priest sight --Priestshaven.com