16
Jan 12
spirit will simply be the first and last word
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered, like why paladins are so awesome.
With Mists of Pandaria coming up on the horizon, many holy paladins are looking ahead to the changes that the expansion will bring. Most of the talent and ability info is still very malleable at this point, and as such, I haven’t begun to worry or get excited just yet. One thing that we do know is that in Mists, intellect will finish the transformation that it started in Cataclysm. Intellect is going to become a throughput-only stat, as it will stop increasing our maximum mana.
Today, intellect and longevity are nearly synonymous. Replenishment and Divine Plea are two of our largest mana sources, and they both scale off of our intellect. Most paladins are sporting intellect gems and trinkets, and intellect flasks and food fill up our bags. Holy paladins have been leaning on intellect for a long time due to its versatility, and it seemed like the decision to roll spell power into intellect would permanently ensure intellect’s role as our best stat. By decoupling intellect and mana, the developers are changing everything we know about gearing a healer.
Forced to choose
Today, holy paladins are able to have their Conjured Mana Cake and eat it too. Intellect gives us everything we could want out of a single stat. Blizzard’s developers are forcing us to choose between the two most important aspects of healing: throughput and regeneration.
While I loved being able to socket my gear mindlessly with Brilliant Inferno Rubies, I understand that creating tension between stats ultimately results in a more interesting gearing environment. Our secondary stats are almost to the point now where all three are balanced, and moving intellect and spirit to that same system makes sense. We need to learn how to handle the balance between intellect and spirit now.
Fixed mana pools for everyone
The key change in Mists is that intellect will no longer provide us with 15 mana per point, effectively fixing the size of our mana pools. While we’ll still have mana pools up in the six-digit range, they won’t see any increase from tier to tier. Every raiding holy paladin will end up with the same amount of maximum mana. We don’t know how Divine Plea, Replenishment, or Arcane Torrent will scale under this model, but my money is on spirit becoming a factor here. As a thought, I wouldn’t mind seeing Arcane Torrent grant us holy power points instead of mana in Mists.
Because every holy paladin starts with the same mana pool, the only differentiator in our longevity will be spirit. If one holy paladin has more spirit than another, then they have more longevity. It’s as simple as that. Rather than trying to figure out whether one paladin’s extra intellect makes up for the other’s spirit trinkets, spirit will simply be the first and last word. Need more longevity? Get spirit. It will be as simple as that.