#181 - July 6, 2011, 8:09 a.m.
Stat balance on gear should be looked at via much more than just boss loot tables. We consider reputation gear, tailor gear, Valor gear and the tier sets when examining what's available to you. If you wish, you can have Spirit on every slot but your belt (which can still be reforged). The priest tier set has Spirit on all 5 slots.
Having said that, the mindset that only cloth with spirit is priest healer gear (and cloth with no spirit is never priest healer gear) is a mindset to be resisted. If that is allowed to set in, then all the fun of looking at a potential new piece of gear and deciding for yourself whether it is an upgrade for you is removed entirely.
Along those lines, something to keep in mind is that there is more to improving the healing you do in cloth than simply stacking spirit. As you increase spell power, haste, and crit, and your tank increases health, armor and avoidance, boss damage negates less of your mana in the first place.
Though this response was posted on the US forums first, the information in that quoted blue post was not just intended for the US forums, as it was sent to us internally as a response to your queries in this thread and some others from other languages here on the EU forums.
Spirit gear is here, just not on the bosses.Some of you appear to feel that our response misses the mark or doesn't answer what you're really asking.
But for the question as to why there's not much Spirit gear on the boss loot tables in Firelands, the simple answer is that we do not currently feel that having it in boss loot tables is as important as having it available through one or more of the other paths to obtain gear of a similar quality.
What we mean is, as long as the gear is available through faction quartermasters, via purchase with Valor points, through new Tailoring recipes and last but by
no means least the Priest tier set, then it is OK for it to not also be in the boss loot tables.
You may very well disagree with that viewpoint, and if you do so we encourage you to let us know your thoughts on that and why you feel differently about it.
Yes, we believe other gear should be good too.It's true, there was more in that post than just an explanation of the lack of Spirit gear in the boss loot tables. We also believe that other gear that may not have Spirit on it by default should also be interesting for healing priests.
We really don't want it to be all about stacking one stat, and this is not the first time we've made that ideal clear in our blog articles and blue posts.
We want you to look favourably at spell power, haste and crit and not just
bliss out on the Spirit stat.
And in fact, if you really don't find this the case, then we'd like to know more about it. Because we believe that as long as you're not running out of mana, the other stats should be more appealing and that's what we want to achieve.
So... you're running out of mana?If the main reason some of you feel it is bad to consider gear that doesn't feature Spirit by default is because it’d mean you'd run out of mana while in the Firelands raid, then that is indeed an issue and we'd like to hear more about that too if you do feel that way.
This might grate you to hear it though, but we want to ensure that before you start to state that kind of thing, that you've reviewed the spells you use and are certain that you're healing efficiently.
It’s only natural that in previous tier raid content, as your gear got more powerful, you may have stopped healing as efficiently as you did when first entering Cataclysm raids simply because you gradually gained more and more mana to work with.
It could conceivably be that this is a source of some mana issues – basically that the issue is that you may need a higher amount of Spirit than we feel you
should do, because you need it to power a strong but ultimately not quite as efficient style of healing as that which we believe can or should be achieved.
There's some conjecture there, and you may disagree with that. Feel free to voice that disagreement.
Also, one may need to actually equip all the new gear available – including from factions, crafting and tier gear – before you can come to the conclusion that they're not providing you with enough of the stats you need to do your job well. Keeping in mind that as you gear up, so are the other members of your raid. They’ll become easier to heal as they gear up and also increase their own stats.
We’re definitely listening and we encourage you to give us your thoughts.