With the crit and Resurgence changes in 4.2, there are a lot of possibilities for gearing as a resto shaman. You can choose to gear for haste, or mastery, or crit, or a mix of crit and mastery. Depending on your choices, your need in spirit will change too, as the more crit you have, the more you can reforge spirit off your gear.

Reforging for haste or for mastery like we did in 4.1 is the easy way. We won’t talk about it here. But what if I want to take advantage of the buffs to crit ? Let’s take an example and see what happens.

Let’s imagine a shaman with about 2500 spirit and 6000 intel, 950 haste rating, 16 mastery (~1450 mastery rating) and 23% crit (~730 crit rating) raid buffed. This shaman feel good mana wise, based on her spell usage.

How many Spirit can I spare ?

I explain in a precedent post than 1 spirit give you about 2 to 4 times as much mana than 1 crit rating. Well, lets go further. Let’s imagine the worse case, where this shaman cast Healing Rain on CD, and else mainly use Chain Heal (hitting 4 people, because this shaman is very wise!), Greater Healing Wave and Riptide. This shaman spend 2 seconds every 12 seconds casting a spell not giving any mana thanks to crit. Else, he’s casting spells giving on average 45 mp5 per 1% crit. That’s 37.5 mp5, let’s round that to 40mp5, because really, who cast Healing Rain on cd for the whole fight ? That’s exactly 1/3 of what you’d get by reforging all this crit into spirit.

Or, better said: Each time you gain 3 crit rating on your gear, you can safely reforge 1 spirit away.

What if I reforge for crit above anything else ?

Now, this shaman is very smart and always ask Mr.Robot when she has some complex reforging to do. (That is, more complex than reforge everything to haste).

If I want to make Mr.Robot reforge for crit, I can choose these stats weights :

• Spirit : 90 until 2500 (enter your own amount of spirit, taking into account your average procs and on use effects like Darkmoon Card: Tsunami)
• Haste : 60 until 12.5%, 20 after
• Crit : 55
• Mastery : 20

Optimize, and look at your stats. While doing this I gain a bit of intellect (because I have suboptimal enchants, booh!), and gain 885 crit rating, or 5.06%, at the expense of 5.42 mastery.

Ok, now I have almost 300 spirit I can safely remove out of my gear!

Let’s do the optimize thing again with spirit cap at 2200.

Mr.Robot managed to remove 280 spirit from my gear. Instead, I get 40 intel, 0.80 mastery, and 0.40% crit. For free! Because you didn’t need the spirit anymore.

Isn’t that beautiful ?

And if I want to keep some mastery ?

This time we’ll use the same stat weight, 55, for both crit and mastery. Such Mr.Robot will try to give you as much crit rating than mastery rating. If I’m not mistaken, this should reduced the diminishing returns as much as possible.

Optimizing, we get these new stats :

This time, we get 2.03% crit at the expense of 2.42 mastery. That’s 341 crit rating, and 110 spirit I can reforge away.

With spirit cap at 2390, I reforged away 95 spirit to gain 0.5 mastery and 0.3% crit. Again, for free.

And what about Mana Tide?

Well, I lied. The 95 and 280 spirit I loose could have been useful with Mana Tide. How much mana is that ? If I drop my Mana Tide while my 4T11 is up, 95 more spirit would grant 125 mp5, or 425 mana over the duration of the totem, and 280 spirit would grant 380 mp5, or 1292 mana (again, with 6000 intel raid buffed). See if the other healers in your raid miss the mana, but you shouldn’t notice the difference with your own blue bar.

How is that useful ?

Well this fiddling with Mr.Robot to reforge away unused spirit is useful each time you feel fine with your mana and the crit rating on your gear increases. Be it because you get a new piece, or because you want to reforge some haste or mastery to crit.

I’m a partisan of having only the mana that I really need, and that all the mana I have at the end of the fight is wasted spirit. Some will say that by having more spirit, you can use more expensive heals, and thus spirit is always useful. I personnally think than less spirit and more throughput stats will always make for a more fun an interesting gameplay, and for a better result most of the time, more spirit being only useful when something goes (really) wrong.

I’m also of the opinion that feeling how much spirit you need is like choosing clothes. If you try the bigger size first, you may think it fits and buy it asap, without knowing the smaller size would have look better. If you instead try the smaller size first, you really know if you need the bigger size. For spirit it works the same way : you’ll know if you don’t have enough mana, but you never really know if you have to much.

So, for 4.2, I reforged crit and mastery at the same level, reforged the excess spirit away, and I’ll see how it works.

PS : Beware, Water Shield uptime seems hard to manage as it stand right now, making resurgence unreliable. You may still need the excess spirit until somethings is done to fix Water Shield.