I'm at that level of raiding where I can still compete in dps; I haven't yet lost the thrill of seeing my name at the top of Recount (or indeed, the misery of seeing it at the bottom). So when a priestly colleague of the holy variety told me I was getting spellsurge, I felt a small colnel of rebellion swell inside me even while I knew it would be futile to resist.
Spellsurge, in case you don't know, is a weapon enchant that has a chance on successful spell cast to restore 100 mana to everyone in the caster's party over 10 seconds. But as you can only have one enchant on your weapon at a time, it takes the place of the modest 40-damage or more glamorous soulfrost enchants, both of which cause more pain to baddies and are therefore far more appealing.
That's 40 (or 54) damage I won't be doing to my enemies, which seems like a lot. So I went in search of some sensible comparison of the two enchants. I found a cracking post from the Troll Priest which does just that. (Please come back to us Troll!)
It's not the answer I wanted. Apparently, on paper at least, spellsurge does return more mana to the party than soulfrost (via vampiric touch) — but at the expense of a bucket load of damage, which must also be taken into consideration. I have to ask as well just how necessary that extra mana is to the success of my raid? Has anyone died from lack of mana? Have we ever failed a boss because of it? The answer is very, very rarely.
Ultimately, Troll Priest argues in favour of an addon to automatically swap spellsurge in and out during the internal cooldown, which is probably a decent compromise. Now all I have to do is find a second weapon worthy of the enchant.
Incidentally, Matticus has an equally enlightening comparison of spellsurge to 81 healing, for you holy types. Again he concludes that you can probably settle for both with the right weapons.
Not just one Overton window
16 hours ago
6 comments:
Two things wrong with your posts:
First off, losing 40+Dmg does not mean your attacks will lose 40 damage each. Each spell has a coefficient based upon cast time and/or tick duration. Mind blast, for example, is a 1.5 second cast so it only scales with damage by 42.86&.So you'll be losing about 20 damage for the mindblast.
Additionally, mana is easily a raid killer. For example, a Healadin attempting to heal through a new BT boss while lacking crit gear (Since t5 instances are mp5 based) who has to spam a down-ranked holy light could be Oom fast, and thus the tank could lose the fill-in heals necessary for a successful downing.
Ouch!
Even I know about co-efficients but I really don't think it matters in the context. It was just a throw-away comment, surely you aren't going to hold me to such exacting standards!?
Point taken about T5, but I can only go on my experience so far. There's nothing in Kara you can't get through with a pot and a shadow priest. Any mana you have left when the boss dies is surplus.
Unfortunately, 2.4.3 nerfed gear-swapping macros -- it now interrupts your cast. Swapping out weapons based on a proc cooldown just got significantly trickier.
I use outfitter to swap into Healing gear whenever I come out of Shadowform, so the interrupt has been driving me crazy when I auto-pop to cast a heal. (I am not a button-spammer, so having to hit a button more than once makes me grind my teeth.)
Another way to look at it is the more damage you do the faster mobs die and the less mana is required for entire raid. Also you will heal for a bit more if you use VE :)
I'd completely forgotten about the patch changes. I see CasterWeaponSwapper has been updated to accomodate the changes, which is promising:
http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info4749-2.4.html
I play a Spriest myself and we are currently taking on Mu'ru, all i have to say is that if the people in your guild want you to put spell surge on your weapon /gquit this instant. That is the biggest load of crap I have ever heard. Go run that idea by some of the people at shadowpriest.com and you'll get laughed right off the site. Spellsurge has no place on a spriests weapon plain and simple.
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