I don’t think I’ll ever get the hang of theorycrafting, each time I fool around with numbers, I discover tons of stuff I didn’t know. Nothing is ever as easy at it seems! But on the bright side, if I don’t know something, chances are many other don’t know about it, so it makes for great blogging material.

My god, you’ve become a theory crafter.

I… I don’t think I know you anymore…

1) I don’t know of any other than our Meditation specialization (50%). I suppose talents might be added/changed over the course of the expansion if needed.

2) Kurn would be a better person to ask since she’s actually seen what happens at 85. Right now I’m going to enchant/gear/gem with the mentality that I want a lot of Intellect. If I have mana issues, I’ll gradually add more Spirit. Where I’ll add that spirit- whether it be gemming, gearing, enchanting or reforging will depend on my needs or on what numbers are pegged as ideal by the Math Gurus.

Intellect is a major throughput stat (since it increases spell power and crit) as well as a mana stat, so I don’t want to sacrifice more of it than I have to.

I haven’t looked into weapon enchants yet (I like to experience things on my own), but between the two you described, I’d side with Power Torrent, unless there’s a major difference between the amount of spirit boosted by Heartsong and the amount of int boosted by Power Torrent.

I can’t seem to get WoWHead or any talent calculators to work at the office, but I was curious about a couple of things.

1) Do paladins have any talents that return mana based on the amount of spirit that you have? I know healers, in general come with the Meditation talent. I know holy priests have Holy Concentration. I was wondering if there were any more incentives other than Meditation, as far as talents that holy paladins had as inspiration to start using more spirit.

2) What about enchants? There seem to be a good amount of spirit enchants that will be available in Cataclysm. Chest, bracers, etc. Do you feel that paladins would be using those enchants or do you feel they should be gemming for it (like a spellpower/spirit gem) or using the spirit already on their gear and not making room for more, etc.

Same with weapon enchants. Do you feel that Power Torrent (the chance to increase intellect, based on heal/cast) would be the de facto choice for paladins or do you see them using Heartsong (the chance to increase spirit based on cast) like other healers probably will?

I will certainly RT this when I get home. I can’t seem to do RT from the cell phone version of Twitter. Curses!

I’m tempted to resubscribe for Cata so this is useful stuff!

While I’m not 100% sure of the mechanics of “in combat regen” and casting (although I’m getting an idea of how to test it), the mana regen directly from spirit (in the spirit tab) is, yes, tied to the 5 second rule.

Combat Regen (which is new from 4.0.1), however, doesn’t specify whether or not you’re casting. So I assume it doesn’t matter- it’s the mana you’re getting back while you’re in combat, period. According to the data I got when I made the graph, Combat Regen is always 219+half of the value of spirit based mana at level 80, due to our Meditation specialization. (I suppose that for a ret or prot paladin, Combat Regen will always be 219 at level 80)

I still think Intellect is better, at least for now, but some guides were even telling paladins to completely regem spirit when 4.0.1 dropped.

EDIT: Actually the Armory displays mana regen in terms of casting and not casting and yes, Combat Regen is mana regenned while casting.