"Whenever mana is expended for any purpose, mana regeneration is interrupted for five seconds. This is most often caused by casting spells, but diseases that drain mana will also interrupt mana regeneration. During this time, no spirit-based mana regeneration takes place unless the character has certain talents; there is also the fixed regeneration from mana/5 items, which is never interrupted for any reason." (www.wowwiki.com)
Due to the FSR, spirit will only help you regenerate mana if you spend a considerable amount of time doing nothing.
Mana regen is a difficult thing to gear for since it depends wildly on the tank you're healing. If the tank has low HP, you will most likely be needing to heal him constantly, and therefore receive very little regeneration. However, the opposite is also true. A well geared tank that takes less damage will allow the healer to rest between heals and therefore get some regen.
The actual mana regeneration from spirit equation is as follows for level 80 characters:
mp5 = 5 * (0.001 + sqrt(Intellect) * Spirit * 0.005575 ) * 0.60
I took this equation and graphed the results in excel with varying intellect and spirit values. I assume here that stacking intellect means that you have 500 spirit + varried intellect, and that stacking spirit means that you have 1000 int + varied spirit. Those are realistic values at level 80.
These graphs make sense. Since the mp5 varries with the square root of total intellect, the player receives diminishing returns for regen when stacking intellect. However, mp5 varies proportionally with spirit as to create a linear trend. Initially, this looks like it's obvious that stacking spirit is the wise choice.
However, this is not the entire picture. Sure, you'll end up with more regenerated mana, but what about your total mana pool?
Woah, not what you would have expected, eh? It looks like from this graph that stacking spirit actually ended up with far less mana than did stacking intellect. Well, that's because the graph was only for a 60-second fight, allowing only for 20 regen ticks at most. Furthermore, I assumed a FSR of 50%, meaning that you were casting half the time. Realistically, most boss fights are longer than that. While fighting Kael'Thelzud, the last boss in 10-Naxxramas, the fight lasted 15 minutes. Let's re-examine these graphs when a longer fight is assumed.
Now there's a drastic change. Even with a low amount of spirit, the regneration based on spirit scenario ended up with more total mana in the end because of the base amount of intellect that you'll have anyway. It compounds as spirit is stacked, resulting in a difference of 49k mana. That's a lot... more than 3 full mana bars than the stacked intellect case.
Ok, so you still don't think that's realistic. You don't think you'll reach 50% FSR. Yeah, that's probably not realistic. So let's look at 20%FSR. That's 12 seconds out of every minute, you don't cast. (Well, actually 17 because you have to wait 5 seconds before regen starts)
Here, we see that the two trends are almost parallel. So at every amount stacked in either case, the total mana availiable increases proportionally. However, the spirit case still ends up with the large of the two by about 10k mana. That's for a 15 minute fight, the less time, the worse the spirit case appears.
So the break even point is 13% FSR for 15 minutes while stacked at 2100 spirit 1000 int. Remember that the x-Axis is not time. The x-Axis is amount stacked. It's also important to realize that priests in the best guilds on my server only have 1300 intellect and 1100 spirit. They're not stacking one over the other, and it's highly unlikely that any priest would be able to stack 2100 intellect or 2100 spirit.
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