With the glut of news coming out of Blizzcon came vibrant discussion (read:QQ) about the ramification of these announcements. One of the most interesting issues I’ve come across so far was discussed here http://wow.joystiq.com/2013/11/20/warlords-of-draenors-gear-system-and-spirit-as-a-secondary-stat/#continued. This entry is partially a response to the above article.
To summarize the issue; one of the most exciting changes at Blizzcon is spec specific loot. This means that in the expac when I switch specs from Enhancement to a Resto, for example, the primary stats on my main armor pieces will change from Agility to Intellect. This change will happen automatically upon spec change but the secondary stats will remain the same. So than what about Spirit? Spirit is an unusual case. Sure, it’s technically a secondary stats, but it’s importance to a healer’s mana pool cannot be overstated. Haste affects the resource pool of a dpser as well, but the difference is that a dpser will never reach the point of being unable to do anything for long stretches of time because they don’t have enough haste. However, this is a very real possibility for a healer. A healer without a good amount of spirit and who is using an inefficient playstyle WILL go oom (out of mana). This puts spirit in a different category of importance from the other secondaries. The problem here is that spirit is largely worthless for all but healers. If it appears on gear at all, it’s wasted unless you’re a healer. In addition, pieces without spirit become extremely unattractive for healers. This would effectively exclude healers from the spec-specific-loot party.
Blizzard’s answer to this quandary is that spirit will not appear on the main armor pieces at all. It will only be present on rings, necklaces, trinkets, weapons, offhands, etc. These items will be more tailored to a given role and will not change with spec. They assure us that regen will be balanced with these lower spirit values in mind. The problem I see with this is that I can upgrade my chest, shoulders, pants, gloves, and helm, and see NO improvement in my mana regen. That seems….well…wrong to me. This whole issue brings to light some inherent inconsistencies and questions about healer mana regen.
Swimming in Mana!!!
At the end of every expac we’ve experienced this Scrooge-McDuck-
Swimming-in-Money euphoria of having more mana than we know what to do with. It’s like Christmas! Spam your most inefficient heal willy-nilly and don’t even worry about mana. Well, that may be a bit of an exaggeration, but the point remains. In MoP, we experienced this euphoria much earlier than ever before. Basically from the moment we received our legendary meta gem in 5.2, our mana worries were largely over. In spite of this surplus of mana, my raid team still had to work to get kills through ToT and SoO. I still had to work to keep the team alive even though I routinely finished fights (or we wiped) with plenty of mana left. The healing balancing act remains; prioritize to prevent deaths, keep the group out of spike death range, use raid CDs wisely, conserve mana where possible. Mana is just much less of a concern than other issues though. I still find my gameplay to be dynamic and engaging. This begs the question, do we really need mana regen to be a prime concern? Does it really add anything fun or interesting to our gameplay?
Going oom is fun?
I remember the days of early cata when Telluric Currents and weaving Lightning Bolts was basically a necessity to avoid going oom. It was certainly taxing and challenging at 
times, but I can’t say it was more fun. In fact, the struggle to conserve mana across all healers retired many healer friends of mine from the healing game altogether. This is no surprise really. Hop in a pvp battleground. It won’t be long before you get chain-stunned/feared. While you’re grinding your teeth, you will perfectly understand this issue; it is UNFUN to be unable to do anything. A healer who goes oom is affectively stunned until they can regen some mana. It is incredibly frustrating to watch a player die, to know they need healed, to know which heal needs to be cast to save them, but to be unable to heal them because you have no mana. The penalty for poor play is to stand around for 10-15 seconds watching your fellow raiders die while you regen mana. It doesn’t make sense to me. The only reason we accept it so readily is that it’s just always been that way.
I’m interested in what it would be like for a healer’s resource to be more like a dpsers resource; energy, for example. Energy regens at a set rate based on your haste. You know you’ll always be able to do something in the next second or two, even if you burn through your energy completely. There’s no ‘Oh, you got a little greedy there. Naughty naughty. Now stand around for 10 seconds‘ for a dpser. I would like to see Blizzard head in this direction; a lower overall mana pool, but with exponentially faster regen rate. This would eliminate the enormous penalty for going oom and would create a new incentive for using more mana efficient spells; you get to cast more frequently. This could potentially create a situation where one shaman will tend to use GHW and one will tend to use more HW, both will be effective, but the HW dude will cast more often.
Meh, not sure if that would work, but two things I do know;
1. Going oom is UNFUN
2. No other role faces such a steep penalty for non-optimal play
My Crazy Ideas
Here are a few different ideas to alleviate both of these issues.
1. Make spirit a universal stat to increase resource production/regen rate. 
Change haste to only increase attack speed and casting speed, not resource production/ regen rate. Then add spirit to gear liberally as a secondary stat. This would make spirit useful to everyone, not just healers, and would add another ‘interesting’ secondary to the slim pool of secondaries that are out there. However, this would also have the downside that healers would likely want to pass on pieces without spirit. This brings me to my second alternative.
or…
2. Make spirit the primary stat for healers. Have their regen and throughput scale from it. For this to work, they would also need to eliminate primary stat gems altogether, which I also think would be a good idea. Otherwise healers would just stack spirit to hilarious extent like we used to with Int. This would allow healer regen to scale from primary armor pieces and would also serve to make mana regen more of a foregone conclusion, like it’s always been toward the end of an expac.
or…
3. Eliminate a mana regen stat altogether. Keep Int as our primary stat and simply normalize healer regen. The benefit of doing this is that our playstyle would not have to change over the course of an expac to suit our current regen level. This would seem to make balancing healers easier, and would make learning a healing spec simpler since gameplay would not change so drastically upon the release of a new raid tier. Something else that could be interesting is to iterate on active mana regen mechanics like Telluric Currents. Make this essential to mana regen rather than simply stacking a stat. Could be cool.
I’m sure there are other, better ideas out there that would solve these problems. But no matter the solution, I think it is a good time to address the enormous gulf in playstyle between playing a healer early in the expac and late in the expac. It’s like two totally different games. We can’t assume that mana regen is so completely vital to the healer playstyle any longer, since the end of each expac shows us what it’s like to operate without it as a real concern.
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Totem Ploppin' 