Post by Brmonkey
Unless you're sitting on 100% green "of Agility" gear, agi is almost always better than strength for feral druid dps.
Linking again for emphasis.If you still claim that strength > agility in all or any cases in which it is not according to Toskk's graphs, I invite you to sit down with a calculator and prove him and Tangedyn's models and calculations wrong.
How can you say that AGI > STR when the link you provide shows that AGI = STR (until you get much higher into AP, but even so it feeds off your STR)?
Unless I am mistaken and am looking at it wrong.
Post by Miyari
Personally, I favor a decent balance of mp5 and Spirit on my gear. When looking at an item, if it has both spirit AND mp5 with a good bit of healing it's usually the winner (ie. tier armors). If an item has just mp5 or just spirit, I calculate the in-combat and idle regen values of both, first, then factor in the healing. I think my regen is a little high, based on itemization, because I typically favor mp5 over Spirit. In my opinion, even with 3/3 Living Spirit an item typically requires far too much Spirit to equal the in-combat offerings of a high mp5 item. I don't factor Tree of Life aura into my calculations typically as my guild doesn't do the whole Tree in the MT group thing, in favor of more beneficial aura/buffs. It's quaint, but far from ground-breaking and certainly not worth stacking the Spirit stat for. It's rather ironic that druids get less base regen from Spirit than priests, yet people make sucha huge fuss about "stacking" it. Maybe if druids were the ones with
Spiritual Guidance I'd consider differently.
In the grand scheme of things, I feel that the +healing from ToL aura is ridiculously underwhelming (even having raided at over 700 Spirit buffed) compared to the buffs provided by a feral druid or shaman, and also the contribution to the raid DPS that having other DPS classes in that party brings. I mean, I guess if you were totally heal-starved it would be one thing but to be honest I don't feel that the aura will make or break any encounter, and it most certainly isn't worth wasting a spot in a potential threat-tastic tank/DPS group. We typically just use "healer groups" for most encounters, save a few specifics.
That being said, I feel that in a typical 25-man a tree druid remains in 5sr far too much to depend on their talented in-combat regen modifiers solely, since Spirit's base in-combat regen is typically terrible to begin with when compared to mp5 due to itemization. Ideally I'd look to items with the most possible from either, or a fair enough balance of both that the item is strongest available. That being said, naturally you don't want to gimp yourself on the heals and any self-respecting tree druid loves good ol' fashioned raw healing addition to the HoTs, but it's definitely necessary to be attentive of your regen as well. Thankfully, no end-game healing item really comes with
no regen (neither mp5 nor Spirit) so the decision-making isn't usually so difficult.
All in all, it doesn't take a ton of Spirit to fill a mana bar after an Innervate, and it depends on playstyle. If you lollygag out of 5SR often and can afford to sit around and get some high idle mana regen ticks then it's all good. If you find that the Spirit affecting your ToL aura is really important to your raid, then cool. To me, it's almost always going to be:
Heal -> mp5/Spirit based on calculations -> Int -> Stamina
A resto druid is basically required to look at the grand scheme of things and their gear overall to come to a strong balance of their stats. Individual item values and their contribution to my overall stats is quite important to me when looking at what is available. A good example can be found in my
Google Notebook when it comes to how I compare potential items.