Gearing in Icecrown Citadel

[Quavvy]

As Icecrown citadel comes along, my question is in regards to spirit.

The way I see it at first glance, why have any spirit on your items at all? The tier set has zero spirit, and there is a crit/haste item for every slot except two at the moment. (Main hand and wrist) To get to the hit cap you could easily use main hand, wrist, rep ring and tier gloves to cap and get every other piece with crit/haste and end up with nothing over base spirit. Wouldn't that be the best way to go? And if it is, do you continue to use molten armor? Or sacrifice it for mage armor? And if you DO switch to mage armor, do you glyph for it? Or glyph for Arcane Power?

[Jarlyn]

The problem with dropping to very low levels of spirit is that it simultaneously makes Molten and Mage Armors less valuable. The mana gain from Mage in a low-spirit set is going to be fairly small, and even though Molten might not be giving you much of a dps gain, it's better virtually nothing from Mage (do note that I don't main a mage anymore and although I suspect I'm right, don't quote me).

In general though it's one of the great ironies of this expansion that Blizzard spent a long time making spirit useful to mages, then decided to throw away all that work and create tons of gear with only pure dps stats in the last couple raid tiers.

[Kyth]

It's even worse if you're a warlock since, again, they did the lazy thing and did a lot of copy/paste for mage and lock.

They actually value spirit rather than merely not hating it.

[Quavvy]

I do not craft the theory, but I'm a tester. And currently the way I'm going to go do my gear is to get crit/haste on everything except where I need hit rating. I'm going to nix spirit altogether, and stick with molten armor. Then, before I go to sleep every night, I'm going to pray that once I get my gearset complete, I'll be able to regen enough mana to finish every fight in ICC. If I don't, I'll have to rethink my strategy.

Thanks for the insight tho. It's always appreciated. Really nice to come here to bounce ideas off you nice folks.