Choosing the Right Meta Gem

I’ve touched on gems briefly in my Priest gear list. What I failed to address at the time was what meta gems to use when you had an item that could use it.

What are Meta Gems?

Meta gems are like your standard blue, red, or yellow gems but with one very significant exception: They are fairly rare to obtain. These gems are special because they bestow a special effect or passive ability to the head piece that it is socketed in.

Light-Collar of the Incarnate

Mouse over that link for a moment and you’ll see a helm that has a meta socket and a blue socket which activates the healing bonus. Most head pieces don’t have meta gems. But for healing helms with a meta gem, there’s a few options.

What gems should I use?

3 Choices:

Mystical Skyfire Diamond

• Abilities: 15% chance on spellcast - next spell 50% casting time
• Requires more Blue gems than Yellow gems

Insightful Earthstorm Diamond

• Abilities: +12 Intellect, Chance to restore mana on spellcast
• Requires at least 2 Red gems, 2 Blue gems, 2 Yellow gems

Bracing Earthstorm Diamond

• Abilities: +26 Healing Spells, 2% Reduced Threat
• Requires more red then blue gems

I can tell you right off the bat that I would knock off Bracing Earthstorm Diamond from the list of considerations. The abilities are attractive. But the requirements are too difficult to meet as Priests. The requirements are a little more reasonable now. The 26 healing is nice. I’d consider using it if you’re having some issues with lack of healing. I’ve never really had much of a problem. You’re going to be socketing Nightseyes more than anything else anyway.

You’re better off weighing the other two choices.

In a nutshell, it’s either going to be faster spellcasting or mana regen over time. In a raid setting, Priests will be spending mana like crazy. It would help to have other ways of replenishing your mana, so that’s the argument for the Insightful Earthstorm. I don’t know how often I’ve preached mana regen. If you close your eyes and click a post of mine at random, you’ll probably find some mention of it. The requirements aren’t insanely hard or ridiculous to meet either. 2 reds, blues, and yellows are easy to slot up with. The trick is to find the right combination of gear which will have the necessary slots available.

But don’t discount faster casting entirely. Sometimes, having a fast heal can pay off. My Shaman has this meta gem equipped. I’ve gotten many timely procs of the ability when I thought my party would wipe. The requirements for this to activate are even easier. You just need 1 blue gem and no yellows and you are set. There’s going to be encounters where tanks are taking huge hits and you need that spell haste. Those heals have got to land or else your healing assignment is dead because you can’t keep up with it.

Bottom line

If you’re still unsure of which meta gem to choose, I would suggest picking up the spell cast gem first. Odds are, you may not have enough gear with the necessary sockets for effects to activate. Go with that for now then as your gear progresses, make the shift towards the Insightful Earthstorm Diamond (mana regen). You can’t heal without mana. Always remember that.

Sadly I’m still using the Headdress of the High Potentate which doesn’t even have any slots. I’m waiting for Vashj to surrender a token so I can finally replace it.

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+81 Healing vs Spellsurge

A special big worldofmatticus.com shoutout to Netherlord who was kind enough to give me the recipe for Spellsurge at no cost at all. Thank you VERY much sir and welcome to Carnage!

Here is an important question that needs to be answered. You’ve hit 70 and you just got that ultimate 1H mace or that ultimate healing staff. What enchant do I put on it? Do I want an additional +81 Healing or Spellsurge? Neither of them are cheap to begin with but both will really benefit healers. But, let the analysis begin.

81 Healing

• 8 Large Prismatic Shard
• 8 Primal Water
• 8 Primal Life

This enchant increases the amount of healing you can potentially do by 81. It’s sold by a vendor (Almaador, at the center of town) and requires you to be revered to learn how to perform the enchant.

Spellsurge

• 12 Large Prismatic Shard
• 10 Greater Planar Essence
• 20 Arcane Dust

This enchant offers a unique mechanic in that it does not offer a constant benefit like 81 Healing does. It’s a random world drop so you might have a better chance of winning the lottery instead of getting it. The tooltip suggests that it has a 3% chance of proccing the effect which provides 100 mana over a period of 10 seconds to your entire party. But for the effect to occur, your party members need to be within 30 yards of each other.

Analysis

So which is the better one to get? 81 Healing will increase your healing by that amount. Assuming you heal for 1000 points without any modifiers, then 1000 casts of that same flash heal will net about 1,081,000 healed. But Spellsurge restores mana over time. Furthermore the effect stacks from multiple players who have that enchant on their weapon. So, if 5 players had it and all 5 procced, you’re looking at 500 mana over 10 seconds to everybody in the party. I’ve seen on the WoW Forums as well as WoWWiki that the actual proc percentage is approximately 15%. If you’re in the raid environment, it wouldn’t work if all 25 players had it. It applies strictly to your party within the raid. It’s important to keep in mind that Spellsurge has a hidden cooldown of approximately 50 seconds. That means that if you kept spamming any kind of spell, the Spellsurge effect can only happen once every 50 seconds assuming it does proc.

Ideally, I’d be able to test this in a lab setting with three groups: An experimental group with all 81 healing, an experimental group with all Spellsurge, and control group. But alas, I don’t have access to such resources.

The Argument for 81 Healing

If you don’t see yourself raiding very often or if you are placed in a group that does not have a whole lot of other casters in it, then you will want to augment your own heals and add that extra power. Who needs Spellsurge if you’re going to be the poor guy who has to sacrifice 81 healing so that everyone else in your party can get that extra mana back?

The Argument for Spellsurge

On the other hand, as you progress through the game you will begin to encounter bosses that will test your endurance. If you can work with four other spellcasters and agree to get this enchant, your longevity will increase by a lot. You will see a lot of mana returned. More mana means you last longer, right? Utilitarianism is the the concept of the day.

The Middle Ground

Get both. All you really need is two weapons. Don’t forget that you can switch weapons while in combat. So slap Spellsurge on a mace that as mp5 or Spirit or something that helps you regenerate mana. Keep your 81 Healing on the weapon that you use most of the time. If you start running out of gas, switch from your Healing mace to your Spellsurge mace and let the rest of the group know. Now if you really want to be fancy, pick up another mace or staff which has high intellect and put 30 Int on it. Equip it before the encounter so you have a high starting mana pool. Once you get a spell or two off, switch back to your healing mace. You will essentially be getting an extra flash heal or two. That’s my personal opinion. Be flexible, adapt your enchants to your needs.

Anyways, back to Fathomlord now. We were able to take down the Shaman and the Priest. Pretty good progress… 3 more hours left. I love my macbook. It lets me blog and raid at the same time. Doing it in windowed mode will lag. I’m tempted to install WoW on it and see how it performs, but I purchased my Macbook purely for academic reasons.