The Egotistical Priest
An irreverent and opinionated discussion of the many classes
in the World of Warcraft gaming universe.
Five Second Rule
by Vonya
You will, in reading about spellcasting in WoW, hear a great many terms thrown about like cheap rose petals at a wedding.
“FSR” “Five Second Rule” “5SR” “Regen” “Spirit”
The first three all refer to the same thing, but understanding all of them and how they apply to your class is imperative to being an effective priest.
Let’s take them one at a time, shall we?
Regen
Regen - or, more specifically mana regen - is the ability and speed at which you regenerate mana after casting a spell.
That little blue bar beneath your health is your mana bar. Every time you cast a spell, you spend mana on it. Obviously that mana has to return in some fashion - this is known as Regen.
Mana Regen can be affected by a number of different things - everyone regenerates over time.
Health Regen is affected by whether or not you are in combat. If you are in combat, your health regen is nothing - you do not spontaneously regain health in battle. Outside of combat, you regen your health at a slow but steady pace, even if you don’t stop to eat or bandage or what-have-you.
MANA Regen, on the other hand, is not affected by whether or not you are in battle, but instead is ruled over by the Five Second Rule (FSR). I’ll go into that in more detail later, but for now just be aware that mana regen is not tied to health regen, nor is it determined by battle.
Spirit
Spirit is one of the multitude of stats available on gear. As a matter of fact, it’s one of the favored stats to offer - unfortunately, it’s nearly useless for just about everyone. “Of the Whale” is laughably referred to as “Of the Disenchant” in my guild - and for good reason. It’s dummy gear.
Spirit, the stat, is misleading in many many ways. According to the official WoW site, Spirit “increases Health regeneration rates out of combat and Mana regeneration rates when not casting spells.”
First of all, in absolutely no way does the “health regeneration rate out of combat” benefit any class more than some other stat might. For anyone who does not have mana, Spirit is at best a laughable stat to strive for. And even for casters, you’ll find a general feeling of pity and derision directed toward this stat.
To make a long story short (yes, yes, every time I post I end up finding some tangential post that needs to be written) spirit is useful only for its capabilities with mana regen, and even then it is really only priests that worry about it. All other classes tend to find other stats more useful. And even priests are finding the stat less and less useful.
In the world of the Burning Crusade, Mana Per 5 is king and Spirit is just the irritating cousin who shows up to all the birthday parties without an invitation.
Spirit, you see, is ruled over by the dreaded FSR.
Five Second Rule
Okay, okay. I’ll get into the meat and potatoes of the post now.
The actual FSR is actually rather simple in design.
For five seconds after you spend mana on anything, you do not naturally regenerate mana.
This means that your base character mana regen and any spirit upgrades you have through gear or buffs are completely useless during this time.
Five seconds.
Doesn’t sound like a whole lot, but it can be an eternity when you’re inside an instance or raid. And in truth, if you aren’t aware of the FSR, it can really hogtie you into a situation you aren’t even aware of.
This is why casters have wands. Wanding costs no mana, and thus does not trigger the FSR. Any trinkets or talents or abilities you have which render a spell “free” of mana cost will also not trigger the FSR.
It is only the spending of mana which causes the FSR.
As a side note, I’m currently playing musical addons, trying to find something I like. Pitbull is a Unit Frames addon and it has a little flash of light that creeps across my mana bar after I cast - a visual indicator of when my FSR is up. It’s a nice, if difficult-to-find feature.
But, back to our story. Mana regen from spirit is completely nullified during the first five seconds after you spend mana.
If you start a spell and abort early, the FSR is not triggered.
I think you get the idea.
The downside of the FSR is pretty obvious - you can’t chain-cast anything.
If you cast spells over and over again, you never actually make it out of the FSR. You never start to regen mana from spirit, and your mana pool will dry up quicker than chocolate at a bridal shower.
If, however, you manage to cast a few spells all in a clump and then are able to sit back and wait for MORE THAN five seconds, you’ll be in mana heaven. One of my favorite tactics, back before the expansion, was to finish a gHeal off with an HoT - this gave the tank some “padding” and me a few extra seconds before they needed to be healed again, during which time I would usually wand to help out a little with damage. (A VERY little, I know, but it gave me something to do). I so rarely ran out of mana back then that I had a repuation for healing some of the fastest instance runs this side of the pecos. Warriors LOVED me.
Nowadays, of course, I’m spending most of my healing time INSIDE the FSR. I don’t have a chunk of time available to sit back and regen mana, I have to be tossing out heal after heal after heal. I can’t remember the last time I used my wand for anything other than stats.
The Upside
The good thing about the FSR is that spirit is actually a really powerful regen tool. If you manage to stay outside of the FSR, you’ve got it made. There is no stat that comes close to beating the mana regen of spirit, so long as it’s outside FSR.
If you can manipulate your spellcasting so that you have some goodly gaps before you start casting again, you’ll get a lot of benefit from spirit.
The Downside
You don’t actually get to spend much time outside the FSR, and it’s not really all that easy to manipulate. Particularly in the expansion content.
This is why everyone is saying that Mana Per 5 (MP5) is a much more valuable stat for priests than spirit. As things stand…it is.
Shadow priests don’t spend much (if any) of their time wanding and healing priests are having to deal with a greater amount of incoming damage to both tanks and bystanders - there are more AOEs than ever before, more cleaves, more exploding distance damage spells, more everything.
Inside of battle, priests no longer spend their time outside of the FSR. This is a cold hard fact.
So what can you do?
If you are a low-level priest, Spirit is still the most valuable mana regen stat for you. Not only does low-level gear not offer much in the way of MP5, you’ll be able to have lulls between heals, you’ll be able to stop casting and start wanding to do some pretty snazzy damage. You’ll be able to utilize the FSR to your advantage.
If you are a high-level priest, you should probably weigh your gear choices more heavily toward MP5 than spirit. But that doesn’t mean you can ignore the rule - even doing your best to ignore spirit when weighing gear, you’ll end up with a decent amount of it, and you will STILL benefit greatly from being outside the FSR as much as you can.
Summary
Five seconds after you spend mana, you do not regen mana from spirit.
Try to avoid chain-casting spells and keeping yourself constantly within the restrictive boundaries of the Five Second Rule.
Another Note
I want to note here that there are other things to weigh when selecting spirit. Talents that give a bonus to healing based on spirit, for example. This is intended to be more of a post on the Five Second Rule than on the spirit stat - but I can’t very well discuss FSR without going into SOME detail on spirit.
Also, I apologize for the lateness of the post. Generally I intend to post in the wee hours of the morning, but sometimes work intervenes and I am necessarily distracted.
July 31st, 2007
The Serenity add-on has an indicator for the FSR…. but you actually have to look at the wierd bubble. I don’t like that add-on very much but I’ve considered installing it again just to get that feature. I don’t like a lot of clutter on my screen and if you get the darn thing small enough to not be in the way, it’s too small to be usable if your in a hurry. If you’ve got something that displays the FSR in a nice clean way, please let me know.
July 31st, 2007
X-Perl Unit Frames also has a little moving bar to show you how deep into the 5sr you are. I hear it is less customizable than Pitbull, but more featureful. I really like it, myself; it feels like it was designed just for me.
August 1st, 2007
I’ve not heard of the Serenity addon - but it sounds like I wouldn’t enjoy it much either. I’m very much a minimalist when it comes to my UI - the WoW world is so gorgeous that it rankles me whenever I have just a tiny square of uncorrupted screen space in the middle.
Pitbull (and from what Mel says, X-Perl as well) both display it very nicely, with zero lost space. It’s just a white bar that moves across your mana bar….kinda like a “casting” indicator. When it reaches the end of your mana bar, you’re now inside the FSR.
=] It’s rather nice, though I’ve not yet decided if I like Pitbull enough to keep it.
@Mel
I was using X-Perl before and it’s got a huge problem that I’ve not been able to fix, despite the fact that I love the addon. It won’t show me changes in pet health. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve lost a pet because I didn’t even realize they were getting hit, or how many times it’s shown perfectly healthy pets with -214 million health.
Aside from that, I love it. Do you have any idea why it might be going wrong?
August 1st, 2007
I had the pet problem before I got Perl. It turned out to be an addon. I disabled them one at a time to figure out what it was and turned out to be SmartDebuff. I use SmartBuff to keep PW:F, Divine Spirit, etc always active, but didn’t like SmartDebuff (which despite it’s name is suposed to be for healing the correct rank of a spell w/o overhealing, didn’t work as far as I could tell) I just turned it off in game and didn’t disable the addon from the startup screen. When I disabled it, the problem went away. Your problem could be a bad interaction between another addon, grab a hunter and give it the ‘ole college try.
August 1st, 2007
@Galadria
Hmmm, that’s a good point. I had a similar issue with addon interaction once.
*ponders*
August 1st, 2007
There have been bugs in several WoW versions related to pets. There have been times where pet health was relayed as a percentage instead of a number (3256%) and it wouldn’t surprise me to have had times where you couldn’t get health updates, although no other unit frames would have been working.
Of course, X-Perl sometimes has its own bugs, but it’s updated reasonably frequently, so if you have a bug in your version, it’ll probably be fixed soon. I recommend you give it another try, as it seems to be working well at this time.
August 3rd, 2007
I’m still a big fan of spirit, even at lvl 70. But finding it in game is like pulling teeth! Everything has mana/5, hardly any gear has spirit. There are no decent spi enchants and the best spi gem you can get is +8. Meh.
For raiding, I really really like spirit. I spend alot of time out of the fsr. I normally heal a single target (we let the trees do the raid healing) so I’m constantly casting gheal, cancelling it when not needed. With good use of clearcasting and inner focus, you can really stretch the regen.
For heroics, mana/5 is key. There is no time for regen with you’re spamming your highest rank gheal over and over.
And spirit scales with talents very nicely. There, that was my plug for more spirit.
August 3rd, 2007
@Malva
Ah, that assumes that you’re not doing the bulk of the raid healing though.
For me, I tend to do most of the healing in the raid. I’ll have the offtank and the rest of the raid as my responsibility for healing, so I’m constantly tossing out HoTs and Flash Heals to anyone caught in AOE damage.
Without someone else to pick up the slack of main healer, I’m never outside the FSR.
Though it is VERY true that if you (on a personal and situational basis) are spending your time outside the FSR, you should be stacking up spirit like nobody’s business.
August 24th, 2007
[...] there 40 people (25 skilled players and 15 afk players), Priests could get away with following the five second rule. With the decrease in raid sizes, I’m going to make the ultimate no duh statement and say [...]
October 4th, 2007
Hello Ego,
First of all i’d like to say that this is a lovely blog that you have and i have enjoyed reading every one of your posts. I’ve played a holy priest in almost all my time playing World of Warcraft. I’ve experienced almost every pain and joy from Blizzard’s experimentation with class balancing.
I believe for now that priests are suffering from lack of mana regen capabilites except for the Mp5 from gear and the meditation talent that converts 15% of your OOC regen into FSR regen. However the latter seems negligible if you don’t have much spirit in the first place. And we all know that is really trumped by Druid’s Innervate, Shaman’s Mana Tide (Although beneficial to us as well, it is still in the hands of the shaman) and lastly the paladin’s godly mana regen which leaves us in the dust. Unfortunately, this also has lead to me being pushed away or be put on reserve in raids, as my guild tends to favor the other healing classes more than priests.. =o [
I’d post the rumored 2.3 patch notes that said the meditation talent will be increased to 30% which would make spirit gear much more viable than before (or maybe a balance between mp5 and spirit, which i’ve always done and loved) but i can’t seem to find it.
I’m specced in Holy/disc which lets me have the spirit buff talent and the Improved one which will convert 5% of anyone spirit that i give the buff to be added to their Spell damage and healing. This buff also gives the Spiritual guidance talent in the Holy more power.
I’m trying to prove anything on my post, just wanted to give something more to think about between spirit and mp5 in FSR. As i believe that spirit be a very very powerful stat to a priest when balanced correctly. Not that i’m saying there is a right way.
I’d like to point out as well that Karazhan gear and most 25-man gear now has spirit and mp5 built into them so we don’t really have to try and balance between the two(if you are planning to do such), although there are still items that try to specialize between the two.
I think that’s all i have to say. I’d like to apologize if there are some mistakes that i’ve made in what i’ve said and for my limited English as it’s not my first language. I wish u all good fortunes in your adventures
October 9th, 2007
@Xane
Thank you!
I agree, and am looking forward to 2.3 as well. But since nothing’s set in stone yet, I won’t report on it till it actually happens. =] Too many disappointments in the past.
Spirit is useful to a priest, but not as useful as it should be, IMO. MP5 should not be weighed as heavily for us as it is.
The patch should fix that, and you’re right about some of the higher end raid gear being more balanced.
October 19th, 2007
[...] more information on mana regeneration and the 5 Second Rule, be sure to visit Egotistical Priest and Priestly [...]
October 21st, 2007
Yeah, Its hard to be out of the FSR when are you chain healing stuff.
Althou its possible in kara with 2 extra healers healing the Main tank and raid thou it may lower down the DPS by abit =)
November 4th, 2007
What about 2.3 Meditation @ 30%?
November 5th, 2007
At this time, when I’m in Kara, I am ~70% IRSR when part of a 2-heal crew, and ~60% when part of a 3-heal crew. Hold that thought…
Assuming no other bonuses (and there are some), 1 point of spirit is 0.625 mp5 OFSR. Meditation currently gives 15% of that IFSR, which is 0.09375 mp5 IFSR. Assuming 2.3’s change to meditation continues to be 30% IFSR, that will be 0.1875 mp5 IFSR.
Knowing these numbers I can calculate MY spirit:mp5 ratio - that is, how much spirit do I need to match the mana regen of mp5 gear.
For 2-man, I regen IFSR 70% of the time and OFSR 30% of the time, or:
(0.7 * 0.09375) + (0.3 * 0.625) = .253125 mp5. That means I need ~3.95 spirit to match 1 mp5.
For 3-man, it’s (0.6 * 0.09375) + (0.4 * 0.625) = 0.30625, which means ~3.27 spirit per mp5.
At this time and ignoring (for simplicity) other spirit factors, my nominal trade is 3.5 spirit per mp5.
Assuming meditation goes to 30%, those numbers will change to 3.14 spirit/mp5 for 2-heal, and 2.76 spirit/mp5 for 3-heal. This means my tradeoff will go to ~3 spirit per mp5.
Since gear tradeoff is currently around 2.5 spirit per mp5, I’m still going to be slightly better off choosing mp5 over spirit.
(Actually, my tradeoff will come closer to 2.75 per due to bonuses to healing AND to the spirit increases due to talents. Which is darn close to even - but not quite.)
December 27th, 2007
I use X-perl for my little FSR bar, it’s right under your charector bar, small, efficient, but very visibul.
February 16th, 2008
[...] the “5 second rule”, of which you can all go bugger off and read about elsewhere. Try here . I’m sure you can find some excellent info there that makes my eyes [...]
March 5th, 2008
All your post rock man, thanks a lot. This helped me a lot with my lowbie priest etc. Keep up the good work
March 19th, 2008
With 2.4 coming in a week or so, Spirit will once again be a hot topic and no longer be the black sheep of the stat family. Might want to peek at the numbers they’ve been calculating on the PTR over at EJ… *if* PTR goes live as-is, this post will need a re-working.
Great blog!
September 8th, 2008
I’m so glad I read this post’s comments! I never knew what the little bar on X-Perl was until you guys said it was the FSR bar. How does it work? I just downloaded X-Perl recently and to me, it just looks like it’s constantly moving, doesn’t seem like a lot of rhyme or reason to me. Thanks for any help you can provide!