So, now I'm level 89

You're taking GC's post out of context. He said that any gear without hit is healer gear when leveling. He said that healers and tanks shouldn't worry about itemization (so long as they're using useful stats--i.e. caster stats other than hit for healers) because normal dungeons won't be tuned for min-maxing.

Yeah, just to be clear:

1) Spirit doesn't mean "this is for healers" the same way Strength means "this is for plate-wearers." We assume healers will have some pieces with Spirit and some without, depending on their regen needs. If a boss drops cloth with haste and mastery, and you say "there is no healer gear on this boss" we are going to respectfully disagree. That was my point.

2) On the other hand, if you just can't find any Spirit gear anywhere, that would be a problem.

3) It's likewise a problem if say mail, leather or plate-wearers can find Spirit much easier than cloth. That shouldn't be the case, but bugs happen so we'll take a look at it.

4) All healers should have about the same longevity, but that includes all of their sources of mana and the cost of their spells. This isn't an easy thing to compare just by looking at e.g. Meditation.

5) You should have plenty of mana to heal level up dungeons and even heroics. You might need to reforge or be on the look out for a few more Spirit pieces, but overall you shouldn't feel that every pull and boss fight is a nail-biting mana battle. (Mana will matter a lot more for raiding and challenge modes.) We want level 90 in blues to feel a little easier than level 85 in blues, so please let us know if that's not the case.

6) It's possible there are bad points in progression before level 90, because we haven't looked at that as much yet. If you have just hit say level 88 and haven't gotten any new level 88 gear yet and run a dungeon, it's possible mana return is lower than intended. Feedback on that is also useful. Do keep in mind that at this stage you might run into a boss that is horribly overtuned or just bugged. Just because you can't keep a tank alive doesn't necessarily mean that your mana needs to be massively buffed. It could mean we need to adjust the encounter. That said, the intent is not that you sit around idle much of the time, waiting for mana or too scared to waste a heal that isn't 100% critical.

Besides, he's not wrong. If Blizzard is so butthurt about him and others being snippy for dealing with such outrageous situations, maybe they could do a better job with testing these things themselves before we have to grind our teeth and then be genuinely afraid that these things may actually be "working as intended"? It's not his job to coddle, and he could be far more "smug" than this. At least it's constructive, unlike your post...

Beta is going to be buggy and unpolished- very buggy and unpolished. It may not be a very enjoyable experience. It's not for everyone, and if you don't enjoy content in a half-implemented state, you might have a better experience waiting until the final product, which we will try our hardest to be as bug-free and polished as possible.

If you enjoy offering feedback before things are set in stone (insofar as they ever are in this game) and you don't mind seeing the inner workings of the sausage factory that is game development, then beta may be more fun for you. :)

P.S. I like to think I am less smug than snarky.

Sausage factory? I want some sausage. What kind of sausage do you have?

SPIRIT PORCUPINE SAUSAGE.

Note that I have about 10K spellpower and a little over 7K mana regen. When I think about it, 10K spellpower is what I had in epic 85 gear with about 6K mana regen. Taking into account the huge mana pool increase at 89 (250K versus my ~132K live at 85), this is quite troubling.

I'm looking at the Townlong quest rewards, just because that's what I happen to have in front of me, and it looks like you would get about 1800 Spirit from the ilevel 429 gear in that zone. How much Spirit do you have at the moment?

I'm wondering if part of what is going on is that mana pool and spell costs jump instantly when you level, but regen requires you to gear back up to that level. It's the same phenomenon that happens with say crit or haste but it may feel worse with Spirit.

Like Tiriel, I cringe when I queue for Mogo'shan. I'm thinking that place is overtuned versus the gear we have. I can only cover so many player mistakes. (Yeah, I know. They need to get out of the fire and all that.)

Entirely possible. We ran it the other day, and the final boss did way too much damage from traps. The mechanics have changed a little bit because of that, and of course it's hard for me to remember which version of the dungeon you have without just jumping into beta myself and doing the dungeon.

Again, level up dungeons have to be easy because of the simple fact that if you die much at all, you're just going to run the quests instead, given that even the best rewards from a level up dungeon won't last more than a few hours. If dungeons are inefficient, players will just skip them. At max level it's a different story obviously.

That is exactly what it should be balanced around, healing in that gear when you have crap regen with crap quest gear. So you should be able to heal brewery in 333 gear that you get in Twilight Highlands because that's the previous step right? Without basically any enchants and anything really going for you.

If that's the case, which it is, obviously the dungeons are going to have to take a small step down in their difficulty scale.

Exactly. If you can't heal those dungeons yet, then there is a problem on our end. Some of you are acting like the system is fundamentally flawed and can't be fixed. It can be, fairly easily.

It would be helpful to hear a few numbers from you guys, such as character level, average ilevel and current Spirit. It doesn't need to be super precise.

This is a very good question. Having to swap specs every time you turn in a quest to game your rewards would be very cumbersome.

1) You shouldn't need a lot of Spirit to heal a level up dungeon. A Ret paladin with a lot of Strength gear who swaps Holy should still be a tolerable healer.

2) There are several redundant quest rewards. If you already have the shoulders for your primary spec, take the ones for your off-spec. This is particularly true of Four Winds - Krasarang which are the same level, and Townlong - Dread Wastes, which are the same level.

3) We offer choices in gear (say healer vs. nuker) for many quests, typically end-cappers, blue rewards, weapons and trinkets. In the final zones, there are even more of those since we figure players who level as DPS may start thinking about their end-game healer or tanking gear at that time.

4) If all else fails, there are vendors scattered about with decent green gear. If you have been leveling as Enhance and want to try Resto, you can get a good enough head start by hitting the vendors. Again, the leveling up content where you would want to heal should not feel dangerous at all, especially once you've seen the bosses once.

Nobody is arguing that healers need a lot of Spirit to function. It is our intention that you want a lot of Spirit and can get a lot of Spirit. You should not need Spirit in every slot.

Feedback is very mixed in this thread, so trying to distill it down to one of the following would be more useful than more posts of "I need Spirit," which doesn't give us much information. What we are trying to ascertain is which of the following is true:

1) You have Spirit on nearly every piece and still can't function.
2) You want more Spirit but can't find any.
3) You don't have Spirit on every piece, so you want more.
4) You want so much Spirit that you never run OOM.

Points 1 and 2 are of the most concern to us, but it's still important to distinguish which problem is occurring. Is the problem acquiring Spirit, or is the problem that even with Spirit on many pieces, you run out of mana too frequently?

In this case, it's probably also more relevant how many heals you can cast before running out of mana just standing around alone somewhere, because when healing a dungeon, we can't easily extract from your feedback alone whether the encounters cause too much damage or whether the damage is appropriate and it's the HPS or longevity that are low.

After reading more of this feedback and looking at the zones, we're concerned that there aren't enough quest rewards with Spirit on them. We are leaning towards offering more, as choices, so that players who feel like their Spirit is low can choose to have more.