Questions, comments, aches or pains?

Hello again! Hoping this will only turn out to be a quick update, and a question to be posed.

On the glove front, I've got all the mats, including sun motes! I'm a very lucky Shaman, when I announced my primal farming spree, 4 of my guildies pitched in to help farm and even donate primals from their own stocks, I'm more grateful then I can say, that would have been SUCH a long ordeal without them. We did a Sunwell Plateau trash run and got 6 'motes, which the guild bank gave to me, as I was the only one who had all my mats. Swoot! Now I'm just waiting for the tailor who can make it.... the only one Ally side... to log on. Guh. On the gear front, that leaves me to farming honor for the two new S4 pieces I need. Not actual arean gear, mind you, thank god. Just the bracers and neck piece. The bracers need a, i think its 1525 arena rating. I put together a 3v3 that I respec resto for. I'll prolly make some posts on my experience as a pvp-healer. Lets face it, pve healing isnt that involved. More involved then what I do, but I'm not sure I could put together an interesting post about healing in SSC. I've done it, more times then I'd like to admit, as I'm the first person to respec if we're down a healy bit, but I just don't think I can make it interesting.

I mean, I could hell about max heal crits, but thats not as fun as massive 5k chain lightnings.

I've seen those. Before the coeficent nerf, when I was only in T5/ZA badge gear, I actually was seeing 4k crits. Then they nerfed me, and in my gear now a 4.5k crit is damn impressive.

Thats all on the gear front, for now. I do have a question to pose, and I REALLY want oppinions. A friend suggested needing only 35% crit, which is even lower then our occasionally misguided friends at Elitist Jerks suggest. My personal philosophy has alway been upwards of 42%. But he made a good point for a lower crit rating. Before the "change" to clearcasting, every crit would put up the buff decreasing the mana cost of your next spell by 100%. It was a beautiful thing, and the crux of our very existence. The whole reason for a massive 50% or even more crit rating. More crit directly meant more clearcasting. Hokay. The talent was changed. On each crit, your next two spells have their mana cost reduced by 40%. Does this mean we need roughly half the crit we needed before? My thought was, fuck it. Keep the huge crit rating. Clearcasting will be up almost constantly. Right? Well, yes. The buff is up almost constantly. My Shaman compadre points out, that second charge of clearcasting is almost always being "wasted".

Spell 1 crits
x2 clearcasting buff
Cast spell 2 (spell uses 1 charge of clearcasting, 1 charge remains.)
Spell 2 crits
x2 clearcasting

Theres our problem, as he puts it. That second clearcasting charge was never used. In reality, does it matter? I don't really think so. Thats not what he's getting at. If, say, you dropped your crit chance to a number where critting twice in a row was not the norm, you would use both charges of clearcasting. Replace all the crit you drop with spell damage. The idea is, you don't lose precious mana efficiency, but gain spell damage. Spell damage that will directly increase your DPS and damage done. Its an interesting idea. I would love to test it out, but I don't have the gold to change all my gems, let alone change them all back if the idea flopped.

So my call for opinions! Please, I'd like to hear what people think about the above crit rating proposition. I'll be more tempted to try it if it isn't just one person poking me to try it. Doesnt even need to be opinions from other shamans. Any decent player could grasp the idea and give me their 2 copper *cough Surania cough*

Cheers!