A few people have seen me use Evocation during Battlegrounds after I am oom, or even in Ironforge after conjuring up some food for someone. They would ask:

“Why do you switch weapons for Evocation? They changed it from Spirit base to a % of your total mana!”.

I link them my Evoc weapons and most of the time I get a response of, “Oooh… I see, thanks!” other times it is a, “WTF you n00b! Why would you enchant it with Intellect!?”. Sometimes I explain, sometimes I don’t even bother. Depends on the mood I’m in I guess, or if they leave out the “WTF you n00b!” part. Well here it goes…

Before Patch 2.3, Evocation used to return mana based on how much Spirit you had. This gave a few Mages the idea of carrying around a Spirit Staff and Wand to switch to during Evocation. In Patch 2.3, Blizzard changed it so that Evocation now gave you a percentage of your total Mana. No more need to carry Spirit weapons. Now you need to carry Intellect weapons!

Why Intellect? Now that it is based off your total mana, by increasing your total mana before you use Evocation, the more mana you will receive.

Lets take a look at Evocation. While channeling this spell, you gain 60% of your total mana over 8 sec. Gain 15% of total mana every 2 sec.

That means if you are at 9,000 total mana, when you Evoc, you will gain 5,400 mana back. If you are at 10,000 total mana, you will gain 6,000 mana back.

What gives you more mana? Intellect of course. Each point of Intellect will give you 15 mana. So increasing your Intellect +50 by swapping out weapons, will give you 750 more mana.

My Intellect weapons: [Amani Divining Staff] with 3 x 8 Intellect Gems and +30 Intellect enchant, and [Vengeful Gladiator's Touch of Defeat]. They gave me +62 Intellect (930 mana) over my DPS weapons. You can use any weapon which has more Intellect than your DPS weapons.

We’ll use Utada in our example: