Personally I started to go for SPR primarily. Would have put everything into it, if I could redo it again, but I am sitting now at 100 int and 15XSPR.
Stoneskin is simply broken, with a 150 spirit stonewall I could run around lvl 258 zones and block tons of hits to finish my exploration as a lvl 130.
There is something different it brings though, a blocked hit will not CC you. So if you are fighting CCing mobs (e.g. world bosses) a single non-block can send you flying or set you up to die. With 158x spirit I still have gaps here and there, but not many in e.g. demon prison. However if a low spirit priest presses stoneskin it is like night and day.
My stoneskin basically makes the party immune to physical damage for 35 seconds out of 60. When we think about one of the bigger weaknesses of the chaplain then to me it would be mobs that CC you often. I personally don’t run around with c2, but once I start being CCed it is annoying as hell and my dps plummets because of it.
Not every mob sends you flying so I think saying int does a lot more damage than pure spirit should be taken into consideration with a grain of salt.
Yes rank increases int by 10% per, but currently we are looking at ~500 int so the most more per hit you get (and in reality that is just on aspergillum) is 350.
To give a little damage example with arde for me and no chaplain yet:
170 per damage line for blessing, 80 per sacrament
3 Lines => Autoattack, Cafrisun, Sacrament
My physical autoattack hits for 1 since I didn’t find a mainhand worthy enough to rightclick + 170 + 80 + 153 for arde dagger, cafrisun lane is largely the same as is the sacrament lane.
So if I were to conjure an aspergillum lane being high int would still only add 350 damage to that - with max level int right now. Yes per hit, yes aoe, but that is the damage increase you are mostly looking at. You aren’t throwing your heals around later for damage.