We were sitting down as an officer corps the other day just kind of looking over the changes in 3.1.  There’s a million and one of them, but one thing that really struck us was the mana regen.  On paper it doesn’t look that bad.  The theory is sound, but in the end, I think some classes are going to suffer pretty heavily for the change.  Lets look at a few examples shall we?

Boomkin

Now ordinarily I’m not one to scream bloody murder.  However in this instance I might think seriously about it.  This isn’t to say the sky is falling, but jesus what does Blizzard have against boomkin?  I mean seriously… In Burning Crusade there’s a reason they were called OOMkin.  I played one for a while and on the longer fights I always went out of mana.  It was horrid. 

Enter WoTLK… nice.  We have some decent mana regen on our own and if you couple that with a class with replenishment and suddenly you were doing ok.  On longer fights you could still go OOM, but honestly if you saved your innervate, you never went out of mana.  Close, but not quite.  I went into Naxx a few times without replenishment and running out of mana was a serious concern.

I did a little bit of testing after the patch.  My mana regen is cut in half while casting.  That’s gonna hurt.  I forsee having to start changing up what food is there and what gems I’m using.  MP5 is going to become a stat I pretty much require which means…. lots less crit and spell power… which equals… drop in DPS.  Ouch..

Tree Druids

Tree druids are kind of a mixed bag.  Our resident tree druid was ecstatic for certain reasons.  His bread and butter spells hit considerably harder.  Where yesterday a full stack of lifebloom might have ticked for 600, now it ticks for 750.  Nourish almost doubled on how hard it hits.  Suddenly where on certain tanks he might have struggled to keep them up, it was considerably easier. 

However… mana costs on some key items like Lifebloom doubled.  Mana regen which before was laughably high (in other words.. you’ll never ever run out of mana) is suddenly paltry.  Where before casting a rebirth mid fight might have been easy to recover from, suddenly we are in a scenario where burning the rebirth might ensure that you won’t have enough mana to finish the fight.

Resto Shaman

I’ve personally never played one.  However our guild master does and he informed me that cutting his mana regen in half pretty much bent him over the couch and spanked him until he cried like a little girl.  Ok maybe that’s a bit of a exaggeration, but you get the idea.   And of course this is my resto shaman not yours.  Everyone’s experience is different.

The general gist of it though is that generally we run with two tank healers and one of them is covering the raid.  Shaman are ideally suited for this.  However that also means they are casting non stop in most cases.  If you nerf mana regen suddenly instead of a healing stream totem, you have to use a mana stream totem.  Mana tide may not be sufficient to get you all the way back up on mana either.  So now you’re down to restacking your gear etc. 

Apply Pressure Here… Relieve Pressure There

So where does that leave us… to be honest I’m not sure.  But what I do know is that the laziness we experienced in Naxx is over folks.  At a minimum we know the following:

  • Mana regen on all classes has gone down.
  • Healers can’t cast forever anymore. 
  • Replenishment just became a HAVE TO HAVE.  Sure blizzard assumes you have it, but it was doable without it before.

Ten man teams are going to have to recruit for classes with replenishment.  Honestly that means the concept of bring the player not the class is going to at least have to take a back seat to classes with replenishment.  So knowing that, the following is my prediction on what you have to do to deal with mana regen issues:

  1. Play Smarter.  Raid damage is going to be a huge issue.  The raid needs to learn to avoid damage or the healers will never keep up on healing you.  Plus dying is bad.  Don’t expect your friendly neighborhood druid to pick your butt up off the floor.
  2. Don’t take damage you don’t have to.  This applies to raid as well as tanks.  Tanks need to learn to avoid taking damage too.  Where before we might have been able to just stand in the locust swarm in Anubre Khan’s fight, now we may have to learn to kite him.  Taking damage is a bad idea. 
  3. If healer mana isn’t infinite, dps has to learn to DPS harder.  Gone are the days where certain fights could go on for 10-15 minutes.  Healers can’t sustain a fight that long so the DPS has to hit harder and faster.  So where before you might have been able to bring some lower end DPS and survive, now you probably won’t beat certain fights if you bring low end DPS.

What have you seen as a problem with the new mana regen?  Where has it caused you pain?

4 Responses to “3.1, Mana Regen and Your Raid”

  1. 12:35 pm, 16 April, 2009 р.
    PsychoChris says:

    Ran Ulduar10 last night…or tried to. Between hour long instance server crashes(plural), and what I am assuming was a bugged Ignis, its hard to make intellegent assumptions.

    1) Blizzards idea of Naxx10 –> Ulduar 10 gear progression is a complete joke. Our team of i213+ geared folks had to get scrapped off the floor several times from trash. (I forsee hard Uldaur nerf bat coming. It should be tougher but unless we encountered goofy bugs, that was crazy) ‘BiS’ tanks were regularily 2 shotted by trash. Ouch.

    2) Mana regen is a serious problem, but many classes do come with a replenishment talent (make sure your DPS are smart enough to spec into it)

    3) Our Resto Shammy seemed at a loss with mana regen too. I don’t think their regen was “uber” before so the nerf hit them hardest. Priest have a lot of “smart” healz that are cost effective, so they can manage and Druids just have to completley re-learn to heal before we can get a good idea where they stand.

    What confuses me, is that blizzard wanted to stop the constant heal spamming, but they increased raid wide damage (much of which is unavoidable) and severly increased the incoming damage for tanks (druids with less HP/mitigation)

  2. 2:53 pm, 16 April, 2009 р.
    skarrde says:

    Thought Shammies weren’t going to be hit by the bat. I honestly thought we were the benchmark where the others were going to be tested on. Only main change I knew of was that BoW and mana stream weren’t going to stack anymore.

    skarrdes last blog post..Key fob idea is wrong.

  3. 10:10 am, 17 April, 2009 р.
    PsychoChris says:

    Everyone got hit with the “Mana Regen” bat. My understanding is that it was not a class change, but instead a game mechanic change.

  4. 1:45 pm, 23 April, 2009 р.
    Matticus says:

    It was indeed a mechanics change. For Priests and Druids, the Spirit coefficient did get modified.

    As a Disc Priest, I’ve observed in heroic raids that healers were running low (the single digit percentage range) towards the end of fights. This was after cooldowns, pots, and other such devices were used. This appears to be on par with what it should be like. Mana management is now actually something that healers have to pay attention to. We can no longer get away with spamming our 2 or 3 spells while carelessly not caring about our expenditure.

    At the same time, there is now added pressure to the DPS to get the job done within a reasonable amount of time. The amount of time that the raid has to kill a boss depends not just on boss enrages but also on healer mana. The moment healers are out of gas, it’s game over for the entire raid. So it’s a delicate balance. Do you compensate with extra healers to buy more time? Or do you compensate with extra DPS so as healer regen doesn’t become as significant an issue?

    Resto Shamans are currently “the bar” as to where mana regen should be. I haven’t done a lot of 10s on the live realms for Ulduar, but the team and I did our fair share on the PTR and I personally did find it challenging. I had to alter my timing and order of certain cooldowns. So yes, we did indeed suffer. It just means I’ll have to start using MP5 flasks, MP5 food, and altering some enchants and gems for endurance ^^.

    Matticuss last blog post..Paladin Healing in Heroic Ulduar