Read em’ and weep boys. I don’t foresee this being a major problem since with the changes coming to 3.1 it appears every raid will have the replenishment buff ticking mana back. About the only stipulation here is that talents healers are already taking will now be just about mandatory… which doesn’t make a difference because they already have them… my head hurts. (source)
As we have suggested, we have become concerned that mana regeneration is currently too powerful, especially for healers. We want players to have to keep an eye on mana. We don’t want you to go out of mana every fight, but running out of mana should be a very real risk for sloppy playing or attempting content that you aren’t yet ready for. When mana regeneration is trivial then certain parts of the game break down – classes that offer Replenishment are devalued, stats that offer mana regeneration are devalued, and spells that are efficient are neglected in preference to spells with high throughput.
Here are a list of changes you are likely to see in 3.1. They will be available to try out on the PTR. Mana regeneration is somewhat technical, so please bear with us.
- Regeneration while not casting (outside of the “five second rule”) will be decreased. We think that (1) the ability to cast heal over time spells and then sit back and (2) benefitting from a clearcasting proc that also gets you out of the five second rule both provide too much mana regeneration, even over short time periods.
- To make this change, we are reducing mana regeneration granted by Spirit across the board. However we are also boosting the effects of talents such as Meditation that increase regeneration while casting. The net result should be that your regeneration while casting will stay about the same, but your not-casting regeneration will be reduced. This change will have little impact on dps casters, since they are basically always casting.
- The specific talents and abilities being boosted are: Arcane Meditation, Improved Spirit Tap, Intensity, Mage Armor, Meditation, Pyromaniac and Spirit Tap. Yes this makes these “mandatory” talents even more mandatory, if such a thing is possible.
- Since paladins rely less on Spirit as a mana-regeneration stat, we have to address them in other ways. We don’t want to change Illumination or Replenishment. However, we are going to increase the healing penalty on Divine Plea from 20% to 50%. Divine Plea was originally intended to help Protection and Retribution paladins stay full on mana. It should be a decision for Holy paladins, not something that is automatically used every cooldown.
- In addition, we are also changing the way Spiritual Attunement works. In situations with a large amount of outgoing raid damage, as well as in PvP, this passive ability was responsible for more mana regeneration than we would like. We want to keep the necessary benefit it grants to tanking Protection paladins, while making it less powerful for Holy paladins in PvP or raid encounters with a lot of group damage.
- We are also taking a close look at clearcasting procs themselves. One likely outcome is to change them to an Innervate-like surge of mana so that the net benefit is the same, but healers won’t shift to out-of-casting regeneration so often.
- We balance around the assumption that even 10-player groups have someone offering Replenishment. To make this even easier on players we are likely to offer this ability to additional classes, as well as make sure that existing sources of Replenishment are more equitable.
- These changes are ultimately being done to bring the different healing classes more in line with each other as well as to give the encounter team more leeway when designing encounters, who can balance with these new mana regeneration numbers in mind. In a world with infinite healer mana, the only way to challenge healers is with increasingly insane amount of raid damage, so that global cooldowns become the limiting factor since mana fails to be. An example is the Eredar Twins in late Sunwell. We weren’t necessarily happy with that model, and this change hopefully allows us to move towards giving healing a more deliberate and thoughtful pace rather than frenetic spam.
/sigh … this is gonna suck… now as a healer youre going to have to sit and drink after each fight, heal everyone to lazy to sit and eat, sit and drink again, heal the warlocks that life tap back to full mana cause theyre too lazy to drink, sit and drink AGAIN… meanwhile everyone elses is ready to go so they start pulling again while you have 10% mana… oh joy i cant wait
As a solution, I think they should let us drink more than one pot per fight again. Then at least I can chain chug potions again.
Also, this will possibly make mp5 gear more valuable than spirit gear. Obviously we have to see how it all plays out, but so far, I’m not a happy camper. Warlocks, you can start drinking like the rest of us.
Also, if they are going to make spirit less valuable for mana regen and all things calculated off it then why in the mage changes are they talking about making spirit valuable for them? /boggle
Lames, I’ma miss my devine plea
Upcoming Lfg channel talk, “LF1M Mage dps Gtg Ulduar” wondering why? The food.. you will not be able to raid without mages anymore, or perhaps even do simple heroic. or even dailies without spending a few 1000g on drinks everyweek?
who wants to pay 8g a stack of honey mint tea?
blizz thoughts “hmmm… healers seem to be trying to do dailies, slowly ofcorse because it takes them around 30 mins per kill, lets make it so after that 30 mins they can’t kill another one until they deminish returns by spending it all on drinks?”
blizz guy..”Sure why not! and lets give some more buffs to DKs and give feral druids some buff for no reasons…? lol!”
and have life tap 1 shots the warlock so they don’t even think about using it, and health funnel will instantly RED! their armor.
on the life tap thing. i dont mind tossing a life tapping warlock a heal when were chain pulling trash and not really stopping to drink.. it just bugs me when everyone else stops to drink and they life tap and then just stand there at 3% hp waiting for a heal while everyone else is filled up and ready to start..
can some one explain the “regen outside of the 5 sec rule” i know its when you stop casting you go to increased regen. but how’s that differ from regen when not casting? can some one fill me in..
Warlocks can’t train the “drink” ability sorry ;/
I guess this is an okay change to try to get things back to how they used to be in vanilla WoW, where healers actually had to pay attention and be efficient. My undergeared restoration druid went into Naxx last night and did not drop below 90% mana during boss fights with the exception of Patchwerk where I used innervate. So this change is understandable, although I doubt it will cause too many problems.
I do have to say one good thing will come out of it. Paladin healing will actually take skill! No longer can they shoot holy light out of their asses and be top on healing and 60% overhealing. That means you Keki.
I’s gonna be oomkin again
Time to macro my drink button again.
Stonekee Quote:
can some one explain the “regen outside of the 5 sec rule” i know its when you stop casting you go to increased regen. but how’s that differ from regen when not casting? can some one fill me in..
Never played a priest have you?
Mana regen from not casting is using the “5 second rule”. Basically if you use no mana, after 5 seconds you start to regen your mana at your out of combat rate. Which for priests was very high since holy priests would stack spirit since it gave mana regen, bonus healing, and mp5 (with meditation). Spirit was useful! So basically priests would be dancing in and out of casting all the time. Stopcasting is one way…charge your greater heal, but if you don’t need it, stop it and start again. You haven’t used mana, so you are ticking away time towards your 5 second rule and will restore mana. We’d also watch for our clearcasting (no mana coast greater heal) so that we could overlap it with perhaps inner focus (no mana on next spell cast – 2min CD) for even MORE time out of casting and restore large chunks of mana while fighting. If you were very effective at this you’d have enough mana for when you needed it. With the buff in spirit, we got even more benefit, but some people stopped dancing the 5 second rule all together and were able to still stay full of mana while continuing to cast.
I haven’t had to dance the 5-sec rule nearly as much anymore. But as a result healing was less stressful. I could focus on healing better, more effectively without stop casting or delaying a renew on a life-tapping lock because it would reset my 5-sec timer. Healing feels smoother to me, and more fun, when I don’t have to dance the 5-seconds.
In all honesty, I enjoy healing now. But if they change it, I worry I’ll just switch to one of my easy mode DPS classes. Because let’s all just be honest. Being DPS is FAR FAR FAR less stressful than being a tank or a healer during a battle. If they make healing crazy difficult, screw it, it won’t be worth it. And maybe, Elgar will go shadow… *gasp*