I know my regen seems overpowered as a druid healer. I’m rarely tossed on the tank because I can effectively raid-heal, top the healing meters, and stay full on mana. Crazy, eh? But look at what’s up behind that. I have stacked about 1300 spirit pre-raid buffs with the Blue Dragon card and the Nobles Greatness card. I only have 850 Int, but with my spirit stacked and procs while fully raid buffed, I can maintain about 1850 mana regen OOC, in casting if both my cards proc. I went through hell with my crazy OoM healer paranoia to stack enough that I wouldn’t go out of mana. I was hell-bent on not having to rely on anyone’s replenishment or mana tide or any such thing, especially since I needed to be group with the tanks, not the healers/DPS casters, so I could pop an emergency tranquility. People marveled at my mana bar’s resilience, and I thought nothing of it till I look at what they were doing.

Our Holy Pally was using Divine Plea every cooldown to keep his mana up, knowing that he didn’t have to gear for efficiency. Now he’ll have to. Our hunters never popped auras to regen mana, they relied on buffs and replenishment. In fact, all our DPS relied on Replenishment. Most of our healers have tried to follow suit, so I find myself having to toss my Innervate to priests (and other classes on occasion) that are geared similarly to myself because instead of going for regen, they go for bigger heals/DPS. Let someone else worry about their regen.

I kinda got tired of it, and came up with the policy that if they want an innervate, unless they got capped prematurely, they need to just reroll a druid.

When you really think about it, only the good healers that prioritize regen are not having mana troubles, and why should they be if they are in what is currently the endgame content wearing mostly if not entirely endgame gear? I still need my innervate sometimes if I have to pick up someone else’s slack, or if a boss decides I’m the tasty person he’s going to focus on the whoooooole fight for his detonate mana skill.

To be honest, I think Blizz should leave spirit mana regen the way it is. Instead of messing with that, remove Replenishment, and make other mana regen stuff such as Innervate Self-target only. Let the other classes/players have fun actually having to spec for mana regen the way we already have to. I’m in a constant state of casting anyways, so the FSR won’t mess with me much, but it’s just very off-putting for them to release this ~obviously~ druid-healer-centered nerf, worded specifically to ~say~ it was because of druid healers right after nerfing Wild Growth. Meanwhile, our priestly brethren turn around and (Sorry priests) whine and moan about how terrible the CoH cooldown was (Hey, didn’t touch me, and I still use WG all the time as a druid healer. If I can make up for it, you can too.) and in turn get a number of very nice buffs to both Holy and Disc.

What did we get out of that deal? We can cast ~thorns~ without breaking ToL. We got a talent renamed because it ~confused~ other people. And that 3 point talent which may or may not proc may now be used with the spell that was “Too OP” that they just nerfed with a 6 second cooldown.

….call me crazy, but I’m not feeling the love, Blizz. What’s next? Take away Innervate, add cast times to all hots? Double the mana use on hots, halve the healing? Double the time between hot-ticks?

Of course, Id be happy if they decide to just have innervate work like evocate, returns a % of total mana per second, while casting for 20s. (id lke 4% + of course, since I stacked spirit to do exactly that )

Has anybody else considered yet that unless they rework the spell this new mana regeneration that blizzard is proposing will be a significant nerf to innervate? Also I’m not looking forward to the increased downtime when soloing and the like.

I don’t have answers but I have questions or reformulations of those already in the comments.

The first thing ticking me is: why should a healer run OOM in the first place anyway? If it’s skill at using the appropriate skill to heal the right target at the right time, then AOE healing as a whole is the worst idea introduced in the game, whatever its form might be. If you remember shaman stacking in Sunwell was specifically for their two benefits: best AOE healers and Bloodlust.
This means Wild Growth, although it lost quite a lot of substance (from already being subpar) was altogether a bad idea to add on top of Tranquility.
If we need to still be spamming AOE heals (as I’m sure we all do) means the way damage is dealt to raids is inconsistent with how Blizzard sees an ideal healing world. It is because of random raid damage on large numbers of targets that Paladins were felt as being weak healers at the end of TBC. Their complete lack of AOE healing made them a poor choice to counter the way damage was dealt. Even now with Beacon of Light (hmmm…Bacon) they’re still not very good at AOE.

Second question is: who says a healing class has to be a mana class in the first place anyway?
What if next hero class has three healing trees to compensate for the lack of healers and in order to try grab the attention of people that never healed before a complete new system of healing through energy, rage or any other system is used?
You now have a class that can’t run OOM in the first place because it doesn’t use mana and heals nonetheless, possibly with numbers competitive with the mana-using healing classes (or nobody will play it).
Of course it’s an hypothetical situation but this is what is in place for damage dealing classes: mana users versus non-mana users.

I think the focus is set on the wrong spot: mana is only the currency we use to do the job, it’s not the job itself. Focus should rather be to have the healer make life or death decisions on what spell to use to counter the incoming damage, not finding ways to outgrow mana issues. as such, the disparition of downranking may have been a mistake. As an alternative to downranking, more spells with different effects and costs should be introduced, including ones that lock healing for a set duration be it through Global Cooldown or other mechanics.

However, this could put even MORE emphasis on spirit for those druids that want to retain the endless mana pool. If they really try to make mana regen a limiting factor, healers may change their focus from maxing spell power. Instead it will be about getting spell power to an appropriate number for the content and then focusing mainly on spirit/mp5 for regen. Since druids also gain a little spell power from spirit, I can see spirit staying as one of, if not THE primary stat for trees.

TL;DR version: In 3.1 Bliz plans to nerf mana regen -outside- the 5SR, by nerfing Spirit-based regen. To balance this they will also buff talents like Intensity.

They’re also looking at how Clearcasting works, especially how it affects the 5SR. Sounds like Clearcasting will give you a mana burst (“Innervate-like”) but won’t take you out of the 5SR.

No real opinions yet, still processing. This will put -more- emphasis on MP5 rather than less, of course. Not clear how much value Spirit will retain, at first it looks a lot less attractive.

Oh and @Phae: Thanks! *blush*

Alameins last blog post..Balance gear weights, revisited

@Kiryn: It’s sad that Spirit’s value has been eclipsed by that of Intellect. I always felt that stacking Spirit felt very Druidy. I’m sure Priests feel the same. Hopefully, Blizzard will find a good balance of enjoyable mana management without making us feel powerless.

@Malvesti: I wasn’t aware that the 5SR was something they added during beta. That’s really interesting. I remember MP5 being an attractive stat leveling up, but that might have been because I was clueless. ^_^

@Tree: Hopefully the fact that there are some encounters that are still very challenging means they’ll at least wait to see how Ulduar shakes out before making a drastic overhaul to the system. I’m actually nervous that they might reduce Intensity to its previous 15% value, though that wouldn’t seem to address the issues created by Replenishment.

@Zuggy: The Shaman healing rotation seems boring to me, too. I understand they’re okay with different classes healing differently and Shamans casting fewer spells, but the monotony of Chain Heal would have made me reroll long ago. As far as Spirit being too powerful relative to MP5, Shamans’ lack of reliance upon Spirit means they can afford to stack more Intellect. Obviously, greater Intellect means you derive greater benefit from Replenishment, currently one of the most powerful restorative effects. I’d therefore be hesistant to call for the nerfing of Spirit since I don’t think it’s the heart of the problem.

@Anelf: It sounds like your practice using the 5SR may end up paying off in the long run.

@Keeva: “It’s a bit boring to never have to worry about mana – I enjoy mana management if it’s not something I have to spend a lot of time worrying about; I need to be focusing on everyone’s health bars, not so much on my own mana bar.” < This. Although I never enjoyed Sleepless Mana Potions. Overzealous or oblivious Priests would always dispel the sleep effect off of me, wasting my potion cooldown!

@Ribeye: I was initially having mana troubles on Phaelia, but with only moderate gearing up I was fine again. Having cross-spec versatile gear sounds really, really nice. Although Resto and Balance Druids definitely have some overlap, the need for spell crit, spell haste, and hit along with a de-emphasis on Spirit means you'd practically need a whole second set of gear to really perform. Thanks for the welcome insight Shaman regen.

@Tiroq: I think it's especially noteworthy when players start dropping their regenerative talents (Dreamstate and Intensity). Yikes.

@Gevlon: Unfortunately, it seems like Blizzard doesn't feel mana management should be an issue for DPS classes, only healers. I can understand the argument that they need to compete with non-resource-limited DPS classes like the Rogue and Warrior, but it does seem a bit of a double standard. Great point about Survival Hunters.

@Bellwether: I have fewer objections about mana management in 5-man instances. I'm generally in those for the badges anyway, so the faster we can complete them, the happier I am. I would like to see more mana management necessary for raids, though.

@~The1Jeffy: I don't think MP5 is the problem. As far as I know, most casters aren't stacking MP5 right now.

I disagree that Blizzard shouldn't be looking at healing meters. If raid leaders look at them, Blizzard needs to, as well, to ensure that each healing class remains competitive under different scenarios. The second they start ignoring these stats, we get statements like Tharfor's "Resto druids are still very strong at what they do. I notice when I’m raiding with mine that I don’t do very well on the healing meters, but that’s just because of the way that druid healing works." O.o

While I like the idea of healers adding to the cumulative regen of the raid, I am worried that stacking healers for regen and capping the number that can actually contribute will essentially set that number as the maxium number of healers brought to a raid.

@Marzipan: I hope you're right that they're waiting for Ulduar before deciding what changes to make. Of course, depending on how much PTR testing players do of the new raid instance, they might decide to make some changes concurrent with its release.

@Xathras: It's nice to get some insight into Hunter mana management. I was under the impression that mana was more or less an afterthought for you guys. Good to know that's not the case.

@Speedmonkay: Thanks for commenting and for sharing the article with your guildmates.

@Bearess: I'm all for simplifying gear choices. I am really tired of wondering how much regeneration each one gwill give me. I would prefer if things were more cut and dry. Unfortunately, with many different stats factoring into mana regen right now (Spirit, Intellect, a number of talents, and even spell crit for some classes), I'm not sure how much simpler it can really be made to be.

@Afterdream: I hope that fights aren't made much more complex to make raid content more difficult. There are other ways to make content difficult than making players dance three different variations of the samba to stay alive while trying to keep their raidmates alive. I personally hated fights that took 20 minutes to explain. >.< @Dithanaor: I’m glad you found the blog, and thank you for commenting. I, too, have chosen gear that appears to be optimally balanced for me (Spirit/Intellect/spell power), possibly going a little overboard on regeneration for now. However, if they DO decide to nerf regen — and depending on how they do so — I might be glad I have stacked so much Spirit!

@Alamein: I loved your latest post on raid heals. Great idea for how to graph them!

@Marindah: Hey now, the first rule of Blue Dragon Club is “Don’t talk about Blue Dragon Club!” Thank you for commenting (but please don’t nerf my Blue Dragon Card)!

@Tarqon: Interesting point about PvP regen being out of whack because of the strength of group buffs. I think no one here is talking about PvP mana regen because the article above focused so exclusively on PvE. Right now playing a healer in PvP is so painful that I wouldn’t know if mana regen was a problem. I spend more time in Wisp Form (who has no mana bar) than I do playing.

Not only does this greatly advantage arena teams with a replenishment providing class, it also demonstrates how poor regen is when you’re not being carried by group buffs. In arena, wearing three pieces of deadly and the rest mostly hateful I have 14k mana and absolutely pathetic regen, my mana pool lasts somewhere between three and six minutes depending on pressure, and that’s with a glyphed innervate.

Mana regen is not fine by any means, they nerfed the coefficient on spirit so badly that per point of itemization value it is much worse than mp5, and I don’t see that changing even on the next tier of gear.

Screw replenishment, give us decent self reliant mana regen again in my opinion.

Great article as always, Phae. Long time reader, first time commenter.