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Blue: Mana Regen Complexity and Restoration Scaling
Published on December 2, 2008 by Phaelia 
Blue 
60 Comments There are a couple of recent blue posts I’d like to draw attention to this morning. The first post was made in response to complaints by Nightshroud of Aleria (US) that mana regeneration is simply too complex a stat to deal with, making gear comparisons tedious and more difficult than they should be. In summary, she says:
- MP5 is the most straightforward of mana regeneration stats.
- Spirit is complicated since it scales based on your level and its return is affected by the square root of Intellect.
- Intellect also plays into Spirit/Intellect-based mana regeneration and is now also affected by the raid-wide Replenishment effect.
- Many classes have additional effects to consider like mana regenerated from spell crit.
For the record, the current mana regeneration formula looks like this:
Base Mana RegenInt, Spi, Level = (0.001 + SPI * Base_Regen(Level) * √I) * 5
Was it really necessary to make things THAT complicated? Developer Ghostcrawler seems to question whether it was:
This is something that is totally on our radar. Mana regen requires looking at a lot of different numbers and we’d like to simplify it, without losing any of the interesting gear options that players have.
Simplified mana regeneration would definitely be a welcome change. Or at the very least, increased transparency of how a given stat will affect you. There’s a certain amount of fun in determining whether an item is an upgrade, but I reach my limit at about 30 seconds of thought and often end up picking between two similar items based on which is prettier (a decision made more difficult by the fact that armor designers apparently made ONE texture/mesh for all pre-raid armor in Wrath). With the radical changes that were made to so many ratings systems in the expansion, I really think that they should have scrapped their current formula in favor of something less complex on day 1.
On the perhaps alarmist post entitled "The Druid Dilemma: Worst Healers Post-Naxx", Dimachaeri of Tichondrius (US) laments Druid-unfriendly itemization with many items laden with spell crit and/or spell haste. This is an issue for a number of reasons:
- Our HoTs do not benefit from spell crit as they cannot crit.
- Our HoTs benefit VERY little from spell haste. In fact, haste actually devalues Gift of the Earthmother, the 5-point talent at the bottom of the Restoration tree that reduces the GCD of Lifebloom, Rejuvenation, and Wild Growth by a percentage of its base cast time.
- The benefit to Regrowth from spell crit is extremely marginal. If you’re using Regrowth any considerable amount, chances are you’ll have 5/5 Improved Regrowth, making an additional 1% spell crit practically worthless.
- The benefit to Healing Touch from spell haste is also very small. The 0.5 second reduction in Wrath combined with a Glyph of Healing Touch and 5/5 Naturalist means that haste has no effect on sustained HPS.
A few random thoughts:
- When you talk about scaling, you have to separate a few different issues:
- Does the class / talent / spell scale?
- Does it scale well once it has good gear?
- Does that gear actually exist?
- Is it readily available or is it hard to get?
- Some classes complain about having too many stats and others about not having enough stats. They are just different class styles. There are advantages and disadvantages to both.
- Our goal is not that every stat is useful for you.
- Our goal is not that only stats which are useful for you appear on your gear.
- One of the interesting things about resto seems to be that there is some player preference involved in how you heal. Some use Regrowth a lot now, others use Healing Touch, and others stick with rolling blooms. While it may end up that someone can prove one of those strategies sufficiently trumps the others, for now it is cool to see the experimentation.
- That said, we do worry if Nourish’s niche is too narrow. We’ll see. It is getting compared to heals with very good glyphs affecting them.
If the idea that it’s okay for one class to benefit from fewer stats than another that fills the same role seems familiar, it’s because it mirrors the paradigm of Druid tanking gear. Bears needn’t stack parry or block since they don’t benefit from those stats. This difference means they can more readily equip what would ordinarily be considered "Rogue gear." Meanwhile, the differences between a DPS Warrior set and a tanking Warrior set are far more pronounced. This paradigm relies upon the "simpler" class getting MORE out of their limited stats than the classes who benefit from a more diverse set of stats. This means that Druids should expect to scale better from adding spell power, Spirit, and Intellect since we derive little benefit from haste or spell crit. Whether or not we will remains to be seen.
Looking for information about recent Feral changes? Check out impressions on the armor reduction from Karthis and Kalon (which should totally be a police drama, by the way).
Flash of Moonfire
Glyph of Thorns
Paininabox of Runetotem (US) has released a spreadsheet that includes many items from Wrath, though it doesn’t include source or stat-based filtering. As such, here are some healing-oriented gear lists with descriptors. And I shall henceforth be known as "Phaelia I-Filter-WoWHead-So-You-Don’t-Have-To" or simply "Phaelia IFWSYDHT":
Or is that really what that comment means? Not forgetting about it doesn’t actually mean they’re going to give it to us, just that they’re thinking about it. 
