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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsMana regeneration changing dramatically in 3.1
by Eliah Hecht 
Feb 5th 2009 at 3:35PM
The devs have been telling us for some time that they're not happy with the current state of (most) healers having infinite mana, and it looks like the reckoning is going to come in 3.1. And make no mistake, we're getting hit hard.
- Outside-of-5-second-rule regeneration is decreasing. They think the combination of HoTs and clearcasting let us stay OO5SR too long and get too much mana back.
- Mana regenerated by Spirit is being decreased "across the board."
- However, talents that boost while-casting regen (specifically, Arcane Meditation, Improved Spirit Tap, Intensity, Mage Armor, Meditation, Pyromaniac, and Spirit Tap) are being buffed.
- Since Paladins don't really use Spirit for regen, they're getting a different nerf: the healing penalty on Divine Plea is getting raised from 20% to 50%. Spiritual Attunement is also going to be nerfed for Holy paladins somehow.
- They're "taking a close look" at clearcasting abilities. "One likely outcome" is changing them so they restore mana instead of making spells free to cast, which would still give you mana back, but would not kick you OO5SR.
- It has finally been spelled out that they balance around even 10-man raids having Replenishment. Although I think this is silly (why not just remove it from the game, if everyone should have it all the time), it makes me feel a bit better that they said they are "likely to offer this ability to additional classes" (it's already been announced for Destruction warlocks, for instance).
Overall, although this feels very "sky-is-falling," it's important to remember that Blizzard is not trying to make healers sad, or break the game, or ruin your class. As they spell out at the bottom of the post, this is for the purposes of giving encounter designers more room to play. If healers can't run out of mana, they only way to make the encounter hard for them is to throw huge amounts of raid damage around, which is not always the best choice for an encounter.
This will be going up on the PTR, of course, so we'll get a chance to see exactly how it plays out. But I know a certain Holy paladin who will probably want to stop completely avoiding gear with MP5 on it in the near future.
Patch 3.1 brings us Ulduar, dual specs, significant changes to all the classes, and more! We've got you covered from top to bottom with our Guide to Patch 3.1.Filed under: Druid, Mage, Priest, Shaman, Patches, News items
Reader Comments (Page 7 of 9)
Taladan Feb 5th 2009 5:20PM
"Divine Plea is getting raised from 20% to 50%."
Wow wow wow. Hold a sec. Are we getting a *buff*?!?
Taladan Feb 5th 2009 6:07PM
Ok, I misread the thing. It's the healing "penalty" not the mana regen amount. So, things are going as usual...
Aldheim Feb 5th 2009 5:35PM
OK, I know I just posted, but looking at that thread... Bornakk says that Divine Plea was intended for Protection and Retribution paladins to stay up on their mana.
...what? That... How did they ever think it would be seen as anything but the new lynchpin of the Holy Paladin?
Jinintaanik Feb 5th 2009 5:25PM
I don't even know what to say... I'm at a loss for words...
Since 3.0,
1. Healers have had their gear/stats homogenized so that they have to roll against DPS classes.
2. Raids will be tuned for "Replenishment", which will be provided by DPS classes/specs (shadow priest, ret pally, survival hunter, and destro 'lock)
2. And now this, "we have become concerned that mana regeneration is currently too powerful, especially for HEALERS."
To further quote Bornakk, "running out of mana should be a very real risk for sloppy playing or attempting content that you aren’t yet ready for." When DPS runs out of mana, it just slows down the kill. When healers run out of mana, people die and wipes occur.
Right now, for most fights the only thing DPS has to worry about is "Stay out of the ____!" And they want to make healing harder??? They've already got 10/25 things to worry about.
Aldheim Feb 5th 2009 5:37PM
Not quite. Most bosses still have enrage timers of some sort. If the mana using DPS craps out, there is a very, very good chance you're going to wipe.
armi0022 Feb 5th 2009 5:26PM
If something goes wrong, mana becomes an issue as you are spamming abilities to keep people alive. If things go right, what's wrong with having the reward of leftover mana? Seems to work okay as is.
elladrion Feb 5th 2009 5:31PM
This is going be be a huge strain on soloing and 5 mans more than anything. Can they just get rid of replenishment please? SPriests were awesome BC to the point of me rolling one, but they were so awesome they were almost required for even raiding 10 mans unless you outgeared em. It was a unique ability they chose to pass around to multiple classes with their "bring the player not the class" shenanigans. Now, instead of removing this new buff that they just kinda came up with, they're re-balancing everything ELSE around it.
And as for the 50% Divine Plea, well at least I'll still have a raid spot when I respec to Ret, that way I can go from needing a buff that nobody brought to providing one they need :/ Not like they'll want holy pallies anyways if we can't do our job healing 12 seconds out of every minute. I can see the callouts over vent now "ok, someone heal the tank for me again, I'm hitting DP". They had this during beta and pallies raised a shitstorm for good reason. It makes pallies who are ONLY good at single target healing unable to single-target heal 20% of the time.
Dps is about spell rotation, especially for non-caster dps. A death knight can't go OOM, but the differance between a good one and a bad one is how he uses his abilities during a fight. Using the right abilities at the right time. Why should healing be about watching your mana bar instead of what ability to use? Sounds like blizz is going with a philosophy of "people are going to die now, the healer has to choose who and when they do", and as a healer, the worst thing in the world is watching someone die, even if it's they're own fault
Eisengel Feb 5th 2009 5:49PM
There's a lot of truth to this, even for DPS. I run an Spriest, and while my guild is about halfway through Naxx-10, I've subbed in on Naxx-25 runs. In Naxx-25, I've never had to worry about mana, even in my current gear. In Naxx-10 I have to be careful. I need to keep Arcane Torrent and Shadowfiend on CD, but I can still do my max DPS rotations on bosses and small trash groups, but not larger ones. In 5-mans and heroics I have to be very careful of mana, and sometimes I can't even run my full DPS rotation on bosses.
My only hope is that spells are a little rebalanced; that cast times, mana cost, and effects get a little reduced. That way you'll want to cast more often, can cast more often, and will be using your in-casting regen more... so the buff to it should be more significant.
I have to no idea what to say to Holy Pallys tho...
Shad0wembrace Feb 5th 2009 5:31PM
Taladan, read. We aren't getting buffed. It's a nerf. A 20k crit holy light will now only crit for 10k if Divine Plea is nerfed.
I am a holy paladin (obviously), and I have basically full T7 and gear from 25 mans, with a piece or two from 10 mans. I do PVP often (2s, 3s and 5s), and I'd have to say I'm very disappointed with Blizzard and I really, really, hope this change doesn't go live.
First, they say that they wanted it to be mostly for ret paladins and protadins. LOLwut? The more mana you have, the better Divine Plea is. I used this when I was a protadin, and it wasn't really worth it, I get more mana back getting healed. With a 25k mana pool, I get about 1300 mana back per tick for Divine Plea. I don't even think a protadin/retadin with a 6000 mana pool is getting 500 mana back per tick. I'm really not sure on the math.
But anyways, Blizzard is hitting pallies with a major nerf bat. In BC we had horrible mana regen and often went oom before the end of fights (at least I had this experience in most T4/some T5). They might as well just take Divine Plea back and tell us to go reroll a priest.
arms Feb 5th 2009 5:32PM
good job blizzard... you mess up the arena system... cant fix bugs in the game... and now u nerf healing/mana for healers... i guess im going ret...
at least allow people to use more then 1 mana pot per fight and take away divine plea all together... like it was before...
having 22k mana on my holy pally (unbuffed) is more then enough and i should have leftover mana if a fight goes well... wtf is blizzard thinking!!!!????
forget healing all together!!
Clegane Feb 5th 2009 5:37PM
With WotLK, Blizz opened up the flood gates and gave everyone and their mom access to epic gear with hardly any time or experience commitments (ie. easy mode Naxx, Vault, OS, Heroics, etc.). They give everyone the ability to get geared up quickly with nice gear that ensures that most, if not all, of the encounters become trivial (as all encounters in WoW eventually do).
Now, they complain that characters in general are too powerful, their encounters are too easy, and that people's mana regen is too good.
Sorry Blizzard, this one's on you. You can't have it both ways. You can't give end game access to the masses, and still make all encounters challenging. By making healing hard again, it's going to bump out a lot of guilds that were able to get access to end-game content with sub-par healers; thus excluding lots of people from content that you claimed they'd be able to see in the new casual friendly WotLK.
Oh well, I guess it's time for the pendulum to swing back in favor of harder difficulty. I'm not complaining, the challenge will be fun for me at least (druid healer). Just think it's funny that they keep going back and forth on it.
mitch Feb 5th 2009 8:42PM
Hit the nail on the head there mate.
After 3 years of playing wow - I'm starting to lose confidence in Blizzard.
This expansion doesn't even feel designed - it feels as though everything has been done on the fly. It's like they are quite literally making things up as they go.
What are they actually doing during their days at work? Are they actually doing their best and honestly struggling to maintain the game or are they sitting around on their asses reading the forums and knee-jerking to every QQ on the forum?
Rivana Feb 6th 2009 10:53AM
I agree.
The zones are pretty, the storyline is great, the quests are engaging.
The software is unstable and laggy, the classes aren't balanced, PvP is a mess, PvE is getting 'tweaked' with a crowbar, Blizzard "didn't see" all sorts of obvious problems in their design phase, the "bring the player, not the class" dumbing-down of the game is (IMO) a failure, patches are disasters - very unlike the Blizzard I've seen prior to 3.0.
Kimberly Feb 5th 2009 5:47PM
(screams)
I was just having fun with my holy paladin again after the months - MONTHS! - of retuning how I played and how I geared.
This is going to make it really difficult for me to heal 5-person Heroics, which are my favorite part of the game. And I don't know about you guys, but the priests I run with seem to go OOM every boss fight in Naxx-10 except Loatheb because they can't.
Ugh.
Hoggersbud Feb 5th 2009 5:51PM
Replenishment is here to stay. Accept it, and then you can get why Blizzard might have to adjust the other numbers around.
They do want the raids to be challenging, right?
DCoW Feb 5th 2009 5:53PM
so now I'm being punished for stacking a stat that increases my healing?
great. because you know screwing around with CoH and WG for some fights (I'm looking at KT, and patchwerk) weren't hard enough already.
THANK YOU BLIZZARD. IN YOUR INFINITE WISDOM YOU SCREW US OVER AGAIN.
Zor Feb 5th 2009 6:24PM
still doubt me on that old mouthwash analogy?
yeah, priests are gunna be even more fun to play
el oh el
thank god DK came around, quite frankly now my vanilla WoW priest healer holy from 1-60,61-70, 71-80
3.5 years...can be my favorite BANK alt
just justified on Blood DK (self healing - machine of extreme love giving)
el oh el
have you hugged your priest(healer) today?
Lorne Feb 5th 2009 6:58PM
Today was awesome. Something like 5 posts ago, all the comments were - WOW Priests are finally getting some love!
Then this post, and everyone's going - The sky is falling!
Quite the Priest rollercoaster
Muse Feb 6th 2009 12:40AM
I want to get off now, please.
Griman Feb 5th 2009 6:57PM
I'm so glad that I don't even have a mana bar on my main. Decreasing the regeneration will just screw it up even further.