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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsGhostcrawler gives specifics for patch 3.1 mana regen changes
by Alex Ziebart 
Feb 18th 2009 at 7:00PM
One of the big changes coming in patch 3.1 is the change to mana regen, and it has a lot of people pretty frantic. The last thing healers want is for their life to become harder, right? Well, Ghostcrawler hit the forums today with some clarification on the subject.Base regen (which is an equation that factors in both Intellect and Spirit) will be nerfed by about 40%. This means the mana you would regen while just standing around doing nothing will be quite a bit lower than it currently is. However, in exchange, regen-while-casting talents such as Meditation, Intensity, Spirit Tap and many others, whille be buffed so your in-combat mana regen shouldn't be harmed very much. It'll essentially prevent you from trying to wiggle in and out of the 5 second rule for big regen ticks, while not terribly bothering your mana regen while you're actually doing things.
Since Paladins are hardly affected by these changes at all, they're getting hit in a different way. We have the Divine Plea change which brought the healing debuff to 50%, and they'll be nerfing Spiritual Attunement for all but Protection Paladins. Hopefully that doesn't hit our Retribution friends too badly, but we will see.
Ghostcrawler has a lot of other details in the thread (which you should read through, at least his posts), but I'm pretty skeptical. I'm not so sure these changes will really fix much, which means that they'll need to look for other ways to make Mana Regen something you worry about. I'm admittedly pessimistic since I have a Shadow Priest, but I have no doubt that Replenishment will need to be nerfed again. There's such a massive difference in mana regen between when you have it and when you don't that I'm pretty sure it'll get brought down again in the future. Sure, it's supposed to be as important as a tank, but if your Tank was completely impenetrable that would be nerfed, too.
We'll see what happens, hm?
Filed under: Druid, Paladin, Priest, Shaman, Patches, Analysis / Opinion
Reader Comments (Page 5 of 5)
Sloegin Feb 19th 2009 4:21PM
Step 1. Throw tons of spirit and mp5 on all desirable caster drops in Northrend.
Step 2. React to the fact that all the casters have tons of spirit and aren't running out of mana by changing the mana return on spirit.
Boggle. Bets that they'll over-nerf and this will blow up in their faces?
Oh, and don't breathe easy Restro Shammies. Do you really think that this bat won't swing wide and hit you too? Rest assured they'll monkey with MP5 as well.
makkura Feb 19th 2009 5:00PM
I have to say I'm _VERY_ unhappy with the mana regen changes.
I've been playing a priest since about 6 months after release and recall the roughly 30% spirit regen nerf from the BC release.
These new changes will make overall mana regen lower but mana regen while casting closer to the regen normally.
These changes will change me from / to:
462 mp5 => 277mp5 (60% of it's current)
187 mp5 => 138mp5 (50% of changed value.. give or take 27 for actual mp5 gear.. via Meditation)
[Stats do NOT reflect a level 80 character yet]
Now I've always carefully cast my spells, squeezing them back to back when necessary to leave as long as possible downtime for mana regen, thus using the 5 second rule.
You live and die by the 5 second rule (At least I do)... healing is balancing the health bars with your mana bar and thus the amount of time you spend regenning mana is in there too.
So what's the purpose of these nerfs?
The best I can tell is to lower over all mana regen with minimal impact on mana regen while casting.
...
I'd rather regen less while casting, like the old days.
It looks to me like healing is just getting HARDER, not requiring more skill.
Blizzard, give us some reasoning here, will ya?
Item normalization -> All clothies compete for roughly the same gear. Increased competition for gear on a class that has problems getting good gear outside of instances. (Remember the rate ANY speced priest kills things is a lot slower than the other clothies [or anyone else for that matter] so gathering mats and completing rep grinds is slower too).
Lower Effectiveness in PVP -> The spell power merge and the talent overhauls upped DPS by up to 30% (based on class/spec/etc) but did NOT increase amount healed. PvP healers have that much of a harder time keeping up.
Circle of Healing recast time ->I completely understand this one.. since people seem to be able to have up to 60% of their healing done with this single spell via spamming it.. ... But how is this different from shaman healing waves? CoH isn't as cost effective as greater heals anyway.
Oh well, my healing by CoH never passed around 12%.
So now you're going to nerf my mana regen again.
The 5 second rule isn't going to save me anymore as I carefully horde my time between casts (about the only thing you can do to increase healing endurance once you're gear capped). What am I supposed to do? Potion? Oh.. right.. I only get one of those. I can use my single cast of Inner Focus for 1 extra spell. Shadow fiend can help for a little bit, that's good. Hymn? 8% mana isn't that helpful.
I know some priests don't have mana problems but that's not necessarily a reflection of imbalance or their skill. Perhaps it has something to do with their groups?
I can walk through an instance that I'm exceedingly low for and heal through it just fine because of my guildies cooperation while I can oom in a normal level instance because of what people in PuGs do.
So it will be very likely that PuGs just.. don't work.. after this patch, as so many of them fail to work together and overpull.
Guess I won't be working with anyone I don't know for a long while. GG social aspect of WoW. I'll see you around.
Makkura
P.S. Sorry for the rant but it's head meets keyboard time now.
Johnny Feb 20th 2009 5:38AM
I am starting to understand the changes, to be fair.. on my holy priest my regen is Massive, i have over 1100 spirit and fully buffed i have alot more.. Boss fights i usually end up with more that 60-70% mana and topping the healing charts. Surge of Light and Clearcasting, and procs from trinkets and replenishment.. i could see this nerf coming.
I had started to decrease my spirit for SP/crit as my regen was way too much than actually needed.
Seems like with the 50% regen while not casting with meditation will not actually changed much, will just mean going into OOFSR will be alot less worth than what it is at the moment for that bit of regen..
hp1 Feb 21st 2009 6:15PM
This nerf is going to have a hugely negative impact on speed runs.
I rely on non-casting regen not during a fight but to renew my mana while dashing from one pull to the next. This worked extremely well during ZA speed runs with my resto druid and holy priest.
To make matters worse, the mana food (water, mage snacks, etc) doesn't even come close to the average 17-22K mana pools of end game healers. 12,960 mana over thirty seconds? A healer with drained mana pool after a decent fight will likely need to sit for longer than 30 seconds to replenish their mana. Which, in turn, will delay the rez'ing of fallen members (god forbid those people are mana users because then they'll have to sit and drink for the requisite 30-60 seconds also).
If they're going to nerf out-of-combat mana regen, we need stronger mana consumables.
The effect this is going to have on dragon-mount timed CoS runs, OK corpse burning quest completion and even Naxx on farm is likely to be non-trivial.
tom Apr 15th 2009 10:29PM
For a frost mage who has no in combat mana regeneration(unless using mage armour which frost mages dont) they have to wait till about lvl 80 till they can gain the arcane talent of 50% mana regeneration whilst casting. For any frost mage lower than ~lvl 80 surely this is a reason to give up playing altogether?