Raid Rx: In the spirit of regeneration
by Matt Low 
Nov 5th 2010 at 9:00PM
I can just feel my mana regeneration draining away. Have you seen some of the healing notes on the recent beta patch? Discipline priests and restoration druids had some adjustments made to their mana talents. As holy priest, my mana feels fairly tight as it is.
But not everything is as it seems. I stressed it before, but mana regeneration is one side of the equation. Unavoidable damage and avoidable damage are aspects that need to be taken into account. The feeling that I get when I look around the community is that each respective class got nerfed. But here's a thought: If every class gets nerfed, is it really a nerf? I mean, we're still relatively equal to each other.
The main source of mana is going to come from the spirit stat for all healing classes. But there are additional talents and methods for mana gains. We'll take a quick look at them here to see how to maximize the return from them.
- Holy Concentration Fully talented, we get an additional 20 percent regeneration from spirit while in combat. There is no argument here. Spirit will play a big role for us holy priest players.
- Rapture What about discipline? Don't mind the tooltip. Even though the effect can now occur every 12 seconds instead of 6, Rapture is the next method. Getting 2.5 percent of your total mana back whenever your shields bust (and a limit of 12 seconds) means additional intellect is going to be needed to boost your mana gains from this talent.
- Divine Plea No talents for paladins that will help in this department. Since they're reliant on holy power as an alternative power source, Divine Plea appears to be the only option. Make sure you grab the glyph, as it increases the potency of the spell.
- Mana Tide totem Other than Water Shield, Mana Tide totem is going to be a best friend for a shaman. Note that the return isn't based on mana pool. It actually increases the spirit regeneration rate by 350 percent for 12 seconds. Shaman didn't get any changes to the restoration tree in the recent beta build.
- Revitalize The druids mana gains from Revitalize are similar to Rapture. Cast a Rejuvenation or a Lifebloom and there is a chance the druid scores 2 percent of his mana back. Of course, that can only happen every 12 seconds.
Do you notice the similarities? I don't know if I can call it a straight nerf to any one class. It looks to me that these changes are all in the same ballpark. Personally, I'm still trying to learn how to heal and manage my mana. If players take unnecessary damage, we'll continue to get taxed. As long as bosses aren't doing an overpowered amount of damage, then we should be able to throttle and handle our healing output accordingly. It would suck if we have trouble healing on certain fights, only for our regeneration to go south while the bosses are still waling away with the same amount.
I'm wistfully toying with the idea of stacking a healing team filled with nothing but priests and shamans -- but no, I know better than that. I'd rather keep a diverse group. I already have one of each spec penciled into my healing roster. I'm still looking for the elusive sixth healer. I just haven't decided what yet. I figure since we're covered on abilities and buffs, any healing class would work.
Even on live, my holy priest feels like a Hummer. I just seem to chug mana, even after reforging and switching to additional spirit gems. Only several more weeks to go.
What does beta regeneration look like?
I've got a few screenshots of character sheets if you're still curious about mana levels at 85. Obviously, your mileage is going to vary, but I figured you might be interested in seeing a snapshot of a healer ready for normal dungeons, heroic dungeons and geared to the teeth after raids.
Look at that: a measly 1,127 mana per 5. The additional 20 percent from Holy Concentration, makes it manageable. My item level here is extremely low. This character was a direct copy from live and I leveled him to 85. Gear was naturally acquired from quests and normal instances. I hadn't been able to replace everything yet. My gloves are still tier 10. This character is qualified for high-level dungeons, but that's about it. I can't even think about heroics right now. I run out of mana like crazy in some of the boss battles. Note the intellect amount.
Meet my beta shaman. Her setup consists of blue gear, except they're all the heroic iterations. She has the best possible gear she can get before stepping into raids. This is where you want your character to be before taking the plunge. Now, I think there's a bit of wiggle room here. The character sheet shows an item level of 350. You might be able to get away with 340 or so, but your raid group will need to do everything possible to stay alive and support each other. As for intellect, Mattyjandro has a full 1,000 more than Matticus.
Do you see how spirit jumps? About 1,200 to do normal; 1,800 to start getting into raids; 2,600 after all is said and done and you have all your gear. One can deduce that a figure between 1,200 to 1,800 spirit is needed to withstand healing heroic instances.
Check out the intellect jumps. We have 3,000 intellect and 66,000 mana for a priest ready for normal dungeons; over 4,000 intellect and 85,000 mana for a shaman. Pallycus has almost 4,500 intellect and a whopping 90,000 mana.
Granted, these are all different classes, and it would've been more precise had I shown three of the same class. I figure that they're close enough for all healers to get a ball park idea. A fully decked-out priest might not have 90,000 mana, but it would be around the area, anyway.
Five weeks. I don't know about you, but the last month is always the hardest.
Need advice on working with the healers in your guild? Raid Rx has you covered. Send your questions about raid healing to matticus@wow.com. For less healer-centric raiding advice, visit Ready Check, and don't miss our strategy guides to Icecrown Citadel and Halion/the Ruby Sanctum.Filed under: Druid, Paladin, Priest, Shaman, Raid Rx (Raid Healing)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Alaron Nov 5th 2010 9:38PM
If were talking about mana return mechanics, Innervate deserves a mention.
squig_masta Nov 5th 2010 9:56PM
I think he was trying to show us what each classes personal regeneration looks like. Druids can't really count on being able to innervate themselves whenever they want without risking not being able to give it to another healer who needs it more. They CAN however always count on Revitalize to chip in.
Saeadame Nov 6th 2010 1:49AM
Seeing as they also neglected to mention Hymn and shadowfiend, I guess they were just selecting mana returning talents as opposed to mana returning abilityies.
Artificial Nov 6th 2010 5:20PM
Ah yes, I remember when Innervate actually had a noticeable effect...
Of course, I'm a cat. I guess with the right spec, it's actually useful.
squig_masta Nov 5th 2010 9:50PM
I know that how you heal differs from class to class, but what's the average cost of our small/medium/big heals? I like the article, but regeneration rates and mana pool sizes don't really tell us much unless we know the costs of our heals.
As a side note though, the rate in which our mp5 seems to go up with each level of gear, I wonder what the developers are planning to keep it from being out of control. If by the time I get to deathwing I have roughly 70 kajillion mp5 while casting, I wont really be triaging my heals as hard as I am now, and we'll be back to the wrath style of healing.
yaminokishi Nov 5th 2010 10:21PM
Knowing Blizzard scaling will get completely out of control leading to that exact scenario and in the later dungeons we'll get a Radiant Chill of the DragonThrone debuff decreasing all mana regen by 50% or something.
Texicles Nov 6th 2010 1:04PM
@Yami
I'm inclined to view this with a little more optimism. So far in the beta process, we've seen instances where Blizzard has learned from past mistakes, and they've already acknowledged that WotLK stat scaling was out of control.
With that being said, I can't imagine that they wouldn't have started the gear/content portion of development for Cata without doing a significant amount of planning and spreadsheeting, to determine where they want health, mana, regen, etc. to be at each stage of progression and plan boss encounters accordingly.
As Blizzard is at the forefront of MMO development, however lame it may be as a player to live with mistakes that they've made, it's actually pretty awesome that they are willing to try new things and learn from mistakes. It's better to suffer a few errors on their part and ultimately get a dynamically improving game than to play a game that never changes for better or worse.
Artificial Nov 6th 2010 5:28PM
The important thing is NOT to note that Blizzard has a few more years of experience balancing now than they did then, and expect they'll project the future better. Rather, they've realized projecting the future is a ridiculously hard task, and have instead rebuilt the system with enough levels and knobs so they can adjust things much more easily on the fly in order to preserve balance and drop the system from spiraling out of control. It's the difference between (the old way) trying to completely design a fully automated aircraft that just flies to the destination after they push it out onto the runway and hit the on button, and (the new way) sitting in the cockpit and adjusting all the control surfaces during flight all the way from takeoff to landing. Balancing is becoming something they do continually, rather than something they attempt to do at the start and hope it makes it to the end.
Shot Nov 5th 2010 10:37PM
A nice post for us healers and nice to get a snapshot of stats at various levels of gear. I look forward to some real experience of mana regen in a little over a month!
Lupius Nov 6th 2010 2:13PM
The screenshots neglected to show a crucial part of the stats: combat ratings.
Recall the stats jump from 200 blues to 200/213 epics, the main difference was that items started giving 2 combat ratings instead of 1. If you compare the 350 gear set to the 360, the base stats are very similar, but I suspect a huge jump in haste and crit values, which are not shown here.
johnboy Nov 5th 2010 10:42PM
why did raid-rx turn into another priest/pally healing column. we already have this in their respective class columns. i haven't seen a very fair representative of all of the healing classes lately. anyone else?
Janaan Nov 5th 2010 11:20PM
I know I'm kinda feeding the troll, here, but where in the article do you see anything that's priest/pally specific other than the different types of regen mechanics? It's true that Matt is primarily a priest expert, seeing as that's what he mainly plays, but he most certainly does not just talk about priests and pallies.
themightysven Nov 5th 2010 11:05PM
what about telluric currents? [sp?}
jordanmcguigan Nov 5th 2010 11:08PM
No mention of Shadowfiend, Hymn of Hope, or Innervate? (or possibly Seal of insight, but I don't know if it procs on judgements).
Huga Nov 6th 2010 12:02AM
"I'm wistfully toying with the idea of stacking a healing team filled with nothing but priests and shamans"
My concern exactly...
Wugan Nov 6th 2010 12:18AM
I wouldn't be too concerned about that. The healers from Premonition reported earlier this week that, if anything, you would need to stack Druids and Paladins to defeat some heroic 25 man encounters. I'm also not worried that things will go that way live (I'm a shaman), because Blizzard has a lot of balancing yet to do.
Ez Nov 6th 2010 11:55AM
I have to say i like the current Holy spec. Granted my priest is only lvl 41, but mana regen is tons better than it was before. I am looking forward to leveling her.
queenb Nov 6th 2010 12:12PM
Thanks Matticus! I've been concerned a bit lately about not being able to keep up with or understand all the changes and it's good to have a little perspective of what to expect and what our goal is going into Cataclysm (mana-wise, level 350 gear, etc).
brian Nov 6th 2010 5:46PM
Actually, the Divine Plea glyph is fairly worth ignoring unless you're really good at squeezing a few ticks in, or if you know there's some downtime in a phase where you can get it off.
They're changing Seal of Insight to grant 15% base mana whenever you judge, instead of a chance to restore 4% base mana. Which is nice, considering Judging was a mana loss beforehand. So now, Judgement is pretty much the mana conservation/restore spell, not Divine Plea.
Plea has basically been relegated to an emergency or between pulls spell. It can be squeezed in for a few ticks and then canceled in a fight, but that 50% healing debuff ends up basically making the spell a mana loss if you do any healing during it.
zappel Nov 8th 2010 3:22AM
too many of us are looking at total mana instead of mana regen. you need to strike a balance so that you can last the fight and not run out of mana. what is the point of being able to crit your heals but run out of mana before the boss drops? if you gotta shift points from crit/intellect into spirit, so be it.