So I saw this question on the Q&A and thought about how this would affect arcane mages...

"Whicker asked:

How do you plan on balancing healer mana management in MoP? I for one enjoyed the beginning of Cata when healing was a little more challenging but now Disc and Druids barely have any worries while shamans and Holy priests have a little harder time.

Watcher answered:

We agree. It's a nearly-unavoidable consequence of gear scaling under our current system. Fresh level 85s in mostly quest gear need to have enough mana and regen to be able to set foot in dungeons and sustain a healing rotation for a couple of minutes in the face of reasonable incoming damage. But then a healer in Heroic Firelands gear now has nearly double the stats of a healer fresh out of Uldum questing, and the mana cost of that healer's spells is unchanged, often resulting in a large mana surplus.

Our current plan for Mists is for Intellect to no longer directly increase the size of player mana pools. We intend for our mana-based DPS and Tank classes to be entirely self-reliant regardless of mana pool, so the gameplay impact for those players will be nil. For healers, Spirit will remain as the pure regen stat, and healers after multiple tiers of raid progression will clearly have far more mana at their disposal, but there will be more of an inherent tradeoff between regen and throughput stats. A healer with amazing regen will have amazing regen because of a choice to focus their stats in that direction."

So I know this was about healers, but casters benefit from increased mana pools...and I think that this would affect arcane mages the most since their mastery deals so much with mana percentage...

If we (arcane mages) won't be "increasing" our mana pool as we get more intellect, how do you see this affecting our mastery/rotation??

Again I know Blizzard probably has some way to work this, but I wanted your opinion on it.

TLDR: How will Intellect not increasing mana pool in MoP affect arcane mages' rotation/mastery?

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