Mana is still a throttle for Shadow Priests, in a way. Mind Sear is a pretty expensive spell, and if you don't have enough AoE DPS on a fight, such as, say, Beth'tilac 10, it's not hard to run out of mana trying to keep the spiderlings under control.

Mind Spike spam is by design meant to be expensive in the long term, so that Shadow Priests don't become Frost Mages, but if the add you're DPSing down takes longer than 15 seconds to kill but less than 25, it creates an odd dead zone where the optimal kill technique isn't really clear.

I think that giving secondary resources to the healer classes is a good move (while I don't play a Paladin, I think Holy Power adds a dynamic Holy pallies needed) but I think that it works best as a system that plays in tandem with mana as opposed to a replacement for mana. I really don't expect that the encounter designers are going to give up the ability to throttle a fight based on mana usage, because it's a pretty valuable tool, and also gives you fights like Loatheb and Chimaeron to play with.

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