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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsRaid Rx: A new balance for intellect and spirit in Mists of Pandaria
by Matt Low 
Nov 18th 2011 at 2:00PM
One of the proposed revamps coming in Mists of Pandaria is the way intellect and spirit interact with each other in regards to healers. For the new healer, understanding the current formula for mana regen can be a little daunting. To make it really easy, let's just say that it plays off both your spirit and your intellect. However, your intellect has a gradually increasing impact on how much mana you gain back in combat situations as your gear improves.
It appears that will no longer be the case heading into the next expansion. Ghostcrawler (lead systems designer) helped shed some light on the issue in a blue post earlier in the week.
The highlights?
- Intellect becomes a sheer throughput stat
- Spirit controls the rate of mana regen
- Mana pools will remain fixed
I included some of the passages that I felt would be particularly relevant to healing as we move forward.
Ghostcrawler, via Nethaera
Hey all, here's some more information from Ghostcrawler about this topic-
This is our intent. We aren't trying to nerf healers across the board, and if we were, there are cleaner ways to do that. What we want to do is make the role of the stats less ambiguous. Currently, when Intellect drives mana pool and Spirit drives mana regen, then they are both longevity stats and interact in complex ways. With the change we are proposing, Intellect provides bigger heals and Spirit improves longevity. For healers, there should not always be a clear cut answer. Intellect may still be the superior stat, but not by as much as it is today. (Again, for healers -- DPS specs aren't designed to run out of mana if they use their regen mechanics every now and then.) Mana pools can still be large (we are thinking 100,000 mana at level 85) so that it doesn't feel too bizarre to existing casters and doesn't feel too much like rage or energy.
This is our intent. We aren't trying to nerf healers across the board, and if we were, there are cleaner ways to do that. What we want to do is make the role of the stats less ambiguous. Currently, when Intellect drives mana pool and Spirit drives mana regen, then they are both longevity stats and interact in complex ways. With the change we are proposing, Intellect provides bigger heals and Spirit improves longevity. For healers, there should not always be a clear cut answer. Intellect may still be the superior stat, but not by as much as it is today. (Again, for healers -- DPS specs aren't designed to run out of mana if they use their regen mechanics every now and then.) Mana pools can still be large (we are thinking 100,000 mana at level 85) so that it doesn't feel too bizarre to existing casters and doesn't feel too much like rage or energy.
I feel that this is the system Blizzard should have settled on going into Cataclysm.
We have come a long way since classic. Remember how the first concept of mana regeneration functioned? Mana regen would temporarily stop after a spell had finished casting. After 5 seconds, it would then begin to regen. That was the origin of the five-second rule.
At least now, it'll continue nonstop. To make life easier for everyone, we don't have to worry about deciding between two mana regen stats anymore. With spirit controlling regen, we might need to blend in some hybrid intellect and spirit attributes more often than not. If the start of the this expansion is any indicator of what it'll be like when the next one comes out, something tells me we'll be needing to stack a jaw-droppingly high amount of spirit just for endgame.
Who wants to guess how much mana we'll have at level 90? I'm thinking around 222,000 as a start.
Ghostcrawler, via Nethaera
In addition, we think fixed mana pools will help healers scale better with content. Some players seem to be interpreting the 5.0 design as healing 5-player dungeons should be easy but healing raids should be very hard. That is certainly a better situation than dungeons being very hard and raids being easy, but neither is really the goal. We want the increase in difficulty to be linear. If you can handle dungeons, you should be able to graduate to raids with the normal incremental gear improvements that most players get. This is particularly true of normal and Raid Finder difficulty settings. Heroic raiding will remain more challenging, but even in that case, keep in mind that the challenge of a raid encounter is often its complexity, which requires the group to learn and execute a lot of mechanics.
Fixed mana pools is another concept that's new. The more I think about it, though, the better I think it will be for us overall.
I've stopped thinking about my mana bar in terms of absolute numbers. I've started thinking about how much of my bar gets eaten up by my healing spells. While my Prayer of Healing may have eaten up 10% of my mana bar earlier in the expansion, now it only affects 4% overall (please note that those numbers are hypothetical). Instead of casting Prayer of Healing 10 times before running out of mana, I can cast it 25 times now.
The concern now shifts to finding that equilibrium between throughput and regeneration. You can have high throughput and low mana regen, but that would turn you into a bottle rocket healer. After a limited amount of time, you'd be fresh out of gas. In other words, the thought process then shifts to asking, "How much of that mana bar is going to increase between the time I start casting and stop finishing this spell?" I have no doubt someone out there who is way smarter than I will figure out how much of each stat we need that will put us in that sweet spot.
The fact that both intellect and spirit affected regen to some disagree caused confusion to newer healers in general.
Ghostcrawler, via Nethaera
Gearing up will still be rewarding and meaningful. You'll still feel as powerful as you do today. Intellect and spirit will just do different things. If you find yourself routinely running out of mana on raid fights, you are probably either overhealing a lot or the group is taking a lot of damage that is intended to be avoidable. A fight like Phase 2 Beth'tilac on heroic is about as mana-intensive as things get, and that phase doesn't last very long, so your mana-regen mechanics and cooldowns should be sufficient to keep you going. That won't change in 5.0.
As a player who often runs dangerously low on mana during attempts at times, I can tell you that is due to slight additional overhealing. I blame it on healing paranoia. Ever see a target near you that has taken damage, but you can't really do anything about it? I'll sneak them a Renew or another spell. I find that I will sit there and watch a player take damage for what feels like eternity before using a heal because I'm not sure if anyone near them has seen them take those hits.
I really hope the developers can pull off these changes. I like the idea of the proposed changes but am a little concerned in terms of implementation and stuff. Have to wait and see!
Need advice on working with the healers in your guild? Raid Rx has you covered. Send your questions about raid healing to mattl@wowinsider.com. For less healer-centric raiding advice, visit Ready Check for advanced tactics and advice for the endgame raider.
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Raid Rx (Raid Healing), Mists of Pandaria
Reader Comments (Page 2 of 2)
Olddirty Nov 18th 2011 2:38PM
100k mana for lvl 85 seems kind of low though. Fully raid buffed my pally sits between 128k-135k depending on the gear I use for the fight and our disc priest sits between 140-145. That number is only gonna go up with tier 13 and heroic gear. I would assume each class will have a different pool size also. Really they could make the pool sizes at lvl 90 whatever they wanted if they balanced the mana cost of spells around it.
Dan Nov 18th 2011 2:58PM
They said that if necessary, they'd buff spirit to make up for the lost mana so healers wouldn't feel nerfed.
These numbers the blues are citing make me wonder about that item squish, though. Are they putting it off until the next expansion?
Paul Nov 18th 2011 3:13PM
@Dan
They haven't actually said that they will be squishing. It was merely one of two possible options that they were discussing.
You can't put something off before deciding on it.
spamfest Nov 18th 2011 4:14PM
Of course they're putting it off. It's made pretty obvious in the original post that the other solution would only be temporary, otherwise what happens in xpac 6 when people start critting for 200000 mega damage? Convert it to über damage and hope our PCs can keep up with doing math on 12-digit numbers?
Xpac 12: Your fireball critted Swamplight Murloc for 50 über cyborg damage of l33tness.
Item squishing needs to happen eventually. The only thing that's up in the air is whether it'll happen in MoP.
Dan Nov 18th 2011 7:37PM
I realize they haven't decided. I was merely thinking out loud =)
Paul Nov 18th 2011 3:08PM
Intellect affecting so many things was definately a mistake in the long run, an unforseeable one though. However, taking so long to see the same problem with Intellect when they started (and continued) to sort out the similar issues with Agility does seem....off.
However, I wonder if this means that Spirit is going to be a primary stat again, and healers will have to choose between Spirit or Intellect. Thanks to Ele Shaman and Balance Druids, I think this is unlikely, but I wonder if that would also be better in the long run.
Boobah Nov 18th 2011 4:07PM
Unforeseeable? I don't think so. It was eminently foreseeable as soon as they made intellect directly increase spellpower.
On spirit: Blizzard seems unlikely to make it a primary stat. An important one, sure, but to a tank so is dodge; they don't give up primary stats for it, though. At least not outside gemming. Leaving spirit a secondary stat allows you to reforge for the amount of spirit you want, as well as allowing you to adapt DPS and heal pieces for the other role.
Primary stats are primary because A) without them, you're useless and B) more is always better. There is no cap and never will be for primary stats, while many secondary stats do (although whether it's practical is another matter.)
gymboy91 Nov 18th 2011 6:09PM
@Boobah
I think it would be interesting if healers began gearing like a tank where secondary stats are "king" and you just get the primary stats as baseline by getting better gear but do not really "need" more
This would probably make going from healer to caster dps (and vice versa) more like going from a tank to dps (you can do it but not as well), but it could help alleviate some problems. The main problem I see is spirit converting to hit for hybrids (whereas no dps really looks for dodge or parry rating?).
What do people think about making healers gear like tanks (secondary stat(s) help more than stacking the primary stat)??
Paul Nov 19th 2011 8:05AM
@Boobah
It was unforseeable at the launch of the game (or during alpha), when the system was introduced. At that time, they hadn't looked ahead to consider what they would do. I was not stating that it was unforseeable up until the recent announcement.
As I stated, as soon as they recognised the issue with agility (when it gave 1 attack power, dodge, armor and crit), THAT was when they should've realised that Intellect was going to have similar issues. Since that occured in TBC, I am clearly stating that it was an seeable issue BEFORE int directly affected Spell Power.
Regarding Spirit, I agree that for now, you're spot on. However, I would just like to stat that Primary stats are such because they are essential. The proposed changes are slowly pushing us towards a game where Spirit is essential. I'd compare Spirit to Dodge now, but I think it will be the most important non-primary stat in MoP, and that there will be no comparable stat for any other classes.
Also, what happens if Blizzard do change things up further in the future and the affect of a healing spell is affected by the target's HP and everything (healing-wise) becomes percentage based? Spell Power instantly becomes useless, and the healing game comes down to regen and mechanics, instead of what we have now, where healers have to worry about throughput, mechanics and regen.
As unlikely as it seems, remember that Blizzard are continually trying to simplfy the base-line experience of Healers and Tanks. As much as I'd dislike this kinda of direction shift, I certainly wouldn't see it as impossible, just wholey unlikely. Just as giving Tanks a 99% hit chance by default is unlikely, but we already know that thought has been put through the dev team.
Jordan Nov 18th 2011 5:17PM
Dear god can we stop dramatically changing healing every expansion? These changes to healing mechanics are like China's Great Leap Forward's. They promise to improve but leave you with something diminished.
goldeneye Nov 19th 2011 1:53AM
Design discussions can get a little scary. But you can gloss over them, wait until the xpack drops and then you'll only be confronted with the results.
archbaotho Nov 18th 2011 5:58PM
@MattLow I don't know if you use any sort of healing addon, but my person tool of choice is VuhDo, and it shows you incoming heals on a target. Playing with an Rdruid and Rsham when I que up a heal i see a slightly faded green sliver attach to the larger green bar of health of the target, and if the bar grows again before my heal goes off, than I know they have also que'd up a heal on that target. VuhDo approximates the heal of course and doesn't anticipate crits.
Ajizzle Nov 18th 2011 9:53PM
The more information that Blizzard releases about the new expansion, I can see numerous threads of design concepts coming together. This change I believe can work for the hybrid druid, say you are playing feral and you take the talent in which you can heal for a short period of time. We would defiantly not be stacking spirit, so we can get some competitive burst healing done with this intellect change and considering we will have fixed pools, we will have the same mana pool as other healers which will aid out ability to play the hybrid. All depends on encounter design obviously.