Originally Posted by drats
@ panny, With your gear and the proper raid buffs/trinkets, you should be seeing upwards of 350mpp from SR. Are you using major mageblood pots and getting JoW when possible? I usually get kings, salv and might, so I use major mageblood to give my mana pool a little boost. 16mp5 is 1820m per minute, and really gives you some breathing room in terms of mana usage. I also use mana pots to supplement my mana pool inbetween SR's, but if I use mageblood I usually don't need them.
Your melee damage should be constant throughout the fight, and your shocks/totems are all instant casts. Unless something goes wrong you shouldn't run out of mana to the point where you can't SS. I'm not really sure what you mean by trade melee damage for magic damage, unless you mean at the gear level.
Edit: I guess I should add that from what I've seen in the armory, the leather alternatives generally have better stats than their mail counterparts (tier gear not included). Feral druid gear in particular seems to be really well suited for enh shaman, so I can't imagine people wearing mostly leather having issues with mana if they buff properly and stick to DPS. Having to drop back and heal is another story completely.
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I'm not using Mageblood. On progression stuff I'll use a Flask instead (boost DPS and mana gain) and on farmed stuff I'll just spend less mana by shocking less. JoW is quite rare (our Paladins are new, alts, or just not interested in meleeing stuff) and sometimes I won't get BoW (Salv is more important). 350 mana is about what I get per SRproc (going higher with the trinket), but it's the two minutes in between that can be an issue.
Some back of the envelope maths for two minutes of combat (I realize due to shocks and SS cooling down at the same time, throwing off timers slightly that these figures will be slightly inflated).
Earth Shock every 12 seconds = 535*(120/12) = 5350
Flame Shock every 12 seconds = 500*(120/12) = 5000
Stormstrike every 10 seconds = 8% of base mana. From armoury, this is about 3300 mana = 3300*0.08*(120/10) = 3168
Which is about ~13k mana used every two minutes not including any other costs (Totems, heals, Bloodlust). From my WWSs, I gain around 3-4k per Shamanistic Rage cooldown or every two minutes (this is assuming no procs are wasted "overhealing" my mana pool). Given my 7k mana pool, that's a 2-3k worth of mana that I don't have, whilst going balls to the wall. With a Fel Mana Potion (3.2k mana per 2 minutes), that about covers my mana costs, but you can see, it's already cutting it close.
Edit: Just for comparison:
Talented BoW: 41*(120/5)*1.2 = 1180 mana every 2 minutes
Mageblood (16mp5): 16*(120/5) = 384 mana every 2 minutes (not sure where you got 1820m per minute from)
What I meant by trading melee damage for magic damage is that because you have more melee stats and less int, you run out of mana faster, therefore you can Shock less, spending your mana on more efficient attacks (Stormstrike), essentially trading magic damage for melee damage. I'm thinkng (out loud, I guess) about whether this is a good way to go, considering I like to leave a small buffer in my mana pool for things like Greater Elemental Totems, heals, and Bloodlust.