Beyond Mana

Mana is an old idea which needs to be replaced. In this entry I'm going to examine its use in WoW and propose some alternate resource systems.


Why Mana?

The word "mana" usually refers to a player resource system where you have a constantly regenerating amount of resources to use to perform special abilities. In general, there's no upper bound on the amount of mana the player can have. It's supposed to represent your character's mental fortitude and ability to sustain the rigors of using magic. In gameplay, it's supposed to make the player make the player constantly choose between expensive yet powerful abilities and cheaper, weaker spells. If the player wants to use their high-power high-cost abilities more often, they can be given the option of increasing the amount of mana their character possesses, or increasing their mana regeneration rate.

As a concept, mana needed to wait until the era of the computer RPG with enough processing power to keep track of constant, real-time incrementing and a sufficiently high-resolution display to make a UI where the player would always be able to keep track of it. Once these conditions are met, mana seems like a pretty easy concept from the programmer's end of things - it's just a number undergoing constant adding and subtracting. The designer then makes the decision about how much of a player's resources that a spell should consume. Summoning a meteor might represent 75% of the average player's resources, which is easily converted to a finite number if the player is allowed to empower themself by increasing their mana pool.

Now what happens when the player's wizard is backed against the wall by an army of goblins and has flung one too many fireballs and lightning bolts around? Once their mana descends below a certain numeric threshold, they are unable to use all those flashy magic spells, the stuff that made their character a hero instead of some bearded old man in a funny hat. Maybe they'll get a brief sound clip of their character saying "I don't have enough mana for that spell!" before the goblins close in and make the player go through whatever arduous steps are necessary to recover from their wizard's untimely death.

This scenario is where I think the mana system is lacking. At one moment, the player could sling spells around and use all the abilities that make the game fun. But once their wizard's mana goes under that specific number, they're unable to do anything besides wait for it to regenerate over a long period of time. Maybe they could employ some emergency measure like a mana potion, but this only delays the problem. There are still stretches of time where the player finds themselves unable to do what they want, which is to blast goblins with spells. Presently, players are used to this restiction, but given a better-conceived resource system, I think they will gravitate away from mana-using classes and even the games those classes are in.

Resource systems in WoW

As you probably know, every class in WoW uses mana except for Rogues, Warriors, and Death Knights. The Death Knight in particular employs a complex system called Runes which are a finite yet quickly regenerating resource. I'll spare a detailed explanation of it here but my experience with it in WoW is that it's by far the most fun resource system in the game. It keeps with Blizzard's design philosophy of being initially fun but taking time and thought to master. When you first see it, you see that it reinforces the Death Knight's distinct schools of evil magic - Blood, Frost, and Unholy. As you play your Death Knight more, you learn how to chain your abilities together so that you can do massive amounts of damage in short periods of time by maximizing the use of your runes. You also learn how to use your expensive abilities (Death and Decay) and how to work within the rune limitations that the abilities impose. But most importantly, the player never feels like they've completely spent their resources and opened themselves to complete vulnerability because runes regenerate very quickly. If the player is in some dangerous situation then they'll always have something they can try because their runes will be available for use soon after they try something. This doesn't mean that they'll always survive, but they will at least have a more interesting time of things than the bored wizard who's rendered completely impotent when his mana runs out.

The Death Knight's resource system represents years of additional design insight over the life of WoW, and the new class is all the more fun because of it. Rage and Energy have been in the game since it came out, and while both systems are not without their issues, they've proven popular enough and add an additional layer of depth to their classes without needing to be tweaked too often. Mana has a much more checkered history, as challenging content often exposes the shortcomings of many of the game's mechanics.

Long-term mana sustainability is intended to be a challenge in WoW's end-game content, so there's all variety of gear choices, enchantments, and consumable items that players are given the option of using. So far it's frequently happened that some combination of those optional enhancements leads to players having infinitely sustainable mana, so nearly every patch tweaks the numbers a bit. Classes like Shamen and Paladins had to be given new abilities to provide more direct mana regeneration when they were allowed to fill the damage-dealing role and had to stand toe-to-toe with classes that didn't run out of resources on a long fight. But no matter how much tweaking the mana system undergoes, the worst-case scenario for the player is always a situation where they are rendered helpless and bored for an extended period of time.

It would be hyperbole to say that the mana system is killing WoW or strangling its progress, but the frequency with which it's tweaked and the recent introduction of the much more enjoyable rune system makes it look like one of those game concepts which good designers will eventually replace.


Beyond the Blue Bar

These examples are just my own stabs at replacements, but I hope they'll be the starting point for some more advanced ideas.

Concentration - This is really the same thing a mana system is trying to represent anyway. A magic user is ostensibly taxed from summoning a fireball or whatever and finds it difficult to do the same thing afterwards. In this system, a spell's effectiveness would decrease when a player's concentration level has been reduced from casting spells, so that a low-concentration fireball would still come out but wouldn't be very effecitve. A spell would use up some amount of the player's concentration, perhaps a percentage of the current concentration level so it never reaches zero but just gets really small. It could be represented by either a percentage (you're at 80% concentration) or maybe at multiple levels (you're at concentration level 1/3). It would fully regenerate in a short period of time.

Yin/yang - Ripping this one off from the recent Warhammer MMO. The Archmage class has a yin/yang meter which makes your healing or damage spells increase the power of their opposite. For example, if an Archmage casts 2 healing spells, it charges up his yang meter and makes his next damage spell more powerful. This is a noble attempt to get people to play the traditionally underpopulated healing classes by encouraging them to do both damage and healing. I believe the class uses mana, but this could be replaced by something else.

Barbarian rage - By this I mean the current implementation of the Barbarian's rage system in Diablo 3, according to BlizzCast 8. This is very similar to the rage system in WoW, but has multiple "levels" of rage instead of a finer-grained numeric rage system. Clearly there's a number hiding under this abstraction, but the key is that the player gets this resource by running around smashing enemies and not through tedious waiting. This is the same intent of WoW's rage system but simplifying the numeric aspect of it (all you need to know is if you're at level 0 through 3) lets the player worry a bit less about numbers and more about barbarian ass-stomping.

Some permutation of Death Knight runes - These are already in WoW already and the balancing math has already been worked out, so you could slap some thorns on them and bam, now druids never run out of mana. Combined with another mechanic like the yin/yang system, this could seem fresh enough to not just be a retread of the Death Knight abilities.

None of these systems are complete replacements and would require careful tweaking to work within whichever system they're implemented in, of course.


WoW without mana?

As much as I think jettisoning mana would advance the design of the game, I think WoW is going to be stuck with it for good. There are so many design assumptions that the game is built on that I don't think they'll want to attempt the level of brain surgery necessary to shift all of the mana-using classes to another resource. Among the reasons:

• Every piece of caster gear is built on the assumption that the player has mana. Much of this gear affects the player's mana pool and regeneration rate. Furthermore, these stats are largely unified across player classes. New gear can be made to fit the newest class changes, but the drift can't be too vast or new players and leveling players will be baffled at all the low-level quest gear from 2004 unless the developers spend an absurd amount of time going through the thousands of items.
  
• Alchemy will have to be substantially tweaked, as mana potions are one of its most valuable products.
  
• Every caster ability will have to be re-implemented and balanced within whatever new resource mechanic the class will switch to. Much of the talent trees will have to be re-done, as class-defining talents like the Paladin's Illumination only make sense in the context of mana.
  
• If the resource systems regenerate quickly like Death Knight runes, long fights won't be able to challenge players to manage their mana in the long term. These fights will have to be re-balanced to be made difficult in other ways.
  
• As Star Wars Galaxies has shown, players don't like the feeling of having the rug pulled out from under them. Players are used to mana and an alternate resource system takes time to learn. Of course most people are capable of learning, but this is a leisure activity and frustrated players are more than happy to play another game. Players learned how to use the Death Knight, but they did so by voluntarily starting a Death Knight character instead of being forced to adapt to a new system on their existing characters.

My hope is that whatever Blizzard's new MMO project is, they're having discussions like this about challenging the assumptions that the genre makes and coming up with something new and fun.