And that extra mana regen gives is absolutely no benefit on the majority of the fights right now, hence spirit is useless.
The problem remains where mages are the only pure damage class with limited damage resources.
The thing is that we can't choose how a fight is going to be, I might want a bit more mana regen on KT in case I get 3 detonate mana's and a shadow fissure beneath me while evocating, but in most of the scenarions that won't happen.
I can't predict if a sarth3d kill is gonna take 7 minutes or 10 minutes nor the amount of adds that will spawn and the amount of times I will have to aoe and spend shitloads of mana.

So in most cases the extra regen won't help, in other cases it might help, but if the fight takes even longer you will still have 0 mana and might aswell die and grab something to eat.

There's a difference between non perfect gear and useless stats on it. There's not a single other class that has stats on their tier gear that gives them zero benefit. How would a dps warrior feel if blizzard decided to put defense on his dps gear because they might want to use it with another spec?

The difference is that all those pieces without spirit are also best in slot pieces for warlocks, shadowpriests and probably moonkins too. While they have a chance to get an upgrade with spirit we're left to compete with all these classes on 1 single drop.

The Tier 7.5 Hands, Legs, Shoulders are (from my understanding) currently the best in slot items for FFB mages and the Tier 7.5 Helm and Chest are in the top 3 pieces for their respective slots. Anyone please feel free to correct me.
What I am trying to say is that the Hands, Legs, and Shoulders have zero, count it, zero spirit on them.

As a general response to this thread, as a mage the only raid boss that I have mana constraints on is KT 25, and I have sloppy management of my gems and evocation. Most bosses in 25-man Naxx I now finish with half my mana bar and zero evocation. Even when we were pushing 10 man Naxx and we had just dinged 80 (greens and blues lol) I didn't encounter any mana issues The remaining bosses should be a non-issue assuming you know the fight mechanics (when to gem, evocate, what shield to use, mana or haste pot, all things that have been mentioned before).

The only reasons I can think of a mage going OOM on a fight are:

1) Poor Skill -> You aren't paying attention to your mana bar, using gem too late, evocating when it is likely to be interrupted, using wrong shield for the fight, gear choice. spec ... etc.

2) Unluckiness -> You get bombed 3 times in a row on KT or some similar fight mechanic with mana drains. It happens, there's nothing you can do to prevent it except tough it out.

3) Poor Raid DPS -> You have to remember, that just because YOU as a mage are going OOM on a fight, it does not necessarily mean that you are doing your job wrong. There are other DPS'ers in the group, and if people are not achieving at least an acceptable DPS, you will go OOM on any boss fight regardless of other circumstances. Sometimes this leads to you failing to down a boss with an enrage, other times it leaves you in the situation of being completely OOM and reduced to wanding while the warriors, DKs, hunters, rogues, and locks just go on their merry way.

As for the people discussing spirit:

I personally don't have a problem with how spirit and mana regen are worked into the Mage class right now. Having spirit on 2/5 of our tier pieces really doesn't concern me (it helps for drinking faster LOLOLOL!) because although it is a wasted stat, asking for Blizzard to completely revamp it is unrealistic. Ideas such as tying it to evocation/wanding are interesting, but rendered moot ultimately because at this raiding juncture, NO FFB mage should be going OOM. As for the remaining specs, I can see Arcane and possibly 18/53/0 having mana issues but if you are raiding as Arcane right now lol, and for the deep fire mages, they shouldn't really be having too many problems. No comment on Frosties, do you guys even know what a mana gem is? Fire mages should get a pet imo.

You neglected to mention the word replenishment anywhere in your post. If your going to give a summary of key factors influencing mage mana in a raid scenario, this is a big thing to just ignore. Remember we are not just talking about 'this raiding juncture', but also looking forward at future instances like Ulduar which will have longer, presumably more stressful fights.

Well, I considered adding in improper raid setup as a reason for going OOM, but ultimately decided that if you don't have either an Spriest or a Retpally (both imo) in your 25 man raid setup, you have bigger problems than just yourself and the mana bar.

But since you brought up the issue of Replenishment (0.25% of max mana every second for 15 seconds), it would be interesting if someone could run a diagnostic on mana regen (primarily between spirit/talent/glyph based restoration and replenishment) of an arc/deep fire build versus a ffb build. It would be interesting to see what spec would end up winner in DPS and DPM. I play a priest from time to time and from what I've both read and seen seem to indicate that in a 25 man raid situation, Intell>Spir for MP5 because of Replenishment. This might be something for our OOM mages to consider.

In regards to future instances such as Ulduar; yes predictably fights are going to get tougher and such, and there will be constraints on mana (Evocation CD being reduced leads me to believe 5'+ bosses will probably be the norm or at least very arduous trash), and this will mean that you probably will have to think about your mana management on a fight rather than the standard "pop gem ASAP, pop second gem, evo at 40%, gem when cd is up, and I guess I'll pot if I'm really SOL" mentality.

Edit: I forgot to add in my closing point. Regardless of what I may or may not think Ulduar is going to be, I can't definitely say anything about it because I haven't played it.

You might think mana for mages is ok at the moment because you don't run oom. But there will be bossfights where you will consistently run oom with the current mechanics.
So far there's been
- Kel'thuzad where I've had countless of kills where I spend the last 20% wanding, this is without even using living bombs throughout the whole fight.
- Sartharion with drakes, granted I've only killed him once with 3 drakes up. But I used 5 mana gems, 2 full evocations but the last minute of the fight I spent wanding just because of the randomness of the lava spawns, void zones and lava waves.
- fights where I don't have replenishment.


This is not allright for me, right now there's always gonna be a point where a mage runs oom and other classes can just continue doing their thing. That's bad design and it will repeat itself in the next dungeons and in PVP where it might even be a bigger issue.

As for our tier gear, I do agree it's pretty good, I don't agree with the spirit on it though. I really don't see the point in giving us spirit when it has zero purpose. They might aswell just put agility on it. I'm not claiming I want perfect stat distribution, for all I care they stack it with stamina but I just don't agree with spirit.

Don't get me wrong though, I love playing my mage more than ever and I know we're doing very competitive damage, I'm just concerned for when fights in both pve and pvp will get longer and my all my damage resources will be used which will eventually happen.

This is the primary reason they halved the evocation cooldown. To handle those cases.

You do have the option of starting with mage armour and switching to molten when you know you have enough for the remainder of the fight.

I do this when I'm not sure whether my mana will be sufficient.

I would probably do it more on KT than on Sartharion, because on the latter you can optimise your AOE output a bit if you're running short. Also the boost at the end of KT is more valuable.

It appears from this thread, that people universally agree that Life Tap represents a good example of active mana regen and one from which a mage equivalent might be derived.

Life Tap allows the tradeoff of Health and a GCD for a large amount of mana

My suggestion is either of:
A new mage spell: Instant - 0 Mana - Restores mana equal to your Spirit and allows 100% of mana regen to continue while casting for 10 seconds
OR
Instant - 0 Mana - Allows 100% of mana regen to continue while casting for 15 seconds

This spell would thus be integrated into rotations as needed to ensure that mana lasted for as long as the fight length. The mage would need to adapt to fights of various lengths and tradeoff fewer or greater GCDs for mana instead of dps.

Such a spell fits nicely with the successes of Life Tap and ties the resultant regen to Spirit validating the stat.

Obviously this runs the risk of harming talents that affect regen while casting, but the mechanism could be to allow greater than 100% regen while casting per talents and Mage Armor (ex. 130% regen while casting with Mage Armor and no talents)

Thoughts?

I don't regret it for a second though. I love everything else about the class, it's what my warlock was missing in terms of actually enjoying 5-mans and raids (i.e. something to do other than DPS and the occasional fear.)

But yeah, I had already run into the drinking issue before switching mains -- that and your comments, I definitely knew what I was getting into. Doesn't mean that I didn't think it should be changed both before I switched and, of course, after!

Giving Mages a Life Tap clone seems less like a solution and more like a class blurring bandaid. It doesn't solve the issues with mana gems, Evocation or armor choices. More importantly, it doesn't do anything on a fight where the Mage wouldn't go OOM anyway.

The core problem, as a player in the process of leveling a mage alt, appears to be that there are no fun decisions for Mages regarding mana regen. At best you have non-choices such as Mana Gems or Mage Armor/Molten Armor which aren't really fun or unfun, they just are. At worst you have Spirit gear and the ever interrupted Evocate which are okay when they work and jarringly unfun when they don't. On top of this having more mana has no tangible benefit, you can't increase your DPS with more mana (unless you're Arcane).

All of these mechanics might be considerably less annoying if there was a benefit to having additional mana. I may be wrong, but Arcane Mages seem largely content with everything but Evocation being interruptable, and only because they actually have a use for more mana. If that is the case I don't see why that model shouldn't be extended to the rest of the Mage class with a few tweaks to increase the inherent fun of Mage mana regenerative abilities regardless.

Mage Armor? Even if it doesn't function like that at the moment, there's certainly the potential for it to do so, much like Aspect of the Viper.

That's wasting a gcd and 850 mana because you failed at your pre-fight theorycraft. I'm not talking about theoretical future changes, I'm talking about the way the class works right now. Any change that allows Mages active mana regen in a fight requires increasing our burst dps assuming that we are using some gcds/time to produce mana -- this is how warlocks function, and why their dps when they don't have to lifetap can become quite ridiculous. Do you really see Blizzard increasing Mage burst dps? I certainly do not, not when they've finally, after 4 years of trying, just barely managed to decently balance the specs.

I would actually rather people bitch about intellect over spirit, that was supposed to be our primary stat right? It's certainly more mage themed than spirit. I mean it gives you a shitty amount of crit and some mana. Mana which you don't need because you already had enough intellect from those shitty blues you were questing in and oh hey raid mana regen. At least some measure of usefulness is brute forced out of it by a deep arcane talent, right?

I would see those talents that convert a bad stat into a good stat removed, and the stats themselves actually made relevant somehow.

Since mana is always 2 loose bricks away from a total structural collapse as a system, might I suggest just giving intellect some actual dps? Maybe spirit too since we loves our character sheet stats. I kinda like being a DK because I can look at my primary stats now and they actually mean something.

This is not particularly hard, just something the devs have avoided doing. In the strictest of strict senses, a larger mana pool is never bad, and while it does not increase your maximum DPS for your rotation, saying it cannot increase your DPS over the course of a fight is, in fact, a lie, it just never comes up in stacked raids. If you've ever been reduced to wanding because even Mage Armor from the start of the fight in non-arcane spec isn't enough, you know what I'm talking about...and part of the problem is haste. And if I have to spell that one out, that's sad.

The problem is how little Int and Spirit does provide for Mages [who are not deep Arcane]...practically nothing. Certainly, a simple 'fix' would be to add more crit or spell damage as base benefits from the stats for Mages only. Which would be exactly what other mana-DPS classes get from talents.

So here is a crazy, wacky, nutty idea: tie haste into the regen formula for Mages. The line of logic for this is very simple: haste is the one stat that makes a Mage use mana faster (barring the exception of fire crits using Burnout). Spellpower does not, crit does not, Int and Spirit certainly do not, and hit does not. So if haste is such a part of the problem, why not make it part of the solution? Make it so that a Mage regains mana based on the current formula, multiplied by (100% + the Mage's haste value), and that any regeneration OVER 100% of the formula is gained by all mages outside of the current rules.

Put a different way:
-Mages would regain mana according to all current rules/values.
-In addition, all Mages would gain a percentage of their Int/Spirit Mp5 equal to their haste value at all times. So if haste value is X%, you gain X% of your normal Mp5 regardless of casting state.

I'm sure the idea is far from perfect, may be insignificant simply because of how the current regeneration mechanics work, but the core idea is making haste somehow increase mana returns to compensate for the increased mana usage it requires.

[edit]Thematically, we Evocate faster with haste anyway. So if haste affects how quickly a Mage absorbs mana, why not make it affect how quickly a Mage absorbs mana?[/edit]

Gee this post looks familiar. I think I got flamed to hell and back for an almost identical one a few days ago.

Regardless, I obviously agree with you Vontre -- although that's not a mage problem, it's a caster problem: not benefiting in any real way from stats seems silly, and is an artifact of the launch-time design that casters were burst classes limited by mana. That design didn't survive the test of time, but we're left with a lot of its scaffolding still in place like buffs giving melee haste while we get mana regen, casters not benefiting from stats, and mana just being a deeply silly system.

Someone asked me recently why Mana Gems shouldn't just be an infinite number of charges (since I pointed out mages can't last much over a 6-8 minute fight without taking the hit of re-conjuring a mana gem anyways.)

It was an interesting question -- the answer for me came down to, "because then it would expose how silly a situation we really have." Who would sit and say "it's a good design for a rogue to have to hit button once every 2 minutes because otherwise their energy would stop regenerating"? It's as "wtf" as the old "chug a mana pot each time it's on cooldown" design for mana management: almost entirely non-interactive, uninteresting, and unskilled.

The thing is, I think the mana-gem model is good: if we are capable of operating without them. The "idea" of "I can press this button to have the option to do more dps but it's on a cooldown." Except of course they don't actually generate more DPS.

A better model for the gems, in my mind, which would also be in keeping with the original WoW design would be for gems to provide just a DPS boost (a cousin to the warlock spellstones with a very different mechanic), retain their long cooldown, and our mana to be sustainable without them.

(original model: more mana = more dps, because casters were designed around high burst and melee around lower dps but longevity.)

Well on a normal KT kill I can survive 1, maybe 2 detonate mana's without going oom. This is without using living bomb.
In phase 1 I just use scorch and ffb on ghosts and scorch/wand on skeletons. I use a gem near the end of phase 1.
I usually try to evo right after an aoe frostbolt but that leaves me vulnerable to a shadow fissure, had this 3 times so far where I had to move after 1 tick of evocation, I know that's really unlucky but it pisses me off :p. Getting MCed is also fatal for my mana, switching armor 3 times and starting to aoe easily costs me easily 5k+ mana. We usually use our bloodlust the moment the adds spawn so I don't miss out on it. Raidsetup is pretty standard, I don't get mana spring/tide because we only run with 1 shaman at the moment. We do have 1 spriest and 1 retpaladins so unless they both die I'll always have replenishment.
So yeah on a perfect kill without too much bad luck I won't run oom, in any other case I will. Whether it's detonate mana, bad shadow fissure, retadin/spriest dying, MC. That's a lot of things you can get unlucky with.

I don't want to compare myself to other classes, but the fact is that we're balanced right now, when fights are short, hence I can assume we are balanced around having infinite mana. Because once our mana is gone we don't do damage anymore en we will fall back in damage alot which leaves us pretty gimped on gimmick fights and fights that last long. Ah well, 4 minutes on evocation and 30% regen will help us again for when fights last longer, but again it doesn't fix it. And it's even worse in pvp :s

Well yes, KT sucks for mana users, especially mages, but like you said: unless you're really unlucky, you won't be oom. At the end of the day you can theorycraft as much as possbile, but RNG can be pretty tough. I usually save evocation (if I'm not mana bombed) until just before the adds come, and mana gem interimly. This fight is also about analysing the raid dps and looking ahead. I sometimes refresh my mana gem charge at 60% or so, if things look like they are going to take awhile, it might be a drop in dps to do it at that point, but having mana for <40% will more than balance it, not to mention a potential fourth mana gem damage buff.

As for damage done on KT, the one time I went completely OOM at 5% I was still at #2 dps and #5 damage done. I wish I had the WWS. That's another thing, after a fight where you are having mana problems on, go back and look at your WWS for it, look at your buffs gained, debuffs gained, spells cast, and determine where you may not have made the best decision, and keep it mind for the next time you encounter the boss.

Edit: One more thing I forgot to mention, I don't know if you are like most mages who just eat the mana gem CD everytime it is up. After my first mana gem on a fight such as this, I pop a pot instead of using the next mana gem CD. Two reasons, first of all, it saves you having to use a mana gem too early, and secondly (more importantly =D), it allows you to control WHEN you pop your gem, so if you have trinket procs or raid procs, you can both restore some mana, and increase your damage for a short period of time.

One last note on evocation. If you are having problems timing it to avoid interruption, consider chaining it at the end of an IV, 100% cast interruption prevention is pretty useful if that's a problem you're encountering.

Assuming you start with mage armor, then beyond that there is no button to increase your mana regen (sadly) for us mages--yeah. But, the rest of this discussion (balancing around the highest burn cycle per school/class) is true, but I have to say that it seems like Blizz is attempting to achieve that balance by forcing mana usage constraints rather than purely DPS of each spell cast (like current FFB and 18/53/0 specs). The best possible DPS *purposely cannot be sustained* that's gotta be their point with the ridiculous 200% base mana cost debuff for AB. I wish they had five stacks to re-emphasize this point.

I think you highlighted Blizz's point for this spec, except one small missing word from your argument: "in order to be competitive you need to be using the highest sustainable dps cycle for most of the fight." In my mind, how to sustain your maxdps cycle is very much the point of the new arcane spec.

I think that was the model for AB after the 2-piece T5 nerf (so spamming AB would give okay DPS but you'd need 3 druids and 3 shammies to keep you going, producing a raid resource suck that is implausible). I -think- what they are attempting to do is balance a maxdps scenario with the need to replenish the resource to keep that maxdps cycle going. If you have 3 druids and a crazy raid leader who is a mage (mine was an arcane mage), you might be lucky enough to get some innervates. Practically speaking, I don't think that will be an issue going forward (spam AB->MBarAM->ABar and pray for regular "emergency mana relief" just is highly impractical in a raid setting). I think they are taking a gamble that the likely max sustainable DPS cycle will be something less than the theoretical max DPS cycle in typical raid situations.

This argument is probably your weakest, in my view. That's because the brain work largely comes from attempting to gear for adequate spirit/int to sustain your max DPS cycle, rather than just looking for hit/dmg/crit/haste in our current builds. I think TBC Arcane Mages had a far less challenging cast cycle because the AB buff only affected itself (and still is that way until 3.0.8). So, that took all the guesswork out of how to "throttle" your cast sequence based on fight-segment length. I think there are already meaningful choices to make as I can tell from my tests on the PTR (active, in-combat ones).

I guess the real issue is PvP...but I don't believe it is some kind of "nightmare" like you are envisioning. We know that there isn't a "perfect mana dump" sequence we can affect to spend 15k mana for a single 200k blast or something like that. They do work around the margins, but they are effectively just creating another path toward achieving the same ends--competitive sustainable (and in this case somewhat variable) DPS.

I like the intellect discussion too. Somehow, I think it got missed even though two major ways we get mana back in raids (replenishment and evocate) are dependent on your total mana pool. I always thought that int could be exploited somewhat more for decent crit instead of garbage crit and a little more damage in arcane specs. It also affects passive regen now, correct?

I wonder if there had been some thought into creating a talent that traded mana for damage at a ratio like 10:1 where 5000 mana gets you 500 dmg for x seconds, for example. I suppose they could create a couple of different mage spells like this: trade mana for stam, etc.

That is pretty much Arcane Power in a nutshell, your out put there of course is based on the value of your Int and Mind Mastery Points.

^ Agreed, kinda. I was thinking of something that was on a much shorter cooldown (like 6 seconds, etc.) and it could possibly scale to some degree with spell power (base damage + spell power coefficient). So, to use it, you may just get to blow extra mana you have at the end of a fight, or if you have great regen, use it more regularly, etc.