Does anyone believe that Bllizzard's solution is to force us into wearing mail? We are the only plate DPS class without a talent that gives us a bonus for wearing plate and hunter mail is pretty decently itemized besides the lack of strength. Given that we have to use reduced rotations if we wear plate, there must be a point of inflection where intellect becomes a very strong dps stat.

Perhaps I'm not seeing this right or just don't quite understand, but if you are using JoL, and the health returned to you is counted as your heals, you do not receive mana back from spiritual attunement, do you? If in fact that is the case, it would probably be wise to be judging wisdom and allowing others to JoL so that you may in fact get mana return. I haven't had mana issues yet, granted i'm wearing 3 pieces of gear that have intel on them, but still minimal issues with mana.

An option for increasing mana return is tossing a hand of sacrifice on your tank, but this can be risky in some fights, especially if your healers aren't ready for it. I did run low at the end of brutallus this week, but of course that's with spamming everything I had.

I am not experiencing the same mana concerns people are reporting here. Ran Black Temple last night and on Gorefiend I was able to sustain all of my DPS abilities (DS, CS, J, Consecration, Exorcism, Avenging Wrath, Holy Wrath, Hammer of Wrath) and did not run out of mana until Gorefiend was at about 5%. All I had to do at that point was pop a potion and I was back in the fight for the remaining 5%.

Granted that Gorefiend is a joke with the raid DPS that is being put out now, the fight didn't last very long (a little over 2 minutes if I remember correctly). I have very little int on my gear and a mana pool around 4,700.

Add Divine Plea into the mix, and I'm really not concerned about mana at this point.

A ret pallys JoL is more effective then other pally's so unless it's a fight where the raid dmg is minimal or you're on farmed content you should probably still be using JoL. The raid comes first.

As for throwing up a sacrifice throwing it up on the tank is stupidly risky. Throw it up on a raid member that is soaking meteor slashes.
So what you're saying here is that in a VERY short fight with lots of raid dmg you still went oom before the end... ya there's no reason to be concerned here....

We run with two ret paladins, so I usually throw it on the other ret paladin to do.

Raids are a joke right now, if we wipe in sunwell on something other than:

Felmyst:
Bad breath call

Twins:
Not moving when conflag otw

Muru:
Bad transition

KJ:
Bubble Problems

Then something is wrong. Sunwell other than brutallus is a very poor testing ground for mana because of the insane amount of AoE damage going around. I haven't really been into naxx on beta, but depending on fight lengths will be a big factor as well. Most all fights (for my guild) are no longer than 4 minutes, KJ and perhaps council being the exception.

This is potentially a very legitimate concern/solution, which would no doubt cause as much strife with our arrow-plinking/frawshawking brethren as it did with the rogues and ferals of pre-3.0 (with the exception of badge gear, which is at our own discretion).

Now personally, I've always felt smug about downgrading armor classes. I play a moonkin, BM hunter, and paladin (all 3 specs), and on each of those I've taken the opportunity to downgrade to cloth, leather, and leather/mail appropriately. Traditionally I've found that even with item level normalization the sub-class armor pieces tend to eerily outweigh the "proper" armor choices in a very Twilight zone way. I'm not sure if this is holdover from the days of Pre-TBC when armor was considered a legitimate, distinguishing feature of each class' viability, but it's not something I've really questioned. Rather, I've just accepted it, with the reasoning that if Blizzard is balancing DPS around wearing the "proper" armor, then downgrading in favor of stats gives me a sort of edge over that balance. (The same is true for my holy exploits, where I found that shaman mail invariably possessed higher healing and at least equal mana regen with an MP5-to-crit tradeoff for most levels).

For me, that's not an issue. For many people, it is. Image is a very big motivator for why people play this game, and I'm certain the vast majority of paladin players would prefer their character to mirror the hammer-swinging, plated behemoth of virtue that they visualize in their minds. People just like the holy warrior vibe that plate gives. And there's a functional loss too; I'm lucky because I'm in a very open-minded guild that's cool on rets rolling on sub-armor-class upgrades. But there are many guilds that balk at these practices, which would result in the paladin who engaged in them becoming either despised by his guildmates OR on a permanent waiting list so that he can't ever get that particular mail piece until every single hunter/shammy in the guild has it and it's about to be sharded. And all this is not even considering the whole tier-gear conundrum.

At the end of the day, however, we're getting very conflicting reports at level 70 and 80 both. I hate to mirror the blues, but from personal experience and what I've read, it's just too soon to draw any conclusions about the severity, or lack thereof, concerning ret mana. It's certainly something to keep in mind and watch carefully on the way to 80 for sure. Blizzard has a pretty solid track record of holding off on buffs so long as "someone" is doing well (at least from a PVE Moonkin, PVP Hunter perspective). That means that mana issues are very likely to become the responsibility of players and players alone. If that's the case, we may have to adopt our own solutions such as downgrading to mail, group stacking with the shamans, item benefits from professions, and so forth. It would appear that mana management will be just as crucial a determinant of player skill as rotation.

Of course, this is all assuming mail is even viable. Lots of LK mail is loaded with haste (which ironically provides more frequent SA returns from the recoil of SoB/M), crit, and armor pen (yay physical Divine Storm! -.-), but the price we pay for the int is that we do not have any Int=AP talents like shamans or hunters. Am I mistaken in believing that when Blizzard places the AP numbers on these pieces, they do it assuming 1 Int = 1 AP for most/all hunters and shamans? As such, we could end up with suboptimal AP numbers from mail from simply not receiving the intended Int->AP conversion, and that's not even counting the loss of all that strength (which is hit even harder by the massively scaling values compared to BC). I smell some empirical testing in the eaves.

-'- And on a completely off topic P.S. note, I find it ironic that these mechanics are causing me to once again consider degrading my paladin's armor, while the whole Aspect of the Viper rigamarole is forcing me to upgrade back to mail from leather on my hunter. :P

DP is a one minute cooldown, Consecrate is a 10 second cooldown if you glyph it.

I'm sorry, I just don't see this add up, that's what I was saying above. Even if you double our mana raid buffed, it's still going to be a little over 2 consecrates a minute.

Also, potions are not the answer - I'm glad Joypunk was able to spman his cooldowns, but a 2 minute fight to and potting the last 5 % doesn't indicate to me, in anyway, a lack of concern over mana.

EDIT: My problem with using mail is that if our only option is to itemize with mail for our pve concerns, what do we do for PVP? Mana regeneration is demonstrably less for pvp.

It seems I need to say the mana isssue again.

PvP and PvE at 70 is fine mana-wise (at least for me, even with nerfed JoW), partly due to int on gear and 2 Tier 6 and/or 4 piece PvP gear, which are pretty common bonuses on people now.

At 80 on the pre-made, I wasn't fine for either role at 15% JotW returns. Therefore, I think once people start hitting 80, it will be adjusted or mana costs will be reduced. GC will not mess with it now because it is not necessary, and GC did promise he would adjust things if was necessary.


Edit: The 70 information (from doing BT and Onynia post-3.03, is doing all attacks except the Undead ones).

Out of curiosity, was that with the "prescription" rotation of CS-DS-Judge, or the loaded cheezburger option with all the consecrate and exorcism and HoW on top?

Something that I will admit does frighten me about ret mana is that in his endorsement of the "Triple Entente" ret cycle, GC omitted HoW. Even though it's only usable sub-20%, it's still an icredibly powerful DPS booster that we need to have the option of relying on. If we assume a standard fight length of 10 minutes, at a steady DPS rate, we're looking at basically 2 minutes worth of potential HoW spam. I could see our mana pools running very low in those two minutes, and we should for damn sure not be placed in a position where we have to choose whether to use our sub-20 kill ability or not, unlike every other class that has one.

I am not really familiar with the gear in the expansion except that it won't have Int. If Int is needed, what do Int/mana enchants look like as opposed to the standard DPS enchants? What about the possibility of supplementing the DPS plate with caster gear for the rings, cloak, etc. Also, what about Holy or Prot pally gear? will that have Int on it? Would swapping out a Plate item designed for Ret with something designed for Holy severely decrease our DPS? And if it is a viable option, how hard would this be to balance out to get adequate mana return?

Has anyone taken a closer look at Righteous Vengeance? The way it's calculated, both for stacking purposes and just in general, seem to be a bit wonky. Looking at our Brutallus kill for last night, it seems that both have some oddities in them. For instance, when Righteous Vengeance is partially resisted, the damage done plus the amount resisted adds up to 5-20 damage less than what an unresisted tick will do. In addition, when you overwrite a previous debuff, it seems to stack, but not in any way that I can figure. At first I thought it might be seal damage, but that doesn't seem to work either. Here's a link to the filtered WWS, in case someone wishes to take a closer look, maybe you'll have better luck than I will.

WWS Report, 11/05/08.

As for the mana issue, I'm a bit worried about what we'll look like at 80. I was still top damage for Felmyst, thanks to liberal AoE damage, but as that report shows, I was #6 on Brutallus, and I was pushing HARD for extra damage. I had to use a potion for the first time since 3.0. Without 2pc T6, and the int from the S4 chest and gloves I use, I would've been even worse off, and the problem is only more severe as fight length scales. They've gotten our damage under control; what's the reasoning behind forcing mana to be an issue as well?

Another note: Judgement of Light seems to work very strangely. Last night it was varying in amount healed by a large margin, with the average heal being for 529, but a maximum tick of 1627? It wasn't an AP or SP-scaling bug, otherwise it would've been more noticeable in my damage, I think.