Even with the chance to DP, I still think Intellect is the stat to stack. Since when you are able to DP you want to get as much mana from it as possible, and its a good mana stat outside of DP (as shown at the end of the last page). Though we will have a better idea once we know better how often we can DP in Ulduar.
Interesting in what exactly will be the change to Spiritual attunement.
I don't see anything changing about int being the stat to stack given how illumination is scaling, replenishment, and obviously DP as the last line of mana regen. However, we're still left to the mercy of the next tier of content. If mortal striking your output becomes prohibitive on some fights for any number of reasons, then the style you execute will change.
But again, we're still left waiting for the next tier of content. In current mechanics, this doesn't really change anything. At most, possibly flashing early on Sarth3D and switching to HL spam later once Drake damage kicks in.
Last edited by Silmeria : 02/05/09 at 4:58 PM.
Reason: Removed a bad statement
In my opinion, the DP nerf is now to accomplish what they originally intended, a painful sacrifice for some great regen. Now finding those 10-15 seconds (as much as possible) to DP during a "safe" time will be necessary, instead of DPing and shrugging off the healing loss. Shouldn't be too hard to coordinate among healers the DP uptime. Sure, you can throw a heal if it's an emergency, but you should try and avoid any healing at all during DP. Still get the great regen, which works for me, it's now more strategic in it's use.
In my opinion, the DP nerf is now to accomplish what they originally intended, a painful sacrifice for some great regen. Now finding those 10-15 seconds (as much as possible) to DP during a "safe" time will be necessary, instead of DPing and shrugging off the healing loss. Shouldn't be too hard to coordinate among healers the DP uptime. Sure, you can throw a heal if it's an emergency, but you should try and avoid any healing at all during DP. Still get the great regen, which works for me, it's now more strategic in it's use.
It also balances PvP, since using DP is like putting an MS up if it's not already there or doing 25% healing if MS already up. Overall, probably a pretty fair change, though it does indicate that they had no intention of nerfing int scaling for holy paladins.
Int will remain our core stat for a long time. Unless people find that stacking SP/Haste will somehow enable them to use DP more without consequence.
The DP change is elegant in that it only affects Holy significantly (it affects PvP Ret Pallies healing output some).
However, like Endo said it only makes you want to stack Int more so you need to Plea less.
This is also a good PvP change, since self-MS yourself is much worse than just a 20% reduction.
Millions of words are written annually purporting to tell how to beat the races, whereas the best possible advice on the subject is found in the three monosyllables: 'Do not try.'
Edit - lol, got busy at work, left this hanging, then posted it before finding they had annouced changes. Tis interesting they only went to a -50% percent, I figured they would go with "after activating DP, any attempt to heal will cancel DP"
Very happy to see they didn't hurt Ret/Prot with this change.
So I'm feeling slightly confused here. It's almost like I've spent the entire day slacking off, doing no work, and my boss has called me into his office with a stern look and then said "excellent work lately, we're going to pay you a bonus!" I can't exactly say "no", but this certainly isn't what I was expecting.
The screams of paladins being killed as viable healers and no longer having any mana regen at all are amusing to read through (talking about official forums here of course) for a few pages but after a while I'm finding myself wondering whether or not there'll be any difference at all?
For reference, some rough napkin math, assuming ~2200-2300 SP and 50% crit (on both FoL and HL, which would need FoL to be glyphed), as well as 4T7, GoSoW, and -113 Libram, shows that switching from HL spam to FoL spam for 15 seconds (ie 10 HLs vs 15 FoLs) represents just under 50% drop in total healing done (48.5% or so, although numbers are very rough), and a mana gain of just over 3.5k mana. Anyone with more than 14k raid buffed mana will see a greater return from DP, for a similar penalty.
Now of course the above is a gross over-simplification. Those 15 FoLs could be weaved in after every 2 HLs to space out the "penalty" to the point where it was trivial, while with Divine Plea you're stuck for 15 seconds with a severely reduced output (a /cancelaura macro for unexpected bursts is something I'll probably put on my bars, though). The maths is rough and I probably left stuff out but the trend is still there.
HL spam will still be just as maintainable as before, and it looks like there will be absolutely no nerfs to regen via Illumination or Divine Plea. DP's "deterrent" can essentially be replicated by switching to FoL for 15 seconds. Intellect will still be just as disgustingly good while at the same time we're being told that spirit was too good and is being nerfed. Replenishment is being expanded to the point that Blizzard is saying that they'll design encounters with the assumption that you'll have it, almost like they'll assume that you have a tank.
Honestly, the only changes I can see myself making to my healing style in light of these announcements is to give DP roughly half a second's consideration before mashing it, and to perhaps try to time it with SP trinket procs / use abilities, and wings. I don't see this as a nerf at all.
Spiritual attunement, on the other hand, is a very good target for a nerf (assuming it remains unchanged for prot and possibly ret). Back in SWP, Brutallus was the only fight that gave me mana issues due to the relatively low amount of raid damage. On felmyst I'd simply spam max rank HLs on the tank for the entirity of P1. During P2 I'd melee skellies with SoW, and coupled with the SA return from the aura, would be back on max mana in time for P1 again. On twins, SA was the deciding factor in my output. If I took 2+ flame sears, I could spam HL without even considering downranking. If I took 0 then by the time we dropped down to Aly I'd be meleeing with SoW up, after having spent most of the fight alternating between ranks 7 and 9. It's just too large a variable from fight to fight.
I'm hoping that we'll see many more changes to regen than what's been posted so far before 3.1 goes live.
Mex, I have to agree. One other aspect, we still overheal like monsters. For example on Sarth 3d last nite my overheal was 68%, popping DP even with a -50% penalty isn't going to stop me when clearly I overheal more than the penalty. Sure it will stop me during buffed breaths, but it isn't a huge reach to pop that appropiately to avoid debuff during buffed breaths.
Maybe they will change T7 4pc, Seal of Wisdom Glyph, libram? Or perhaps some form of synergy that adds a mana sink to use. Could also be that content in Ulduar is sufficent that mana is a concern with just what they have done (got to believe they are testing it internally).
Honestly, the only changes I can see myself making to my healing style in light of these announcements is to give DP roughly half a second's consideration before mashing it, and to perhaps try to time it with SP trinket procs / use abilities, and wings. I don't see this as a nerf at all.
On any challenging fight you will have to do a lot more then just a seconds consideration. Try thinking about healing Sarth10+3 with it, large portions of it are unhealable with a -50% healing debuff. This is definitely a pretty big nerf for any challenging fight. If I can heal the fight fine with having a 50% healing debuff up for 1/4 of the time without thinking about it, then I can go back to TBC style healing pretty easily and not use DP at all.
One problem I see with this nerf though, is that DP can still be quite strong/op on certain fights with forced downtime. Think about Malygos, you really don't lose anything at all if you DP before each vortex while still having close to 80-90% of max usage.
edit:
Just because your average overheal is more then 50%, doesn't mean the debuff will barely effect you. Most healing spells either overheal almost completely or overheal very little. It is when the tank gets burst and you have 50% debuff up it is going to really hit you hard on any challenging fight. I don't really consider Sarth25+3 a really challenging healing fight if you have full Naxx25 gear, it is a much more execution based fight.
One problem I see with this nerf though, is that DP can still be quite strong/op on certain fights with forced downtime. Think about Malygos, you really don't lose anything at all if you DP before each vortex while still having close to 80-90% of max usage.
I agree and think that may end up being the elegance of the solution, is the added decision to find those times when it is not dangerous to use Divine Plea. I have average gear right now (10man/badge gear, nothing from 25mans) and on average raiding content it's not even a concern popping DP. I just use it and continue with Holy Light, or FoL raid healing with Beacon on the MT without a second thought.
After 3.1 I will definitely be using DP less, and while the direct DP-regen is not nerfed, essentially our overall regen is nerfed by the end effect of using DP that much less. Same effect if it had a longer cooldown, but this adds a little element of strategy. I like it (as long as my prot/ret friends are not nerfed unnecessarily).
Thinking about this more, I am happier they went with a bigger penalty as opposed to reduced mana return. If they just reduced the mana return it would be quite a boring ability, one that you just hit on every CD and not think about. With the increased penalty it leads to better players being able to optimize there playstyle more. It leads you open to things like timing DP with Greatness, since you aren't trying to maximize the mana return anymore, as much as you are trying to minimize the healing penalty. Malygos vortex is probably an extreme example, since the CDs on those two abilities line up pretty well. It is still more interesting then forgetting it has a penalty 1/2 the time.
Wings certainly helps offset at least one of your DPs too in case something problematic catches you off guard.
I think it's a good change too. I hope they do something about extremely high crit scaling at this point - but nothing short of reshuffling the ret talents would be an answer to that (e.g,. putting them out of reach of BoL paladins). At first I thought they wanted an illumination nerf based on a previous blue post from a week or so ago, but this latest one seems counter to that.
Thinking about this more, I am happier they went with a bigger penalty as opposed to reduced mana return. If they just reduced the mana return it would be quite a boring ability, one that you just hit on every CD and not think about. With the increased penalty it leads to better players being able to optimize there playstyle more. It leads you open to things like timing DP with Greatness, since you aren't trying to maximize the mana return anymore, as much as you are trying to minimize the healing penalty. Malygos vortex is probably an extreme example, since the CDs on those two abilities line up pretty well. It is still more interesting then forgetting it has a penalty 1/2 the time.
That was actually my first thought: more incentive to buy that expensive trinket... Previously voiced arguments still apply, but the overall increased effectiveness of simply popping it on cooldown (the downside to waiting for Greatness procs) is much less of a detraction. Moreover, I can imagine popping DP + Wings for when Greatness procs and you sorely need the mana but timing might not be great. Overall, some interesting options begin to surface, though seeing what they are discussing for the Discipline tree, I'm hoping we might also get a few spare developer minutes to further our healing toolkit.
Note that DP and AW stack multiplicatively, not additively. So with AW up during DP you will heal only at 60% effectiveness. This is very easy to test in game, AW+DP heals will heal for noticeably less then normal heals. If they were additively they would heal at normal amount, multiplicatively they would heal at 96%. So I wouldn't really waste AW on DP, since you should be using DP when you don't need to heal a lot. Instead save it for when you think some large burst damage is going to be incoming.
The point about DP requiring more tactical usage is valid I think; 50% is a very significant number compared to 20%. That said, I'm still going to be fighting tooth and nail to maximise its uptime; the mana it restores is just too good.
As I mentioned, the difference between dropping FoLs in place of HLs compared to DP isn't as clear cut as just the numbers. An extended period of weak healing is much more dangerous than once every 5 seconds. Even so, I'm not convinced that it will be detrimental enough to deter me from using it on cooldown 90% of the time. During especially hectic periods (priest DCing on saph and logging back in, sarth+3 with a huge number of adds up, or double drakes on the tank, etc) I'll most likely delay its use, but otherwise I'll still try to mash it on cooldown.
50% overhealing not being equitable to 50% less healing done is true to an extent, but even in the more difficult encounters, I don't think we're seeing levels of burst that are high enough to make the difference. We're not really at the point where two hits without a heal in-between will kill a tank, although I will admit that I haven't killed 10 man sarth+3 (and was prot back when we were attempting it), so I can't comment exactly on to what extent the tank's health yo-yo's there, but it would have to be significant for any real chance of death to occur. 15 seconds is long enough that you wouldn't expect huge variation in tanks' avoidance rates, and with EH pools being so large compared to the damage, there's enough leeway to at the very least be able to react by cancelling DP. With effective communication I don't think it's really as big a deal as it may seem.
Maybe I'm being naive, but when these changes arrive, I'm most likely going to continue hitting DP on CD, with a /cancelaura Divine Plea /cast Holy Light macro in case bursts do occur which I don't think I'll be able to heal through with DP up. If that really proves to be ineffective (and I'm willing to let a lot of tanks die before I'm convinced, heh), then I'll move to a more tactical usage of DP. I'll also most likely make more of an effort to time my DP usage to coincide with tank CDs (IBF especially).
Ultimately though, this change will come with 3.1, so it's largely irrelevant to current content. Stuff is still purely speculative at the moment, and I'll almost certainly be re-evaluating my position when full changes to paladin healing are announced, and then again when we have a good idea of what sorts of encounters Ulduar will deliver.
The DP change is certainly better than an Illumination nerf but I think they could have done something better than 50% penalty. Given that it's really just designed to stop constant HL spam DP should have just reduced heals from Holy Light by 100%. That way we have to flash when using DP and holy shock will still save people. A holy light during thew new DP is going to hit for about what a crit flash heal does and still be splashing with the glyph. With the cast times of flash and holy light not too far apart we may just end up mostly ignoring the penalty.
For sure though we will be timing stuff like Greatness procs and not using DP when we really need our heals to be at 100% like drakes up on sarth and hopefully hard modes in ulduar will require us to really be conscious of when we use it.
I am curious as to what other possible changes Holy might see. I get the distinct feeling we are seeing half the equation. Priests got significant buffs across the board, both in Holy tree and in Discipline. It would seem we are due for some countering effect to this major change.
We get technically negative movement overall in mana regen compared to other healers;
-Divine Plea effectiveness
-Spiritual Attunement
-Nerf to Spirit / OOMP5 rule
-Buffs to "evocation" style mana regens to compensate
Almost all of the changes mentioned so far hurt us, or do not benefit us in any way, but benefit other healing classes. Its interesting to say the least, but I am left with only two conclusions;
Healing is going to be an "easier" job; I.E less button mashing, more careful targeting (easier in my book).
or
We have not seen the entire picture in terms of changes to the Paladin Holy Tree yet.
I still do consider Illumination to be a candidate for future reworking. The Divine Plea change will have much more of an effect on 10man raids, probably not so much on heroic raids. And as it was pointed out, there really is no change to the overall mana regeneration caused by DP. Plus players can use DS/BoSac or DS with Divine Guardian to DP at least once per boss encounter in relative safety, and there are many other cooldowns which can be synchronized with DP as well, should it be really necessary.
Wings certainly helps offset at least one of your DPs too in case something problematic catches you off guard.
I think it's a good change too. I hope they do something about extremely high crit scaling at this point - but nothing short of reshuffling the ret talents would be an answer to that (e.g,. putting them out of reach of BoL paladins). At first I thought they wanted an illumination nerf based on a previous blue post from a week or so ago, but this latest one seems counter to that.
This is the line of thinking I had when I first saw this. I also thought that using HoSacrifice with DP might help, though this might be a little bit more tricky to pull off. Purely depends on the incoming damage there. At face value this sounds like a good idea to me if you live through it. I'm not good at maths though. :P I like how our cooldowns are becoming less fire and forget but perhaps it is just me.
One thing they could do about the crit problem is just not give us more crit and give us other stats on gear instead. I suppose the one stat I can think they could up would be Mp5, but who knows that might be even worse. It all depends on what the critical percentage is that illumination is too powerful. It also depends on if we can reach that value. The other stat I can think of would be haste. We are still a bit off having the "soft haste cap" without thinking.
Blessing of Kings – this spell is now a base ability trainable by all paladins.
Exorcism – this spell now causes damage to all types of enemy targets. However, it always critical strikes undead or demon targets. This change should make sure paladin damage doesn’t drop when going from Naxxramas to later tiers of content.
Shield of the Templar now causes your Avenger’s Shield and Shield of the Righteousness to silence targets for 3 sec. The old damage bonus of this talent has been folded into Holy Shield, Avenger’s Shield, and Shield of the Righteousness.
Ardent Defender, Improved Hammer of Justice, One-Handed Weapon Specialization and more have had their ranks reduced.
Guarded by the Light – no longer reduces the mana cost of shield spells, but now has a 50/100% chance to refresh Divine Plea duration.
Judgements of the Just – now also reduces the cooldown of Hammer of Justice by 10/20 seconds and increases the duration of the Seal of Justice stun effect by 0.5/1 second.
The prot pally inside me just wet himself, while his holy counterpart shrugged and felt happy that he can finally spec 51/0/20 without gimping his 10 mans.
Seems like all the pally changes that we're seeing for the moment are focused on stimying holy regen, and buffing prot and generally reducing the tree's clutter, especially higher up. The DP refresh is a really interesting solution to any SA changes, but I should prob shutup now and head for the prot thread.
Looks like we'll have to wait for full patch notes before being able to get a good grasp on how holy will shape up for 3.1.
This is the line of thinking I had when I first saw this. I also thought that using HoSacrifice with DP might help, though this might be a little bit more tricky to pull off. Purely depends on the incoming damage there. At face value this sounds like a good idea to me if you live through it. I'm not good at maths though. :P I like how our cooldowns are becoming less fire and forget but perhaps it is just me.
One thing they could do about the crit problem is just not give us more crit and give us other stats on gear instead. I suppose the one stat I can think they could up would be Mp5, but who knows that might be even worse. It all depends on what the critical percentage is that illumination is too powerful. It also depends on if we can reach that value. The other stat I can think of would be haste. We are still a bit off having the "soft haste cap" without thinking.
What crit problem? Crit is not an overpowered stat, if they nerf illumination at all it will become quite a crappy one. The only "problem" there might be is the 8% of easily accessible Ret talents, which gives a very high crit amount with entry level gear. That is a very easily fixed thing though.
The way I was reading it was if we reached a certain amount of crit (let's say 70%, I'm terribad at math) the return from the talent might be too good. Right now I don't believe it is a problem at all, but we don't reach this amount of crit to HL either.
The easiest way to fix that is well, just don't scale our crit so much with T8 and T9, yes?
Long-time reader, first time poster. As a holy paladin, I've been using a combination of heals - FoL when it suffices, HS when tanks (or others) take damage spikes, and Holy Light a lot of the time (especially when I need to such as the OTss on Patchwerk, the MT on Malygos after a vortex, and some other situations when a tank or someone else is very low on hitpoints). Of course I judge to keep Judgements of the Pure up, use Beacon on Light, and Sacred Shield when appropriate.
It seems that in my guild, I'm the only one using a lot of Holy Lights. The other holy paladins are still using a lot of FoLs and I've been told that, given the upcoming changes to Divine Plea, I should try using FoL more and should gear appropriately - they are even suggesting getting PvP gear and librams to increase the power of my FoLs (or the Kara libram if I can't get the PvP one), as well as stacking more SP and crit. I'm being given the impression my holy lights are considered "wasteful" and "overkill" and that they aren't really needed. I'm told the other holy paladins are using mostly FoL and have no problems and that I should try it as well. The other paladins in my guild that I've spoken with seem to think that I won't be able to cast as many holy lights when the change to Divine Plea goes through.
This seems contrary to most of what I've read here. Is this just a different play style? Given the upcoming change to Divine Plea (provided it goes through of course as the devs have suggested) is this something that is worthwhile to try? Thanks.
I think i might have stumbled upon something interesting.
Imagine a Razuvious-like fight, where you spam heal a single target with a huge health pool. No overhealing, no danger of losing tank to sudden burst, just need to heal for maximum amount over fight duration.
Let's assume the fight goes on for 3 minutes. Imagine 2 scenarios.
Scenario 1 - Plea used every 60 seconds.
Scenario 2 - Plea used every 90 seconds.
Assume total mana pool = MP, average healing per mana = HPM (illumination is treated as mana cost reduction on crittable spells). m5s amount after raid buffs = M5
In scenario 1, by using Plea every 60 seconds, a paladin maintains 7/8 of his total HPM. The total amount of mana he works with looks like this:
MP (Base pool) + 0,75MP (Plea) + 0,45MP (Replenishment) + 36*M5 = 2,2MP + 36M5
So total amount of healing done amounts to 7/8*HPM*(2,2MP + 36M5), about equal to HPM*(1,925MP + 31,5M5)
In scenario 2, by using plea every 90 seconds, a paladin maintains 11/12 of his total HPM, with the following total amount of mana to work with:
MP (Base pool) + 0,5MP (Plea) + 0,45MP (Replenishment) + 36*M5 = 1,95MP + 36M5
So total amount of healing done amounts to 11/12*HPM*(1,95MP + 36M5), about equal to HPM*(1,7875MP + 33M5)
So by using Pleas every 90 seconds instead of every 60 seconds, the Paladin sacrifices the healing he could get from 13,75% of his mana pool minus 1,5 full m5s ticks. For a 25k mana pool pala with 200 raidbuffed m5s, this amounts to 3138 mana.
If a Paladin uses mana pot, LoH and gets a mana tide, this difference gets closer to 0.
In short, when compared to a Paladin using pleas every 90 seconds, a Paladin which using pleas every 60 seconds has more mana to use, but a harder time actually making use of that mana properly in a spam heal situation.
Furthermore, it is likely that a 90 sec plea paladin will use more efficient spells overall than a 60 sec plea paladin. If he uses enough lesser heals to increase his overall HPM by 7%, he will overtake 60 sec plea paladin on total healing done.
This is all arbitrary on a very test-tube fight of course. But i thought that the impact 50% healing reduction has in situation where you just can't stop healing is still worth mentioning.
Originally Posted by Caylynn
Long-time reader, first time poster. As a holy paladin, I've been using a combination of heals - FoL when it suffices, HS when tanks (or others) take damage spikes, and Holy Light a lot of the time (especially when I need to such as the OTss on Patchwerk, the MT on Malygos after a vortex, and some other situations when a tank or someone else is very low on hitpoints). Of course I judge to keep Judgements of the Pure up, use Beacon on Light, and Sacred Shield when appropriate.
It seems that in my guild, I'm the only one using a lot of Holy Lights. The other holy paladins are still using a lot of FoLs and I've been told that, given the upcoming changes to Divine Plea, I should try using FoL more and should gear appropriately - they are even suggesting getting PvP gear and librams to increase the power of my FoLs (or the Kara libram if I can't get the PvP one), as well as stacking more SP and crit. I'm being given the impression my holy lights are considered "wasteful" and "overkill" and that they aren't really needed. I'm told the other holy paladins are using mostly FoL and have no problems and that I should try it as well. The other paladins in my guild that I've spoken with seem to think that I won't be able to cast as many holy lights when the change to Divine Plea goes through.
This seems contrary to most of what I've read here. Is this just a different play style? Given the upcoming change to Divine Plea (provided it goes through of course as the devs have suggested) is this something that is worthwhile to try? Thanks.
The logic of this statement goes like this:
50% penalty on plea -> less opportunities for plea use -> less mana -> HoL spam less viable -> more flashes used.
I am not yet convinced on the "less opportunities for plea use" part. I normally run with 30-40% overheal, so i think plea penalty will cut into my overhealing a lot more than into my actual healing. Plus, it's not like bosses don't have windows of opportunity where you can shield tank, pop plea and not heal for a few seconds without worrying that anything might die.
That being said, my previous post might suggest that using less Pleas and more mana-efficient spells might actually amount to higher potential total healing than using pleas on every cd and spamming HL.
However, what's important for you now is whether you need to respec or regear. Well, the answer is - most likely no.
Int is still the best stat you can have, and HoL mana reduction libram is still the best libram. Flash heal libram is good, but it won't make it possible to outheal harder encounters with just flashes.
Last edited by maxi : 02/06/09 at 8:38 AM.
Reason: Merging two back-to-back posts and correcting minor stuff
It's more like crit scales directly with the more mana you have, which causes it to look like it indirectly scales with the frequency of holy lights. After all we're looking at how many holy lights we can cast in a given timeframe (or more precicely, how much healing we can do using all our mana in a given timeframe). The direct cause for casting more holy lights is having more mana, and nothing else, so crit is an effective mana multiplier.
mp5 scales the more mana you have too. A larger mana pool takes more time to deplete, which means a bigger return from mp5. Strictly, crit scales directly with the number of holy lights cast, mp5 scales directly with the amount of time between your first and last heal. Both of these things scale with mana pool with an upper bound proportional to the length of combat. The key difference is that mp5 is relatively stronger if you cancel/get breaks from healing, crit is relatively stronger in scenarios where you're constantly casting. The latter is probably more interesting, since if I'm cancel-casting or getting breaks where I don't really have to do much raid healing, then I'm probably not too worried about my mana pool running out.
Originally Posted by maxi
I normally run with 30-40% overheal, so i think plea penalty will cut into my overhealing a lot more than into my actual healing.
I don't think this is true (or possibly I'm misinterpreting what you're saying). Typical boss melee tends to be in the 8-12k range, which is pretty close to what a noncrit HL heals for. From there it's not a massive leap to repeating something mentioned earlier, most of your HLs are either around 100% effective, or around 100% overheal (although obviously this completely falls apart in certain cases, anything that dual-wields for a start). Now if this is a true reflection of what's going on, plea will mean your HLs will only be healing ~50% of the health deficit caused by a melee swing (though crits will be more like 75%). This does mean your overheals will suddenly start becoming effective of course, but only because what was previously effective healing isn't up to the job, and you're relying on your old overhealing to cover.
That's making the assumption that you currently spam HL of course, if you're cancel-casting then basically you end up reverting to spamming during DP, since you'll be sufficiently close to the limit of your healing output that cancel-casting no longer offers much mana saving and just ends up limiting your responsiveness.
I do reckon that /cancelaura is going to be the thing that separates the men from the boys on this one. Using sarth+3 as an example, my temptation when my DP came off cd would be to wait till just after recovering from the next breath, then immediately pop DP and cancel it after 9 seconds.
For insurance reasons. Yes. That, and for freedom.
mp5 scales the more mana you have too. A larger mana pool takes more time to deplete, which means a bigger return from mp5.
This is just incorrect I'm afraid. A larger mana pool does indeed take more time to deplete, but for any given value of time, the returns from mp5 are not only uniform, but (by its very nature) easily established by reading the numbers from your paper doll.
Mana per 5 does indeed give greater benefits over longer fights, but only as compared with that same mana per 5 for a shorter period. Any statement that mp5 gains in value compared with Crit or Intellect as fight length increases presupposes significant shifts in casting style, which is at present pure supposition.
The only thing one can say with any certainty is that as fight length increases, mp5 returns more mana. Trying to tack on 'compared to Crit or Int' is speculative at best, and more likely flatly wrong in any case.
02/05/09, 4:56 PM
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