What makes these mana changes so puzzling is that it seems like pretty much everyone here agrees that the problem with mana regen was that you get too much mana regen from int. Blizzard is apparently married to replenish, though.

In addition to that, today they say they are going to look at changes to make spirit a more interesting stat to all mages. So apparently they want people to still want spirit. The only way they can accomplish this is to give mages talents that give them benefit from spirit. This, to me, was what really stood out as problematic about their mana regen system. Spirit does nothing. Without talents, the only classes that would get any effect at all from spirit is druids and warlocks, and that is only because they have spells that give spirit additional effects. Holy priests may spend time out of the 5sr but that is because their talents allow them to do so. This isn't like strength doing nothing for priests, this is supposed to be a stat we care about, and without talents it has no effect whatsoever.

But also I am very curious about how this is going to make healing be at a more measured pace. Isn't the pace of healing going to be the pace of damage? If it's not then we lose. They talk about casting a hot and sitting back and regenning, but when was this ever possible in a raid situation. Are we fighting some mythical boss than takes 15 seconds to kill the tank without heals?

Many of the class changes they refer to look good to me, but this mana regen change seems absurd. If it is as they describe here then it simply isn't much of a change at all, and if it does lead to holy priests having mana troubles, those will quickly evaporate with Ulduar gear.

What I find most interesting here is what Nidaba addresses: Boss encounters will have to be redone. In Naxx, some bosses can be downed in less than 2 minutes and most can be downed in less than 3 minutes. No matter what spells you cast, or how regen is nerfed, it's nearly impossible to run OOM on such short fights. So Blizzard will have to rethink encounters in Ulduar. They can't just make mobs require more healing, because global cooldowns/throughput is the limiting factor, and bringing more healers is the answer. Traditionally Blizz's solution has been to decrease raid dps (move a lot on Grobbulus, wait around a lot on Sapphiron, etc). The other solution is to buff mob's health or give them more adds. A final option is to give bosses mana burn abilities (which I hate).

I'm a reformed shadow priest, so I have a bias, but what I would like is to force classes to cast some spells which do not synergize with their talents. I'm not necessarily fond of "dispel or die" scenarios, but I do enjoy fights where I need to contribute some Holy Fire or Shadow Word Death help (think skellies in phase 1 Kel'Thuzad). These impact regen, provide a better variety of actions, and keep me from watching Grid with tunnel vision.

I wouldn't say a lot of love, more of a friendly nudge. While this new ability seems good for Vortex pre-shielding (practice will tell ofc), I would also like to see something done about DA. Nothing worse then to see a 12K crit GH being followed by a 4.5K crit penance tick or see penance crit 3 times in a row.

The changes to the mana regen I really don't see them affecting me and probably most disc priest will feel the same.
From the WWS of our latest patchwerk kill I got about 2.4K mana restore versus 36K mana from rapture and 7K mana from replenishment. I remember ending that fight with 22K mana out of 25K left. Not even used a mana pot or shadowfiend. The only times I do get low on mana are the fights where I regurarly use PoH like the Gothik trash waves.

I don't think their intention is this. Currently the mana regen formula is K x Sqrt(INT) x Spi and what I think they intend on doing is lowering the value of K which affects Int and Spirit. A sensible change because the only thing that lowers healer stamina right now is not the encounter but haste.

What i'm thinking is: "Why the hell don't they just ditch replenishment?".

Because when i'm raiding with 0 or only 1 replenisher i sure as hell don't have the mana to spam Holy Light for longer fights, and our other healers also notice the drastically lowered mana regen.

Our mana using damage dealers, on the other hand, only notice that they actually need to sit down and drink after AoE-clearing some trash.

The announced changes only hurt good healers, and don't change anything about the mediocre ones running oom when there's no replenishment .
With replenishment i will still spam Holy Light all the time, and our priests, druids and shamans also wont feel the change provided they user innervate/mana pots.

Trash replenishment and judgement of wisdom, and they can stop having to worry about "external" factors when balancing mana usage/gains for all classes.

Do any of you feel, regardless of if it's irrational or not, like you're being punished for skillful use of FSR mechanics? I personally feel like Blizzard wants to dumb down healing for all healers and make it more "spammy"and less selective and that simply doesn't appeal to what I enjoy about healing as a holy priest. Right before WotLK release, I had level 70s of each healing class and I chose to stick with priest. I hope the proposed changes don't make me regret that decision, but obviously we all have to wait until the math is out.

I'm equally surprised with the rest of you. Reason behind the OFSR regen is obviously to hit the healers, without hurting DPS. I would not be surprised to see this as the first of many changes to mana regeneration. But like the rest of you, I feel that Blizzard is touching the wrong end of the problem, but I'm confident they will realize this sooner or later.

Exactly right. Any challenging fight were your healing is pressed you Oo5SR will be next to nothing. Pretty sure our druids don't need to spend any Oo5SR time for regen, nor do our priests. So this change basically does nothing but nerf our regen in between trash packs, and questing forcing us to drink more. Not fun and surely not what was intended. Have bliz just dreamed up this problem? Rather baffled by the change should they choose to go through with it.

Well they certainly didn't just 'dream up' this problem. It's possible that Ulduar contains some fights with 'forced downtime' or some other mechanic that forces people to simply do something that doesn't involve spellcasting (think: Heigan Dance). In this case Druids/Holy Priests would have a HUGE advantage, since not only is replenishment going to fade during a Heigan Dance-style encounter, you're going to spend the entire thing not casting. This would lead to Druids and Holy Priests coming out of it with basically a full mana bar. I know in one of our 4-man downs of Heigan (PUG, don't ask), the 'tank' (a ret pally, the only plate wearer alive, again, don't ask) was laughing that my mana bar would basically fill up every Heigan Dance (this was back when I was holy).

Assuming that the encounter is a little harder than this iteration of Heigan, there would be a huge incentive to bring druids or holy priests if they can simply cast whatever the hell they want, go into the dance, and come out of it basically at full mana while Pallies and Shammies are getting half the regen or less of their spirit-ful brethren.

We have to remember they're not balancing CURRENT content, they're balancing FUTURE content.

P.S. I'm leaving Disc priests out of this, because at current we have an absurdly infinite mana bar, and unless they change something major, it just isn't an issue.

I agree. How they can not see how this will effect druids and priests playstyle is beyond me. To me it seems like this will hit druids the hardest.

BTW what will this do to our spriit to spellpower talent if the answer in Ulduar is to start stacking int for regen?

You still need spirit. The fact that your innate regen scales directly with spirit, but with the square root of intellect means that if you want to gain regen directly, spirit is still viable. In fact, it may be *more* viable after the patch, if we assume a 100% I5SR system, because they're buffing Meditation to compensate for the change.

@ 50% Meditation, every point of spirit is worth ~ 0.5 Mp5. In addition, it also grants 0.25 spellpower.

So ask yourself, which would you rather have on an item:
- 39 spirit = 14 Mp5 + 11.2 spellpower (example: [Punctilious Bindings])
- 15 Mp5 (example: [Cuffs of the Shadow Ascendant])

(note: this is assuming 50% Meditation, current coefficient. Obviously the coefficient will change, and we don't know to what, so these numbers are back-of-the-envelope made up. However, they're basically what we have at present, and they said I5SR regen shouldn't change, so ... )

The answer is obvious.

Remember: "stacking intellect" is not something you can really do when it comes to choosing cloth items. You can socket for it, sure. You can use a higher intellect (read: staff) weapon. You can use an intellect trinket. But that's it. You can't deliberately "gear" for intellect, because there aren't pieces that differ only in the amount of intellect.

And as long as the comparison is between an item with spirit and an item with Mp5, the spirit item remains far superior. In fact, it becomes slightly more attractive with a higher Meditation coefficient, simply because it will scale better in the long run. And on top of that ... baseline BoK means any paladin instantly gains you another 10% spirit, which is "free", as compared to your Mp5, which is static.

@Nidaba

Good points, guess its more of a playstyle change. And I'm ok with that. Regen is pretty crazy right now in Wrath. 50% meditation would be great and since I'm only about at most 20% o5sr it shouldn't effect priests that much. You would bring up bracers, I've been waiting to get the ones from OS for ever. One of the few priests that doesn't have it.

Assuming IFSR stays the same, we will be valuing gear more or less exactly like now. But Blizzard seems to want to eradicate any remains of OFSR juggling through Clearcasting, Inner Focus and similar tricks. Eradicate is a bit strong maybe, but they are dimming it down a lot. Seems to me that they expect all healers to be like Shaman and Paladins, and spam heal from start to end. Atleast that is the only thing that makes sense to me.

In practice however (atleast for me), this change changes nothing. I barely have OFSR time. The net effect will be that when soloing, I will have to drink more often. In raids, the various buffs will keep me high enough on mana for this change to be entirely ignored.


What this change REALLY hurts, is Innervate. I can't really see it being for any other purpose than that.

It hurts for Innervate, yes, which maybe is a concern: it's an effective "reset" button for priests. If I burn every cooldown I have (Fiend, pot, Hymn), I can still reset my mana from 0 to full in 20 seconds from Innervate. This change will hammer that, at least until the end of Ulduar when I have 1700 spirit again, and it climbs back up to 75%+ of my mana pool.

The biggest change that is going to suck is something no-one seems to be talking about (and we should be). Drinking. Right now, I sit to drink, and I have 1600 Mp5 + <water Mp5>. It still takes me 30+ seconds to go 0->full. This is going to dramatically increase (time, that is) when my "OO5SR regen" is nerfed. They need a new rank of water, and pronto. We don't need to go another 2 years with water that barely fills half our mana bar. It's time to just give up on the whole idea, and provide %-based water. 3% per second, 30 second duration. Fin.

We need to see the PTR to know what changes for sure... Though I would not expect an openly documented nerf to rapture but a redesign of the divsor for the calculation that is different, and factors in gear/spell. I posted previous discussion on the topic if you look back a few pages. Rapture itself is well designed. Because in my mind the right change to tone down rapture is not a part of the talent, and instead the behind the scenes processing of the gains we might not be notified of a change going in.

I would expect PW:Barrier to benefit from rapture but have a higher cost associated as such. Though I could be proven wrong. It would make the decision to use it more dynamic similar to deciding to use PoH/CoH etc because the net benefit decreases with the less people that need the effect. If only 1 person of the 5 will use the absorbtion you would be better with a PW:S obviously but as it becomes 3-5 people due to GCD limitation and spell CD the group cast becomes a better/only option.

I totally agree with you here, but I'd like to add that Paladins too are at an advantage during those types of 'forced downtime' encounters, and the new Divine Plea penalty will do nothing to change that. On the fights that require constant casting and that would affect a Paladin's every-CD use of the ability we'll just start seeing Paladins doing the exact same thing Priests / Druids have been doing for these past four years: calling out for someone to cover their target for a short period of time (or simply casting through it if the full throughput isn't necessary).

I do agree that mana regeneration really needs to be toned down, but I hope the changes Blizzard makes still allow for Priests / Druids to manipulate the OO5SR to some degree (or at least to gain enough mana from OO5SR regeneration to make Spirit regenning still a viable strategy). It seems as if Paladins will have this option in 3.1.0, but I can't discern whether or not it's intended as such.

Unfortunately, while the reduction in OO5SR regen will increase drinking time for priests, it would likely only bring us closer to the drinking downtime faced by FFB mages using Molten Armor, which seems to be tolerable for Blizz at this point.

Granted, they have a significant mana regen tool that works out of combat and is on a relatively short cooldown, but drinking downtime already seems to be worse for them than it will be for us in 3.1, so I'm not sure that this change alone will make them change water functionality.

Im Glad I visited all those Elders again this year and stocked up on %mana pots - to those that haven't you've got a week still to do it.

The regen changes to spirit being more in fsr would seem to boost Magestic dragon figurine trinket. Greatness card as well but thats nice enough anyway.

Except that mages typically run 2-4k less mana than priests and up to 10k less than paladins (although this isn't as much of an issue because their OO5SR isn't really being touched by the spirit change). Additionally, Molten Armor doesn't change OO5SR regen vs Mage Armor in the slightest. Go read the tooltips again.

I'm very much in the same camp with those who see meditation's buff as well as spiritual guidance as preserving the value of spirit. I'm pretty sure that meditation will be buffed considerably to make sure that priests are viable healers.

The point about drinking is very interesting. If, as they say, Ulduar will be more difficult and thus there will be more wiping and deaths on trash and bosses, then the down time from this "drinking nerf" could be considerable. I assume that leveling may also be a lot more painful for various classes. Percentage based drinking would remedy the situation but maybe the concern with that would be arena.

Just a thought, I was wondering if the changes to OO5sr would alter the way in which we use trinkets like the [Spirit-World Glass]?. Maybe we'll just constantly keep it on cooldown now if getting outside the five second rule is more difficult and less beneficial.

The fake notes that were released a few days ago on MMO and other sites had Replenishment changed to a % of base mana per second. If all classes' base mana was equalled this would make a much easier way for Blizzard to control healer mana at end game for each coming expansion. If they are able to do it that way, Replenishment would be so easy to factor in when they are doing 3.1, 3.2, 3.3 or at 4.0, 4.1 etc when we are all level 90, as it would be a solid e.g 250mp5. This would be a fantastic amount at entry level raids, but will start to stress healers when they get to newer end game content and that 250mp5 accounts for a much smaller amount of our regen.

As replenishment is such an important form of regen, and spell costs are set at the beginning of the expansion - they can ensure that certains classes like Holy Paladins/Disc Priests, are unable to go infinite by stacking INT.

In wrath a mage can potentially get a lot more out of spirit than we do. With glyphed mage shield and talent support the mage can get 80% of spirit regeneration while in the 5 second rule. My understanding however is that they have to make a choice between the mana regeneration shield and other DPS increasing shields. So given low mana regeneration pressure they're probably not interested in taking advantage of that capability.

I would be very suprised if group PW:S is connected to rapture. They've been reasonably careful about making sure group heals are disconnected from mana regeneration mechanics.

Even with that it seems this change will make rapture slightly stronger (since stacking int is even more beneficial) while making the holy mechanics and mana regeneration model weaker.