Mana Articles

This is a much-needed change with some fascinating implications. To recap, hunters will no longer use mana, they will use "focus" instead, which is just another word for energy with slightly different regen mechanics. This was, of course, the original plan in WoW: Hunters used focus, which they only regenerated by standing perfectly still.

This has fascinating implications for hunter shot design (and perhaps pvp), and also helps highlight how movement impacts the different resource systems differently. This is the second time that they have explicitly limited hunter resource regeneration in a specific way, and it is certainly deliberate.

At the end of my post I actually look broadly at the different resources and how movement/interrupt affects them all.

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I sat down tonight to write my analysis/commentary on the Blizzcon changes. I realized it would be long, so I put in a table of contents at the top. By the time the post count hit 1500 words, I knew I needed to break it into multiple posts.

The big news for everyone was that Blizzard will be returning to a more WoW 1.0 set of stats, but one that actually gives mana-based classes DPS rather than just longevity (i.e. a higher total damage cap.)

Overall this represents a good direction for gear: the tension between plate having "four" stats and other gear having "five" stats will be relieved, and healer/dps gear will be somewhat separated again (it's been a rough expansion to be a caster trying to gear up.)

Unfortunately I don't understand enough of the tanking area to have a grasp on what it means to get rid of defense: I'm not a tank, and I don't gear up my character like a tank. Tanks are different from DPS classes in that they care about different stats in different situations and defense was one of them. Part of the minigame of tank gearing was picking the best piece for that boss and balancing considerations like threat versus mitigation. Dodge wasn't mentioned in either the "trash" list or the "keep" list -- my guess is it will still exist, like spirit will be an additional healer stat, but it's unclear.

The other big announcement in this area is that they won't be forcing DPS to try to shoehorn regen stats into their gear anymore. I'm especially curious about the PvP implications of the new designs in terms of the hybrid healer/caster classes.

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8/21 update: Blizzcon announcement that haste will affect melee regen systems, and they're removing the need for casters to gear for regen stats because regen isn't a fun concern for non-healers. :)

Glad to see my thoughts were on the same lines of what Blizzard was already implementing!

Unfortunately GC completely dodged answering one of the only good questions in that panel: even with all those haste changes, they're neglecting dots and spells with cooldowns, which hits most casters, but hits spriests especially hard.

It's laudable that they're fixing haste for melee, it would be even more for them to bring all casters up to par at the same time, and not force them to wait again.

GC is posting to mages again, which gave me another opportunity to try to argue that they handle mana poorly in WoW.

GC said:

Yes, that's exactly why we did it. We thought mana was becoming too limiting for mages. That doesn't mean you are supposed to ignore it.

I can't count the number of threads I've seen today alone that basically argue "I shouldn't have to worry about my resources." That's not the vision for WoW.

Which is a good design and I agree with him. The problem is we've heard this over and over again and they don't seem to understand why they're not achieving that with mana.

After the cut is my response:

Summary

If you want resources to matter, recognize that mana does not, for many classes, play the role of a regenerating resource, and so limiting its availability without creating interactive interesting tools that help manage when and how we deal with our mana for all mana users is an exercise in futility.

Mana doesn't matter, it will not matter, unless there is both the risk of it running out and a set of player-driven tools to actually address this and still complete the fights successfully and at that class's target DPS level.

The problem isn't what your customers want or are asking for -- it's a lack of tools and a lack of fundamental understanding of the difference between pacing resources and fuel resources.

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Well, the much-anticipated "benefit from spirit" is here. GC wasn't quite true to his word.

He said that the goal was that we wouldn't have a DPS loss by taking gear with spirit on it, but we also wouldn't see a dps gain. He's correct we don't see a dps gain...

But it's definitely still a loss to take any gear with spirit.

The changes are:

• Molten Armor now causes 170 Fire damage when hit for all ranks (Up from 75/130/170) and also increases your critical strike rating by 25% of your spirit.
• Molten Armor glyph increases that by 15% (to a total of 40%)

It requires about 380 unbuffed spirit for glyphed Molten Armor fully-raid-buffed to still provide 5% crit.

It's a good move from a gear-homogenization perspective (how good that design is I won't go into here.) It's a "...what?" move from a mage perspective, since it doesn't really address anything at all with the class, and just brings us closer to parity with what the other cloth classes have had with itemization up until now.

Most interesting is what isn't in this patch:

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Source

Well, the implications of these changes as I see them so far:

* Drinking just got worse: we're already at 12.5 mana per 30-second drink and 20-30k mana pools, but now OOC regen is worse so drinking is even slower.

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