Let's talk Mana

[Duke81]

I was never a fan of mana management, that's why Wrath was my favorite X-Pack. It managed to somewhat retain the spirit of classic while alleviating the mana problem. I would love to see changes across the board to address the constant downtime.

This is a new Dev Team with new opportunities.

Would you like to see changes?
Do you like mana scarcity?

I would love to hear some pros because i can't think of any

[Ubivakafrm]

I think the only class with a lot of downtime is mage. I leveled a mage on Ambershire and got it only to level 31, because drinking after every second mob was really boring. Also I have a personal oppinion that wrath doesn't really feel like classic. It's still a great expansion, but it feels much more streamlined and classes feel closer to retail.

I think that classic is about traidoffs. So if you want to kill mobs fast, you will use a lot of abilities and a lot of mana. Or you can manage your mana and take mobs more slowly. Leveling speed would still be around the same, because in the first case you have to sit and drink, and in the second you don't.

Also if we are talking about healers, they are all about mana management (except paladins ofc, they don't run out of mana), and it is a part of classic design.

Finally, what I said about mage. They are different from other classes, because they don't have a way to kill mobs slowly, without taking a lot of damage. So priests can shield and wand, warlocks have pet and also wand, hunters have pet and autoshot. If you just stand there and wand as a mage, you take a lot of damage, you deal very little damage, and you are killing one mob every two minutes. I don't really know how this can be addressed without big changes to the class, but I still think it's an issue

[Cryptyy]

Let's not talk mana, its fine as is.

[Duke81]

Let's not talk mana, its fine as is.

Not an argument.

[Randowowheals]

I have a lvl 38 mage.. and this exactly is my experience.

It was just as bad on a priest lvling solo when not in a dungeon group. Mana takes forever. Please make OOC mana regen faster or increase the drink coefficient so it fills up the mana bar faster.

[Kodinonebayy]

A lot of the problems with mana go back to one small "blink and you miss it" addition to the 1.18.0 patch notes of Turtle, one that actually affected leveling so much despite receiving no publicity:

"Increased the HP and damage of some creatures on Azeroth by 10–15% to bring them more in line with current gameplay balance. This includes some dungeon monsters."

The funny thing is that this is a lie: pretty much every single mob in the world was given this HP+damage buff, and some of them for more than the suggested maximum of 15%. This requires mana-using jobs (especially mages and priests) to either unload more mana to maintain relatively close kill speeds or just wand a LOT more at the end.

But this is not a mana problem, the mana system in Vanilla is great and one that a lot of people enjoy; a lot of the mana-related pain people are feeling is due to the Turtle balance team implementing changes like these that nobody asked for, ones that already popular leveling classes like Hunter and Warlock (mana-using classes, but ones that do not really depend on it as a finite resource) barely care about, allowing the rich to simply get richer, so to speak.

Octo's team has done great reverting some of the terrible decisions that the Turtle team implemented near the end of the game's lifecycle (especially the 50% rested exp nerf), and I feel like this could probably be addressed, as well.

[Duke81]

I found the only enjoyable way to play Paladin is to use seal of wisdom. That is every spec. Even as ret i use seal of wisdom. Putting a skillpoint into seal of command is a waste because you simply don't have the mana to sustain it even with improved blessing of wisdom.

What does mana actually do? It slows down everything. In groups with classes that don't depend on mana you simply have to wait. Oom? Everyone stop playing the game and let me drink for 15 seconds. It is not a solvable problem and bad game design as a consequence.

In games like Diablo or Path of Exile for example the character starts out flawed: No damage, no defense, no mana, no aoe and so on. The goal in action rpgs is to plug those holes via itemisation or passive abilities. In turtle wow and classic the mana issue is not a solvable issue and will be a constant annoyance throughout your entire playtime. You can mitigate it but never solve it.

Paladin, Hunter and all the other mana classes need wrath style class design which just removes all that annoying nonsense. Classic+ imho should not be doubling down on bad class design, that would be classic-.

[Rocdog]

I see priests discussed in the same breath as mages. I do drink often on mage, but once I got 5/5 Spirit Tap fighting XP mobs, I rarely drink on my priest and am probably more efficient.

Overall, I'm fine with the current state. There's a reason why mages don't have to pay for water.

[Exordius]

Mana is an important RPG element. Can it be adjusted? Sure.

It's a resource needed for casting spells. Once it's out, no more spells. Thus endless healing, utility spells, and spam of spells like Moonfire is prevented. This is important for balance.

I see no reason to fundamentally change this. Doing so creates new problems to be solved. It has a cascading effect.

But the suggestion is to reduce the "constant" OOM downtime. That's something that exists on a per-class/spec basis.

I support tweaks to make certain specs have less of this problem, as needed. Such as was done for Balance druids. Care should be taken to not go too far.

Ideally, the dynamic of every caster would be: Bringing your full power to bear rapidly drains you; you can switch to dealing reduced damage (downranking, cutting rotation) to hit even; or, reducing further, allow meager but meaningful mana regeneration. I don't believe passive mana regeneration should be quite as low as it is.

Spirit is a weak stat and could do with a buff.