#0 - April 3, 2010, 7:51 p.m.
So, here's the question: in the later tiers of content, how will mana continue to be "an issue" for healers?
"What do you mean?" You ask. The answer is quite simple: Mana pools / regeneration scales, costs do not. Look at mana progression in WotLK (at least from a shammy's point of view): In Naxx, you were socketing for pure int, and had a very real danger of running out of mana. Now, in ICC, I can more or less spam heals and not really worry about going out of mana. I fully understand that is what the dev's are trying to avoid.
The problem here (at least in the way I look at it) is that mana regen will be balanced (and where blizz wants it) for the first tier of two. After that, regen and mana pools are going to keep going up, whereas the costs of spells will stay the same. The only way to counter that and make mana an issue is to increase raid / tank damage, so healers will have to spam heals more, and then that puts us right back where we are now.
So, my question to blizzard is: how will you deal with this potential problem?
The only solutions I can see are:
- 1) A mana-drain aura in raids that would function similar to Chill of the Throne (i.e. a way to correct high scaling on gear).
- 2) Do away with regen on ITEMS entirely, and have gear upgrades only increase how fast / hardhitting your heals are. You will be only able to cast EXACTLY the same number of heals in each tier.
- 3) Make spell costs increase somehow with content. Similar to number one.
What does everybody think of this?