#25 - April 7, 2012, 5:49 a.m.
What is the reason behind the increased mana cost for certain spells? Particularly holy word: chastise which on live costs about 7.8k but in beta it's around 15k. Also, mass dispell's mana cost shot up to 45k, which is almost half of the finite mana pool that priests now have.
Chastise is probably an oversight. Off the top of my head, I can't imagine why it would need to be more expensive. Mass Dispel is expensive because under the new dispel model, it is very powerful. We want priests to use normal dispel some instead of letting Mass solve every problem.
Also, would you consider removing the mana cost for power infusion? Most of the newer priest talents (save the top tier talents) like void shift, etc. use cooldowns rather than mana.
Power Infusion probably doesn't need a cost. I'll discuss it with the team.
P.S. I should add that we completed a big audit of heals (for all classes) recently, and concluded that the mana costs were reasonable for the most part but that the heals were much too small for the Mists health pools. We buffed all of the heals quite a bit. We want mana to be less painful than it was at the start of Cataclysm, but we want it to matter more than it did at the end of Cataclysm. We want the slope of the line to be less steep -- your higher throughput and regen in later patches will still make heals more efficient overall, just less so than they became in Dragon Soul. The static mana pool helps a lot with that.