12 March 2009

Two buffs good, one buff better!

Mana spring totem and blessing of wisdom will not stack in the next patch if changes announced by eyonix yesterday make it to live. Thanks to the Suicidal Zebra for sharing this gloomy news.

The amount of mana the two buffs provide will be standardised, and mana spring will be extended to affect the entire raid.

In situations where you have at least one player of each class (which, at least in my experience, is usual), I suspect the job of mana bot will go to the shaman, freeing up paladins to bless kings and might. The other water totems don't compare favourably, except in the odd case where frequent cleansing is needed.

But if you have a glut of either class it's really not going to matter how you handle it, so much redundancy do we now have in the system. You could probably drop totems and blessings at random and still end up with all bases covered.

Blizzard, you'll remember, is trying to challenge healers on their current near-inexhaustible supply of mana, but predictably this is going to hurt the mana-using dps more. These are the classes who already have limited in-combat mana regen, who can't afford to gear for spirit or mp5, and who rely more than healers on external buffs.

Once again, they are failing to tackle individual classes and builds on their own unique terms, choosing instead to swipe at the whole lot of us with near-communist equality. Meanwhile, this is a further prod — if ever one was needed — at those stubborn dps who refuse to spec into replenishment for the good of the raid, the selfish bastards. We are all in the shadow of Blizzard's egalitarian vision now, like some great looming statue of Lenin. It'll all end in tears, mark my words.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'd be with you except Blizzard's stated intention is to not let these mana changes affect DPS. They're tweaking DPS mana regen talent coefficients to make up for the loss. Now, I can understand if you don't have faith that this will go as planned, but I personally am not going to assume the worst until I get a live patch.

Merlot said...

Tiv, you may be right in the long run, but Blizzard's tweaks to mana regen talents are specifically to compensate for the nerf to base mana regeneration — so, for example, the amount of mp5 you get from meditation after the patch should be roughly equal to the amount you get now. Same for spirit tap. This is different: we are going from two raid-wide mana regeneration buffs to one. Unless they near-double their values, the net effect will be a substantial loss of in-combat mana. I'm guessing that's deliberate. Happy to be proved wrong :)

Anonymous said...

This is actually a buff for 10 and 25 man groups where paladins are in short supply. They will still be desired for kings but having at least 2 required even for 10 mans if you wanted a full compliment of buffs was a bit rediculous considering they are all about the new bring the player not the class movement.

Anonymous said...

heya merlot, the communist stuff made me laugh for ages ^_^ and yeah i agree about blizz going about this in the wrong way :< but oh well, it might work... maybe...

yeah haven't seen you in a while, hope you're ok :)

and *cough* maybe comment on the new hymns *cough* :P

but anyway, im in the middle of a naxx raid with your guild :P its fun, but i better go now we're having another attempt on KT.

bye :)

Anonymous said...

None of these mana regen changes make me ever want to log onto my resto shaman for a raid ever again. At least my shadow priest seems to be relatively unscathed...so far.

Merlot said...

Hi Bellatrix, hope you got KT! I've been away a week but you're right, I should talk about hymns. After I delete all those damn spam comments I've just been peppered with.