Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Ask Coriel: 2.4 Spirit/Mana Regen Mechanics Changes

Syrien of Arathor writes:
I was wondering if you have any thoughts about the changes to spirit/mana regen in 2.4. and how/if this will impect holy paladins?

For those who don't know, in 2.4 the amount of mana regenerated by Spirit will scale with your Intellect. It's a general buff to mana regen for Spirit-using classes.

I don't think that the spirit change will directly affect paladins, as we don't stack Spirit. I have heard rumors of a paladin wearing Druid healing gear and using [Darkmoon Card: Blue Dragon] to take advantage of the increased regen. Personally, I think such an idea is unlikely to really be effective, but you never know.

(Honestly, I expect Blizzard to nerf [Darkmoon Card: Blue Dragon] at some point, as it is a trinket which scales with levels. It will be just as good at level 80 as it is at 70, and as it was at 60.)

Indirectly, it will make priests and druids stronger healers, and they won't need to pop mana potions as much. However, most raids prefer to take 3 paladins for the blessings. What I think we'll see is more guilds dropping from 3 Paladin healers to 1 Ret Paladin, 1-2 Holy Paladins, and 0-1 Prot Paladins. Retribution is in a really good place at the moment, and an AoE tank is pretty useful. But the raid doesn't really benefit from having a second Ret pally (or a second Prot paladin), so there will still be a need for Holy Paladins.

I don't think the number of paladins taken to raids will change, but I do think that this change will give us more freedom to take on different roles other than just healers. And quite frankly, that's a good thing in my opinion. 90% of us healing was unhealthy.

5 comments:

  1. On the very least, these are interesting changes. Depending on how it ends, it might come to the point of innervating Paladins and Shamans on raids. Also, trinkets like the one from Botanica might become of interest for Paladins and Shamans.

    And I doubt the Blue Dragon card will be nerfed. On the very least, it's erratic (too many times I've seen it proc during Arena/BG preparation, to never proc again) with a low proc rate (2% if I remember correctly).

    ReplyDelete
  2. Paladins will still never stack spirit, or at least shouldn't.

    Since although the amount of intellect will effect your non casting mana regen, who realistically stops casting for long enough to really take advantage of this?

    Particularly as Paladins are already very mana efficient, however if the spirit buff were to make the other healers overly efficient on their healing, then it'd likely mean that shamans / paladins would just recieve a buff to our own mana regen (maybe reverse some of the changes in 2.2 re: spellcrit).

    Anywho that's my 2c :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Many guilds already raid with Ret and Prot Paladins. Guilds that do not currently raid with Ret or Prot paladins will likely not change their minds just because paladin healing isn't as good as spirit based classes anymore (if in fact it isn't). They will likely just bring other healers into their raids.

    I think we will just have to wait and see if the changes affect the balance.

    P.S. I raid as Ret and it is quite good right now. Crossing my fingers that Blizz won't screw it up in WotLK.

    ReplyDelete
  4. IIRC One of the paladins in DnT used the Blue Dragon card and a shedload of spirit gear in AQ40. He said it was streaky but gave him better regen overall. I've never tried it for myself and probably will never have time to.

    I agree that raids will probably always take 3-4 paladins for a good spread of buffs but it's kinda sad to see holy paladins in decline. Don't get me wrong, I'm a tank through and through, but I remember what it was like to heal and I support all paladin specs.

    They need to make holy more interesting. If they won't increase the number of heals then they need to do two things: 1) acknowledge the shockadin playstyle more in PVP/solo 2) develop the non-healing support gameplay (think BoF/BoSac/cleanse), e.g. like discipline priests who are still essentially healers but who are characterised by spells like pain suppression and power infusion.

    ReplyDelete
  5. An awesome mana regeneration calculator can be found at:
    http://www.resto4life.com/guides/calculator-mana-regeneration/

    And an In-Game version with some cool features is being made, its in Beta at the moment, but it all works:

    http://wow.curse.com/downloads/details/12772/

    ReplyDelete