Just posted on the WoW forums by Bornakk:
As we have suggested, we have become concerned that mana regeneration is currently too powerful, especially for healers. We want players to have to keep an eye on mana. We don’t want you to go out of mana every fight, but running out of mana should be a very real risk for sloppy playing or attempting content that you aren’t yet ready for. When mana regeneration is trivial then certain parts of the game break down – classes that offer Replenishment are devalued, stats that offer mana regeneration are devalued, and spells that are efficient are neglected in preference to spells with high throughput.
Here are a list of changes you are likely to see in 3.1. They will be available to try out on the PTR. Mana regeneration is somewhat technical, so please bear with us.
- Regeneration while not casting (outside of the “five second rule”) will be decreased. We think that (1) the ability to cast heal over time spells and then sit back and (2) benefitting from a clearcasting proc that also gets you out of the five second rule both provide too much mana regeneration, even over short time periods.
- To make this change, we are reducing mana regeneration granted by Spirit across the board. However we are also boosting the effects of talents such as Meditation that increase regeneration while casting. The net result should be that your regeneration while casting will stay about the same, but your not-casting regeneration will be reduced. This change will have little impact on dps casters, since they are basically always casting.
- The specific talents and abilities being boosted are: Arcane Meditation, Improved Spirit Tap, Intensity, Mage Armor, Meditation, Pyromaniac and Spirit Tap. Yes this makes these “mandatory” talents even more mandatory, if such a thing is possible.
- Since paladins rely less on Spirit as a mana-regeneration stat, we have to address them in other ways. We don’t want to change Illumination or Replenishment. However, we are going to increase the healing penalty on Divine Plea from 20% to 50%. Divine Plea was originally intended to help Protection and Retribution paladins stay full on mana. It should be a decision for Holy paladins, not something that is automatically used every cooldown.
- In addition, we are also changing the way Spiritual Attunement works. In situations with a large amount of outgoing raid damage, as well as in PvP, this passive ability was responsible for more mana regeneration than we would like. We want to keep the necessary benefit it grants to tanking Protection paladins, while making it less powerful for Holy paladins in PvP or raid encounters with a lot of group damage.
- We are also taking a close look at clearcasting procs themselves. One likely outcome is to change them to an Innervate-like surge of mana so that the net benefit is the same, but healers won’t shift to out-of-casting regeneration so often.
- We balance around the assumption that even 10-player groups have someone offering Replenishment. To make this even easier on players we are likely to offer this ability to additional classes, as well as make sure that existing sources of Replenishment are more equitable.
- These changes are ultimately being done to bring the different healing classes more in line with each other as well as to give the encounter team more leeway when designing encounters, who can balance with these new mana regeneration numbers in mind. In a world with infinite healer mana, the only way to challenge healers is with increasingly insane amount of raid damage, so that global cooldowns become the limiting factor since mana fails to be. An example is the Eredar Twins in late Sunwell. We weren’t necessarily happy with that model, and this change hopefully allows us to move towards giving healing a more deliberate and thoughtful pace rather than frenetic spam.
Paladin-relevant parts bolded by me.
I’m not running around QQing about this just yet, until I see some reasoned analysis of the changes, or try it out for myself on the PTR. But you should be aware it’s coming, and I’d recommend analysing your use of Divine Plea to see what it’d feel like if your healing was cut in half when you used it; to keep an eye out for less healing-intensive moments to trigger it.
I suppose we had it coming?
Thanks for the heads up Siha
Unless Blizzard is going back to heavy raid damage, which I didn’t think they wanted to, SA doesn’t seem to be providing a whole lot of mana to holy paladins.
The Divine Plea changes were definitely coming since mana is never an issue when that’s up. However, the 50% healing reduction seems a bit much. I’m guessing that will be tuned in other ways. Personally, I’d rather see the 50% healing penalty changed to a 25% – 50% casting speed penalty (adjust the number for balance). Protection and retribution paladins are still largely unaffected, since most of the protection and DPS spells are instant, holy spells are the only ones that require paladins to stop and cast. Holy paladins still have to be careful about using since throughput takes a big hit, even though we heal for the same amount.
Yeah I saw this coming when I glance at the other healers near the end of several bosses and we had near full mana. Thankfully they aren’t touching illumination, would hate to have to regear cause they decided to give us spirit of something. Thanks for the heads up Siha, and I guess I have to go back to using divine plea less, which is ok I guess I didn’t use it a whole lot in the beginning.
Its a bad notice :( Actually im using the tipical combo “Plea” + Illumination (i like FM)…..but im thinking about alternatives:
1- Get more mana and min. 150 Cmp5(casting mp5)
2- Get more mana and crit. rate up a lot.
Its to soon to think about it but we can do all boses without unsing “plea” :S
Thanks for the heads up Siha, and sorry grammar faults , english is not my mature language ^_^
Wasn’t the original DP on beta 50%? Or was it 35%? I don’t quite recall. The change to SA surprises me a little bit. I’m not quite sure how they can change it for one tree and not the others, unless they tie it to particular talents that EVERY Protection and Ret pally will take. As for me, I already try to use DP in situations where there’s a break in the action (i.e., Gothik ports to the other side) or when I’m running from one side of the room to the other. If I feel I absolutely can’t afford to lose the 20%, but really need to Plea I’ll trinket or Avenging Wrath to try to make up for it. I don’t think it’s a gamebreaker. I’m glad they said they don’t want to change illumination, most of my mana currently comes from that.
I think the original DP on PTR had a considerably higher healing nerf. I don’t use DP unless I absolutely have too. I generally try to reserve it for a lull in the damage being taken and I can count on the other healers in the raid to take up my slack.
@Revaan-I could see the casting speed working as a deterrent.
That being said I can understand the reasoning behind the nerf but I still don’t have to like it. And nothing is set in stone yet so we’ll just have to wait and see.
I think the original Divine Plea was about 35% reduction, but that got changed a lot. We may also have to start popping Divine Illumination more often (I know I’m rarely using it now, but probably will be on every boss fight on every cooldown in the future).
From memory, DP started out as 50% reduction, then 100%, then back to the current 20%. Along the way, the duration went from 10 to 12 to 15 seconds, too.
I’m guessing that with this nerf a /cancelaura macro will be even more necessary. It’s also worth noting that the mana regen ticks every 3 seconds so configuring an add-on such as Power Auras to track the duration of the buff and cooldown of the spell may be a sensible idea.
I’m not sure if it matters very much but Avenging Wrath will partially mitigate the healing loss. %Healing modifiers are multiplicative, so if you pop AW and DP together the resulting heal modifier is 60%.
Oh, and as an aside, Divine Plea was initially a 6 second channeled spell restoring some % of mana – I think 25% total. Hence the initial incarnation reduced healing by 100% and meant you couldn’t move, but the channelled period scaled with Spell Haste and was a much shorter duration than currently.