TLDR: is that Affliction Warlocks can run out of mana very easily when stacking haste because your dps spells consume more mana per second than you regen. This is a major issue because almost every spell costs mana so once you run out, you lose a ton of dps because of missing globals and failing to complete channels. In addition you cannot use abilities such as your kick, wall, movement, or cc.
I’m at 44% unbuffed haste now and it’s extremely easy to run out of mana during prolonged battleground fights. Or even just normal length fights with little downtime between them. It happens in all varities of battlegrounds. Regular bgs, epics, brawls, blitz. The Hotmogu brawl that’s active right now amplifies the problem to the max. The 50% haste buff seems bugged and is giving a lot more than that. I’m at 116% haste with 0.75s global in the brawl starting room. I can deplete my mana in seconds if I try.
In MANY bgs now I’ve literally needed to run away from the fight to drop combat and drink to be able to continue to do damage. This happens in blitz often where teams tend to be more evenly matched. I don’t think there is any other dps spec in the game with this problem (including Demo and Destro).
A huge part of the issue is Drain Soul. The mana it consumes is fixed at 5% for the whole channel despite the tooltip stating it consumes 1% (2500 mana) per second and haste reducing the channel duration. The problem is that with 44% base haste + Nightfall procs, it’s a 1.7 second channel and still consumes 5% mana. This greatly outpaces our passive 1% mana per second regen.
Even if Drain Soul was fixed to cost no mana, there is inherently a design flaw with a 2024 retail dps class being able to match or exceed their innate mana regen (which you have no way to improve). At 44.22% haste, this gives a global of 1.04 seconds. You passively regen 1% mana per second and instant cast spells cost 1% mana. That means if you were to spam instants, you would BARELY regen more than you consume. The issue with this, in Affliction’s case, is that once you use Drain Life a few times (which, by design, costs a ton of mana. 15% per cast) as long as you keep fighting you basically cannot ever use Drain Life again because you regen mana so slowly that it would take forever to actually regen enough to complete a channel. And as I’ve stated in the TLDR, and state again below, almost every spell costs mana so once you’re out you can’t press most of your buttons anymore without afking to regen mana.
This doesn’t just happen in battlegrounds either. I’ve seen streams of multi glad warlocks (Jaz) running out of mana in 2v2. And this could easily happen in PVE as well if you were to suboptimally stack haste past the 2nd DR like I am.
It feels terrible to be missing globals and for channeled spells to end early (Drain Soul) because you’re out of mana. Not to mention being unable to use most of your abilities including your wall, port, gate, and kick. This isn’t classic wow. This problem shouldn’t exist.
I propose that Warlocks (and all other mana using dps specs except Arcane) be updated so no abilities cost mana except for spammable heals (Drain Life) and spammable CC (Fear). This is exactly how Balance Druid is designed right now. In a long fight you should be able to dps forever and still be able to use your defensives and utility spells after depleting your mana from spamming heals or cc.
Also, as a footnote, the current mana costs of spells in general seems to have no real logic behind why one spell costs x mana and another does not. I’ll list some examples below.
Fear costs 12500 (5%) mana while Cyclone, Roots, and Hibernate cost 3000 (1.2%) mana. None have cooldowns so are spammable, yet almost every ability for Affliction costs mana while almost no abilities for Balance do.
Phantom Singularity costs 2500 (1%) mana while Fury of Elune costs nothing. Both abilities are optional instant cast spells from the spec talent trees with a 45 second cooldown.
Mass Entanglement, Ursol’s Vortex, Typhoon, Incapacitating Roar, and Mighty Bash are all free while Shadowfury costs 1% mana, Shadowflame costs 3% mana, Mortal Coil costs 2% mana, and Howl of Terror costs 1.8% mana. All these abilties are optional crowd control spells from the class talent trees.
