I leveled a druid in the stress test tonight. It was my first chance to play the beta so I decided to level a character I know inside and out, at least from TBC and Vanilla… a druid.
In Vanilla, I leveled as balance for about 25 levels before switching to feral. I was a noob then and remember very few details about the leveling.
In mid-TBC, I leveled a night elf balance druid 1-70 during our off-times from raiding on horde side. By this time, I was an experienced raider and I definitely remember min-maxing this druid as I leveled.
Our guild disbanded and reformed later on another server during LK, so I leveled another balance druid in late-Wrath.
During TBC, I had to drink constantly to replenish mana – even at low levels. I distinctly remembering sitting and drinking in Teldrassil, which is the Night Elf 1-10 leveling zone
But when I leveled in Wrath, I hardly ever drank because the mana regen rates at low levels had been raised substantially. This is the same kind of behavior I am seeing on the beta. I am spamming Wrath, going oom, and regenning most of my mana while finishing off mobs with melee. Then I am at least 70-80% mana and often topped off from regen by the time I find the next mob to spam Wrath at.
I really would like to believe my memory is just faulty, but I remember needing to carry stacks of water even in Teldrassil while leveling in TBC.
Regen from 1-20ish was buffed in late vanilla. It slows down considerably by 20, and is pretty much nonexistent in its buffed form after that. So 1-15 feeling like it regenerates fast is normal. You’ll still run out of mana if all you do is cast Wrath, but again, the regeneration values are higher than you remember.
It’s pretty much the same problem with how, “difficult” the game was in vanilla. 1.12 was the final patch of vanilla, so it was as progressed as it could be. For quite a while people were saying the beta was undertuned and that vanilla was, “harder” and even a CM posting evidence and explicitly saying that the values are correct didn’t halt that train of thought.
People just remembered wrong, is all. It’s quite likely you’re far more seasoned now so you know a bit more about mana sustain and can do it without thinking about it. Trust me when I say you’re going to be OOM a lot if you level as Balance, and that you’ll want to know about frontloading spells so you can regenerate mana so you don’t have as much downtime.
I thought the same thing when I played the first stress test but it definitely slows down. I was summoning water like crazy on my mage by the time she hit level 10. I was drinking every 2-3 mobs. I expect it to be like that from here on out.
Also, your mana increases with +int items. It seems fast because you have no mana pool. As your gear improves and you get a bigger mana pool, it makes it feel that much slower (non existent).
Yep. Not to mention when you don’t have a lot of gear you’ll start feeling the hurt and how much slower you can be. It’s so sad that Balance Druids and Elemental Shaman can’t use wands, as that’s a huge portion of damage for the cloth casters.
At least they don’t have to worry about weapon upgrades.
Yeah I remember constantly drinking in tbc on ele/resto shaman.
Mana was very painful I was always oom on mage making water for everyone and fighting multiple mobs in classic. It was very painful for my warlock that I gave a spell power staff at low levels in classic also.
It could be high or feel high because you don’t have much of a mana pool and high spirit or idk.
Regen rates are fine. Mana pool as expected bottoms out very quickly as a Druid caster, and if you are out of combat it comes back relatively fast. We’re just better now at managing it rather than immediately drinking whenever we finish combat. Or at least I am.
It was actually not very well known in vanilla you could drink and eat at the same time, so if something like that wasn’t common knowledge for a while I imagine we were all bad about not letting natural regeneration run its course. That and it was buffed at some point.
It was buffed in TBC and massively again in Wrath, but this feels like Vanilla. I can kill 1.5 mobs before running out, and if I don’t cast in combat, 5s later I can get one or two spells off while staving them to death.
Was it? Perhaps it was private servers making me think the regen was so high. I don’t have a sub so I wasn’t in beta nor the stress test, but from what I’ve seen it doesn’t seem high at all.
I remember hearing one of the servers (I wouldn’t know which one) had TBC regen values, so that might have been it. I haven’t spent time on any either so I can’t say if that was true or not for more than one.
I was patiently waiting and hoping Blizzard would announce Classic, and… well here we are.
I also remember some classes having to constantly eat or drink from the get go. I remember Warrior had to eat really often, Mages had to drink often, but Paladin and Shaman didn’t have to if you played your cards right.
Someone did the math about a month ago and found out that mana regen, based on the original vanilla formula we have is actually too LOW and gets to normally expected values the closer you get to lvl 20.
![:stuck_out_tongue:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/stuck_out_tongue.png?v=6" ":stuck_out_tongue:")