Mana feels like it’s really close to a good spot. I play Holy Pally, Resto Shaman and Disc/Holy Priest and there all pretty much in the same boat:
If I chain spam my short burst Heal, I am going to quickly OOM. Mostly this happens due to DPS failing mechanics or just a bad party all together.
Its at a spot now where I must be conscious of the heals I’m casting to not go OOM over a long or intense encounter but with a little management, it’s a non issue.
I just returned from a 10 year break but I hope Blizzard pushes a tad more in this direction with making Mana “slightly” more of a thought while maybe adding some things like Mana Totem and some utility in that direction to give Mana management some play.
I also wouldn’t mind see a slight, slight return to sone of the PvP Mana drain spells of old. Slight.
Mana now feels precious, as it should. No one should be able to nonstop spam their fastest most powerful heal with wreckless abandon.
Right now it just takes the most basic of forethought to manage Mana.
Mana drives the competition between flash heal and regular heal (or whatever the equivalents are for your class).
Specifically, there needs to be a tradeoff between HPS and HPM for mana to work well. Then you have to think about how badly do you need that burst healing now, versus how badly will you need that mana later – which requires knowing the fight and its mechanics and the pace of incoming damage. In other words, actual skill.
Running out of mana is not something that just happens, it’s a function of which spells you choose to use when. That’s why making it irrelevant would lower the amount of skill involved in healing.
ETA: of course if all your DPS are standing in volcanic or something, then incoming damage will be much higher than it is supposed to be and you will have problems. But that’s not actually the healer’s fault even if the rest of the group thinks it is.
Last time I raided, the monk got the innervates and wisdom (assume only one ret paladin if any), then by Nighthold it was the paladin officer that demanded it, there was never any discussion and it was irritating to see healers oom while the ones that got the spells stayed topped up. Being the officer has its perks of course, even setting up Hymn of Hope for their burst healing (pally wings ftw)
Actually I disagree, flash is when you need a fast heal to save someone, you won’t let them die to save mana, at least I assume thats how healers play nowadays right?
I regular heal by default and flash when needed, not determined by mana (unless I am oom then I simply can’t use flash at all)
Again, in the highest difficulty, the skill is how you heal, what spells you use when to save people, planning for big hits. If you are spam healing people with full health, of course that is a waste, but there is more to skillful healing than mana. Perhaps this is because I was a whack-a-mole holy paladin, always saving people from the brink of death with fast reactions and decisions back in the day (gosh I miss it)
But if flash heal didn’t cost a lot of mana then there would be no reason not to use it every time. It’s the same amount of healing with a shorter cast time. If mana were legitimately not a thing then “just spam flash heal” would be optimal, and that would be boring and require less skill than what you are doing, which is deciding whether you need the extra speed of flash heal enough to be worth paying mana for it.
Hopefully letting someone die is not going to be necessary, but whether using regular heal is “letting someone die” depends on whether they’re going to be hit hard again before a regular heal would go off, which depends on the encounter mechanics.
If you’re using flash heal only when needed and still going OOM, then your group is taking too much avoidable damage or you’re just not geared enough for the content you are doing. But it is definitely possible to go OOM by using flash heal when regular heal would have been fine – and that’s an element of skill that would go away if mana stopped being a meaningful resource.
If you are flash healing people who won’t be hit again for 5 seconds, that is also a waste – if mana matters. I thought the OP was considering a game where it was impossible to go OOM.
Of course mana management isn’t the only skill involved in healing. But it is one of the skills and I think the role would be less interesting without it.
I like playing around mana. As an Arcane mage anyway.
But that’s because Arcane is designed to manage Mana. But I do feel healers should have mana.
People on these forums seem to pretend healers are these fragile little flowers that are so helpless, then you go into a BG and see them face tank entire teams.
As a healer, I haven’t felt actually powerful for nearly a decade, I honestly have always hated the changes they made in Cataclysm to mana and healing spells.
You get use to it, but I miss Int/Mp5/Spirit actually meaning something.
I will admit, it’s rather annoying to be literally the only class type that has limited resources, and the only class type that has to actually play carefully, everyone else gets to go full throttle, in ways healers are severely punished for doing so.
I think mana is necessary to help make healing a more involved role, otherwise we’d (I saw we because my main is a resto druid) just spam our most powerful spell non-stopping and healing would be boring, for example I’d just sit there casting regrowth like there’s no tomorrow and I wouldn’t even bother with anything else if I didn’t had to worry about mana, that would make healing super easy, but at the same time super boring.
At the same time I think having mana that runs out so quickly that in the end we have to focus more on conserving mana than actually healing ruins the experience even more, so it needs balance.
It’s mostly ok in wow, at least for the healing classes I have on 120 now, the only one I don’t have at max level right now is monk, she is at 86 and is already having issues with mana, something that did not happen to me with any of the other specs while leveling, so I can only assume it’s a really mana hungry spec and that is like the kind I mentioned above: I’ll end up having to focus more on saving mana than on healing.
I like having to juggle spells to account for mana usage. I do a lot of casual BGs, and when fights continue for a long time, I eventually oom, so I need to be cognizant of what I am doing and when. Some fights require a ton of spamming because of the damage being taken from my team, and others are more lax. It’s weird because sometimes mana is a non-issue and I forget about it, which I find kind of boring, and other times drinking is necessary before long. I like having to manage the resource because I feel like it adds a bit of complexity to healing.
Except in WoW these are static encounters that get learned and practiced and there is virtually no penalty for death. It’s understood that the very challenging encounters make take hundreds of tries.
I can take it or leave it. I never run out. I take plenty of mana buns an potions and I’ll sit down and eat whether they wait or not if I run low on mana.
Honestly, resources in WoW are in a very weird state not only mana.
On one hand constantly running out of mana the way you do on Classic isn’t a fun experience in my opinion, but on the other hand having an infinite mana pool the way you do in retail isn’t a fun experience either. Resources should matter and you should have to think about your resources in a meaningful way and they should impact gameplay but not to a huge extent.
For example I miss the days of running out of mana while healing arenas and not because dampening was forcing me to heal more. But, at the same time, I don’t want to go OOM after killing 3 mobs.
I think WoTLK had the mana situation down pretty well. Just my take on it though.
Yes, balance is neccessary but its not something Blizz is great at haha
Like you and others have said, running out too easily is frustrating and limiting, while having unlimited is too generous.
Personally, being frustrated with a resource running out, when all you want to do is heal through tough damage, is bad. I also think the drama and competition for spells to assist regen is worse than “man all I do is spam flash heal I am bored”
Tbf the throughput in PUGs is astronomically low in all roles. I can play battle shaman in a lot of PUG groups and compete with people on hps when half my globals are spent on Lava Burst.
Also, the fights where 2/2/6 thrive are Illy’G and N’Zoth where space is an issue sometimes for the former and it is probably not a good idea to do N’Zoth without a healer upstairs or downstairs.
I am not arguing against that I am just saying that PUGs usually go for the easiest option. It’s easier to just go 2/2/6 and purge bads than like 2/2/10 in a PUG. When we do heroic shenanigans we usually like 2/2/14 or something since heroic bosses don’t really do damage. Hell I think for the first few bosses our HPal 1 heals (I don’t go personally so I can’t say for sure).
