So lately i’ve been playing my arcane mage, and I actually run out of mana when spamming Arcane Blast.
And that’s when it hit me! (again probably) that this game is rendered mana mostly unneeded for most mana using classes. I mean healers, especially holy paladins for some reason, can run through man quick if they just do expense heals over and over. But any other spec just cant run out of mana unless they use their heal, which uses 1/4 of their max mana.
What I think would bring some variety into gameplay rotations again could actually be adding some lower power spells/abilites or something like “Flame Blast” with Arcane, its a low cost and lower damage, but it’s still some damage while your mana recharges. Which i’ve started to use in my rotation which helps my mana stay afloat.
And I think more classes and specs should have those “low cost low power” options to attack with when needing their mana to recharge. As well as making mana an actual finite source where if you just spam your high cost abilties you’ll run out of mana, and will have to either, chug a mana potions, or use your lower abilities to let your mana recharge.
Also by making mana an actual resource you have to worry about things could be added to increase mana regen. An engineer could make a device to shoot out mana to everyone, Paladins might have a mana aura, or maybe priests have something of that sort. Maybe mages with the Focus Magic talent would also buff their target’s mana regen significantly.
Edit: I also forgot about the Shaman’s mana tide totem for “300% mana regen” that never gets used, due to the lack of needing to be used.
As always speak your minds below, and offer suggestions and such! Thank you for reading my rant inspired post!
It’s the sole reason healing in tbc classic is fun af. I had this complaint over the years that I could spam heals and never oom its sad they took the thinking aspect outta healing.
Now it’s memorize the damage intake patterns and plan a cd for each one. It’s soooooo brainless
2 Likes
I would like if warlocks got mana drain back and mana burn for shadow priests.
Viper sting for hunters is probably fine too.
Also as cheesey as it sometimes is I much preferred pvp in TBC classic as healers can go OOM much faster and aren’t as difficult to kill (unless they’re a damned druid)
1 Like
I’d rather mana just be removed from the game.
Its not fun when you run out
2 Likes
You may be the only one here (for arcane) that sees that as a fun thing to have to deal with. Even then, why are you spamming ab so much?
Just don’t go back to the extremes of early Cataclysm.
One heal, two heals, three he(OOM)…
Well I may be wrong as I dont play Arcane much, but I feel like Arcane Blast gives the most dps.
And because of that I wanted to go Nax with my Mage, and then got the Nax based Legendary, which procs on Arcane Blast.
I can agree, when it was that much of a mana cost it was also no fun because then you couldnt USE your big abilities because instantly out of mana.
When mana is a good resource it has to be something that can both run out if mismanaged, but also can managed well with a variety of tools.
1 Like
Oh, okay. Yeah, don’t spam it like that and throw in a mana gem and use cc proc missiles. Outside of deathborne just spam missiles and dump barrage to keep yourself from running too low on mana. From there you should have evocation up before the next arcane power.
The proc chance from the necrolord legendary is way too low for it to be worth fishing out as arcane with arcane blast.
1 Like
Good stuff to know.
I should have added I do use cc proc missiles, as they add some great damage.
To be fair everything around it didnt look great, I just loved the look of giant deathborne, and I wasnt planning to doing anything serious with my mage.
Also apologies to everyone else for getting this off topic with “how Delgrimm’s mage can be a better mage” lol
Though again thanks for the tips!
Oh, sorry 
I just thought I’d chim in here for that. And yes, a lot of people within the mage community sees deathborne as a very cool concept, but its implementation and how it’s design doesn’t really synergies very well with arcane and its current design, unlike frost for example where there’s no penalty whatsoever with spamming frostbolt to benfit from the necrolord, whereas with arcane you’ll run out of mana very fast before you could see one proc which will then cause issues. Frost (and fire) at least has a legendary specific to them that will synergies with the covenant one.
Either way, I still do toy around with the necrolords as arcane sometimes just for the theme, but I feel that satisfaction with frost more 
I don’t think they could return mana to classes without reducing the potion use CD back down to 2min and usable multiple times during a fight. I also don’t think this current community could handle having to manage mana, it’s too fast paced nowadays.
2 Likes
I think this would be good for most cooldown items at this point. Like bombs from your friendly engineer, most of the time they are a standard hit, once per 5 minutes. Which aint to fancy. Now every 2 miniutes and then its something nicer because they are AoE blasts. Up their damage and then you’ve got a goblin engineering explosive!
In general I think if consumables could be used more than would be able to play a bit more of a roll into standard play, since they could be used along side your other burst CDs and not just a “use with Hero/Warp”
1 Like
But, the thing with that is that consumables are used and still has value concerning mana pots. Higher key levels in myhtic+ and raids has healers run out of mana quite a bit during the whole duration of a dungeon run and raid. Some classes handle mana management a bit better than others, but even then, these things are still valuable.
I’m not sure where people get this idea that you can be a healer and never run out of mana, which could be coming from people running only lfr, heroic dungeons or maybe regular mythic dungeons. Aside from that I can understand the sentiment from the view of how things operated in the old days, but this inaccurate view that you can just roll a healer and mana isn’t important is very wrong.
1 Like
Can’t say that as a dps I miss mana. I understand that its’ a core part of Arcane, and it does need to hold some weight for healers but assuming they actually build the specs and rotations properly I don’t see why it really needs to exist for dps at all. I know a lot of the oldschool Arcane players note it as a ‘fun’ aspect of their class but I feel that with a proper redesign so it’s not just spamming AB/AM the removal of mana management would bring a lot more players to the spec.
1 Like
No, no, god no. They took out mana management for DPS because melee classes don’t use it. Rogues could DPS endlessly but ranged would OOM (except locks who could mana tap). That meant class balance problems. Ranged DPS would be mana limited at the start of an expansion but once they got more mana/regen they’d top meters. Now they can just balance around throughput. Not that they’re good at even that, but at least mana isn’t another factor in the mix.
Mana management for healers is still in the game because otherwise the only way they can make healing challenging is massive damage. We’ve been there a couple times late in expansions and everybody hated it. If healers have to be efficient, it forces us to make some interesting decisions instead of just spamming our most expensive spell.
1 Like
It’s a play for years,first it was intellect based then mana ,now it is mastery (which is hard to maintain because of gear). Balancing the rotation and mastery is a battle Arcane has been doing for quite while you’ll never get better til the end of a expansion.
I miss all of these, especially viper sting.
But maybe that’s just my total unfettered spite towards pvp healing in general. It’s nonsense.
1 Like
From my perspective, the complexity of mana management was an important part of why I loved playing a priest back in Vanilla. Mana management was THE key to being a great healer. In addition to prioritizing targets we down ranked spells, timed our pots, and, as a priest always kept a Greater Heal in the pipeline to manage MP5.
In fact, some of you may remember seeing your priests jumping up and down on the long encounters. It’s how we stopped the Greater Heals from firing when no one needed one.
Cheers,
1 Like