I’m posting on my fresh 85 alt toon . I am one of those shadowers who is experiencing MAJOR mana issues. I open with mind spike>mindblast>sw:p dot>flay to get to my Archangel. I hit sw:d every time it’s available. I disperse when it’s available. I use my fiend when it’s available. I use hymn when it’s available. I sit and snooze drink when it’s available. I’m sure there’s will be someone who chimes in about my logs and I hope the power trip makes your day. That said, mana is a severe issue. It has nothing to do with playing your priest the right way or managing your mana right and reason being is that if I can only get through half of a boss fight using all of those back ups then there is a big problem that either needs to be adjusted. The adjustment can be done in a number of ways but the biggest and best would be to increase the mana returns on any one (or two) of the items I listed above. For example, a Mage can cast one spell and refill their entire mana pool and they can do it quite frequently. Priests have no such ability. Without looking at the tooltips I think our max mana return is only 3% of our mana pool. It’s not enough.
but it does solve the “issue.” maybe if this was during Dragon Soul and people still had mana issues but we’re just in the first raid tier, and even if you don’t raid heroic a full guild group should be at the point by now that they are in mostly full 359 gear unless they have the absolute worst luck, are doing extreme class stacking and not getting the right gear drops, or are constantly bringing in low geared alts and don’t have a priority system with loot so alts that only get played once get gear over mains.
firelands gear will solve this issue, using your class abilities that regen mana properly and not waiting for 10% mana will solve the issue, having a group that kills the bosses at reasonable times solves the issue.
Now that I do have experience with. HPriest is my favorite healer, and in raids I go OOM very easily. Although I don’t have the 4 piece on it yet. I have to ask, why on Earth does Holy Word: Sanctuary cost so much mana?? I don’t know how much Healing Rain costs, but Druid’s Efflorescence costs barely over 2k mana and they have almost 100% uptime on it. Sanctuary costs 6.8k mana and only has about a 60% uptime. They need to lower Sanctuary’s cost and bring it in line with Swiftmend.
#1 this isn’t Dragon Soul, this is current content.
#2 We don’t raid heroics in my guild so what you are saying is that the issue will never be solved and that’s OK. You’re saying it’s OK to punish casual players and players who don’t meet the requirements to join elitist guilds to get the gear because …they can’t get the gear. In the meantime, mages of the same gear and guild levels still have a spell that replenishes their whole mana pool plus three mana gems. As far as luck goes, it doesn’t address the issue even if I had the best luck in the world if we aren’t running heroics.
If you’re porperly rotating fiend/wings/disperse/SWD you should never oom. Took me a bit of time to figure it out when i first got to 85, but after playing shadow for a while you’ll get better with this.
In pvp it’s much easier to spend tons of mana, but it’s also way easier to get mana back with lower CD disperse, spamming swd not being a big issue and wings being your burst you should always have mana whem you need it.
Unfortunately, this is just somrthing you nedd to learn on shadow.
He’s right, though. Shadow has a ton of high mana cost spells that you can just spam if you arent careful. Havving to put up SWP more than once a fight is a massive mana mistake. Dotting every mob in an aoe pack with SWP is a massive mana mistake. Double clicking DP is a massive mana mistake. Not using mind blast on CD is a massive mana mistake l. Using wings before 5 stacks is a massive mana mistake.
Unfortunately, the way shadow is punished for poor play is they hemorrhage mana. The spec is not beginner friendly due to this combined with all the maintenance buffs/debuffs you have to maintain.
Try this opener out next time:
Precast ms->fiend->swp->flay->flay(hopefully you have an orb at this point)->MB->vt->dp
Then go into maitaining your dots, keeping 5 stack evangelism up and pressing mb on cd. When you have to move (you do a lot in cata fights) press swd.
Swd gives you 12% of your mana pool back, disperse is 6% per sec, hymm is the worst mana/sec at 3%. A larger mana pool will help out, but a fully geared spriest has like 15k-20k more mana than one just entering heroics. It makes things better but wont be the difference between going oom and not.
Darkmoon card: Volcano is actually pretty big for our mana recovery when coupled with swd/disperse/wings, though.
This is a big one, maybe the most important. Don’t hold your mana cooldowns until you’re low. Use them as soon as you can, without overcapping your mana. If you have one that gives back 10% mana, you should be using it at 85-88%, not waiting until you’re already below 50%.
Takes practice. I still occasionally screw up on holding my first mana gem too long, and mage can still OOM.
But the idea is you want most of your mana CDs to be on rotation so they’re constantly coming back up throughout the fight.
idk about Hymn of Hope though. Seems like Shadow shouldn’t have to use that unless they screw up, or your healers need it.
If you want us to look at logs to see how you can improve, we can do that. Do you want me to look at a specific boss you were having mana trouble on?
Shadow Priests have Dispersion which is 36% mana on a 2 minute cooldown, and it could be glyphed down to a 1.25 minute cooldown if needed. Evocation is 60% mana on a 4 minute cooldown for Fire/Frost, and on a 2 minute cooldown for Arcane. That seems pretty comparable to me.
Shadow Priests chew through mana but have a large suite of mana-regenerating cooldowns that can be used when needed. The spec is just designed differently than Mages are. There’s no single button that will fully solve your mana issues.
Shadow Word: Death - 10%
Shadowfiend - 3% per melee swing
Archangel - 5%
Dispersion - 36%
Efflorescence has a 15 second cooldown (it’s triggered via Swiftmend) and has a 7 second duration. It has a 47% uptime at most.
I’d have to check, but Healing Rain costs in the realm of 10-12k mana IIRC.
Right - it’s based off of spirit and, even more importantly, intellect. Intellect gives a higher max mana pool, which has a huge impact on any percentage mana return. The talent Revitalize makes Lifebloom/Rejuv give 2% max mana every ~15 seconds. Replenishment gives 1% max mana every 10 seconds. Innervate gives 20% max mana every 3 minutes. Intellect also factors into the spirit-based mana regen formula somewhat significantly.
So with higher ilevel gear, those mana regen sources are all giving significantly higher mana returns. It doesn’t take long for healer mana regen in Cataclysm to scale to a level where it’s hard/impossible to run OOM.
