I spent a few days playing afflock in classic…then started a new one in retail last night.
Booooring.
There is no mana management with afflock now. Its horrible.
Arcane mage is the only spec in the game now with mana shorts.
They need to just dumb the game down the rest of the way and remove mana entirely at this point so we can have the game on mobile devices and be done with it.
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Maybe it’s just me but that seems really stupid, so you can’t use a mana pot in combat due to it wasting your int pot? And say if blizzard really wanted that to be the case, why not add battlepots then that’s not on GCD can only be used every 5-7 minutes, only can use it on combat, not usable in rated and you need alchemy maxed out with expensive reagents.
It used to be you could use a potion every 2 minutes, shorter if you had a Alchemist stone ((IIRC) but apparently people found that to be too OP, just like unlimited battle rezzes, so blizzard put a hard stop on it to prevent people from overdoing it.
You can still technically use two potions on a boss, just gotta pop one before the boss is actually pulled so the CD starts ticking.
But yeah, right now, your allowed to use one potion per fight, and your potion will not come off CD until the fight is over.
I agree about druids. They feel much more better in this play style than they did in any other expansion (well, Legion was better than BfA but that was because of Artifact weapons)
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Yeah in certain scenarios if my healer needs to drink I can just 6 second kidney the DPS blind the healer vanish and sap the dps and my healer is behind another pillar drinking and now we just focus the 20% MP healer.
Yeah you can only use 1 potion, regardless of type, during combat. You get more bang for your buck with int potions (either to supplement DPS or to help burst healing phases). IMHO they should be counted differently, you should be able to use 1 stat increasing and 1 regeneration (be it healing or mana). As is healing/mana ones are pretty much useless since except for extreme fringe cases (if then), it is always going to be better to boost main stat.
They could be more useful in PvP, idk… but for raiding they are fairly well useless.
That’s stupid, if that was the case then tune the bosses to make them hit a tad bit harder or just increase the cooldown. People are nothing without healers PVE wise I don’t know why you wouldn’t want them as strong as possible. PVP though I hate ya’ll with a passion.
I miss Legion immensely for sure. >< The artifact was just an infinitely better system than Azerite.
And yeah, I’ve dabbled in Balance in and off since original Vanilla. Every expansion, they were reinvented because their playstyle felt dreadful. I think the worst one was the pendulum, haha.
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And what of pvp, where a non caster doesnt have to choose between sustainability and damage and can keep pressure on you when you go oom?
it it makes you feel any better, I’m purely PvE, so don’t hate on me too much. 
But yeah, I don’t know why it was really changed, it was changed around the same time as the GCD iirc. And it’s been going on for a while now. Just something you got used to I guess.
Then you cast sustainably seeking an opportunity to burst with your mana heavy spells to settle the fight within a short timing window.
It’s funny to me that it’s the mana issue that made me stop playing Classic shortly after trying it out.
Being OOM after 3 fireballs as a mage is absurd. I only tolerated it back in Vanilla because I didn’t know any better.
And healers do still have to care about mana, but frankly we healers have gotten darn good at our jobs over the last 15 years, so good healers make it look easy. I’ve been leveling another Priest lately in Retail and - no joke - I was complimented on my healing skill by three random Dungeon groups in a row (3 entirely different groups of people). It’s because I know when to spend tons of mana to save people and when to be patient and efficient.
For DPS though, ugh! It’s so nice to not need to worry about it.
I’m very glad you’re enjoying the challenge, however, and hope I don’t take away any fun from your Classic experience.
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No, it wasn’t because it was OP. It was because they were being forced to design encounters/classes around the assumption that you were drinking mana pots on cooldown.
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Warlocks have mana, we just call them Soul Shards. They build over time during combat, we unload and drain it utterly, and then let it rebuild again. Meanwhile, we have some “free” filler spells that are simply weak, or have their own resource (multiple charges with cool downs).
The mechanic is the same, the numbers are different.
If a Chaos Bolt consumed 40% of mana instead of 2 (out of 5) should shards, it would make no difference.
They simply made two resource pools instead of one.
In Legion, mana actually moved, but was reset when I used a Chaos Bolt (and, another, I think RoF). But in the end, that simply made playing annoying against low level weak trash (where you’d simply never use CB or RoF). Nothing like a 3s hard cast of a 4M pt CB against a level 40 boar to reload your mana pool.
This… this is why mana management is not a thing. It slows down game play and people complained.
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I actually tried a few classes in Classic and honestly, I enjoy playing the classes more better in Retail than Classic.
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Sounds great on paper but pretty much every caster in the game can’t afford a drawn out battle with melee classes who have their high damage abilities available at a whim, and often have higher defenses than casters do.
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That all depends on how the balance team handles the more mana efficient playstyle. PvP isn’t a big deal anyway, as they can always make changes that are PvP specific that minimally impact the PvE playstyle. My post primarily focuses on how it would function in PvE, its PvP balance can be tuned differently, as Blizz has done in the past.
As folks said, mostly to homogenize the DPS classes - Rogues don’t need mana, so they needed to find a way for Mages to keep parity with them in longer fights. And once they did that, they were like: “What’s even the point of Mana anyway?”… so they just made it so DPS only needed to care about it if they utilized their utility.
The homogenization of WoW started a real downward trend I felt.
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Like being limited by threat, it’s just utterly boring for many people.
Nothing says fun like having to stop DPS.
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