Should Blizzard "reintroduce mana"?

[arkanon]

I'm all for more complexity to the dps specs, one thing about healing which I enjoy is to manage your mana in such a way that you hit 0% mana at the same time as the boss dies. This would though require all dps specs to have means to regulate their mana usage without having to stop using abilities, and that would require a rework of many if not all specs who use mana.

One thing about healing i enjoyed as well (i dont heal anymore). As a tank now, nothing annoys me more than getting the boss to 15%, looking at my healers' mana and everyone is on 45-60%, and ppl start to die to sustained damage (not failed mechanics). To me, it was just lazy ass healers and no communication - everyone focused on the tank instead of someone raid healing, or just general shit play. Then when i question it and someone says "being careful with mana" - fucker what the fuck you saving it for? we dead? how more pressing could the need for heals be?

As for the second part, what i dont EVER want to see the return of is dps downtime where they just have to auto attack for a while to regain mana. The way hunters worked was fantastic, and if every mana class had a similar mechanic (not identical) that would be swell. TAP was always good too, sacrificing some hp for some mana is a cool mechanic. I liked evocation as well, thats pretty cool - always obvious to see which mages knew the fights and which didnt - the good ones got a full evo cast in during a safe period, the shit mages cast it whenever and would have it interupted and wasted.

Ele could have a totem, Druids innervate, Spriest could do away with mana altogether with the current system imo. I guess the issue blizzard have is if it just becomes a standard part of your rotation, why have it at all? If you can easily mitigate the lost mana, why have it as a mechanic?

Smuggler was my main in SWTOR and it was fucking horrible. If you screwed up your rotation, you were punished with BORING and slow gameplay - less dps would have been ok, but nope, it literally slowed the rotation right down and made it horribly boring.

[Ragnarohk]

As a healer I rather have to manage my mana. At least it adds some complexity and disuades you from just spammig your biggest and fastest heal.

Offtopic: I hate how healers are expected to push DPS as much as posible. If I wanted to heal/DPS I would play disc or fistweaver (back when it was viable).

[Fayolynn]

Yes, but even a crappy shadowpriest brought more managains than no shadowpriest.

I think the point was that complaining about being a mana battery is over simplifying the situation. Shadow priests had literally the same job as any other DPS, do as much DPS as possible while following fight mechanics. Their unique utility was more valuable to the raid then bringing one more pure DPS to do more individual damage.

[Throwme]

Their unique utility was more valuable to the raid then bringing one more pure DPS to do more individual damage.

That oddly enough brings me back to my original point. You were taken for the utility, not because you were good. That was not fun.

[draynay]

I had fun as a shadow priest, the rotation was good and I would much rather be keeping the paladins with mana than be one of them spamming FoL and listening to people bitch about buffs.

[Nitros14]

That oddly enough brings me back to my original point. You were taken for the utility, not because you were good. That was not fun.

Some people actually want to play support. You don't have to if you don't want to.

[vertigo12]

Innervate, Pots, mana gem are the only mana battery sources.

[Throwme]

Some people actually want to play support. You don't have to if you don't want to.

Som people actually want to play poker. You don't have to if you don't want to.

What kind of argument is that? We're talking about the past here and my personal opinion on the past. It wasn't fun being picked just for the utility that happened to be thrown at my main class of choice. It's like if druids were no good for anything but healing or if warriors were stuck in tanking roles. What do we need the other specs for then?

[Socialhealer]

Some people actually want to play support. You don't have to if you don't want to.

Support classes were great in tomb of sargeras, IMMUNITY OR GTFO THE RAID!

blizzard don't have the design to make support work, they've gutted so many hybrids of support that pure dps brings more support than hybrids do, my suggestion is play another game not because i don't agree with you but blizzard don't share your view, not even close they've made every attempt to gut hybrids of support and favour mages/rogues/hunters with their mobility and immunties instead, shit they even took hybrids support in WoD and gave mages+hunters a raid wide support buff "because no-one would take them otherwise" blizzards words, then they removed that and made both classes the most OP they could so you could raid a 20 man mythic with the raid 25% hunters 25% mages 50% randoms.

[sam86]

That is a good point, there is no functional point for mana in most dps specs. They may as well just make them CDs with charges since it's the equivalent.

u do know i was talking about want that mana used for all abilities, not remove it totally ?

[Rozz]

u do know i was talking about want that mana used for all abilities, not remove it totally ?

I know that, but your point goes to show how worthless they made it is what I'm agreeing with.

[Nephys]

So, why was mana changes into what we have today?

I personally see it as something they did just to reduce complexity in balancing. Like a potential mana using DPS running out of mana in the GOGOGO M+ mentality, can't have that can we?

You really think that mana increases the complexity in balancing? If you really think about this you will see how wrong you are. And even if you were not wrong becasue of this, you would still be wrong because they don't make decisions based on "complexity in balancing", nor should they. If they wanted to get all classes doing the exact same damage, using the statistics they have access to, it would be a simple task.

Their focus, as it should be, is to make classes fun to play, while they completely failed in this expansion it was not because of that. Moving away from mana was a good decision. It works for healers, because their purpose is not to heal as much as possible, it is to keep the raid alive, if a healer spams like crazy he's screwing himself and his fellow healers, if you ever healed in a guild you will know that it is completely different than healing with pugs, as no mana goes to waste. As a dps your job is to always hit as hard as you possibly can, so their job is to avoid the mechanics as best they can to maximize their uptime.

[schwarzkopf]

As an Arcane Mage... I ask 'what do you mean re-introduce'

[ipoststuff]

No. Most dps specs have resources to manage. Mana managing fits healers, not dps.

[Boricha]

I thought mana management added more depth to pvp. In PvE it just created conserve phases, which was a skill to be good at but not very fun.

[Varitok]

I hate a system where I spend a finite resource. I prefer gaining a resource to spend. Such as Runic Power and Rage.

[lllBlackSunlll]

I'm not sure mana matters, it acts no different than something like energy or rage.
For example here is the Hunter's (BM) mana management during BC...

Aspect of the Hawk until 60% mana, then pop mana pot and go aspect of the viper. At 30-40% mana you should be able to pop another potion. If you were entering a kill phase or Hero/BL was being popped then you go back to Aspect of the Hawk, otherwise stay in Viper.

Today it is float around 40 focus but never above 80. This is so you never cap out which is inefficient, but not about 40 so you can use abilities on demand.
Really there is no difference in pure gameplay, just adds another dimension for the player that adds nothing. At least this way it is easier for the Devs to balance.

[Alkizon]

tl;dr I think they should, but I don't think they will.

I don’t want to go deep in description of requirements/priorities and hierarchy of classes' organization again, their resources and encounters' organization in general, to tell that sharing several of them has never harmed anyone, as well as to point out the fact that devs were fine with this resource as almost one alone (with a couple of exceptions) before this happen (*pointing at lost class mechanics and beginning confusion in resources area near and after Cata*) and everything worked out just fine and smoothly for them... in the end, almost every spec, as I understand it, has its own unique resource now... and? so what? how does that feel? does it help? does its management have at least some worthy depth? how does this help for lore and class (not spec) fantasy? Just artificial diversity/"complication" and nothing more (I still remember, how one acquaintance ret swore and spat at holy power, and told me that he won't play "your rotten nasty rogue", and well... it really happened, he completely left his character, don't know if he is playing now)

Not all replacements and additions were completely inappropriate, but vast majority... - RPG-gimmick. Same nonsense, which is currently under discussion in General <1> <2> <3> <4>. People, you're obsessed with cosmetics in absence of normal class design. This is ve-ery inappropriate and relaxing for devs, I would even say - defocus. This isn't only not necessary for the game, but even contraindicated at this stage. Don't engage in such nonsense.

In short, I'll focus on my first sentence, as basic wording, since this is my general opinion on issue, and I hardly see that people going to read details about it (however, like always), since everyone has their own opinion on this.

So it goes.

[Ahovv]

Resources when done elegantly are a great addition to gameplay. But Blizzard has proven they don't know how to design classes since they can't even remotely balance them.

[HuxNeva]

Resource management can be an interesting for a support class. For a DPS class it was always meh, with cool-down management a much better fit to factor in a strategic decision play. Being able to 'do stuff' and selectively apply a power spike in dps is just more fun than having to constantly restrain while still slowly but surely feeling the power being leached from you. And then we didn't even mention that other 'energy' based specs, or specs that get masses of 'white damage' basically for free are still out there making the mana vs non-mana user balancing act even more precious.

For dps, I'd say resource starvation was an idea that was tried for a few years and found wanting. You think you do, but you don't.