PVP moonkin mana regen is utterly broken

#0 - April 23, 2009, 9:45 a.m.

Don't get me wrong. I actually like the changes for raiding because I felt we had too much mana and now we tend to only go OOM when chaining Hurricanes or at the end of a long fight.

But PVP? It's absurd.

I know, moonkin PVP is kind of dead anyway, but now it feels like the entire mechanics of the class is broken whereas before it just wasn't viable.

I did a WSG earlier and found that I could barely last a fight with multple people in it. I went OOM and decided to hit innervate and try to save up enough mana for a typhoon. Even with innervate on, it took quite awhile and I found that I could easily spend more mana then I was regenerating. When our spells cost 500-2,000, the mana that innervate regens doesn't do squat.

The problem is that mana regen was balanced around raiding & mana gains from other classes. But PVP doesn't really work that way in most situations. My understanding is that the developers compensated the spirit regen nerf by buffing Intensity, but if you're in PVP gear, and if your mana regen is really low, intensity doesn't do much. It requires a lot of mana regen in order for it to be effective, so the buff doesn't make up for the difference when it comes to balance druids.

This is a rather serious issue. Moonkins have been seriously gimped in PVP for a long time now, but our mana regen problems basically make it unplayable.

I've timed it on a training dummy. If I'm oom, a single starfire takes 15 seconds before I can regen enough to cast it. A single Lifebloom takes about 30 seconds. I know mana is supposed to be a limiting resource, but considering that one spell uses up 1/13th of my resources, it's absurd to have such low regen.

The only thing I could really do to help it is to put more points into Dreamstate. I have 1 point in it already, and that's only after getting all the necessary talents (there really isn't a lot to play with). Intensity is useless in PVP gear. Even in really good gear, which I have, mana regen is a complete joke.

The unfortunate part is that there is a long list of other problems with moonkin PVP at the moment. 3.1 brought a nice PVP change with the addition of a daze to Typhoon, but the regen change makes it a moot point since we won't have enough mana to cast it. This issue has basically made the spec unplayable in PVP.

Ghostcrawler

#32 - April 23, 2009, 10:49 p.m.

Part of the problem is that Innervate scales with buffs. So we can either have it give too much mana in PvE or too little in PvP. Right now it's the latter -- we're pretty happy with Balance mana regen in Ulduar, but it's too low in PvP.

We'd like to make a change where Innervate always restrores about the same total mana (say 15,000 at level 80). That's good for PvP but not overpowered for PvE, and has the added bonus of being more useful to non-Spirit based casters as well. "Innervating the hunter!"

Ghostcrawler

#52 - April 23, 2009, 11:28 p.m.

Q u o t e:
GC, please stop making changes to the game which continue to lower the value of spirit. This will just be one more reason for PVE priests and druids to only stack intellect as their mana regen stat.

Do we really want to return to spirit just being a junk stat that you randomly sink some itemization points on?

You are rarely in a situation to compare Int and Spirit directly. More often you are choosing say Spirit vs. Crit, and Crit is already much better for Balance druids. I don't know that many priests really stack Spirit because of the Innervate potential, so a change like this wouldn't affect them much (though I get your point overall).

Really though the greater issue is that we don't put a lot of regen stats on PvP gear, and ultimately we don't want to. That makes Innervate a lot better in PvE than PvP. PvP Balance druids seem to have mana problems. Solving that through Innervate, the ability you get that, you know, is supposed to give you mana, is an attractive solution.

This is a bigger discussion, but we have muddied the waters by converting Int into a regen stat and Spirit into a damage stat for so many casters. Long term, we would like to clean that up somewhat. Regen in general has always been just a little too confusing in WoW. We think we can make it a more straight-forward concept without losing any depth.

Ghostcrawler

#63 - April 24, 2009, 12:02 a.m.

I understand your concern for your spec in PvP, but when you respond to an issue with "Yes, but that's not really what we want to talk about, here are these 6 other things you must address," it makes me reluctant to want to post at all.

PvP mana regeneration is something we are talking about a lot right now, so when I saw a thread that brought up the exact same discussion, it was fresh on my mind and I thought it was appropriate to respond.

Ghostcrawler

#167 - April 24, 2009, 10:02 p.m.

Q u o t e:
A change to scaling % of mana would be good for all the druid specs. A flat non-scaling number is more problematic in the long run, since eventually a new expansion will come out with new #'s, and you'd have to balance how much mana it gave at each rank, and would be a pain in the neck.

I was actually talking more about a flat number (or a relatively flat number). If it’s a percentage then it still risks being too good in PvE and too weak in PvP. In this case the difference in mana pools is the whole problem, so scaling the amount regenerated to the size of your pool doesn’t fix the disparity. (It would be different if say the PvP boomkin had less mana but also cheaper spells.)

It would have small scaling problems for the next few content patches, but I don’t think we are going to see many druids with 40K mana anytime soon. Long-term we could always add ranks (the way Wrath has ranks) to keep it scaling at higher (or lower) levels.

Q u o t e:
good luck getting anyone to take leather gear with spirit on it now...to take that a step further, why should we even take imp moonkin form now since we wont have any use for spirit now and most raids (inc my own) don't go without a ret pally?

I don’t think many Balance druids were stacking spirit for its benefit to Innervate. Crit is almost as good as spirit for regen, and when you consider its non-regen benefits, you probably will want it over spirit every chance you can get. Longer term we might look at something like Lunar Guidance or Dreamstate tying into spirit instead of int. However as I said (was it above or in another thread?) we need to make sure we’re happy with the way spirit works overall before we monkey around with it too much.

Ghostcrawler

#191 - April 25, 2009, 12:03 a.m.

Q u o t e:
Make Innervate scale based on Base Mana, like everything else. Maybe 5x base mana total. Now the spell will scale to level 90 for the new expansion.

Our thought exactly.

Q u o t e:
Uh, what? Evocate works like that, and PvP mages aren't complaining about not receiving enough mana from it. I'm pretty sure if Moonkins could get 60% of their mana restored from Innervate every time, they'd be stoked.

Mages don’t have a healing spec. :)

Q u o t e:
So let me get this right, it should give a bout 15k mana, but you won't make it percentage based because on some classes it will return far too little because their mana pool is too small, like a hunter or ret pala.

No, I only meant the difference between a druid in a PvP (low mana) versus a PvE (much higher mana) environment. We don’t want to be in a situation where a Resto druid could get back say 25,000 mana (or give it to a priest or paladin) in a raid at level 80. It’s not nearly as scary for a mage, who can’t use it to heal and can’t hand it out to another player.

The cooldown is long, and that is something we would consider lowering if we continue to see mana problems. We just want to be cautious, because such a change would just mean free mana for a raid. You may not be running out of mana healing Ulduar, but the healers on the hard modes are.