The Mana Regen Game

I was wandering around the blue post roundup on wow.com, and came across Running out of mana was never fun. Ghostcrawler's remarks were interesting, but what I'd really like to talk about is mana regen in healing and dpsing.

Now, when I got to 80 on my hunter, I was marks. Marks was rather horribly mana-inefficient at the time. As in sting, chimera, arcane, aimed, hey look there went a quarter of my mana pool. It was a challenge to do as much damage as possible given this limitation. I figured out which bosses in Naxx had mana pools and used Viper Sting + Chimera shot on them to get mana back. I spent a lot of time at the test dummies figuring out how to get the most mana back in the minimum amount of time with Aspect of the Viper while in combat. It was a fun challenge, but not an overwhelming one. If I failed at it, well, my dps went down. That was it.

As a healer, if I run oom, people die. If I have no mana, I am a useless priest. This means the mana game is no longer a game, and I do everything possible to make sure I don't need to worry about mana. Now, I have Solace, which gives me mana regen every time I cast a helpful spell, so I don't worry much. But I remember the not-fun days, where I was always worrying about mana, in addition to worrying about healing, where I was standing, and if I was doing okay or not. Healing's a higher-stress job, so having more worries is understandable and as long as the fun to worry ratio is good, I'm not going to stop healing.

But is there any way to make the mana game as a healer like the mana game as a hunter? From what I've seen, holy pallies do have that. They basically manage their own regen dynamically, and that's what I want as a priest. Hymn of Hope and Shadowfiend are all well and good, but I want something more. Don't know what, exactly, but I'll continue to hope that Cataclysm has it. Until then, you can have my Solace of the Defeated when you pry it from my cold dead hands.

MM in raids without replenishment, tips and tricks

If you're like me, you spend most of your time without replenishment. Whether it's soloing quests for cash (and pet leveling), running 5 mans, or raiding, mana management as MM is a challenge. Especially when your tanks are go go go and the healers lose mana slower than you.
So, in my quest to improve dps this week, I discovered a few things and figured I'd share with you.

1. Viper Sting. Remember that one, the one that drains mana and only seems to get used in pvp (unless you're me and didn't even remember you had it till you were reminded)? Well, guess what, it works just as well on bosses with mana and if you keep it rolling on a boss, you will not run oom. Me, I switch between viper and serpent (serpent, chimera, viper, rest of shot rotation, serpent as chimera's about to come off cooldown, chimera, viper....) It means I don't lose the nice chunk of damage chimera+serpent gives me.

2. If you are not actively shooting something, you should be in aspect of the viper unless your mana pool is full. This includes the running around bits of a fight.

3. Rapid recuperation. It's not quite as nice as it used to be (grumble, Blizzard fixed bug, grumble) but it's still nice. In any boss fight, wait a bit till you hit Rapid Fire (I wait till I'm at about 70% mana). Enjoy. Then hit Readiness and repeat. If the fight is going quickly, wait till kill shot is available. Then you get two kill shots and two rapid fires. Nifty.

4. Aspect of the viper. Eventually you're going to have to. First, always always always switch to hawk/dragonhawk to sting and to use Chimera. You don't want to gimp your number 1 damaging shot. Second, you can either just steady shot your heart out or keep to your rotation. It'll depend on the fight, but you want to keep shooting. Autoshot alone's going to take quite a while to refill your pool.

The standard build atm for marksmen is 7/57/7. It does not include efficiency because, well, it's not a huge damage talent, is it? But for me, efficiency is a must. I am not a mage, I should not have to sit and drink after every pull. So, I removed go for the throat and improved steady shot, and used those 5 points to max efficiency. And here's the the build and please ignore the glyph of rapid fire. I haven't been able to get my hands on a kill shot glyph.