I walked into Firelands on Tuesday, June 28th and proceeded to heal exactly as I usually do in a 25-man raid. In so doing, I discovered three things.
- I was constantly out of mana.
- Barring mana issues, I didn’t have much trouble solo-healing a tank on Shannox.
- No, SERIOUSLY, I was really out of mana.
The thing was, I didn’t feel as though I was lacking mana, I just felt as though I wasn’t as efficient as I could have been. I felt as though I wasn’t using all the tools at my disposal.
Guess what? I wasn’t. Given the increase in the cost of our casted heals, given my overconfidence in not only my own abilities, but the level of content (hey, these are NORMALS!), I was playing poorly.
If you feel that you’re constantly out of mana too, are you sure that you were doing everything you could to maintain/regenerate mana?
Here’s what I am trying to do, and be aware of, to combat being out of mana, in a rough order of importance:
a) Judge more. Smart paladins will judge on cooldown. I got into the bad habit of not judging on cooldown. I was definitely judging more frequently than once a minute, since my Judgements of the Pure uptime was usually very good, but I freely admit that as soon as things get hairy, I stop judging as often as I should. So I walked back in there on Thursday and, while downing Shannox, proceeded to judge approximately four times as much as I did on our best attempt on Tuesday. And that was probably still half of what I COULD have judged. Granted, sometimes you just can’t use that GCD on a judgement, but every time you don’t judge, that’s 3513.1 mana you are losing out on. (Hilariously, when healing on my baby paladin, I judge ALL THE TIME because I know I’m not that well-geared and my mana regen is, how you say, “le crap“!)
b) Use Divine Plea more. On an 8 minute fight, I can reasonably expect to use Divine Plea three times (assuming I use it at the 1m mark or so, then again at 3m, 5m and 7m). I used it, uh, once on Tuesday. I used it twice on Thursday, so that’s an improvement, but not ideal.
c) Use the Jar of Ancient Remedies more. On our second-to-last heroic Maloriak kill, I picked up the Jar of Ancient Memories. So I’ve been playing around with it. While I don’t like not having the 321 intellect that the Darkmoon Card: Tsunami offers, I definitely get more spirit from the Jar versus the Card. My other trinket is too valuable for me to swap out at the moment, being the Vibrant Alchemist Stone. (The haste, the excellent amount of intellect and the 40% more mana from potions are all amazing.) So I ran with Jar + Stone on both Tuesday and Thursday. On Tuesday’s best attempt, I used it once. ONCE. Bad Kurn! No cookie! It has a 2m cooldown, so I really had zero excuses. On Thursday, I did better and used it four times in that 8m17s fight. Since it only gives back 7160 mana per use, it’s really easy to be missing that much (and more!) early in the fight to make sure you’re not losing out on mana back. Cast a Holy Radiance and a Divine Light or two and you’re down a chunk already.
d) Use Mythical Mana Potions or Potions of Concentration more. Well, by “more”, I mean once a fight. With my Vibrant Alchemist Stone equipped, I’m getting ~14k mana back from a Mythical Mana Potion and ~31k mana back from a Potion of Concentration. I took neither on Tuesday and then TRIED to take a Potion of Concentration on Thursday, but then Shannox dropped an Immolation Trap on my face and I had to move, thereby breaking the effect.
e) Use Word of Glory more. I’m a weird holy paladin. I strongly dislike using LoD on the raid to funnel heals to my beacon target. I MUCH prefer using Word of Glory. And it got buffed! And yet, I didn’t use it often enough either on Tuesday or Thursday. That means I’m not taking advantage of having full holy power and I really need to be aware of when I hit 3 HP and then USE it. (Because hey, I wasn’t using LoD either. Because I am apparently bad. /facepalm)
Basically, it’s all about using the tools available to us. That means regenerating mana (judging/Divine Plea/Jar/Potions) and making use of mana-efficient (or mana-free) spells are all important parts of our job, almost as important as healing. If we don’t do those things well enough, we run into trouble while healing and can’t continue healing for as long as we otherwise could.
(I didn’t even MENTION Angry!Man (er, Guardian of Ancient Kings), but don’t forget that he’s free healing, too, just on a longer cooldown.)
How’s YOUR mana pool holding up?
I feel like we’ve all gotten slack on using our cd’s, and it’s really coming back to bite us. Better to fix it now than during hard modes though. You can always do what I did and gear away from spirit to /force/ yourself to use your mana cd’s.
Perhaps I’m just not used to healing without Luck of the Draw, but I walked into BoT as a healer for the first time since February, and found myself out of sorts. I was wearing all the best gear, had all the right gems and enchants, and was even judging on cooldown. While I only found myself short on mana once (I found that a combination of popping Synapse Springs, Divine Plea, Core of Ripeness (haven’t gotten any drops with which to replace it), and Jar yields a veritable truckload of mana in a rather short time period), my healing per second was the lowest of our group. I would not have worried were I the only holy paladin, but I found myself beatten out by the other holy pal on every fight EXCEPT for Cho’Gall – on which fight I stayed near Cho, while he went back with the Corrupted Adherent tank. And he still beat me out when phase 2 popped.
I looked first at my failure to pop Divine Favor, Avenging Wrath, or GoAK, and determined that still would not account for as much healing as I felt I was lacking.
Then I looked at the other Holy pal’s overall healing throughout the dungeon. Almost 30% of it came from Holy Radiance! In fact, he was popping HR every time it came off of CD. Since the cooldown of HR with talent is down to 30 seconds, and uptime is 10 seconds, and mana cost is pretty close to Divine Light, I have to wonder – is that only a viable decision on heavy AoE fights, or might it make sense all the time?
EDIT: In retrospect, I did not look at overhealing done.
Holding up pretty well. I came into the first week knowing I’d need to cast more Holy Light. I’m trying to get in the habit of whenever I think I’ll just spam some HL onto my Beacon target as maintenance that I should be spamming it around the raid because transfer is now 100% on the spell.
I judged often already but I’ll be tweaking to do it more often. I am already good at using my Holy Power via WoG. I still haven’t gotten used to LoD.
The key to using my Holy Power all the time has been Power Auras. Not only do I use an animated (spinning) indicator for 3 power, but it makes the ‘sonar’ ping noise too. Even when Eternal Glory procs, I get the sound notification as well. I have visual indicators for Shock & Jugement but I think I’m going to add a subtle sound to Judgement as well.
For mana cooldowns I also use Power Auras. I use a combination condition to notify when an item/spell is off c/d and my mana is also below a particular threshold (so I don’t receive extraneous notifications right off the pull).
I’m taking a look at WeakAuras this week, too. Setup is slightly easier and I’ll see if I can do some interesting things with it.
I’d gotten in the habit of using Divine Light more than necessary, so I was OOM a lot while working on Shannox. I try to judge whenever possible and use my jar on cooldown. I’ve never used a potion of concentration because the idea of being unable to do anything is scary as he’ll to me. One thing I did was start to throw more holy lights around – the other tank when in range, other healers, the dps I know aren’t standing in the fire to get one more cast off – since 100% of that goes to my beacon target. My big problem is camping 3HP instead of using it and generating 3 more (or getting an eternal glory proc), once I get better about that I should be doing alright.
I think I prepared too hard for the nerf and found myself afraid to use DL even when I should have been using it quite a bit. I haven’t figured a good balance yet.
I’m always torn between just spraying LoD towards the melee and using WoG with my fingers crossed for getting my HP back to do it again. For a while I thought I never got enough Eternal Glory procs to make it worth it, but, ahem, I wasn’t using enough WoG to proc it ever. *shame*
I can’t really say I was struggling on mana, but the manapool feels abit more empty to what it used to :)
Our Disc Priest and Resto druid had less mana troubles, but couldn’t keep up throughput on the tougher healing phases of Baleroc. Even with me struggling on mana I managed to keep it up in full 359 set from previous Tier
For the rest of the fights I felt the strain, casted holy light more often, judged more often, popped plea on CD instead of when suitable, Even took a concenctration pot, accompanying cds from other healers.
All in all I think this will get easier when we get abit more used to the nerf, aswell as getting a couple of gear upgrades. More INT= More Regen, More spirit = More regen, More of both = more regen :))
Have you tried using the ‘Hear Kitty’ addon? It provides an audio que when ever you gain or spend holy power. This makes it far easier to know when you need to use Word of Glory, because you have just hit three stacks of holy power – I find this easier to keep track of than additional visual markers.
I think there is a big difference between 10s and 25s, and the mana issue is one of the more obvious pointers to that. In 10s I think you get used to squeezing every drop out of your mana bar – Judging, Shock/WoG, melee, I do it all as a matter of course. Concentration pot? Outside of Magmaw, I rarely get the chance to use one, ever.
Actually I love the boost to WoG so far, seeing those big crits land is just bliss (waiting for the nerf now). I stopped using Flash of Light, decided it was too expensive these days, and a 3 power WoG is so much more effective.
The new 100% Holy Light through Beacon change is a good bonus. I have also switched to using the 4 piece T11 for the Spirit boost, seeing as mana is more of an issue – it also enourages me to use Flash/WoG as much as possible, too. I’m down about 200 haste, but not really feeling it that much.
I think as ever, a lot of it comes down to how many people are standing in the fire. With minimal extra incoming damage, your mana lasts so much better.
As a holy priest, I’m not really experiencing much of the mana issues that everyone else seems to be dealing with. I too have been using the Heroic Jar and that’s the only cooldown I’ve really had to burn. I think I used my Fiend once or twice the other night, but I’ve gotten away with no pots, no HoH, etc. It’s not that I’m trying to be slick and not use those things. In fact, I probably could put the Vibrant Stone back on (I replaced that instead of the Jar, but I may switch it around) and stand to use those cooldowns more, for more throughput.
I’m glad I’m doing OK for mana, because it means I’m not dreading the lack of spirit on a lot of the cloth pieces like other priests have been. They’re really whipping themselves into a frenzy over that and I’m not sure why.
Gday Kurn!
Excellent article!
One last thing to add to your mana on Shannox. I found sitting with the melee, and meleeing Shannox at every opportunity; the mana return from seal of insight was huge! The added bonus was the AOE heals from radiance was soo much more powerful too.
WOG is very very powerful now and almost equals a LOH when it crits.
In spite of the mana nerfs, I think we are coming to a really nice place now.
Keep up the good work,
Gday of Frostmourne
I waited to answer this because my first post-4.2 raid was tonight! I guess I don’t have much to compare with but mana was definitely an ongoing concern. As someone noted above, judging on CD is something I really am used to doing but my uptime on JoTP could definitely be better and something I’m going to work to improve.
So long as I was clever with DP and judging I was fine, which means most (tens) paladins should be fine, I’d imagine, since my gear is not absolutely awesome or anything. Word of Glory buff is so fantastic! 100% Holy Light is equally fantastic! I’m hoping we don’t see a nerf. I can still cast DL when needed but HL all around the raid is pretty awesome. I am a happy paladin. :D
I’ve raided twice, and I have to say I can definitely feel the effect on my mana pool. The thing is, I haven’t really slacked off on using my cooldowns and such. I’ve actually improved on using HoS very often, and I’ve always been good at judging on cooldown (except in heal heavy moments, which seem to be more frequent though.) And I’ve had to use Potions of Concentration MUCH more often than I used to. I can’t say I’ve gone back to using my Jar but I might try if I continue to have problems. I haven’t gotten to the really healing intensive fights in Molten Core yet though so that might make me wipe the dust off and bring it out.
Still, it’s hard to spam HL in ten mans – at least I can feel the crit change. Yay for 16k HPS!
From our 10 man’s I’m not noticing any difference. were still 2 healing fights, I’m just ending with 30% instead of 50% I think because I’m used to 2 healing, and squeezing out all the man’s I can, and I’m almost always in melee range, I didn’t feel the hit as bad.
Ever since Cata dropped I have been freaked about using Div Plea. Any tips on best use? Especially now that it will likely become mandatory. I run 10s, and there were rare times in the first tier that I had a break in casting when I also needed the regen.
Personally I say use it when you need it. most bosses have aoe or spikes that are fairly predictable, or that come in waves. if you’re super paranoid pop it with avenging wrath or divine favor. I just macro a tell to my heal partner that I’m pleaing, so please watch the tank. you can also work with your tanks to use cds during that time as well.
think of it like this. its 9 seconds, that’s 6 gcds of reduced healing. that’s not too bad.
I’m just curious about the mana regen effects of trinkets – I currently run with the stone and the DMC, but was wondering about swapping in and macroing core of ripeness to get an average 320 spirit. Apart from loosing the duration bonus to our flasks, wouldn’t this constant boost be better than the extra 4000 mana you get from popping a potion? According to chardev, my combat regen boosts from 3077 to 4250 with the on use activated, resulting in an average 195.5 mp5
(caveat – we aren’t all that progressed as a guild. 12/12 normal mode, but even so, non of the healers have even seen the maloriak trinket drop!)
I’d been thinking that the DMC plus the core would give the equivalent of around 700 spirit on average over the course of a fight, as opposed to loosing the extra 30 int, 200 haste and +40% potion.
BTW LeMartin, who created Chardev is planning on shutting up shop on the 2nd September
Suffering, but not too bad. I’d say right after Judge more should be Stand In Mele more, in terms of importance. In the previous content I usually gained about 120k mana per fight just from mele swings (for example see Buffs Gained, Seal of Insight: http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/wb8fjnjc4grgfbof/details/10/?s=6118&e=6614). I’m still flailing with the new bosses, so my SoI numbers are pretty bad. Of course, there are times when it’s not smart (cleaves, tail swipes, etc), and you have to learn when not to do it. And you sometimes have to explain to others giving instructions that you don’t fit into the category of “ranged and healers” because you’re a mele healer.
Even with the mana cost increases, IMHO it’s still better to use DLs and never use HL, because the time spent casting HLs would be better spent 1. moving to stay properly positioned in mele, being certain to get 2. Judgements and 3. HSs off on cooldown (both instants, and don’t reset your swing timer), 4. popping mana regen trinkets (e.g. Jar, core of ripeness, arcane torrent), 5. liberally using CDs (HoSac, HoP), and of course 6. swinging for mana, all of which in turn lets you DL more.
Also, with the buff to WoG, I wonder if it’s a good idea to start Crusader Striking again, when possible of course, to more quickly generate HP. We’ll see.
Personally, I’m loving the changes. I’m using the entire suite of my heals(even found the occasional use for FoL), I’ve always been on the ball about using my cooldowns (I have 4! Having less makes me a sad healer) and now there’s a greater punishment waiting if I forget to use my mana recovery abilities, so I’ve been significantly improved there as well.
Added to which, my heals themselves have never felt more dynamic and coherent. I switched around my reforging just after the patch, before I tried any serious healing, leaning heavily on crit, and now some of the talents in the holy tree that used to feel kinda arbitrary define the style of healing I’m using.(In particular, when I repeatedly get crit HS’s my efficiency and HPS go through the roof)
Lastly, I’d say that I certainly feel like a stronger healer than I was pre-4.2, especially in everything-went-to-hell situations, where I’ve found that I can pull out all the stops and do 25K HPS for 15-20 glorious, glorious seconds. Then die.