Hear me out. Without Intellect being a base stat on our gear, we’re going to have very low mana pools. Blizzards solution for this is Primal Wisdom. Primal Wisdom has a 40% chance to grant 5% of your mana back per melee attack. This rate will then be affected by haste or an internal cooldown if there is one.

Blizzard said that Shamanistic Rage should not be part of our rotation simply to sustain mana, but saved for survial or emergency situations. Now I’m wondering what magic using class doesn’t have to work for their mana *by design*. The design part is important simply because on live servers, a lot of classes simply don’t consider going OOM as a factor in what they do. Yet mana gems (even evocation), thunderstorm, life tap and whatever those abominations (moonkins) do, are all designed to help out when your mana gets low.


I don’t know if getting low on mana is what blizzard calls an emergency but regardless, Shamanistic Rage is not sufficient to compensate for not have any intellect. Instead, we’re relying on Primal Wisdom. Most people are up in arms about the lack of mana we’ll have but let’s not forget that all spells are based on our base mana. So no, we’re not going to be OOM after 3 shocks.

Even so, there is a valid concern lurking in there. Can Primal Wisdom really compensate? Should we have to gem Intellect to be more competitive? If paladins really do get that new Holy Power resource, we’ll be the last physical damage dealers that use mana. However, that made me realize this wasn’t the first time I encountered this design.


Rage.


I have a level 80 prot warrior, and soon I understood that there’s not much difference between our new system and that. Rage works on a meager 100 cap figure. Whirlwind and Bloodthirst costs 25 and 20 rage respectively (which is 20% and 25% of their max since it’s 100). LB and LvB both costs 10% of our base each, while Chain Lightning costs 26%. Getting a feel of how it compares. After thinking about it like that, we’re not so badly off. May take a lot of tweaking but I have a feeling we’re being designed much like our physical damage dealing compatriots without actually changing resource.


We generate mana by attacking now. If that’s the case, we may in fact be capped more based on that regen than we will on cooldowns. I’m not sure if that’s what they’re going for, this may just be a tinfoil hat theory. But we are going to be going out of magic soon without intellect. We will also be regenerating that magic through attacking. The usual difference between magic users and the others is the direction of one’s resource over the course of the fight. Mana goes down, and everything else goes up. There is a lot of tweaking that goes into adjusting for the difference, but I think that’s the core. We gain mana passively through attacking now, seems we’re closer to the latter than the former.


Has blizzard slipped us a new resource model without us knowing?
(Think I’ll post this on the forums to see if a blue replies)

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