So on the PTR, the devs are experimenting a new Mana tea that requires stacks and a channeling that slows you down.
Although it is reminiscent of the Wod/Mop era, this spell was always a pretty clunky mechanism as far as I remember. The present implementation doesn’t seam different.
You basically have to ’ do nothing and wait ’ before you can get your mana back, and you have to stack things up beforehand… this very poor quality of life change. In any game or any other class, you would have only one of the two penalties, either the channeling or the stacking, not both.
And doing nothing is not fun, it is not somthing you can build a mini game around unless you want to make it a hurdle.
Getting 20 stacks of Mana tea down is going to take between 5 and 10 seconds depending on talents… it is way too long. We have to work hard for it in the first place… why make us channel and wait then ?
A more proper implementation of Mana Tea should be as follows :
Mana Tea
No mana cost, instant
For every 25 K mana you spend, you gain 1 stack of Mana Tea, with a chance equal to you critical strike chance to generate 1 extra stack.
Mana Tea (activation) :
Consumes up to 10 stacks of Mana Tea to gradually restore 3 K mana per 0.5 sec and reduces the mana cost of your spells by 50% for 1 sec per stack consumed.
No channeling, no idle time, no more mana cost, no hurdles. This way we get the buff instantly, the mana gets restored over time after activation and the mana cost reduction is the cherry on top. the Activation may or may not cost a global cooldown but this is by the by.
This would be much more dynamic, smooth and fun. If it had been implemented for druids or shamans no one in their right mind would have ever proposed a channeled ability.
I do like the new coming/return of the Mana Tea concept but I am indeed quite weary of how it’s gonna play out. I liked it back then, but i’m not as excited to see it back.
Since it is in its first iteration, I hope to see some more attractive points to it. It’d be a shame to see it gone though just to solve its potential problems…
Well the proposed version that is being brought back in the game is somewhat better than what we used to have in the past… but still, we know what was wrong about it then. Good old times were very memorable of other reasons I feel.
In a game that is this GCD intensive and focused on every ounce of micro edge you can get… I don’t understand how ’ RP walking around whilst doing nothing ’ is going to help us.
This is where the sum of my fears are, agreed. I might be looking through rose-tinted glasses, but back then there was a little more lee-way to having a calm moment to drink and utilize those stacks and get the most benefit out of them.
Nowadays… not so much. Even with the talent that reduces the channel time, I feel it needs to be better on par with the intensive nature nowadays.
EDIT: At least, I really dont like the idea of having to ask my party/groups to pause just to make this optimally work. I like the idea, but not in this context…
I don’t know, I wish the devs would sit down and agree on the purpose of mana. One seems to think as long as the healer uses the correct rotation it should be infinite, others that it’s a raid-wide resource that expires if the group plays bad.
I also don’t get the US’s hype about the new mana tea. They’re just replacing a set bonus that passively gave us as much mana as our base regen with a new mechanic that gives us a quarter of our mana over 10 seconds?
That 50% mana reduction is going to be so annoying…
The MoP mana tea felt good because you pressed it during a quiet stage, whenever, and that was it. It refilled what, 60% of total mana?
Now we have to trigger everything at the right time because -I’m betting all my money- the balance will be so stingy we’ll need perfect plays to match the other classes who are rolling their face across the keyboard.
Add to that, that pure fistweaving with AT and chiji still won’t be viable in raids because it’s simply undertuned and you got yourself another mediocre, unfun, annoying spec to look forward to.