Hello!
We’ve taken a careful look at healer mana during longer PvP engagements in both Arenas and battlegrounds, and we’re deploying some changes to address several concerns.
In PvP, we want mana to feel like a more critical resource, and we want mana efficiency to be an important part of PvP healing. At the beginning of Battle for Azeroth, mana regeneration from all healer specs was reduced by 15-30% (depending on the class), and after reviewing the current state of the game, we feel like further reductions are necessary to both healer specs and a few hybrid specs.
The following hotfixes were implemented overnight:
Player versus Player
- Restoration Druid mana regeneration is now reduced by 55% in PvP.
- Holy Priest, Holy Paladin, Restoration Shaman, and Mistweaver Monk mana regeneration is now reduced by 50% in PvP.
- Discipline Priest mana regeneration is now reduced by 45% in PvP.
- Balance Druid, Feral Druid, and Elemental Shaman mana regeneration is reduced by 35% in PvP.
Separately, we’re working on the following hotfix:
Druid
Restoration
- Nourish (PvP Talent) mana cost increased by 30%
Separately, we’re addressing Neurotoxin.
Rogue
Assassination
- Neurotoxin now increases the cooldown of affected spells by 1 sec, down from 3 sec.
- Neurotoxin now has a 45 second cooldown, up from 25 sec.
- Neurotoxin now has a 3 sec duration, down from 10 sec.
- Developers note: Unfortunately, we are unable to fix a number of technical issues with this spell at this time. We’re working on a fix for it that we hope to include in 8.1.5.
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This was a problem since Bauble in WotLK. I remember calling it out after playing 50 minute 2v2 games back then. It’d be even worse today if not for dampening, which should be removed, given how awful a solution it is next to this.
I’m glad something is getting done. Took you long enough.
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i think the mana changes are very good thanks
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PVP community: We want druid nerfs since they are broken
Blizzard: Watches resident sleeper tournament, nerfs all healers mana
Result: Rdruid is still broken (profit?)
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These changes are good. If you would buff a bit an underperforming classes and spec. Qould be awesome!
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Some love for FDK and Demo. : )
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Wish there was no split between US and EU Forums, their post has massively bigger participation.
From what I experienced so far, which is only healing on my MW in BGs, it sucks. Hard. Halving the regen was too overboard. I’m in fight for around half a minute and I am already scraping the 20% mana mark. That’s far away from being fun.
From what I’ve SEEN in Healers’ streams, its terrible in Arena too. Cause it basically didnt change anything balance related, just squished the games to be shorter while the healer ranklist is still the same. Also worth noting, they could not use their utility spells without being oom in a matter of minutes.
I dont know if that should be the goal of those nerfs. Instead of nerfing basically everyones’ mana regen, why not just look at the evildoers. I.e. the RDruid we have all seen in the recent Arena Tournament.
Smh.
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I have a better solution. Bring back the mana regen In combat. Remember your mana regen in and out of combat? It was fun.
Blizzard could consider bring spirit back again!
Spirit is what got us here in the first place, but maybe there’s room for a stat that increases your mana pool, like intellect used to do.
The problem with mana regen is that mana regen offsets mana spent per second. It doesn’t extend mana per fight, it extends mana per second in a fight, and mana is designed to go OOM over time in fights. If the mana regen becomes as big as or bigger than the mana being spent, the healer literally never goes OOM.
This is not good gameplay, because it means you either need to base healing entirely on cooldown management or just kill people in stunlocks, because otherwise the healer will never ever run out of tools with which to keep everybody alive.
Band-aid fixing it by making heals gradually less effective just means that early game efficiency doesn’t matter, at which point it just becomes an exercise in trading cooldowns such that they don’t have enough cooldowns when dampening gets too high, or someone gets stunlocked. That’s exactly what happened, and it’s just not fun to only have that playstyle available. It’s WAY too flat.
By the way, it isn’t just healers this had to happen to, but it did have to happen.
On the critical side, then:
- The changes come out of the blue following a tournament, as if Blizzard had literally never seen high level PvP before and only now realised that this was a problem, even though it’s been a problem for over 10 years and they’ve tried to band-aid their way out of it like 6-7 times already. And yes, I have definitely been screaming about it ad nauseam.
- It comes in the middle of a season, completely upending the balance and making everyone have to relearn the game. This is very frustrating!
- This essentially solves what Dampening was trying to fix, so this could very well have been accompanied by killing off Dampening.
- The exact numbers picked seem to be a little bit off in terms of class balance.
- There’s a severe lack of polish. The fact that healers can go OOM is revealing underlying flaws abotu the mana cost of several abilities being too high or too low, and Blizzard haven’t given themselves the space to polish this up when they just hotfix it into live like this.
- This isn’t just a PvP problem, and therefore shouldn’t be specifically fixed for PvP. Healers also have ridiculous amounts of mana in PvE, to the point where we’re having fights that last over 10 minutes which repeatedly knocks everyone down to low health over and over and over again as just passive AoE damage, and healers still aren’t running OOM. Obviously it has to be a PvP specific change now since the tier is already live and shouldn’t be frivolously changed, but I ask Blizzard to consider this in the future.
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