The Unfair State of Healer Mana

In Development Undermine(d) PTR Discussion
1

Hey everyone,

I wanted to bring up a serious issue that’s making healer balance feel completely off: the inconsistency of mana management, damage contribution, and healing output among healers.

Blizzard has stated that mana management should be an important part of healer gameplay—yet some specs barely feel it, while others are constantly struggling. For example:

  • Discipline Priests have virtually no mana issues (m+). Their damage contributes significantly to their healing, and they can keep going without worrying much about drinking or downtime.
  • Restoration Shamans, on the other hand, burn through mana extremely quickly and are forced to waste time drinking whenever possible, which puts them at a disadvantage in both PvE and PvP.

This imbalance means that some healers are spending way more time worrying about mana than others, which isn’t fair when healing is already a demanding role. On top of that, healers who contribute more DPS (like Disc Priest) are in higher demand for content because they bring more to the group—while others who have to focus purely on healing (and still go OOM fast) feel left behind.

If mana management is supposed to be a key part of healing, why does it feel like only certain healers are actually punished for it?

Solutions Blizzard should consider:

  • Normalize mana costs across healers so that no one spec is at a major disadvantage.
  • Give struggling healers better ways to sustain themselves, like mana regeneration tools or adjustments to their spell costs.
  • Balance healer DPS contributions so that no one class is favored purely for its damage output on top of healing efficiency.

Why This is a Big Problem

In Mythic+

  • Every second matters. If a healer has to stop and drink, it slows down the entire group, reducing DPS uptime and potentially costing a key.
  • Even if it’s just a few seconds here and there, over a full dungeon, that adds up to minutes of lost time—which is a huge disadvantage compared to a healer who never has to stop.
  • Healers who can DPS more while maintaining mana (like Disc Priest) naturally push higher keys, while others struggle just to keep up. Also absorbs and increased HP.

In Raids

  • Longer fights expose mana problems even more. Some healers can sustain through the entire encounter, while others go OOM early and become dead weight.
  • Having to manage mana excessively while others don’t isn’t skill—it’s just an unfair disadvantage based on class choice.
  • A healer who has to conserve mana constantly will heal less, while others can pump without concern.

I’d love to hear from other healers—do you feel like the mana balance is fair right now? Which specs do you think are suffering the most?

6 Likes
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I think that, to an extent, every healer should have to pay attention to mana, but the game design currently doesn’t really allow to you to cast your more mana efficient spells - very high uptime is basically required in higher level play. Now, itemisation can help with this to an extent, as can talents and hero talents (which allow the usually mana starved Holy Priest to fare decently well in raid, but less so in M+, where they have very few reliable AoE skills, and need to spam mana hungry single target spells.)

On top of that, a lot of healers are currently balanced around cooldown uptime/downtime, which further relieves or adds strain to a mana pool depending on what is needed to fill those gaps.

The ideal would be to shift the mana cost to the more impactful cooldowns, and allow filler to be mana efficient for all specs, while also having access to mana restoration cooldowns or passives - but that still doesn’t entirely fix the issue with Disc dealing damage for cheap heals.

2 Likes
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Many things should matter in a game in special the way u manage ur mana but that its long gone like many expansions ago the fact that they say they care about they just lie simple as that

1 Like
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Do you even play a healer to say this? Also did you read what Aleix wrote?

We have a stupid imbalance, where disc priest has 95+% mana even during super intense healing, while other classes, like Holy Priest, Resto Shaman and Holy Pala run out of mana rather quickly, while also performing worse.

They could, for example, significantly increase mana cost for disc priest’s offensive spells, since they also do healing, but since we going into season 2 and Disc Priest is meta above ALL other healing specs, I don’t expect any adequate decisions on those in charge of healing balance.

I only hope that the subs numbers will go down in season 2, as this is the only thing that incentives those greedy monkeys to do some meaningful changes and perhaps increase staff / increase salaries.

1 Like
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I’m not even sure if we really need mana. I don’t think it adds gameplay value in the fast paced retail game. People don’t want to take drinking breaks after every couple of pulls in M+. And in raids, mana is only interesting during difficult progression fights.

3 Likes
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It also depends on your group comp. If you have a group with no off-heals/passive healing and a tank that requires more healing (e.g. brew), even a disc priest will need to drink often - its just even worse for other healers.