Mana spring totem has inverse scaling, what's with that?

[magwo]

Mana spring is a nice totem, especially now that it can be stacked. BUT..
There's is one major weirdness about it - it scales inversely, meaning it becomes worse and worse as your gear improves. Why? Because of the change to mana cost for spells that Blizzard introduced in 3.0, where most/all spells use a percentage of your mana pool. Combine this mechanic with a fixed mana regen tick on the manaspring totems, and you are experiencing inverse scaling, meaning your can get into mana issues if you increase your intellect.

Not very likely due to our mp5 talent in elemental, but still... it's -very- strange to me that by adding intellect to our gear, we might run out of mana easier.

[Tonyx]

Actually the spells cost a percentage of the "base mana pool", that is your mana pool if you are naked. So, instead, it scales very well with gearing and is a very nice idea.

[magwo]

Ooh.. you are sure it's based on base mana pool?

Edit: yes.. just confirmed this.. you can ignore this thread! xD

[magwo]

No, so it doesn't scale at all with gear.

[Tonyx]

With scaling I meant that its mana cost becomes a lower percentage of your total mana pool as you get better gear, I should have been more clear.

[algol]

Very sure that it's % of base mana.

Mostly this has two effects - it makes downranked spells cost the same as the max level, and it makes the character's "power" comparable to monsters rather irregular while leveling. It was already a bit of a spike when you got a new rank, now it's even more pronounced. Mainly below 60 though.

It does have "inverse scaling," like any constant valued buff with no contribution from gear. I would love to see it converted to a % of total mana to keep the usefulness from going down, but in a way it's not that bad. The cost of spells is constant, the mana regained is constant, so in terms of say how many lightning bolts per minute it lets you cast - no change. But you should get stronger as you acquire better gear, and this is a class-defining aspect which does not progress at all. Same story for mana shield, at that.

Stacked mana totems are still hax though. Mana downtime is worse than the "squishy caster" model, and shamans can avoid a great deal of both issues.

[magwo]

With scaling I meant that its mana cost becomes a lower percentage of your total mana pool as you get better gear, I should have been more clear.

While this is true it's such a cheap totem that I wasn't too concerned about its mana cost, but.. yeah I guess that's true, even though its mana cost is almost neglectable and thus limited in how much it can "scale".