Holy Nova Explosion - 2 mages 1 priest

I just started a new multi-box combo, 2 mages and a priest. I'm using keyclone and running three windows on one machine. I have multi-boxed two characters before(back in the old days before such tools as keyclone) namely a hunter and druid and other combos that I later abandoned. I have leveled a frost mage to 60 before using the standard frost aoe technique.

So I started leveling and began following the cookie cutter specs on my mages in frost and on my priest picking up spirit tap and improved wands with the intention to pick up Imp PW:Shield and Fort or pick up Mind Flay.

So I was tooling around Azeroth with this setup and it seemed like things were going slow. I got Imp Blizzard but could only cast it with one character due to the targeting reticule being mouse driven. I used Mind Flay in conjunction with Arcane Missiles to quickly take down single mobs in between camps of mobs.

Then I noticed something in the priest holy tree...

Quote:

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Holy Nova Rank 1
185 Mana
Instant cast
Causes an explosion of holy light around the caster, causing 28 to 32 Holy damage to all enemy targets within 10 yards and healing all party members within 10 yards for 52 to 60. These effects cause no threat.

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Hmm ... AoE damage? AoE healing? No threat!?! I respecced immediately.

I was in heaven the first pull. No more tricky pulls, just shield the lead mage run into a camp and start mashing 1 button: Arcane Explosion | Arcane Explosion | Holy Nova! It was like Blizzard designed this spell specifically for multi-boxers!

Before picking this up I could handle maybe five to nine mobs using Arcane Explosion to AoE. More with the frost technique, but it was slow. After speccing my priest for Holy Nova I was taking 15-20 at a time with little problem and less total downtime.

I am in love with this combo and just wanted to share, as most priest's generally consider Holy Nova nothing more than something to pick up and spam rank 1 to uncover rogues or druids. But for the multi-boxer it is sooooo good.

Holy nova costs about the same as prayer of healing. Huge mana sink. :P

Why would I be concerned about mana conservation when I'm following mages around?

I have free water.

At least one of the mages is going to need to drink after a large AoE pull no matter what the method. Since I only use Holy Nova when my mages are AoEing and I have a button to make all my characters drink at once I'm not incurring any extra downtime.

Give it a try I think you will be surprised :D

Because you don't regen mana in combat :)

With the changes in 2.3 this spell is even better. I'm getting more damage from plus healing and 30% regen outside the fsr. 8)

As for mana regen in general it's not really that important when AoEing. AoEing isn't an endurance thing like raids. The longer I let things beat on me the more likely I am to die.

Normally everything is dead before I'm out of mana, and if it isn't I was probably going to die anyway. However one little trick I did on really big pulls was to kill a single mob outside of a camp to proc Spirit Tap before charging in. But while it's a neat trick I rarely take the time to do it.

With this setup my biggest downtime comes from waiting for groups of mobs to respawn. My biggest problem related to mana comes from the fact that I'm on a pvp server and somebody decides to screw with me just after a pull. Usually a sheep, double evocate, and the fact that my priest has procced Spirit Tap is enough to take care of things. Pretty rare though since people see three toons and assume there are three players.

While the spell overall isn't that great, and even most holy heavy specced priests skip it, in this particular situation the synergy is amazing. By using arcane explosion I am getting 100% damage output from both mages, instead of the single reticule targeted aoe while the other mage does nothing. It makes things go much faster.

Anyway, with any other setup besides following mages around I probably wouldn't pick up Holy Nova either but the synergy is really good and I would definitely recommend picking it up if you are boxing a similar group.