Thursday, December 6, 2007

MM/SV Mana Inefficiency

Another post which is an answer to a blog post here, this time from BRK. *grin*

How does Survival avoid being mana inefficient? I can think of a few different things.

- Know your role. Survival to some degree is a couple of different specs in one, depending on what you're doing. If you're going healer guard/trap spec, for mana efficiency make sure you get Resourcefulness. 60% mana cost reduction and 6 seconds off the cooldown of traps.

- Pot. In most of the scenarios I've been in, I generally haven't had to pot too much, but make sure you've got some mana potions.

- Use a lower rank of Multi-Shot. I learned this trick from one of the guys in the forum. If you open up your spellbook and look at Multi, you'll see that if you use it at a couple of ranks lower, the actual damage doesn't go down much, but the mana cost does.

- Use a good rotation. Survival and Marks both can use the 1:1.5. Steady, Arcane, Auto, Steady, Multi, Auto, Steady, Auto, Steady, Auto. If you've got CC around, you'll save a lot of mana from not using Multi.

- Do not be a slave to the damage meter. BM is there to do max possible sustained damage. We on the other hand are there primarily to keep other people alive. If your healer dies because you're out of mana from blasting away at range, and didn't have enough left to drop a freezing trap, that's a fundamental failure as a Survival Hunter, IMHO.

Again, BM can measure their success by their place on the damage meter. As Survival, when you have one of those moments that you wish you had Fraps for...when everyone else in the group (including the main tank) is dead, and standing back to back with the Priest, you manage to kill the adds and avoid a total wipe...you'll know how to measure yours. ;-)

1 comment:

W T F ? said...

Thanks for posting this, especially the part about about knowing your role. I've been trying to adjust to the spec, and it's been frustrating. I know that it's because I just haven't figured it out yet, but I still feel like a dork when the BMs and MMs routinely out dps me. I'm not making the kind of impact you described when you described saving the priest and the party from a wipe.

Yet.

Reading that scenario has motivated me to keep practicing. I'll get it, eventually.

Anyway, good blog. Keep posting!