I’ve been spending a little more time on my Mage lately, leveling him a bit more casually in between raids. The class is great fun and benefited greatly from recent changes, as I’ve said in previous posts, but I found myself looking more closely at mana as a resource mechanic.
I thought about other classes that I had the most fun DPSing on: they were the Rogue, Warrior, and Death Knight. What do all of these have in common? An indefinite resource pool.
With the Mage, the class is great fun in groups as long as I was able to keep up on mana, which thankfully isn’t overly difficult as a Frost Mage. But, if a boss fight carries over longer than normal or the group wants to move quickly, I found myself in situations where I could literally do nothing but fire my wand while I waited for mana. While soloing, this problem was even more troublesome compared to those other classes I had enjoyed, as I found myself needing to stop and drink every few kills. This wouldn’t bother me if there was some benefit I gained for having to do so, but in fact the Death Knight killed things more easily and with less downtime than my Mage.
In other words, once my mana was depleted, I was no longer having fun. This is, of course, a painfully obvious observation that everyone knows, but the point of the post is to suggest alternatives.
I think every class should be able to indefinitely sustain themselves. Games like Warhammer Online use the AP system, which is very good, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be the same as that. Even traditional mana can be sustained in this way as long as the class has abilities that allow them to do so. Take the Warlock for example, who is capable of trading health for mana, and then draining health from enemies to repelenish. The old Retribution Paladin, before nerfs, also had nearly infinite mana thanks to Judgements of the Wise. This is good class design, yet Blizzard seems afraid to give it to all classes. They shouldn’t be.
Thinking of my ideal MMO, I think I would give every class two resource pools, both replenishable. The first would be mana/energy, constantly regenerating like the WoW Rogue or Warhammer’s AP. The 2nd would be class-specific, gained by doing certain class abilities similar to Rogue combo points or various class mechanics in Warhammer.
Mana as a resource just seems like an outdated mechanic that occasionally needlessly forces a player into a position where they are no longer having fun, and not always because they did something wrong. It’s time to do away with it!
