Making the most of your mana

The flip side of the mana coin is the saving of it. Using less mana for a give spell also makes you sweet blueness last longer, and this is why we choose certain talents.

The Discipline Tree holds some nice talents that help tremendously with saving mana.

In the second tier you’ll find Inner Focus, which gives you a free spell cast once every three minutes. There is a trick to this talent, and that is to actually remember to use it. I have worked it into a macro to help save the toll on my excellent but very short memory (I'll get to the macro section later).

The second tier also houses Absolution, which reduces the mana cost of you dispel magic and cure/abolish disease spells. 3 points to max out this and get a total mana cost reduction of 15 %. Worth it? No, I don’t think so, the raid encounters that need heavy dispelling ain’t that many (the Maiden and Nightbane in Karazhan are those that come to mind requiring a lot of dispelling, maybe Jan’alai in Zul’Aman too).

In the 3d tier you’ll find Mental Agility, which reduces the mana cost of all your instant spells by 10 % if maxed out with 5 points. The spells affected by this talent is quite a bunch actually, Renew, Prayer of Mending, Circle of Healing (if you have that one, 41 pt talent in the Holy tree), Dispel magic, Abolish Disease, Cure Disease, Shadow Word: Pain and Shadow Word: Death. Don’t know about your healing spell preferences, but the first three ones are pretty much my staple healing spells, coupled with Greater Heal for tank healing, so you don’t see me leaving home without this one.

The 4th tier has Mental Strength, which if maxed with 5 pts gives 10 % more mana, which is pretty good. I have around 10 k mana raid buffed, so this would mean another 1000 mana, or 2,5 renews or 1,5Gheals. However, going this deep into the Disc Tree requires sacrificing a lot of the goodness from the Holy Tree, and if you do wanna do this dive into Disc, the sweet talents of Divine Spirit and the Improved Variety is just beside it.

2 tiers further down you’ll find Pain Suppression, which for 16 % of your base mana will give you a 20 % mana cost reduction for all spells for 15 seconds every 3 minutes. Getting this means that you have spent at least 31 talent points in the Discipline Tree, and that’s simply not viable for a raid healing priest unless in very specialized encounters of which I can’t think of any right now.

Same goes for Enlightenment – good talent but way too deep in the Disc tree to be a possibility for a healing priest.

So, Discipline Tree talent summary from a mana-saving healing perspective:

Inner Focus – get it.
Absolution - skip.
Mental agility – get it unless your healing style relies heavily on cast spells like Greater Heal, Flash Heal or Prayer of Healing (maybe not all 5 points if you have something else you really really want).
Mental Strength – skip.
Pain Suppression- skip.
Enlightenment – skip.

Holy Tree

In the Holy Tree you have to dive down to the 4th tier before you find a talent that reduces mana costs, and the use of Improved Healing is a somewhat debatable one. 3 points for 15 % less mana cost for a single spell (come on, how many times do you use Lesser Heal or Heal?). But these point means that your Greater Heal will cost 701 mana instead of 825, and it is one of your mostly used spells, so I’d go for it.

Healing Prayers in the 5th tier – 2 points for 20 % less mana for Prayer of Mending - frisbee bouncing back and forth ftw! Pass it forward and keep it up! - and Prayer of Healing, a spell not used quite as often but still often enough that the mana reduction with this talent is pretty tangible.

The 7th tier holds Holy Concentration. 6 % for 3 talent points may not sound much but it feels like it procs a lot and it actually often helps you regenerate mana as well – the WoW-gods don’t realise that you have cast a spell because you are not using any mana and thus they let your sweet bubbly 100% mana regen kick in while you secretly laugh at them and drop the mana-free Gheal on someone who really needed it.

And that’s about it – no more mana saving talents available in the Holy Tree.

So, Holy Tree talent summary from a mana-saving healing perspective:

Improved Healing – get it.
Healing Prayers – get it.
Holy Concentration – get it.

Shadow Tree

The shadow tree has nothing a healing priest want. Period. The Spirit tap may sound alluring but it does not kick in unless you are the one that kills the target, and how many killing blows have you managed to get off on raid trash or mobs?

So, Shadow Tree talent summary from a mana-saving healing perspective:

Void, null, not applicable. Get back to the holy tree if you wanna heal.
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Stay tuned for the next part: How to use macros and addons to help you keep that blue bar bubbling up.