Replenishment please

Hello mana battery! I trade mana for healz.

This post is dedicated to the new group buff replenishment. This is import to us shamans as replenishment can be a huge source of mana. We don’t benefit from spirit and our crit mana regen is not comparable to paladins because chainheal is not included.

We are all very familiar with the way Shadowpriests brought us mana back pre 3.0.2. It was a very simple concept:

Shadowpriest does damage -> His group gets mana. More damage -> more mana.

The way replenishment work is far more complex and I personally don’t fully understand it yet. Blizzard actually didn’t talk about it much as well. They said 10 mans sould be doable without any replenishment providing class. And the bluepost I found about this new buff keeps it really short (and is obviously rather old as replenishment now returns 0.25% of total mana):

In addition to this change, we also needed to address the “mana battery” roles in a raid. The mana regeneration effect they grant is no longer limited to their own party, and it no longer depends on the amount of damage they deal. Each time they trigger the mana regeneration effect, 10 people in their raid group will receive a buff which causes them to regenerate 0.5% of their maximum mana each second. This buff, Replenishment, will be given preferentially to raid members with the lowest mana, but will re-evaluate which raid members receive it each time it is fired. Replenishment is provided by Shadow Priests, Survival Hunters, and Retribution Paladins.

The most important points are:

1. Replenishment is raid wide.
2. Mana regeneration gets calculated off your total mana pool -> more int=more mana regeneration.
3. Replenishment proccs of three styles of three different classes: Ret paladins judging, Shadowbriests doing a Mind Blast with Vampiric Touch up and Survival Hunters having a crit with Steady Shot, Arcane Shot or Explosive Shot.
4. Looking at the abilities that procc replenishment, frequency of proccs is around 1 procc every 6 seconds, total duration is 15 seconds.
   
5. The 10 people with lowest mana will get the buff (it bugs my though that the wording is “preferentially to raid members with the lowest mana” without further clarification).
6. People that already have the buff will have it renewed.
7. According to my wws logs this buff does procc on imps and water elementals.

Now on with the numbers. I picked out two raid nights of 25 man raiding. One we were running with one shadowpriest, the second night there were two of them. Many calculaction of the value for INT do so with a estimated 100% uptime of replenishment buff which I can’t really confirm.

One Shadowpriest: 75 min spent in combat with bosses, 60k mana gained with replenishment (watershield gave me 135k, mana spring totem 100k). This equals ~66mp5, buff uptime was around 25%. Damagedealers got up to 105k mana back with replenishment.

Two Shadowpriests: 50 min spent in combat with bosses , 90k mana gained with replenishment (watershield 115k, mana spring totem 90k). This is around 153 mp5, buff uptime was 58%. No damagedealer got more than 87k out of replenishment.

CAVE: Those numbers are not the truth! They completely ignore boss mechanics. They ignore if a shadowpriest died early in an encounter. One night was death knight wing the other night was construct quarter. Nevertheless you get kind of an idea of the difference between having one replenishment providing class in your raid or two.

On Monday we did some clumsy tries on malygos. There I picked a fight with 3 shadowpriests and one survival hunter present, where all 4 of them and myself didn’t die to early:

Fight length 280 seconds, mana gained was 10k, ticks on myself 194 which leads to an 69% uptime. Mp5 is 178.

The clumsy conclusions:

I honestly don’t know how exactly replenishment works and chooses on which person it’s going to proc. But this is the internet so I can guess as I please. And surely the guys who really know how to theorycraft will correct my someday.

On proccing: If you run with one shadowpriest, most of the time 10 people run with the buff. WWS logs show the numbers drop down to 7-8 persons sometimes which I can’t really explain. If you have 2 shadowpriests you can roughly double those numbers. Replenishment preferably proccs on people low on mana which are damagedealers and imps.

On classes: All three replenishment providing classes do so in a good way, I see slight advantges for SV hunters with insanely good crit stats.

On numbers: This is important! Zero replenishment providing classes is very bad. Only one of them is bad. Two is fantastic. Three is even better but not required. The mana you’ll pump into your raid is just great.

For Healers: Talk to whoever is organizing your raids. Replenishment is a really good way to get mana back and running with none or only one mana battery hurts us very much.

For Shamans: I haven’t come to a final conclusion yet. Replenishment is a fantastic buff for us but I’m not sure if you can have 100% uptime even with 3-4 providing classes. This would speak for having a good base of mp5 and not gemming every socket with 16 INT. I myself will gem SP for red, SP+INT for yellow and INT+MP5 for blue sockets. If you run with around 18-19k mana unbuffed replenishment gives you roughly the same amount of mana back as your watershield.

Corrections, comments and additions are most welcome.