Downranking is going down the drain
Downranking is a technique used by players to gain some mana efficiency by using lower ranks of spells. Currently this is effective since spells have fixed mana costs and each rank gets more expensive as it goes up. This way it makes sense to use something that costs less when you don’t need the effect of your highest rank anyway. Downranking has been known to be used for things like using rank 1 arcane explosion to find stealthed players in pvp or using a lower ranked holy light when healing your tank in raids and other such practices.
Blizzard poster Zarhym came out in the official forums to announce that the practice of downranking is going down the drain as it will be made obsolete.
This is not a bug.
In the latest WotLK beta push, we made a large change to the mana cost of spells. All player spells now cost a percentage of base mana rather than a fixed cost. Base mana is a special value determined by the player’s level and class, regardless of any effects or items that increase intellect. It is the size of a player’s mana pool if the player has zero intellect.
This change was made primarily to prevent downranking, as it’s a technique that was never quite intended. Rather than continue to find ways to penalize players for casting low-rank spells, we decided to essentially make doing so obsolete. If rank 5 and rank 6 of a spell cost the same amount of mana, but rank 6 does more damage/healing, then there is no reason to consider casting rank 5.
So, each spell line (eg. Frostbolt, Shadowbolt, Greater Heal, Rejuvenation, etc.) has a fixed percentage of base mana that it costs for most of its ranks. That means each time a player gains a level the cost will go up some. The percentages were picked to attempt to keep the costs relatively similar to what they are currently in World of Warcraft. For most spells, that percentage will drop some when the player receives their highest-rank spell in existing Burning Crusade content. This was done to better fit the existing cost curve, and to keep the mana cost for level 70 players as close as possible to existing costs. Level 70 characters will see most of their maximum rank spells change in cost slightly up or down, but not by significant amounts.
We anticipate there being some balance concerns due to this change, and our development staff will be ready to implement new spells, abilities, or talents to resolve those issues as the testing process continues. source
First of all, I’d like the say that I never really liked the idea of downranking. It was one of the things that scared me away from playing a healer class before. It took learning to play a holy paladin and simply spamming flash of light to realize that I didn’t really need to downrank anything since I was mana efficient anyway. I just find downranking too messy and cerebral to do.
On the other hand, downranking was a pretty awesome technique especially for healers. I wonder how not being able to downrank will affect the mana efficiency of those people and classes who normally use it. I could imagine that it’s at least going to change the way some people play their character like when to heal to get the maximum effect per mana consumed or when to take that mana potion. We’ll just have to see how players will adapt to this change.
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2 opinions for Downranking is going down the drain
Dennis
Aug 14, 2008 at 9:21 am
I was really annoyed when I first heard about this. It seemed at first as if there was no point in bumping up your int~mana since since each spell was going to cost a fixed percent of what you had. But reading more carefully, the cost is a fixed percent of *base* mana, which is the detail I missed initially. So spells will cost less of your mana bar with higher int than if you had low int, which is just as it works now.
So at first glance I thought a spell costing 10% of your base mana could only be cast 10 times (not counting mana regen) regardless of your int before you went OOM. But the higher your int~mana, the more times you can cast it, just like today. Seems like an OK change to me now.
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Aug 14, 2008 at 12:53 pm
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