How to Take Charge of Your Mana Regen

Mana the enemy of all healers?

It is the beginning of the expansion once more and many healers are struggling for mana. Of course the top priority is not to waste your mana with a gazillion over healing or on that pesky rogue who always stands in the crap. But even when you've got these things under control sometimes things are still rough on us healers right? 

The first thing you need to do is, of course get as much spirit as possible, Gem it, enchant it, reforge it anything goes right now because while you can stack all the other stats you like they're are worthless without mana.

You also need to change the way you see your mana pool.  As it is NOT 300,000. Sure it STARTS at that amount but throughout a fight we regen mana and therefore over a long fight we use a heck of a lot more than 300,000. The trick is to use your cooldowns early and then again as soon as the CD is over.

Know what your cooldowns return to you and then when you're short by about that amount use your CD for the first time. My Mindbender returns me 42,900 mana per minute, so once I have spent 50k mana I need to use him, frequently I don't but I'm getting better at remembering to do so.

Hymn of Hope, sadly sucks balls in comparison as that only returns a total of 80100 to the raid which hopefully is 26700 to three healers, unless you got a greedy arcane mage who is lower in mana than the healers.

This means over a 6 minute fight a priest should be able to restore 284100 mana as well as the natural mana regen from spirit which at approx 7000 mp/5 returns is 504,000 mana per 6 minutes gives us a mana pool of 1,088,100 before we look at potions and mana regen from outside sources such as Mana Tide, Innervate and Replenishment.

HoH and other long cooldown should be used early in a fight too as if the fight allows it, you can get a second use at about 7 minutes of the fight rather than only at the point you're sweating for mana.

Co-ordinating mana regen cooldowns is important too as it means that we don't get so much mana back that we all get to 300,000 mana and waste ticks of  HoH, Mana Tide or Innervate. The same thing applies on not risking losing part of your regen ability by casting something like HoH just as you need to move or get immobilised.

Lastly, don't overlook the use of potions. Alchemists get the option of using Alchemist's Rejuvenation which returns a 28000 mana (I always assume the worst) while non-alchemists have to stick to Master Mana Potions to get the same minus the mini heal. The better option if the fight can lose you for 10 seconds though is the Potion of Focus, however, you have to be 110% certain that your healing buddies know it is incoming and can pick up the slack and that you won't get stuck in the crap and cost the other healers more mana than you regen.

All things considered in a 6 minute fight our mana pool is more likely to be between 1,250,000 and 1,500,000. So now you DO have enough mana, well maybe not for the pesky rogue, just let him die ;p