Monday, May 26, 2008

Do you dare to ask for innervates?

Do you beg for services in the vent or raid chat?

I try not to myself. I can't help thinking that asking for heals (as an example) is like telling the healers that you don't trust them doing their job. You don't think they're monitoring the raid and you certainly don't think they're wise enough to make the right priorities.


Sometimes I fail and cry out myself, but mostly I don't. Having a push to talk system helps a lot, I can cry spontaneously for heals and whine for myself out of anger and frustration, but they won't hear me if I really don't intentionally force them to.


Then there are fights where you suddenly may get huge damage out of some debuff or spell, where the healers actually ask you to cry out when you're affected. But that's different story.
The same goes with battle ress. I never ever ask in vent - or in raid chat - for battle ress. Of course the raid leader will see I'm dead. And of course he'll ask the druids to make battle resses when needed, and of course he'll choose the one that the raid needs most. Sometimes it could be me, but more likely it's a healer. Asking for battle ress is like telling the whole raid that you know better what to do than those who are assigned on the job. And I know for sure I don't.


I came to think about begging when I read a must-to-read blog post (at least for mages and druids) by Resto4life about innervate and the arcane mage. (Well I admit that I may be a LITTLE biased in this issue, being an arcane mage myself).


She actually suggests us to make a macro to ask for innervates. It should be used early in the fight, after burning some mana down, but still not when being completely dry.


I'm wrestling my mind if I should do one. Is it right of me at all to try to get favours from the druids, begging them in whispers during a fight? I mean the raid leader is aware of the innervate ability as well and probably has a wise plan about when to use it and on which player. Maybe I'll just mess things up by trying to convince them to give their innervates to me?


On the other hand, it's a real waste not to use innervate during a fight. And what I've read, after the last big patch, mana issues aren't as big as they used to be for some classes, making arcane mages be more likely to be the ones to benefit most from innervate. How huge the benefit actually is to the raid I hadn't quite realized before reading this post.


Maybe all druids aren't aware of it, being used to focus mainly on the mana pools of the healers?
While making up my mind whether to beg or not to beg in raid for innervate, I'll at least help resto4life telling the world about why you should innervate arcane mages. Maybe it will help us to get it without having to ask. Up to this day I've actually never received a single innervate. I'm looking forward to it though!

4 comments:

Jezebeau said...

Resto druids themselves, actually, have some of the poorer mana recovery among casters. In my experience, Innervate is saved until a necessary character is about to go OOM, or until a mana-user is Rebirthed. Don't make it part of your fight strategy to require an Innervate to finish the fight. It'll hurt raid DPS when you don't get one.

Between Mage Armor, Student of the Mind, evocate, and mana gems, you shouldn't be having significant problems unless you're ignoring their solutions.

Anonymous said...

Since mana regeneration from innervate is based from spirit, and mages didn't used to have any, I never asked for one before.

But now it's all over my gear. And arcane even benefits more from it than most specs. And innervate is really nice for them.

But...I still have not dared to ask. Maybe if I know we've a lot of druids and no mana problems elsewhere I will ask. But I haven't yet.

Unknown said...

There was a long discussion going around blogs a while back about "kill lists". Basically, who are you going to let die first? Obviously, the tank is last on this list, but, then you prioritize for usefulness.

I'll admit that I sometimes do the same with my long cooldowns that have potential to benefit others.

When two DPSers die and the decision comes down on who to battle rez, I will choose the player who does more damage and has better adaptability.

It gets a little more iffy for Innervate, in my opinion. Depending on the fight, I might save it for myself or another healer and secretly curse the holy paladin with gobs of +Crit and a never ending mana pool! When it comes to innervating a DPSer... I try to make the call on who can use it the most and has no other resource for mana regeneration. I think it's a bit more nebulous.

For example, Hunters can pop into Viper and quickly regen mana, whereas, say, a retribution paladin cannot. But the tiny mana pools on Ret Paladins might make that choice a little short sighted.

Anonymous said...

Oh, this was a surprise! Suddenly I get comments on a post from may last year, thanks to a link from the Greedy Goblin, who came to think about this old post.

I'm not sure how valid my post is now. Or at least, as far as I've seen, I haven't been into deep mana issues in 25 man raids as arcane, so I haven't had any reason to beg for inervates as I used to with my AB-spam-spec in TBC. On the other hand - in a 5 man instance or in 10 man raids, mana issues are worse, so maybe I'll get into begging anyway.

So:
@Jezebeau: as I said, I'm not that desperate for mana right now. Of course I use evocation, mana gems and so on. So far I try to stick to molten armor (with glyph), but if mana will become too much of a problem I'll switch to mage armor.

@Rhoanna: I actually think it's best to discuss those issues in a forum outside of the raid. (If you're raiding in your guild.) Starting an argument in the middle of a raid isn't easy, you want to keep channels clear if possible. It's better to have the druid aware of the potential of getting lots of damage out of the mana on beforehand.

@You wake it, you tank it: ah, the kill list... that's interesting. Who to rez... Could be worth another blog post at some point. I really would say it depends. Battlerezzing a squishy clothie like me can be a bit harzadious, for instance if it's in OS, with waves, flames and adds and stuff running around. It can easily turn out to be a complete waste...