As Celestalon mentioned, this build includes a general change that affects a number of non-healing specs on hybrid classes. Resources were previously handled somewhat inconsistently across these specs: Balance and Retribution, for example, have a DPS resource (Astral Power or Holy Power) as well as a mana bar that’s used only for the occasional heal or utility spell. Shadow, Enhancement, and Elemental had eliminated the mana bar, and had DPS resource costs (Insanity or Maelstrom) associated with various heal and utility spells. After discussing this, we decided to go with the mana approach on all hybrid healing classes except for Monks.

So, this build, you’ll now have a visible mana bar on Retribution, Protection Paladin, Balance, Shadow, Enhancement, and Elemental. Feral and Guardian are also subject to these changes, although their mana is not visible in form by default. On all of these specs, mana regen and cost of healing spells has been made more consistent. You should have the ability to cast a reasonable-strength heal at any time as a utility option, but mana limits you from spamming it for too long, until you pause and regen. Because the mana pool on all of these classes is much smaller than a healer’s, it does not take inordinately long to refill the bar–roughly 30 seconds. On classes like Shadow with a large number of utility spells, mana will force you to make some choices between using Shadow Mend and PW:Shield and spells like Mass Dispel.

The tuning will continue to be revised as we test this out on alpha, but it should give a much more consistent opportunity for hybrid classes to access that aspect of their class and make decisions about how to use their hybrid spells. Please let us know any feedback.