Vampiric TouchFollow

Yes, it returns mana. I've never checked the combat log for it. Some people don't cast it much when soloing because they did some sort of math about the mana cost vs. how much is returned and how long the fight has to be before it evens out. But I always liked it. Extra DOT FTW. And between VT and VE you really never have to stop to rest/eat/drink again.

I think Teacake has answered your first question, I'll answer the second with a screenshot:



Going back to efficiency while soloing with VT, I'm usually a holy priest, I've specced shadow for a few weeks cos I'm not raiding at the minute and I want to farm some cash up, I'm still using mostly holy gear and only have 700ish +damage, my rotation on normal mobs is MB, SW:P. MF, MF, Wand most normal mobs are down to 30% health by the time I start wanding; they die very quickly. With a single mob at 70 let's say having 7k health the most amount of mana I can gain back is 350, it just doesn't seem worthwhile using while soloing.

So ok I get a DoT which does about 2k damage over its course for around 75 mana (at best on a single normal mob) but I can gain more mana than that back while wanding and I'll be out of the FSR earlier, if you're lower level than 70 this is even less efficient but hey as always it's your choice :)

Edited, Sep 4th 2008 1:46pm by cococj

No he isn't, the wotlk version of this spell looks like this:


He's talking about the live version

My point wasn't that it didn't have it's uses as an effective low mana DoT simply that any allusion that you're making any mana back from it overall while soloing against normal mobs in most cases isn't the case.

My point put another way; its mana return can be offset against the mana it costs to cast, making it at best a very effective very low mana cost DoT when soloing, but against normal mobs with normal health it's not doing any more than offsetting some of its own cast. If used in your rotation in place of something else with a higher effective mana cost then the net effect is you're losing less mana per kill than if you were simply killing everything by casting (other spells). However if you replace some of that damage with a wand (at level 70 with effects in place that's 200+dps) then it becomes less effective and the time difference per kill is negligible.

However I will agree with you whichever you choose we as priests have plenty of tricks to regen mana so in either case beyond a point you should never have to stop anyway.

Edited, Sep 7th 2008 11:12am by cococj