Cyr wrote on Mar 29
th, 2011 at 10:54am:
It looks like they are not scaling the SP cap so it is a moot point as with a low cap like that there is little potential harm.
Got to say I am happy with that.
It's a pretty fast regen. I took a 16 WF wizard into the vale, and pissed away SP as fast as I could. Once I got below 12, it regenned 4sp every 2 seconds, iirc. So if I dropped down to 11 SP, I would regen to the cap of 15 SP.
Most of the SLAs are 1-6 SP. Scorching ray is now 6 SP. With 1 SP hypno, 3 SP Otto's Resistable, and 6 SP hold, I could easily pull and destroy one mob at a time in the Vale slayer area, by either kiting, dancing, or holding them. It was like being a ranged ranger - Pew Pew Pew. It didn't take as long as I though it would, either.
I went into the Sands and did the same thing - after dumping all my SP and then using only the SP regen, I relied on SLA and Scorching Ray to work my way through the undead area. I took down the rare air elemental (and 3-4 others), took down one red-named gnoll, and was working on Vovund Darkfur when I aggro'd too many mobs, forgot that I had hypnotize, got tripped, and overwhelmed.
Still, two red-named and another 50 kills at level 16 in the sands only took 2-3 times longer using only SP regen as it would on a farming run.
It will be nice when leveling for those rare occasions that I run out of SP. It's not something I expect to need other than for emergencies and leveling. The pew pew playstyle doesn't appeal to me, whittling down mob HP one arcane bolt at a time. I don't see it being terribly useful for people at cap, raiding, or epics.
However, I can see it getting me to the next shrine without wasting resources. For people with capped characters, time >> resources, so moot point. I'll scroll heal with my cleric before I'll try to heal up a high level party using cheap CMW/CSW and SP regen.
I see this making it easier for newbies - it is slow enough and you need to play with enough caution that it isn't overpowered. It only allows unlimited casting if you know how to pull mobs and use some tactics. If you can do that, you're rarely going to run out of SP anyways.
The time required for newbies to learn decent SP conservation just increased though. I remember hating my first arcane caster when I started playing the game, so having some training wheels isn't an entirely bad thing.