Replenishment is not 100% awesomeness. It is 85% awesomeness.

It was first noticed on Plus Heal, but not widely publicized. Replenishment granted up to 10 party/raid members 1% of their mana over 5 seconds (0.2% every second) for 15 seconds. By this awesome logic, the WoW community has come to these conclusions:

1. If you have 3 replenishment-givers, it covers 30 people; thus, your whole 25-man is covered!
2. It’s in effect as long as the buff is up; it only loses it’s effectiveness when the DPSer lets it fall.
3. If you have 40k mana, you get the most benefit.

Point 1 is entirely false. The buff does not stack in any way, shape, or form. If you have 15 replenishment-giving dps, all keeping the buff up, you have only 10 people getting the benefit. Not 150 (wut?). Most people assumed that when the tooltip said “this doesn’t stack” that it meant the mana given itself. Which is also true. Having 3 replenishment givers will not give you 30 people covered or 3x the mana gain. It’s just 10 people, 1% mana.

Point 2 is also wrong. You see, not only does having more replen-givers not help you, it can actually harm you. If the buff refreshes in between seconds (and if you have 5 replen-givers, chances are you’re only going through 1-3 seconds, if that…), then you won’t get any mana from it. Let me walk you through it.

Hunter starts Replenishment
14 seconds (1 tick) → 13 seconds (1 tick)
Mage refreshes Replenishment
14 seconds (1 tick) → 13.5 seconds (no ticks)
Shadow Priest refreshes Replenishment
14 seconds (1 tick)
Hunter refreshes Replenishment
14.1 seconds (no ticks)
Paladin refreshes Replenishment
14 seconds (1 tick) → 13 seconds (1 tick) → 12 seconds (1 tick) → 11.7 seconds (no ticks)
Hunter refreshes Replenishment

And the cycle continues. If it refreshes between seconds, as it often will, you get no tick. Also, for the very first tick (15 seconds), it doesn’t instantly give you mana. So refreshing it prematurely is bad, mk? (NOTE: That last statement was my own observation, and has NOT been proven. If it does in fact tick immediately, please comment!!!)

Point 3 actually holds some truth. Your Replenishment ticks will be larger if you have a bigger mana pool than others. Unfortunately for the large mana-pool mongers, Replenishment is not based off how much % of mana you are low, but how much actual mana is lost. If you are missing 90% mana but have 2.5k left, and some sap is missing 75% but has 2.4k left, he’ll get the buff and you won’t. (Assuming 9 others also got the buff over you.)

After looking over my WWS reports between me, two other priests, a druid, and two shamans, I found out that the average between 4 nights and 12 bosses was 85%. The highest number any one of us had was me at 90% on one fight. The lowest, I forgot who it was, was just below 50%. The average altogether though was 85%. And trust me, I look during raids. The buff is “up” all the damn time.

TL;DR?

Replenishment is active an average of 85% of the time while maintaining a 100% uptime. Go figure.

“lrn2math imo” was all that was needed to unleash my PISS-IGNORANT FURY.

A discipline priest had observed that there was no mp5 cloth in Ulduar, leaving him no option but to pick up extra mp5 from rings and weapons and so forth. I pointed out that mp5 does not scale with any buffs or talents, and was a very expensive stat to stack in comparison with spirit. A debate followed in guild chat until the whispered “lrn2math imo” came to my attention.

PISS-IGNORANT FURY.

For the purposes of this experiment, let’s assume the following:

mana regen = [(5 x √int) x spi] x 0.003345
mp5 = mana regen ÷ 2

He has 163 raw mp5 on his gear. He’ll need 326 regen from spirit to make that up. Sounds very hard so far. The truth is, unbuffed, he would need 1350 spirit (538 more than he has now) to meet that goal.

Now let’s add in Imp Mark, Arcane Intellect, and Divine Spirit. While we’re at it, let’s replace that +250mana chest enchant with +10 stats. He would now need 1285 spirit, 318 more than he would otherwise have with these buffs.

Finally, let’s give him Kings. 1225 spirit is needed. 161 more than he has completely raid buffed now. As far as ilvl points go (it’s how Blizzard decides how much of a certain stat to put on an item), mp5 is 1.6 times (60%) more expensive than spirit… to save you all of the fancy talk, he could easily make that up by replacing his mp5 items with spirit items of a lower ilvl.

Final note:

I actually went into this several days after the incident. I tilted my head, and added up the numbers. I’m glad I went into this objectively.