In the last patch, Blizz took the nerf-bat to Spirit all over the place. I play a Mage. To expand on that, I have a Mage fettish. I have three Mages: one is at the BC cap (no Wrath xpac... QQ!), and I'm in the process of leveling the other two. I haven't noticed much of a difference in my capped Mage. He's Arcane, he's level 70, and he's spec'd to not need to worry about mana regen. (I do ~1.8k dps by myself and ~2.1k dps on a long fight in heroics before I have a crap-ton of raid buffs on me. It's wicked. If you don't believe me about my personal dps,
here's my screenshot on a training dummy.
) However, on my other two Mages, leveling has become, to be frank, a royal pain in the ass.
Blizzard tripled my down-time between fights at lower levels, and I'm not thrilled about it. I used to level Fire because I could just pewpewpew my way through quests, but I've had to switch to Arcane just to try and avoid the kick in the bullocks. With it spec'd, the cool-down on Evocate is still too long, and we all know how broken lower level water summoning is... (Right now, my level 40 Mage summons water that returns ~2k mana, and he has ~4.5k mana.
This is particularly obnoxious when I'm pugging an instance with people who don't want to wait for the mana users.)
What's a good solution? Obviously, Blizzard thought Spirit was broken, so we can't ask them to put it back how it was. We could ask them to change how much mana drinks refund, but that would be disproportionate with the drinks npc vendors sell. Would reducing the cool-down on Evocate be viable? What about changing the levels at which we get to summon useful drinks? At higher levels, Mages get mana gems with 3 charges on them; would a slight reduction in cool-down on mana gems and adding 2 charges to all the lower level gems be a good idea?
What's a good way to reduce mana down-time for leveling Mages?