What Mana Costs in Water and Food

Mana turned into a number you can count

A mana bar is a pacing device until somebody prices it. In Forever it has a price, because the bar is refilled with items that were bought, cooked, fished or conjured by a player. Beta reports describe downranking as weaker than Classic players are used to: casting an old, cheap rank no longer stretches a bar the way it did, so the trick that kept a healer upright between pulls now costs closer to the full rate. More drinking follows, and drinking is stock.

That is the whole mechanism. Every point of mana restored out of combat comes from an object, and every object has a vendor counter or an auction listing behind it. With no Token in the game, coins spent on water walk to another player or vanish into charges that remove coins permanently. A caster who never counts the drink is running an unmeasured cost against measured income, which is how an evening can feel profitable and not be.

None of the rates behind this are published. Blizzard has not said what the spell-rank change is meant to do to mana per cast, and behaviour on the test client can be adjusted before 4 November like anything else there. Treat the direction as the useful part: mana spent per fight went up, time spent sitting went up with it, and both land on the same shopping list at the end of the night.

Turning the bar into gold per hour

Counting it is simple arithmetic and almost nobody does it. Write down what was in the bags at the start of a session and what is in them at the end, then subtract the water, food and reagents consumed on the way. What is left is the honest takings. The floor under the whole calculation is what an NPC pays per item, because any stack that fails to move on the auction house still clears at that counter.

Camping changes the shape of the bill rather than its size. A campsite puts vendors and repairs in the field, so a restock no longer costs a ride back to town, which means fewer interruptions at roughly the same spend. The charges behind that convenience sit in what a campsite costs. Cooking does the same job from the other side, since fish cooked into stat food replaces a bought meal with materials that came out of the water.

Instanced content is where the tax is most visible, because a healer drinks between most pulls and the group waits through it. Measured against what a dungeon clear returns, the drink bill is small for a well-geared party and large for an undergeared one running long fights. That is why gear and group composition belong in a gold conversation at all: they decide how many breaks the party takes, and every break empties another stack.

Questions

Does the downranking change hit every class the same way?

No. It lands hardest on characters who leaned on cheap old ranks to stretch a bar, which in practice means healers and anyone casting long filler sequences. A class that spends its resource in short bursts and recovers in combat notices far less. Blizzard has not published the numbers behind the change, so the difference between classes is something players are measuring on the test client rather than something stated in patch notes.

Is conjured water actually free for a mage?

Free of coins, not free of cost. Conjuring spends mana, time and a bag slot, and the mage who stocks a party is doing unpaid work that somebody else would have paid a vendor or an auction listing for. In a group that is usually a good trade, because the mage sits once and four other people stop buying. Solo, the honest accounting is that the water cost you the minutes it took to make it.

Should I buy water or cook and fish for it?

Depends on what your hour is worth elsewhere. If your gathering route pays well, buying drink and staying on the route is usually the better call. If you are levelling, between activities, or waiting on a group, cooking and fishing convert dead time into supply you would otherwise purchase, and cooked food carries a stat bonus on top. There is no single answer, which is why the arithmetic above is per session rather than universal.

Does any of this change which class is cheap to level?

It shifts the ordering slightly rather than rewriting it. Self-sufficient classes keep more coins in the bag because their restock is a cast instead of a purchase, and classes that buy both drink and reagents give some back. The larger costs of levelling, riding training, bags and repairs, are still the same for everybody, so treat the mana bill as a steady drip rather than the thing that decides a character.