Shaman Totems vs Paladin Blessings

[Mavfin]

Raid totems would be horrifically unbalancing. I don't think anyone can objectively argue the fact that Horde currently have it worse in end-game. It's obvious that a solution should be implemented. But raid-wide totems are not that.

To illustrate: Mana Spring is 5 mana/sec for one minute for the group (ideally, five mana users). Five mana per second is 25 mana every 5 seconds. Blessing of Wisdom, fully improved and ranked, is 40 mana every five seconds. The edge goes to Alliance, clearly: every caster can get a Blessing whereas some mana users may miss out on Spring depending on group composition. Mana Tide can make it a little smaller of a gap, but in any encounter where Judgment of Wisdom can be applied, Alliance mages and warlocks gain an enormous benefit.

With raid-wide totems, however, five shaman dropping mana springs would provide an incredible 125 mana every 5 seconds to every caster in the raid. This doesn't just balance Blessing of Wisdom, it crushes it, delivering over three times the regeneration. Every mana tide shaman increases the rate by an additional 18 1/3 mp5. Should all five shaman be Tide specced, the rate would rise to 216 2/3 mp5, well over five times the regen Blessing of Wisdom could offer. At some point, rates could rise to the point where Horde players could not conceivably run out of mana in a raid environment, and that would be far more of a balance issue than the current state happens to be.

There's no point removing one imbalance only to introduce another one that's enormously worse. Nerfing totems so they stack to a reasonable amount won't help either, since then it'll be useless in any situations outside of raids, as well as being too weak with too few shaman and too strong with too many. I don't think that there's going to be an easy solution to fix totems.

Same totems don't stack. 5 Shamans could conceivably drop *every* available buff totem, but the raid could *only* get one of each. The only reason to drop multiple mana tides would be to cover the whole raid if it was spread out some. Or multiple SoE, or WF, or GoA, or Stoneskin, whatever.