RET vs. PRT: Mana

As far as differences go regarding Retribution and Protection, I find that my have more trouble with mana as prot while questing and ret while in instances. really? yes, even with blessing of the sanctuary up. this is because a lot of quest mobs are scattered, and many are casters. to keep a prot paladin's mana bar full, I will need to run up to about 3 or 4 melee mobs (or hope a caster or two will stand in melee range and take a swing at me, or pull the two melees towards the caster and tank them at the caster's position) and take them down together, as a group. I'd be halfway down in health, but my mana bar will be full. I just need to cast heal on myself and move to the next set of mobs. although this works well with cats and raptors, this doesn’t work well with humanoid or undead mobs who cast spells. so instances are the best places for prot paladins to work. but overall, questing isnt so bad if you plan out the pulls.

as far as ret leveling goes, questing is slow enough that I do not need to sit and drink often. switching to seal of light basically negates all need to heal after combat, even when judging wisdom, leaving my mana for better things like exo or judgments or lolturnevil. I don’t even use turn evil. I may have to one day tho. so after several mobs, I sit to drink, then continue with my kills. for one-target pulls, I pull with exo, then judge and walk to my fridge to look for a bite to eat. come back--mob's dead. its that simple, and im so glad that in cata expansion, pallys will have one more attack to work with.

now, as ret in instances, things get a little tricky. since it is a group effort fighting other groups, starting off with an exo might be a dps loss, unless it’s an undead I am trying to kill. so I run in with judgment, then consecrate. I keep consecrate up as long as there's three or more mobs. im using seal of command instead of seal of light, and the tanks do not seem to have problems ever, so im keeping ret aura up instead of devotion or whatever else. sometimes I am surprised with my mana regen and im at 75% mana after a big pull. and sometimes I find myself completely out of mana.

for example, in SMGY, after the first hallway there is a torture room with 10-12 mobs. some tanks pull the whole room. some pull half but end up getting the whole room pulled due to fleeing mobs. sorry, judgment of justice has an 8 second cooldown. if mobs die one at a time, we usually finish them off before they aggro a new group, but when two or three decide to flee at once, in different directions, we end up with more groups being pulled. this isnt too much a problem. but I find myself running back and forth a lot, which is always fun. in this room, I usually deplete my mana supply. then I drink and move up to the actual graveyard. I deplete my mana supply there as well, right before we enter the mausoleum. now if the group decides to kill all the mobs in the graveyard (instead of killing only the ones on the path), then I drink midway through the graveyard and once again before we enter the mausoleum. im at about 25% mana before we hit the boss, but I find that that is just enough mana to finish off the boss.

so there, some minor nuances in mana management between prot and ret. please note that I leveled prot almost two years ago, and that was before the changes made to the paladin class in patch 3.0. and even then, i only leveled prot to 60 before picking it back up again several months ago, during patch 3.3.2. so many prot leveling is a little different now. or maybe the same. some input may be required. =]