Mana Test

Mana is most clearly and strongly based on class. Enchanters have the most mana (the only characters with over 400 in my data were chanters), followed by Priests, then Death Mages (which may be higher since I only had two), Elder Druids, Guardians then Minstrels.

Race seems to have little to do with mana gain compared to wisdom, but class is certainly the strongest factor. Higher wisdom does tend to give higher mana, but it is not a hard and fast rule and the variance is great. A Half-Orc Priest had 290 with 14 wisdom and at the same time there was an Elven Priest with 21 wisdom who had only 289 (who imo needs a reset lol).

Between characters of the same class and level, mana seemed to vary a great deal. I had 6 Priests listed with 21 wisdom and mana ranged from 289 all the way to 398. Those Priests with 20 wisdom ranged from 337 to 376. The difference between 20 and 21 wisdom seems to be negligible, as is also evidenced in the Enchanters listed.

The lack of Gnomes in the data made comparing 22 wisdom difficult. The benefits seemed to vary. There was only one Gnome Enchanter, but there were two Elven Enchanters with 21 wisdom who had higher mana than it did. With Sorcerors and Necromancers of varying levels, those with 22 wisdom did seem to have more mana than others of the same level or ranked in with those a level or two above, but the mix of 20, 21 and 22 wisdom was pretty even. Of note is the Gnome Necromancer at level 17 with 22 wisdom who has 306 mana. I'm most interested to find out what that character's mana will be at Death Mage. It will most likely be over 400, which implies that Death Mages rank higher on the class list than is shown above, probably equal to Enchanters.

Level 20 Clerics, for obvious reasons, were the most abundant same level/same class category and therefore provided the best data. This data showed most clearly how mixed mana levels were between 20 and 21 wisdom. Below that things fell for the most part into rank by wisdom, with the notable exceptions of an Elven Cleric with 21 wisdom and only 228 mana and a Dwarven Cleric with 14 wisdom and 193, on par with characters whose wisdom was 2 or 3 points higher.

Below 17 wisdom, mana gain seems to be quite consistent between similar classes implying that there is a "floor" to how wisdom effects mana gain, much like the fact that all characters with under 12 endurance have the same hit point gain. If my conclusion is correct that mana gain is the same for 20 and 21 wisdom, it is possible that the way wisdom controls Animorph gives us insight into wisdom effecting mana gain. Druids with less than 17 wisdom all get the same amount of bonus to strength, agility, and armor when casting Animorph, and Druids with 20 and 21 wisdom recieve the same bonus. Those rules seem to hold true with the data collected for mana gain.

My overall conclusion is that first and foremost, mana gain is based on class. Wisdom does effect mana, but the amount that you get with each level varies so greatly that there is little difference in being off by one or even two points, and most likely no difference between 20 and 21 wisdom, or anything below 17.

I've complied the data into an Excel worksheet. You can download that here. I was going to put it all into html but I figured I've spent enough of my morning at work on this that I should probably do something they pay me for now :p

~Shanti, October 2003