A light went on for me a few days ago as I was feverishly working on my current speed leveling run.  I always run a hunter for speed runs and I don’t take a single second longer than I absolutely have to for anything.  That means I’m not spending precious time at the ah looking for every teeny tiny gear upgrade, or anything else for that matter.

As a result, I can end up having mana issues.  I’m not able to spend the time to get all the exactly right gear and spec MM to make that sort of issue go away, since that would defeat the purpose of trying to break records anyway.  Think about it, if I can save just 5 minutes in every level it will take 5 hours and 45 minutes off the total time.  So spending even 10 minutes running to the nearest AH to get minor gear upgrades is completely out of the question.

But taking 10 seconds between every six to ten fights or so to mana back up is also a time killer.  But if you back off on your skill shots, you don’t mow them down as fast – you can see the dilemma.  Kill fast = more down time to drink.  Slow down a touch = slowing down (I hate that).  But I found a really nice little exploit for this issue.  It doesn’t work for more than 10 levels or so.  But at levels 51-60, when the quests all seem like gathering quests, a little speed boost to down-time is just the ticket.

So whilst I was speeding through Azeroth wondering how to better manage my mana drain, I had to go to Org to turn in a quest in the valley of honor.  And then it hit me: Alterac Manna Biscuits!  I logged out for a minute to check Wowhead for these little nuggets of goodness.  Here’s the tale of the tape:

See that?  4410 health AND 4410 mana on one food.  Well I didn’t waste another second, I logged back in, jumped into an AV and bought 10 stacks of these.  A little pricey, but well worth it.  At level 52 these things will fill up your mana bar in about 5-7 seconds, talk about speeding things up!

You’ll notice that you can’t use these until level 51, so it’s a bummer for you until then.  You can’t join AV before level 51 anyway, so you just have to wait until then.  These are available at Gruunda Wolfheart for horde in Frostwolf Village, and Gaelden Hammersmith in Dun Baldar for Alliance.

A little more research showed that there is not anything to compare to the Alterac Manna Biscuit (AMB’s) until well into outlands and level 60.  So for ten levels I’ve got the very best thing available to fill my mana bar – so fast, in fact, that I can just sit down to munch and send my pet to the next mob.  I can virtually fight non-stop all the way to Hellfire.

Now I was looking at this from the purely mana-regeneration perspective, since I normally don’t have a lot of health damage running on the hunter.  These things are a great boost to all the mana-using classes as we will see below.  But there are also big benefits to the warrior and rogue who have no other way to heal themselves after a tough fight than by using bandages or food if they are running solo.

As a matter of fact, you might think that the only class that might not get a big boost from these is the mage.  Mages get to conjure all their food and water for free, but until they get to train rank 7 of conjure food and water at level 60 (Rank 7 food from a drop tome as well), these things are much better than the rank 6 conjured items.  Past that, rank 6 of conjure food and water only regenerate 2148 health or mana, so AMB’s have twice the punch and give health and mana simultaneously!  So every single class wins with AV Manna Biscuits.

So as you slog through the 50’s on your next toon, be sure to hop an AV match and grab some of these, they will certainly do more than anything else out there to keep you on your feet – dominating!