tl;dr Pets will burn through mana, so work on their Mana Regen. If you want to save training points and money, invest in 110 Meditation/110 Focus, 5 MR, and at least INT of 370+, that will get you 6-7 ticks. The max I found was 8-9.
Well, Mana Regen is really only an issue on a very long fight or during drawn-out fights over multiple mobs (Champ spawns for instance.)
I took my Fire Steed out this morning and have been playing it today, went the Mysticism 120 route, and with just average stats, I'm punching 7 mana per tick. I reasonably see that on most of my pets that I create, 7 being the norm, so I was curious and went to see how Mana Regeneration works for pets.
It's a bit confusing to start out with.
The calculators available do not allow you to go over 168INT.
So, I had to do it all by hand according to:
Mana regen formula?
Once I used the math, I found I was getting like 7.11 mana per second with my stats.
Ok, that's cool, that's what I have eyeballed when spamming Animal Lore.
But then I ran totals, because I wanted to see what the max Pet Regen would be if all posssible stats were at max.
Here's my math:
1> .02
2>0.6
3A>MB2.965 (826INT Bless+TastyTreat:13+5=18%)
3B>2.965*1.1=3.2615
3C>Pets Actively Med: 3.2615*2 = 6.523TMB
4A>BIB= 1
4B>3
4C>5.5
4D>1.45
5>Total=0.2+0.6+1.45+6.523=8.773
So, it looks like pets can do 8.773 mana per tick. When I eyeball my mana regen on my pets, sometimes it staggers like 6, then 7, then 7 then 6. So, I'm assuming the ticks would look like this:
8, 17, 26, 35, 43, 52, 61...
That looks like: 8, 9, 9, 9, 8, 9, 9... which is really cool.
If other Vets are more familiar with the max range of Pet Mana Regen please inform me, because I'm making some assumptions from what I have experienced.
So in conclusion, if you are concerned about mana, even if you spend well over 50million on two 120 Focus/Med scrolls, and max out your MR to 30, at most you're going to get 8-9 ticks on MR. I am able to punch out 7/tick from 110F/110M 5MR 757INT on this Fire Steed, atm. This saves me on some of the costly points needed to upgrade MR to max 30. I'm fine with 7/tick. If I have a pet with extra space, I'll max it out though.
Your pet is still going to run out of mana no matter what you do over a period of time in longer fights. So, if you're soley worried about mana, getting rid of certain skills would probably help stifle you a bit. But from experience, at the moment, Armor Ignore is your pet's bread and butter skill, (as evidenced here:
AI vs Non AI on a Cu vs Balrons, possibly other posts) so in order to be relevant, you would need to at least have this skill at most. Otherwise, your deeps are going to hurt.
:-] GL
(*Btw, Mytsicism is wicked awesome. I haven't played with that magic school since my return and the AoE is pretty lovely. Probably doesn't trigger as often as my Hiryu with Bushido/Whirlwind, but still, super fun.)