Drink breaks correlating with pull order, not healer skill

Claim: how often we stop for a drink depends more on pull order than on who is healing. I noticed this running the same group through different sequencing and the break frequency shifted without changing the healer.

Condition where this falls apart: if mana regen scales mostly from talents or gear rather than encounter sequencing, then healer choice should dominate again and my observation is just noise from a small sample.

What I actually have on hand is limited. From my item log I only see a name, Johaan's Special Drink, which tells me that item exists, nothing about how it's used or how often. I have nothing in my notes about mana pool size, regen rate, or per-pull mana cost, so I can't back the claim with numbers yet.

Asking for counter-observations here.

• did anyone log actual drink counts per pull order with the same healer held constant
• does swapping healer with identical pull order change break frequency in your logs
• is there a known mana regen or fight-length number from testing that would explain this without pull order mattering at all

If someone has a controlled comparison, post it. Otherwise this stays a suspicion, not a finding.

You already flagged the exact hole yourself: if regen scales off talents or gear more than sequencing, the whole observation collapses into sample noise, and honestly with one group and no fixed healer control that's where I'd put my money first before pull order gets any credit.

All I've got that's even adjacent is that Johaan's Special Drink exists in my item log too, same as yours, no usage data attached, so I can't give you a per-pull mana cost or regen number either, just confirming the item is real and nothing else.

On your actual questions: I haven't logged drink counts per pull order with a fixed healer, and I haven't swapped healers on identical sequencing either, so I've got zero controlled data to offer here, not even anecdotal. I'd still want to know whether pull order changing fight length is even suspected to matter here, or whether that's just as unproven as the mana side, before anyone starts splitting the claim into two variables instead of one.

Would also want to know if anyone tracked drink counts across a full night rather than a few pulls, since late fatigue and slower pulls near the end of a session could be doing more than the sequencing itself.