I disagree that Focus and Vengeance type mana regen should be removed. If anything, the other classes should have their free mana gain abilities buffed. (not mana strike, that skill is boss.)
I agree, mostly, about the mana regen. It DOES need to be tied to your max mana, maybe at 2%, 4% seems a bit high to me. I also think life should be the same. It should have regen based on max pool.
I think there is a disconnect with the devs vision that high cost abilities should do great damage and not be able to be spammed. The cost is quite high on some of them, but the damage just isn’t as good as a lot of the free or low cost skills. If they buff mana regen like the OP suggested, I would suggest increasing the cost of skills further and buffing very much the damage of high cost skills to bring them more in line with damage/mana of lower cost skills.
I find Mana sustain is overall on a good place like it is for now.
Sure, you have to find and build around the right Combination of Items, Affixes, Skillpoints and such, but it’s fine.
You should think about EHG’s creativity and therefore much more future unique items good for better mana-management.
On this game state we can see some redundant capabilities like “Exsanguinous”, (“Shroud of Obscurity”) and “Last Steps of the Living” for the same feature. You can do with 1 of them, or with 1 of each to basicaly do the same thing, and it works.
I think we will see so many fun and strong-feeling mechanics on the future of Last Epoch, everybody will play any skill(combination) on a halfways competitive way.
And if i think about all the upcoming bonus like (more?) blessings, the announced legendarys and… i don’t know… maybe any kind of a “sockel-system” and so on, i really think it’s potential of being playable without to many mana issues is given.
Yes, we have some free skills for mana sustain and some skills that are used to be mana spender on most other games, that was and is EHG’s intention, right?
-> Good Job, that’s fine!
No, I meant FUNCTIONAL, high cost builds easily cost 50-100 mana per second(or in some cases as high as 150), having 30-50 will not suddenly make it spammable.
Keep in mind that even with the insane regen that is Focus, high cost mage builds(such as shatter strike) STILL feel annoying to play, with a 3 second regen via focus for just 1 second of use. Now take that frustration and multiply it 5 times over for any class that cannot regen mana quickly.
Rip blood mana node is 6 per cast at max, which is around 18 on a transplant, while this is relatively high compared to passive mana regen, it is not enough to afford anything that has a high mana cost.
Primalist can reach 20 per hit from tempest strike, but it has the issue of the 5% chance of failure as you need to go through a node that it has negative synergy with(as the mana is only if something doesn’t trigger, but requires a node that gives that thing a chance to trigger, the mana node should actually be placed elsewhere in the tree). This is actually decent, but the issue of unreliability holds it back.
What’s your view of the difference between having a 4-8s cooldown on a skill compared to having mana costs such that it requires 4-8s of regen to be able to use it again? Are cooldown skills “not functional”?
First I am happy with the fact that a lot think that the mana management in this game is good and diffrent fromiother game.
Ok this thread is here to make it even better, but it seems that quite some post vary from this starting assesment and want to be able to spam big ability.
I feel mana magement is really good as it. I am for allowing better mana regen at cost of affix.
But I don’t really fells the need for it…
I dont have any problem with mana, with any of my builds.
My sentinel forge strike use it 3 times then he is oom, but can do rive (without any mana regen) and then for the next group of monster he is full mana.
So mana regen is already high.
I have a lot of char like this where I use all my mana at the begining of the fight then for the next I am full or near enough to fight well.
I have other build where I use mid mana eater and so the regen is enought too, without oom.
I never get your problem. I feel that the fact to cannot spam high mana ability is a real good idea and it is really well done.
It really help the build variety and fun.
Ok perhaps my builds are not the most performant, but they are fun Don’t forget that.
To want to spam the most damaging ability is natural and more efficient, but don’t make any managment and make less fun.
Here we are offered with various way:
make spender and “maker” (don’t get the right term): I don(t really like, but it’s a style
make big move and no mana moves and manage when use the big (I really like)
make spam medium ability with all the build to bost it
…
Variety is here because of this mama management, don’t kill it
There are some (sub)classes that don’t have a good source of mana regeneration. The high mana regen on your Sentinel is a good example because this mechanic was just added recently. Before this the Sentinel only had volatile reversal as a mana regen source.
On a shatter strike Spellblade it feels very clunky to use focus every few seconds when oom. The Spellblade currently lacks a bit of defensive mechanics as a squishy melee class. Having a channelled ability to gain mana back leaves him very vulnerable.
Also you have to consider that high mana pool doesn’t come from nothing. To get a high mana pool to “spam” your high cost abilities comes with a tradeoff for other stats.
Increasing max mana doesn’t have a rewarding benefit currently. That could be changed with this suggestion.
Maybe off topic, but the spellblade can use Mana Strike to refund mana (and gain Ward), and it goes pretty fast. Add in that the Spellblade can stack “damage taken to mana before life” type things, and that makes the Spellblade quite tanky.
The only “benefit” of increasing mana pool currently are the idols that gain more increased damage if you reach 200 or 300 max mana. Not great.
It does, it means you can go for longer before going OOM, just like having high life (& protections) means you can go for longer before dieing). I’m not saying I disagree with whoever it was that said that having lots of mana just means you can go for longer before you get back to the annoying cycle of using your skills then using a filler/generator. But having high mana does have a benefit.
Only when they are being used entirely for burst damage. If you have to wait that long to kill an enemy you will just die.
This does not include summons or continuous AOEs(they kill WHILE you wait for cooldowns), or utility moves(they are not there to kill enemies quick) it is just burst damage that suffers from this - unluckily a lot of the high mana cost skills are burst damage.
That’s only partially true. If you have 100 Mana and a skill that costs 60, you can cast it twice. If you have 110 mana, you can cast it twice.
You need at least a certain amount of additional mana before it really works out to grand an additional cast. And on top of it, to have that additional cast you need to reg longer to get full again. So you don’t have any dps increase in the long run. Just a better burst at the cost of a longer preperation. That’s not a valuable tradeoff for investing into mana imho.
To make this mechanic save your life you need to keep your mana. Oom = no benefit.
Mana Strike is a cool skill that works very well when build around it. But as it scales with spelldamage and your Spellblade mainly revolves around melee damage, there are near to no synergies with a “real” spellblade.
Add a node that converts focus from a channeling skill into a buff, that applies on your character for x seconds on use and let’s you still move but halves effectiveness of the mana reg. The buff expires after its duration or if you use another skill while active.
This would make focus more viable for fast agile builds that rely on movement very much.
Unless I’ve missed something, Mana Strike has the melee tag & the only nodes that relate to spells are Rune Sap (global spell damage per enemies hit), Mana Storm (casts a Lightning spell) & Spark Charges (also casts a lightning spell), it also has 2 nodes that buff your attack speed (Swift Sap & Explosive Flurry, though for the latter you need to take Mana Storm which will reduce the net mana you get). I don’t think that’s too unreasonable for a base class that has both spell & melee masteries, I also really wouldn’t call it a skill that scales with spell damage.
Apart from being able to run around, I really don’t think that would be particularly useful.
And as a worthy opponent you may leave the field with your weapons…
Getting back to your suggestion of a new node for Focus. Would it be bad if it could be cast as a buff for X seconds with half the benefit (as you suggested) but allowing you to use skills while it’s up? Maybe give it a cooldown as well so you’re not always at 2-3 times the normal regen?
A very detailed system! I do like the idea of mana regen being based on maximum mana, I feel health regen should work this way as well and I also believe your maximum mana should increase per level and you should get more mana per point of int and more health per point of vitality. That’s all I have to add here. Good work!
Good post, but I see an issue with mana regen being linked to mana increase because of the way mana works in the game (being able to cast a 30 mana spell with only 10 mana). You only need 1 mana to cast a spell no matter the cost and that’s why (I believe) mana and mana regen are seperate because else it would be too powerful.
If I have an Erasing Strike/Meteor/Glacier build right now I have to choose between more initial casts (mana) or being able to cast faster after the burst(regen). If mana and mana regen are tied together this becomes (possibly) the best stat to stack and it’ll be really hard to balance non-high mana builds to be competitive without nerfing those builds or changes.
I’ll take my VK as an example. He’s 74 and uses Erasing Strike to damage stuff, using Lunge for a crit buff. Erasing Strike costs 56 mana and he has a manapool of 127 and a regen of 10/s. With your proposed system (10 + [.04 x 127]) x 1.8) we come at 27/s regen.
We’re going to use Rive when we’re out of mana, giving 4 mana with it’s first two strikes and 16 with it’s last. Fortunately for this example my attack rate hovers at about 1/s.
Lets assume that I strike whenever I have mana.
So right now we can do 3 Erasing Strikes (40k avg damage) to end up with -41mana. I can do another strike from 1 mana, so I do one full Rive (10k avg damage) to get to that treshhold. On average Every 3 seconds I have enough mana to strike. Calculating that Rive does 10k and ES 40k DPS, roughly 1260k damage over a minute.
With your system:
3 Strikes at -41 mana we can ES far more often resulting in 1500k damage per minute.
Now if we gain 50 mana in the current system, only our initial burst DPS increases. Our damage goes up 3% (1300k/m). This will show in our clearspeed) but boss-dps it’ll be far less noticeable.
In the proposed system, if we gain 50 mana our regen becomes 30/s and our damage goes to 1760k/m, that’s a 17% increase. Now considering the original manapool is 127 we can assume that getting 50 mana is a hefty investment. But not all classes I feel are designed to use mana the same way. Maybe I’m missing something here (it’s 5am writing this lol) but I fear that it woudl result in highburst skills becoming the meta.
1760k damage per minute isn’t that high, it is only 29k per second, keep in mind deaths oath is able to hit those numbers on every single hit and aura of decay utterly eclipses it.
Keep in mind that even if bursty builds ended up at twice the dps as builds that can constantly attack, they still would not be the only meta pick because you actually need to wait a little bit, and waiting even a second to clear a pack means you are clearing slower than the very top clearing builds(like the aforementioned aura of decay).
Don’t forget that.
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