What the title says. When a skill echoes, it usually feels pretty rewarding, but certain nodes such as Sacrifice and Resonating Cleave (I’ve likely missed a few) can have an inverse effect on that. It puts the player into a situation where they have deal with extra penalties that are completely out of their own control, and is compounded when relying on a skill like Volatile Reversal for sustain.
For example, when using Resonating Cleave, using Reversal immediately after using your mana on Void Cleave gives you a 10-40% chance for your otherwise refilled bar to be drained, which really doesn’t feel great and can mess with a rotation. On the other hand, you could wait the 0.5 seconds for the 10-40% chance that your skill does echo before using Reversal, which also doesn’t feel too great and adds arbitrary waiting to a rotation for something that may not actually happen.
Overall, this is just a thing that’s been bugging me while leveling a melee VK, but it does feel a bit like a bit of a lapse in design. It makes what’s meant to be a random beneficial proc feel like a random tax instead.
From memory, it’s because they take the specialised skill tree when they echo the skill so all nodes are applied including any “negative” nodes. Specifically for Sacrifice, if they didn’t apply that node you’d be missing out on ~250% more damage which would massively nerf an echo’d Smite.
They probably could change how certain nodes work vis-a-vis echoes (for example, Smite’s Descend node isn’t used if the skill isn’t directly cast, though I suspect if you take that node then it wouldn’t echo) but that would likely involve just disabling the “problematic” node in it’s entirety rather than disabling just the cost part.
I understand why they currently make use of the extra costs, I suppose it could be seen as an additional price to taking those specific nodes.
I very much agree that outright disabling such nodes for echoes would be a pretty big nerf, and would not be ideal. I think it’d honestly be preferable if they added a new behavior to those nodes, or the echoes themselves to ignore the additional resource costs from them when echoing, while keeping the other effects, assuming something like this is feasible. There are already quite a few other skills that come with modifiers specifically for when they’re echoed, and not many cases where this would need to be done.
I don’t understand why echos and item procs use player mana in the first place. I remember how excited I was when I got enough totems to cast malestorm every X seconds, reliably… until I didn’t have shit for mana anymore.
Yeah, but I don’t understand why they do, at all. Not that mana management is terrible in this game, but it can hurt before you begin getting more optimized gear.
I always assumed that the intent was to prevent players from being able to partially or totally bypass a skill’s mana cost - which is one of the ways they balance out skill power - by using procs.
Whether or not that should be a goal is a different discussion, but that’s what I believe the “why” is.
Oh, I’m sure that’s the “why” as well. But it doesn’t answer the underlying “why”…? Most proc effects require either : a) a fairly decent skill point investment, b) multiple items to achieve a reliable proc % or c) require a specific item/item(s). So they already limit the proc, to an extent. I guess I just find it odd that a character is further taxed for it with a mana cost.
Also, outside of lower than lvl 40-50ish character, I’ve never found proc effects to be limited by mana. If anything it just creates an uncontrollable inconvenience factor when trying to use other skills, like leap, shift, etc. Which is more frustrating, as a player, than power-constraining, from a balance pov. shruf
