This is the problem, succinctly described.
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The thing is, the heavy mana spenders are balanced around their mana cost, if they would make mana way more convenient they would either have to nerf them or give them a cooldown.
Even now it is quite borderline how you can “spam” some high damage mana spenders (ele nove for example). We don’t need more of that.
P.S: please fix stunlock, there should be no way that you can perma cc a boss
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I agree, but one of the balances working against the big mana spenders is that you then need another skill to either get your mana back, or you need an alternate attack. At that point, why not just use the alternate attack as your main skill and then use your mana for support stuff, which is what I usually do. If I do have a big mana spender “attack”, I will try to spec it in a way that is defensive or supportive like CC.
That feeds directly into what you are talking about with Earthquake stunlock. People spec that big mana spender in a defensive supportive way, and then it gets abused by a cooldown work around.
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I understand and agree with the design philosophy of wanting mana to be an important resource that can’t simply be brushed off with mana leech or mana potions.
The concept of “active” mana generation (as opposed to mp/s or leech) through skills is a great way of having the player utilize a larger variety of skills.
However as it is now, not enough skills can be used for this which makes it feel like a playstyle is being forced onto you. Take Sorcerer for example, 2 skill slots are basically locked by default, 1 for teleport and 1 for either Mana Strike of Focus. No amount of stacking mana regen is going to be enough for the vast majority of skill build options for a Sorcerer.
To combat this, there should be a larger variety of options as to how a build can generate mana.
- We need more skills with nodes which can be used as mana chargers.
- We need more passives which allow us to generate mana through other means than mp/s (like the mana gain on X skill use or mana gain on 0 cost skills).
- We need more affixes which impact mana generation/conservation (not less, like removing efficiency).
Mana generation shouldn’t come for free, of course something needs to be sacrificed if you want it to be a meaningful resource. ARPG’s are great because of the many choices one can make when designing builds, but each mastery has at best 1-2 options for mana generation, with a third option being “don’t use high cost skills”.
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Agreed that Sorcerer is already 40% decided for you when you pick that mastery not as much room for wiggle. Part of the problem, in my opinion, is the impact of the skills that use huge chunks of mana. Meteor feels great damage wise, but can be hard to aim and frustrating to use at times. When you miss due to rng placement or poor prediction your left with an empty mana bar and nothing to show for it.
A good example of an impactful skill is the barbarian war stomp in Diablo 3. It looked great, hit everything close to you with a long stun. The cooldown on it, kind of like mana, made you choose when to use the skill at the right time which added a bunch of player strategy and enjoyment. Would love to see more skills with that kind of feeling.
Edit: fixed some intoxicated typos
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I totally agree, but than the question is, if not the “free” skills/spells are doing way to much damage to be viable as solo skills/spells. Don’t get me wrong I use those also, but the question remains if the balance needs readjusting there.
But this thread is about the new patch and i have to say i really like that patch huge cudos to EHG and the comunity testers
They shouldn’t be free. Having a big mana cost on things like Meteor and Volcanic Orb to balance out their high damage is perfectly fine.
But there needs to be more choices for how you wish to overcome the cost so it doesn’t feel like the game is forcing you down a road with only two splitting paths, simply for wanting to use a specific skill.
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They were saying that the current free skill deal too much damage which makes the big mana spenders feel not worth it.
This could also be true as well the free spenders might just be too strong.
For some classes, (mage specifically) that is not entirely wrong.
Mana Strike for Spellblade can dish out ridiculous damage (especially if you pick the stacking spell damage node and focus on dmg through skill procs).
And for Sorcerer, you can simply channel Focus + Arcane Ascendance for huge lightning aoe damage and autocasts of Lightning Blast.
I think all classes/masteries need more skills that can generate mana, the tradeoff should be damage, but a skill that’s only there to generate mana can feel boring. So they should have more utility options, perhaps locked behind the “+mana -damage” (to put it crudely) node.
Let’s go. Big patch, seems promising
I have just got back into the game after a while of not playing. Everything is looking very promising! Thanks
This is I guess where I am as well. I absolutely don’t think spells should have no mana cost, I think there should be more not fewer options for overcoming mana costs. And I don’t think that nerfing the base no investment version helps that any. I certainly don’t care that one player found belt affixes boring and so were fine with requiring an affix to get to 1. And I absolutely don’t approve of removing mana efficiency affixes.
This patch puts people with 0 investment worse off, and people with the “wrong kind” of investment worse off, for no discernible benefit to build diversity. It’s not a good change.
It doesn’t reward you for investing, it punishes you for not investing. (no these are not 2 viewpoints of the same thing).
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Will it affect that many classes?
I don’t know, I have a lich, necromancer, sorcerer and shaman. Apart from the shaman the others don’t even use mana regen at all.
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Seiken Densetsu 
Acolyte can use health as a resource for a lot of things, which is more or less its main way of mana management.
Sorcerer definitely suffers from this, Focus increased your mana regeneration by 100%, that’s a 2mp/s nerf or 4 mp/s nerf if you pick the additional 100% node.
Shaman is probably the only one that in some way benefits from this, if you’re going for maelstorm/ice thorns which you want to keep spamming a lot and Shaman having to rely on mp/s to stack them outside of combat.
If you’re only looking at build diversity, sure, maybe this is true. But no investment should have downsides, you should have to make choices when gearing and speccing skills/passives. Plenty of people were already complaining that the choices you can make while gearing weren’t engaging enough. So when you look at it through that lens, then this is a positive change. Now you have to make more choices, and consider the mana cost of you abilities when you do so.
There are. They’ve added more nodes/passives that help with this, as well as increased the number of affixes you can theoretically get on gear to compensate. There’s also new base types.
And why doesn’t the Sorcerer benefit in the same way?
Because Sorcerer had no reason to stack mana regeneration because
- You can’t get enough to skip either Focus or Mana Strike and
- Either one of those provides sufficient regeneration on their own.
But now a Sorcerer which uses Focus either loses mp/s or has to get a mana regen affix to get back to pre-patch focus gain.
Pretty much no class besides Shaman is able to get sufficient mana with mana regeneration, but have to instead rely on specific passives, skills or skill nodes.
This change to mana regen doesn’t address this. Most builds would still need to stack an absurd amount of mana regen gear in order to be able to skip their other ways of generating mana. In 99% of cases this would result in a worse build.
And that’s very bad.
Yes, adding a mana regen affix on my belt feels very engaging.
No there are objectively less choices since they even removed mana cost efficiency. The lack of choices was an issue to begin with.
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Off the top of my head, it will affect all my rogue builds, 2 of my paladin builds, 2 of my void knight builds, 1-2 of my necro builds, and I think one of my shaman builds.
Basically anyone who made their build work with the base regen is worse off, anyone who invested in mana efficiency affix instead of regen, is worse off. (efficiency is a superior mechanic anyways Reducing cost > recovering cost)
Incorrect, No investment should be the baseline. You’re not specialized in this area, you’re average and acceptable. It shouldn’t feel bad to not invest in things, it should feel ok, not great, just ok. It objectively is worse today than it was yesterday.
Light/moderate/heavy investment into any mechanic should reward the player with increasingly more specialization in this area to a point and then offer diminishing returns.
For example Mana regeneration. I can invest in passive regen, active regen, I can invest in abilities which efficiently convert large amounts of mana to larger amounts of damage, I can invest in abilities which use mana as a defensive layer as an extra HP pool, or mana cost as a way to scale dmg in addition to other ways. Those are all systems which could reward additional investments into mana and most of them are in the game AFAIK, which is great! However, lowering the base effectiveness of no investment is objectively a punishment for not investing instead of a reward for investing.
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