Fair warning up front, I tend to be very verbose when it comes to discussing game design. This will probably be a long one. Also this isn’t some “please remove all mana costs from the game” type post. I do think the intention of EHG - having builds that use a lot of mana require investment and trade offs - to be a good one. This post is about how well it’s actually executed.
I also think this is important. I literally watched someone who was streaming the game quit after they couldn’t figure out how to solve the mana issues on their Marksman. Mana problems feel bad, and they will absolutely push players away if a solution isn’t apparent and available. Most players don’t want to play “run around waiting for my mana to regen so I can attack again” in this genre, they want to do the fun part where they’re actually killing monsters for loot. This also isn’t some tactical RPG where we’re spending minutes deciding when it’s the right time to spend our valuable mana resources - the game plays way too fast for that.
For as long as I’ve followed LE I’ve felt like their designs around mana were one of their larger blind spots. With the release of the Falconer and the Falcon Fists item I saw an opportunity to dig into it further, and thus began operation “Make Overexertion Work”. The goal, to test for myself if it could even work, and just how effective it would be. I think Cinder Strikes with Overexertion is the perfect test case for this, because the skill can be both a free skill and one that requires mana investment with very little change to how it functions.
To start I got a good pair of Falcon Fists and crafted multiple low level legendary items with T5-7 Mana regen. I supplemented this with mana from Dive Bomb, Falcon Strikes, Shift, and Stamina of the Rover. Short of a perfect Urzil’s Pride setup this was probably about the best mana support you could reasonably get on a rogue, with about 200% increased mana regen and additional bursts of mana from my skills.
The end result? It actually kind of worked. Mana sustain was generally enough to clear packs, and against bosses it would only need to take short breaks to recharge.
So case closed right? The build worked despite the huge mana cost, so high mana builds must be fine. Well… not quite.
The next thing I did was respec out of Overexertion to see how the build played without it, and immediately found it to be far stronger. To understand why, let’s breakdown just how much I needed to invest to make Overexertion work. Here I’m only counting things that were purely there to help with mana costs, so not counting skill points spent in something like Hunter’s Spoils (also gives health for sustain) or Rush of the Hunt (lowered CDR helped get more mana back but it is good enough to keep even after the respec). Basically just the things that I changed as soon as I removed the Overexertion node.
Cinder Strike - 6 skill points
Dive Bomb - 7 skill points
Passive Tree - 6 points
Gear - 4 high tier affixes (although I only actually swapped out 2)
In addition, I could now scale my damage with attack speed. Previously I had to focus my scaling elsewhere because attacking faster meant draining my mana faster, but without Overexertion that was no longer a problem. Also the build can now use Falcon Strikes aggressively because it no longer needs all its mana for its primary attack.
So even though I lose the bonus from Overexertion which I had basically tailored the whole build around, the ability to reinvest all the opportunity cost it took to support it far more than makes up for that loss. For both bosses and clearing large packs the build was noticeably more effective - in fact it wasn’t even particularly close.
My final analysis - building around mana just isn’t worth it in the game’s current state. The reason why is actually a combination of many factors.
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Mana costs don’t really scale. Many ARPGs increase the mana costs of their skills as they get stronger, but in LE the cost when you unlock it tends to be the same as the cost for a lv 100 character. Some skills do have the ability to add to the cost for a benefit, but these are rarely strong enough to become ‘must have’ options. This becomes important for the next point.
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Since mana costs don’t scale, they need to be balanced around the mana regen of an endgame character. Since all gear needs some sort of progression this means that early/mid game mana regen on gear is very weak. To support my build I needed 1 T5 and 3 T7 affixes! This functionally locks out builds until extreme end game unless they’re playing a secondary character that is able to cheat the system with legendary items.
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High mana builds lose one of the strongest scalers in the game - attack/cast/throw/bow speed. However, unlike cooldown and channeling abilities, they are not balanced around this restriction because it’s technically possible to spam them. This makes them much weaker in practice than they may appear on paper.
There’s a reason that flat mana cost reductions are so strong in LE. With the a couple of exceptions they don’t scale (and those are fairly effective even at low levels because they use hybrid stats so they can scale something without improving the mana portion at every level (this will be relevant later (foreshadowing is a literary device…))), so you generally don’t need end game stats to use the spell you unlocked at level 7. They also fully support cast speed scaling.
Now I’m not trying to say that it’s impossible to build around high mana skills in the game’s current state. As it stands I think the only good reason to build around a skill like that is if it has no other option, like a Harbinger of the Stars build which has no choice but to use Meteor. Basically it needs to be something that is actually strong enough to justify the large investment it takes to do anything with mana in this game. Fully investing in the Cthonic Aurora node on your Chaos Bolt character may sound like fun, but the huge amount of investment it will take to compensate for the increased cost will almost certainly not be worth it.
I do think the situation is fixable. Personally I’d introduce a new batch of hybrid affixes that provide significant mana regen in addition to some other stat, similar to the -Mana Cost + Spell Damage affix. The mana regen part would be relatively strong at T1, but would stay the same at all tiers. The second stat would start out very weak (possibly even negative), but would get stronger as you move from T1 to T7. This addresses the issue where you need scaling affixes but don’t have scaling mana costs, because the mana regen stat doesn’t change but there’s still a strong incentive to get higher tier versions of the affix.
The specifics don’t really matter, but I do think EHG would be well served to remove all these mana traps from their game. As it stands it’s just too easy for a player to run into a wall, and frequently that can lead to people walking away entirely. It’s cool to have things that are really hard to build around, but those should be reserved for unique items that players won’t see right away. When players are already facing challenges with a core mechanic of the game before they have been exposed to tools to deal with it they become very likely to quit, and that’s not good for anyone.