So because of the discussion from the mana regeneration thread and not wanting to de-rail it I thought about starting anotehr thread that is closely tied to it, but has it’s own topic.
Here is the thread and post as a starting ground
@SigmaQ I certainly wouldn’t mind a cooldown-based branch within meteor.
But having a cooldown or mana cost is really not that different.
The gearing is slightly different, but the “playstyle” really is not that different.
Now to give a more detailed statement regarding the original topic from myself:
I prefer mana-gated skills in LE, because I think many classes have really cool and creative ways to regenerate mana already and I think this will certainly improve even more in the future.
Mana-gating leads to way higher ceiling, investment possiblity and more diverse builds, than cooldown-gated skills.
Cool-down is very tricky to balance, especially once you include several sources of cooldown speed recovery, which EHG is very sparing with, which is good.
I can totally see why some skills ,especailly crowd control and defensive/utility skills like Black Hole or Decoy have cooldowns instead of high mana cost. But for offfensive skills I definitely prefer mana cost.
I think it is different though. When meteor shower costed 200 mana+ to use, we will need to use some sort of mana gain skill after using meteor like focus or mana strike. It shoehorned you into a build with downtime which I dont enjoy. Personally, I dislike having to stand still with focus and mana strike is lightning based. Also not a fan of their animation. I prefer flashy skill and meteor shower is one of the flashiest one.
If gated by cooldown. We can save meteor for high hp enemy like profane flesh and in the midst of the cooldown, another medium mana cost skill like static orb or volcanic orb can be used.
Yes, balancing with cd can be an issue. Doesn’t mean that there is no creative way though. Like giving debuff on use or giving -X% to fire damage while meteor is on cd. Or just reduce the meteor damage itself.
So, in a way, I prefer a playstyle that gives consistent damage output with flashy animation and having meteor on cd would be preferrable to me.
EDIT: for example, I actually like lethal mirage a lot as a cd skill, but a melee bladedancer has a very limited aoe option when I am building bleed so I canned that build.
I agree with SigmaQ’s idea that waiting a little constantly is more fun than waiting a lot less often. However Last Epoch doesn’t have many options to reduce cooldown and in it’s current state the game doesn’t scale well on cooldown skills.
This isn’t very important to me though. Each build has a play style that you have to discover, so I’ll be fine with playing heavy skills that are either mana gated or CD gated.
I am not sure what you consider “consistent”, but if we are talking anything above 5-6seconds cooldown, I would consider that “playstyle” rather bursty than consitent.
With high mana cost skills, you can try to invest enough into mana regen/mana regain to consistently use the high mana cost skill, probably more “cinsitent” than any cooldown skill could achieve.
Hmm, I agree to that too. I was thinking of the cooldown on Shift for example. 3 seconds or so.
Currently in my opinion Last Epoch has a good balance in mana usage. Given enough effort, you can make it so you can cast heavy mana skills very often. If skills would suddenly receive long cooldowns, a lot of rebalancing and many more CD reduction options would be required.
During leveling I typically don’t have enough mana to sustain the skills I wield and I regularly found myself running around the boss waiting for my below zero mana to replenish. It is very tempting to throw everything you have at the boss immediately, so I was thinking in that particular case a short cooldown would give you more to do the entire fight. However after thinking it through a bit more, this short cooldown is probably very similar to waiting for the mana to replenish.
I am not entirely against cooldowns, they have their palce and they can work.
But yeah there is really not that much different between cooldown and mana in a lot of cases.
With mana you can control your bursts more, especially if you need/want them in a specific situations, but then you will run into a situations where you probably are out of ressources for an extended period of time, but that is self afflicted.
Another BIG Point, especially for super high mana cost skills in Last Epoch, that makes mana-cost based playstyle waaaaaaaaaaaaaay mroe smooth, than any other game, is the ability to go into negative mana.
This leads to skills that cost mroe than twice your maximum mana, to be able to be used twice in a row.
Gather mobs ->meteor shower-> mana strike → metoor shower is low damage to huge damage to low damage. Damage output is spiky in short term
Static orb → Static orb → Meteor → static orb and so on. Consistent good damage and occasional burst.
In the first build, I am relying on meteor to clear anything in the map and mana strike in between to recoup mana.
In the second build, I am using static orb to kill pesky mobs and only meteor shower on valuable targets or dangerous situation (ie situational). This is not possible atm with meteor shower.
I think both are quite a different playstyles and to prefer one over the other is quite normal.
This whole thread is strange, in quite a few other threads they always refer to EHG’s design philosophy and the like, and here in contrast they try a more dogmatic stance/split (either<->or).
“Mana Regeneration should be a thing” I still find good.
Some abilities would be already borderline strong without cooldown. Add mana-leech to that and you have D3/PoE. Ugh.
I think both mana-gating and CD-gating have a place. Huge mana cost skills that do absurd damage should probably not be overly restricted by cooldowns. I feel that cooldowns should be used more for tactical skills. Things like teleport/lunge are best as low cost, moderate cooldown skills. Similar would be skills that make you invulnerable for a moment, with high cooldown.
The fact that there is no mana potions or mana leech makes it easier to have huge damage very high mana cost skills be balanced. Go to boss, unload your 6 uber meteors, then find a way to get the mana back or switch to a finisher skill.
I think often times, design philosophy may be put on the back burner in the grind to find a way to balance a skill. I think it should be the other way around. Find a way to balance the skill within the given constraints of the design philosophy.
I do think there’s a significant difference between CD and high mana gating, but I think the difference swings in favor of high mana gating when it comes to build flexibility. A CD enforces a very particular playstyle, i.e. “You will use this no more than every X seconds”. Apart from CDR, there is now way to overcome this restriction. But with mana, the player can choose to get a high mana pool and spam the skill several times, creating an even larger burst at the expense of longer downtime. They can also choose to be more conservative with their use and effectively replicate what the skill would be like with a cooldown, or even use it situationally, with more bursty play during certain situations and more conservative during others.
I think CDs on skills do have a place in the game, since it opens up certain design choices that might not work or be too OP without one. But overall if there isn’t a specific design reason to have a cooldown, I would rather at least have the option of a no CD high mana gate so I can keep that flexibility.
Rogue Hail of arrows builds for example, you can get a high cost hail of arrows with tons of bonus damage, and use a generator to keep mana topped up. or multistrike into forgestrike, multi is the gap filler and restores resources and you drop the hammer on CD or with mana gating.
Meteor is the prime example where it feels bad mostly because mages restrictions in how they recover mana are boring as hell. Focus feels good when you only need to get the burst to top up mana, when working with like a 150~ pool it feels fine. if im casting a 200 mana meteor storm focus is gonna need to be used for long periods of time to replenish 200 mana.
So meteor feels like a case where the tools on hand are not enough for the desired playstyle. Where as for forge guard/rogue they are.
I think mage just needs better mana management tools for really fat mana builds, Sorcs entire gimmick is getting more damage by spending mana, the meatier the spell the better the damage it does. So why does he not have increased ability to recover his large pool?
I dont really mind either. But EHG needs to make skill rotation more fun/interesting to do if the intent is to gate powerful skills. Currently many of the builds I enjoy uses a primary attack skill (not saying I only enjoy such builds, just that it is what it currently is), and mana/cooldown just feels like an annoyance to deal with as in POE.
This question is irrelevant because its still gatekept by EHGs development
Meaning I cannot have 85% cooldown reduction like in D3
and I cannot have infinite mana from leech/regen like PoE.
I know the respones already to the above quotes about how you didnt have to invest into it, and every piece didnt need Cooldown reduction to hit 85%… or how did you didnt need a lot of regen/leech to make yourself have ‘infinite mana’
So we get the worst of both worlds, Meaning as usual in this games almost 3 year development cycle - free/low cost skills are the optimal way to play.
I strongly prefer mana-gated.
A cooldown-gated system leads to situations when you have a powerful skill and run around in all directions, waiting for it to be available. Then it’s burst-time, you use your skill and erase four whole screens. Then cooldown again, and back to running all around, dodging the few remaining monsters. I don’t like this system.
I like low and reasonable cooldowns, like the one Void Cleave has, for example. Or the one for Forge Strike. You can’t spam the ability, but your can use it more than twice per echo.
This is really interesting to me, because I think Mage has some of the coolest and more creative ways of regenerating mana, together with Rogue.
On this point however I agree.
I think Sorcerer in particular could use some ways of regenerating %max mana in some capacity.
Big Mana pool sorcerer does not feel that different, because the amou t of mana you can recover and sustain does not change if you have 200 or 600 mana.
Yes, if higher mana pools meant higher mana regeneration, the mana shield (Damage to Mana before Health) would also be more usable.
→ In short battles the mana shield is good, in longer battles nobody uses the “400+ mana meteor bonus” on the side.
[At least my wizard - although he had over 35 mana regeneration - couldn’t do that on Arena. Maybe with some other skill combinations.]
Not entirely sure that you can have a preference here…
I think that each situation suits a different choice…
For example - for me:
a movement skill lends itself to a cooldown-gate… reduced by taking cooldown reduction but with limited effectiveness because it could potentially be game breaking - teleporting without stopping, lunging from the start of a map to the end in a minute…
an offensive skill lends itself to mana regen… you built up mana either passively (regen) or actively (mana earner) to use a high damage skill… controlled by regen limits/earner limits and skill costs , to prevent someone just nuking their way through a map.
a defensive skill / buff lends itself to a combination of the two… i.e. it may be OP if a stacking buff could be easily maxed out by recasting if you had the mana… a cooldown could prevent this… personally I believe defensive skills would be better either rather than both but this could be tricky.
And then obviously… how the particular class is intended/designed to be played impacts on the question as well… A fast paced rogue might not get such a long coodown on Shift… vs a tanky Sentinel Lunging (even the word sounds slower) from mob to mob…
Mana gated. You can work with this but Cooldowns are mostly longer then the time you need to regain mana for a skill.
Imagine beeing able to shapeshift without 20 sec CD between the shifts and be able to make use of the “after transformation” nodes. Even if a shift takes 100 mana you can work with it by increasig your mana pool. Reducing a 20 sec CD to 6 seconds…lol?
I don’t want to be “forced” to play with 4 skills on a high CD and spam a 0 sec cd skill meanwhile.
