I get that resource spending is a big part of the game. But even for classes that rely on big mana pools there are practically no options for itemization. Mana regeneration is a flat value and all increases for it scale of that flat value.
Investing into flat mana just gives you a bigger buffer and you are still gated behind your measly regeneration. I feel like making mana regen a function is your max mana is more fair.
What do you think?
Baseline I am not a fan.
For the Sorcerer Mastery I think itās a cool mechanic that could make it into the upper half of the passive tree, to be sorcerer exclusive.
I could also see some uniques getting it, to enable cool playstyles for other classes that have some niche mana stacking (like Paladin with Judgment/Devotion) or VK with Erasing Strike/Time Loop
To be honest, I feel mana management is far easier than it was before.
With the dedicated rings or the regen suffixes, mana is in a good spot.
Having more regen would give more power and maybe would necesitate to rebalance some elements. I may be wrong, but for me mana regen is good as is.
I think that the design goals of mana management in this game compared to other, similar games can be a bit of a shock.
All other ARPGs Iāve played, resource management always felt like something that is generally annoying to deal with until you progress far enough to make it irrelevant. Thereās not a whole lot of depth to it - itās a limitation and then suddenly itās not. EHG seems to want to avoid mana management just being a āI got X stat/passive/item and now I can spam this one ability the whole gameā checkbox. They seem to have hit that mark in some places but not in others.
Overall I think it is probably healthy for the game to have limited passive mana recovery options and have the intended focus be on having to actively manage it by using other abilities.
Thats also true for many if the skills in LE. The current balance of mana regen allows you to form builds that can sustain medium mana hungry skills. Like playing Multishot or Detonating Arrow. When you start, the skills eat your mana. Later you have enough sustain to spam them.
Some skills are not meant to be spammed. They are big fat nukes. Sometimes these skills are balanced by cooldown or alternatively by mana. The result is the same. Just the mind gets tricked here.
If skill A is on cooldown you are fine with it. You get a feeling for the length and take it for what it is. Being oom after 2 casts of whatever does the same. It kicks the skill from further use. Just it feels worse becaus you always think ābut if I had more manaā¦!!ā. In top the mana loss by using a big nuke can also lock you out from other skills that cost mana if you get below 0. This feels a bit unfair.
When Iām not totally mistaken I think I remember that EHG wants to go more the route with cd rather than mana cost for balancing skills.
I think mana regen is fine atm. But I do wish EHG take a second look at skills that takes a humongous amount of mana to use such as meteor, thorn totem etc. Their damage potential vs the more spammable skills are just not comparable if we include the downtime. Not to mention they are worse for area clearing.
EHG preffered to get skills balanced by mana cost.
The last patch was a big exception, since it added a lot of medium cooldowns to many of the Sentinel Ability.
I am not sure if this is what we will see in the future, but generally we still have more skills that are heavily gated by mana cost, instead of mana cost.
The biggest contender here is definitely mage, he has by far the most skills that have high mana cost and offensively he only has one skill that is gated by cooldown (black hole), which also offers a lot of utiltiy, defense and crowd control.
All other offensive skils have either no cooldown or maximum of 3-4 seconds
Acolyte has also basically no cooldowns (excluding minions and transform) and only relies on mana and health sustain
Primalist only has transforms and fury leap as medium to big cooldowns.
Rogue only has decoy,smoke bomb and lethal mirage as bigger cooldowns.
Setninle definitely received a lot of cooldowns with the recent patch, but still runs with mana sustain on the majority of other skills.
Obviously a lot of skills can change from no cooldown to cooldown or vise versa within the skill spec tree, but over all LE is still more mana gated, than cooldown gated.
And the majority of skills that do have a medium or longer cooldown are defensive/utility/crowdcontrol
Meteor is insanely good for both single target and area.
If you build around it properly, you can use it as main spender ability without the need of a secondary offensive skill.
Meteor is probably one of the best balanced skill in the game right now IMO.
Also thorn totem is very much sustainable, but you will probably play other damage skills on top fo thorn totem, not because of the mana, but because primalist just can put to many otehr things on top of the thorn totem for sustained damage.
For the rightmost meteor tree, I can see it work with another mana gain skill and the meteor mana recovery node. It can work but thing is it is clunky compared to other build. I would prefer it to be blackhole-like and cd-limited even if damage is lower so that while it is on cd, I can use other skills like volcanic orb.
Thorn totem on ring config cost hundreds of mana (a lot for primalist) and the damage is comparably pitiful so I am not sure what is the point of that node (other than limiting it to be procced by tempest strike). I have only been using that node just because there is no other better options for trap-style build.
Yes obviously you need to invest into it, to make it sustainable, itās not ājust sustainableā without any effort. thatās the whole point of the discussion here.
Mage has sone of the coolest and most creative ways to refill mana. There are plenty of ways to refill mana.
Just because Meteor has no cooldown, doesnāt mean you need to use it all the time.
Thatās what @XLVI_carpo tried to explain earlier.
There is some skill involved into using meteor not too often, but also not to less.
If you spec meteor right itās way more potent than black hole, because you can invest a lot into it.
Cooldown skills donāt have a high ceiling and investment possible.
I prefer mana cost, that you can invest into, comapred to cooldowns in LE.
(Contary to Marvel Heroes, which is my favorite aRPG of all tiem, which used cooldowns A LOT, but that gameās balance was way different anyway, so not comapreable)
I donāt want to derail this thread into a meteor discussion. So, I just want to summarize that I agree with you, @heavy that meteor is a viable skill given investment and there are builds centred around it. However, for a specialization skill unique to sorcerer, it is not a popular one compared to his other skills. And I think the buildās clunkiness with mana cost and mana gain is the cause.
Also, I am not advocating for a total change of the meteor tree. Just saying, It doesnāt hurt to have a small branch of meteor rain to be cd-limited akin to blackhole so that we have more playstyle.
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