Mana, Sorcerer, Focus - rebalancing suggestions/ideas

Feedback and Suggestions
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So I have been playing (and loving really) Last Epoch on and off for a decent while - probably right around the time it went Early Access on Steam. I also am fond of good old “Arm Chair Game Design.” I can’t claim any level of pedigree or professional experience, so obviously take anything I say with as much salt as you deem necessary.

I’ll start out by saying that prior to sitting down and writing things out I did do a bit of research looking at build planners on Last Epoch Tools and the like, to parse out some estimated metrics as a jumping off point for my ideas. I obviously have no back end data to work with and I’m fully aware that build guides are a slice of what is a huge pie of information… but hey. here we go. If you don’t like reading long posts… well. I’m sorry.

From my own experience, general forum creeping, reading developer blogs and listening to dev streams while doing laundry, one thing that seems to be needing some Focus (ha ha) is Sorcerer’s mana management and how it feels. Generally, Mana Regeneration is a ‘Feels Bad’ problem. From my own play experiences, it’s especially gross because Sorcerer feels very glass cannon as a concept, and once you are out of cannonballs you are in for a world of running for your life while your mana slowly trickles back, or risking being totally beaten to death while you channel focus. So below will be a few ideas I have and justifications for them.

  • Remove Preparation from the mage passive tree.
    • New Passive: Rapacity (5 points)
      • Every point of mana spent on a spell or skill increases its damage
        • Damage increase per mana per skill point: X%

While looking at builds I noticed that Preparation (along with arcane current and arcane flames) is not seeing a lot of usage. Thus it seems like the easiest candidate for removal and reworking. While the proposed replacement in isolation seems very sorcerer specific, its also general enough that spell blade and whatever Rune Master will be are able to see potential benefit.

  • Change Sorcerer base ability:
    • +50 Mana
    • Mana Regeneration rate increases dramatically for 3 seconds when you go into negative mana, increasing in potency for each point of negative mana gained

This change maintains the idea that Sorcerer is all about dumping Mana on big spells, allows increased mana costs to still be an element of gearing/skill builds because going deeper into the negative will actually get your mana back faster than dipping just a little lower or waiting for it to recover naturally from single digits. It still also means sorcerers will still have some down time on casting, just not nearly as much. Spell blade and whatever Rune Master may be can also conceivably benefit from the Preparation change.

  • Focus asjustments
    • Swap Focus and Static Orb’s positions in learning - Static Orb becomes the 20 point investment mage ability, Focus becomes the sorcerer 5 points.

I actually had a bit of a struggle on this. But of the builds I looked at, 40 sorcerer builds use Focus, while only 2 Spellblade builds do. Of all the swaps one could make instead of just outright revamping skills, this makes the most sense. Spell blade could presumably benefit from the orbiting tree in Static Orb, as well as the Static Armor node. Less benefit from ice barrage, black hole or ascendency. The general changes to sorcerer’s mana also make the Manacharged passive tree branches for static orb much more attractive.

  • Remove the passive tree lines of and branching from Energy Overflow.

Elemental Nova is going to do the waves of damage thing better. At a glance, multiplayer applications for these branches feel tepid. Also as far as I can tell, no one is using this. Correct me if I’m wrong.

  • Replace them with:
    • Energy Overflow > Preparation (5 points) (Yes i know we are reusing this name but stick with me.)
      • While focusing you gain a stack of preparation each second, which increases the mana cost and potency of your next spell cast by 5%
        • Maximum stacks: 1 per point
    • Unstable Energy > Greater Accumulation (5 points)
      • Each stack of preparation further increases the damage and mana cost of your next spell
        • Damage Increase: 1% per point per stack
        • Mana Increase: 2% per point per Stack
    • Unbound Thought > Unhindered Focus (1 point)
      • The Focus burst no longer grants mana but instead releases a shockwave which knocks back all nearby enemies by 3m.
    • Rapid Overflow > Binding Thought (3 points) (haha i’m cute)
      • The shockwave from Unhindered Focus stuns enemies
        • Stun duration: .75 seconds per point

The above changes give greater diversity to how Focus can be used without removing its current functionality. It also feeds further into the Sorcerer idea of “Big mana costs for big damage.” Further, it reduces the risk of getting 1-shot when you stop to gain mana which at least in my experience has been my entire problem with Focus as a whole. Numbers should definitely be tweaked by someone who does actual Math, and perhaps a greater point investment should be required.

Concluding thoughts, I feel like changes like or similar to these would go a long way for quality of life for sorcerer without dramatically impacting the play style. It also makes the “haha big button” abilities like Meteor and Volcanic Orb feel even more punchy. It opens up build ideas around what one could refer to as “reverse builder skills” where you use lesser skill costs to dump your mana as low as possible before dropping a meteor one someone’s head. In general I think it allows for a lot more creativity without a entirely rewriting the class or the functions of Mana as a base game mechanic.

A few potential problems I do foresee is nodes like the “Cycle of Fire” from meteor being less impactful, but I’ve already left an entire Essay here so… I’ll leave it at this for now. Thoughts and feed back of course is always wanted :smiley:

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Thanks for the feedback…

Mage skills/passives are getting pretty long in the tooth now and I expect that the devs are going to give them a once over - especially to bring them up to Rogue levels of integration/polish… There are without doubt skills in the Mage class that are barely used - and even for some there are entire branches in specific skills that have cobwebs and layers of dust… I expect that EHG is very keen to get multiplayer working so that they can finally have real data to see how skills are being used etc… obviously the build planners are just plans posted and not actually real player data…

Some of your suggestions seem interesting - in fact the whole preparation one reminds me of the Rogue Flow / Concentration ones…

Mana regeneration / Mana management has been a hot topic on the forum for as long as I can remember… and the key points have always boiled down to it being difficult but that if it wasnt then spell/mana heavy builds would be OP to the point of madness… in some scenarios even just 5 additional flat mana regen per second be so potent it would disrupt balance tremendously…

Honestly, I have no solution to this… I have been playing for so long that I have gotten used to this restriction (I say restriction, not limitation) and building around the mana management issue is something i equate to building around any other metric - like attack speed… Yes. it is hard to build around… and yes, it does mean that some builds need “regen” moments of no attacking and kiting around or taking a knee… but I honestly dont think its a problem and when you figure it out, it can be very rewarding… i think its just how LE works…

Could it be made easier… perhaps… your suggestion for mages to regen negative mana quicker seems like something that could be a nice differentiator for the mage class - it could mean an additional cast/nuke (due to LE allowing one extra cast on low partial mana) in a squence which may be a balance issue… but I dont think mage classes should get higher base mana - its so easy to get 300+ mana and all the benefits that brings that I dont think its neccessary… and having bigger pools of mana then impacts on balance again because it means longer times of DPS before regen is required…

Everything is so intertwined that I find the mana regen is never as easy as it seems.

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I kinda like that. I was going to suggest a node in Focus that gave you much higher regen if you had negative mana, then rememeberd that it already has that (Desperate Meditation, 1% increased regen per point of mana missing, so if you have 300 mana & are at -300 mana, that’s 600 missing = 600% increased regen).

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All issues with mana regen stem from the fact that it is a flat value that doesn’t increase with your mana pool going up.

600% increased mana regen if you are missing 600 mana sounds awesome, until you realize your base mana regen is 8 and 600% on top of that is 72. So if you are missing 600 mana you actually have to channel for 8 seconds. Standing in one place. With 0 defensive options.

Then you realize that Sentinel - the tank class - gets all its mana back with the press of a button. Instantly.

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While also being moved to the location that you were standing in 2-4 seconds ago potentially landing you in an unavoidable one shot.
Instantly.

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I’ll take that over standing still for 9 sec with 0 added damage protection any day, any night. Wait i lied. You can get 400 armor and 60 health regen :slight_smile:

Volatile Reversal meanwhile gives you move, cast, atk speed and between 30% and 70% more damage. Tough choice really.

Really the only major change they need to do is make regeneration dependent on the size of your total mana pool. This will fix many problems automatically.

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This was suggested in the older thread on mana management too… scaling regen based on mana pool is an ok concept for most non-mana focussed classes… my concern is that its really easy for mages (even void knights) to get a 500 - 600 mana pool - how would this realistically scale without breaking things? by breaking things, essentially allow mages to infinitely cast nuke level skills without any real concern for needing to stop to recover mana

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You are implying that using your skills is a bad thing. Something i inherently do not agree with. But in reality it’s a balancing act to get the damage/mana cost ratios right. But the alternative is much worse, as the extra mana only gives you burst damage.

If you don’t scale the regen with the full pool then the pool just gives you a fixed amount of “extra” casts before you run dry. If we take for example 40 mana as the ballpark of an expensive nuke skill and consider 2 characters - one with 200 mana pool and one with 600. Both have 100% increased mana regen, so 16/sec

One of them has 3 times the mana of the other so difference is x3 for burst damage. So if you can kill your target in the time needed to spend that mana great… But as the fight drags on the damage difference diminishes rapidly.

60 seconds into the fight one character has spent 1280 mana on his skill and the other 1680… to only 40%

Another 60 seconds into the fight and this drops even further… 2120 vs 2520… 18%

Now factor in that clear speed for monos and packs requires sustained mana, not burst. So your expanded mana pool only helps against bosses. But EHG in their infinite wisdom added DR to bosses to counter burst. So in reality adding flat mana is a very very inefficient way to build your character. Ultimately, unless you are able to kill the boss in 10-15 sec how much mana gated dmg you do is a function of your mana regeneration options.

And Focus is by far the worst in this regard.

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I am not implying that using skills is a bad thing… thats an odd takeaway from my comment…

What I am suggesting is that allowing potentially unlimited casting of a high cost/nuke skill is inherently dangerous from a balance perspective…

I understand what you are trying to say, but IF dps was proportional to your mana regeneration as you suggest, AND mana regen was scaled based on total mana pool, then the balance would skew back to the person with 600 mana (faster regen) vs 200 (slower regen) mana - in any situation, clearing or bossing.

Focus as a skill for mana regen is crap imho… not even going to defend it, and most definitely not when compared to other classes mana earners. Mage skills could definitely use some love in this regard… even Mana Strike for Spellblades is by far superior to Focus…

Honestly, as I mentioned above, I dont have such a problem with Mana issues in LE - even with my Sorceror/Spellblades… As a general example, I am currently messing around with a permanently up Warpath build (non VK) and the mana issues are most definitely relevant to the point where I am having to juggle the build around to make it work with keeping enough mana earned while channelling to proc buff spells… It just feels like a natural limitation to me that I have to figure a way around… maybe I have just been playing for long enough where it doesnt bother me?

So, I understand that people find mana management frustrating and there are definitely skills that are crap (like Focus) for earning mana that NEED to be reworked/replaced, but generally I dont feel that the mana issue is really a problem…

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If the Mage’s mana regen were based on the size of their mana pool then they’d be able to use those big nukes significantly more frequently than the devs want (given the damage balanced by mana cost), so they’d have to counter that by either increasing the cost further or reducing their damage to bring the skills back in line with their intended use case (high damage skills are made expensive in order to prevent them being spammed), or have a cooldown added (which would eliminate them as burst).

I don’t think that it necessarily is by itself. The “problem” is when people bring their expectations from other games where there are generally ways round high mana cost to enable them to spam high cost skills. I’m not saying that this is necessarily the issue here, but the devs do need to be aware that they’re not developing LE in a vacuum & these kinds of skills will feel frustrating to use when you’re used to not having to manage mana. And making the screen explode is fun.

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I don’t think its odd. LE has a very odd system where it has both CD and mana costs as balancing factors. And many high cost nuke skills are already cooldown gated. If a skill already does too much it has a cooldown… And the problem with this hybrid system is that if you are running cooldown based mana spenders you still run out of mana. And there are not enough skills to fit for every job, especially on Mage where damage elements largely control scaling affixes.

As an example mage is in this weird spot where it has cheap, but not free skills. The highest scaling single target skill in the mage is Lightning Blast. It does ridiculous single target damage for very little mana cost (but its not 0 and still eats into your regen). And next to it you have Disintegrate, which seemingly fills the same role, eats up tons of mana and is just unbelievably bad and needs 2 specific unique items to even function.

As a comparison Rogue mana management is much more fun, because rogue has decent 0 cost abilities to use to fill the gap and they actually give him bonus mana. It feels fluid and fun to play and even if you don’t have the mana to spend your nukes it still feels good to land some cinder strikes or punctures or whatever. Having to stop and channel on a glass cannon character is just AWFUL game design. Honestly Rebuke is what Focus should have been…

Rebuke has tactical applications as you can use it to tank big hits using a non-movement skill. It gives good buffs. It even gives back mana.

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I think that there is another factor at work here…

Your examples of Rogue mana management being much more fun is, imho, a direct result of Rogue being the latest class to get a revamp… Mage if I recall is the oldest class and one that has not had a “Rogue level” rework for a very very long time… Even sentinel (another old class) has had some love…

So it may be that what you are describing, by comparison to other LE classes (and possibly other games as Llama8 points out), is simply the fact that the Mage classes / Skills are from a time when the devs had probably not cemented how they wanted things to work as well as they have with something like Rogue…

True… but I like having to figure things out too… :stuck_out_tongue:

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There’s not that many DPS skills that have a baseline cooldown & amusingly, most of them appear to be on the Sentinel:

  • Void Cleave,
  • Erasing Strike,
  • Abyssal Echoes,
  • Devouring Orb, though it’s not as expensive as others,
  • Shield Throw, also not as expensive,
  • Smelter’s Wrath (though it’s channelled which puts it in a bit of a different slot)
  • Forge Strike,
  • Judgement, also not as expensive

Whereas the Mage has

  • Volcanic Orb, expensive and a cooldown,
  • Surge, not sure this is a DPS skill as such, but it’s got a medium cost & a 4s cooldown,

The Mage also has a bunch of expensive DPS skills without a cooldown -

  • Glacier, no cooldown but pretty expensive,
  • Static Orb, no cooldown,
  • Meteor, no cooldown,
  • Flame Reave, medium cost, no cooldown

Lightning Blast has a cost of 3, so if you’re using a wand or staff, it’s free, plus if you get some regen then you’d be able to sustain it without having problems.

Not fond of Disintegrate either TBH.

The Mage has far more expensive skills than it does cooldown skills (or both), and the mana cost is supposed to be the gating thing.

Not baseline, but yes, it can be spec’d to do that. I’ve ignored skill nodes that affect cost or cooldown as there’s too many ways you can affect things.

Which is valid feedback, but I’m not sure just giving the Mage significantly higher mana regen would be balanced. But I don’t disagree with you that there could be something to do to make it feel better to play. That said, you can just spam a free Lightning Strike while you wait for your mana to regen, as you said, that does a lot of damage.

The two are not mutually exclusive, it mainly sounds that he’s having problems figuring out a build that remains fun while waiting for the mana to regen.

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Oooh lots of conversation :o

I definitely agree that Mana is a thing to be balanced around, and by no means do I think it should be a negligible factor in character builds, as it is in certain other very successful ARPGs which we won’t name because good lord that is a can of worms.

The two most important points I feel are that a.) Sorcerer does in fact seem to struggle with its Mana pool a bit more than other classes. b.) Even if the mana issues weren’t as prominent as they are,

and I’m making this a new line for emphasis :stuck_out_tongue: “Feels bad.”

In a game genre where you can reduce everything down to “press button, spend resource, do damage, wait.” the feeling behind these sorts of things matters. @azmodael pointed out the diminishing potency over time based on Mana gain, and even if you don’t necessarily bring that directly into line with other classes, because flavor and such, making a slightly longer Mana regen feel less horrible because the numbers climb up much faster goes a long way towards not making things feel bad.

Similar with why I proposed the added power up nodes to Focus, which is as everyone has noted, pretty horrible. Having to stop and channel is obviously insanely risky, and when it’s the only way to reliably recover your resources quickly… well. ew. Adding a tangible benefit to it outside of base mana gain seems to me to be a good way to balance the feel of the skill. Yes you are still stopping to recover and taking considerable risks, but you are also gaining a reward on top of those risks that isn’t just “oh I can play the game again.” I’d even go so far as to say that other less notable aspects of its tree should be revamped with this same idea in mind, if plans aren’t already to scrap Focus all together.

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Sure, mage has more mana spenders. But are they really more powerful than what you find in other classes?

Imho the core reason mana management being not fun is because you have nothing useful to do when you are out of mana. Rogue does. Sentinel does. That’s why those classes feel good. On Mage you are just punished - you have no good options.

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Lightning Blast is good, but I agree that the Mage could do with some work in that area.

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Thing about lightning blast is it kinda does not feel good when you make it free. Free LB means no convergence, no extra chains etc. it also does not give you mana like puncture or smite or what have you.

Lightning blast as a filler is just… filler it serves no purpose unlike 0 mana smite or multistrike or puncture which actively fill your mana bar while providing buffs or other utilities generally.

Puncture fills mana and buffs you.

Vengence fills mana and makes you tanky while you do it.

Smite heals, cleanses and provides mana on cast as well as mana regen buff or a cast speed buff.

Lightning blast has terrible chance at lightning aegis and uhhhh gives you a buff maybe if you chain to yourself that is really small and is only good if you stack it up by holding down LB.

Mages mana options suck because they dont actually have mana generators that are good, even mana strike just heals mana it provides very little buffs generally because again its buff wants you to spam it.

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