In my point of view current sorcerer has issues on cycle start because the mana tools in place don’t lend themselves to be used with high mana costs.
Starting with Arcane Ascendance this ability is in place to supplement burst at the cost of mana drain however it has a talent which trades this for the opposite granting no mana drained at the cost of limited amount of spell buffs called Acuity. Acuity paired with Arcane rift makes it function as a minor mana battery however the way it currently functions (where the mana is lost no matter what) only adds to current burst window so to speak. It adds 75 mana which is almost immediately lost upon exiting/reaching negative mana or casting the limited amount of spells (I’ll leave Cunning outside of this perspective as more uses isnt realistic if you’re casting higher cost spells.) This results in more mana spent per full mana bar but not in more mana per total amount of time as the negative cost has to be spent regardless.
My suggetsion for AA is as follows: Either through a further talent or baseline, reword Arcane Rift to be “Unspent temporary mana is lost at the end of current Arcane Ascendance.” possibly at the cost of charges, cast speed, spell power or cooldown.
This would allow AA to be used as a temporary battery to be used with higher cost spells occassionally.
Moving on to another Sorcerer specific high cost spell solution that’s currently lacking, namely Cycle of Fire. For those unfamiliar, it’s a talent in the Meteor tree (a sorcerer signature spell) aimed at supplementing Meteors high cost with casting fireballs for +6 mana per Fireball. However this talent doesn’t lend itself to scaling up the cost of the Meteor, because not only does it not synergize with high costs which naturally come with lower cast speed but also Craterborn (the buff required to gain the mana cost regain) requires you to cast meteor every 6 seconds. As you scale up the mana cost the cost per 6 seconds goes up while the total fireballs in those seconds likely does not ending with insufficient mana.
To help remedy this one, I suggest giving Cycle of Fire or perhaps a node behind it some amount of % missing mana (think in the magnitude of around 1%) regained on Fireball cast. This way recovering mana doesnt get out of hand as it’s aimed at missing mana and rewards scaling maximum mana which meteor already does in a big way. The downside of this is that it’s not very cycle start friendly where you’re not likely to have much maximum mana to work with to begin with, but in my opinion it helps round out a skill tree in a very intuitive way for the skill.
Lastly a minor suggestion for the Focus skill that already has a maximum mana route you can take, namely Null Profusion and Null Infusion. Don’t have much to complain about here, it’s well though out. My only suggestion is that the cooldown gained on the passives is made conditional. Rather than limiting the options of use for Focus (and the mana gained given a fixed amount of time), allow focus to retain it’s low cooldown as long as it hasnt given the % maximum mana back. To be a bit clearer: Null Profusion and Infusion should only penalize the cooldown if the effect has been made use of. This would allow you to use Focus as a minor battery on the way down to negative mana and then proc the last ditch effort of the Null profusion/infusion benefits.
I’m aware that mana is a very tight ship and that the developers would very much prefer to keep it in line. Hopefully these suggestions fall in line with that philosophy, however if they don’t then I’m still very hyped for any sorcerer love in the upcoming patch. Spellslinger is by far my favourite arpg fantasy.
EDIT: mana drain