Mana prefixes on items are just useless for most classes, most of the time you want to sustain your mana consumption. Also mana regen doesn’t scale well as you get only increased mana instead of flat outside a few items.
In health you have flat health and increased health, one scales of the other, so there’s a nice synergy there to play with in itemization. Mana regeneration don’t have any of that.
A nice solution would be that you have 4 base mana regen and you gain 4% of your maximum mana as flat mana regen (200 max mana = 12 base regen).
Another solution would be to add a minor flat mana regen on mana prefixes. Something like: from 1 flat in T2 to 4 flat in T7 (0-1-1-2-2-3-4).
Also would be nice to see mana regen in the character UI with a single decimal accuracy, after all you are playing with low values. Example: 13.8 instead of rounding to 14.
On a side note, the base 6 health regen maybe is too powerful very early game, you don’t need potions due to that, just walk away a few seconds. Maybe is intended, but would be nice to teach new players to rely on potions for emergencies early on.
I wonder if this is due to the low numbers? I think EHG wants mana to be a heavy choice, but not sure. Good examples of solutions (alternatives? Solution implies a problem exists, and not sure if there is one, but this is a good question imo.), expecially the scaling shards. Kind of like that!
They do, they don’t want it to be trivialised like it is in PoE. They’ve also added in various ways to deal with mana as a limiting factor to each class, from zero cost skills, passives that give mana on use/hit, skills that explicitly return mana (either baseline like Mana Strike & Volatile Reversal or via nodes such as Rip Blood’s Mana Feast, Drain Life’s Grim Harvest, Meteor’s Cycle of Fire & Tempest Strike’s Unspent Power) & item affixes.
The one thing I’d be concerned about this is that it would massively gimp you early on, though as a counter to that, all classes get a cheap/free skill early on.
Yeah, hopefully this is one of the changes they make when they revamp the character screen (delayed due to MP).
Life on melee hit is similarly very powerful early on as well. IMO it’s not really much of an issue since the early game (& most of the campaign) is very easy.
Well, there is not a problem per se, maybe you can call this an enhancement on the current system.
Shouldn’t, as you start with 50 mana, and you gain 2 per level rounding up (I think), you would be already with 6 mana flat at Level 1. Also your starting skills are not heavy spenders.
It would give the player more power, to invest more heavily in mana/mana regen and/or with fewer prefixes if they choose so, (that have a power opportunity cost), also flat mana prefixes would have some value for every class. Not to mention it would buff attunement a bit (strength 4% increased armor is OP by comparison, but that is another topic)
Not that you will spam a 40 mana cost no cooldown skill with a little aid in mana regen… You still have to invest in efficiency and other means. Still would aid to make some heavy spenders feel so much better, if the player choose to invest in mana/regen.
So in my opinion mana is in a really good spot right now except perhaps based around a couple of skills that I believe might cost just a tad but more mana than they should. Here’s a few example of completely different playstyles based on different ways mana is incorporated that make me have the above opinion.
the void knight autobomber. This playstyle is based around investing into mana regeneration and a mana generator on hit to offset the cost of spamming devouring orb, anomaly, and sigils… you can build unto higher tiers of mama regen to spam less smite or vice versa. You can build into max mana so you can go longer before having to use smite to generate. There’s many choices and you’ll have to balance and invest. This makes mana feel meaningful.
second example is the devotion smite which benefits from having high maximum mana but you want low regen so you can spend it all and keep it low to maximize damage. Your solution of having regen passively scale with max mana would make it at 1000 max mana (which even higher is possible) would have 44 mana/s which wouldn’t be possible to spend to get low mana to make use of the devotion unique. It would kill off this build.
this last example is what happens if you make mana to easy to get back and make high costing skills spammable unlike there intended to be. This example is the unlimited mana earthquake spammer which is no longer possible but in its hayday took advantage of totems giving massive mana back on death allowing you to spam the 3 initial hit EQ (most expensive version at over 100 mana cost back in patch 0.8.0) and get all the mana back annihilate everything in an area with huge hits. Being able to permanently spam things like this or erasing strike would just be cheesy.
It’s not heavier investment if your investing less to get more.
You can with the current system already do this. Investing in all these forms can already make expensive 40 mana costing skills feel better. Making them completely spammable to where your not even worried about mana anymore would ruin mana having a meaningful presence.
TLDR - mana is in a good spot and there are mana ways to balance around it. Perhaps a few skills need a mana cost adjustment to scale with their actual power but outside that the system IMO is good
Power creep is when new features render old ones obsolete, the game isn’t even out yet, and is far from balanced right now (not in a terrible spot though, as there are so many viable builds after all, we will see how they balance when MP arrive).
Anyways you can call it more flexibility, instead of power out of nothing, again, you’re sacrificing prefixes, that usually are offenisve, for mana.
Well, you get more regen out of less prefixes, only if you invest in 3 or 4+ mana/mana regen in combination.
All your counter-argument is very solid, specially on the smite build based on max mana with low mana. Still is a very niche example and could be adjusted (with a “less mana regen” in the node, for example). I will agree the system as is now, is not in a bad place.
Anyways I don’t see my proposal as “very powerful”, most build usually have one regen or two to sustain, some classes may want some mana for node effects, this would open up for so more builds, if you want to cast a 100 mana EQ constantly you would give up so many possible offensive prefixes in exchange I doubt is really a great option.
