The Importance of Mana in Last Epoch

General
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So i wanted to start a healthy discussion about Mana in LE.

First of all i want so say: In my opinion, Mana Management and everything else revolving around Mana in LE is already alot better than in any other similar aRPG.

The pure fact that you basically cannot trivialize Mana in Last Epoch is a good thing. You need to either heavily invest into Mana-Regen/Mana Efficiency or you need to sacrifice a skill slot for Mana Management(or at least slightly adjust some skill spec trees to have some kind of mana cost/mana regain thing going).

So my general Statement is: Mana in Last Epoch is in a really good spot.

What i would want to see are more different ways to manage your mana.
Good Examples for creative mana management are cool uniques like Urzil’s Pride.
Or Skill Spec Tree Nodes like Aftermath or Cycle Of Fire, latter requires heavy investment, since you need to use 2 different skills to make use of it. But the gain from it can be incredible, making Fireball either a basically 0 Mana Cost Skill or let you even regain Mana with Fireball.
Even entire skill slots dedicated to either pure Mana Management or other utility stuff in this game can be really creative and awesome too use, like Volatile Reversal.
While things like Focus can be clunky to use, there are really cool opportunities to use Focus, with itemization(while channeling) and some of the Nodes inside the Skill Spec Tree are also cool.

The easiest way to deal with mana issues in LE is usually to increase Max Mana, since that is the most common and easy available affix. But that won’t solve sustaining mana issues.

Every Class has some sort of free to use skill, that often times also can be used to regain mana with some minimal investment. Like Sentinels Vengence, Rive or Smite Node Time And Faith in the Sentinel Base Passive Tree, which is only up to 5 passive points, but leads to cost a skill slot, which is totally fair.

On top of that almost every other skill, even the more expensive ones have ways to deal with their mana costs inside their skill spec tree.

One thing i want to mention here is also the very unique mechanic of being able to go into negative mana, which is something i have never ever seen in any kind of similar game. And it is awesome. It makes high mana costs skills so much easier and smoother to use in early/mid game, when a skill basically costs more of 50% of your mana pool and you are still able to cast it twice, if neccessary.
And the option to go into negative mana still does not solve sustain issues, but as i said, makes builds feel good if you kill everything in 1-2 casts and then have some spare time to regen.

Also I want to never see something remotely similar to Mana-Leech in Last Epoch.

My most played aRPG of all time is/was Marvel Heroes, which had a very similar approach to Mana(in Marvel Heroes it was called Spirit).
Basically you genrally had two types of active skills: Builders and Spenders.
Which was more basic as a system and didn’t had much creative freedom, but it worked.
Generally strong abilities should be impactful, but should have such a ressource cost that you cannot spam them indefinitely. (Except you invested sooo much into gear/passives etc that it’s justified)

What do you guys think? Do you agree, do you disagree?
What other ideas or suggestions you might have for the future?

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Well said. I agree with everything here - particularly the point about more options for mana management. Perhaps we could give up some block or dodge or glancing blow to get some mana regen or reduced mana cost?

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I think mana is in a very good spot right now. The only thing with mana generating skills is that they feel mandatory. Like focus on wizard.

Sentinel has some good variety now with the new node.

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Mandatory is such a strong word. While i know what you want to say, there are several other ways. Mage is in fact the class that has the most option and variety for mana regain.

Some of the stuff i pointed out at my OP. Plus you have Mana Strike and Mana-Regain capabilities on Glacier and Disintegration.

But yeah Focus is the cookier-cutter way and works in every build.

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go play a shaman and use a sorcery staff then tell me again how good mana management is in this game. i have mana effiency and regen . still every 5 sec im tempest striking for mana

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Using an item such as Sorcery Staff is a deliberate choice.

If you haven’t build enough to counter the increased mana cost, you might consider using a slightly weaker base until you are able to manage that. That base type is by no means a base that has no alternatives. Or maybe farm for more bases that might have a lower rolled increased mana cost.

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Plus it’s an outlier. There are more than likely other stringent builds that don’t mitigate their mana costs well but, discounting outliers which are few, in LE with some critical thinking and thoughtful tradeoff you can get a comfortable mana regen and still have a very viable build.

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I kind of agree with Zwiebel on this one.
Playing shaman currently and tempest strike is mandatory for mana recovery.
For one all shaman spells are mana devouring even after investing in mana efficiency nodes on skill tree.
Second shaman have a few nodes of mana regen up in the passive tree but investing in that is not worth.
The biggest problem is that there is no mana regen added for shard. If you have no way to increase your base regen value investing so heaviliy in mana regen shard/point is worthless just to go from 10 to what ? 11/12/13 ?

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I like the base idea behind mana’s implementation in this game, but dislike how it is currently represented. perhaps this week I will be making a large post with rework ideas.

Right now there is a schism between mage and sentinel and the other classes, wherein the former two don’t really have mana issues because their forms of sustain are so insanely powerful compared to others [Focus and Vengeance], with almost no investment.

Primalist in particular, as stated, is in a very rough spot. To give a tl;dr of the idea I will be posting, I think that base mana regen should be 10 + 4% of max mana. That’s about it, although I will need to make a lot of arguments toward why I think this is the case in the post.

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You make a point, I played mage shatterstrike where it uses up the entire mana bar in seconds and it still felt clunky that I needed to use Focus in between casts.

For all the classes without decent mana regen methods the only actually decent skills are the ones you can spam without any mana issues.

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Yeah I forgot Mana strike.

You take it anyway because what else would you need. 2 dmg skills, 1 movement skill, 1 def skill and a mana regen skill.

No need for a third dmg skill. Maybe take ice ward but that one is going to be deleted?

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Especially Sentinel was one of the worst classes to play in terms of mana sustain imho. The recent implementation of the “gain mana on use of…” solved this. And I really like this.

I’d hope that mana issues on certain classes will be solved by implementing similar mechanics. A general improvement of mana reg is boring imho, although I don’t know what other aspects your “rework suggestion” might contain. I’m curious.

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I agree with nearly everything OP said. However I think Time and Faith is too strong and would prefer it to be 5 mana per use instead of 10, since you can further improve that with the class suffixes if needed. With high attack speed this node provides way more mana regeneration than it should for how easy it is to access.

Additionally, I think Tempest Strike is in a terrible spot for mana gain in that it doesn’t really fit its own theme to incentivise NOT procing its spells. I’ve written up an entire post on that here The current method of gaining mana when using Tempest Strike feels bad

What I’d love to see is varied and unique identities for each class on how they approach mana. Acolyte uses hp for spells, mage has focus/mana strike, sentinel I guess uses time and faith. I’d love primalist to get access to some base mana regeneration so they can stack increased mana regeneration to better effect.

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I agree, i havn’t talked about specific things are not balanced and stuff, but yeah there are some things.

I think the better route would be to “nerf” it with the change it being “Mana gained on hit”, rather than “on use”. Numbers could be also decreases by a bit and it woudl still be very strong.

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Mana is now good, and that’s why we can get more creative ways to use mana or manage mana, because it have very good infrastructure to build around

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Yeah, but then you have Focus. From the wording on Desperate Meditation - “Each point of negative mana counts as missing an addional point of mana. For example, with 1 point invested, if you have 10 maximum mana and are at -10 mana then this node will increase mana regen by 20%.”

So if you have 400 mana & are at zero, you get 400% mana regen (on top of the base 300%) per point in that one node, 4 points would take you up to 1,600% regen + 300% = 1,900% regen per sec = 190 allowing you to regen to full in 2s, which is probably half as fast as with Rive/Vengenace? So yeah, maybe halving Time & Faith would be reasonable.

Yes, this has been a bit of a train of thought.

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Here you go. Just posted it! A suggestion regarding Mana, Mana Regen, and Diversity for High-Cost Builds

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Being forced to use skills like Vengeance, Tempest Strike, and Focus to regen mana, and not have to hit anything, is very clunky, and in itself is actually VERY trivializing for mana regen. I don’t hate it, but I don’t love it.

Passive mana regen built into skills like Tornado or Warpath, or a skill that gives mana on hit, like Mana Strike flow much better, and make a lot more sense.

Why not have mana leech, so mana heavy builds can regen more naturally? Or on healing totems, maybe add a mana regen node. edit*
With mana leech, you can make it mutually exclusive with life leech per item. You can add a little per skill in the skill passives; especially on high mp cost spells like meteor or avalanche. You say “golly gosh no. Mana leech never” but you actually like having to use a skill that has nothing to do with your build? Let’s not even add in that the Sentinel Vengeance Smite node gives you mana AND hp on a NON hit! How is this LESS imbalanced than mana leech?

For bear form you have nodes that keep you at full mana 100% of the time! With high damage and tankiness, and 100% crit BUILT RIGHT IN! How is this less imbalanced than mana leech? Also I’d like to point out that mana leech affixes could be limited by the different types of gear: say, relic (obvious choice), weapon, and caster offhand.

Sorcerer passives have so many of the same effect, why not give passive mana regen in the passive tree or mastery class?

I think it’s imbalanced in that a few skills and specs keep you at full mana perpetually, while others struggle.

Ie: almost every single acolyte build so far. Using your hp as a casting cost is awesome…but why then give SOO much leech?

I was using Urzil’s Pride on my auto cast shaman. With my gear and Storm Totem out I had over 2200 lightning resist…but only 18 mana regen. The bonus on the armor is so low, it’s almost negligible. I dropped the armor and lightning prot gear, and was at 15 mana per tick…it didn’t make a difference, the rest of my mana regen coming from affixed and Tornado was sufficient enough to get by…but it could be better.

I refuse to swap out a skill for something as gimmicky as Tempest Strike. It’s a crutch and bandage; not a system that shines.

On another character I was doing, following Boardman21’s plague pally…was literally spam 4 devouring orbs, hit abyssal echoes, hit vengeance 5 times at the air, and repeat. It’s tedium. It disrupts the flow of combat. Sure, it works, and it’s what we have, but it’s nothing to praise.

Let’s add more mana regen onto caster uniques. I can think of 2…Urzil’s Pride, and the lightning wand…but the wand comes at a price.
The spriggan form belt is an example of a well balanced mana regen tool, for a build that needed it badly.

All of this being said, I don’t necessarily want to see mana leech introduced to the game, rather, I’d prefer to see more, bigger, passive ways to regenerate it across the classes, and not be forced to take a skill for it.

Make the methods of mana regen fit the build; not be forced into it.

2 Likes
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It’s not a strong word. It’s literal for most builds.

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It sure would be nice to take a buff spell, in place of a mana regen skill. Maybe add some mana regen to Fire Shield? It needs some love. It doesn’t have nearly as many passives as other skills.