The first league I’m going to skip playing. Even though I was excited to play after seeing the patch notes and the new content, that excitement lasted only until I started looking for builds.
Frankly, there isn’t a single build that looks fun. For those who like minion/pet builds, there might be a variety they find interesting. But I personally enjoy self-cast; I usually like fast builds or ones that use high area-of-effect spells.
Almost every build that seems remotely fun comes with the cost of being extremely inconvenient to manage mana. You have to constantly use completely useless skills just to deal with mana, and for no other reason. I tried to ignore this in the last three times I played, but the reality is, when you’re playing and have to constantly perform useless actions in your gameplay to manage an artificial problem—just to make game balancing easier for the developers—it makes no sense.
It feels like they are pushing discomfort and inconvenience onto me, the player, to provide convenience for the developers, making their balancing job easier. It seems like a highly questionable decision, to say the least. It’s a shame that a large portion of the player base seems to adapt to this kind of thing, letting these types of decisions slide for free.
EHG has prooven a lot of times that their balancing approach is… questionable. Then again if you are no fan of a builder/spender playstyle and don’t like to remove mana cost from skills to make them spammy you can’t be helped. Maybe play D3 or D4 or TL:I where mana is a non issue if this important to you and you don’t want to make stuff work in a game where mana managment takes 3 braincells to pull of.
Some people have issues with this and there are some topics about it but EHG already made changes that eased it up so much that mana is a non issue if you think about your build. If you want to use 100% of your mana each cast and have 100% mana reg the above mentioned games have you covered.
This season I will play a Bleed Lich (not yet descided if I play melee or caster) and I have like 0 mana cost. Same can be done for many other builds shown again and again by a real flood of videos that are out there.
Mana is just not free in LE and a non issue if handled correctly.
I think you severely overestimate the need of using useless or inconvinient skill to solve mana problems. While there are some builds that do that, most of the very top builds solve mana problems in some automated way. Which is usually the reason why they can scale so high, because they can go all in on crazy attack/cast speeds etc.
I think you really should take a closer look at all the different options, because your assessment is very far of from the reality. Especially in the top end.
Also, even for the builds that do have to use some skill soley for the mana, I think that is FAAAAAAAR healthier than a game where 99% of builds trivlize mana, because that is boring AF.
If it’s restoring mana I’d hardly call that useless. In fact, I’d call it keeping you actively engaged in the game play rather than turning your brain off and just automating everything.
I have been thrilled with the new additions they’ve made to mana management. Between all of the variety of passive nodes as well as new affixes and skill adjustments, it makes things so much more enjoyable, and active. It’s made builds I tried in the past actually possible. I can’t wait for more of the passive trees to get similar tweaks.
I’m going to be frank, I disagree completely with OP … It almost sounds like they never played Last Epoch before … There’s dozens upon dozens of builds that never have to worry about mana.
But even the premise is silly … Mana is a staple of the genre. And even still, you can completely ignore mana-generator abilities on most builds and complete all the content.
I would like to take this opportunity to point at the entire Spellblade class having to use mana strike is pretty much every build that has existed ever. I don’t actually know of a spellblade build that doesn’t have to use mana strike. Literally 20% of your character power is dedicated to solving mana.
Yea, and most games have mana potions too. Or PoE1 giving you half a dozen ways to solve mana through reduced cost, minus cost, alternate cost, flat regen, or % regen.
One of the Warlock builds I’m pretty stoked to play this season is going to be awful unless I can figure out mana. If I can (doubtful) then it’ll be crazy fun. Procs as far as the eye can see.
Mana isn’t a problem if you build for it? Are you kidding me?
Give me a Meteor or a Glyph of Dominion build that I can actually spam, for example, and many others. To even use these skills, you need an entire build dedicated to it. This means that until you’ve completely finished that build, you can’t even play with those skills. And by the time you finally complete the build, you want to look for another fun one to play—not just keep using the same build forever after you’ve achieved your goal.
This is just one example. For many skills, to get the talents that boost their power, you have to invest in points that increase their mana cost. This is just a lazy way for them to balance the game, unfortunately.
Mana isn’t a problem if you build for it? Are you kidding me?
Give me a Meteor or a Glyph of Dominion build that I can actually spam. The issue is that to even use these skills, you need an entire build dedicated to it. This means that until you’ve completely finished that build, you can’t even play with those skills. And by the time you finally complete it, you’re expected to just… stop? The goal is to look for another fun build to play—not just keep using the same one forever after you’ve achieved your goal.
This is just one example. For many skills, to get the talents that boost their power, you have to invest in points that increase their mana cost. This is just a lazy way to balance the game, unfortunately.
This idea that it’s ‘a non-issue if handled correctly’ only holds up if you completely disregard the entire process of progression, which is the very essence of an ARPG. The journey is the game. The slow acquisition of power, the step-by-step solving of your build’s problems—that’s the core gameplay loop. To hand-wave that away is to miss the point of the genre entirely. Perhaps for some players you are correct, but for me, what you said is completely wrong. I find it bizarre that you would view an ARPG in that way.
This is my exact point. Builds are designed by working around these problems. Give me an example: show me a build that spams Forge Strike. You won’t find one because what completely destroys the build is the mana cost, which cannot be resolved in a healthy way. This means you’ll see builds using the skill in different ways—not actually built around it for high damage, etc.
This is precisely my argument. The builds you see all have clear (or problematic) mana solutions. Everything else simply doesn’t exist because the mana cost is too prohibitive to solve.
The core issue is that the builds you’re seeing are the ones that work. For obvious reasons, you never get to see the ones that don’t.
In most builds that are available today—and not for all skills, correct? Again, you only get to see the builds that currently work. You don’t see the possibilities that are limited because of mana issues.
I usually create my own builds, even if they are weaker, because most people only think about performance and not about actually having fun playing the game. But in Last Epoch, I can’t even do that with the skills I would like to play.
Once more: try to make a build focused on damage with Forge Strike, Meteor, Glyph of Dominion, or many others. You will quickly understand where all of EHG’s ‘balancing’ is focused.
Exactly my point. Most skills have extreme mana limitations. The problem is that people mostly see the functional builds and think that represents a lot of options, especially when you consider the total number of skills in the game.
I wanted to make a Spellblade build; it’s simply impossible to do unless you use Mana Strike…
Why do you wanna spam a single ability so badly? This isn’t Path of Exile. And don’t get me wrong, I love Path of Exile to death, 4k hours nearing 5k. That being said, this is a different game with a more combo-oriented combat loop where you’re using skills in conjunction with one another. Sure, some skills are buffs/passive-type, sure, not every build uses all 5 buttons constantly, but it’s not the one-button-wonder PoE is, it was never meant to be, and thank the gods it isn’t. I need a break from PoE sometimes too.
Why do you assume I want to spam one ability? I’m talking about fundamental problems with mana. How am I supposed to solve mana for skills with a high mana cost?
Second, take a Judgment build: you do just spam that one spell like an idiot. You claim that switching to another spell to regenerate mana and then switching back counts as using two abilities? Come on, stop it.
I play WoW. If you gave me 30 abilities to click, I couldn’t be happier. What I want is to use the cool, powerful abilities—not the basic, lame starter skills that only exist because they don’t have a mana problem.
And just to be clear: Judgment, Rive, Heartseeker, Javelin, Lightning Blast, and many others—you only use one primary skill, just like in Path of Exile. So if you’re trying to claim that Last Epoch is fundamentally different, you have failed miserably at actually looking at the game.
Perfect example right there of your incredible multi-button gameplay.
If that is what you consider gameplay that effectively uses multiple buttons, then fine—we have different opinions. Because what I would prefer is to use multiple abilities that actually bring something effective and engaging to the gameplay, not just a mediocre buff at best.
Well the problem with that logic is that the “Combo” in question isnt actually a combo, Rogues flow mechanic for example rewards timing abilities in a certain order and feels like a “Combo”
going “okay i have 400 mana, and can drop 10 forge strikes before I then use 10 smites for no purpose other then mana gain” thats not a combo, thats your hand being forced in how you restore mana.
For as much flak as focus gets, I love focus 1000x more then having to hit some random move on sent to fill mana so I just actively ignore all the builds that spend large amounts of mana.
the entire problem with cooldowns and mana are they were introduced to balance the game BUT the game is still not balanced.
instead of balancing the game EHG went ahead and made more difficult content (abby) so players EXPECT to be stronger as a result and would naturally learn to hate these balancing “features”.
so now instead of players asking for the game to be more balanced, the general consensus is asking for players to gain more power.
its the easiest and most convenient solution that most people can think of.
I’m not going to lie: if they swapped mana for cooldowns and forced you to use several abilities, it would be a thousand times better in my opinion. But I bet the people who are used to just using 1-2 skills wouldn’t like it.
Let’s get this straight then. You say that mana management makes the game more engaging. When I say that if a game needs that to keep you engaged, then the game has serious gameplay problems, did I say anything even close to the quote you provided?
You definitely have serious problems with text interpretation. I’m sorry; perhaps society failed to provide you with the education you needed.
