yeap, coz most modern d-likes have evolved into power fantasy games where you delete entire screens of enemies at whim with zero effort.
most gamers are conditioned to play this way. POE2 tried to deliver deliberate gameplay but now is turning into another POE1
So not only do you take a 25% range hit from grabbing the mana node, but you also have to waste another skill slot just to sustain your mana?
The build works just fine, “waste” isn’t a word I’d use. lol
Your full quote.
No where in my original post did I include the word “need” anywhere.
In my rebuttal I used th word “only” instead of “need” you are correct. Both however your need and my synonym of ‘only’ were used to imply that was the reason I enjoyed the game.
You are incorrect on all instances.
Good luck. I’m looking forward to tomorrow.
And in what world do those two things have nothing to do with each other? Wow, I misused one word in my second language, but that quote is surely very far from what I actually said. Sorry, but you’re trying hard to prove you’re correct for no reason. Anyway… any ten-year-old would have understood what I meant.
Edit:
Actually, your reading comprehension is so poor that you even confused me. I’ve reviewed it, and you are incorrect again. I said ‘IF the game needs mana management’ , very clearly: IF the game needs mana…
In other words, once again very clear, the game does NOT need mana management to make combat engaging.
Once again showing your poor interpretation skills that even confused me…
But if a large portion of the player base likes a thing why is that “bad” just because you don’t like it?
Mana being a limiting factor isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Are you stoked by the challenge of trying to solve the mana issue by applying your creativity and knowledge of game mechanics or do you just want to see the screen explode without much creativity or thought needed?
Yes, because those skills are not intended to be spammed. Do people complain that they can’t spam skills with a long cooldown? I think generally not because they are aware that the cooldown is there for balance purposes & that the damage/effect warrants, or should warrant, it.
I’m confused, isn’t the entire point of a game to keep us entertained & engaged? Why is providing things to keep us engaged bad?
Calling people stupid, even in a passive aggressive way is kinda a dick move.
But why not have a mix of both? There are also games that do focus on just cooldowns, like Vampire/Soulstone Survivors.
Yay for more passive aggressive denigration of people who disagree with you!
Becauseyou seem to talk about it quite a bit:
You could mean you want to be constantly casting several abilities, but in that case, why would one of those not be a generator?
Skills that generate mana.
That would be because people enjoy solving puzzles and overcoming challenges while creating their build.
LE encourages creating thinking in their approach to making builds and this includes mana management.
So yes, a large portion of the playerbase seems to adapt to this kind of thing because they enjoy it.
In PoE1, mana is a non-issue. You have to manage your mana in the early stages of the campaign and after that mana is a totally irrelevant stat. Almost every single build there uses auras to reserve 95% of mana, or even 100% and switch ES to mana.
Because mana isn’t something that needs to be solved in PoE. Instead it’s something that if you don’t use fully on something else then it’s useless.
Barely any build even uses a mana flask in endgame. Without having to solve anything because there is nothing to solve.
Why do you even try? Some people don’t want to listen or understand stuff no matter how wrong they are.
If you wipe the screen with 60M dps or 600M dps, doesn’t matter because the screen can’t wipe any faster. It’s kinda like balance, right? Right? 
That guy made a special effort to twist my words to fit his interpretation. I used the passive-aggressiveness simply to point out that fact because, honestly, as I said later, a 10-year-old would have understood my point, which he went out of his way to ridicule.
This is where we disagree, and that’s fine. In my point of view, this is a lazy way to balance the game and not a way to keep the player engaged at any point.
Here, I actually didn’t understand. Do you not believe that most people wouldn’t like this? We have an example with Path of Exile 2, which made using multiple skills mandatory and it already caused problems with the players.
That is exactly my point. The game has numerous skills with a high mana cost. However, if you look through all the builds available today, you will see a pattern where 70%+ of them use a low mana cost skill as their main skill. Are you going to tell me I’m wrong? Why are high-cost skills so rare in builds? Or when they are used, it’s only possible when the entire build is finished and designed to deal with the mana problem?
Again, for me, the essence of an ARPG is the process of reaching the finished build. If I can only play with the skill I want after the build is complete, what’s the point in that?
Try playing a Meteor build until you have the entire build finished. You’ll see which skill you’re actually using the most.
Eh this is not the right way to look at it.
This just means they have more powerful tools to solve it.
All the things you listed are decisions the player is making in how they solve mana.
You can scale regen, leech, spend hp instead, or ES, or delete the mana costs with - mana cost rings and a quite a few other mechanics to get rid of mana as an issue.
Thats sorta the issue that LE runs into as being less free form as PoE, your “Choices” to solve mana are much less. You will not be solving a meteor spam build with regen, its just not happening. So you have to figure out other options.
in a game like PoE, you can take a skill taht cost 1000 mana, try and instead get 1000 regen x cast speed, get a really big pool, and try and leech it, stack %reduced/%less mana cost, convert it to another resource that is easier etc.
Thats where LE falls a bit short. Mana regen is better then it was, but its still not good. There is no mana leech, and in general just a lack of options.
So yeah, disagree, PoE mana is an issue you still have to solve, but you have so many options at your finger tips that it isnt a hair pulling experience.
Last epoch could release a shield that allowed you to spend ward instead of mana, some people would immediately go “omg thats so op” but it comes with a ton of downsides AND upsides. its not just a random free pass, you now need to generate ward and be concerned about getting hit, cause no ward = no casting. it would mean if you played well you could spam insanely hard if you had enough ward gen. etc etc
LE really needs more interesting ways to tackle the management issue of mana is all it really is.
But you always gotta remember, its never “Free” everything you spend resources on, be it an item, or a specific way to build is a way that is being purposely done to circumvent the issue you have which could be mana, life recovery, or status ailments etc. Primordials funny enough are a really interesting space for this topic, You can make a primordial item that solves mana completely(Blue band comes to mind) but it comes at the cost of your primordial slot so its a big ask.
For me it’s a lazy way to balance the game, as I said before. You can try to see it in a positive light, and that’s fine, but it’s not what I see. Any developer will clearly notice the easy life they have with this system, and convincing me that this was not intentional is simply impossible to prove, unfortunately.
You claim people like it, but how strange is this then? Explain why it’s listed as a downside in build guides. Does that seem like something people enjoy?
I see. That’s strange. You said in your own comment how people deal with mana. First, you gave one example of how to deal with mana without mentioning the downsides of it. Now, in this sense, I agree: in Path of Exile, you solve the mana problem. There are downsides, but you literally fix the mana issue instead of continuing to have a problem with it even after investing resources and also suffering downsides.
Now, you said that mana isn’t a problem, but then you listed below how people solve this very problem?
And remember, you cited one way to solve a problem as if it were possible to use the same method for all builds. If that’s truly what you believe, you simply haven’t played Path of Exile. But yes, in Path of Exile, it is usually possible to solve the mana issue if you are willing to invest resources into it.
Correction. It caused problems with PoE1 players. Plenty of people seemed to enjoy it that way, judging by player numbers.
So yeah, some people would enjoy this, some would enjoy more the way LE is, some would enjoy the way PoE2 is. Much like some enjoy the way D4 is as well.
This is not “most people” though.
They don’t, though. Mana regen per second is a % of your max mana. And your max mana increases with levels. So when you reach level 70 you have a much higher regen without having to have done anything.
And the way PoE works, this regen is more than enough for 90% of the builds.
So you don’t worry about mana not because you have the tools to solve that problem. That is what LE does. You solve it because it solves itself. Much like it did in D2.
The only solving that you do in PoE regarding mana is how to best fit as many auras as possible. Do you reserve 95% and use leftover mana? Do you reserve 100% and use ES as mana? Do you reserve 100% and use life as mana instead?
That is not solving, that is just giving a use to useless resources.
It’s not any different from balancing with cooldowns. Except this way you often have tools to go beyond it and actually spam high costs skills. It’s very hard to do and generally not worth it, but you do have the tools for it.
Some people do. Some people don’t. I personally don’t enjoy it, but there are plenty that do and have, in fact, asked for more of it in this forum.
Isn’t the biggest ARPG on the market the majority?
And right after a one-button build is released, over 70% of the player base uses it. Doesn’t that prove a point?
But with a cooldown, I could use several cool skills in the same build. It would be designed for me to have fun, not to use a useless skill to give me mana so I can use the skill I actually liked.
I would honestly need an example of this; I can’t even imagine it. I’ve never met a single person who actually likes it. At most, I’ve seen people who don’t mind dealing with mana.
Ah, I didn’t realize you were talking about D4. My bad, then.
D4 has more players than PoE, PoE2, LE and all of them combined. So I guess you want all of these games to change to D4 standards.
It’s actually the same thing. You piano through your build and wait for cooldowns to get back up, or you piano through your build and wait for mana to get back up.
With one you try to reduce this with reduced cooldowns, with the other you try to reduce this with mana regen or with effects that give you mana.
With either system you can’t spam the high cost skills.
But here, are you talking about made-up numbers or real ones? Because the real numbers are terrible, while the ‘speculated’ ones are high—with no proof whatsoever.
Secondly, counting players based on nostalgia—people who bought the game, played it, and never returned—that’s not the audience Path of Exile or Last Epoch would try to please. They aren’t coming back for another season…
But in this case, it would be the same thing, just more efficient and using more of the skills that were designed for the game—instead of using 1 main skill and 1 mana regeneration skill…
I only see it as an improvement, even in that example you cited. Because if you were to implement cooldown skills, you would obviously assign longer cooldowns to highly impactful skills, but taking the ARPG factor into account, the cooldowns would be adjusted so you constantly have something interesting to use…
There are no real numbers because Blizzard doesn’t release them. There are only wildly extrapolated ones from several sites. And those use the same methods for every game. And D4 has wildly more players than either game.
Sales numbers also suport this. They have already sold more than 25 million copies. They continue to sell copies.
Steamcharts also supports this. Only a small fraction of players use steam (much much less in percentage than PoE) and yet they have 40k players at season start. And they have 10-20k daily on steam alone.
So yes, we can comfortably say that D4 is the game with the largest playerbase. By far.
Not really. Because with cooldowns you never have a chance to remove them. Whereas with mana you can actually solve it and spam abilities.
So, to reply to your examples of impossible things to do, here is a build using frost claw AND meteor, not using neither mana strike NOR focus, and yet having no mana issues:
I think your issue is that you want easy solutions, not having to actually to plan around for it to work.
Actually, this shows just how tiny the correct sample size we’re talking about is. According to the words of the Path of Exile 2 developer himself, he said they got 900k players at the launch of the PoE2 early access. Diablo’s peak player count on Steam was 55,561. That is 16 times smaller…
Of course, let’s wait for the real launch. But Diablo’s launch is very different from Path of Exile and Last Epoch for one very simple reason: they attract people through content, not nostalgia.
You just gave me the perfect example to prove my point. You provided a finished build that requires exact numbers to avoid spending mana—otherwise, the moment it starts spending mana, you wouldn’t be able to regenerate it. In other words, as I’ve said multiple times, you can have a different perspective than mine, but the essence of an ARPG is the character progression process, not the finished build. This is why most people quit a few days after reaching the finished build.
Until that build is complete, you wouldn’t be able to sustain your mana along the way. Secondly, you sent me a build that uses a skill with a base cost of 12 mana. Like I said, using Meteor as a main skill and using Frost Claw as a main skill are two very different things…
Except that for PoE2 every PC player uses steam. For PoE1 it’s about 60-70% of players using steam vs their client.
In D4’s case, the vast majority (80%+) uses Battle.Net directly and so do all console players.
So yes, D4’s playerbase is much much much higher than the very small minority using steam. And even then, they have a very close number during their downtime to PoE2. Which currently has less players than D4, despite the much higher prevalence of steam users in their playerbase.
Of course. Mana solutions are endgame solutions.
Same thing happens in PoE1. If you select a high mana cost skill to level up, during early campaign you’ll cast it once and then have to chug a potion and hope that you get enough charges to keep it up. Otherwise you will have to (often) wait for mana regen (or use a different skill for DPS).