A potential change I'm keen to hear your thoughts on

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Mark_GGG wrote:

In all other respects, ES behaves exactly the same - it still has the refresh mechanic, and anything that references ES still applies to ES.

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Mark_GGG wrote:

Effects which just make you lose mana, such as Arctic Armour or Sapping flasks, will not be affected, just as ES doesn't stop Caustic Flasks from removing life.
If you take the Blood Magic Keystone, you'll have no mana, and ES will be protecting your empty mana globe. Mind over Matter will still try to divert some damage to mana, and this will be able to be absorbed by ES, but once ES is depleted of course, no damage can be taken from mana and will will all go to life.

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Asday wrote:

Fucking DEFINITELY do it. EB is much too easy of a way to just negate any thoughts toward mana as it stands.

Everyone complaining is just complaining because they think they want an easier game. Fuck those guys.

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

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CliveHowlitzer wrote:

I don't like it. It turns your ES into mana, and that is all I want to see. Also, does this imply that ES will be spent before mana. This means that ES regen will be separate from mana regen when using EB. As such, it'll be harder to get a very large mana regen by making use of EB.

ya Im with you man.


Can I ask waht the thought process is behind this? Is this change for the sake of change or is the idea to completely destroy life based spell casters and wipe them from viability? Because thats what this is from what I can see.

I hope its not from thoughts like this...

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Serleth wrote:

I think this change to EB falls back into that line. The EB/AA/CoD setup was easily the strongest defensive choice you could make, without really sacrificing a whole lot to get it done.

EB/COD/AA was one of the most investment intensive and weak defenses in the game. Compared to properly specced evasion, armour, ondars, endurance, acrobatics, lightning coil etc combos it is so terrible, absolutely terrible at mitigating damage. Thats good, because if it was anywhere near as good as a character in the melee area of the tree can get their defenses then casters would be absolutely overpowered because of how safe and easy to scale spells are. They need to be defensively weak and they already are, this is just going to absolutely destroy them.

How do you balance this? MoM is just gone, it was poor compared to proper dex and str defenses before now you just cant have any auras, you wont be able to get enough free mana or mana regen to make it worth anything. If you edit arctic armour to the point where you can actually sustain it now with a much lower mana regen to counter act butchering EB like this then you are gonna put it into a realm where non eb builds can use it a lot easier, and how is that going to be balanced? A lightning coil full evasion ondars guile phase acrobatics endurance charge attacker also now running high level arctic armour?

I dont get it, I just dont get why you would want to take one of the only things thats making life based casters defensively viable and completely trash it.



Is this to try and stop cloak being so pervasive? Is this a zeno "omg nerf cloak omg" thing? Cause I agree its way over used, I totally get why he says that, but surely theres other ways around that which dont involve just obliterating life based spell builds? You could balance that by moving mind over matter into the spellcaster part of the tree somewhere spell casters can actually get it easily and then edit the node itself as the chest is now just giving you the node. Change it to 20% of damage from mana or something. AA was already nerfed to the point where it feels like you are wearing 1k armour against any sized hit that matters even at extreme levels of inner force + lvl25 arctic armour.

Is this just trying to change the caster meta? Cause I mean I can understand a desire to do that but this... man, this is terrifying for life based casters. People think casters are op, theyre not, their damage is more often than not quite meh, defensively theyre a joke, an absolute joke. I have a lvl94 witch with a legacy cloak running a lvl25AA with inner force, vertex, some pretty serious gear, as good as you can really hope for on a cloak of D setup before you start hitting mirror level gears and I can tell you with some certainty shes the most defensively fragile character I have. Im not saying this because I dont want my build nerfed, I have so many builds across all spectrums of characters and for sure, for absolutely sure the idea that cod mom aa builds are some op defense is absolutely nonsense. Im first and foremost a physical attack guy, I have tons of attack builds thats my thing, what Im saying is honestly for the sake of game and casters at large.



Thats my thoughts looking at it, obviously we havent tried it yet, but if you want first impressions, there it is. Casters are already "if you want to have a viable build you need to go to the south side of the tree and take scion life wheel", do this to them and its going to be a case of casters needing to go get iron reflexes or ondars or god knows what else to be able to survive while theyre down there and thats just, imo, nonsense. Esp when you combine it with making them give up life leech or life regen to be able to sustain casting etc... from a distance it just looks like a nightmare tbh.

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Rory wrote:

Edit edit: All the usual effects on Energy Shield will still apply to this ES - Recovery delay, Ghost Reaver, Zealot's Oath, etc. You'll not have any more base mana than you would have had prior to taking the keystone, though. Damage won't interrupt ES recovery any more, only losing mana or ES will.

• Recovery delay - Sounds good but that means you have to wait every time you cast a spell to recharge
• Ghost Reaver - This is great for attack based characters, but spell casters really suffer if they dont have physical damage types. There are no nice nodes on the tree to recover ES around where the caster is, the casters take a double nerf because of this (spells have generally higher mana cost than attacks and this nerf essentially means clarity will reserve 100% of your mana until very high levels (and even at high levels the mana cost will still be huge). This means there is no point runnning clarity at all.
• Zealot's Oath - This could be nice, but it would be a big commitment for a caster because not all casters have a way to regain life. This would make you purely rely on potions (not a big change for me since I only have ~100 life regen anyway)

• Clarity would now be useless
• AA would only be run by people standing still (lightning warp builds)
• Casters seem to gain no benefit from having ES as mana, I mean why not just use actual mana? It would cost far less nodes
• The only benefit I can see is from attack based characters that want to run more auras and not take blood magic (which would be more effective if you wanted more auras). You would have to run a niche EB / Zealots Oath Shadow (as they have good placement with other aura nodes) which would be quite niche, you would have 0 mana troubles, but would take a large hit to your defenses since most of the juicy defensive nodes are on the other side of the tree.