Let's Talk About Reduced Mana Cost of Skills

Introduction

I'm writing this because I'm recently running into a lot of opinions that the EB nerf is the death of self-casting. And that simply isn't true. You can self-cast and run nearly any set of defenses that you want. And this is one of the more powerful and versatile methods of achieving that without resorting to Blood Magic, Mana Leech or EB. You just need an underleveled Clarity.

This guide isn't a particular "build" so much as it is an introduction to a grouping of potential builds that Scion can pull off by simply by taking Reduced Mana Cost of Skills nodes, which are much much stronger than people give credit for. Or put simply: I think they're vastly underrated. They're incredibly cost effective nodes, owing to a recent patch, and are now conveniently located near lots of juicy things like mana, life and armor.

For the sake of simplicity I'm going to be referring to Reduced Mana Cost of Skills nodes as "RM nodes" from here on out.

Why Reduced Mana Cost Is Actually Pretty Good

RM nodes work a lot like the way resistances work. Each successive percentage that you get after the last becomes more and more valuable. The 5% resistance gain going from 75% to 80% is less valuable than the 5% going from 80% to 85%. And so on.

In just the same way that resistances increase your effective hit points (ehp), these nodes multiply your effective mana and effective mana regeneration with respect to skills. You can geometrically increase your effective mana by stacking these nodes.



"But wait," you say, "this doesn't help at all with Arctic Armour or aura economy!"
And sad to say, no it won't help you with Arctic Armour at all.
But you can run anything from Lightning Coil, Acrobatics, Armor, increased duration Immortal Calls, crit or life+ES hybrid builds. Simply because Scion is located conveniently in the center of our skill tree.

As for auras, it helps more than you'd think.
That's because RM nodes also multiply the regeneration you are getting from Clarity. This means you can underlevel the Clarity gem and reserve less flat mana out of your pool. And the effect is magnified once you take reduced reservation nodes. Since you don't need a lot of unreserved mana, even the tiny amounts of mana you get off gear wind up making a huge difference to the build. Elreon's rings are also quite powerful, allowing you to drive down your Clarity level even further.

Lastly, the nodes deal very efficiently with blood magic, 50% regeneration or no regeneration map mods. You spend so little for your skills that the first two mods are trivial to you. And the last can be circumvented by using Life Leech and a Blood Magic gem. Nothing stops your spam.

"The Build"

The build is just a simple template you can modify to fit whatever build that you want to run.
So here it is.



You can also grab the Marauder's accuracy/RM nodes as well if it fits your build, though I find that 43% RM is more than sufficient to run most builds. This tree should remain largely unchanged for beta.

Here are a few variations on an Arc build that I dashed-off for fun.







And that's it! It's as simple as that. You can adjust the amount of tankiness versus the amount of damage quite easily simply by swapping nodes around to your taste.

And don't forget that Spell Echo gem for added mana economy.

Reserved for future use.

"

DeviantLightning wrote:

As for auras, it helps more than you'd think.
That's because RM nodes also multiply the regeneration you are getting from Clarity.

How? Reduced mana costs for skill usage should have no impact on the amount of mana reg/sec from clarity.

"

Bada_Bing wrote:

"

DeviantLightning wrote:

As for auras, it helps more than you'd think.
That's because RM nodes also multiply the regeneration you are getting from Clarity.

How? Reduced mana costs for skill usage should have no impact on the amount of mana reg/sec from clarity.

Effective mana regeneration.
If your spending costs are "damage" to your mana pool, then RM costs is analogous to resist. Your regeneration is more valuable simply because you are spending less for skills globally. So you don't need to reserve a leveled Clarity.

If your mana pool is small to begin with, Clarity can easily take up the lion's share of it. Shimmying in auras just becomes easier, particularly if you are getting more than one aura cluster.

I ran a Flame Totem build in the 1mhc that ran off a level 10 Clarity without ever using Blood Magic or EB, while running Vitality and Purity of Fire. Spamming the totems is not a problem on the remaining 235 mana and 88 mana regen, with totems costing 78 apiece. This is just off the Sovereignty cluster.

You could just as easily run the new Anger post-beta and a 6L that devotes all its links to damage, instead of wasting a slot on Blood Magic.

Elreon's Rings likewise remove a flat amount after the percentile deduction to your costs. So two perfect -8's would drop my costs to 62 mana per totem, which would allow me to drive down Clarity's level even further. In the event that I need to run a half-regeneration map, then I can swap in a higher level Clarity.

Dont forget the reduced mana gem for even better mana economy. Sorry didn't see that anywhere yet :)

On auras? True enough, although I thought that went without saying.

For skills, it's not really worthwhile, as the point is to avoid using gems like Blood Magic or Mana Leech to pay for the skill in the first place. Skills lose too much utility or damage from doing that.
Although it would probably be acceptable for Explosive Arrow + Quillrain, which would otherwise just drain mana alarmingly fast.

IMHO the panic around EB is mostly about the inevitable doom of the OP MoM/AA combo. That being said the reduced mana passives/Elreon jewels one is definitely underrated. Even though it's most famous occurrence was the 0 mana Incinerate build, it actually has greater synergy with attacks, AOE and crit. The reasons behind that are:
Attacks generally cost much less than spells
The general passives around Templar and Marauder trees
Concentrated effect's quality bonus (15% reduced mana cost at +20q)
Crit enhancing support gems have much lower multipliers overall

Some builds can definitely benefit a lot more than others if you have the time and resources to roll decent jewelry. I had to run a lot of different variants while trying to make a 0 mana Molten strike build and to sum it up:
Check if there's a 5/6 link for your skill that can be reduced (to 0 mana) which effectively let's you reserve more/all of it for auras (and in some cases replace blood magic with another support)
Another very popular skill that submits to the math is Tornado shot as its base cost is also incredibly low. The main issue however will always be the jewels as you have to take into account if the loss of a prefix is worth it and more importantly how much investment is needed to get a decent piece.

All of this is probably going to change once 2.0 hits but it's definitely an idea that's worth considering once you start planing your build. And for those interested here's the calculation on how much mana can you get reduced with 3 x -8 Elreon's and the build posted by OP:
Total mana reduced - 43%
[TotalSkillCost]*[1-0.43]-[3*8]=0 => TotalSkillCost=42.1
With +20q Conc. effect:
[TotalSkillCost]*[1-0.43-0.15]-[3*8]=0 => TotalSkillCost=57.14

"

purjunka wrote:

IMHO the panic around EB is mostly about the inevitable doom of the OP MoM/AA combo. That being said the reduced mana passives/Elreon jewels one is definitely underrated. Even though it's most famous occurrence was the 0 mana Incinerate build, it actually has greater synergy with attacks, AOE and crit. The reasons behind that are:
Attacks generally cost much less than spells
The general passives around Templar and Marauder trees
Concentrated effect's quality bonus (15% reduced mana cost at +20q)
Crit enhancing support gems have much lower multipliers overall

Some builds can definitely benefit a lot more than others if you have the time and resources to roll decent jewelry. I had to run a lot of different variants while trying to make a 0 mana Molten strike build and to sum it up:
Check if there's a 5/6 link for your skill that can be reduced (to 0 mana) which effectively let's you reserve more/all of it for auras (and in some cases replace blood magic with another support)
Another very popular skill that submits to the math is Tornado shot as its base cost is also incredibly low. The main issue however will always be the jewels as you have to take into account if the loss of a prefix is worth it and more importantly how much investment is needed to get a decent piece.

All of this is probably going to change once 2.0 hits but it's definitely an idea that's worth considering once you start planing your build. And for those interested here's the calculation on how much mana can you get reduced with 3 x -8 Elreon's and the build posted by OP:
Total mana reduced - 43%
[TotalSkillCost]*[1-0.43]-[3*8]=0 => TotalSkillCost=42.1
With +20q Conc. effect:
[TotalSkillCost]*[1-0.43-0.15]-[3*8]=0 => TotalSkillCost=57.14

conc effect will no efect cost of skills in 2.0 but i like your equations...

still i think most skills will not work .. i mean 6 linked skill with 42 mana cost.... need to check some combinations