Aura Reservation and Reduced Mana Support Gem Change

so, I think I got it:

aside from a very lucky gemcutters box, you will most likely play overwhelming majority in temp leagues without a high level enlighten. this eliminates the 'mandatory socket' problem.

however, this is without taking a good look at +lvl of gems items which are bound to break some of this mantra.

and in perma leagues, GGG doesnt care much about them and thinks if you consider RM mandatory you can scrub some cash for high level enlightens.

I dont see any other way to look at things. funnily enough, this doesnt seem so bad, but I just think it would be wy more fair to simply remove the bonus on enlighten and instead give a different bonus to it

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C0Y0T3_SLY wrote:

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Loreweaver wrote:

"A very high-level Enlighten." Please forgive me if I'm missing something, but even a corrupted level 4 Enlighten would need the bonus from a Voideye to match a level 21 Reduced Mana...which would, of course, be useless, since it can't link to anything.

I don't think the point is that Enlighten matches exactly to the old meta, but that with the Enlighten bonus they either have to:

1)Balance basically identically to the way the do now. This makes Enlighten mandatory, and changes nothing except for pricing basically the entire player base out.

2) Balance as is reduced multipliers for mana reservation are extremely limited, leaving the vast majority of players in roughly the same state plus one gem slot....and providing and incredibly broken power boost to anyone able to afford a lvl 4 empower.

Neither of these things is good. Can you imagine the insanity an incredibly wealthy player could out together with lower base aura reservation, lvl 4 empower, and a low life BM build with 60‰ less reservation? Because it'll be coming if this goes live.

I absolutely agree. I don't think this change is a good idea at all.
Getting even a level 2 Enlighten is hard enough for most players. This just makes wealthy players even more powerful.

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dspair wrote:

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Sezuki wrote:

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Martox29A wrote:

One step forward and one step back: it's not what i'd call 2.0 GGG.

Its not 2.0, that's why its still in beta. And really... between black and white are a thousand shades of gray. Reduced Mana was pretty much mandatory before these changes, but if Enlighten is properly balanced it will not take its place. Any change that removes "must-have"-skills is three steps forward in my book.

Enlighten works exactly like Reduced Mana before the changes.
It's like they renamed "Reduced Mana" to "Enlighten", made it rare and hard to level.
It's still must-have but now it's a lot more expensive.
There is no "proper balancing" going on here.

dspair is right, "must-have skills" have not been removed, just renamed and made crazily more difficult to acquire. Enlighten as it is in the beta doesn't balance anything, it's just the old RM for those who think that farming your life away on levelling gems it's actually fun, which i'm afraid it's not, since it doesn't involve any skill (gems level up without experience penalties from character level or deaths) or any thrill (like a good RNG drop), it's just a huge time sink.

That's what i meant when i said i wouldn't call this thing "2.0": it's just the old thing made more tedious, nothing new.

Maybe they will make enlightnen quest reward and less exp to level?
i think this change is pretty cool, for mele builds you maybe able to keep using 2 auras without reservation nodes and 1 slot less. I don't understand yet if auras keep having radius with Quality but if you got a nice enlightnen lvl 3 with %dmg on Quality of auras is very powerfull.

So in the short term... everyone who plays standard should get a 6-link atziri axe and put 6 enlightens in it right? If you're going to need it in the long run, you may as well level it with some bonus experience.

Sigh..The enlighten is such a bad idea.. It's going to take months to get it to level 3, and on top of that it's going to be extremely expensive....

Id love it if they made enlighten easily available to every build via a cool (yet simple) recipe. It would make the people whining about this change shut up fast.

People, you know what you signed up for with this beta. Be patient, you dont need to complain at every inconvenience.

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Rory wrote:

It's worth noting that a very high level Enlighten gem can reduce aura reservation costs to the point of the old Reduced Mana support and below, and that aura reservation costs are now often lower than otherwise possible until player level 45.

this is very bad imho, because it makes elighten the new "desired" RM ... Every end game build used a 20lvl RM , so it would have been better to make the auras around x0.71 of the live cost ... maybe you could scale reservation cost while leveling the aura gem itself(eg: hatred lvl 1 60% hatred lvl 20 42%)
Moreover aura reservations nodes feel almost mandatory just to run a couple of auras

worth to note is that you are destroying any cool combo with heralds, because the cost would be unbearable

in the end im not against meta shifts, but this would be bigger than the "almost every aura costs 60%" and im not entirely sure it's good for the health of the game...

unless you state in the manifesto that you also want that on average we run 1 aura + 1 herald

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TheTenthDoc wrote:

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rockmassif wrote:

Reducing Reservation costs but removing Reduced Mana and then turning Enlighten into a mini-Reduced Mana and making it more useful for really end-game min-maxed builds.

Fine by me. Good Change.

Enlighten is useful for builds at every stage of the game with this change. With a level 3 enlighten you'll generally get an additional aura (or an additional gem slot on your DPS skill due to not having to use Blood Magic). Level 4 Enlighten in a Geofri's or whatever is amazing. There are very, very few builds that won't benefit.

You're talking like LVL3-4 Enlighten is easy to get.
Sure it might be easy for usual Standard/Hardcore players since they can just BUY it but from a Temp League perspective, they are not that easy to get.

I don't remember myself ever having a LVL3 Empower/Enlighten/Enhance, let alone LVL4.

From what GGG staff have stated in the past the broad majority of players are in Normal and Cruel - with many being unable to proceed beyond this point. A lot of work has gone into making PoE accessible to this player base in the past year. I definitely support making this game easier for new players and can see why these aura changes were considered pre-level 45.

After reading the OP and the numerous responses I have to add my support to those wary of these aura changes post-level 45. It seems the endgame meta will be shifted to acquiring an Enlightened gem and levelling one or buying one at an exorbitant price. Increasing the power of mana passives may make acquiring these a build requirement hampering build diversity and keystone options. I’ve never had a build that wasn’t able to use Reduced Mana and the changes that allowed this to drop as a Quest Reward for all classes resolved the issue of acquiring one.

Those replying in this thread may be the vocal minority who never had an issue going beyond level 45 into endgame. I, like them, are just very uncomfortable with being locked into a situation where we now need a previously rare, difficult to level, gem. Perhaps the calculations regarding mana will work out but auras are powerful and everyone will always want to run as many as possible in seeking out a way to lower aura reservation costs.