Defences question

That is why I stay on the Ranger side and grab crit with a few mana leech nodes. A phys/elemental mix of damage allows me to unspec most mana regen by endgame.

Currently, mana really sucks for the classes which ought to have the most at their disposal. (casters)
Leech is fine for the right side Imo/

It would suck to have to use mana boosts in the new ascendancy tree, if any are even announced.

"

Bars wrote:

Did you read what I wrote? You get Mind over Matter, Eldritch Battery and

a) Ghost Reaver plus a life leech gem
b) Zealot's Oath with some life regen from tree and The Blood Dance boots, which are pretty nice anyway and give frenzy charges

and you get your sustain, plus an easily achievable 1500-2000 ES pool which acts as a secondary buffer and the ability to reserve all your mana with auras. Add 4500-5500 life, again reasonably achievable, and you'll get a pretty high-hitpoint character. Not immortal by any means, but won't be a complete glass cannon and you'll be able to clear almost everything if you have enough damage. Manual cast Enduring Cry, throw in a lvl 20 cwdt + IC + increased duration, maybe get +1 endurance charge from the passive tree or quest and you'll be fine.

However, from my experience, going for anything but crit EK can't compete with incinerate in clear speed. Crit EK is pretty damn nice, though.

yes it "works" and then u get to like a 78 map and get instakilled by a pack od flicker strikers. i just feel anything that isnt armour simply cant do some content. and casters that arent incinerate are just completely unusable conparatively, simply everything else is way better

"

Bars wrote:

I would never accept a playstyle in which I have to stop and manual curse everything before I actually start attacking. It would frustrate me to no end and slow down clear speed considerably. However, this is certainly another way to go about it and some other players might like it as a solution. I didn't even think about that. So, good imput.

casting curse take 0,5 second; 0,3 second with faster casting. Cast time for my curs on hit Ball Lightning is 0,51 and it apply 2 curses, it do a bit of damage and leech life/mana.

DPS curse boost DPS significaly, and the longer it take to kill mob the more effective they are so they are perfect for rare monsters, exiles, warbands etc.

Defensive curse are also great because If you die your dps is 0. Curse on hit is good but it desn't work on 1st hit. Of course Aurify is coming and with enfeeble it will be even more popular than Immortal Call on cast when damage taken ever was, but it is still not here.

When you use blood magic you need to have way to regenerate life very fast, using elreon ring is great if you have good rings. EB/MOM/mana cost reduce etc can allow to use more auras but is almost the same as taking mana regen and can require many passive points and gear changes, can still require way to regen mana.

For 2nd cure you just need unqiue ring or unqiue boots no matter where you are in passive tree. This is easy and cheap for many build. Problematic if your build already relay on many uniques and need rares for life/resistances.

As for mana issues - have you considered using mana flask? It works wonders. I run 6L incinerate templar with MoM, huge mana pool, no auras, mana regen and Lavianga spirit mana flask. Flask is important here, because with MoM mana = life. The flask make it easy even when doing no-regen map. Seriously, it is so good it can be my only source of mana on entire map, despite having high cost spell (no elreon rings 6L incinerate burns mana like crazy) and MoM.

"

maoster wrote:

yes it "works" and then u get to like a 78 map and get instakilled by a pack od flicker strikers. i just feel anything that isnt armour simply cant do some content. and casters that arent incinerate are just completely unusable conparatively, simply everything else is way better

I ran in Warbands with a friend who had EK crit with MoM/EB/ZO and The Blood Dance, he had about 100k dps (and later on more with better items), cleared extremely well, did pretty well. I was incinerating, could tank everything but he was clearing much faster than me with the occasional death (he leveled his caster to 91 or 92 in two weeks, so the deaths weren't too many).

His build was pretty damn good for softcore.

There is a distinct lack of Poachers Mark/Blasphemy hype in this thread.

As for casters try investing heavily into mana, it works, it just not be to efficient enough for all those min maxers out there.

I think the problem with mana is that it takes a fair bit of investment in mana nodes to be able to regen enough mana to cover the more horrifically expensive spells.

Even a simple 5L fireball spell costs 85 mana per cast and with 300int your base mana pool would be 586 mana with 1.75% regen per second, so 10.25 mana. Because the pool is relatively low and the base mana regen is relatively low you need a fair bit of investment to be able to spam that fireball. With spell echo and faster casting you can probably cast it 3 times per second so you are looking to drum up 255 mana per second and that 10 base isn't doing a lot for you.

If mana pots wouldn't cut out as soon as you hit full mana you could rely on them more as a partial alternative, however, I find them to be very wasteful in most scenarios.

Getting 255 life per second on the other hand you pretty much pick up by default getting the life nodes that you need to survive, you can pretty easily get 700+ if you want to take some minor detours. When you are not casting it heals you up, you can ignore all mana pots and focus on just health and survival pots.

EB made as easy to deal with mana as blood magic casters, if you wanted to run a ton of auras and still have plenty of mana it still needed a fair bit of investment.

My 89 Templar doesn't have enough regen to chain cast a 3L arctic breath, it is pretty pathetic, but he a triple incinerate totem caster so while his totems are expensive, I don't need to chain cast them and I just use a mana pot to clear the curses so it is a pretty simplistic situation for him, but most of my casters I would prefer being BM. What you save on mana management and lost of auras you can put into more damage or more survivability.

i feel like EB is just a GGG saying, mana is shiet, dont even bother trying to use mana, trade 70% of something supposed to be part of your defence to avoid using mana, and cause we are nice, you now need to branch into life regen and take not one, not 2 but 3 key stones just to make it work.

atleast with the old EB, you convert defence to offence and defence, you traded lifepoool and got es cut down to 40% effectiveness, but you gaind actually casting your spells with no hassle, annd AA, admittedly AA was op as fck, so nerf AA not gut mana, cause right now, mana is a joke, the only people who use mana funnily enough are attackers because they can get leach on items, and a little on the tree, and sustain themselves with like 90 unreserved mana. like i literally have a reaver that uses phys to light, and still leaches enough to sustain attacks.

BUT DUDE, INCINERATE IS STILL ON MANA, sure with 90-100% cost removal, can i get 90% cost removal on my 6link empowered gmp chain ice spear? like mana is so bad, i need like 16*3 mana regen per second on one of my charactors, and i was like, jk i dont wanna drop an aura and have to spec into mana regen on the tree(prbaoby atleast 5points maybe more) eleron rings, i lost close to 80 total resist and some life, but it was still worth it.

yes EB works, but again the investment on EB is huge, and in the end, a net loss, and it is clunky to play, EB should be something like, reduces es recharge to 10%, ES recharges 100% faster. using energy shield inflicts depleted sorcory, while you are depleted, es recharge rate is 75% slower, lasts 2 seconds.

so basically, your es begins recharging 0.3seconds after being used, however if u have cast or attacked in the last 2 seconds using es, it will recharge 75% slower(recharge speed is doubled if you take EB) so 50% of what it is currently, still great for mom and now you dont get super fcked when a huge hit wipes out all your ES, because 0.3seconds later, you get that massive regen surge, and smoother for casting, if you dont like mom or you dont have enough ES to make it effective thats fine, but it is still worth investing into ES until you can achieve fluid gameplay(something new EB fails to do). and one slight tweak to MoM, if taken in conjunction with EB, MoM cannot remove the last 50 ES, its is to match up mana regen and the es regen problem so u can use one spell to escape.

then mana needs a huge rework, just massive cause it is terrible atm, witht he amouint of investment needed to get good mana regen, there should be substantial reward, its like i could go mana regen, or i could go block, but block lets me avoid 75% of dmg thats the point cost comparison.



and one last thing, casters need armour, no matter how i think about it, this is unavoidable, they currently have nothing to actually mitigate phys dmg, and this is a very very simple change.

molten shell gives armour based off a product(some formular) of int, ES and mana regen, currently molten shell for casters is pointless, it gives nothing, but i use molten shell on my 2h crit staff, cause i have the armour scaling to make it worth it. having it work this way also takes it away from iron will chars who do also get the iron will scaling. could potentially hike its requirement up to 250int simply just to make sure, but that feels like brute force method

It's almost as if GGG actually wants people to use mana flasks. They exist in the game for a reason, and yet people act like they're allergic to mana flasks and will do anything to avoid them.

Mana flasks don't work because of the reservation issue. You simply do not have enough unreserved mana to effectively use mana flasks at high levels.

That said, they are great at low/mid levels. Or if you purposely don't reserve your mana by giving up an aura.