What happens if you remove mana?

Okay, mana management seems to be troublesome in this game and maybe a problem, if you want to know in detail check threads from people who have explained it better than i could.

So what would happen if you just took out mana? What if mana would instead be a requirement of sorts to be able to use skills (and include a new mechanic based on it for skill cooldown) and you just take out mana management entirely? Would this work? Or not? What would happen? Etc

You could at least provide links to the better-explained threads. You said mana being a requirement, you mean like Intelligence? It would be redundant if so.

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gonzaw wrote:

What if mana would instead be a requirement of sorts to be able to use skills

I don't understand what you mean by this statement at all.

In general though, if you take out resource management you'd have to put everything on cooldowns. From there you can go two ways that I'm aware of:
1) Include heavy cooldown reduction mechanics. Everybody stacks CDR until they can spam their uber ability of choice. See Sacred 1 & 2.
2) No CDR, or very limited CDR. People build a "rotation" or "priority" around the cooldowns of their most powerful/useful abilities. See most popular MMOs.

It can work, really has to be well-designed to work well. I think it is no better or worse than mana management, just different.

I hate MMOs so much.

No cooldowns, I don't even like the ones we currently have.

Mana is a good thing as it keeps builds in check. If you have to worry about resource management that's points away from EHP or DPS. The problem at this time is even with a massive investment through passives and gear it doesn't work as well as the lower investments of using mana leech or BM.

The fun of a game of this sort is being able to spam skills and move quickly. Adding cooldowns would require more active skills so less combinations through gem sockets also would dramatically slow down play pace.

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Nobake wrote:

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gonzaw wrote:

What if mana would instead be a requirement of sorts to be able to use skills

I don't understand what you mean by this statement at all.

In general though, if you take out resource management you'd have to put everything on cooldowns. From there you can go two ways that I'm aware of:
1) Include heavy cooldown reduction mechanics. Everybody stacks CDR until they can spam their uber ability of choice. See Sacred 1 & 2.
2) No CDR, or very limited CDR. People build a "rotation" or "priority" around the cooldowns of their most powerful/useful abilities. See most popular MMOs.

It can work, really has to be well-designed to work well. I think it is no better or worse than mana management, just different.

For instance, you would need X mana before using LA. If you link Chain to it, youd need even more mana to be able to cast it. You could also make mana determine the cooldown of skills, the more additional mana the less cooldown you have. Basically make every skill like mana reserved auras in a way (or differently if this doesnt work)


^^^sorry im on phone so i cant really search for it. Im sure ive seen some other threads discuss it, along BM and auras, etc

Okay back on PC

SO yeah, the forum search options suck so I couldn't really find the threads I was talking about.


The thing is that mana is more of a burden than a gameplay mechanic one looks forward to use.
Not only that, but you basically need to stack mana and mana regen just to keep a constant/semi-constant use of skills, which again seems like a burden, since you'll have to "waste" gear affixes to get them, or "waste" nodes to do so.

Yeah someone else explained it better than I did.....but yeah it certainly feels like a "burden" at times, specially if you have no BM nor EB.
There's also the fact most of your mana is "wasted" for this reason. You need mana regen the most, so if you have 1000 mana, you'll use 200 of it at a time, which it'll regen instantly. That's 1800 mana "wasted"
If it's not wasted, it's used to stack auras, which doesn't help the "everybody stacks auras" issue either.


I was toying with this idea though (not actually suggesting it, but just putting it out there and see what people think about it)


Remove the "Use mana to cast" mentality. Instead, add a "Skill point" of sorts.
You need these points to even use your skills.

If you want to use Burning arrow, yeah you need only 8 SP. You would start with 10-20 SP so this wouldn't matter. Once you equip BA, your SP is reduced by that amount, like with auras (so you'd end up with 2-12 SP then)

The more skills you equip, the more SP it reserves.
When you use Support Gems, their "increased mana cost" still holds true, but this time to SPs.
So a normal BA would require you to have 8 SP, while a BA+BM would require you 16 SP.

Everything else works the same, when leveling up the SP requirement for skills goes up, etc.

What about cooldown? There should be a basic cooldown for when you have exactly 0 SP left. Maybe use a skill and wait 1 second before using it again (depends on skill).


I was thinking that you can choose, for each skill, how many "additional" SPs you can use for cooldown

Let's take the BA example again:
You have 15 SP, and you pick up BA. It uses 8 SP, so when you equip it you have 7 SP left.
This skill has a cooldown of 2 seconds.

However, you can choose to allocate your 7 SP left to BA, so the cooldown now is of 0.5 seconds.
If you somehow get more SP, and allocate a "maximum" amount to it, BA won't have any cooldown at all.


Sounds easy right? Well...yeah if you have a single skill with no support. If you choose to get more skills, you'll need to reserve more SP to that one, so the original skill you used will have a higher cooldown.
Support gems increase the amount of SP needed to reduce cooldown as well.


Another possibility is just have a "general" cooldown reduction cost for everything. Every skill has a relative cooldown you can reduce by allocating spare SP, but not individually but globally.
Dunno though, was just an idea.


Would something like this work? What changes would it need to do so?
Would this have an impact on other stuff? (and again, if it could be changed accordingly, would those impacts still be there?


I'm mostly toying with this idea....because nobody else is :P

I do think the Sacred series got it best because you had the option of keeping skills always available and essentially free or making them into longer cooldowns. But this game is way too far along to make such a radical change. Best we can hope for is more tools to handle mana.

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Moosifer wrote:

I hate MMOs so much.

No cooldowns, I don't even like the ones we currently have.

Mana is a good thing as it keeps builds in check. If you have to worry about resource management that's points away from EHP or DPS. The problem at this time is even with a massive investment through passives and gear it doesn't work as well as the lower investments of using mana leech or BM.

The fun of a game of this sort is being able to spam skills and move quickly. Adding cooldowns would require more active skills so less combinations through gem sockets also would dramatically slow down play pace.

Agree entirely. Mana management is a lot like accuracy where you can get a lot out of investing into nodes for it, but can be entirely ignored for a small cost instead.

I have to ask, OP, do you think mana potions have a purpose in this game, or would you rather that basic regen was good enough for skill use? Currently I think mana potions don't exactly scale well due to using as many charges as a life potion, I imagine people would find them less of a "burden" if their charge use was smaller but effect brought down to scale.

The game lacks any real "big" skills that soak up a lot of mana and once your regen is almost 1:1 with your main attack skill, you don't need any more. Arctic armour is the first thing to be of any use to a player with higher than before necessary regen. There's maybe a couple supports that increase damage and mana enough on a skill to turn it into a "nuke" which is why its best to just focus on your main attacks mana management.


One thing I think might work was if you could always use a skill if you didn't have enough mana for it, but its effectiveness was equivalent to the amount of mana below its cost you were at when casting. So if you used a 100 mana skill with only 20 mana remaining, you'd deal only 20% damage with it, or have its duration lowered to 20%, etc. Though I don't think its entirely necessary.

Mana potions seems nice and dandy in low-levels when alternate skills are a "commodity" and you can easily use your normal attack with no problems, it's even fun at times (relatively)

In higher levels when your default attack completely sucks and you are forced to use skills, they become a hassle, both to manage, for the "waste" of another granite/life flask, and just frustrating to have to see the right hand orb and see when it's empty enough to bring a flask on (slightly distracting you from the stuff in the screen).
Also a hassle to manage in terms of charges and the like. If you have more than 1 mana flask (like I had in previous chars) you have to constantly check how much charges both have left to see when to use certain skills and when not to use others, etc.

It's just "too much", specially considering how "easy" and "lazy" using BM is....where you just have to check your life and pop in life flasks and nothing else (which you are doing without BM anyways)

EDIT: Or how "easy" and "lazy" it is to pump EB or high mana regen and basically know you have enough mana to not use a flask ever

EB and high regen is a very huge investment, even if you don't have to worry about mana anymore you'll have a lot less life and could have spent the regen passives/item mods on necessary life.

Blood magic itself isn't so bad because it limits aura use, but it does mean that mana management that would likely require nodes to cover is instead ignoreable. Same with managing accuracy and RT. Theres arguements against both as to whether losing auras/crits that would otherwise require investment to make use of anyway are a fair trade when its only 1 point spent on the keystones.

The truely easy way to avoid mana costs is to just use a mana leech gem however, as there's no need at all to worry about regen or potions if the mana cost of the skill is covered. Considering most builds only need use 1 main attack skill this doesn't mean any loss other than 1 socket.

I've currently got an EB build with max'd regen, capable of running arctic armour at all times. But I might have been smarter to have just put a mana leech gem on my main attack instead of investing all these points and gear into mana. Or better yet, have gone with blood magic and lost no survivability and have a much easier time handling regen. Before arctic armour was added my current character felt like a big mistake.