Mortal Conviction needs a rework

The math on Mortal Conviction does not add up. Best case scenario you have Prism Guardian which gives 3 auras at 11% HP reserved. Or you can run 2 at 8% with the 3rd socket lvl 20 reduced mana. This assumes you spend the 80 ish points to get all the reduced mana reserved nodes. This would leave about 20 points left at level 80 for survivability and damage. If you run max auras then this would be fine. But it causes problems explained below. If you only want 2-3 auras then you can only realistically get (21% red for templar/marauder nodes or 25% near the ranger). This would make your 3 auras each cost 18% or 20% totaling 54-60% which is too much to be viable. Granted I understand that GGG doesn't want players to be aura-whores and run 5+ auras. However. If you run low life BM aura the max number of auras is 8. Running 8 auras leaves you with 7% HP assuming you can build enough ES to survive with a shavronnes. The real problem is the energy shield. If you rely heavily on ES, every attack prevents ES from regenerating due to BM which kills you without high life leech. Conversely if I want to run low life without blood magic and reserve both mana and life with Prism Guardian, alphas cowl, and 1 blood magic gem I get 9 auras. My abilities still cost mana and therefore ES will regen. If I only want 1-3 auras I reserve 40-70% of my mana which allows me to have full life, use BM on my damage skill and save my left over mana for Mind over Matter. Or I can run CI and just use the left over mana for my abilities. Either way I am both tankier and deal more damage. To me this rules out every possible application of the skill. If I am missing something feel free to comment. I can post the math for anyone that wants to see it.


TLDR:
1. More auras possible without BM and MC.
2. BM prevents ES from regenerating without LL or Zealots Oath.
3. The 'ideal' reduced mana reserved equires nearly 80 talents which makes your dps/survivability garbage.

I posted this to r/pathofexile a few minutes ago as well.

The "problem" with MC revolves around the fact that players want to have their cake and eat it too. BM has inherent upsides (0 resource management) and downsides (No safe auras). MC partially negates the downside (+1 safe aura ish).

BM gem needs to be changed or removed. Suddenly BM (and MC) become a potential choice.

BM+Mortal Conviction has some potential on a life/ES hybrid or ES-focused build, where it's feasible to sacrifice a large percentage of your life pool. Unfortunately, ES-heavy builds that also take life damage are difficult to manage because of the need to recover both life and ES in combat, so by going this route you're trading one compund resource management game (life/mana) for another (life/ES). But I'm sure someone could make it work if the incentives were there.

Pure life builds are never going to play well with BM + auras, unless the reservation cost goes down so far that it starts to become overpowered on ES-focused builds (for instance, I think a low-life Shavronne's build can deal with a bit of awkwardness around life if it means being able to run a huge pile of auras). Perhaps one fix would be the following:

Mortal Conviction:
- MUCH less life reserved (say 70% less)
- Skills reserve ES as well as life

This would make MC more appealing to pure life builds (who are presumably the 'standard' type of build to take Blood Magic) without letting the hybrid life/ES builds go wild.

Autocthon: In principle, throwing away all your mana ought to be quite a big downside even without the aura issue. Alternatively, using up a support gem slot is also a big downside, and the life cost of a 6l skill that includes BM gem can certainly be non-trivial (maybe not in the sense of 'impossible to sustain', but more 'seriously eats into your net rate of healing in combat'). I think the basic concept of the gem is reasonable. The issue is more the relative abundance of life and mana in the game at present (natural mana, as opposed to the silly amounts of mana that Eldritch Battery can generate).

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Incompetent wrote:

Autocthon: In principle, throwing away all your mana ought to be quite a big downside even without the aura issue. Alternatively, using up a support gem slot is also a big downside, and the life cost of a 6l skill that includes BM gem can certainly be non-trivial (maybe not in the sense of 'impossible to sustain', but more 'seriously eats into your net rate of healing in combat'). I think the basic concept of the gem is reasonable. The issue is more the relative abundance of life and mana in the game at present (natural mana, as opposed to the silly amounts of mana that Eldritch Battery can generate).

Removing mana management is almost never a downside. It's pure upside in almost every case excepting specifically the use of auras. Which is the main trade of the node. The gem on the other hand can be a non-trivial trade, but it is directly competing with the node making the node essentially a non-choice. Everything the node does the gem does better because you still get your auras for free.

Regarding mana, it exists per level and form gear at ~66% of the value life does (this is important because of MOM). People simply do not have any incentive to get mana on gear because it competes with other affixes that keep you alive. Whereas mana is an almost purely utility affix.

tl;dr: BM's loss of mana is never a downside with regards to casting, and the loss of auras are the "Keystone cost". Mana per level and on gear is fine from a value standpoint, but bad because it's non-competitive.

Although I'm glad Incompetent is aware of potentialities, I tend to agree with Autocthon the most here. BM keystone's main weakness is supposed to be difficulty running auras. As such, MC should be a node of niche utility, not one for mass consumption. In general, BM builds should have trouble running auras.

I'd increase MC to 50% less, but I wouldn't dare increase it more than that. Why? Same reasoning Incompetent gave: you'd have heavy-ES builds with Shavronne's or Lorica abusing the keystone to stack more auras than before. Even with a "50% less" MC, it would allow them to stack more than non-MC... but only about 1 aura more. All things considered, that's a fair trade for the extra passive points they'd need to spend. With "40% less" MC it's a break-even for such builds, and spending extra passive points should not be a break-even. The heavy-ES, MC auramancer build would become the "most all-in" auramancer build... and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.

The truth is that MC is not a node for Blood Magic, it's a node for Blood Magic combined with heavy ES. This is a rather eccentric combination, so I'm actually glad there is some degree of passive tree support for it; it should not be removed. Thus, I do not like Incompetent's idea of having MC require ES reservation, because it kills motivation for the only build I'm aware of which is currently close to using MC competitively. Additionally, it would require "casual" MC users to have some amount of ES which they can reserve away.

I've posted this in several threads before, but it's still how I feel... also, not so sure about the skill tree placement anymore (I made this image before Vaal Pact got moved — again)... but we still really need a keystone like this.

This would allow BM keystone users to go for a US+IR-style keystone combo — especially those who play in maps and/or solo, the two areas in which BM keystone needs the most help.

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Autocthon wrote:

Mana per level and on gear is fine from a value standpoint, but bad because it's non-competitive.

Mana itself as a stat is pretty solidly worthless in the current system. Mana Regeneration and Reduced Mana are the only ones budgeted at an impactful value.

In return for the 10 to 16 passive points, Clarity, and two suffixes devoted to it, you get around ~30% more damage instead of the Blood Magic Gem, 300 to 600 less life spent per second, and the ability to use Arctic Armour pretty much as much as you'd like.

But yeah I understand completely why people say "screw that" and then just use totems and spend points into damage or max resist% instead or whatever. Honestly it kind of peeves me off that the Witch isn't positioned to be able to take Mana Shield off the tree. All that investment to reach 200+ effective regen, and can't even use it to its maximum potential.

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LimitedRooster wrote:

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Autocthon wrote:

Mana per level and on gear is fine from a value standpoint, but bad because it's non-competitive.

Mana itself as a stat is pretty solidly worthless in the current system. Mana Regeneration and Reduced Mana are the only ones budgeted at an impactful value.

In return for the 10 to 16 passive points, Clarity, and two suffixes devoted to it, you get around ~30% more damage instead of the Blood Magic Gem, 300 to 600 less life spent per second, and the ability to use Arctic Armour pretty much as much as you'd like.

But yeah I understand completely why people say "screw that" and then just use totems and spend points into damage or max resist% instead or whatever. Honestly it kind of peeves me off that the Witch isn't positioned to be able to take Mana Shield off the tree. All that investment to reach 200+ effective regen, and can't even use it to its maximum potential.

That's why I said mana (valyues) are fine the problem is that it's non-competitive.

In a world where mana doesn't compete with defensive affixes, and mana nodes don;t compete with defensive nodes, it's fine. Sadly that's not our world. This is why D3 decided to redo affixes from essentially the ground up with the RoS release. Players only care about the one metric.

Hi there.
I cant understand the idea of having MC where and/or what does atm. It really needs a rework.

As was already said, a good idea is to increase the % reduced, which would lead to a possible use for Melee/Life builds (since the keystone is between Marauder and Duelist), but probably could improve even more the ES builds.

Personally i would like to still have it (i just play melees/life), but staying where it is, really need some sort of improvement... or just remove/move it and give us more aura nodes.

Melees always need way more currency/gear to match most builds, so more auras would be nice to try balance that.
To do great in late game as melee and mainly as duelist, you need extremely expensive items. At least in 90% of the cases Aegis shield is required (Legacy better). And thats probably the cheapest item.
Using BM keystone as Melee atm is just suicide or thousands of DPS loss, and defensive stats.

Why should anyone use bloodmagic keystone if you can use the gem and Hatred which gives the same dps like added fire for example and then you still can run 1 or 2 auras without investment

keep mortal conviction as-is, make blood magic node add mana to life total?