any mana leeching mobs in the game ?

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raics wrote:

Enemies don't have mana.
Therefore they don't need (or use) mana leech.

Enemies definitely do have and need mana. I don't think there are any enemies currently with mana leech, but it wouldn't surprise me much.

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raics wrote:

It's a percentage of damage done, it doesn't actually drain target's mana (which would actually render it useless versus monsters).

This part is true - mana leech doesn't remove the enemy's mana, it gives you mana based on the damage done to the enemy.

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raics wrote:

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Vipermagi wrote:

Spark Mages pretty clearly run a tight budget; they quickly fall back to their slow single-projectile Spell. Ape Chieftains used to spam the crap out of their Frenzy Charge cry if you gave them Blood Magic, which seems to imply they basically use that whenever they have sufficient Mana?

Now that you mention... it seems to be just the case. Truth be told, I wasn't really expecting devs to go to all the hassle to implement such a feature if it would be simpler to make enemy skills timer-operated.

That wouldn't be simpler though. We already have to have mana costs on skills, mana regen, maximum mana, etc in the game. Making monsters use an entirely separate system instead of the one we already have to have is a lot more work. Making them use mana, and having skill frequencies limited by mana costs vs regen values takes literally no extra work, because those are all things already in the game. Implementing skill timers would take a whole bunch of work, the first part of which would be going to the trouble of removing the mana systems from monsters.

Obviously it doesn't matter much for monsters that only use default attacks, and there are plenty of monsters we don't want to run out of mana because their 'standard' skill is one with a cost that we want them to always use, but most monsters with skills that are only sometimes used are, and have been for a long time, using mana* - such as the blood ape chieftains, who as noted above, will spam the skill if given blood magic, because they no longer run out of mana. I'm pretty sure at least at one point there was a monster with mana gain on hit in order to make it use the default attack a few times before casting a bit spell, but my memory's fuzzy on the details.
Incidentally, our initial reaction to players working out they could manipulate spectre behaviour with blood magic like that was "awesome" followed by implementing a system so the values of their max mana are closer to what players would expect so this worked in a better way.

*although in modern times some things are done with cooldowns as well, particularly for bosses with a variety of skills where we want them to use one when another's unusable, which is harder to do just with mana.