imo Mana, Energy Shield and Leech are not good enough

"

Andrius319 wrote:

Psss..

I have one end game spell caster, and she eats a lot of mana and i don't give a crap about mana consumption.

There is one pretty simple way to solve mana problems as i did with nearly no investment at all.

All u have to do is to pick right mana potion and not a strongest one but a right one. U have to aim that mana regeneration with mana flask would be same as mana drain while casting, in this way u wont run out of mana and flask's mana regeneration won't stop (as it won't refill you mana orb) until u end your casting streak.

mana pot is clunky according to people-they don't wanna use then instead of other flasks. Which is another example of people not willing to sacrifice deeps/defenses for proper resource management.

This thread is blowing my mind. Given its opening and the 14 pages of text following, it could potentially be a prolifically productive discussion of the current resource management imbalance in mana and life or life substitutes and the failure of the game to forecast to new players the viability of build paths that at first appear natural. Instead, this thread is Snorkle having to justify his well-stated opinions to people who have contrary opinions without solid logical foundation.*1

Some valuable points made so far involve mana reservation, covering up an already flawed system with crutches that are then taken away without resolving the fundamental flaws, and the inequality of life vs life substitute vs mana and the accompanying inequality in flask usefulness. I'm trying to salvage this discussion because I, like snorkle, see a part of the game that fails to live up to expectation (my own of how I want it to be AND the expectation of what it will be given what it tells me about itself), and because there is therefore ground to be made in the discussion.


*1 - I say without solid logical foundation because they operate under the assumption that his subjective opinion is flawed because it either doesn't match theirs (clear failure of ability to argue) or because it doesn't match an objective reality while the arguer has no solid basis for either establishing an objective reality or evidence outside his own subjective opinion. I won't name and shame, but it's clear from reading this thread who's perpetuating the dysfunctional direction of the 13 pages following the first. For the record, this is the same failing premise of Jerry Springer quotes "You don't know me, you can't judge me" or the high-school drop-out wanna-be philosopher "There is no objective truth, you can't prove anything" etc.

"

grepman wrote:

drop faster casting and replace it with RM gem.

....seriously tho


drop a dps gem for reduced mana....


no one serious is taking that seriously mate. I appreciate the lengths you are willing to go to defend your point but what you just suggested does not leave us with a functioning character. Ghost Reaver is literally keeping this build alive, even if I just dropped the atziri gloves I wouldnt have a build. Its not only leech but instant leech that even puts this build in place where you can take on proper high maps with hard mods. The bit of my tree at templar you didnt understand was intuitive leap, the templar jewel slot is taken, thats how Im saving 3 passives while getting all those notables and my extra endurance charge.

You literally wouldnt have a character doing what you suggest, I appreciate you managed it but what you did to manage it is the whole reason we have this thread, as Vince points out. Im aware of everything you suggested, but it is absolutely insane, you must see that right? This is a very average cast speed build with low cost supports, and what you suggested would completely gut multiple parts of the character that are needed for it to even work. You cant drop es leech, you cant drop any es, armour or life, its already not got quite enough of those. If you look at the gear level were using here to end up with a character that couldnt clear a lot of rare yellow tier maps, thats not realistic.

How do you expect a healthy spellcaster meta based on ci, hybrid and low life energy shield builds to come into play when you describe a build that uses, god knows, probably over 300ex of gear to literally end up with a char that doesnt work? This has to work on self found gear if its going to be a thing. The self found cant be expected to clear a rare 77 map unless ur finding some heavy duty items, but it has to function in endgame at roughly the same level of effectiveness as bows, melee, summons, coc, wanders, totems etc are. And if its going to do it on mana regen that has to be possible with a character that is ending up in the same effectiveness ballpark as all those other types of builds too.



edit: and one thing, you suggest using reduced mana gem and then fundamentally destroying my passive tree. Why wouldnt I just use a mana leech gem instead of reduced mana and leave my passive tree as it is? Is mana leech gem also broken in your opinion? Mana leech that basically no one uses because its that bad an idea in the way people have played this game since the start of open beta.

"

grepman wrote:

I can't wait till all builds are forced to be managing resources. Can't fucking wait.

why? why does that make you happy? You would kill the game, you understand that right? Everyone who has a good build right now is not doing what you are suggesting, so you are suggesting killing every good build in play right now, all the builds whos capabilities the entire games difficulty has been balanced around. So you destroy everyone who knows how to make a builds characters, you completely destroy the balance of difficulty across the entire game, you lose your entire player base.... and you cant wait?

Theres investing in resources.

Theres investing in defenses.

Theres investing in hp.

Theres investing in sustain.

Theres investing in damage.

Theres a lot of investing going on in characters. You would love it if resources were so important to invest in that they take priority over all those other things. Ok, fair enough, but i dont agree. I think investing in resources should be the least demanding of all those. Look how many life nodes are on the tree, look how many damage nodes, now look how many mana nodes are there. See what Im saying? the game is not designed for you to be making the same spend into resources as damage and defense, not passively, not on gear, nowhere. Because its the least fun thing to invest in and the least meaningful, varied and interesting.

This witch build in the example pulls of feats of multiple investment, mana, es, life, armour, cast speed, spell d, crit chance, crit multi, leech... and what we end up with is just about worth it. Im happy with it, its exactly how I expected it to function thereabouts, it works just how it is now without further compromising anything. But its a build that is resting on its gear, this would not function in an acceptable way on anything short of an insane budget. This build would not get any real benefit from the suggestions Im making, and it doesnt need them, people doing this on a budget need them. Casters are weaker than attackers now, I dont mind that this char doesnt compete with my melees. But the budget version of this is not even a viable choice and thats why no one plays them at those levels. What you suggested is not viable, and you want everything to be like that. Not every area of investment can demand you entire character is built around it, if this was an expensive supports, max cast speed everywhere type build then yes, you should expect doing something extreme that something extreme is demanded. This is just bog standard, very average cost and cast speed self casting we are talking about on a class that has to warp their entire build around their survivability investments because its been decided that casters are glass cannon and have to work to the bone to get survivability while maintaining enough damage to clear content.



When do you ever see someone putting together a gear set like Im using here to make a character now days? Im willing to do it because i can throw together gear like that just for science, to see how it works first hand and know what Im talking about. Charan was talking about evasion ci and questioning if its viable, everyone has an opinion of course.



how many of them went off and crafted gear like this to actually try it out and know what they are talking about from experience? Its viable, I can say that because Ive actually done it, but it has issues, some serious issues and while its viable with that level of gear its not matching the alternatives and that gap is only going to get bigger and bigger as you come down from gg gear to self found gear. As a result I made a suggestion about bloodrage. I can sit here and say well its viable the way I did it, but when do you see people using gear like this? Whens the last time you looked at someones build guide and saw this sort of stat configuration? The proof is in the meta, if it was in a healthy position people would be playing it more. Diagnosing exactly where the issue is and what needs changed, that needs people to actually go off and try these builds out, but you can see something is not right from the complete lack of ci evasion builds going on. How many endgame self cast projectile spellspammers are going mana regen and hybrid/ci type int defenses now days? Something is wrong with them and no matter how satisfied you are with them, people are not going to play them until they are 'better'. How many hybrid casters and ci casters do you currently play grepman? You have your profile set to private so we cant actually see what sort of builds you play and how you spec them.

You can take the position that the reason no one plays them is because people are playing broken alternatives that need nerfed. But the alternatives in most cases are still not as good as many builds in many other areas, so to nerf them would cause a massive game imbalance that would see even less people playing casters. You would have the entire game rebalanced around the issue rather than fixing the issue, I dont agree and I dont think we are ever going to agree. I respect your opinion grepman, and I too have a love for the punishing, demanding aspect of this game. I like that they turned up the difficulty of content etc. But were never going to see eye to eye on this, and really it doesnt matter, Rory and Qarl have their opinions, whatever they see eye to eye on is what happens.

"

Biznits wrote:

*1 - I say without solid logical foundation because they operate under the assumption that his subjective opinion is flawed because it either doesn't match theirs (clear failure of ability to argue) or because it doesn't match an objective reality while the arguer has no solid basis for either establishing an objective reality or evidence outside his own subjective opinion. I won't name and shame, but it's clear from reading this thread who's perpetuating the dysfunctional direction of the 13 pages following the first. For the record, this is the same failing premise of Jerry Springer quotes "You don't know me, you can't judge me" or the high-school drop-out wanna-be philosopher "There is no objective truth, you can't prove anything" etc.

I dont operate under assumption that someones opinion is flawed because it matches theirs- on the contrary I respect each and every person's opinion in this thread. as a programmer, I argue strictly and only strictly under terms of logic.

my point has a very solid logical foundation Ive restated many times-

1) top tier builds dont sacrifice shit for resource management and treat it (resource management) like an annoying sore that needs to be bandaided.
2) people want casters to be brought up to the level of top tier builds in terms of resource management. not to 190 builds that exist in poe, but the top 10. not ice shot or cleave, but cyclone or pa.


there is nothing subjective about that. those two points are facts.
from that, a simple conclusion follows that really casters want to not sacrifice *as much* shit to get resource management.

my point is that, if everyone is striving for 'perfection' and 'efficiency' and everyone tries to emulate what the top tier builds do (which is not spend precious nodes or gems for resource management) then why not get rid of cost of spells altogether ?

if all the casters are trying to do is to not spend time resource management, why do we even need mana ? and why are people then pretending like they care about resource management ? if for them its a tool that is just a springboard to sustain health and damage, why act like its important ?

"

Snorkle_uk wrote:

no one serious is taking that seriously mate. I appreciate the lengths you are willing to go to defend your point but what you just suggested does not leave us with a functioning character.

wait what ? so again we go back to thinking inside the box. this character would not be functional character because it lost a tiny bit of deeps ? it couldnt do atziri ? it couldnt do high level maps ?

your opinion of what a functional character is for some reason the range from 1 to 2 in integers. why ?

"

You literally wouldnt have a character doing what you suggest,

I literally would. I can put this build together sometime and make a video. (I dont have acuities tho, but I'll manage) it wont be the best toon ever, sure. it wont compete with insane op builds, true. but it would be a functional toon able to clear maps effectively. theres very little difference between soloing with 40k dps arc and a 32k dps arc

"

but it is absolutely insane, you must see that right?

remember how I asked you about 20 mana nodes and you laughed at me ? that was a litmus test at what you consider 'insane'. I already knew since you consider the loss of one gem catastrophic, but still...you know that old joke how a guy asks a woman would she sleep with a random dude for 10,000,000 and shes like sure and he says what about 10 bucks and shes like who do you think I am...and he says we both know who you are, Im just trying to establish your price range...
same here I wanted to see how far you are willing to go to make actual sacrifices.

nothing personal and no offense meant here- just a joke. you're a good poster. but your range here is extremely thin. basically you are against anything more than an inch taken away from you in terms of damage or health/defense

"

How do you expect a healthy spellcaster meta based on ci, hybrid and low life energy shield builds to come into play when you describe a build that uses, god knows, probably over 300ex of gear to literally end up with a char that doesnt work?

once again, I do not care about meta. when we started this dicussion I asked to explain to me why a character in your opinion cannot sacrifice damage and health for resource management without using concepts of 'meta', 'ladder' and 'top builds'. saying 'only op builds can work in this meta' is a copout.

"

This has to work on self found gear if its going to be a thing. The self found cant be expected to clear a rare 77 map unless ur finding some heavy duty items, but it has to function in endgame at roughly the same level of effectiveness as bows, melee, summons, coc, wanders, totems etc are. And if its going to do it on mana regen that has to be possible with a character that is ending up in the same effectiveness ballpark as all those other types of builds too.

a self found gear toon likely wont have an endgame 6 link so his mana problems will be far less severe than yours. Ive done self-found toons pre and post 2.0 with 'not top tier' builds and I could clear high maps fine. that doesnt mean they were without problems, obviously- I play sc and Ive died a good amount of times, mostly to my own stupidity but sometimes to burst damage as well.

"

edit: and one thing, you suggest using reduced mana gem and then fundamentally destroying my passive tree. Why wouldnt I just use a mana leech gem instead of reduced mana and leave my passive tree as it is? Is mana leech gem also broken in your opinion? Mana leech that basically no one uses because its that bad an idea in the way people have played this game since the start of open beta.

well, to have your build not depend on 400ex gear and acuity ;) mana leech without acuity doesnt sustain indefinitely because theres a cap and its enqueued, and that's what I was trying to prove- sustain that is basically indefinite. Im aware you're losing a lot of defense without leech - we can keep it. when I build builds acuity is one of those things I never consider.

"

"

grepman wrote:

I can't wait till all builds are forced to be managing resources. Can't fucking wait.

why? why does that make you happy? You would kill the game, you understand that right?

no it wouldn't (come on man, youre too smart to be overdramatic like that.) - it would kill top tier builds and hopefully bring them down to the rest of the builds. I want to see people play underused skills and I want people to make real choices when it comes to resource management.

the thing is, people on the ladder are the only ones with a pass to play the most op/fotm/resourceless builds, because all they care about is being the first and being as fast as they can. no one else should (in my opinion, of course) be blindly following. I want the shittier builds to be more popular too, except I want them to be smart builds that rely on resource management, multiple skill juggling and such. like Ive said, Im a selfish guy but so is everyone else- we just are on different sides of the barricade.

"

Everyone who has a good build right now

when you say good I say they're 'op' builds. you think the 'good' builds are the ones that people on the ladder use. I disagree vehemently. we arent going to ever see face to face on this.

"

is not doing what you are suggesting, so you are suggesting killing every good build in play right now, all the builds whos capabilities the entire games difficulty has been balanced around.

yes I suggest killing every op build out there. cyclone ? gone zero-cost/GR+MOM+EB incinerate ? outta here. pa ? lolstop its over

I disagree that the game is balanced around those builds; the game is balanced the ladder PLAYERS, as it should be. the ladder players find whatever takes the least amount of investment for the better good. they do a great job of showing GGG which builds stand out too much above the rest. they are basically lab rats that take the path of least resistance(c)

"

You would love it if resources were so important to invest in that they take priority over all those other things.

I did not say that. even if you dedicate 20 nodes to mana, thats still only less than a FIFTH of all nodes on the whole tree. 20% is hardly bigger than 80% to divide between damage and defenses.

I said make meaningful investments. a meaningful investment would be, yeah something like 20%. the problem is that solutions that you propose to resource management problems arent the ones where youd sacrifice something. you simply are buffing numbers in nodes YOU ALREADY TAKE so that nothing is conceptually changed. so again, there is very, very little you want to sacrifice- lets call spade a spade here. Im not saying you personally btw- basically that your solutions are solutions not to make management interesting and meaningful, but - on the contrary- make it go away as painlessly as possible.

"

Because its the least fun thing to invest in and the least meaningful, varied and interesting.

NOW we're getting somewhere- it took strangely a while for this admittance. but unlike other posters, I knew this would come- youre too good of a poster to not say this eventually. this is what I asked people to say in the first place - that resource management is least fun or interesting or meaningful to you and therefore you want to minimize it, and not try to kinda dance behind other explanation for it. thank you for your honesty.

"

This witch build in the example pulls of feats of multiple investment, mana, es, life, armour, cast speed, spell d, crit chance, crit multi, leech... and what we end up with is just about worth it. Im happy with it, its exactly how I expected it to function thereabouts, it works just how it is now without further compromising anything. But its a build that is resting on its gear, this would not function in an acceptable way on anything short of an insane budget. This build would not get any real benefit from the suggestions Im making, and it doesnt need them, people doing this on a budget need them.

again, we seem to have a quite different understanding of what a build 'working' means. to you getting rid of one faster casting gem means the build isnt working. to you a 'working' build is a top tier build that wrecks any content. to me, its not that - and that kind of mindset makes me sad because people miss out on really cool and interesting builds (to me) because op builds exist and people get jelly. these build would not be as cool if they cleared as fast as the top builds.

"

What you suggested is not viable, and you want everything to be like that.

not viable for who ? for top ladder players ? absolutely not.
this is why anything top ladder players play will get nerfed besides builds that arent clearly op. I posted the definition of op builds before- feel free to disagree with me. it involves getting as much damage as possible with good clear speed, for as little cost as possible and be able to put the rest into eHP. while throwing resource management an ugly bone in a form of a quick fix. that essentially what 'good' or 'op' builds are, with very few exceptions

"

Not every area of investment can demand you entire character is built around it, if this was an expensive supports, max cast speed everywhere type build then yes, you should expect doing something extreme that something extreme is demanded. This is just bog standard, very average cost and cast speed self casting we are talking about on a class that has to warp their entire build around their survivability investments because its been decided that casters are glass cannon and have to work to the bone to get survivability while maintaining enough damage to clear content.

the glass cannon aspect I can agree on, in terms of dual impact; however, you and I again have different opinions of what 'extreme investment' is. to me, 20 nodes or 2 gem slots isnt extreme investment- to you, it clearly is and then some; and the thing is, most attack-based builds just take the same trite bandaids such as bm gem/keystone/etc. they do have access to natural leech so thats one area I think casters can be compensated there just a tiny, tiny bit especially since leech has been nerfed

"

I can sit here and say well its viable the way I did it, but when do you see people using gear like this? Whens the last time you looked at someones build guide and saw this sort of stat configuration? The proof is in the meta, if it was in a healthy position people would be playing it more.

so again- youre discussing the meta moreso than resource management. thats why I wanted to separate the two in the first place. meta is cyclical. poe is cyclical. this is why no nerfs or changes will ever kill the game.

"

Something is wrong with them and no matter how satisfied you are with them, people are not going to play them until they are 'better'.

or...wait for it...until the rest are 'worse'. this is the end from where I come from- yes, many will disagree. and that's ok. I dont hold my opinion to be the utter truth. but you have to understand where I come from too. the game isn't punishing enough to me. theres still waay too much faceroll from top builds for my liking. I never support the 'buff 190 other skills than nerf 10 op skills' mantra and never will because not only its pretty flawed, but also illogical in terms of balancing.

"

How many hybrid casters and ci casters do you currently play grepman? You have your profile set to private so we cant actually see what sort of builds you play and how you spec them.

none. Im not playing poe atm after the flashback league- Im a bit burned out, I'll come back when talisman hits maybe. its not because of meta or anything - I like the game now a lot too. CI builds are very special to me, I always go from hating them to liking them a lot to hating them (regardless of meta). maybe Ill make a ci/hybrid caster in the talisman. take a skill everyone deems shitty and have fun with it

"

I respect your opinion grepman, and I too have a love for the punishing, demanding aspect of this game. I like that they turned up the difficulty of content etc. But were never going to see eye to eye on this, and really it doesnt matter, Rory and Qarl have their opinions, whatever they see eye to eye on is what happens.

fair enough. I respect a good debate- we've had a lot of those at this point already. cheers.

.


I strongly agree with OP.

Casters cant do much actually. PoE have changed, it's not anymore the game I loved to play as caster.


,

"

grepman wrote:

NOW we're getting somewhere- it took strangely a while for this admittance. but unlike other posters, I knew this would come- youre too good of a poster to not say this eventually. this is what I asked people to say in the first place - that resource management is least fun or interesting or meaningful to you and therefore you want to minimize it, and not try to kinda dance behind other explanation for it. thank you for your honesty.

admittance? its a fact pure and simple that should be obvious to most people. I dont want it to go away, I want to it to appropriate. And right now it is appropriate for every form of fueling your attacks except for mana regen.

Pre 2.0 my mana leech melee builds used a lvl20 reduced mana, 4 nodes invested into mana on the tree and a 2% mana leech stat on gear. Now my melee builds invest 8 points into mana, use a lvl3 enlighten and have a mana leech stat somewhere. Doubled the passive investment, made the gem investment more costly, am I complaining? Not about the passive investment. I have to take an extra 4 nodes, ok, thats fine, not insignificant but its fine.

This arc build, Im taking 12 nodes that have mana on them, and yes some also have life on them, thats fine. Hybrid nodes are a thing because they realised if you want people to be able to spec things like armour%, evasion%, mana etc, given their importance along side life% and damage%, you couldnt expect people to spend more than 3 to 8 points on pure defense nodes tops. So to allow room for a 20+ point investment in defense they made hybrid nodes, defense with damage, defense with life etc. Because that is what is realistic, that actually works. You do a lot of presuming about me "you think this and that" "you only look at ladder builds" loads of stuff that is so wrong it makes it hard to take talking with you seriously, because it would take a short book about myself just to shake all that nonsense out of your head. My presumption is that you hate hybrid nodes, I may be wrong, but that seems like the kind of guy you are. We have hybrid nodes in the tree, theyve been growing as a thing, I feel that the devs like them, understand what Im saying? You dont really take more than 3 dedicated accuracy nodes now, but you get maybe 10+ nodes with accuracy on in your build and you back it up with 1 to 4 gear stats, then you are good to go. This is appropriate investment for the significance of that mechanic in the bigger picture. Its not making accuracy go away, its making it appropriate.

I dont really care what you think I think, and I dont really care how you think the game should be. I respect your opinion but I dont share it, and ultimately it doesnt matter enough to me to carry on the discussion. My feedback has been given.

"

grepman wrote:

mana pot is clunky according to people-they don't wanna use then instead of other flasks.

It's not clunky, but a waste and possibly a deadly option. The indispensable combo I use on almost all my chars:


All of those are strictly needed. Two life pots with staunching & heat, one elemental pot with warding (other elemental flasks with warding sit in inventory and are switched accordingly), granite (in this case rumi's, but usually granite with iron skin) and strictly needed quicksilver.

There is no space for mana pots! I'd do every mana management (even use the crappy mana leech), before I resort to using pots. I only use mana pots when leveling, never at endgame.

Now if GGG would give us another flask slot, then I'd maybe think about mana pots, maybe, but probably just use another elemental flask. Combat is too deadly and spikey for mana pots wasting your precious slots.

---- E:

Another reason why mana pots are pure garbage: their duration ends when your mana is full, which means they are almost useless for all suffixes that need duration, like warding, adrenaline, iron skin... In that regard a mana pot can only replace a life pot (insta effects like staunching, heat...), which is a non-option.

"

morbo wrote:

---- E:

Another reason why mana pots are pure garbage: their duration ends when your mana is full, which means they are almost useless for all suffixes that need duration, like warding, adrenaline, iron skin... In that regard a mana pot can only replace a life pot (insta effects like staunching, heat...), which is a non-option.

And because you mostly reserve your mana, so your actual mana does not allow for not casting anything, since you will fill up your mana and stop the regen of the flask (if you need to move etc).

Mana reservation in the current form needs to go if manaflask should be an alternative worth thinking about in any build.