imo Mana, Energy Shield and Leech are not good enough

I theorycrafted a level 90 EK build that would do ~50k dps w/ a 6L around level 90 and good-ish wands. That ripped at ~20k dps on a 4L. This being a build intentionally going over to Templar to pick up Reduced Mana Cost of Skills. This was an Acrobatics build, simply because I wanted to prove a point. Ironically, this thing didn't die to physical damage but to that Orchard boss fireball. Woops.

My revised plan for this build is to use Reduced Mana instead, and despite the loss of the slot, it is still projected hit similar endgame dps as my ripped EK design. ~40k with moderately good gear and ~50k if stretched. Neither build can have mana problems. The second, was by design, supposed to be easier to level.

I didn't use ZO, EB, Blood Magic or SR gimmicks and both builds were using underleveled Clarity.
Reduced Mana is actually good now as a mana econ gem because it actually benefits more from additive stacking rather than multiplicative stacking. By quite a lot. (For the same reason that ehp scales geometrically w/ resists, the same goes for effective mana and reduced mana costs.)

I have a 5L armored arcer from Tempest that's doing ~17,5k dps with a goodly amount of defenses (9% regen, 5 charges, chaos golem, 5,7k life and 10k AR). With a 6L leveled Empower it can maybe maybe hit ~19k or ~20k tooltip dps? I forget. This build emphatically does not use Reduced Mana.

Either way, this well beats the tooltip of 1.3 Foxtactics Arc, and adjusted for new mob health, is better because it is also running Lightning Pen. This build runs on a level 11 or 12 Clarity and the only notable unique is a Pledge of Hands. I never had mana issues throughout the leveling curve beyond early level mana flasking. The changes to Iron Will and Wrath are huge for strength casters.

And yes, I more or less calculated most of these mechanics beforehand on a spreadsheet and got exactly what I was expecting, except the mana boost from Pledge, which was really more a bonus than a necessity.

Could it be adjusted for Incinerate and do better? Yeah probably. But it's still very strong.
Arc is more like Split Arrow. It has nothing to appeal to tooltip heroes because that's not its place. It's a little homely but it's very good at what it does.

Hell, maybe I should just dust off Life/ES to see how far I can take it to spite all the naysayers.

"

Snorkle_uk wrote:

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Life Leech


I like the theory of the new leech, better on packs less so single target. Its just too nerfed though, the mechanical idea is sound the cutting leech down to 1/5 of its previous values was way too harsh.

Right now leech is at 1/5 of its old value right? 1% is now 0.2%, this desperately needs relaxed. 1/2 or 2/5 at the very least, 1% going down to 0.5% or 0.4%. The direction of the mechanics regarding packs vs single target is commendable but leech feels so bad now even for physical melee who have specced leech nodes.



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Mana


its crap, straight up mana is crap. Too often you just dont have the points to make mana work late game and the nodes arnt on the tree even if you could afford to spec them which you cant. Yes exceptions and yes steve with his 4L spell running around cruel A3 is doing ok, fine, no one cares. Late game fueling 6 links with spells that need to be throwing out 40k+ dps constantly spammed are not ok, you just cant even get half way to an acceptable mana sustain on an acceptable point investment in too many cases.

Mana pots? No, just no...

That's what i'm trying to say to GGG and want to see in new 2.1 big patch.
Same you can see here: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1475969

Let's believe GGG read that forum and care to buff leech node, leech gem, Add more skill point from quest, and other important changes, like buff melee.

This is going to sound rude, but really isn't meant to be. DeviantLightning, I'm not really sure what point you're making. If you could help draw it out for me a bit, I'd have a better idea how to frame it in light of the rest of the thread. It seems like you're going away from ES and needing to invest heavily into reduced mana in order to make it go well. The confluence of ES and mana is particularly problematic, but a look at my EK marauder I think is telling.

I was just updating my Iron Will EK Marauder from a league or two ago. As an Iron Will Marauder caster, I am full life+armor. My EK DPS is pretty good, but I run it with a blood magic gem and Haste+Hatred+Herald of Ash on mana. Are these ideal? Obviously not. Even if you just take the rough number of 20% more damage per gem slot, another gem other than blood magic would easily outweigh Herald of Ash. I could drop HoA and get dps/utility gem and run on mana, but the difficulty of getting enough mana to support that setup is a huge jump from the difficulty of running it as it is. I have tried it. I have to invest in exponentially more in order to get marginally less. He's only level 85. I use HoA not because I really want to, or because it's the maximum power level, but because I hit a wall where mana is too hard and I fall back on blood magic, and then incidentally use HoA because it's a 0-cost at that point. I have muddled into using it, and that seems to indicate a problem with the value of mana. I'm not into the top tier highest end builds, but if the returns continue on requiring exponentially more for marginally less, I'm not at all surprised if it just fails to be viable and people looking to build to the maximum feel really disappointed that it's not really a maximal option.

"

DeviantLightning wrote:

Hell, maybe I should just dust off Life/ES to see how far I can take it to spite all the naysayers.

Go ahead.

Your target is to get 20k life and clear maps in 3-4 minutes.

Good luck.

"

Biznits wrote:

This is going to sound rude, but really isn't meant to be. DeviantLightning, I'm not really sure what point you're making. If you could help draw it out for me a bit, I'd have a better idea how to frame it in light of the rest of the thread. It seems like you're going away from ES and needing to invest heavily into reduced mana in order to make it go well. The confluence of ES and mana is particularly problematic, but a look at my EK marauder I think is telling.

I was just updating my Iron Will EK Marauder from a league or two ago. As an Iron Will Marauder caster, I am full life+armor. My EK DPS is pretty good, but I run it with a blood magic gem and Haste+Hatred+Herald of Ash on mana. Are these ideal? Obviously not. Even if you just take the rough number of 20% more damage per gem slot, another gem other than blood magic would easily outweigh Herald of Ash. I could drop HoA and get dps/utility gem and run on mana, but the difficulty of getting enough mana to support that setup is a huge jump from the difficulty of running it as it is. I have tried it. I have to invest in exponentially more in order to get marginally less. He's only level 85. I use HoA not because I really want to, or because it's the maximum power level, but because I hit a wall where mana is too hard and I fall back on blood magic, and then incidentally use HoA because it's a 0-cost at that point. I have muddled into using it, and that seems to indicate a problem with the value of mana. I'm not into the top tier highest end builds, but if the returns continue on requiring exponentially more for marginally less, I'm not at all surprised if it just fails to be viable and people looking to build to the maximum feel really disappointed that it's not really a maximal option.

Okay, I just spreadsheet out the dps of an incinerate variant of my armored Arcist.
I use the following assumptions:
1) The build uses Incinerate w/ Iron Will + Fast Cast + Faster Proj + Fire Pen
2) The build has a 5L Pledge of Hands with about 150% spell damage
3) The build uses three jewels with about 90% spell damage
4) All gems are level 20 and full quality
5) The build is running a level 20 Anger and Purity of Fire
6) No other sources of strength except the skill tree.

The result? 23,600 tooltip dps that scales to 94,600 dps by stage three. This number not adjusted for Fire Penetration. (Or aura bonuses from nodes.)
If the build ever has to interrupt casting then the dps is at some point between the two extremes.
Frankly, this is way more damage than you actually need to do the so-called "0.2% of content." All this combined with reasonably good defenses. This build is by no means a glass cannon with a 6L and a level 4 Empower with a level 21 corrupted Incinerate.

The thing you don't get is that Reduced Mana Cost of Skills actually takes less investment than alternatives (ZO+EB+SR) simply because it is right next to things you do want (i.e. Armor, Life and Strength). And in many cases, I find that ~40% RM is more than enough to all but solve mana problems in conjunction with a very underleveled Clarity.

Consider also that there are attacker builds that use Blood Magic gem or keystone simply to pay for skills. The former sacrificing a gem slot to pay for skill and the latter giving up any serious number of auras. If you're committing an entire gem slot to pay for skills, then that should all but free you up to get damage and defenses to the exclusion of mana or mana-like mechanics.

So I have a complete and utter inability to understand just how much scaling you should have or where your expectations for diminishing returns are. Do you somehow think that every build should have 200k sustained dps in order to be a one percenter? Does it matter to those of us who don't no-life stream full time for a living? (And those guys don't always go for that kind of absurd dps. During the time that Arc was in vogue, almost nobody cared that it had theoretically bad single-target dps. And guess what? It still doesn't matter. Arc only seems bad because Incinerate is better.)

I'm far from thinking that there cannot be improvements to spells, but those are largely to do with how irritatingly clunky some of them are. Flame Totem and Incinerate have incredible handling characteristics compared to a lot of other spells and just fixing the quality of life issues of other skills would bring them up to tier 2 if nothing else. (Cyclone also lets you both move and attack while phasing through mobs and being stun immune for its duration.)

As for ES/life, ZO is easily fixed by simply having it apply to both life and ES regen simultaneously. It sounds way less broken then you think. In practice, your life isn't damaged most of the time, so you're only getting a fraction of your regen. Even if both pools are damaged, you're only regenerating what a life or CI build would proportionally get all the time.

"

The thing you don't get is that Reduced Mana Cost of Skills actually takes less investment than alternatives (ZO+EB+SR) simply because it is right next to things you do want (i.e. Armor, Life and Strength). And in many cases, I find that ~40% RM is more than enough to all but solve mana problems in conjunction with a very underleveled Clarity.

But isn't this the underlying issue of what is being said?
Why, may I ask, should an int class be forced to go into strength (blood magic, reduced mana) to solve mana issues?
Why is int class not be able to use int to solve mana issues?
What is the point of playing an int class then, when strength does everything better?

How was that different from 1.3 EB? Because RM is nominally red instead of blue? Nobody thinks twice about taking Melee Damage on SRS or Fire Penetration for Incinerate, and I don't see why it matters now. Mana Leech is green by the way. If red is not your color.

It's also a natural conclusion to spec red if you're life/ES. Templar very much seems to be about sustainability mechanics as a thematic thing (i.e. Regeneration, Reduced Mana and the strongest aura nodes are in that part of the tree).

I suspect out-of-the-box mana is useable but nobody wants to learn to multiply or, god forbid, give up an aura instead of a bunch of skill points, gear slots and gem slots to make sustainability work. You really need that Herald of Thunder on a cold caster, right? Totally a rational use of resources.

Low-level Clarity is the furthest thing from tedious too. You just level it. Mana problems solved until you really start dealing with 4L's and 5L's.

Since nobody will believe me unless I do the math I suppose I'll have to spend a few hours designing an off-green hybrid Witch for that. (Which sounds like insanity because you might as well just throw up your hands and CI for the same expense. It's basically the same thing at that point.)

I did also advocate putting aura nodes and reduced mana nodes directly in the Witch start, but that never happened.

"

sidtherat wrote:

it WONT HAPPEN. never. ever. this game has so many multipliers that even the mere possibility for something to have 5 scalars instead of 4 (example) throws ALL the balance out of the window. you try to fix it by removing resource management from the equation - but the problem is elsewhere and doing that wont fix a thing

You're completely wrong there. Even more complex games can be balanced, if developer knows what he's doing.

I will repeat - all "popular" spells (Incinerate, Flame Totem, SWT) actually have 3-4 times higher base (and total) DPS than other substitute skills. That's why they are so popular. Increase damage of all other spells, and suddenly all spells will be viable even despite you have to INVEST points into mana management.

On other hand, spells have 2-3 times higher base mana costs than attacks. You can balance that by giving them much higher DPS (like Incinerate), but since there exist things like Blood Magic or CoC in the game (meant to "bypass" mana costs), player will just be forced to use it (like OP stated). So, spell mana costs should be reduced in general, so going Blood Magic wont be mandatory for every spell.

Developers can and should balance all that.
With mentality like yours (proper balancing is impossible, creating good games is impossible, yada yada yada, so just eat all the shit you're given), there will be no progress. No good customer can ever accept that, me included.

Mana really is crap right now. With old EB, you could stack enough ES that mana regen didn't have to be a problem, even in half regen maps. But in 2.0...

Take my lvl 94 EK Shadow. It has Pledge of Hands, lvl 22 Clarity, around a 50% regen mod on three different accessories, good mana rolls on three pieces of gear (not counting the extra mana from Pledge), and 11 nodes on the tree that buff either mana or mana regen (six of those nodes are mana-only nodes and would never be used outside of mana-powered builds). Now you'd think that with all that I'd have PLENTY of mana regen, but I have JUST enough to constantly cast. Forget about lowered regen maps (unless I swap in Mana Leech, which non-mana builds don't have to do).

My 1.3 Dreamfeather build worked well on mana because there was no point in taking elemental Cleave past lvl 5, so mana cost was crazy low with Elreon accessories. In 2.0 with changes to gem scaling, it makes sense to get the main skill up to level 20, but mana sustain at that point is utterly obnoxious. Instead I've resorted to either Blood Magic (gem) or, preferably, Soul Taker. There is no longer a reason to use mana here since it would make the build less efficient in terms of running maps and even damage! Mana investment on the tree is too high to make it work and be worth it.

The worst case is any CI caster. Unless you do something funky with Elreon accessories and Reduced Mana, you need to waste your precious mana reserves on Clarity AND Discipline, leaving little room for any other auras/heralds on top of the mana you need just to be able to cast your spell. What if the Chaos Innoculation passive granted some "reduced Mana Reserved"? Or if there was a passive one node beyond CI that was designed specifically for CI casters?