imo Mana, Energy Shield and Leech are not good enough

"

Tempada wrote:

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?

"

koszmarnica wrote:

In my opinion life leeching have enough rate.

"

Ptirodaktill wrote:

What if we gain 2 mana per intelligence point instead of 1 mana per 2 int. I think that could solve mana problems for witches =)

"

Biznits wrote:

Ive been thinking this over, and I actually really like this suggestion as a starting point. Assuming most non-int, well-rounded characters get around 150 int to run their int aura or curse or whatever, they're currently getting 75 mana out of it. Getting 2 mana per int would mean they get 300 instead. Assuming that 75% of that is reserved, they're getting 75 net mana instead of 19. This might be a bit much seeing as that's usually 2-3 more attacks, but it wouldn't be the end of the world and might give people reason to flask. I like a smaller change, turning mana/int into a 1/1 ratio more. That would give them 150 mana, 38 net. This is a base double, but really only represents 1 more attack for a high level character. The far more important comparison is for int-based characters.

As it is, all my int characters leave the int tree in a hurry to get life nodes. What I like about this solution is that has a relatively small affect on non-ints, as seen above, but really helps where it's needed most. If an int leaves the int tree, they get less mana. If an int stays there, most notably with CI characters, they may be getting up in the area of 300/400 int, 600 at the most. This translates into going from unreserved 38/50/75 base mana added to 150/200/300, and again that seems to have scaling problems. Again, I feel a 1:1 makes more sense, ending up with 75/100/150 unreserved base mana added. This equates to 1/2/3 base casts added for the serious use 5L/6L spells.

Remember this is all just base usable numbers, and the numbers aren't the sum total of how to fix this. What I like here is the relative scaling you can see happening to classes heavy in int. Because all classes have some, all mana nodes increase in value because of higher base mana totals. Classes that are more likely to self-cast off mana and use high int gain the tools to do just that, while others don't. Others can still look to blood magic or reduced mana to play high usage skills, but ints don't have to look to them to pay their own schtick. Again, this is a relatively precise change as far as poe goes, and I think could set the stage for other balance improvements. It feels like this starts in the right direction and makes other suggestions more likely to make a difference.

To be clear and keep other suggestions separate, treat the following as other ideas that I think would be enhanced by the above:
Mana flasks could endure after full mana
Some reservation %nodes behind CI. It doesn't make sense that Blood magic gets this and CI doesn't, when the resource CI is giving up is even more valuable. This also lessens the gap between CI and low-life so they don't have to just nerf low-life every single patch.