0.95 Mana regen criticism

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BrecMadak wrote:

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BrotherLaz wrote:

- Mana increases spell damage. You do not stop casting when you run out, you just deal less damage.

- You cannot cast when you run out of mana, but there are very cheap abilities that don't do much damage and expensive ones that do more damage; forcing you to decide which would be better.

These two are reasonably well to be implemented. And what is great that it forces a player to decide that which way he should be playing by taking it into account. But should be tweaked for balance, needless to say.

100% agreed

The main benefit (not from individual perspective) of a slow recharge rate on mana relative to their total mana pool is the capacity for attrition - that is, for a player to be relatively depleted from a previous fight when going into the next one (or when the next one decides to arrive on its own). This is also possible with health, though it's generally more difficult (and more tense when it does occur).

The lack of attrition was a problem in Median XL, in my view - you only ever needed a single health potion to recover from a battle you'd won, and mana - while it could easily run out during a battle - either ran out during every battle or never did, with no in-between.

That said, the capacity for attrition may or may not be a design goal; if it is, the natural solution is to increase the mana pool (relative to flask capacity, baseline mana regeneration, and mana usage per fight).

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Skivverus wrote:

The main benefit (not from individual perspective) of a slow recharge rate on mana relative to their total mana pool is the capacity for attrition - that is, for a player to be relatively depleted from a previous fight when going into the next one (or when the next one decides to arrive on its own). This is also possible with health, though it's generally more difficult (and more tense when it does occur).

This is not mutually exclusive with solutions that do not prevent you from casting altogether. In fact, it would indicate the opposite, because attrition means low mana regen means if you run out you're a sitting duck for the next 30 seconds. Skyrim has this to an annoying degree, forcing you to get mountains of mana and mana regen just so you can finish a fight.

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Skivverus wrote:

The lack of attrition was a problem in Median XL, in my view - you only ever needed a single health potion to recover from a battle you'd won, and mana - while it could easily run out during a battle - either ran out during every battle or never did, with no in-between.

Mana is messed up in MXL because I discovered a few things too late:

- Base mana is always tied to base energy, so there must be mana growth per level or you're stuck with 10 mana forever.
- Spell mana costs can only scale (linearly) with level, not with anything else. If this makes the spell expensive at high level, people will simply downlevel it or find another spell (the '1 point into main spell, max synergy' sorc builds of 1.99 days).
- You cannot significantly change the mana mechanic in any other way: the only knobs you can turn are mana per level/mana per energy/mana regen rate.

There isn't much leeway to do anything interesting there, which is why I hoped to make mana more interesting in this game.

As for health, this is intentional in order to cut down on the number of potions you need to lug around. Having to constantly TP to buy new potions bloody sucks, and removing them from shops would lead to irritating Act 1 pot runs. The design goal here was something similar to Halo shields where if you can disengage for a while you can heal right back up.

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Skivverus wrote:

That said, the capacity for attrition may or may not be a design goal; if it is, the natural solution is to increase the mana pool (relative to flask capacity, baseline mana regeneration, and mana usage per fight).

I actually see some attrition in this game in the form of flask charges. Of course it is too easy to TP and recharge them but the foundation is there.

The issue I have with buffing regen so much is that it now is so superior to mana pool passives now.

Mana pool passives increase regen, and the rate of leeching, (and the pool), but who really cares about total pool if you have a reasonable amount already? 5% mana pool vs 30% regeneration seems a bit imbalanced.

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Xapti wrote:

The issue I have with buffing regen so much is that it now is so superior to mana pool passives now.

Mana pool passives increase regen, and the rate of leeching, (and the pool), but who really cares about total pool if you have a reasonable amount already? 5% mana pool vs 30% regeneration seems a bit imbalanced.

If all you care about is regen, mana pool and regen stack multiplicatively. You'll eventually get enough regen that mana pool is better for regen.

...not when the difference is 6x. you'd need getting +500% mana regen (and 0% mana pool) for it to be equivalent in regen effectiveness. I mean obviously at a 1:1 ratio mana pool is far better, but still it's pretty difficult to get more than lets say +300% regen. Not only that but with so much regen you probably wouldn't really want much or any more.

Hm.

500 mana, getting a +40% passive would give me about 3.9 mana per second.

Heh, still not worth it. Even if I grab the three closest ones for +120% (5 points total), it would still not be worth the passive points.

1800 mana got many passiv for manaregen and stats on items
Running out of mana ...
97 mana per second in
190 mana per second out

oh and btw:
the price for that is that you die if a monster looks on you.

What's your DPS with that set up and what spells/supports?

Still, with catalyzed flasks running you should not be running out of mana with *THAT* much regeneration.

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konfeta wrote:

What's your DPS with that set up and what spells/supports?

Still, with catalyzed flasks running you should not be running out of mana with *THAT* much regeneration.

mulitfirewall witch on level 58.
I have mulit + concentrate + fastercast + fireball

dps is hard to tell because of the concentrate bug but must be around 1k per fireball. 4 fireballs total but most time only one hits. So like 1-2k dps - resident.
I have all +fire/+spell/+castspeed passive and +fire/+spell/+castspeed gear.

Not much for my level but this is the only option to play firewitch after path. To be honest i used respec. i dont think you can level up to 60 with this build any more.

If i hit all my flask at once, i see no change in manapool at all. Flask are just useless if you want to play multi-shoot witch. BTW you dont need health flask too: everything oneshot you with this build...

SO here it is:
the mass mana, fire, glass witch that have to kite monsters of own level to kill them ...