100% reduced mana cost hierophant

So with the new Hierophant ascendancy having 50% reduced mana cost, can you get 100% reduced mana cost for free skills?

I set up a skill tree to demo this idea.




This tree gets 35% reduced mana cost.
Hierophant can get 50% reduced mana cost from an ascendancy.
The reduced mana support gem gives 25% - 34% depending on level.

35 + 50 + 25 = 110% reduced mana cost?

So would spells just be free with this? Or am I completely crazy.

Yes, with 100% reduced mana cost, spells would be free. You'd have to support them all with the reduced mana gem though, or get more reduced mana from somewhere else.

Yup, 100% = free. Nice change to the Hierophant ascendancy.

With good ES leech, you could conceivably have 100% reduction just from that Ascendancy.

If your ES is low, ES on hit seems like the best idea. Leech is capped at 20% of max ES per second.

I wanted to write that originally, but the node we're talking about also grants 25% of mana as bonus ES.
So low ES isn't an easy feat, unless you go bloodmagic. And why would you, given that you get 10% of damage taken by mana, bonus mana, and with the reduction could probably reserve most of it.
Cleverly done by GGG. ;)

Or you could just take (in addition to the 35% reduced mana from skilltree) 3 jewels with 5% reduced mana each.. So you wouldnt need the gem and all your skills wouldnt cost mana.

You can get 47% reduced mana from the tree, all very close to Templar. So one jewel or ring with reduced mana makes all spells free. Meaning if you want you can reserve all of your mana with auras, with no need to go EB, allowing you to still have an effective ES over your life.

However, all of the Hierophant's sub-nodes give mana regen, and Divine Guidance gives 150 mana plus a mini-MoM, almost all of which is made completely useless if you're going full reserve. The 150 extra mana helps with the 25% of mana as ES buff a little, but that effect is also heavily weakened, since a full mana reserve build isn't going to be stacking mana.

A better way to go would be high-mana, moderate-low reserve, big life-ES hybrid with MoM(which looking at your tree it seems you intended). The high mana both buffs your ES and helps provide a high EHP for tanking big hits(though 90% of the time it'll feel useless, on those big hits EHP is vital), the reduced mana cost means that tanking a hit that depletes your mana pool doesn't leave you unable to cast anything for long(or at all if you hit 100% reduction), and the high mana regen means that part of your EHP bounces back from the hit almost immediately.

Only question being the classic hybrid dilemma of how to ensure your life bounces back from big hits and chaos while also being able to sustain your ES in general, since trying to restore both is a pain. ZO can keep your ES healthy in most situations, with a life pot or 2 available if hits break through, or one skill that has life leech. Big issue here is chaos DoTs(like poison), since neither ES nor MoM protect against them and unlike big hits they aren't an occasional thing. Shavronne's wrappings being the most obvious answer. Alternately you can wander over to Shadow and grab Vaal Pact/Ghost Reave if your ES is especially high, but it doesn't really seem worth it, especially as the reduced mana nodes require you to wander into Marauder, and that makes restoring life even more of a pain.

One interesting option might be to reserve enough life to be LL, while still having enough life for the MoM to be meaningful(with it's effective 67% increase to your effective life), and thereby snagging the juicy bonuses that come from LL(damage buffs, regen buffs, etc), which would allow for some auras as well(some from each of life and mana). Dunno how solid that is though.