mana situation post 3.15 - and why people have such diverse reactions to it

I'll ignore the 'mana is boring' part - it is, lets move on.


in general, 3.15 changes were to move power from easily obtainable sources (or not needed at all) to the gear - in short - to be the same as in 3.14 you 'just' need a (much?) better gear. Reason is obvious - you cannot 'just' get better gear, you need to farm for it, thus play longer, thus retention->mtx->profit. It is quite basic thing. Game hardly got any harder, it simply got 'harder' at the point people were comfortable with their time investment. As a standard player with lots of gear on hand - the game is the same (but slower and more clunky oh and half of new skills are borderline worthless).


Mana changes were part of it - for years now mana was easily 'solvable' puzzle. attacks were 'cheap', self-cast was archmage, everything else either bypassed the cost completely (CoCS/CwC) or easily leeched/-cost/%reduced cost'ed it

initial mana cost changes were CRAZY. luckily someone reverted most of them (that shows the confidence btw) but the reality is - most stuff now costs more mana.

so why for some 'there is no problem' and some 'have their builds ruined'?

very simple: crutches.

right now there are 4 crutches you can use to cheaply solve the mana situation:

1) -mana cost of skills
2) Lifetap
3) Inspiration Support
4) one mana leech node

if you can use one+ of these - you see no problem and wonder what other people are so angry about. if you cant (and there are LEGIT reasons for it) - then the situation just got worse, no dancing around it.

one by one:
-mana cost (and +mana on hit): great if your total cost is not something like 80 per cast. so it applies mostly to attacks, channelling, supportive setups.
-Lifetap: great'ish if you a) can afford damage loss b) can slot it into your gear c) most importantly, you are ready to pay 300life per cast on some builds.
-Inspiration: cheeziest of them all. is your build elemental and crit? great, youve just won 35% less mana woes. that cost reduction is just unfair tbh. I cannot imagine a build that CAN use this that is not going to.
-leech: are you physical attack? great, move on. you are not? you are screwed

in theory this covers quite a serious build spectrum, but in reality - A LOT of otherwise 'ok' builds are not able to utilize any of these 4. and 'generic' method of handling mana is WAY more expensive.

stuff like chaos skills got hit the hardest as they.. cannot tick any of these boxes. elemental attacks on characters far from generic mana leech nodes are pretty much forced into a) Inspiration b) if that cannot be done annointing one of the mana leech notables (SIGNIFICANT opportunity cost). any caster/summoner that regularly spends 100mana/cast really felt these changes dis-proportionately

then there is the weird base mana cost distribution. playing mostly attacks i only now realised that some attacks are just way more expensive than others - seemingly to balance out things but the formula used must have been valid in 1.3 and urgently needs an update. 22 mana per swing on a slammer (who plays slams anyway) is completely different to 22 mana on 8aps elemental dual strike..


in general: mana changes are.. half baked. the best way is still to cheeze the entire mana system. mostly - due to very low BASE mana regen making %mana regen gear rolls inefective. 'just use Clarity' is not a solution - if everyone is expected to run Clarity maybe its time to do something about it?

oh and mana flask is just BORING. simple as that. flasks ought to be reactive? but this one flask has to be up 100% of the time?

mana system needs changes but not motivated by 'make people play more to get better gear' but 'how to make it interesting. how to make it fair to meet expectations, yet rewarding if invested into EVEN on non-archmage builds'

Of course the changes were asinine, they were half baked since their inception - blanket nerfing mana cost was the worst solution they could have taken...

I would actually enjoy if TencentGGG would add mana cost as a proper solving query - damage should scale mana cost, and faster casts/attacks should too.

For example, they should tune mana costs and mana cost multipliers based on channeling duration (bigger channels => more damage => more mana costs) while also faster casts/attacks should have a smaller cost increase depending on the APS (faster casts/attack => more damage => more mana cost).

Lastly, slow, powerful hits/cast should also require more mana than regular "faster multiple puny hits", where outright more damage => more mana cost.

To not make every mana dealing solution either a total bypass or an obsolete pushover, they should add more mana sustain/gain nodes in the passive tree.

Dealing with mana should always provide opportunity costs, but you should also have a couple of viable ways to deal with it...

I'll just start by agreeing with the devs on the basic idea, resource management has to be a problem your build somehow has to solve, they obviously want that to be a thing. Also, we can be farily certain that they intend for different archetypes to have different options for solving it, and that those options should vary in effectiveness, investment and accessiblity, but everyone should have at least some way of solving it.

Casters and summoners are probably the easiest, they tend to keep to the top part of the tree so mana pool and regen are accessible and the opportunity cost isn't high. Now that we have cluster jewels, that probably isn't a problem for casters in other parts of the tree either. Now the iffy part, and that's the clarity aura, as you noted yourself, it's a bit weird that ...

Ah, what's even the point of talking about mana as long as your main goal is to reserve as much of it as you can afford to. System is fundamentally flawed.

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raics wrote:

System is fundamentally flawed.

Well there's a no shitter. Might want to add that statement as a permanent fixture to your clipboard if you are going to post about systems in this game.

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Xtorma wrote:

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raics wrote:

System is fundamentally flawed.

Well theirs a no shitter. Might want to add that statement as a permanent fixture to your clipboard if you are going to post about systems in this game.

Watch out there a bit, sir, we wouldn't want to come out as needlessly negative, now would we?

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raics wrote:

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Xtorma wrote:

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raics wrote:

System is fundamentally flawed.

Well theirs a no shitter. Might want to add that statement as a permanent fixture to your clipboard if you are going to post about systems in this game.

Watch out there a bit, sir, we wouldn't want to come out as needlessly negative, now would we?

Admonishment accepted. Not like we have any reason to be negative here.

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raics wrote:

I'll just start by agreeing with the devs on the basic idea, resource management has to be a problem your build somehow has to solve, they obviously want that to be a thing. Also, we can be farily certain that they intend for different archetypes to have different options for solving it, and that those options should vary in effectiveness, investment and accessiblity, but everyone should have at least some way of solving it.

Yepp, I think they trying to move us away from just managing pure damage to also manage resources like SP thus further bringing down player damage since not everything can go into that. Not a bad way of doing it in my book.

I think GGG need to do another pass over the options we have to manage this just to make sure that there is enough ways to do this to fit most builds.

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raics wrote:

Ah, what's even the point of talking about mana as long as your main goal is to reserve as much of it as you can afford to. System is fundamentally flawed.

but.. i kinda like the mana reservation system. and you described the good part very nicely 'reserve AS MUCH AS YOU CAN'. dancing around it is the cool part of build creation. or it could be if not for:

- linear %reservation reduction instead of multiplicative. this part, the RMR jewels especially, is one of the first items GGG has to nuke from orbit. as long as this mechanic in its current form is in the game - mana is indeed stupid

- the sad fact that some builds have it much easier than others FOR NO REASON. phys, dumb, bonk bonk slammer has way more effective 'mana solutions' than chaos caster. I remember playing SRS ~2years ago. my biggest issue was MANA. on a summoner. i had to get legacy blood magic staff to finally play it comfortably. no, stacking mana items was NOT enough. i was so desperate that i had Mana Leech + Orb of Storms ffs..

- expanding the above. take 2 attack builds. same dps, one uses 2.1aps foils, the other 1.4aps. the end result is the same damage. yet one of these will struggle with mana. if the goal is to 'punish' fast attack speed - then this SHOULD NOT be the way. it is the 'clunky/unfun/disruptive' way, im sure there are better ones. but right now this is exactly what happens

thats why im so sad, they took attack mana/life leech from Berserker and replaced it with this Defy Pain DoA.. it made perfect sense to be there

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sidtherat wrote:

I remember playing SRS ~2years ago. my biggest issue was MANA. on a summoner. i had to get legacy blood magic staff to finally play it comfortably. no, stacking mana items was NOT enough. i was so desperate that i had Mana Leech + Orb of Storms ffs..

Mana has always been the most limiting factor for SRS, which I think still stems of the old days when you could summon way more Spirits then you can nowadays. I think it was 50 back then? Not sure.
And even back then the solution was The Covenant - pretty much the same as a Blood Magic staff.
Nothing really changed in that regard.

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sidtherat wrote:

- expanding the above. take 2 attack builds. same dps, one uses 2.1aps foils, the other 1.4aps. the end result is the same damage. yet one of these will struggle with mana. if the goal is to 'punish' fast attack speed - then this SHOULD NOT be the way. it is the 'clunky/unfun/disruptive' way, im sure there are better ones. but right now this is exactly what happens

The difference is that if the faster build is using lifetap it can support a higher lvl lifetap and since lifetap does trigger CWDT setups you could also build around that more easily.
Triggering curses or whatever that way fairly reliably.
Attack based builds never had issues getting some form of life leech going, so its not a huge downside I think.
Another advantage for some builds is that you can now spec into or anoint cannibalistic rite, which depending on your pathing might be easier to get compared to hired killer and is way cheaper to anoint too.

I dont think its much of an issue tbh. Throw lifetap in there, get some leech going and/or get hired killer or cannibalistic rite. Problem solved and abuse CWDT setups if you can while you are at it.


To be clear: Im not a huge fan of the changes, because they dont do anything except for HoP and HoA builds - those are really screwed.
Mana sustain is only an issue until its solved. Once its solved, you never think of mana again. So basically it only affects the storyline and early mapping at most but after that this issue should be solved and can therefore be ignored entirely.

This is one thing I totally agree on, the mana changes weren't thought through properly before implementing.

There are very few options to recover mana for most builds that don't stack mana. The % reduced mana cost on the tree doesn't help because even with a skill that costs 5 mana, triggered abilities are cast so often that the only solution is to get flat - mana cost. And that's not available on the tree & only obtainable through temple jewellery & specific unveils.

I was trying to sustain a 5 mana cost desecrate with CwC (with a -8 mana cost ring) and nodes to reduce mana cost on the tree, even with ~200 free mana it was impossible to sustain. Base mana regen is just pitiful.