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

i quite like the mana changes.

i dont think its done to sell mtx, thats just crazy. its done to make us put a little more effort into mana.

everything ive tried either stayed the same or just needed a little more effort than before. i think a blade vortex was the worst hurt where i needed something like 4 points redirected into mana nodes on the tree... ok, seemed fine tbh, not rly a big deal.


mana leech isnt just phys now, u just grab it on the tree its generic attack damage mana leech for all attacks. its a benefit for melee, i dont think its an issue, melee needs up sides and theres a good one. putting in mana pressure hits casters and as people have said some forms of summoners... great, thats a really good thing, make those builds harder to work. thats awesome, they dont need to worry about getting sick weapon like attack builds. a phys weapon attack build is the hardest thing in the game to get the good weapon you need, and they have the least gear pressure for mana issues? seems like a good give/take situation, theres a rightness about it.


i agree with the solve it take, the tools are there to solve it, you solve it and thats that. weve had times in the past where mana was impossible for so many builds to solve without using leech via warlords mark etc. you could literally take every mana notable across half the tree + use clarity and not sustain casting your spells. theres been a lot of changes and mechanics here and there along the way and where its at now, from the builds ive tried out theres always a way to solve mana and the builds who have the easiest time are builds that typically have a harder time in the game in a lot of other areas and i think thats got a good balancing aspect.

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sidtherat wrote:

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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

Sure, sid, it could work better, but the whole thing would have to be managed really carefully and we know how that usually turns out.

That aside, the current system completely invalidates the concept of 'have enough resource for X uses of something, do something to regain it back before it runs out', and that's nuts. Our resource management solutions are entirely passive, active management doesn't work at all, you can either indefinitely sustain the use of your skills, or you didn't solve the problem. That's why people say 'mana is boring', there's nothing interesting they can do with it as long as it works this way.

So, I would personally prefer if we had some kind of a separate 'permabuff gauge', that would make maintaining the system much simpler and open new possibilities. Like using mana pool as a pool, not as a checkbox.

oh man.. that podcast interview, that really opened my eyes.

there is no point of discussing fine details of a mechanic.

what ive heard means they barely grasp the reason SO MANY players left this league (if they did - he wouldnt mention hardmode). and will apply random changes to 'fix' that. nothing in what he said seemed solid. all grandiose ideas, abstracts and 'adding': add new notables, add new mod tiers, add new items, add new uniques.. FFS STOP! there are already too many one-trick items/passives/mods everywhere. you dilute your own game with mandatory 'choices'. it is all bloat at this point.

flask tier rolls? drop this idea. make it multiply its effect every 25 player levels (poet's pen). here, done. one layer of bloat removed.

mandatory passives to remove bleed/poisson? maybe use Pantheon - youve introduced it 5 years ago and abandoned immediately after. add more stuff there, make us pick two minor choices. this system can really fix all current ailment situation. NO MORE RARE CORRUPTION FAUX-SOLUTIONS


and ffs stop releasing half-baked stuff 'because 13week cycle'. that cycle is the worst form of Agile ive ever seen and ive seen some.

Don't really have an issue with it as a concept, some ailments are designed to potentially be a big problem, and solving that problem so easily doesn't sit right with me. But, once you remove the means to solve it easily and don't have the fallback option to solve it with reasonable involvement, you're left with your outhouse tank filled and the pumping crew won't be back from vacation until september.

Chris did mention they will use the pantheon for this, and that's a good thing. If we assume that the four major gods will be used for stun, ignite, freeze and shock, and the minor ones for, dunno, bleed, poison and impale, it should, to some extent, cover two ailments that might be hard for that character to take care of through gear, passive tree and skills. So, that's good, but I hope they will keep track of where we get the soul upgrades, don't expect players would be too happy with 'ok, I get my moving bleed immunity upgrade in a t15 map, what do I do until then', or 'uh, they did a derp and rotated the map with the upgrade out of the atlas in this league'. I think those maps should be fixed on the atlas, really.

In a way, this is a chance to reinvigorate some items and skills. For instance, hrimnor could be a pretty nice helm but it wasn't used because its special ability just didn't reduce any passive pressure. Or the purity aura, if it also reduced the effect of elemental ailments, that could make it a huge depressurizer at all levels. Making more items and effects important is a good thing, well, in the case of the latter, it's a good thing assuming they do something about aura bots, but they're planning to at least.

So, on one hand it's good that they saw the problem in some cases, but their solutions are often real headscratchers, rolling flasks is already annoying enough, but flask mod tiers too? Get that noise outta here.

Of course, in other cases it doesn't seem like they saw neither what the core issue was nor where they want to go with it, so the 'fixes' are just flailing around in the dark.