Mind Over Matter Improvements (Mana Defense)

Issue:
Mind Over Matter is poor defense option compared to other defense mechanics. It require a large investment and gives little in return. You need a large pool of unreserved mana(losing out on the benefits of auras) with great mana regen required. The idea is interesting but lacks usefulness & utility.

(FYI) Mind Over Matter - 40% of damage is taken to mana before life

Solution:
Add a new stat that reduce damage taken to mana by #%
The new stat will be found on energy based gear, hybrid energy based gear, and new cluster nodes in the intelligence side of the tree.
This new stat will further reduce the damage you take to your mana after all other damage mitigation is applied. With enough investment into max mana, mana regen, and reduce damage taken to mana you will able to maintain the benefits of Mind Over Matter.

Balance & Notes:
Mind Over Matter should be raised from 40% to 50% to be inline with other defense mechanics.
The cap for this new stat should be fairly high in my opinion.
It should be 75% or more on the cap, but maybe that's too high and needs tested.
It need to be somewhat of an investment, but shouldn't be too hard or too easy to get. The stat is there to help improve the usefulness of Mind Over Matter and to ease the cost of it. Another benefit of using this new stat is it also should apply to all monster effects that drain or damage mana (Example: Mana Siphon monster mod). This would provide another way to deal with mana damaging effects. Thus add its own advantage and uniqueness of play in Path.

One of the fun things about path is variety of defense mechanics. Each having their own unique advantages and playstyle. Having different defense mechanics to deal with challenges the game throws at you. This what keeps me coming back for more. Variety is the spice of life however, if its not useful there is no point in using it.

something like "mana density"

sounds fun and more layers to the onion often bring life to new and old builds.

You don't need to rely solely on mana REGENERATION. Recovery is the generic word in path of exile. Besides Mana Regeneration you can use
* Mana Flasks
* Mana Leech
* Mana Gain on Hit
* x% of Damage Taken gained as Mana / x% of Damage taken Recouped as Mana
and maybe a few more. 40% is already quite a lot and more than any other defense provides.

https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Mana_before_Life

MOM as a defense mechanic is in good spot IMO.
You can scale mana and mana regen to quite healthy levels, reaching 10k+ mana and several thousand regen per second. I don't think you really need much more than this.

The issue with mana builds is utter destruction of Archmage Support that happened in 3.15 (six leagues ago lol) and which still haven't been recovered from. Mana builds scaled their damage off that and with that gem being destroyed there's not much to do here.

Mana builds already sacrifice a lot by not running auras, since we're stuck with this stupid percentage reservation that will reserve 5000 mana if you slam determination.

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Esubane wrote:

MOM as a defense mechanic is in good spot IMO.
You can scale mana and mana regen to quite healthy levels, reaching 10k+ mana and several thousand regen per second. I don't think you really need much more than this.

The issue with mana builds is utter destruction of Archmage Support that happened in 3.15 (six leagues ago lol) and which still haven't been recovered from. Mana builds scaled their damage off that and with that gem being destroyed there's not much to do here.

Mana builds already sacrifice a lot by not running auras, since we're stuck with this stupid percentage reservation that will reserve 5000 mana if you slam determination.

would not mind if they introduce a new suport for auras say: 20% reduced aura effectivness, 1% increased aura effectivness for every 80 mana reserved.

archmage was kind of bonkers when first introduced but instead of fine tuning it they went with the nerf nuke.

mind of the council and manastorm could also use a buff, Personaly i rather see mana storm giving "When you Cast a Spell, Sacrifice all Mana to gain % more damage equal to 3% of Sacrificed Mana for 4 seconds"

keystones related to mana stacking like sanctuary of thought or prodigal perfection having a limit does not help either i mean we have plenty of keystones without a limit like "1% fire damage every 20 str" so why give them a limit?

the big nerf to mana regen was the final nail of the mana build coffin.

They have to deal with Storm Brand / Orb of Storm type spells before they can buff Archmage. I don't know why they haven't done so yet and maybe never will.

It just sucks to see a whole archetype destroyed because of a few op interactions.

Also sad to see that raider is probably still the optimal choice for mana builds. Just because the suppression ailment immunity and cast speed is very useful and any defense is welcome without having much mitigation since MoM is just EHP + recovery (agnostic).

I'm likely going play archmage hiero this league even if its mediocre at best. I'll try out the updated arcane surge ascendancy and small buff to arcane surge nodes. Probably better as raider still though.

MoM is just Mana Shield / Energy Shield. There's nothing wrong with the concept. It's been used in quite a few games. What's wrong is reversing mana as a concept. It's not good and never was.

There is nothing Auras do that can't simply be replaced or compensated for. Nothing.

Blessings, were a decent method of how to deal with AoE support and burst buff cooldowns. This does also lead into another game problem where we don't have enough hotkeys. Like Lost Ark, League, every RTS and many other isometric games in general ASDF should be hotkeys.

I feel like it would be weird to add item mods to the pool that only function in the presence of a handful of specialised sources like keystones and uniques. Yes, you mentioned mana siphon, but that’s still pretty niche.

Oh, it could be an implicit, I guess. Either way it would work more effectively if there were more sources of mana interactions.

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caboom wrote:

keystones related to mana stacking like sanctuary of thought or prodigal perfection having a limit does not help either i mean we have plenty of keystones without a limit like "1% fire damage every 20 str" so why give them a limit?

Neither of those are keystones.

For Prodigal Perfection, 40% increased damage on a notable that also does something else you want is fine.

Sanctuary of Thought does four things. Two of those are stat boosts scaling off mana, and only one of those is capped. Even then, if you're concerned about the limit that means you're hitting it, and in that case, 100% increased AOE surely has to be about the largest amount given by an ascendancy node.