Add % mana cost attacks

This will make blood magic more of a tactical choice. If you make a new area of effect skill for maces consume a percentage of your mana per cast (say 3-4%), it will be extremely dangerous to use with tons of life and blood magic. At the same time, it might be sustainable with a very tiny mana pool like the average Marauder might have.

Of course, these could be non-attack skills and support skills, if % based costs aren't fair for spammable damage attacks.

Given how insanely underpowered marauder is, I really feel the only way to salvage balance in this game is to allow one of their starting nodes to give them the ability to use all skills, buffs, and auras at no cost whatsoever. It's only fair. LIfe's tough on a marauder, you know? So I'm afraid I have to disagree with your suggestion.

What? Marauders underpowered? Your post doesn't even make any sense. Is it supposed to be sarcastic?

Marauders are very, very strong currently. Resolute Technique, Blood Magic, and extremely high life and life regeneration. It's trivial to level and farm with a Marauder, compared, say, to a Shadow.

I'm suggesting we add some percentage-mana-based skills so that Blood Magic is no longer the dominant and de-facto way to build Marauder, and that using mana as a resource as a Marauder is possible, due to the way % mana costs work.

Currently, if you do not take mana as a Marauder, mana costs creep up so quickly that with enough attack speed, you go dry in seconds. This consumes two valuable potion slots at least, if not several stat slots on gear, for mana. There are very few +mana or +mana regen nodes around the Marauder, though I suppose you could try a build around -mana cost.

All I'm saying is, if we had some skills that had a base cost as %, besides auras, blood magic would be mostly incompatible with those spells. Mana-based Marauders could then get enough mana regen to offset their cost, tailoring their builds in a specific way.

Maybe a Keystone for shadows that removes mana and gives 100% ES, and uses ES as a source to cast skills/spell. Would that work?
Because i think that modifying it to % of mana is a big change.

All this would do is break the marauder class.

Witches have a keystone that allows them to ignore two stats completely (CI for STR/HP/Armor, using spells for DEX)

Marauders have a keystone that allows them to go crazy without running out of juice, but precludes the vast majority of auras.

Also, high-end marauders typically back out of the keystone anyway (so they can reserve their mana with auras and use BM support gems on their main skills).
-------------------------------------

This would be a great way to add more powerful templar/duelist abilities without making the marauder even more powerful, however.

CI comes with a much bigger downside than you think. End game, I get stunned by every attack I don't dodge and every crit perma freezes me without "cannot be frozen" mod. Sure, there are powerful keystones, but believe Marauders have it great right now. I'd like to diversify the possible builds with them, which is the aim of my suggestion.

Yes, I was being sarcastic. I actually agree the south-west part of the 'drasil is particularly powerful but I'm comfortable with the general mechanics, just believe numbers are a little off. Health constantly regenerates while energy shield doesn't, plus it seems like I need to spend twice as many points for maximum shield and shield regeneration compared to health and health regen. I also think an ES build is much more gear dependent.

Saying that, gear dependency is also very reliant on build so it's hard to say. It's easy to make a ES character work if they aren't under direct aggro constantly by using minions or totems but a melee witch or templar that focuses on ES is a tricky thing to pull off. I have a lvl 44 templar who reached the CI keystone at least 10 levels ago but I haven't taken it yet because it isn't directly beneficial yet. I had a melee witch I ended up giving up on because it just became impractical to try to out-dps them when their damage and resistance numbers became too much greater than mine.

I can see what you're saying Defiler, but the point of this thread isn't to say Marauders need to be nerfed. I'm just suggesting skills so that we can broaden the horizon of the Marauder. Although doing unusual builds is difficult with other classes, it is possible. It isn't exactly feasible as a Marauder to consider not going Blood Magic, or at least, I'd like to see a Marauder build that does not use Blood Magic and performs well in maps, with minimal down-time.

AFAICT, Righteous Fire was created to lure people away from CI casters. It didn't succeed in that role nearly as much as it has as a standalone skill (on a max-life marauder, no less), but it was a good idea.

This is similar, and seems like a really cool idea.

I've got a mana using mara on my friend's list. While mana nodes might be hard to reach, there's always the +30 from Alira and mara is situated close to both of the reduced mana reserved clusters. I guess there's even a reason to remove blood magic and use skillgems instead so a manapool can be used for buffs. Gives me something to think about since Mara is the only class I haven't touched since the last reset.

I also don't think Mara's should be nerfed, if that's what it seems. I've said before that it seems like every build I make has an achille's heel hidden somewhere in the design of the game except for the high health and regen build. I don't think that build should be nerfed, I'd rather see a specific enemy or damage type that targets that build.