[Posted this on the discord earlier, but someone said I should post it here too]
Base mana regen should scale to some degree with your max mana, as it currently doesn’t feel great to build max mana. It moreso means you can get off a little more burst, but then just have to wait even longer to get back to your max mana value. Although, I also understand that having a scaling value too high could cause issues. As such, I’d like to suggest that your base mana regen be equal to 5 + 5% of your max mana. This would leave it at 10 for the base 100 mana, 15 for 200, and 20 for 300. Also, mana regen as a mod should be a little more accessible from items, and I think it should appear on amulets and relics.
Mana Reg and HP reg should scale with attributes. Int % mana reg, Vitality % HP reg. It’s to easy any other way I can think of and both stats interact with mana usage without buffing the mana reg of classes who poop on int.
Class definition is in my opinion something that’s needed a lot more.
Int giving mana regen would be really REALLY broken.
Also classes would still need to build mana to take advantage of my proposed buff. You wouldn’t be getting buffed regen without investment. Sentinel, for example, doesn’t have many nodes that increase max mana, and won’t have access to large mana amounts without a sceptre.
There would still be class definition with this change. Classes that focus around spells inherently have more mana access via passives.
I love this so much. It would actually have a bit of diminishing returns, since the first flat 5 regen is a smaller % the more mana you have. 5 of 100 is 5%, but 5 of 200 is only 2.5%. It takes a lot of investment to get to 300+ mana, so it’s a tradeoff.
A dimishing return is a must. Last time I looked mana was craftable so there are a lot of possibilitys to get it. If they simply add x mana improves refresh by x it might get bonkers. Right now most mana classes have ways in their skilltrees to make spells free and stuff like that, so I still think .25% increase per int might be a better solution because how do you want to balance how much mana brings how much regen? I realy don’t want to see metoeor spamming mages just because they can ^^.
Hey guys, we have this topic and forum thread slated for discussion in our next game design meeting. Thank you for the suggestion and providing the reasoning behind it!
Yeah that’s ture but I think it’s not that big of a problem when this comes naturaly to casters whos bread and butter depends on it and harder to other classes who have different things in mind as well.
If this is to much RP the manareg could be added to the most commen attribute of the class, like str for sentinels, attunment for Shamans etc.
If other classes had any other ressource I’d agree. But since every class Needs mana to cast their skills/spells, that Point becomes void. It’s not like a Knight could use his Special attacks without mana.
And primalists for example can be built as pure spellcaster druids or shamans, so it’s not like they have any other thing in mind, and even as pet build they act similar to necromancers, so there’s just no argument there to give Int classes an unproportionate amount of mana reg.
(D3 had the same Problem with their Dex classes, as Str gives armor and Int gives AllRes, Dex with their Evasion Chance could never feasibly gain the survivability Str and Int classes could get. Thus they eventually changed Dex to grant armor as well.)
Giving each “Main stat” automatic manareg on the other Hand would just be power creep, as you want to maximize your main stat either way. So you can do that, and Balance the skills around the higher mana reg, or just leave it out and make spells cheaper accordingly
Sure but the power creep is always there. I played all classes and I don’t see any need to change the manareg at all. I just throw out ideas because the manareg is high enough if you don’t mindlessly spamm 40+ mana cost skills. Sure the system how it is right now promotes certain skillsetups as needed or benefical but I NEVER had Mana issues ever because I was always well aware that this game isn’t D3 where you can spamm everything without a second thought. I don’t want to imply you use your mana unwise btw no offence intended but I don’t want to have another mindnumbing ressource system in a ARPG.
No offense taken, no worries
In my druid and shaman caster builds I do run out of mana regularly, but that’s expected as I deliberately went for spell spam builds (Entangling Roots and Tornados, respectively), and thus it’s okay because the mana regen is so fast that I have full mana for the next Group of enemies anyway.
I actually like that mana Efficiency nodes mean something. On the other Hand I do share the Sentiment that +max Mana is a really undesirable stat currently, as mana reg and mana Efficiency net you more DPS, and Max Mana only offers more Alpha Damage, which mana Efficiency even does as well.
The ammount of mana you need depends on the skillbuild you wan’t to do. If you want to cast 3 Skills that need 60 mana per group you simply need arround 180ish mana, just to have some reservs. At this point I start to work with mana efficeny and look for more mana regen oder different skill builds to lower my mana consumption. So far I never had issues with this approach.
I dislike the idea that ressource managment is a nobrainer and everyone is able to just put offensive and defensive stats on his ger and is set. This would benefit the strange item meta even more. I made a post in the past about this how anyone is almost every time picking the item with the highest armor because there are no downsides for any builds and more armor is better in every case outside of reflect builds in my oppinion.
I don’t know if there are other items later on like the helm that offers base spell dmg just for mana reg. We already have a armor type that increases healing efficency and I’m sure more will come.
If mana is a to easiely managable ressource the game by itself will be to easy and therefor skills need to be rebalanced because they never been intended to be spammed, just as an example.
Some days ago I changed my entangling roots setup for my werebear druid and reskilled it pretty soon because it sucked away half my mana :D.
From my point of view mana problems are a player made problem because everything just works fine aas far as I can tell but I could be wrong for sure ^^.
With the risk of being little offensive it seems that the comments from most people here are from classes that do not heavily depend on mana/mana regen. Or they are not high level enough to test some really mana intensive builds.
Getting back on the topic. Base mana regen is really not in a good place. Having no way to actually improve base mana regen seems very punishing for builds on classes that heavily depend on mana regen. I am currently playing a sorcerer(71) and i am investing in some heavy mana cost volcanic orb build. My volcanic orb costs 102 mana currently and I have managed to make it work with Focus mana regen skill tree build. While i am having a lot of fun with the build and i have pulled really good dps i still think that there should be a way to increase your base mana regen so %mana regenaration will have more effect. Currently even if i have lets say 100% mana regen my mana regen would be 20 per second while every 1 second i cast a volcanic orb with around 30% faster cast rate(that is after the -70% cast speed reduction from one of the nodes is calculated) so a total of 100% faster cast rate. So basically i am playing with -80 mana regen per second. The only way to sustain this is with the skill Focus and a down time of 2 3 second every 3 volcanic orbs i cast.
There are a few ways to fix this:
Implement nodes/passives/item affixes that grand flat amount of base mana regen.
Get 1 base mana regen every 10 levels(0.1 base mana regen per level) with starting mana regen of 10. Which will be 20 base mana regen at lvl 100.
Increased base mana regen based on maximum mana, more flat amount of
mana will result more base mana regen. A percentage of max mana.
To conclude i would say that mana regen skills/systems and overall seems to be at a good place. Just the absence of a way to increase base mana regen needs some tweaking.
With the risk that you think I’m a little offensive… Noone forces you to use 102 Mana cost spells. My caster makes use of teleport for nuke spells because 0 Manacost is pretty nice even for a 60 cost spell.
Sure it sounds like very little to have only 20 manareg with a 100% increase but you forgett Mana efficency totaly in your calculation. 10% mana efficency would bring the mentioned orb to 90 manacost and 10% mana efficency is easiely obtainable.
I REALY like the fact that there is no mindless psamming because manareg will solve this issue even why I love the volcanic orb spell dearly I’m still happy. I still think the issue is somewhere else because the full dmg built volcanic orb with gear it benefits from is still nothing compared to the dmg other classes can deal with the same ammount of mana.
So I’m pretty happy with focus and the teleport option to counteract immense mana drains.
A middle ground may be 5 mana reg from the beginning with 0.5 more mana reg untill you hit 15 natural mana reg, so you could easyly achive 30 mana reg. This might help with issues some people have for whatever reason without being to good to soley take care of mana issues. 30 manareg on the other hand would make me laugh on almost every other class that isn’t using caster nukes.
I still ask myself if there is any more gear coming that helps casters like a helm with mana efficency or something alike. Without knowing what’s there to come I realy won’t touch manareg at all even if some skillbuilds suffer from it.
Don’t you think that the good dps would become OP if you could just spam this expensive spell? Think of high mana costs like a bootleg cooldown, just more elegant, flexible, and less intrusive.
In other words: Would you have the same Problem if Volcanic Orb just had a 1 second cooldown after each cast? In the end, you’d have a 3 second downtime per 3 volcanic blasts as well, so your mana Regeneration would be enough either way, at which Point the mana cost of the orb don’t really matter and could be 30, you’d be able to permacast volcanic orb either way.
But the “no cooldown but high mana” way allows you to Alphaburst any particulary nasty mob right away, or wait a bit longer after the first orb to cast 3 in a row shortly after. Things you couldn’t do with a cooldown, but also maintaining the Balance that strong spells can’t just be spammed in the endgame, Rendering cheaper spells irrelevant.
I’m only testing acolytes, but for this class, mana regen strikes me as being in a really good spot right now (patch 0.7.3c). All the skill nodes that affect mana are legitimate choices if you want to build that way. Alternately, you can invest in other areas, which push up both your power and the mana cost, forcing you to manage a resource.
So to follow on from this idea:
What if increases to max mana allowed you to go into more mana debt? Mana regen would not scale with max mana, but investing in max mana would thus allow you to blow more mana at one time. This should provide a noticable power increase when investing in the stat, but also you would need longer to recover, so there is a bit of danger in choosing to dump out all your DPS at once, rather than choosing to ration it wisely.
I won’t say max mana is useless. After this thread I started both mage classes from 0 and Maxmana is pretty important for your burst potential. It’s pretty important if you are able to spamm 3 or 6 spells or 2-3 skills you skilled very expensive before you run out of mana and have to reg it by whatever means.
Maybe the whole potion change they came up with a short time ago will offer a potion that regs mana instead of HP or something like this who knows. Right now i still think everything is easiely managable but restricting your skillbuild as well. It’s up to the player to life with said restrictions or without mana :D.
the manareg could be added to the most commen attribute of the class, like str for sentinels, attunment for Shamans etc.
but I don’t want to have another mindnumbing ressource system in a ARPG.