Mind over Matter and Energy Shield

Introduction

Some of you might know me, many probably won't. For this reason, I'd like to give a brief introduction and then dive into my suggestion. I had purchased the Eternal Supporter pack a while back, but was throwing ideas back and forth in my mind. I knew I wanted to make a unique that would never become irrelevant. I did not want to make something OP, but I wanted to make a build defining unique. At the time, Mana was not regarded as a very valuable resource. All you ever needed mana for was to be able to run whatever auras you needed, and that was it. Most players ran the Blood Magic gem to sustain their attacks, or ran Mana leech. I eventually decided to build my unique around mana. For anybody who is still lost, I am the creator of both Cloak of Defiance and the keystone Mind over Matter.

Changes

Although technically my "job" is done when it comes to designing my unique, I feel a connection with both the keystone and the unique as I designed it, and have observed how well/badly it has been received through the months. I'd like to think that it has made players look at mana very differently and has created it's own specific range of builds.

I feel like it would incredibly beneficial to allow Mind over Matter to work with Energy shield. There are a number of reasons why I think this would be helpful.

1. Right now, the only combo used is MoM+EB. If MoM worked with ES, EB would not be possible. This might spark a completely new set of builds that MoM could be a part of. In short, EB is too mandatory when making a build with MoM!
2. It would not be too strong. EB is one of the reasons MoM is incredibly powerful. If EB is not possible, how good can we expect MoM to be?
3. I feel like while MoM has generated many "new" builds, it also restricts it due to forcing you to go life. Not to mention, once you go life, taking EB is a no-brainer, there is no choice in this matter. Not taking EB is clearly the inferior choice.
4. I feel like allowing MoM to work on ES builds might serve to improve the diversity we see with ES builds. Perhaps you could go low life, or CI, while taking MoM.

I envision that you would either go life with EB, or go CI. Since both are very far away from MoM, it would require sufficient travel or make you dependent on the unique. It would also be mutually exclusive, so you could go CI or EB.

Problems

Are there any potential problems anybody can see with this suggestion? At the time of implementation, GGG were worried that MoM might be too powerful with ES. However, without the option of EB, I don't see how it would be any better than a life build using MoM with EB to boost their mana.

Thank you for reading and I hope we can have a meaningful discussion. :)

If making MoM function on ES work kills EB "mandatory" (it isn't, but unless it's hard to do people will treat it like it is) nature I'm for it.

The real big problem is lack of good mana increases in the area as a whole.

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Autocthon a écrit :

The real big problem is lack of good mana increases in the area as a whole.

This. It's not so much that MoM 'needs' Eldritch Battery, it's that you are strongly encouraged to go north in order to get more mana passives (including the Life and Mana passives which seem to be made for MoM), and then by the time you're up there, you may as well go all the way to EB.

It does force you to make a life-based build though, that's certainly true. (It also makes auras other than Clarity more trouble than they're worth, for the same reason that Blood Magic is difficult to use with auras.)

I actually think the problem is worse in the other direction: if you're a spellcaster or the like who takes EB for the huge mana pool, MoM suddenly becomes almost 'mandatory' so that you're not a complete glass cannon.

Mana has been broken for a while. 8-20% increases are not sufficient with the given +max mana implcits found on gear, +mana regen or EB are much, much more effective at giving mana

Consider that even a crappy endgame rare can give 200+ ES and that the most mana you can get with an implcit mod is fucking 68.

Yeh, flat mana needs to be a bit higher.
I'd say in the range of 10-20 % on item mods.
More than that, however, I still think that EB is still flat boring, it takes away an entire mechnic, adds nothing new, and makes other mechanics simpler.

Oh, and btw, great work on the item and keystone.
The game needed that.

First things first: now I know who to thank for what is probably my favorite Keystone in the entire game. Thanks for making it, really. It really appeals to me and I always try to fit it into my builds one way or another.

As for your question: the main problem I see is the synergy this creates with some already powerful stuff, such as Aegis Aurora. If you think about it, an Aegis Aurora MoM build (maybe CI is needed too) would probably be completely immortal if MoM worked with ES, probably even after the nerf to Aegis Aurora. A drawback of "reduces Block Chance to 0" would be fix this. That said, I don't think Keystones should be balanced around uniques, but the other way around. Maybe people more experienced with balance can find ways to not make it broken.

Back when I was hoping to make ES+MoM builds that were actually viable, I always thought that one way it could work would be if it came on a separate Keystone. So for example, you take Mind over Matter, then it is followed by a couple of "tax points" which could give any combination of int/ES/Mana, and then you get to a second Keystone (think of how Acrobatics-Phase Acrobatics looks) which is like "Damage mitigation from MoM applies to ES first" or something.

The main problem for me is the fact that while an ES/MoM build would scale with INT, MoM is like all the way down the tree. It needs to be moved from there if you're going to make it work with ES. In fact, it needs to be moved anyway. Unlike most people who think they know how the skill works, I can tell you that it does nothing for characters without the mana pool to support it. Or at least, it is a lot worse than reserving your entire mana pool with auras as a duelist/Marauder.

I might think of more things to say on this. I really want this to work in some way or another. There are builds I have in progress that would greatly benefit from it.

It's important to point out that with current mana value on gear it's entirely possible to have MoM in the life/mana sweetspot without EB

It just requires effort. And players are allergic to effort. It also requires investing in mana at roughly half the amount you invest into life.

A build with +100% life and +50% mana with the correct gear spends 75% the nodes to reach the same eHP as a build with 180% increased life. In fact I have several planned builds utilizing a 160% Life/ 80% mana split, where the only bottleneck to the build is actually gearing into it (much like CI has always been, only requiring much more specific gear).

The result of such a build is gear MoM sweetspot and the ability to wear Ev/Ar items instead of Es items... Also investing in the mana took about the same as it would have taken to get the EB node, a bit less IIRC. Have to update the pathings though.

Cross-post from the "MoM is in the wrong spot in the tree" thread (not its exact title):

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ScrotieMcB a écrit :

I've been thinking about this keystone a lot, to include discussion with the supporter responsible for Cloak of Defiance and other members of my guild (although I'm definitely speaking for myself here).

The thing is, MoM actually *does* have a very strong synergy with ES, but not in the way our min-max brains usually think of ES. This is because we assume we have CI or Shav's-mod or some similar Chaos damage "cheat." But is that a good assumption?

If you are running hybrid life/ES, MoM's life-specific clause means MoM becomes fairly damage-specific — it might as well read "when you take Chaos damage, take 30% as mana damage instead of Life" for such a character. This wouldn't require the unreserved mana pool to the extent a life build requires — the keystone would only trigger sometimes, preventing death from spike damage at the cost of mana pool depletion, allowing the player an opportunity to escape alive. It would, thus, provide some kind of *competition* for CI or Shav's-mod...

... that is, if it were anywhere an ES build could take it. But it isn't.

MoM does have this nice anti-aura thing going on, since it dislikes mana reservation. I like that, and thus it's positioning away from aura nodes is indeed a good thing. But it should also be placed near ES nodes (and away from EB and CI) to offer alternate means of dealing with Chaos damage.

As you can gather by now, there's a lot of intracacy in MoM's synergy with various mechanics, and the hard truth is, given the postions of other nodes, there is no ideal location for it. However, I believe some significant tree juggling could allow it to shine both in life-based and ES-based builds.

I guess all this is kind of personal discretion, but I think things would be better if:
1. CI (and EB) were in the Templar area.
2. MoM was in the Shadow area.
3. Blood Magic was in the Duelist/Ranger area — actually, in MoM's current location.
4. Aura nodes, in general, were a left-half-of-tree affair (rather than a top-half-of-tree). After all, a Shadow with an aura is kind of silly — how are you supposed to be sneaky when you're incandescent?

The problem with moving MoM near shadow tho is that it's just cool by the duelist. Hey look a node that replaces my defensive auras and scales with my preferred damage reduction sources.

Moving MoM would pretty heavily nerf the Duelist, I agree, but it's not like we couldn't introduce a better keystone for that kind of thing. Though, GGG doesn't seem to be wont to introduce new keystones, which is a shame. I'd love if we got at least 1 new one every major patch...