MANA LEECH IS RUINED

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tikitaki a écrit :

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Fruz a écrit :

But you know, 5~10 years ago, most games had down times between fights

Not that I recall, unless you were crappy at the game or undergeared.

I have been playing ARPG's for over 20 years, since before they were called ARPG's and looked like this:

Spoiler

And unless something catastrophic/horrible happened to your character, there was very little "down time."

- In many RPG without a mana regeneration mechanism, you had to rest to regain your resources.
- In many RPG with mana regenerations ( like olds mmorpgs, I'm thinking about DAoC here ), there were downtimes, even high level pvp abilities to get mana back in the middle of a fight.

I was not only speaking of arpgs, more like just rpgs to be honest.
I don't know arpgs before Diablo 1 tbh.

I have played a ridiculous amount of ARPGs. In every single one I have played, a standard for a solid character is to be able to keep going without stopping.

Thus the term action role-playing game.

They are very different from MMO's for this reason. People who play ARPG's generally prefer fast gameplay. MMO's typically have much much slower gameplay.

Another simple reason that people prefer characters that don't need to stop and regen is that it's simply more enjoyable.

For me, if a build requires you to stop and regenerate constantly just to cast your main attack/spell, then the build is broken (in a bad way) and needs to be fixed.

There's a difference between stopping to consider what you are going to do next when encountering a difficult situation - and being forced to stop constantly because your character cannot keep up with his own spell-casting.

Edit: To put this as succinctly as possible:

Stopping and waiting to regenerate mana is a problem with your build - not a solution.

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tikitaki a écrit :

I have played a ridiculous amount of ARPGs. In every single one I have played, a standard for a solid character is to be able to keep going without stopping.

Thus the term action role-playing game.

They are very different from MMO's for this reason. People who play ARPG's generally prefer fast gameplay. MMO's typically have much much slower gameplay.

Maybe GGG does not want to follow those exact same rules, who knows.

To me, 2~4 seconds down time is so short that it can easily be the movement you're making between two packs and that still makes a smooth gameplay tbh.
I'm not saying that peopel should sit 10 seconds between packs of mobs, but couple of seconds for someone who does not want to spend points in resources management seems pretty realistic to me.

I don't like to apply most of arpg's rules to PoE to say "it should be like this".
I like however to take what worked in other games in general, and see if it can apply/help in our case.

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tikitaki a écrit :

There's a difference between stopping to consider what you are going to do next when encountering a difficult situation - and being forced to stop constantly because your character cannot keep up with his own spell-casting.

Atm, it's not really difficult to keep up to finish a pack of monsters while self casting, it needs a little bit of investment in mana, but it's not really difficult.
If a player does not have that, there can be two reasons :
- not enough damage = too many casts required to clear
- not enough mana/mana regeneration/mana leech

Now that leech has been nerfed, it's not enough to only rely on that for some setup.
A character stopping constantly in PoE, sitting and waiting a lot between fights is not well built, this is already true.
Mana on hit seem to be a good alternative for fast hitting/cast spells, it's not easy to get atm, I hope that GGG will give us more possibilities to get some.

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tikitaki a écrit :

Stopping and waiting to regenerate mana is a problem with your build - not a solution.

And this is your opinion, this ain't a true statement that applies to everyone ( my only caster has no mana problem btw, so just in case this was directed to me : it doesn't apply anyway ).

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Fruz a écrit :

Maybe GGG does not want to follow those exact same rules, who knows.

They do.

Evidence:
Races, 4 month ladders, and the fact that the quicker you kill monsters, the more loot you get.

Going fast and steady is how you get ahead in PoE, in pretty much every way - unless it causes you to die in a HC league.

Even then, if you were going twice as fast as the guy who had to wait "2 - 4s" all the time, you're probably going to have much better gear than him, and a much more impressive stash. Probably lots more currency as well.

Going quickly, and efficiently using your resources, is a core element of Path of Exile and ARGPs in general.

This is all derailment btw.

My original point stands: Stacking the daylights out of regen is not an efficient solution to spamming spells. That's what Leech is for.

Regen has a fundamentally different purpose and is useful in entirely different situations - like running Arctic Armor or having a Mind Over Matter build.

Saying using regen is an efficient solution to this is kind of problem is like saying it's efficient to build an off-grid windmill farm so that 100 people can take a hot shower at the same time - once per day.

Your windmill farm would have to be HUGE to generate all the hot water for 100 people at once, and most of the time the windmill farm was running, it would be doing nothing (off-grid)....Because in the PoE universe, you can't transfer your excess mana to other people.

Edit: I'm not saying it's useless to have some mana regen. I'm just saying that pointing to it as a primary solution to mana problems for people who simply spam spells, is not correct.

That's your vision of what mana is/should be for there, we obviously have different opinions on the matter.

Anyway, my point is ( with mana regen ) : you don't need to sustain spamming one skill endlessly, sustaining the spells needed to kill a pack of monster before getting "oom" ( as it's never completely the case ) is enough. If there is a very small down time, or if you need the time to move to the next pack to get the mana back, it's fine because it keeps the gameplay smooth anyway.
But for that, people need ton consider having more mana unreserved most-likely ( and stop taking the "the no mana management need" policy for granted ).

And for big monsters/single target = use a single target combination that will cost less mana, it's as simple as that.


Mana leech was trivializing half regen/no-regen map mod btw, it was probably not intended for it to be that easy to do.

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Fruz a écrit :

That's your vision of what mana is/should be for there, we obviously have different opinions on the matter.

My "vision of what mana is" is that it is a tool used to primarily cast spells and use attacks.

If you have a different "vision" of what it is for, please explain.

I was referring to this :

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tikitaki a écrit :

Regen has a fundamentally different purpose and is useful in entirely different situations - like running Arctic Armor or having a Mind Over Matter build.

I think that mana regeneration is here to support/allow spell casting ( even intensive ) as well as running MoM/arctic armor, that's why I said that we had different opinions on the matter.

And if heavy spell casting/spamming requires more than usual, that does not seem like broken to me.



However, leech was a solution to almost forget about mana ( and trivialize less-regen maps, which is maybe one of the reason why it happened ), it still is for some spells/attacks, but shotguning ( I tend to consider shotguning very efficient in term of dps, so having a drawback would be somewhat fair I think ) / fast attacking/casting with multi-target got heavily nerfed, about this.

So people cannot take the "easy way" for those last one that got heavily handicapped, is this meant to by GGG's design ? I'm not sure, that's why I was proposing more mana/hit options for those kind of spells/attacks.

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Fruz a écrit :

I was referring to this :

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tikitaki a écrit :

Regen has a fundamentally different purpose and is useful in entirely different situations - like running Arctic Armor or having a Mind Over Matter build.

I think that mana regeneration is here to support/allow spell casting ( even intensive ) as well as running MoM/arctic armor, that's why I said that we had different opinions on the matter.

The bolded part was the important distinction I was making.

It's not efficient to build a tool for sustaining a constant drain (like MoM/AA) for a purpose that is not a constant drain.

Is this that hard for you to understand? It's not really a matter of opinion. Efficiency in this context can be clearly defined as the amount of waste....less waste, more efficiency...

If you are constantly regenerating a shitload of mana, and not using it all the time, that is wasteful - because it is quite expensive, both in gear and nodes, to have that level of mana regeneration. So if you aren't using it most of the time, why build it?

This is why almost everybody primarily uses mana leech, with mana regeneration as a buffer. It's much more efficient and makes a lot more sense if you do not need to support a constant mana drain.

You can use a jackhammer to break a single walnut, but it's not how sane people approach the problem.

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Fruz a écrit :

So people cannot take the "easy way"

Blood Magic skill gem says hello.

Don't say it's an "extra skill gem" - it would just replace the Mana Leech gem ;)

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tikitaki a écrit :

Don't say it's an "extra skill gem" - it would just replace the Mana Leech gem ;)

That would be true if I would need a mana leech gem, which isn't necessary with enough mana regen.

Most of the setup will run fine with a reasonable of investment in mana/mana regeneration ( by reasonable I mean not much ).

AA at max level requires much more mana/s than spell casting, there is a middle ground between those two :).


Now, some quite niche setup relying on leech may have been unfairly affected by the changes, the heavily cast-speed multiple-projectile ones ( also works for attacks, split arrow attack speed bases archers as it seems, as an example ).

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Fruz a écrit :

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tikitaki a écrit :

Don't say it's an "extra skill gem" - it would just replace the Mana Leech gem ;)

That would be true if I would need a mana leech gem, which isn't necessary with enough mana regen.

And this goes back to waste. You would have to prove that, for example, 7+ nodes spent on mana to earn you an extra skill gem slot is more efficient than just spending those 7+ nodes on damage, and keeping mana leech linked.

Also note that, increasing your damage while keeping mana leech linked also increases the amount of mana that you leech. Extremely efficient.

Mana regen can also be inefficient for another reason: because you need more survivability and not more damage.

If the goal is to simply sustain the spell and do decent damage, and then stacking as much raw hp/es as possible (like many hardcore builds do in this game) then you will find this to be substantially harder using your plan.

Either way, it's a bad proposal for the same reason adding an extra mandatory keystone is a bad solution, because you don't want to pigeonhole players into all doing the same thing.

"If you want to use mana, you have to take all these nodes, because mana leech is not good enough."

That's bad.