Determination

Can't afford it. Too busy Using Hatred. :P

You've justified % mana reservation amounts by saying that a scaling effect requires a scaling cost. That's simply wrong. The only thing Determination scales with is your base armor. Whatever your base armor is, you get 20% of that. Compare that to Grace or Discipline, which give more than 20% of an all-out evasion or energy shield character's base evasion or base energy shield in most cases.

As you level up you get more base armor, and as you level up you get higher gem levels. Why is it so hard to make these two stats match?

If you don't want to lower the cost, then at the very least greatly increase the radius so auras can be good in groups and not for solo. Right now aura sizes are very small so you can't even give its benefits to anyone else unless everyone is a melee character.

I prefer Determination to Vitality or Tempest Shield, so I am happy with using this at the moment. It changes my character sheet DR from 65% to 68%, so I guess that is around an 8% damage reduction versus an average monster.

If the armor bonus was on top of all other armor bonuses, and it then applied THAT amount of armor to your allies, then it might justify the 40% cost.

But when you realize there are gems out there like Hatred which take 30% of your manapool to give you 20%+ of your physical damage back as cold damage? It's just not worth it.


Heck, if it stayed the way it was, and the mana cost dropped to a measly 5% reserved, I'd still not use it on anything but a Marauder/Iron Reflex-user, and even then I'd be wondering if it was worth the skill slot.

Feedback:

Skill aura animation i dont like at all. Maybe make it ground based and more "mature" ? Atm it's to colotfull an fluffy like.


Edit: No idea atm if skill aura animation is changed or not.

I feel that armour and mana reserved should both be flat amounts and not percentages.

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YellowMage wrote:

I feel that armour and mana reserved should both be flat amounts and not percentages.

Agreed. This skill scales horribly compared to other defensive auras. Every level gains 1% armor... Whoo big difference. Even after 5 levels there isn't a noticeable difference in survival for 40% of your mana, which insanely high. Other auras like Discipline and Grace give huge base modifiers that get amplified by passives without the huge mana cost.

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Repeats wrote:

Even after 5 levels there isn't a noticeable difference in survival for 40% of your mana, which insanely high. Other auras like Discipline and Grace give huge base modifiers that get amplified by passives without the huge mana cost.

Agreed. I honestly think this skill is quite.. well.. it's not useless but almost. I'm currently playing an all out support tank and while I do have this skill equipped.. I never use it. Cost vs Benefit is just too much. Even with all the Aura passives taken, it's still too much. There are many other auras that are cheaper and provide better bonuses.

You can lower its cost by 20% by taking 4 passives around marauder starting position. Dualist has +20% mana passive which negates 20% penalty of this aura (hopefully, I don't know the precise math here).

Also you can ignore these passives, stack auras on mana, and use blood magic support gem for main attack skills.

Ive been using Determination on my tanky marauder since level 40. I'm currently level 68 and I believe that determination should provide a flat armor bonus (like Grace and Discipline) instead of a % increased armor bonus. Currently it only gives me 3% more damage reduction which is quite negligible. Because of the 40% reserved mana, it means that I can't really take anymore auras to buff my character so if a player was to use Determination, it would be all that they would have (unless they spected into reserved mana reduction passives). What I'm saying is, for 40% reserved mana, it isn't powerful enough. Currently from passives I have 135% increased armor and this only adds 20-40% more for a large mana cost and not much damage reduction.

IMO, if Determination does get buffed (which it needs) only the effect should be changed not the mana reserved value. Because most players that would use it, would have a lower mana value (from building Strength not Intelligence) and so a increasing flat mana reserved value would render the character with a very small mana pool.