Arctic Armor and Mana Regen: Something doesn't add up

... now it does add up huh

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Mark_GGG wrote:

Arctic Armour, like Righteous Fire, is explicitly not intended to always be on. Having it on uses up a resource, so you need to either put significant effort into managing that resource, or not have it constantly active.

Plus the game would be boring if everything worked the same.

Copied/modified from another thread. Please reconsider additional mana drain on moving.

This was one of VERY few things that was equal to life node stacking, which just got destroyed.

Even with significant investment I still couldn't perma-AA even before the changes with 100% mana regen from passives (was planning 140%) and 117% regen from items, clarity with inner focus and eldritch battery with hybrid ES items with extra ES / Mana.

I had to sacrifice every other stat and plan my tree around it just to have semi-working AA (heavily relaying on mana leech and lightning warp) and in act 3 merci have only 1916 hp which is ridiculously low not to mention that AA doesn't affect chaos or other elements than fire. Plus, anything including AA in it's setup will not manage high level maps with regeneration mods.

Path of life nodes it is then!

great ;/

so now i use 206 mana per second instead of 173 with lv 14 AA

this is a bullshit change

i have 285% mana regen with EB and lv 20 clarity and i cant tank the degen.... that is bullshit... if i cant tank it at lv 14 then almost nobody can.

time to move exclusively with lighting warp

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Mark_GGG wrote:

Arctic Armour puts a buff on you. This buff provides four stats:
1) Flat Physical Damage reduction
2) Flat Fire Damage reduction
3) Mana Degen
4) Additional Mana Degen while moving

That's not four different buffs/debuffs, it's a buff with four stats. It's considered a buff as opposed to a debuff because it's overall positive to you and is something you chose to apply to yourself that you can turn off at any time.

Because it's a buff, Inner force affects it, increasing all it's stats. There is no way for inner force to distinguish between a positive and negative stat, as pretty much any stat could be positive or negative in certain situations at certain values. Inner force simply sees you gaining stats from a buff, and increases them.


UPDATE: Found the discrepancy! My description was partially wrong.

Arctic Armour actually involves two effects. It applies a buff, which has three stats:
1) Flat Physical Damage reduction
2) Flat Fire Damage reduction
3) Mana Degen

That's one buff, and affected by inner force as described above.

When you begin moving, it adds a second, invisible effect, which has one stat:
1) Mana Degen
This is removed again when you stop moving.
This is an invisible, background effect, so Inner force doesn't count it as a buff (it affects buffs in the sense of things giving buff icons), and thus is not affected, while the base mana drain, being part of the buff, is.

That's fairly unintuitive and in terms of this skill, inconsistent, so I'll be looking at ways to improve this in future.

So I'm guessing that patch 1.08c has 'corrected' this unintuitive relationship between inner force and the additional mana drain while moving? While I commend you on making changes where you chose to, I must say that it makes this skill even more difficult to use. I am using eldritch battery and i have 209% mana regen from gear as well as another 60% from the skill tree. In total I have 205 mana regen per second. Before the patch I could keep a level 15 arctic armour on me permanently, and now I cannot. While my build could perhaps have more mana regen from the skill tree, getting in excess of 200 is something very few builds are capable of doing, and if a build like mine can't keep a somewhat decently levelled arctic armour on then very few, if any, can. Unluck righteous fire, which an entire strategy can be based around, I don't think the skill is powerful enough to warrant the massive amount of customisation required to even attempt using it; it is very inaccessible at this point in time in my opinion. Now of course a solution could be for guys like me to just drop inner force, but with skills like eldritch battery that let you reserve several auras at once this just isn't a good idea in the greater context. Of course I may sell it with scouring orbs to the vendor so that I may use a level 12-odd AA on my level 80 character, but should that really be necessary?

As i said, I commend you (GGG) for making the changes you wished to and making things more intuitive (whether the duscussed association is intuitive or not is actually a lot more subjective than most uf us think). I just feel that skills like AA should be made more accessible, as utility skills (aside from curses and totems) are often kind of underpowered in PoE in general. Another thing to keep in mind is that even with all of the mana drain from arctic armour, we also have other skills to cast as well, such as my fireball at 122 mana per cast every 0.6 seconds. I'm just not sure what it takes to use AA properly from a build perspective, and unlike righteous fire, it should be much more easily incorporated into other builds as opposed to requiring almost an entire skill tree and item base dedicated to its use.

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Ozgwald wrote:

Support gems multipliers also do nothing so a free link with increased duration for the ice effect is kind of nice.

the mana multipliers from supports do apply. But artic armor costs 0 mana. 0 * 1.5 = 0