A potential change I'm keen to hear your thoughts on

I would actually quite appreciate the change, EB is a nobrainer for almost any caster build atm. The new mechanic would force people to make decisions on how to sustain their skills.

But they would have to make it easier to invest into mana or rebalance skill cost or add more reduced mana cost nodes.


And Eb MoM could still be useful, you can use regen to regain your life and leech for your energy shield. It would need more investment , but it allow some nice new hybrid builds.

Oh, this is definitely one of the most interesting changes this expansion has to offer. Didn't expect this, but it's a quite good idea. It makes the keystone more interesting and dynamic, rather than just basically "click this and get more mana" ...

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Nivius wrote:

soooo

how will i ever get 50-100 mana regen again?

Am I missing something here I admit im a scrubby player, that never chose clear speed over defense but i distinctly remember having 248 mana regen on a toon ( cause I was running lvl 20 AA) and have never played eb...and actually nearly exclusively ci

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EpicFail42 wrote:

The idea is insanely bold and interesting, of course - it would turn the metagame inside out and after some general rebalancing we'll see a new generation of fresh builds.

There is a major problem there, though, and not in this particular change only, but in multiple recent changes. In short - GGG seems to be trying (maybe even unintentionally) to slow the gameplay down a little, and sometimes does it in unfun ways.

Skills get cooldowns (often shared ones), enemies get periods of invulnerability that you need to wait through (phylacteral link, otherworldly), and now this change. The general theme here is "you have to wait" - doing nothing fun while you wait. Not the best thing for an action-RPG.

I'm aware, of course, that all these things are caused by different design problems, and solve those in reasonable ways. I'm also aware that you generally can avoid or mitigate the waiting (spending charges for some skills, running past p.link packs, getting some kind of energy shield regen), but the defaults DO matter.

For example, for most players encountering a p.link pack, it would be a default action to kill it. It would take unpleasantly long and be very frustrating, but we are all conditioned that we want to kill everything.

The same thing seems to be coming for this change: the default would be "let me take this node to get more auras and I'll just cast in bursts, because other ways cost too much points". Fine, but casting in bursts leads to waiting for recharge - and is, once again, frustrating.

Please, invent some kind of "better default mode" before implementing this change. While a few inventive players will find interesting ways to subvert the new EB, most beginners who will try it would be frustrated and unhappy, but keep playing for some time through that frustration. It would certainly leave an unhappy memory.

those plink and obelisk packs become really annoying when mobs desync or run each into a different room in a closed map, it s just facepalm absurd.

This change is not as complex as so many of you seem to think. Here's, in essence, what it actually does: it materializes the threshold between your original base mana and the mana added through Eldritch Battery, and applies ES rules onto the latter pool while preventing mana-based abilities from affecting it.

In other words, it's as if EB directly transferred the ES sliver from your life pool to your mana pool, with the same rules and restrictions.

Let's clear up a few things: this change does not mean that you can now reserve more mana: you have just as much effective mana as before. In fact, what it means is that you can reserve less mana, since you can no longer tap into EB's additional mana for reservation.

I am absolutely opposed to this change, since it renders EB in most ways obsolete.

First of all, it completely destroys EB's utility outside of EB+MoM. Those characters that were using eldritch battery to enlargen their mana pool (giving them more leeway for dealing with high mana costs and larger reservations) now find themselves with an essentially useless additional mana pool that can't be reserved and that won't regenerate until they stop using skills entirely for a small period of time.

This stems from the fact that ES was designed as an alternative life pool, which balanced great scaling and quick regeneration with the presence of a recharge delay and the inability to use flasks. To effectively manage your ES pool, you had to be able to avoid damage for small periods of time, and/or leech your pool back through Ghost Reaver.

As an alternate mana pool, where you'll be consistently using skills that prevent your ES from regenerating at all, this concept falls flat, since you'll in most cases find yourself with a temporary mana pool that will always find itself depleted in a sustained battle.
The only way to counteract this is to use the Ghost Reaver node, but that means giving up life regeneration entirely for the sake of sustaining part of your mana pool... an entirely lackluster option (not to mention the passive travel cost).

Second of all, it makes even the EB+MoM combo obsolete, by eliminating the additional mana buffer that EB provided. The reason MoM's 30% damage conversion is often considered as a pure damage reduction is the fact that mana quickly and consistently regenerates, allowing your mana to serve as a constant buffer for damage - and the more mana you had, the more likely it was that that buffer would never be depleted. But with the new EB mechanic, you'll be giving up your energy shield in exchange for a "temporary" additional mana pool that in most cases will find itself entirely depleted and unable to regenerate, leaving you only with your base pool for true damage reduction.

And in that case, why choose 30% of damage taken from ES with EB instead of 100% of damage taken from ES without it?

What a strange change to consider.


Was someone at GGG worried that Cybil's Paw was gonna lose it's place as 'best claw PoE' in 1.2.0, or what?


Change for sake of change?

I dunno, do not like.

Rory said it's not gonna work with MoM but Mark said otherwise. I'm confused. Let's assume Mark is correct, usually he is the go-to guy about game mechanics.

So with these new changes:
*EB won't increase mana pool therefore no increase in mana regen.
*MoM will still work, but there will be a recharge time because converted ES still behaves like normal ES.
*If the initial damage is Chaos, then it will bypass ES and directly hit mana.
*Spells/Attacks will use ES before Mana and this will allow us to become more aggresive about auras, but then again we might run out of ES pretty quickly.

If this is the case then it doesn't sound that bad.
When running EB, you usually don't go heavy on auras because you need a really big remaining mana pool. But with these changes we can go 80-90% reservation. And consider that now we can even run Discipline too.

A rough estimation;

OLD EB
2450 Total Mana
1450 Reserved

NEW EB
850 Total Mana
750 Reserved
2300 ES on Mana

This is only true if I got it all correct of course.

Please check the interaction with this:



And also with RF and Auras.

Cannot give a complete feedback because I do not know how the new passive tree works.

Big net effect:

Elderich battery is no longer a free artic armor.

Mana potions may become less needed as ES recharge when not casting (moving to next pack) might be Amaze balls

Much wow. Could be great. (ES numbers are so crazy high on a good piece compare to natural mana that this could be great for future mechanics.)

This also means you can cast great on full mana reservation. Summoners might love that.

Just sitting in the hospital, can't wait to check this out:

The main reason to pick EB is not to increase a characters mana pool, but it's mana regen.
While both are indissociable in the current form, the new one would essentially keep the large but rather useless pool and slashes the desirable regen part.

While some (all?) of that regen could be claimed back with the use of zealoth oath, it all becomes a very questionable trade.

Why wouldn't I just spend all those skill points into mana nodes, keep my ES as an effective hp buffer, and keep my life regen?

Picking this new EB + MOM would turn a 100% effective ES buffer into a 30% effective buffer since the regen rate of both would be the same, which again seems questionable.

people also talk about how great the shavronne's ring would be to it. Have fun running a char with very low armor/ev and , no life regen no AA in a map!

And please, add at least a link to mark's post in the op, as it doesn't even explain what we are talking about.