Arcane Surge granted by Arcane Blessing may not be respecting the strongest buff rule.

https://youtu.be/NyGFnQOq4aU



In the video above, you can observe my character TykeroBrand casting Wave of Conviction linked to level 20 Arcane Surge and level 19 Archmage. The spell costs him 784 mana to cast.
He has the Arcane Blessing ascendancy passive allocated. He also has the Arcane Capacitor passive allocated.


His passive mana regen without Arcane Surge is 908.8 on the character sheet.

Upon casting Wave of Conviction but not hitting any enemies, you can observe his mana regen jumps to 1268.2 for the duration of the Arcane Surge. Further casting to reach the 50% increased Arcane Surge effect from Arcane Capacitor would increase his mana regen to 1431.6, though this is not displayed in the video.
Later in the video, I cast Wave of Conviction and hit an enemy. Immediately upon casting Wave of Conviction, you can see his mana regen jump to 1268.2 as expected. However, when the Wave of Conviction hits an enemy, a new Arcane Surge is applied to him from Arcane Blessing. This Arcane Surge appears to take priority over the stronger Arcane Surge linked with the skill, reducing his mana regen to 1137.5. If you watch carefully, you can see this weaker Arcane Surge wear off, returning his mana regen to 1268.2, before the original Arcane Surge also wears off, returning his mana regen to its baseline 908.8.

I believe this possible bug only manifests when Arcane Capacitor is allocated alongside Arcane Blessing, and may be related to the Arcane Surge granted by Arcane Blessing not interacting as I expect it should with the "effect of Arcane Surge on you" and "effect of Arcane Surge on you per 200 Mana spent Recently" passive modifiers. I did not test it myself, but a guildmate of mine reported that they did not observe the effect with just Arcane Capacitor or just Arcane Blessing allocated - both must apparently be allocated to manifest this possible bug.


Thanks for reading.

First off, this is not restricted to Arcane Blessing, but any two different sources of Arcane Surge in conjunction with Arcane Capacitor.

I've been testing this a bit since I noticed it a few days ago, and I'm fairly sure this is what's happening:

Arcane Capacitor does not apply it's increased Arcane Surge effect retroactively or dynamically. In other words, if you cast a 1k mana cost spell linked to a lvl 20 Arcane Surge, that spell will not get the 50% increased AS effect (actually it doesn't get any of the benefits of the AS buff), nor will the 50% increased effect apply to your mana regen, cast speed etc as your AS buff is "regular" strength. When you cast the same 1k mana cost spell again within the 4s "recently" window, that spell will apply the juiced-up Arcane Surge as it sees the 1k mana spent on the first cast. The same would apply if the second spell cast cost 400 mana (to fulfill the Arcane Surge mana spending requirement).


Now what's happening with the buff strength is easily explained:

You cast Wave of Conviction, granting a regular strength lvl 20 Arcane Surge buff, then Arcane Blessing triggers, granting you a lvl 1 Arcane surge buff that has been juiced up by Arcane Capacitor. The game compares the two Arcane Surge buffs, both having the same name but the second (lvl 1) having increased effect than the first (lvl 20) and consequently applying the second buff instead, despite it actually being a weaker buff in all aspects, regardless of the increased effect.

Now, this will only come in play with infrequent casts of high-mana spells, as the lvl 20 Arcane Surge buff is chosen over the lvl 1 buff if they both have equal increased effect. It does however impact the usage of things like Arcane Cloak + Arcane Surge as a temporary buff in that the high-level AS will be overwritten by a lower effect.


Clearly the game chosing a lower strength buff over a higher strength one needs to be addressed. Ideally the behaviour of Arcane Capacitor should be changed as well to allow for high-cost casts to grant the increased Arcane Surge buff immediately but I guess that's not as clear-cut and more of a game mechanics question.

Good observation, that makes sense.

Hope to see this fixed/changed.

Can we get a comment from devs about this wierd interaction?
Does Arcane Capacitor work as intended?

Address the issue please.

Bump. Also, FWIW, the wiki claims this is unintended behavior.

From https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Arcane_Surge:

"

If multiple sources of Arcane Surge are active at once (e.g. from Arcane Capacitor and a lvl 20 Arcane Surge Support), only the one with the highest effect grants any bonuses.

Would be cool if we could get an answer from the devs!

Bumping. This is a very annoying issue that reduces the viability of this node when using Arcane Surge on something like Arcane cloak. I see no reason why it should override a stronger instance of Arcane Surge.