Mind over Matter with or without Eldritch Battery?

Hiho,

been a while since I played MoM and I am trying to decide wether or not my next character will go EB alongside MoM or not. It will be a CDoT-caster, thus I won't need much mana for casting. I just want to check, if I missed something, if you know any cool combos, stuff like that. Maybe there even is a guide on the topic that I missed.

Here are my musings:

EB:
-obviously EB allows to reserve mana to do auras, aspect of the spider, blasphemy, ...
-going EB solves all mana regen issues that MoM-builds have (or is there an easy fix since last time I played this?)
-no need for mana rolls on equip

not EB:
-one can scale armour, ergo Vaal Molten Shell, ergo great.
-With Supreme Ego coming to the regular skill tree, it might be one of the best times to go Essence Worm + no mana reservation
-able to include dodge?

I, for once, was quite dismayed when the "MoM means you build mana and keep that mana unreserved" prejudice was smacked hard during a build improvement thread.
The main problem with EB is that ES will not protect mana from chaos damage (unless you go Coruscating/Shav/Solaris/Esh), making chaosDoT quite deadly for your life. Of course, going CI+EB is to dance with death

At this point, for what I can see, you can go MoM and EB and either:

> keep that mana unreserved. This is useful if you just need the ES for mana cost and you can leech enough ES (this is more common since Synthesis league to do) or regen your ES fast enough (ESRegen takes an oofing 50% less malus with ES regenRate, but it will start regen right away unless you are actually damaging the ES with MoM) to cover the skill mana cost = virtual mana-less skill. Mana will kick in when a not-too-high ES will be depleted, or to cover chaos damage hits.

> Keep all the mana reserved. This comes useful when you can't or don't want to build too much mana, or find easier to build a lot of ES. In this case doing the above mana-less skill trick is easier (higher ES pool = higher ES leech rate), but you will have little to no cover against chaos damage, which will be taken by life after the very tiny bit of unreserved mana (if any) will be depleted

In both cases, you will have some major problem in proccing Arcane Surge, which is quite arguabily one of the best way to increase your spell damage, since spending ES or Life instead of mana will not make the counter go on. Inspiration too will not work as intended for the same reason, and people are slowly noticing it is not that bad as a support as it seems

As for the ability to include Dodge, Thread of Hope makes you now able to get Phase Acrobatics without getting Acrobatics itself. Also, you can try get Elusive - Harvest will give you some more passive tree to get that sweet 25% temporary dodgeHits. Albeit, if you go ColdDoT you can choose a Trickster rather than an obvious Occultist if you want to have some extra layer of defence with the dodging

Supreme Ego is a very nice Keystone, but should benefit you more if you go with the first choice (all mana unreserved). Minus EB, of course, since you won't have ES. This will make your life be pretty much always full, but will deplete your mana kinda quickly, so you'll need to find a lot of manaRegen or manaLeech, the latter made quite difficult since Synthesis league

If your ES is higher then 40% of life, there's no point to go EB. Just keep ~100 unreserved mana, and you're fine. If it's lower, then having EB is actually helpful.

Thx for the long response :)

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Maxtrux wrote:

> keep that mana unreserved. This is useful if you just need the ES for mana cost and you can leech enough ES (this is more common since Synthesis league to do) or regen your ES fast enough (ESRegen takes an oofing 50% less malus with ES regenRate, but it will start regen right away unless you are actually damaging the ES with MoM) to cover the skill mana cost = virtual mana-less skill. Mana will kick in when a not-too-high ES will be depleted, or to cover chaos damage hits.

I was kinda rdy to do this route. Now I updated my skilltree to 3.11 and realised I most likely can't afford to travel all the way to Supreme Ego :/

Any tips on getting mana recovery? As a Chaos DoT I can't leech, is mana regen an actually viable way?

Something that I see Mathil do fairly often: use Inquisitor with Pious Path and Sanctuary ascendancy nodes, then add MoM and EB, then reserve 100% of his mana for more damage through auras and stuff.

The Inquisitor ascendancy offers 200 flat Energy shield regen which is much higher than your mana regen will ever be unless you're playing an archmage support build. This allows you to fix any mana problems your build might have, allows you to reserve more resource than usual, and you still can benefit from the damage mitigation that MoM provides by consuming 30% of your energy shield on hits.

I don't know that I would use both MoM and EB without Inquisitor, though.