Mana stacking

When you try to theorycraft a mana build often you end up trying to make it have good recovery. Wether it's because you run Mind over Matter, indigon or archmage you usually spend a lot of mana as a means to get damage or as a defensive layer. But that means you have to recover all of the mana that you're spending. Early on you can just use a mana flask and although that is kind of annoying it works just fine together with the regeneration that you get. But when you get to 7-10k mana you can't solve your mana with flasks which brings me to my point: 'honest' mana stackers don't have good options to solve their recovery.

By honest I mean casters that consume a considerable amount of mana with each cast and also use their mana as a defensive layer of some sort, comparable to how bonezone uses its lifepool (although with less crazy recovery). What options do they have to fix their recovery? Flasks and regeneration work fine early but fall off a cliff pretty quickly. Mana works only for mapping and only if you have good damage. The only really potent option for them is recouping mana but that is super inconsistent.
That means that good mana stackers either don't cast spells and recover mana via leech like the manaforged arrows build or they avoid spending a lot of mana like the archmage PBoD or mjölner build.
I myself thought about theorycrafting a build that utilizes manastorm but you will have to either use totems to avoid spending a lot of mana regularly or an attack to leech back to full quickly. The point is that the way to make this powerful unique usable you have to kind of cheese it which doesn't feel that good.

I understand giving casters access to leech might make mana recovery too easy for non-mana stacker and might be too powerful with indigon but here are a few suggestions:
-give some notables %mana regeneration so you can regenerate like 50% of your mana per second if you really try to and invest a lot of points into it.
-make a helmet or something in another highly contestet slot that gives spell damage leeched as mana. This way you create difficult choices between let's say indigon and the new helmet.
These suggestions would not make honest mana stackers be able to compete with manaforged arrows but it would make them a solid archetype that also has ok QoL.

These are just some thoughts on mana stacking. If I was to assign this 'issue' with mana stackers a priority I would put it below Glad/Bleed rework and creating an alternative for melee totems but I would still like mana stacking on the todo-list.

it is funny that this is the league (3.24) they reintroduced tattoos and changed 3 mana regen per second to 8% increased.

They don't like people having good mana regen apparently.

Archmage change is actually fantastic. It doesn't amtter if mana cost is your entire mana bar or you reduce the cost to 0, you still gain the added damage.

This opens up the possibility of playing Mjolnir with Archmage, since mana cost no longer matters (and spells triggered by Mjolnir don't spend mana, which made Archmage a dead link before 3.24).

Essentially, you can just get 'enough' mana recovery and even use uniques like Lavianga's Spirit to 'ignore' the downside of Manastorm.

Will we need to tinker around more? Sure. But I don't think mana is worse off at all

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ArtCrusade wrote:

Archmage change is actually fantastic. It doesn't amtter if mana cost is your entire mana bar or you reduce the cost to 0, you still gain the added damage.

This opens up the possibility of playing Mjolnir with Archmage, since mana cost no longer matters (and spells triggered by Mjolnir don't spend mana, which made Archmage a dead link before 3.24).

Essentially, you can just get 'enough' mana recovery and even use uniques like Lavianga's Spirit to 'ignore' the downside of Manastorm.

Will we need to tinker around more? Sure. But I don't think mana is worse off at all

I am well aware about mjölner and how it works with new archmage but I consider that a sort of cheese that causes mana recovery to not get fixed because people can always point at mjölner and say "that build doesn't have a problem with mana recovery".
You could say that Mjölner existing pushes mana builds in a direction where they abuse it to mitigate their lackluster mana recovery.

But leaving Mjölner aside, anything that runs mind over matter as their primary defence isn't helped with that.

Lastly Manastorm and lavignas spirit don't interact with each other in a meaningful way. Manastorm makes you sacrifice all your mana when casting a spell, which cannot be circumvented as this is not a mana cost. There is no way around the fact that you get as much added lightning damage as you can recover mana. Also I have tinkered around quite a bit and have landed on something that would work fine and be really powerful (assuming that the added lightning damage also applies to attacks which I belief it should): Molten strike hiero with indigon+battlemages cry to scale both %increased and flat damage with mana, making it double dip. For indigon we need arcane cloak to actually spend mana (sacrificing is not spending). As a spell that doesn't consume most of your mana prior to manastorm saccing the rest I think blood rage is perfect. Now with molten strikes hit rate (+return proj) we have a great skill for instant leeching to recover our mana once per second. Every 4 seconds we have to sacrifice it all to keep manastorm active and inbetween we have to use arcane cloak to keep our spend high. The battlemages cry should ideally be socketed in a weaponswap redblade banner to maximise its power. For accuracy the best solution is likely shapers touch with int and str stacking as this also plays into mana stacking and to get auras (eternal blessing grace, vaal disc and clarity) you go ivorytower (i.e. what every high end mana stacker uses rn)

Is this powerful? Yeah it's really powerful.
Is the playstyle fun? No, although it might still be better than manabond mjölner
Did the playstyle get unfun because I need to use cheesy solutions to solve problems that shouldn't be that hard to solve on a dedicated mana build? Absolutely. You could have automated your arcane cloak and pressing blood rage manually every 4 seconds is fine by me (manastorm requires manual casting, triggers don't sac your mana) but weaponswapping to get reliable damage uptime is a bit cringe. Maybe I'm wrong and you don't have to do the weaponswap for consistent uptime but I think my point with how those cheeses kind of ruin the playstyle is appearent.

It's not about finding workarounds because they do exist and I know about them, it's about them making builds unfun and streamlining the process of creating a good mana stacker: Indigon, Arcane cloak, Ivory tower, shapers touch, hiero and either you spend mana only roughly every two seconds on your arcane cloak or you use battlemages cry and some attack. And if we're daring today we throw in a manastorm.

i hope you realise that Ivory Tower is beyond broken? it should be a T0 unique. Indigon is equaly so but at least it is one-dimensional item. Ivory Tower is good for everything

and Manastorm is precisely designed to NOT be easily manageable. you get insane damage boost for the price (small in my opinion) of being annoying

GGG was really generous to mana stacking archetype. you get pretty much everything for 'just' stacking mana and stacking it isnt even that hard. i wish i could reach the same result for the same investment using rare melee weapons..

i do not believe mana stacking needs any better recovery - it is already very strong (even if not using flasks. it is amazing if one can force himself to use mana flasks). it is true that mana regen falls off the more mana you have. reason is simple - clarity is flat base, it gets dwarfed with natural mana regen, it doesnt scale up. but it applies to 5-7K+ mana builds. people who reach 10K (and acquire corresponding power) in most cases can handle recovery just fine but it isnt cheap. in my opinion mana stacking is in general, pound per pound, one of the cheapest and with a very long upgrade path

The reason why it's not that easy to build is specifically because anything that lets you build defence while also building offence should come with downsides. If people like Connor Converse have shown anything, then just how broken mana-stacking is and you ask for what, even more?

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ArtCrusade wrote:

The reason why it's not that easy to build is specifically because anything that lets you build defence while also building offence should come with downsides.

Like what, armourstackers? Do armourstackers have to weaponswap to deal damage? Or do energyblade users not do that? Tbf the price that energyblade users pay is their half their ES pool but building offence and defence simultaneously or double dipping isn't uncommon and in cases like boneshatter the price is that you have to have a good defence and recovery.

Manastackers don't need to have comically bad QoL to compensate their natural scaling potential from a balance perspective. Mana Stackers that abuse broken mechanics shouldn't get buffed further but there should rather be non-broken alternatives that should get opened up. To achieve this you would make the non-broken alternatives take the place of a core item in the broken builds, like indigon, which is what the original post aimed at. A mjölner build without indigon is still a good build, but not broken by any means. Otherwise I wouldn't mind the broken builds getting nuked from orbit if that frees up space for mana builds to get QoL.

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sidtherat wrote:

people who reach 10K (and acquire corresponding power) in most cases can handle recovery just fine but it isnt cheap.

Handling recovery isn't really something you can invest in - that's the whole point of the post. The builds that do get played either cheese recovery by being attack based (no need to invest, you get it for free) or don't spend much mana at all (so clarity regen is enough). The builds that don't meet one of these criteria don't really get played beyond a league start point.