Mage Rework Suggestion: Arcane, Body, Mind

Peppermaster

1. Meditation: Mana regen also increases even if you attack as long as you do not move. When not moving and attacking, health regen also increases as well. 

2. Magic Circle: slow increased from 50%/60%/70% to 60%/80%/100%. Mana boost increased as level increases (cannot give exact number for this one because I do not know the exact mana boost it gives originally)

3. Magic Shield: deleted and each school of spell has its unique defense secondary.

4. Battle Mage: Changed from 10%/15%/20%/25%/30%/35%/40% to 5%/10%/15%/20%/25%

5. Channel Mana: changed from 25%/50%/75%/100%/125% to 75%/100%/125%/150%/175%. Channel Mana's regen bonus gets halved when attacking and 1.5 second after attacking .  

5. Mana Barrier (new): casting a secondary spell with cost of 100 mana or more grant temporary shield equal to its mana cost for 5/7/10 seconds.

6. Resist Posion: Removed due to its ineffectiveness and not fitting to the characteristic of mage.

7. Sympathetic Overdrive (new): When you receive a damage that decreases your health below 25%, you instantly recharge all secondary skills and gain 400% bonus mana regen for 1.5 seconds. Has cooldown of 160/120/80 seconds

Comment: Because I put mana generator skills in each school of magic, I nerfed on Battle mage and Channel Mana. Also, Magic Shield is also gone because like I have said in 2 years ago, it is a problematic skill (go look up that post if you want more detail). It is now replaced with a defensive skill for each school of magic. Other than that, rest of them are just minor tweaks that are pretty self-explanatory. 

VasSin

I have one more suggestion:
Make it so Mana Up also increases the base mana regeneration rate. The increasing value is the square-rooted value by which Mana Up increases the base max mana, for example if character’s current Mana Up gives him +300 max mana, effectively quadrupling his max mana, Mana Up also doubles the base mana regeneration rate. With the current Man Up values this will give us increasing of mana regeneration by 1.4/1.7/2/2.2/2.4/2.6/2.8/3

VasSin

If these values seem too overpowered, the exponentiation of the rooting can be adjusted.

VasSin

For example, with cubic root the values will look like this: 1.3/1.4/1.6/1.7/1.8/1.9/2/2.1

RodentRacer

I think adding 50% to every Channel Mana upgrade seems a bit much to me.  Maybe it's good towards the end, but if you just have to spend one skill point to get +75% mana regeneration, it seems a bit excessive.  Spreading it out a bit more would help.

Peppermaster

Don't forget that your mana regen bonus from channel mana gets halved when you attack. That is the reason why channel mana's value seems higher than it should. Also, I made level 1 of channel mana to be slightly better than previous version to lessen the early game difficult due to battle mage nerf and not getting those element specific mana skill due to rng or something.

VasSin

Anyway, I think there should be a possibility for any mage to reach the state where his primary skill’s mana cost/second >= his mana regeneration rate.

Peppermaster

I totally agree and that is one of the purpose of these reworks that I was doing.

RodentRacer

Yeah.  It's a pain to have to retreat against the enemy because you're constantly running out of mana even though you can't get better.  I mean, some retreating is good, but it's rough, especially in early game when you have a bunch of bad rolls where you don't get any mana boosting powers and are instead given a ton of mana spending upgrades.

VasSin

So what do you think about Mana Up boosting mana regeneration?

RodentRacer

I think that would be pretty cool, although I think it's better how it is; separated into mana up and channel mana.
I think it would be really neat if there was something like channel mana, but for health; it would increase the rate at which you heal.  Also, I think it would be neat if there was some upgrade that boosted the amount of mana you gained while you were using mana.  Something to counteract this: "Don't forget that your mana regen bonus from channel mana gets halved when you attack." from what Peppermaster said above.

Peppermaster

I first thought about that few years before but I don't think its a good way to make mana up viable. Sure it will make it viable, but it just replaces it with channel mana. What I did in some of the mana generating skills in previous rework stuff is to make mana generators to scale with max mana. For example, in my fire rework, burn generate 1% of max mana. If you have no mana up, it regenerates 1 mana but once you have mana ups, you get more than 1 mana. Increasing mana cost for secondary spells to be more than 100 mana is a good way to incentives mana up as well. Mana Barrier that i mentioned up there is also a way to promote mana up as well.

VasSin

Well, my main issue with your suggested element’s mana generating skill is that for some of them, as for example for Water ones, you need to stop firing your primary skill.

Peppermaster

Having to stop firing your primary skill is intentional. I don't want players to be literally holding attack button for ages without using brain. I want to make sure that players have to think carefully about the timing of attack and making most uses out of the limited mana reserves. Oh also I forgot to mention it in the post but frostbite will not interrupt attack so you won't have to stop and use frostbite. Of course you will eventually stop firing your primary cuz by the time you use frostbite, the cost of your primary would be high enough to drain your mana quickly(cuz mana cost increases per second once you have elemental flourish).

VasSin

Well, my main issue with having to stop firing primary is the fact that it stops the growth of Harden and the arrow deflection.

VasSin

Also, it seems (very) a bit unfair that Fire and Air have mana regeneration skills which don’t require the player to stop firing, especially considering that for Water it would be much more essential. And I even don’t say about that Water’s mana regeneration skills seem just weak compared to other elements’ mana regeneration skills.

Peppermaster

It is true that it stops the growth of harden and the arrow deflection but I think it is a bit too overpowered to have harden and arrow deflection active infinitely (John agrees with me on the fact that frost jet's defensive capability is a bit too much). You will have enough time to have harden be on at max stack for quite awhile but it won't be forever. 

After looking at it again, I think frostbite's mana generation is theoretically too low. It should be more like 5% of max mana per enemy hit and 50% of max mana for boss. I was kind of afraid to give too much mana regen after I made burn(fire mana regen) too op so I gave it too little. 

If you look at the value of mana regen the siphon skill gives, it actually doesn't recover as much as you think. If you want to hit more enemies so that you get more regen bonus, you need to put points in channing which will drastically increase mana cost. It is suppose to only allow you to fire a bit longer rather than fire it infinitely. (air's flourish also increase mana cost per second as you atttack as well.) 

Fire's mana generator, on the other hand, is a bit overpowered now that I looked a bit more and I am well aware of that. I think there should be a cap of how much you can get from burn so that it doesn't instantly makes your mana to full (about 25% of max mana per second). However, you have to understand that Fire has way more mana cost then the rest of the elements because it has more subskills(hence making it cost way more than it used to). 

VasSin

Hmmm...

VasSin

Well, anyway there will also be items which lower costs/heighten mana regeneration, so I hope it will still be possible to reach the point where you can fire your primary skill at least half an hour.

VasSin

Probably I should explain my point more clearly to not get confused.

VasSin

The thing is that I don’t have very fast reaction, and I actually need some time to think, and when I am forced to constantly stop firing and start running, it makes difficult for me to think of a good tactic.

Peppermaster

I didn't went into items yet but of course those won't be as powerful as in original games to make sure that firing for at least half an hour never happens.

VasSin

And thought I agree that of course in the early- and mid-game it mustn’t allow you to constantly fire super-duper powerful magic, I think there should be some post-late-game point where you can finally think not about how to use your skills so you don’t run out of mana, but about how to use them effectively.