Hey guys, Bon here, and today let's talk about mana and mana cost. Specifically, a variable that we all kind of have to engage with with our builds, some more, some less. But yeah, turns out casting your main skill is actually pretty damn valuable, and running out of mana feels really bad. This didn't used to be an issue, and it used to be something that was easily fixed with leech, mana flasks, EB. But G has kind of thrown a little bit of a wrench in that. And if you are leak-starting Arc and you're still playing Ark Mage, you might be wondering, What is he talking about? Are you playing like hex blast with blood magic? So yeah, we're going to start out with what happened, then we're going to talk about why cheesy mana is actually so goddamn good. I'm going to give you an example from this build right here that I'm currently setting up. It's kind of like a ward caster right side. It's a little bit experimental. It might be completely... We'll see. Then how to

cheese Mana problematic archetypes, and maybe some changes I would propose. So, what happened in the last two leaks in 3.24? The 25% reduced Mana cost that you could get from a flask is gone. It was a crafted modifier that you could basically get by unveiling Cinder swallow, and um, yeah, it just doesn't exist anymore, which is a ridiculous Nerf for first up Mage blood, which to be honest was pretty broken and is something that probably should have been addressed. But it also nerfed a lot of Pathfinder archetypes and even archetypes that just slapped it onto their normal builds to at least have good uptime on reduced Mana cost. TLDR, it was an incredibly strong mod, and some archetypes just ceased to exist because of this change. For example, a lot of the cast on crit builds that are now kind of relegated to either going Arc Mage or just disappearing. Now, the second Nerf was inspiration support, and this is a pretty big deal for builds that already had some amount of reduced Mana cost.

they now get screwed big time because this 38% used to actually stack additively because it used to say reduced Mana cost. And to give you an example right here, let's take a spell that costs 200 mana, and it has 30% reduced Mana cost just from the passive tree, right? Uh, maybe it has stuff like tireless on the left side, uh, it has the reduced Mana Mastery right here, that's already 25%. Maybe you even get more, right? You get righteous decree. But the TL;DR here is that the old inspiration, this 30% reduced Mana cost, would be additive with inspiration, which means you could theoretically get your Mana cost to zero with it. But in this case, 70% that gets the 200 Mana to 60 mana, and with the new changes, you first get the 40% less, which gets it to 120, and then the reduced part is only on those 120, which gets it to 84 monoc cost. And while this does not look like a game changer, it's often a lot of small

changes together that make huge changes. So, the 5% reduced mana cost has gone from Jewels. Now, this was not as big of a deal because people just used to take like one or two. Very rarely would you actually see people investing into this, mostly because that's where you get your crit multi or your dot multi from mods on Jewels. Especially suffixes are high priority, so it wasn't the biggest deal, but it was something you had at least a chance to use. Another thing that happened last patch is attack-based skills have now increased mana cost. It's not true for all skills, but almost all skills. So, they basically normalized how much they cost and made it a little bit more competitive with how extremely expensive spells are. We also have the removal of divine blessing. Why that is so important is mainly because of Eldritch battery. If you look right here, you will see that Eldritch battery used to be one of the ways to cheese mana, and it always used to get that divine blessing, which gives you plus one aura to kind of offset the

fact that you cannot use energy Shield anymore, and that you now have to scale energy Shield, that is also kind of gone, which is a huge Nerf for one ways of cheesing mana. And then even further back, we also have the enduring Mana flask Nerf. Enduring Mana are still used in stuff like hex blast, but that is only because the mines are very cheap in builds that, for example, take 60 to 70 Mana per cast, and they have like, I don't know, five, six casts per second. It is basically impossible to do anything with this flask, even if you're willing to give one up. Now, before we even go through how you can sidestep your Mana cost completely, I want to quickly talk to you about why this is so important, and especially if you're somebody who's a build maker, you need to know these things, and you need to plan your build accordingly. Right now, I have a very intricate Ward build with Beacon of Madness, which as you can think has a lot

of weird interactions, and there's a lot of things to fix, but the hardest one to fix was finally enough Mana cost. And when I say fix, people always go to, Well, you can take this Mana cluster, and you can take that Mana cluster, which is what I want to counter in this video. And I want to give you a little bit of insight into how costly it is to actually fix your Mana. This is as straightforward as it gets, and this is an Elemental skill, so this one can use inspiration, so it's actually easier for them to fix Mana. So right now, I'm putting six passive points into Mana right here. I have Deep Thoughts with reduced Mana cost of skills, and then I have Mind Drinker with the Mana monery for this build. Don't ask why Spell Echo is not very good, so this moner is actually incredibly strong. Six passive points, which would translate in this build to 23% more damage with an extra medium cluster and two damage notes. So far, so good. Then we have two prefixes and one suffix, and this is

basically, my ring right here, and this is a very, very strong ring. These are annoying as hell to craft because the hybrid reduced mana cost of skill mana in the prefix. You have to hit with a veiled orb, which are very expensive. So, not only is it hard to fix, it's also expensive. I also need a mana region roll in the suffix that I need to catalyze everything. And at the end, I even need to craft on non-changing skills have minus 8. If you chuck these in prefixes for caster, are actually not that big of a deal. You're missing like a percentage damage roll. The suffix could have been do multi. So, in total, these come out to 9% more damage that I could have gotten otherwise. But be aware that this is with me having to use a RAR ring here. I have no option for anything else. Then we have inspiration, which has actually cost me 10% more damage because if I didn't use that, I could actually use Awaken Spell Echo or Empower or something like that.

it's I think even a little bit more, but I think this is more normalized. And then we also have Clarity reservation. I'm reserving Clarity right now. I'm doing it on life, but it might turn back to Mana, in which case I'm losing Herald of Agony, which is a straight-up 10% more damage. Multiply all of these with each other, and you're coming out to around about 63% more damage. What I want you to take away from this point here is that think about the skill, the off-meta skill that you love to use to play, and now it's not really viable anymore, but it just needs more damage. Think about how good it would be with 63% more damage. Just being able to fix your Mana does not mean that you can actually compete with all the other build archetypes that do not need to address Mana at all, as you can very clearly see from this example. And this is, by the way, a mild example. I could be a Fizz skill that doesn't convert or a

chaos spellcaster, and I could not even use inspiration, and I would probably lose like half of my damage here. But let's talk about how you can cheese Mana. The first one is Arch Mage, which you might say, Well, I have to go cloak of the fins in my build. I have to go at zerus foyble and whatnot. But what you have to understand when you say those things, right, is Mana nodes and everything that revolves around Mana also fixes your defenses and your offenses at the same time. If an Arc mage build would have to take deep thoughts right here or mind Drinker, it would do that anyways because it's already efficient. Now, there are a few nodes that you probably wouldn't take, like this one hanging note here, this one hanging note there, um, maybe a few other small Manor region notes that you wouldn't need otherwise. But figuring out your Mana kind of goes hand in hand with figuring out your damage and defenses. The second one is blood magic, and the reason this is so strong, right

now is because Eternal blessing exists, and eternal blessing basically gives you a free Aura. So, it's kind of like, imagine you don't have to take any Aura clusters at all; you just reserve one Aura without blood magic. That would be 50% of your Mana, so whatever you could do other than that with your Mana would maybe be a 25% reservation, 30% reservation. With blood magic, you just have that one Aura, but now you also completely figured out your Mana. This is being used on spellcasters, and it is being used on attack-based builds that are down here anyway as an easy solution. As well as that, it also does give 10% more max life. Then we have the enduring Mana flask, which makes it so you get, without any scaling, without any extra quality, 14.9 Mana region per second, which is enough for builds like hex blast. It's enough for other mine builds or maybe some Trappers that don't have any problem with Mana whatsoever. And um, yeah, you do slap it on your build. It's minus one flask, and hopefully

you're going to kill whatever before these charges run out. It's not a great solution, but a solution nonetheless. And it, funnily enough, is better on builds that cannot recover their charges consistently, 'cause on those builds, flask slots are not as valuable as on, for example, Pathfinder. Then we have Elri Battery, and you might be thinking you haven't seen much of it this league. The first reason why that is is that people have now realized just how strong Archmage is for almost any skill. Last League was kind of like the warm-up period for a lot of people. This league, it's come full circle. And the second reason is that Divine Blessing got removed, and this is a big deal because it means that you don't just get a 50% reservation Aura for free anymore. That means you lose Zealotry, Raft Determination. You're not going to lose your best reservation Aura because you already have that anyways, but at the end, you can slap on for a lot of spellcasters at the end, maybe like a

zealotry or something, and losing that incentive makes the archetype a lot more questionable. And that's why you're also going to see more and more tricksters that have been already out because trickster can use EB anyways, and it's one of the biggest winners because of its demise. Then let's talk about attack-based builds like, for example, lightning strike, frost blades, molten strike, whatever is meta this league. They got their mana cost increase, like I said earlier, but one of the things they got is they got new clusters. The premier one is right here with Thrill of Battle, 15% reduced mana cost, mana on hit. The small note here is good as well, and the back note is also really strong with 12%. They also have a mana mastery right here, which gives you easy access to reservation if you need it, or even more reduced mana cost. Couple that with the fact that you can easily get a searing exarch reduced mana cost right here, which goes up to 30%, which granted means you

have to use a rare helmet, but that's not really a big sacrifice for most attack-based builds. And to top this all off, we obviously have Mona Leach. So, wherever you get your Mona Lee, maybe you have a one-pointer here, maybe you're Fizz-based, and you can actually get an A-synth implicit. Maybe you just take this one-pointer here. Most of them are probably going to take Clever Thief. Once you have a mana cost down to a certain point, leech just takes over, and it's not an issue anymore. Mana costed a lot of attack-based builds is less of a necessity and more quality of life. Plus, there's also other clusters over here, Spirit of War, which doesn't have the best pain ever, and then you also have Cannibalistic Ride, which is a little bit better placed. And as I talked about before, especially if you're a marauder or slam build, blood magic will come in handy. So, what is left here at the end is nonar Mage casters, which you might think

H. That sounds disgusting. Who the hell would do that? But believe me, there are dozens of us. And there's also the fact that Caston crit right now heavily relies on Mana because of the changes they made five, six, seven leagues ago, actually, where a lot of that stuff used to be free. They removed a lot of other things. That would be another video to go into completely, but those builds have been bleeding. And what I mean with bleeding, once again, is this example right here. Yes, you can figure it out, but you could also say that, in essence, a lot of these non-arc Mage casters are actually nerfed quite significantly. If we invert this potential more damage gained into less damage, we could say that non-Arch Mage casters right now deal 39% less damage. And I know that's not 100% true 'cause Ark Mage, especially after some of the Mana Nerfs or bug fixes mid-league, has been getting a little bit more competitive. At the end of the day, most of the noes that

you take still feed into it, and even if we give it a little bit of leeway, maybe we say like 30% less damage or whatever, that is still incredible and one of the premier reasons why archmage right now is so goddamn strong, why there's so many Hero fens on the ladder. It is just one of the strongest archetypes at the moment. One of the reasons that you should not forget is this monoc cost, and this is also kind of to remind you that if that ever should go away, that might stomp a lot of that Advantage. So overall, I think what we just talked about is not the end of the world. I don't even know if I like it or hate it. I think it's an interesting decision to make, and it's something they could expand upon, but I have two issues with this. First one is inspiration is simply too efficient now. Even though inspiration got nerfed, if you're trying to fix the Mana, for example, let's say forbidden right, which is a pure chaos.

Caster versus something like an elemental skill like I'm doing right here rolling magma. It's a crazy difference, and yes, once again, we could just go back to say, uh, just use this, use that, use one of these cheese methods, but you can't tell me that it's not weird that you have to use one of these things that completely remove Mana from the equation instead of actually using the tools that were given, right? The reduced Mana cost, the Mana region, it just all feels too inefficient. If this was the same across the board, sure, but it just isn't. It completely stomps chaos and Fizz-based casters. Most Fizz builds, believe it or not, there would be more Fizz builds and more chaos casters if inspiration was, for example, Global, or there was way easier ways to reduce mana. And the second thing that always has existed is this weird gap between spellcasters and attack-based builds, and that just comes down to Mana. Mana Leech is a joke. If you think it isn't, uh, you take 0.1%.

Mana Leach on a syph jewel, and you basically cap a Mana. I don't even know why these Mana Leach notes exist, like as if anybody's going to take Spirit void or Essence sap. I mean, there's a very, very small amount of builds that would ever even take this, but let's be real, like we all know it's a one-point fix. And then you have caster, which have this massive burden. I'm not really sure what that's about. I guess their thought for this design, Joy, is that it's just not very easy to get a lot of Mana in the bottom side or, I don't know, right side of the tree. So we're going to have less Mana, so naturally less Mana regions. So let's just give them a free card. I'm not really sure what it is. Either way, these are incredibly big rifts between those archetypes. I guess one more thing I forgot is that the issues with the current mod situation is that it also punishes you for taking cast speed nodes.

and punishing you for something that makes your build more fun is probably not a good idea overall. I haven't really thought about this too much, but it's the only conclusion I can make now. What kind of changes would I make personally? I think that inspiration being Elemental damage only is a super weird design choice. I have no idea what this is about. Now, I'm sure back in the day when Mana was way easier to cheese, and with back of the day I mean like literally seven-six leagues ago, right? This wasn't really an issue. It was just like something you got on top on El builds. But nowadays, inspiration on a lot of these non-archage casters just feels mandatory, and a lot of these non-Elemental casters actually die to Mana cost. What I mean by that is in order to facilitate the Mana cost, you lose so much damage. So I would propose that either inspiration becomes all damage. If necessary, you can maybe reduce the damage bonus a little bit if you think it's just going to be too good.

across the board, but honestly, there's a lot of fringe builds that would need this in order to sustain the mana or remove inspiration and rework mana region values in general. A lot of builds would not use inspiration if it wasn't for the mana part, so if they can now figure out the mana region values without it and it's reworked, then they get a payoff for it. So, for example, if you pay like six points, all of a sudden, you're going to actually get something else, right? You're going to get more damage. Like, for example, in my build, I can use Spell Echo, which is 44% more damage, versus inspiration, which was only 28, and I get a payoff for that. But that is only possible if something changes there. Now, if we put all of this into a short conclusion, you should take away from this video that finding a way to circumvent your mana cost right now instead of trying to fix it with points is incredibly, incredibly efficient. And I'm saying this because I feel like some

people do not realize what the alternative to their EB or their Mana flask or them going blood magic or them having an arch Mage basically fix the Mana cost for you actually how much of an advantage that actually is you have to your build to play it so make it worthwhile if if you actually want to go for a build that has to fix their Mana the normal way better make sure it's worth it that's it and if you want to be efficient you probably want to fall into one of these first five categories but that's about all I got to say uh my internet was a little bit shitty recently so I couldn't really make as much content as I wanted to we're definitely back though with a build that I hope will turn out even if it sucks I'll still make a video about it because I think it's a cool concept uh but with that being said since I still don't have a slogan see you next time [Music]

Mana Costs are Weird in 3.25, What Happened? | Path of Exile

Mana Costs are Weird in 3.25, What Happened? | Path of Exile