Gearing your mage

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Gearing your mage

Postby DevilSpawn » Sat Jan 26, 2008 4:12 pm

Some things to consider while gearing your mage:

So a few months ago there was a patch that changed the way mana regen worked. They put mana regen from items on diminishing returns.

I generally overlooked this change and thought it wouldn't make a big difference. More mana regen meant... well, more mana regen.

I've been trying to gear my mage recently and found this website...

http://noxins.net/flash/misc/mrcalc.swf

It's a mana regen calculator. You enter your stats, it tells you how much mana you regenerate per second. I was alarmed to find that because of the diminishing returns patch, the mana regen difference between 8 MR on your suit and 11 MR is approximately .1 mana per second on my dexer's suit (exactly what 10 meditation does or what 1 mana regen did before the patch)... the difference between 11 and 14 mana regen is more pronounced. So, going from 8 to 14 mana regen on a suit would be equivalent to increasing your meditation by 20 (approximately). This incredible diminish is less pronounced on characters with higher meditation. I think something on the patch notes said that increased meditation makes the diminishing returns less severe.

This observation has very interesting implications. Let's say you're a tamer mage or spellweaver mage and you want to do a peerless. So you gear your character out in max mana regen items... So you have like 14 or more mana regen on your suit... not counting that boomstick that all the PAS mages carry (heh). The boomstick has 3 mana regen on it. If you already have 14 on your suit and plan to hold a boomstick to go to 17 mana regen (assuming that's the only reason you want to hold it) maybe you should think again... What if we got a spellbook with +15 meditation on it? Then 15 meditation would actually give MORE mana regen than 3 MR on your suit. What if you already have 120 meditation and getting more from a book won't work? Well, 20 focus is equal to 10 meditation, which is equal to .1 mana per second. That's better than going from 14 MR to 17. What if you got a spellbook with 15 meditation and say... 15 magery? Then you could drop your magery by 15, wear the book, gain 30 meditation, and it would generate more mana than anything else you could carry in your hands.

This could have other strange effects on what gear is optimal for mana regen. Suppose you like FC/FCR on your spellweaver mage or tamer mage... so you would normally wear jewelry with 1/3... You could wear the scrappers and the vesper replica shield for 2/4 casting... Then get jewelry with a ton of +skill on it, then juggle skills around until you get a lot more focus or meditation than you had before for a net gain in mana regeneration. Use the calculator posted above to figure out what's optimal.

LMC vs Mana regen - a slightly closer look

Mana regen has no cap, but it diminishes. LMC is capped at 40%. It applies to every ability that uses mana.

So one might ask.. which is better? Well, that depends on the situation.

Let's say you can either get 12 mana regen or 40 LMC and can't pick anything in the middle. Now let's assume you're going to a peerless and you're going to spam level 4 greater heal on your rune beetle or ogre lord... Let's assume 2/6 casting (cap casting speed for magery - this should actually factor into your decision of how to gear your mage). Let's assume gheal takes 2 seconds to cast and target. I think it actually takes 1.4 seconds to cast with no lag. Anyway, assuming 1 cast every 2 seconds at a base mana cost of 11, with 40% lower mana cost, thats 6.6 mana per spell. For simplicity's sake, let's say it costs 7 mana per greater heal if you have 40 LMC. You save 4 mana per cast. That means you actually save 2 mana per second!! That's AMAZING. No level of mana regen on your armor can give you 2 whole mana per second. That'd be better than 20 mana regen on your armor. Let's make the same calculation though, assuming you have 12 mana regen on your suit... and I'll round up in mana regen's favor to say that you get 1 whole mana per second with 12 mr... Assuming you cast greater heal once every 2 seconds for the duration of the encounter, 40 LMC completely dominates 12 mana regen.


Let's look at another situation...

Say you're in doom and you've got a deamon slayer book and you're casting flamestrike on a dark father. Flamestrike takes 40 mana. With 40% LMC, you save a whopping 16 mana per cast. Let's say you spam flamestrike and get one off every 4 seconds (that'd be extremely slow and you aren't going to get arties that way)... thats 4 mana saved per second while casting. That's amazing.

The bigger the spells you're casting, the more often you're casting, the more dominant LMC is over mana regen. If you are spamming magic arrow, then LMC and mana regen would be about the same, assuming you couldn't cast magic arrow more often than once a second.

Lower Mana Cost AND Mana Regen


Basically, LMC makes your mana more efficient. So before you could heal say 50 points for 11 mana... that's the base mana cost of greater heal. That's about 4.6 healed points per mana. With LMC it changes to 50 points healed for 7 mana. That's 7.14 points healed per mana. That's much more efficient. I think my peerless fights usually last about 12 minutes - that is 12 minutes of pure combat, not the time spent looting or messing around while someone honors the travesty. Let's say that you're casting the whole time, so you're never at full mana, so mana regen is working for you all the time... Assume you get 1 whole mana regen per second from your armor - maybe you get 1.5... Anyway with one mana per second from armor for a 12 minute fight, that's 720 seconds - that's 720 mana generated from armor only... The difference between the efficiency of spells casted at 0 and 40 LMC is 2.54 points healed per mana (if you're just casting greater heal - this is theory-crafting, not an exact science)... So if we take the mana we get from MR... 720 over the course of the fight... times the LMC efficiency gain, we would be casting 1828 more points of heals if we just used the mana we generated from our armor and healed with LMC on. (I'm not sure if this last calculation is worth considering - it's to give an idea of how big of a factor items can be)

Conclusion


If you're casting spells constantly, LMC dominates mana regen in level of importance. Gear for both, but cap LMC first. LMC makes all your mana more efficient - that's more damage per mana and more points healed per mana. Consider that while gearing your character. When deciding what skills to get for a PvM caster character, seriously consider maxing meditation and running LMC. If there is a way for you to trade off mana regen for meditation or focus, use the calculator that I posted above to decide which is optimal.

On a related note, if you just have meditation and no focus, remember being human gives you 20 focus for free. That's an extra .1 mana per second. If you are in a very long battle with a mob (say a peerless boss) and you are casting to where you never reach full mana, then that 20 focus will give you 72 mana over the course of a 12 minute battle. Being an elf gives you 20 extra mana. Of course, if you are an elf and get meditation and focus, then you'll have more mana and regenerate more... but that depends on whether or not you have room on your template for it - also, you can't wear the stitchers mittens if you're human.
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Postby Damien Kilcannon » Sun Jan 27, 2008 3:43 am

according to that calc my bard/mage is getting 2.48 mana back per second....and I just realized that if my resists were a little better on this suit I would have a major uber suit...LOL...40lmc/100lrc/16 mr/ 4fc/6fcr...well the spell damage increase could be better too...only 60%
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Postby Sir William » Sun Jan 27, 2008 5:18 pm

im 2.98/sec on the new calc
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Postby Melkezidac » Wed Feb 20, 2008 7:25 am

bump
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Postby Damien Kilcannon » Wed Feb 20, 2008 2:52 pm

There i changed this thread to sticky so it will stay near the top...no reason to bump!
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Postby Maldar » Mon Jan 12, 2009 12:33 am

Then my mage/necro/weaver, wearing the new Sorcerer's Suit, sucks. *Heads off to build a suit*
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Postby AshOfCaine » Mon Jan 12, 2009 12:50 am

Maldar wrote:Then my mage/necro/weaver, wearing the new Sorcerer's Suit, sucks. *Heads off to build a suit*


Well, I don't think so, least not for my necro/mage.. He wears the Sorcerer's suit and the luck jewelry set as well, basically because I wanted one character i didn't have to share pieces or entire suit with all my other characters.

But being a necro, he doesn't care about mana regen as he spends his time in wraith form and has been out doing champ spawns (ilsh and tokuno) without a care in the world.
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Postby Maldar » Mon Jan 12, 2009 1:57 am

I need to play around with Wraith then. I have never played that spell except messing around early on in the creation of the character.
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