Game Mechanics Arcane, and by extension Mana, REALLY need to be tweaked

[Shanaxyle]

Hello world, i created an account just to post this.

Arcane prefix is incredibly useful in theory. Itl greatly increases your dps consistency, by way of allowing more sustained fire, as well as increasing your mana regeneration rate.

However arcane becomes becomes capped by how good your armour is due to the mana cap of 400. It is by far too easy to reach the cap of 400 mana in-game. Having an amber robe (60 mana) and a magic hat (60 mana) from the travelling merchant, as well as 5 accessories reforged with the arcane prefix (100 mana) you will reach the mana cap in pre-hardmode with little difficulty.

This is BEFORE considering naturally mana boosting accessories, which give an additional 80 mana, the diamond robes, which add 20 mana more than amber ruby and emerald, and the extra accessory slot gained from master mode, allowing 20 mana from an additional arcane modifier. Master mode is whete the cracks in arcane show the most because of this

By all rights, you should be able to achieve a total of 440-5p0 mana pre-boss, by simply grinding a goblin battle standard. Thats 200 from stars,
Plus 20-40 from band of starpower upgrades, based on shadow orb rng,
Plus 60-80 from robes, since amber is easy to find in large enough amounts, but could be outclassed by diamond giving 20 more mana,
Plus 60 from the magic hat, which is the easier mage set hat to attain,
Plus 100-120 from accessory reforges, depending on if you play master mode. There is not a SINGLE stage of the game where you can take advantage of a full arcane, max mana build in master mode. Expert mode only shows this issue in hardmode, due to the delayed addition of the expert accessory slot.

lets look at hardmode now. Being generous and assuming adamantine, which gives 20 less mana than titanium, your maximum should reach 200(base)+80(accesories)+20(crystal ball)+100 from arcane(up to 140 in master mode) for a total of 400-440 mana. In titanium worlds, or post mech boss, this become a range of 420-460 mana, meaning that three arcane accesory slots my as well not be reforged in the first place .

Arcane is THE ONLY reforge which is fundementally broken in such a way as to be rendered completely useless and inert in multiple slots if all slots are filled.
Many people complain that move speed and attack speed reforges are useless. But those modifiers at least STACK consistently. arcane as a modifier is hardcoded NOT to benefit the player if stacked. This feels like a MASSIVE oversight, which kneecaps arcane into being the worst reforge prefix.

There are a few ways i could see this being fixed. The first one, is simply to change arcane to increase MP regen by 2-4%, while reducing mana use by the same amount. This functionally fits the same exact niche use that more mana does, increasing your overall mana regen rate and uptime, without breaking the UI by having mana stars flow off the screen. This would also allow for variable tiers ofmagic prefix, ranging from a 1% to a 4% buff, which wpuld also achieve parity with other reforges.

Alternatively, mana could simply be uncapped, as the visual issue if mana going off the screen would only be prominent in master mode, where presumably players can hear and recognize their mana chirp, as well as judge roughly how fast any particular item consumes mana.

Lastly, if the ui is considered a critical issue, mana could be given a life fruit style colour shift, where the stars wrap around, turning them purple sequentially from the top of the screen as you surpass the 400 mana cap.

Arcane is great. Ive done mana builds with my mage characters pretty much since the day reforges were implemented, and while the mana issue always bugged me, its only since ive recently started playing master mode that I've started to truly detest the mana hardcap, as it's oy become ever increasingly more noticeable since.

Thanks for reading this far if you did.

Tl;dr: mana stacking is broken, especially in master mode where you are basically capped to a classic mode number of reforges due to mana being hardcapped between 40 and 140 below your theoretical upper limit at basically every stage of the game

Edit: a word, reduced two numbers in pre-HM example because you cant have three bands of starpower without summoning EOW

 

[Coleyohley]

Another problem is that Mana Potions can only restore up to 300 mana at once, meaning having more maximum mana than that is essentially wasted unless you stop attacking to regenerate, at which point you miss out on a lot of potential damage. Many hardmode magic armours can reach this amount of mana with just a Crystal Ball, and very few need anything more.

In hardmode, relying solely on mana potions for mana is a miniscule damage loss for every magic weapon except Last Prism (I calculated the average at 6%, and the maximum loss was only 13%), whereas relying on Mana Regeneration potions requires you to stop attacking for several seconds at a time, which is far, far more damage lost than just drinking a mana potion and accepting the small damage penalty.

Arcane would actually not be very good even if there was no mana cap at all, the cap is just adding insult to injury. That's a problem with the entire system though, not just the modifer; there really isn't a clean solution to this (at least, not one that allows Arcane to stay a mana- economy modifier), that doesn't involve an almost-total rework to how mana is spent, restored, and managed. If you want Arcane to be relevant in the current mana system, it needs to do something completely different.

The sad truth about magic is that, in the game's current state, making every magic weapon consume no mana at all would not actually make most of them all that much stronger (Last Prism is the only current exception), so any effects that only slightly help with mana management will only be a fraction of that already-small damage gain.

 

[Mille Marteaux]

i dont think itd be "good" per say but i think it'd be interesting if arcane was just a flat passive mana regen per second effect (kinda like the buff you get from nebula armor) and you could just keep stacking them to passively regenerate more and more mana

you'd probably need a lot of them to matter but it would be fun

e: i think a bigger problem with arcane is just that it isnt a "global" modifier the way most of the others are (i'm looking at you Lucky). it's a completely dead roll on most setups and it becomes a dead roll later in the game for setups that use mana anyway.

 

[Auren]

Very interesting post, especially considering that the arcane reforge hasn't received any updates for 3 major game updates now. Mana as a whole should be reworked as my mage runs tend to be mana-flower potion-spammer playthroughs (as intended by current meta) that relies on damage accessories and armor to outdo the potion sickness debuff.

 

[cockatoo12]

Edit: a word, reduced two numbers in pre-HM example because you cant have three bands of starpower without summoning EOW

corrupt crates can actually give a band of starpower
arcane does need something its only really useful in phm and even then +20 mana increases don't increase mana regen by much and you could just ignore them in favour of damage realistically
personally I agree with millie a passive mana regen effect like nebula armour or what TRAE does would be a great mechanic to implement whether its arcane as a reforge or just as a change to the mana system (mana is a nothing mechanic late game I hate that mage has so much potential but they haven't done anything to really improve its core mechanic)

 

[J Bame]

There is no point in keeping the 400 mana cap, we can all agree on that.

Arcane is just dead. A fully fledged mana rework is not going to happen, best you can do is give it a token buff like an additional reduced mana consumption to make it matter more, and even then it's still useless in 3 out of 4 classes. You could rework it, maybe? I can't think of anything that would be worth the effort, because again mana has been found to have little impact for most magic weapons.

 

[Shanaxyle]

Another problem is that Mana Potions can only restore up to 300 mana at once, meaning having more maximum mana than that is essentially wasted unless you stop attacking to regenerate, at which point you miss out on a lot of potential damage.

With 400 mana and a mana regen potion, you regenerate exceptionally fast and have basically no downtime. Stopping after using about 150-250 of a maxed 400 point mana bar also will allow regen with very little downtime, both of which are comparable to mana potion dps wise ime.

Mana sickness is really debilitating

i dont think itd be "good" per say but i think it'd be interesting if arcane was just a flat passive mana regen per second effect (kinda like the buff you get from nebula armor) and you could just keep stacking them to passively regenerate more and more mana

Depending how much it gives, it could be potentially gamebreaking tbh. At 3 per sec it would be able to basically nullify mana consumption of quite a few weapons, giving 21 regen per sec while actively casting is huge, particularly when combined with mana cost reduction. Honestly it wouldnt be a bad change, given right now mana just feels bad at the moment. If added alongside a flight accesory that uses mana, similar to classic rocket boots, it could make mana seem meaningful again

Very interesting post, especially considering that the arcane reforge hasn't received any updates for 3 major game updates now. Mana as a whole should be reworked as my mage runs tend to be mana-flower potion-spammer playthroughs (as intended by current meta) that relies on damage accessories and armor to outdo the potion sickness debuff.

Yeah the current mage meta is just.... weird. Like so many magic weapons are so cool, but they may as well be ranged, given you're effectively shoehorned into using mana pots as an over-glorified ammo count that doesn't fit into ammo slots. Magic really feels like it should lean more into the niche of burst dps, rather than just being ranger with less defense and damage consistency, which it has increasingly felt like as updates have come and gone. IMO Mana potions should be an "oh i messed up" item, similar to health pots, not the seemingly essential item they're currently percieved as.

corrupt crates can actually give a band of starpower
arcane does need something its only really useful in phm and even then +20 mana increases don't increase mana regen by much and you could just ignore them in favour of damage realistically

I forgot about crates. In that case its iirc 560 theiretical mana pre-boss. With nearly 600 mana, the regen increase from max mana becomes MUCH more significant (if the wiki calculations are to be believed at least), to the point it would be a neaningful choice, though i doubt it would be enough to become optimal

mana is a nothing mechanic late game I hate that mage has so much potential but they haven't done anything to really improve its core mechanic)

Yeah, mana late game just feels bad. Either its completely redundant, or its the only thing keeping a weapon from being ludicrously over powered.

There is no point in keeping the 400 mana cap, we can all agree on that.

Arcane is just dead. A fully fledged mana rework is not going to happen, best you can do is give it a token buff like an additional reduced mana consumption to make it matter more, and even then it's still useless in 3 out of 4 classes. You could rework it, maybe? I can't think of anything that would be worth the effort, because again mana has been found to have little impact for most magic weapons.

Adding accesories which use mana could be a nice way to make it meaningful, such as diverting a % of damage to mana, allowing mana to be consumed for extended flight or mobility (like classic rocket boots), or stat increases based on max mana. Arcane would also make more sense if melee weapons still used mana for projectiles, like starfury used to.

I love mage weapons, but the class is really just... not well designed. Especially as there are so many cool unique mechanics that ONLY apply to small portions of the game. Mage should have accessories that work like later game set bonuses but at a significantly reduced efficacy. Specter and nebula armour both look soo damn cool. Why don't we have an accessory that spawns tiny floating mana stars on hit, or gives mana reduction when within a short distance of a recently damaged enemy.

Regardless of anything, arcane, and by extension mana in general, need to be tweaked to have more meaningful interactions with the greater class as a whole. We just recently had a massive melee qol and animation overhaul, so im hopeful that we may get something similar with mana in 1.4.5.1 or something like that.

Edits: emojis and clarity

 

[Mille Marteaux]

Depending how much it gives, it could be potentially gamebreaking tbh

not really. a theoretical infinite mana pool that costs you every reforge slot is worth less damage than just going full menacing and you're also losing the potential utility of full warding. it'd be fun and an option and would feel cool (it would give magic players a way to feel like they're "cheating" the system, similar to melee players getting projectile weapons and ranged weapons getting fancy ammo) but it would in most cases be strictly "worse" on paper than just resolving the encounter faster

there'd likely be some kind of sweet spot balancing this theoretical version of arcane and menacing and it'd vary from weapon to weapon. this would be fun to lab out for about a week until it gets solved and i honestly think after the first one the theoretical dps value would fall off a cliff in general since the first one is probably enough to keep you out of the mana "sinkhole" (using mana guide terminology) when using nebula blaze. it'd probably help last prism mana flower warriors if you full stacked it but they're already killing everything anyway.

At 3 per sec it would be able to basically nullify mana consumption of quite a few weapons, giving 21 regen per sec while actively casting is huge, particularly when combined with mana cost reduction

keep classic and expert in mind as well, though even then 15 mana/sec would effectively be nebula armor and a half. even three of them at 3/sec would be nearly one stack of nebula armor

If added alongside a flight accesory that uses mana, similar to classic rocket boots, it could make mana seem meaningful again

things like this would be a strict buff for every player that isn't using magic and a kick in the shin for anyone that is. like imagine if soaring insignia turned your mana pool into extra flight time instead of just being extra flight time. Zenithmaster500 just gets infinite flight for the low cost of having to drink mana potions for the first time in his life while TheWizard80 is locked out of it


mana's pointless but trying to reinvent the wheel isn't going to work because 99/100 times its going to just be worse than what's in the game already

 

[Coleyohley]

With 400 mana and a mana regen potion, you regenerate exceptionally fast and have basically no downtime. Stopping after using about 150-250 of a maxed 400 point mana bar also will allow regen with very little downtime, both of which are comparable to mana potion dps wise ime.

Mana sickness is really debilitating

No. Pardon my french, but no the it's not. The red column of this chart represents the total average damage loss to mana sickness that each weapon suffers. The average mana sickness penalty (using Super Mana Potions) from all hardmode, pre-Moon Lord magic weapons is only 7.24%.

Mana Sickness is a 25% penalty for 5 seconds that degrades linearly to 0 in potency, meaning the average loss of damage from 5 seconds of mana sickness is 12.5%. However, many weapons will spend several more seconds firing at full damage before needing to drink another mana potion, which lessens the average damage lost. No hardmode weapon consumes 300 mana in less than 5 seconds aside from last Prism, which by virtue of its nature demands the use of mana potions anyway (and also just melts things so fast that the Mana Sickness doesn't build up enough to become debilitating).

Whenever you stop attacking to regenerate mana, you effectively give yourself a 100% damage penalty for as long as you do not fire your weapon. This is far, far worse than just accepting the damage penalty from Mana Sickness. If my weapon deals 1000dps, and I stop attacking for even a single second, I have just lost 1000 potential damage. Regenerating from 0 mana to 400 took me 4 seconds; in this example, that's 4,000 damage lost. Regenerating from 150 to 400, like you suggested, took me 3 seconds, which in this example would be 3000 damage lost, however, I am only using ~65% of my mana bar, meaning I will have to have to stop to regenerate mana quite a bit more often, losing immense amounts of potential damage over a long fight.

However, If my weapon deals that same 1000 dps and I instead drink a mana potion to keep attacking, I will suffer an average damage loss of 12.5%, leaving me at dps for 5 seconds, losing 625 damage over the course of the sickness. The 625 damage I lost to instantly restore my mana is much better than the 3000-4000 damage lost to regenerate it.

(There is also no need to stop attacking to regenerate midway through your mana bar, as Mana Regeneration Potions always maximize your mana regeneration rate, so having high current mana as opposed to no current mana has no effect on your mana regeneration. Doing this doesn't hurt your damage, but it doesn't help it either.)

Depending how much it gives, it could be potentially gamebreaking tbh. At 3 per sec it would be able to basically nullify mana consumption of quite a few weapons, giving 21 regen per sec while actively casting is huge, particularly when combined with mana cost reduction.

This also would not. The last column of this chart is how much damage each weapon would gain if you had an effect that granted them infinite mana. As you can see, most of these damage bonuses are rather small. Any effect that gives you less than infinite mana is going to be even smaller.

Honestly it wouldnt be a bad change, given right now mana just feels bad at the moment.

Infinite mana is, depending on the weapon, an either miniscule increase to damage, a pretty good increase to your damage, or somewhere in the middle. It's not gamebreaking, and honestly doesn't even really change the playstyle of the class if you play optimally. Does it kill the main "gimmick" of the class? Yes. Does it actually change very much in terms of how it's played? Not really.

IMO Mana potions should be an "oh i messed up" item, similar to health pots, not the seemingly essential item they're currently percieved as.

It's not that they're mandatory, you can certainly beat the game with mana regen potions instead, but your damage output will be so far behind that of someone who does use mana potions that there's not really a reason to unless you personally just don't want to.

Yeah, mana late game just feels bad. Either its completely redundant, or its the only thing keeping a weapon from being ludicrously over powered.

The only late-game weapon mana is keeping from being "overpowered" is Last Prism, as that is the only hardmode magic weapon that consumes mana faster than mana sickness runs out, resulting in a mana sickness sinkhole that eventually halves its damage. Last Prism is so ridiculously strong, though, that it's still a crazy weapon even with its damage halved, and it also tends to vaporize everything before it reaches that point in the first place.

Adding accesories which use mana could be a nice way to make it meaningful, such as diverting a % of damage to mana, allowing mana to be consumed for extended flight or mobility (like classic rocket boots), or stat increases based on max mana. Arcane would also make more sense if melee weapons still used mana for projectiles, like starfury used to.

This essentially makes it an option for everyone but magic users. Mages need their mana to attack and wouldn't want to spend it on mobility, and everyone else who physically cannot use their mana for anything else will suffer no downsides. I'm... not actually opposed to that, but I don't think it's going to accomplish what you think it will.

I love mage weapons, but the class is really just... not well designed. Especially as there are so many cool unique mechanics that ONLY apply to small portions of the game. Mage should have accessories that work like later game set bonuses but at a significantly reduced efficacy. Specter and nebula armour both look soo damn cool. Why don't we have an accessory that spawns tiny floating mana stars on hit, or gives mana reduction when within a short distance of a recently damaged enemy.

We have Star Cloak, but unfortunately its damage is miserable and extra mana pickups have such a small impact on your damage output that you're better off equipping something that increases the damage of your weapon instead. I do wish we had more interesting accessories, though, there are so many that are just percent stat gains and it bores me to tears; they're strong, yeah, but they're not cool.

Regardless of anything, arcane, and by extension mana in general, need to be tweaked to have more meaningful interactions with the greater class as a whole. We just recently had a massive melee qol and animation overhaul, so im hopeful that we may get something similar with mana in 1.4.5.1 or something like that.

I completely agree, though for very different reasons: as it currently stands I do not view mana as anything more than a minor inconvenience because circumventing it as a mechanic with Mana Flower and Mana Potions is so easy and so much better than actually interacting with it that to me it may as well not exist. Mana in the early-game can be interesting when your mana potions are so bad that the mana sickness sinkhole actually has a chance of happening, but magic has so few weapons early-game that I'm not really interested anyway.

 

[Shanaxyle]

No. Pardon my french, but no the it's not. The red column of this chart represents the total average damage loss to mana sickness that each weapon suffers. The average mana sickness penalty (using Super Mana Potions) from all hardmode, pre-Moon Lord magic weapons is only 7.24%. Mana Sickness is a 25% penalty for 5 seconds that degrades linearly to 0 in potency

I remembered mana sickness being a 50% damage debuff, not 25%, but my last restrictive magic damage only run was a long time back. Ill take the L here for mis-recalling.

Whenever you stop attacking to regenerate mana, you effectively give yourself a 100% damage penalty for as long as you do not fire your weapon. This is far, far worse than just accepting the damage penalty from Mana Sickness. If my weapon deals 1000dps, and I stop attacking for even a single second, I have just lost 1000 potential damage. Regenerating from 0 mana to 400 took me 4 seconds; in this example, that's 4,000 damage lost. Regenerating from 150 to 400, like you suggested, took me 3 seconds, which in this example would be 3000 damage lost, however, I am only using ~65% of my mana bar, meaning I will have to have to stop to regenerate mana quite more often, losing immense amounts of potential damage over a long fight.

I take issue with your 0% damage argument, as I don't tend restrict myself to only one damage type unless im playing classic or expert, which i generally only do in coop. Solo, i always have two summons and a ranged or melee secondary fire weapon, (whichever is the best at the time) when i play to mitigate mana regen damage loss, at least for bosses. With mana sickness being less debilitating than i remembered (im not a wiki crawler), potions are far better than my original impression (~5-10% reductions vs the ~15-20% i was thinking writing initially), mana potions are likely much better than raw mana regen.

things like this would be a strict buff for every player that isn't using magic and a kick in the shin for anyone that is. like imagine if soaring insignia turned your mana pool into extra flight time instead of just being extra flight time. Zenithmaster500 just gets infinite flight for the low cost of having to drink mana potions for the first time in his life while TheWizard80 is locked out of it

I should have thought this through a bit more, for sure. My bad for typing it out walking to the store lol. Anyways, Keep the same general ideas, but have the accessories scale with max mana, rather than consuming mana. This would allow mana, and arcane by extension, to work as an alternative mobility stat for those who wouldnt otherwise use it, and that mechanic could be applied to countless items in the game.

But really, at the end of the day, i just wanted to have a big blue star bar, and for the arcane prefix to do what it says on the tin, even if that ultimately involves changing the tin itself. How that is implemented is up to whoever ultimately makes the change.

 

[Coleyohley]

I take issue with your 0% damage argument, as I don't tend restrict myself to only one damage type unless im playing classic or expert, which i generally only do in coop. Solo, i always have two summons and a ranged or melee secondary fire weapon, (whichever is the best at the time) when i play to mitigate mana regen damage loss, at least for bosses. With mana sickness being less debilitating than i remembered (im not a wiki crawler), potions are far better than my original impression (~5-10% reductions vs the ~15-20% i was thinking writing initially), mana potions are likely much better than raw mana regen.

That's completely fair, though I will mention that unless you're not focusing on magic damage boosts much or at all, swapping weapons will also lose you considerable DPS, as your secondary weapon is not likely to be as powerful as your magic weapon due to not having your armour or accessories to support its damage (that's why it's called secondary in the first place ), though the loss is genuinely infinitely better than not attacking at all, which I have absolutely seen people elsewhere suggest and it always baffles me. "Just stop attacking for a bit, it's not that bad!"

Using a secondary weapon while your mana regenerates is great! However, it does prompt an evaluation of how strong your sidearm is versus how strong your main magic weapon is with mana sickness. I will admit that swapping weapons is a lot more fun, but the damage difference between your main and secondary weapons is probably larger than the 9-10% damage loss that Mana Sickness will be hitting you with.

If your secondary  is strong enough to be better than your mana-sick magic weapon, then it prompts a further discussion about whether or not you'd be better off ditching the magic weapon and just building your loadout around the "sidearm" instead, if it's already so powerful that it's this close in damage output to your main weapon without any of the magic damage bonuses your armour or accessories are probably giving you.

I should have thought this through a bit more, for sure. My bad for typing it out walking to the store lol. Anyways, Keep the same general ideas, but have the accessories scale with max mana, rather than consuming mana. This would allow mana, and arcane by extension, to work as an alternative mobility stat for those who wouldnt otherwise use it, and that mechanic could be applied to countless items in the game.

Perfect. Now Arcane is a stat that everyone might want rather than something only one class can use and rarely actually wants to use. It's an option that's on the table now, rather than a dry, meatless bone on the floor. I'm actually interested in using that now! You could have this on a defensive item, where maybe you gain a fraction of your max mana as damage reduction, or one for extra damage, or crit chance, or minion slots. I love it!

But really, at the end of the day, i just wanted to have a big blue star bar, and for the arcane prefix to do what it says on the tin, even if that ultimately involves changing the tin itself.

I also want it to do that, there are zero reasons for a mana cap in the first place. There's no damage cap, there's no defense cap, why is there a mana cap? I also remember being frustrated after equipping several arcane items and every mana-increasing accessory and seeing no returns. It sucks! Full support on just letting you have as much as you want. As I hope I've established in this thread, it's not much of a power boost in the first place, it'a just fun to have a preposterously large mana bar.

 

[Mille Marteaux]

I remembered mana sickness being a 50% damage debuff, not 25%

mana sickness can reach 50% if you keep drinking mana potions quickly, but in practice this only really occurs at two points, which is pre-hardmode mana potion usage with late-phm weapons, and the late hardmode tremendously mana hungry weapons that use more mana per second than super mana potions can regenerate.

i do think that there is something to be said about how binary mana regeneration seems to be treated. when using a mana regeneration potion you don't have to stop attacking for like four seconds straight to regen, you can just let go of the button for like half a second and get another four uses out of something like nightglow.

it takes like maybe 200 mana to do an entire charged blaster cannon barrage and the entire opening salvo costs like 20. star statues exist, there's purposefully taking hits with magic cuffs and warding if you're a lunatic. there are options other than potions that have their own tradeoffs but that's the price you pay for not having to dig for chlorophyte every 20 minutes or get a snowman cannon to have homing projectiles and lingering area denial.

 

[Orchamut]

If max mana was uncapped, then your mana stars/bar should change color like hearts do when you get life fruits, I think the aura from that alone would make full arcane worth using.

 

[Coleyohley]

i do think that there is something to be said about how binary mana regeneration seems to be treated. when using a mana regeneration potion you don't have to stop attacking for like four seconds straight to regen, you can just let go of the button for like half a second and get another four uses out of something like nightglow.

You could do that, or you could drink a mana potion, and lose way less potential damage. There's no reason not to use your entire mana bar anyway, as stopping more often to regenerate results in the same amount of downtime anyway. You can check any weapon you like against the chart I made to see how pathetically little impact mana sickness actually has on it; almost any amount of time spent not firing your weapon is more damage lost than just drinking a potion. Switching to a sidearm during the recovery is also usually worse, since that secondary weapon will not have nearly as many damage bonuses for it, unless for some reason you have next to no bonuses at all, though magic has access to both Magic Power Potion and Clairvoyance so I doubt that's the case.

it takes like maybe 200 mana to do an entire charged blaster cannon barrage and the entire opening salvo costs like 20. star statues exist, there's purposefully taking hits with magic cuffs and warding if you're a lunatic. there are options other than potions that have their own tradeoffs but that's the price you pay for not having to dig for chlorophyte every 20 minutes or get a snowman cannon to have homing projectiles and lingering area denial.

What is the "tradeoff" of just drinking a potion? You get better damage, better uptime, and you don't have to deal with any of this nonsense. This nonsense might be more fun, sure, but it's also usually just worse than chugging a potion and suffering a tiny damage decrease. The last column on my chart, the "infinite mana damage gain" is how much more damage you would be dealing over relying on mana potions if you suddenly started doing something that gave you infinite mana, be that star statues or celestial cuffs. Those numbers are depressingly small, small enough to where you'd probably get more damage if you equipped an Avenger Emblem or a Putrid Scent instead of Celestial Cuffs.

Star Statues are free and don't cost an accessory slot, yes, but they also require you to either stay generally in one place or double back to the statue whenever you need more mana, which can be extremely dangerous in many late-game fights. Is that worth the small increase in damage? I don't think so, but I suppose that depends on the player.

Frankly I think all the alternative options to mana potions need large buffs in hardmode, as you're not rewarded nearly enough for actually interacting with the system. I don't really know how to achieve that though, since having infinite mana is really not that much of an increase. I like that these options exist, but I think they need to be much stronger. Are they viable? I suppose that depends on how good at the game you are but they're almost always just worse than potions and I think that should change.

 

[Mille Marteaux]

What is the "tradeoff" of just drinking a potion?

the tradeoff is i have to see my displayed number go down and that makes me sad. as flawed as mana's implementation is, it's still better than most i've seen because it has some degree of player expression in how you approach it compared to many other games (i'm looking at you, core keeper).

there are cases where delays in attacking with a mana weapon can occur naturally - letting razorblade typhoon do its thing, doing burst fire with a charged blaster cannon instead of the full beam, etc. it is usually better to just sit down and blindly fire your broken homing weapon in one direction, and i will admit i do that when i get my hands on a stellar tune (one of very few weapons i will actively choose to use mana potions for), but outside of bossing it is very easy to just blind fire a few attacks and let go of the attack button while the enemies on screen get discombobulated, which is similar logic to using expensive ranger ammunition.

star statues and magic cuffs are usually either when you're turning your local wizard into a sentry in multiplayer, while magic cuffs fill a similar role if you didn't get many star statues or don't want to wire them up.

The last column on my chart, the "infinite mana damage gain" is how much more damage you would be dealing over relying on mana potions if you suddenly started doing something that gave you infinite mana, be that star statues or celestial cuffs. Those numbers are depressingly small, small enough to where you'd probably get more damage if you equipped an Avenger Emblem or a Putrid Scent instead of Celestial Cuffs.

if the damage gain is that small, then the theoretical damage loss that occurs from the strategy compared to the more powerful alternatives is also small. this is all paper DPS; at the end of the day a player will feel more "broken" or "powerful" if they feel like they have found a way to cheat the system or otherwise ignore a mechanic that would be limiting them in some way. taking a hit to your overall DPS that most players wouldn't even notice in order to feel like you have infinite mana without seeing the Mana Sickness icon come up on your screen is a valid and viable strategy, and if arcane was a 'real' modifier it would add another strategy to the pile and further cement magic's identity of "wide array of attack types and area denial effects that use a shared resource pool"

 

[Coleyohley]

At the end of the day a player will feel more "broken" or "powerful" if they feel like they have found a way to cheat the system or otherwise ignore a mechanic that would be limiting them in some way.

I completely agree, and that's what has me so frustrated. I want these creative options to  actually be strong rather than just feeling strong, and I don't think just chugging mana potions should result in  better performance than these more creative options. But... I don't think mana potions right now are actually the problem; magic isn't an outstandingly powerful class until post-plantera even using the most powerful strategies (mana potions) and nerfing mana potions would just make it even less impressive. I don't think mana potions are too far ahead, I think they're par for the course and everything else is too far behind.

If you look at the raw dps that each magic weapon deals, basically none of them are high enough to warrant any sort of limiting factor in the first place, and I think the devs know that, which is why mana sickness is such a low penalty. The reward for proper mana management can't be very high because mana potions are so easy to just to chug all day long, so the weapons can't have very high base damage output, but the penalty for not managing it can't be very high either because these weapons don't have high-enough dps to warrant a penalty. It's a dead end and makes the mechanic just feels tacked-on and obligatory rather than a deep system you're encouraged to really explore, understand, and get creative with. I'm not sure I'd be excited about any solution that's not a total overhaul, like TRAE does with its mana system.

 

[Mille Marteaux]

It's a dead end and makes the mechanic just feels tacked-on and obligatory rather than a deep system you're encouraged to really explore, understand, and get creative with.

most mana systems are. at the very least this one is just mediocre at worst instead of actively intrusive, but not everything can be as free form as PP in later phantasy star games so alas

I'm not sure I'd be excited about any solution that's not a total overhaul like TRAE's mana system.

i unironically think that one of the best 'mana' systems i've seen came from dragon ball terraria legacy's ki class of all things. you get a huge pool of it and spend it to fly, power up, and use ranged attacks, and you have to stop or slow down to manually charge it until you get a bigger ki pool and gear that can passively charge it allowing you to tangibly feel more powerful later in the game than you did at the start