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TL;DR: mana-hungry builds in general, and Hierophant in particular, are gimped by a years-old bug that's been "fixed" numerous times. The year is 2021. What better place than here? What better time than now? Let's make it happen. GGG I believe in you. #arcane2021
I feel like a jebaited Charlie Brown. GGG pulled the football away from me again.
On paper, it seems great:
- Approx. level 26 Arcane Surge (give or take corruptions) ~= 22% more spell dmg., 22% inc. cast speed, and just hits the 1.2% mana regen/sec breakpoint
- Arcane Capacitor + Arcane Blessing = 100% increased Arcane Surge effect + minor nodes (30%) = 130% total
- This should yield a buff worth 50% more spell dmg. and inc. cast speed, plus 2.7% mana regen/sec
- Link with Arcane Cloak + Increased Duration for easy constant uptime
- Profit
However, due to a longstanding bug, the game instead wrongly applies an instance of level 1 Arcane Surge, which only grants 10% more dmg & speed and 0.5% regen.
After increased buff effect, that ends up as 23% and 1.1%, respectively, essentially the same as an unbuffed level 26 Arcane Surge... So we're right back where we started at!
In the end, we lose out on 27% more damage and increased cast speed and 1.6% mana regeneration.
Let that sink in.
What this means is that Arcane Blessing currently does effectively nothing. Complete waste of an ascendancy point. The travel nodes on either side of it are more valuable.
As it stands, that whole wing of the Hierophant is broken. It's kinda like he only gets 3/4ths of an ascendancy... and the rest simply doesn't synergize.
Similar effects from Arcane Capacitor and gear mods are broken in exactly the same way. I strongly suspect many players out there right now are blissfully unaware that their Arcane Capacitor is actively working against them.
I know I was for the first month of Delirium. I only spotted this whole problem by fluke when I had my character sheet open while mapping.
Most of the player base is going to look at those numbers and think "So what?" You lose a bit of damage and cast speed. Big whoop. That shouldn't make or break a build.
I'm guessing most players haven't played Archmage or any other mana-hungry build that's had to really min-max their mana regeneration. Plenty of builds operate on double-digit or less mana pools and it never becomes an issue. Those folks won't appreciate just how valuable that 0.5% mana regeneration is.
For reference, a character's base mana regeneration rate is 1.75% per second. The 0.5% is additive with the 1.75%. So in essence, if this were your only source of additional base % mana regeneration, it's effectively a ~29% more mana regeneration multiplier. Of course you'll want to stack this stat as high as you can, but not many sources of it even exist in the game. For instance, this is one of Cloak of Defiance's biggest selling points. That measly 1% is impactful enough to put it in strong contention for endgame chestpiece.
In fact, across all gear slots, I only counted a theoretical maximum of:
- 1% from Cloak of Defiance
- 0.4% from a wand mod (x2 = 0.8%)
- 0.5% from a helmet mod
- and 0.5% from Pure Talent
That's only 2.8%. I might be forgetting one or two, but regardless, it should be obvious why scaling Arcane Surge to 2.7% is the key to unlocking Hiero's potential.
...And then I look over at Elementalist's Mastermind of Discord. With that 1%, and due to this bug, she effortlessly puts herself at or near equal footing with Hiero in the mana regen department. Oh, and that same node grants bonus exposure. And the rest of her tree is just as stacked.
Seems fair.
If this is the state in which Hierophant is meant to stay, you might as well just put him in hospice.
For all the praise GGG (rightfully) receives for their open communication, they've been nothing but silent on this issue:
- https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2814844
- https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2789845
- https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2806220
- https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2795453
- https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2795006
- https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2646069
- https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2975948
- https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2954208
- https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2202708
- https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3000844
...And pages and pages more worth of forum search results dating back to at least 2018. As far as I can tell, GGG has never so much as acknowledged the issue. What gives? Some reports indicate this or similar issues were fixed at various points, only for them to reoccur at later times.
The closest thing I ever remember seeing from GGG on the matter was this line buried in the Harvest launch patch notes: "Fixed a bug which caused the Arcane Capacitor notable to not correctly update the effect of Arcane Surge as mana was spent."
This doesn't really sound like the same issue to me, but I'll be damned if when I logged in on Standard to try it on my toon left over from Delirium, it worked like a charm. And it felt great! But now it's gone again. And I am disappoint.
I didn't stick around for much of Harvest, and I skipped Heist. So somewhen during that period, or possibly at Ritual launch, a regression was introduced. And if I ever git blame the jerk who did it... I'd politely ask them to fix it.
When the Hiero ascendancy was spoiled, I kinda got pumped at the idea of overhauling my build from Delirium and was eager to see how far I could push it. This just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. As I was approaching maps, I noticed Arcane Capacitor was borking my regen again. Now I get to reroll and do 10 more acts. Fun. Think I'll give Ascendant a shot.
I'm not even that bothered that the bug exists or has persisted so long. Software is hard. Mistakes are easier than not.
What bothers me is that this has been a known issue for years, yet, to the best of my knowledge, players were never informed of the issue and GGG doesn't seem to have made any effort to prevent player after player from running headlong into the problem. Just a little message to the effect of "Hey guys, we know this interaction is fubar. It's on our to-do list, but we don't know when we'll get around to it. Just know that you can't currently do the thing you'd obviously want to do. Don't even try. It'll end in tears." would have been enough for me.
Sorry if this all came off as whiny. It's kinda hard not to be negative about this. But I think I'm being fair and correct here.
And -- absolutely! -- if I'm in the wrong, please correct me. Since there doesn't seem to be any official information about any of this and the historicity of the bug is murky at best, if the interaction between Arcane Blessing/Capacitor and multiple Arcane Surge instances is working as intended, please set the record straight once and for all. The lack of solid information to base their build off of makes players feel like they're taking crazy pills when an interaction that would seem to be indicated through the game text fails to do so. Staying silent just leaves us frustrated and mystified. No bueno. Again, if I've missed some official communication about this that already clears things up, then I owe you 1000 mea culpas. It wasn't for a lack of searching, I assure you.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
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