Mandrake Elixir suggestion

rainbowmesa

Hi everyone, I'm mostly on Discord but would imagine this is a better place for discussion. In game I'm known as Vile (and also by my very harsh anti-mage rhetoric, lol).

**Big text coming. There will be a TL;DR.**

Coming fresh off a siege in my town of Felstal (very fun by the way, even if we got outnumbered) it was very clear how strong the Mandrake Elixir is. The worst part is that it is not exclusive to the special conditions on this test. Let's list the Mandrake Elixir's effects:

Instant 1000 mana
Magical Debuff removal

Now to my arguments, as I will focus on the mana portion. In my suggestions I will discuss the Debuff removal a little, but it is far from being the most egregious.

The First.

"Soon, consumables will take an ability slot".

With how the game works right now, with short combos, low cooldowns, and the CC fiesta, it will hardly, if ever, be optimal (or possible) to use your whole ability bar in a fight. Most slots will be situational, like Dispel Magic. Myself, as an assassin, use 7, with two being a Ready and a Stance (which I might just dump for something else for as long as the mana regen bug sticks around) and still have both a slot and a memory point.

To replace a situational skill for an instant consumable that would allow my skill rotations to go forever with no care in the world for my only limiting resource is simply a no brainer, enough that people are skipping mana regen materials, imbues and talents.

The Second.

"It feels strong right now because we can spawn them in."

The recipe for a Mandrake Elixir is a single mandrake, and every craft from this yields 10 elixirs. Yes, they are rare on Aerhen and abundant on Terra, but wildfolk lands are both a safe planet and also the same place where portcrystals are gathered - 60 at a time if you're patient, worth three trips. And the around 12 nodes on Aerhen are enough to craft 120 elixirs every run.

With all that being said, here are my suggestions.

Remove the Instant effect.

For a simple and cheap consumable to simply negate any downtime at all is far too powerful a tool. I am also against making it expensive as a balancing act, as this would simply lock the item out from casual players and make it exclusive to sieges, as there will be no price not worth defending your town over, and the problem will just be pushed further down.

Make it increase Mana regeneration instead.

This would cause the item to still reduce downtimes without cancelling them outright. This also prevents the user from basically instantly recovering from any openings caused by mana draining spells.

Remove the cleanse of Magical Debuffs.

As discussed previously, the item is far too inexpensive and abundant. There already is a debuff removal item (that also removes a Magical Buff along with it). For the Mandrake Elixir to do this without a downside, worse, giving mana instead, is incompatible with the vision of making consumables into reasonable ability bar choices.

(Optional) Give the Mana Regen effect a INT scaling.

Just some extra flavor and a bit of a compensation. Would also make it a mirror to the bandages, though we all know those who struggle with mana the most are those without INT. ~~(Yay, I managed to complain about INT)~~

TL;DR TL;DR TL;DR TL;DR TL;DR TL;DR TL;DR

Mandrake Elixir is so powerful players are skipping mana regen materials, imbues and talents.
The item is far too easy to acquire for how powerful it is. The solution is reworking the item, not the price.
The instant effect negates any downtime and circumvents openings made from mana reducing skills and imbues. Trading an ability bar slot for this is barely a choice. It should be made into regeneration instead.
There already is a Magical Debuff cleanser consumable, and it removes Magical Buffs along with it as a downside. The Mandrake Elixir replaces the Buff cleanser with instant mana. This goes against the vision of making consumables into reasonable ability bar options.
An (optional) INT scaling to the regeneration effect would make it a mirror to Bandages and also compensate for the huge nerfs. ~~Would also be very easy to just copy-paste the Bandage code and change the pulls.~~

spoletta

@rainbowmesa
First of all, yes. this is the best place when it comes to getting noticed by devs. Discord chat is sometimes monitored but it is more an exception than a rule.

With that said, I wholly agree with the point you are making.
This is a straight up better version of another consumable, so it is bound to be problematic. It either becomes prohibitively expensive, or overshadows the lesser version.
We see this with the linen and cotton bandages, but in that case it is fine because linen bandages are meant to be the easily accessible "primitive" version of the bandages.

This isn't the case for this elixir.
IMO the solution here is to remove the cleansing effect, so that it no longer competes with the other elixir, but also as you said turn the instant mana into a mana regen effect which scales with Constitution (consumables are meant to scale on that attribute, no matter the effect).

We are getting another consumable in the future for instant mana regen (you can easily guess which ones), but it comes with its own limitations, so this elixir which has only CD as a limitation would also be in conflict with it.

Mius

I agree with everything that has been said.