As far as I can tell, fanaticism is clunky and sucks... but the new manabond skill got me thinking that maybe it could be spammed to high heaven using fanatacism.
The general premise is that you would play a character with like 10,000 mana and get 1500 base lightning for manabond when all your mana is gone and you use the skill. At this point it seems like you would use archmage... but what if you didn’t? What if you somehow got all your mana gone and then spammed the skill super fast with no mana cost at all?
Enter fanaticism with guest appearances from inspiration and the Templar mana cost reduction nodes. I’m pretty sure you can get the cost to zero.
I think the cycle would be to whirling blades (or whatever attack you choose) around the arena for 2-3 seconds, pop arcane cloak manually, and then attack one more time to trigger fanaticism before you start spamming manabond. You’d drop most mana from the arcane cloak and hopefully squish out the rest to get your full mana pool depleted before fanatacism starts. Then fanatacism starts and you get 4 seconds to go absolutely HAM spamming Manabond with huge damage (from all the missing mana) and zero cost.
The main shitty things here:
You’ll be a MoM character spamming a spell standing still while all your mana is missing. Unwise. But at least you’d have arcane cloak up for the whole vulnerable period.
What I just described is incredibly clunky and awful.
Your mana would regen as you used fanatacism so the missing mana would recover and hamstring your damage. You could curtail this with soul catcher if you wanted to, I guess. Maybe you could use manastorm somehow, idk.
The main good things:
If it doesn’t work, you’ll be an inquisitor with mana stacking gear. It could be worse.
Archmage levels of flat damage without using archmage support AND you can spam it as fast as you want for a 4 second window.OK, I have abandoned the fanatacism idea and have instead gone into building with Heiro.
Coming out to ~10k mana, ~3k life, ~4k ES. GIGANTIC AoE when I cast only once. I'm running around with like 280% inc AoE, so even without having the size bonus from the skill itself, I'll have a good size manaBOMB going off. Pretty decent mana regen, incidentally, so when I'm clearing (not spamming on a boss) it will probably be pretty fuckin big. If it's not, I could pop in spell cascade (we shall see how that gem interacts).
For now, I'm using shock nova as a surrogate skill for Manabond and have an archmage support in the links to toggle on/off to get an idea of what is going on with my mana cost.
I went with supports like Intensify and Spell Echo because they do more than just damage so maybe will be good supports still in 3.15.
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The basics of the mana management: Got Mana COST down to 100% reduced with combination of the tree, inspiration support, and Wyrmsign. There are other items that could work to reduce the cost, but Wyrmsign seemed fun for the rampage. I keep my mana down by using manastorm which sacrifices 100% of mana when I use a spell to give me 25% of what is sacrificed as maximum lightning damage. I use inspiration on whirling blades to keep inspiration charges up. I love whirling blades, so this is not an issue for me personally. Whirling blades will have a mana cost of 1 and will feel smooth because of torrent's reclaimation. More flat lightning damage is coming from arcane cloak, which is not affected by modifiers to mana cost (fortunately).
Heiro just seems way easier to work around than Fanatacism and when I unchecked Agnostic I had 4.6k of ES with no other ES investment, so I slapped Energy Leech in my damage links and would basically just run around using ES as my main HP pool and then when I get chunked, it would tell me to stop casting so that my MoM can be more effective. It might be janky AF, idk, but I have ES leech and I have life leech and a really respectable total EHP pool.
Here's a PoB Pastbin if you want to tear it to pieces, but it looks kinda fun.
https://pastebin.com/EMyvb3x5
Stupid shit in the POB:
2905
9704
4686
4M
-60
75
75
74.4
4K
3K
75 | 75
17%
100%
0
133
253
64
0%
0%
248%
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