The mana system: my gripes and suggestions for improvement

[Nicolas Cage]

My biggest issue with this game so far is the mana system (the sprint mechanic gets an honorable mention). More specifically, it's the counter-synergy between a lot of the mechanics surrounding the mana system.

First problem: no natural regen. Yes I know there's a card you unlock pretty early that gives you mana regen, and I'm also aware that you seem to be offered a mana regen perk every time for your first boon, but neither really solves the issue. Sometimes the perk you're offered is just not very good, or at least not very good at regenning mana (like the take less damage and get mana back when you get hit one). The mana regen card should absolutely be baseline IMO. Especially coming from the first game, it feels really bad to have your omega attacks/specials just become unavailable, particularly in boss fights where you almost always will run out of mana without a mana regen perk and just be stuck spamming normals.

Second problem: Hexes require you to spend mana in that specific combat to activate; they reset in each new room. Many of them have mana expenditure costs that are simply impossible to do without mana regen perks or a huge mana reserve. The first time I got a hex, I assumed that the mana expenditure didn't reset and you were intended to build it up over multiple encounters since none of the ones I was offered could possibly even be activated in a single room. So I basically got a completely useless perk. I got to see what the activation looked like because it does charge for the room you're in when you first get it, but I wasn't able to use it in even a single actual encounter. Yippee, what fun...

Third problem: Mana reserve perks. There are several problems with these actually. Firstly, they are counter-synergistic with hexes. Without adequate mana regen, you will already struggle to activate your hexes. With even a single mana reserve perk, you can ensure you never do. An even worse problem with them, though, is that you can quite easily lock yourself out of being able to ever use one or both of your omegas. This is a pretty egregious oversight IMO, and it usually will basically end your run.

To illustrate the point, I'll tell you a story of the most recent run I had, the run which prompted me to finally voice these complaints. It did involve what I can only assume was a bug, but man did it suck. I had the staff and was doing pretty well. I'd been stacking mana so that I could spam omegas to activate my hex: Moonbeam I think it's called? The one where you shoot a continuous beam of damage for a while. I had the staff upgrade where kills from your omega attacks heal you 5hp, and had later picked up the one where your omega special costs more but does a ton of damage in an area. With that massive mana reserve (I had a little over 200 mana) I picked up the Zeus mana reserve perk that reserves 50 mana but makes all of your hits cast chain lightning. I didn't have a mana regen perk however, and noticed that the regen I was getting from the card wasn't really cutting it - I needed a mana regen perk. I found a Zeus boon and was offered the rare version of his mana regen perk: +6 mana regen a second but cut your mana reserves down to 70% of its maximum. Well I had around 200 mana, so 70% would be around 140, then the 50 mana reserve would take me down to 90 mana I had access to, more than enough to spam especially with the added regen. I took the perk and...my mana reserves went down to a little over 70 with 50 mana reserved, which somehow gave me only 12 mana? Maybe I had another reserve perk or something, but my build was absolutely ruined. I couldn't cast my omega attack, so the 5hp heal staff ability was useless. I couldn't cast my omega special so my "more mana but bigger boom" staff ability was useless. The only way I could actually even use my mana was charging my cast, or with the Zeus sprint ability that lightning bolts people nearby for something like 3 mana a pop. I even picked up one of those +mana potions after that but only got +10 mana from it, and with 22 mana I still couldn't activate my attack omega or the powered up version of my special omega. I was pretty easily crushed soon after that.

Conclusion: mana is poorly implemented currently. I expect its clunkiness will get better as I progress and unlock more things, but plenty of players will just conclude the game is unfun and not play it enough to reach that point. These mechanics *need* to work at lower levels for that reason, plus it's just bad design to have rewards (like boons) actually punish the player more than they help. It feels *really* bad to try out what should be a cool new ability only to have it cripple your character beyond repair and ultimately kill you. Extremely frustrating.

Proposed solutions:

1) Make the mana regen Tarot card baseline. I really see absolutely no reason why this isn't the case. It's basically just a Grasp tax - I would never start a run without base mana regen, and the few I did before I unlocked it I was completely at the mercy of RNGesus as to what mana regen options I actually had access to during the run. You could even still keep the Tarot card and just have it add a little more mana regen to whatever the existing baseline is. Even if the baseline is just 1 mana regenned a second, that would be a massive improvement. Having no mana regen at all at baseline is just bonkers IMO.

2) Make it so that if you are at full mana, but don't have enough to use one of your omegas (attack, special, or cast), you can *still* use that omega, but if you do you go to negative mana which must be regenned before your mana starts to regen (and obviously you couldn't use it again until you've regenned your mana back to max). This would make it so that you still *could* use your omegas even if you'd accidentally reserved so much mana that your max is lower than the mana cost of the omega. It does still mean that you'd need mana regen in order to use it again, but as I already said I think that should be baseline. If that solution isn't restrictive enough you could maybe have your character have lower speed or less damage or something while they have negative mana. I'm not sure exactly how to do it properly, maybe there's a better way than this suggestion, but I definitely do think that you should have *some* access to your omegas guaranteed each combat, even if it's maybe only one or two uses a combat depending on what your boons are. The majority of the fun of this game is in weaving different kinds of attacks in at different moments in combat. Stripping away everything except for basic attacks makes the game pretty boring, really. It's definitely much less fun at least.

3) Tweak the numbers on mana reserve and hex perks to make them accessible to earlier playthroughs. One way to potentially do this is to scale how much mana is reserved with the rarity (and, thus, power level) of the perks themselves. Maybe that's already being done, I haven't mapped these things out or anything, but if it is then the lower end of the abilities need to have a lot less mana reserved.

4) Include a WARNING when a perk you would select would cut your max mana down enough to where some or all of your omegas will be unusable if you do. This should be a bright flashing thing that cannot possibly be missed, since you would need to be doing something very strange to ever even consider locking yourself out of your omegas. Personally, I still say it's straight up bad design to have a reward that could have an extremely negative effect on your character, but if there's a warning at least you won't pick it. You'll still be a little gimped because you effectively have one less perk to choose from, but at least you won't be crippling your character

[Madao]

I've tried all the mana regen boons in the game and they're all good. On the 1 floor, you will always take a gift for mana regen. I don't see any problems here, personally, I've always had enough mana. Upgrade Hexes reduces their mana cost, as well as there are boons to reduce the mana cost of Hexes. The only thing that I paid attention to were the boons with the concentration of mana. It almost never makes sense to take them, because their reward is too small. They should be reworked somehow.
You can take a Keepsake from Hecate that gives regen mana 1000+ per run, then change it as soon as you find a boon for regen mana. What is the problem? Create a problem for himself and asks the developer to solve it.

[Nicolas Cage]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Madao:

I've tried all the mana regen boons in the game and they're all good. On the 1 floor, you will always take a gift for mana regen. I don't see any problems here, personally, I've always had enough mana. Upgrade Hexes reduces their mana cost, as well as there are boons to reduce the mana cost of Hexes. The only thing that I paid attention to were the gifts with the concentration of mana. It almost never makes sense to take them, because their reward is too small. They should be recycled somehow.
You can take a Keepsake from Hecate that gives regen mana 1000+ per run, then change it as soon as you find a boon for regen mana. What is the problem? Create a problem for himself and asks the developer to solve it.

Yeah I used the Hecate keepsake, the issue with that one is that it burns out eventually, which also means that you're encouraged to *not* use your mana in easier rooms so that you can preserve it for when you really need it. You could argue that you should just use your omegas anyway since you're not really expected to clear the whole game at earlier levels, sure, but surely you're still expected to try? Basically, I've found that the Hecate keepsake encourages the more boring gameplay of just spamming normals. I did just unlock the ability to switch keepsakes between levels, so there's that, but if you noticed my arguments are that these mechanics work very poorly when you're early on in the game, so saying that stuff you unlock later helps doesn't really address the issue. Like, I'm a veteran of the first game, so I'm going to keep playing, but I could easily see someone who just picked this game up on a whim playing through a few runs and just being like "this game sucks, I can never use any of my stuff and some of my perks just cripple me". Maybe there's merit in finding ways to mitigate those bad feelings?

I'm not sure if I've necessarily seen all of the mana regen perks yet, but I know there are at least two that I don't like, one of which I actually mentioned in my post: Hephaestus', which gives you damage reduction and lets you regain mana when you're hit, which is not very reliable...you should be trying your best not to get hit so the mana gain isn't really something you can safely use. There's also the Zeus one, which I noted in the post was bugged and therefore depending on when you take it it can actually be the worst perk in the game. Like I said, it absolutely tanked my run on its own, disabling at least half of the advantages I'd built for myself up the that point by locking me out of my omegas =/. I'm not really a fan of Posiden's either, but I'm basically forced to take it, which isn't really a great feeling.

You phrased some of your other points oddly, but I think you're saying that the perks that reserve manna should be scrapped (or maybe reworked, not sure what you meant by "recycled" exactly). Personally, I actually really like the idea of mana reserve perks - powerful bonuses that you can get at a cost of lower mana reserves. The only problems I see with them currently are the ones I stated in my OP: that you can accidentally lock yourself out of using your omegas (which really should just...never be a thing except mmmaaaayybe in some fringe builds focused around perks like the Zeus one that strikes everyone with lightning constantly if your mana is below a certain threshold) and that they are sorta in direct opposition to the hex mechanic of "spend lots of mana in a single combat" since you'll just have less mana to spend - they're pulling you in opposite directions. I do agree they need a rework (I wouldn't scrap them entirely), and to be fair this is one of my lesser gripes - counter-synergy can be interesting to build around sometimes. You could always just avoid getting a hex entirely, or just get tons of mana regen to allow you to spam even with low mana reserves.

You ask what the problem is? Well, the first Hades is one of my favorite games of all time, and the added mana system in Hades II seems demonstrably worse than how the first Hades worked. A new game should come with new mechanics, yes, but ideally these mechanics should add something to the game, not take it away. I find the mana system often takes away more than it adds. The "omega" attacks and specials always existed, and in the original Hades you *could* use them whenever you wanted. Basically, I think that adding mana is a neat idea but some of the implementation doesn't work very well, so I'm voicing my opinion on that in the hopes that the devs see it and fix some of those issues.

And by the way, it's kind of insulting of you to imply that I'm "creating a problem for myself and asking the developers to solve it"? Like, I've seen plenty of other people complain about the mana system, it's hardly just my problem. I've also detailed pretty specifically some of the problems, many of which seem to have gone over your head since you ask questions I literally already answered in my OP...

If you can't see the issues, fine, I'm glad you like the game as is. I'm trying to help the devs with my experience with the game so far, which has only been about 10-15 runs. I assume you're past that point, so maybe you can consider that newer players might have problems that you're blind to? If I were a dev, I'd want to know about those.