It's nice that magic power is no longer the deciding stat and sagacity neither, because the mana cost has been moved to savvy. There is one thing though, Savvy is now the only stat which has an unmodifiable effect. The problem with this is that in order to lower mana costs, one must increase savvy, which has multiple derived stats, meaning that to just lower mana costs, one would have to increase savvy and decrease sneak and haywire by an amount perfectly proportional. And even then you must have a multiple of four for it to even work exactly. Imagine if in order to change melee damage one had to increase burliness. Things that just increase melee power would be very odd. Like a hamachi increasing the user's health and block for no reason. The point is simply this, mana cost reduction needs to be moved from being savvy so that spells, skills and items can use it by itself, without adding sneakiness and haywire. I'd recommend calling it something like mana efficiency, and putting it in the character page along with reflection (whenever that is done). It would be derived from savvy, and for ease of transfer could be 1:1 potentially. The problem of changing the name of the bonus again arises. I'd suggest that savvyBonus just be aliased to efficiencyBonus (with any scalars to the stat if it isn't 1:1) or whatever it's called, so that old mods and such don't break with it.
Brilliant. Not a problem I had ever thought of, but it's a good point, and an apparently easy and graceful solution.
Have I missed something or isn't the cost reducing stat? Either way.. I would still like to see a separate stat for cost reduction, so that mage characters are easier to balance; Because it seems ridiculous that mages can eventually get almost no cost from even the highest level spells ! It should take a bit more effort to maximize your cost reduction, than just getting the highest , which you want to increase anyways for .
You're a while too late. It's savvy and it's been that way for a quite a bit. This doesn't affect balance in just about any way shape or form. It's just about separation of a secondary effect from a primary stat. They should only have derived secondary stats, not effects themselves And isn't really that common of a magic stat to build. It should theoretically help more lategame as it's a percentual increase but anyway that's not the point of this thread.
I just meant that it would make it easier for the devs to change how much cost reduction you would get at any time in the game if they ever chose to change it, since it would be separate from .. And any item would have to specifically have cost reduction, and not just ; Before the / change it was ridiculous, it took almost no effort to get minimum cost from almost every spell. Anyways I am new to the forums, and it doesn't appear to say it in-game, or on the wiki. I must have missed something somewhere, but I have been playing this game since it first came out, and probably just missed the patch notes.. I do agree that it should be separate though, just because it does make a bit more sense this way, and adds another layer of depth to what gear you would want to be using as a mage.
I'd recommend making it a ratio of something like 2 to 1, with 2 savvy equaling 1 mana efficiency, and then just doubling the rate that efficiency reduces spell costs, so that enchantments that buff efficiency aren't totally worthless compared to other buffs of the same amount. Otherwise, I like this idea a lot. It would also allow for heavy armor to hike up the prices of your spells as well, by nerfing your mana efficiency stat along with magic power and mana regen bonus.
Another problem with savvy is that it quickly becomes irrelevant as you reach spells' minimum mana costs. It's way too late now, but if mana cost redux worked on a diminishing returns system, there'd be no need for a "minimum spell cost" - it would require increasingly ludicrous amounts of savvy to reduce a spell's cost by 1. Unfortunately, it's pretty quick and easy (for MOST spells) to acquire a sufffcient amount of Savvy that you bump into the spell's minimum cost floor, even on a character that's not a pure wizard.
Well, you've gotta be a straight Warrior to avoid gaining Savvy. Most Wizard builds that I've seen are Wizard/Rogue, so that's probably why that happens.
Really? I've found Vegan Warrior to be indispensable to most wizard builds, particularly as it totally nerfs the radiance weaknesses of Blood Magic by making all fish ignore you!
