Hit point vs. Mana point gearing on a Manna Robe Magician

[Balimon]

So I've been wondering for some time how to best gear my magician in a Velious locked server. For raiding, for the few mage mains left, everyone acquires a Manna robe eventually. This is the only way to increase mana regen without the aid of others and it's also an extremely convenient way to reset the spell recast timer on Call of the Hero(CoTH). It has a 12 second cast time with a 15 second recast time, using a Manna robe with a 3 second cast time allows for perfect chain casting of CoTH without counting.

Once someone has a Manna robe, hit points are suddenly way more valuable for obvious reasons, so I began to wonder if gearing for hit points is preferable to mana points after a certain plateau is reached mana wise. My theory is that after 3500 mana, hit points are better even though the HP to MP ratio is 3 to 1. After reading a long thread with two nerdy folks arguing over how to calculate proc chance, DoT proc effectiveness, and overall DPS, I realized there was someone who might be able to help answer my question. He was kind enough to agree to help out provided I make the discussion public so here we go:

Some references for those who are interested:

https://wiki.project1999.com/Call_of_the_hero

https://wiki.project1999.com/Manna_Robe

A breakdown of how to use the Manna robe:

https://wiki.project1999.com/Kurrat%...e#Kunark_Chase

An essay I wrote last year on the topic (yes I am that nerdy!):

https://wiki.project1999.com/Kurrat%...f_the_universe

My HP/MP in my best gear and shield of the magi:

2053/3795

Manna Robe and HP gear and shield of the magi:

2030/3551

[Balimon]

Forgot to add raid buffed stats with Manna robe and Z-Heart:

3345/3701

[Snaggles]

I don’t think it’s going to change how most people gear.

As a casual or semi-casual you will shoot for mana and have marginal hps.
With some BiS or near BiS hps pick up in a huge way. The bottleneck is the quality gear, not so much the strategy.

A mage calling for spots, twitches, and bards can effectively coth forever. If you are looking to maximize your mana without any help from anyone, farm some Mystic Cloak’s and Serpent Blood potions. I think having SoW pots, DA stuff, and planning ahead will get most people to about 95% the mage raid capacity. Its part of the reason the class is great.

[bcbrown]

I'm going to split my thoughts on addressing this question over a couple of posts. This first post is essentially a stream-of-consciousness where I was trying to figure out how to structure my thinking on how to answer this question. The next post will be written to try to explain what conclusion I reached and how I reached it, so if you're not interested in the details it's safe to skip this post.

Max mana/hp matters in the tough fights where you're gonna end up almost oom/low-health at the end of the encounter. For a healer, it lets you sustain a healing chain longer. For a nuker, it lets you keep nuking non-stop for longer. So when deciding whether a slot should add X mana or Y health, the question becomes, what lets me sustain my max mana burn for longer? Neither mana nor health will let you burn mana faster.

So the question I'll try to answer is "using a manna robe, how do you maximize the time before hitting oom while burning mana at a constant rate."

If you're burning 500mana/minute, adding 500 mana gives you another minute of casting. Since manna robe converts 60hp->20m, 1500hp gives you another minute of casting. But this doesn't take into account passive mana regeneration, canni dancing, or passive hp regeneration. I'm going to refer to using manna robe as "canni", as it's similar to shaman cannibalization line.

To calculate how long you can burn, you need to know:
mana/minute burn rate: call it burn
total mana pool: call it pool
passive mana regeneration: call it passive
total hp available to canni: call it hp
canni burn rate in hp/minute: call it canni_burn
canni regen rate in mana/minute: call it canni_regen

simplest equation:
time = pool / burn, for example 3500 mana / (500 mana/minute) = 7 minutes. As a sidenote, the most important error-checking in calculations is dimensional analysis: mana divided by (mana/minute) gives you minutes, the right dimension you want to end up with. If you keep track of the units for each number, you can confirm that everything cancels out except the unit/dimension you're trying to calculate, time in this case.

Without manna robe:

total mana regen = time * passive
time = (pool + regen) / burn
time = (pool + time * passive) / burn
time = pool/burn + time * passive / burn
time - time * passive / burn = pool/burn
time * (1 - passive/burn) = pool/burn
time = (pool/burn) / (1 - passive/burn)

1 - passive/burn = (burn - passive) / burn

time = (pool/burn) * burn/(burn - passive)

time = pool/(burn - passive)

This makes sense. Effective burn rate equals actual burn rate minus mana regeneration

When adding manna robe, we can skip a lot of steps and just go to the last equation, adding canni regen:

time_to_oom = pool/(burn - passive - canni_regen)

or, if we define total_regen = passive + canni_regen, we have:
time_to_oom = pool/(burn - total_regen)

the other equation that matters is how long you can sustain canni:

time_to_low_health = hp / canni_burn

So, you want to ensure you have enough health to sustain canni until you hit oom.

Next, let's look at some of the regen rates. At 60, 21 mana/tick while medding gives you 210 mana/minute. 3.2 seconds per cast gives you 18.75 casts/minute, or 375 mana/minute with 1125 health/minute

With some rough numbers, we can start with a 3500 mana pool, 500 mana/minute burn rate, and maybe 2000 health to burn. That gives us 7 minutes before oom without manna robe, and perhaps two minutes of canni that can add 750mana, or another minute and a half of burn, getting us to 8.5 minutes. So clearly, we'll burn through all the health we feel safe burning before going oom.

Since that's the case, the encounter can be split into two sections. For the first few minutes we're going to canni down until we're at whatever low-hp threshold we're comfortable with. After that, we'll mostly med, adding a couple canni clicks as passive hp regen builds up.

The time spent canni-ing will be hp / canni_burn. During that period, the burn rate will be burn - passive - canni_regen. After that period and discounting passive hp regen, the burn rate will be burn - passive.

Passive hp regen will be 29 hp/tick or about one canni every other click.

[Ripqozko]

I'll never wear a mana robe, all that really matters is having a pool high enough in a competitive environment to get 8 coths off (4k pool) , rest is up to necros and bards to do the additional coths. Clicking the robe is ass but I wish ya well. I'm of the opinion to gear for a solid mana pool then survivability for DAing as you can live taking a few hits lots of times.

[Jimjam]

Can’t you pick up skin like nature / regrowth to help recover?

If you get below 50% hp just do a bandage while you cast coth? It has enough time.

[bcbrown]

Let's try to put it all together now. We're going to continue to ignore the time spent casting the spells that are burning mana. We're going to assume that as long as you have health to burn, you'll be canni-dancing the manna robe. Once you've burned through the health you have to burn, you'll canni-dance to match your passive health regen. We'll write equations in terms of ticks, and calculate how many ticks until you run out of mana. Mana burn will be guestimated at 500 mana/minute or 50 mana/tick. For explanatory purposes we'll assume 3500 mana and 2000 health to burn - meaning that after you've burned through 2000 health you're at 20% or whatever safe minimum threshold you've chosen. For now we won't worry about the casting time of the spells that burn mana; it's just a constant 50 mana/tick drain.

At the end of this post we'll have equations for mana burn rate and health burn rate before and after you've burned through all extra health. In the next post we'll take those equations, solve for the time until zero mana, and answer the question initially asked: If you want to add hp or mana to extend the time until out of mana, what's the relative exchange rate between the two?

We have a couple of equations to juggle:
h(t) is current health after t ticks have passed
m(t) is current mana after t ticks have passed

Balimor explains the regen options here: https://wiki.project1999.com/Kurrat%...f_the_universe, but we'll just assume 29 hp/tick from regrowth, z-heart, phantom armor, and standing regen. Since manna robe costs 60 health, that means the steady state after we've burned all the health we can is one click every other tick. Since two ticks regens 58 health we're close enough.

In the first phase, we'll canni-dance the manna robe until we run out of health:
each tick, you'll burn 60 hp, regen 29, and start at 2000 hp, so:
h(t) = 2000 - 60t + 29t = 2000 - 31t
And each tick we're assuming a mana burn of 50, while a manna robe click each tick gets us 20 mana for an adjusted burn rate of 30 mana per tick - note that this isn't accounting for medding mana regen yet.
m(t) = 3500 - 50t + 20t = 3500 - 30t

total ticks in the first phase:
h(t) = 0 = 2000 - 31t
t = 2000/31 = 64.5 ticks

If you graph h(t) you'll see a straight line with a value of 2000 at ticks=0, and a value of 0 at ticks=64.5
If you graph m(t) you'll see a straight line with a value of 3500 at t=0, and a value of 1565 at t=64.5

In the second phase you'll click manna robe every other tick
h(t) = starting health + 29t - 30t = starting health -1t ; we're just not going to worry about losing one health per tick
m(t) = starting mana - 50t + 10t = starting mana - 40t

[Balimon]

Originally Posted by Snaggles [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I don’t think it’s going to change how most people gear.

As a casual or semi-casual you will shoot for mana and have marginal hps.
With some BiS or near BiS hps pick up in a huge way. The bottleneck is the quality gear, not so much the strategy.

A mage calling for spots, twitches, and bards can effectively coth forever. If you are looking to maximize your mana without any help from anyone, farm some Mystic Cloak’s and Serpent Blood potions. I think having SoW pots, DA stuff, and planning ahead will get most people to about 95% the mage raid capacity. Its part of the reason the class is great.

You're not wrong, I'm just thinking beyond all that. On green when I still raided, I spent hours and hours clicking the robe and wondering how to optimize my character.

[Ripqozko]

Originally Posted by Balimon [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

You're not wrong, I'm just thinking beyond all that. On green when I still raided, I spent hours and hours clicking the robe and wondering how to optimize my character.

Have you quaded? Id start there, by far the best thing we can do to help raids.

[Toxigen]

if you aint quaddin you aint mage'in