In the interest of making Manald Heal viable again, I’m suggesting/exploring ideas on the best way to update the item to accomplish this.
**UPDATE**
I’m now thinking that Manald should be de-coupled from the Paralysis passive, and simply give all wizard damage skills a percent chance to deal X% weapon damage depending on the skill proc coefficient.
This should resolve the issue with damage instances being interrupted, and make the power easier to balance as well.
**OP**
To begin, I’m thinking that the interaction with channeling skills needs to be changed in order to make the item more balanced for other damage skills.
This could be accomplished by having the first Manald damage proc from channeled skills end the paralysis “window”.
I believe this would make Manald channeling damage performance similar to other skills (such as Spectral Blade for example), and would also solve the previous issue of other skills interrupting your Manald damage during a channel instance, such as when Lightning Hydra interrupts a damage instance from Static Discharge or Archon beam.
This change would nerf the current (and completely irrelevant) dps ceiling of Manald significantly, and so the item would need a very large damage buff to make it competitive with the other options currently available to wizards.
Before doing any direct buffs, updating the code to allow Manald to benefit from lightning% damage on gear should be done, as this lack of interaction was completely unintuitive and unknown to many players to begin with, and provides a small damage buff in the process.
Finally, the weapon damage% on Manald Heal needs a buff on a magnitude similar to the updated Chantodo set in order to bring its performance in line with other options.
Cant you fit in both, the Chantodo Set and the Manald Heal Ring with the Vyr Set? The only thing that would be missed is the Starfire, but that shouldnt be a problem, cause of the big damage that comes from the “paralysis + manald combo” right?
So you deal damage normally from the Chantodo Stacks and you benefit also from the paralysis - manald procs from time to time, or am i missing something?
Yah currently you can only really take advantage of MH if you do T6/TV4. With seasonal cube it can be decent but nothing to write home about, you’d be providing hydras with I think I plannered even with 2 extra heads and extra attack speed about 40% of their dps? So yah…meh.
For it to really be viable it’d have to do at least 150-200%, not asking for the 1000% like days of old lol, obviously for current hydras that would be OP.
The absolute worst item for wizards IMO. Manald + Paralysis = you have 85% chance of not doing the damage you want.
I would rather have it changed to a smaller damage buff, but increased % for the paralysis passive. A more constant damage output and perhaps becoming an option to builds that can’t stack 4+ attacks per second for reliable procs.
Manald Heal isn’t difficult to fix. You just change it from 14,000% wpn damage to 200% more damage from Lightning and leave everything else the same. It’s simply a matter of changing the numbers, you dont even have to change the mechanics of the item. It’s one of the easier, higher priority items wizards need fixed.
For me, the “problem” with Manald Heal/Paralysis is not the damage but the inconsistent application. I’ve experimented with this on my seasonal wizard and eventually concluded it is best, for me, to consider it bonus damage rather than primary damage.
The “fix” for this is changing Paralysis to trigger from all lightning damage, not just cast skills. I would be ok with lowering the damage of Manald Heal and having the damage it does be more consistent.
The inconsistent application you are experiencing is due to 2 issues. First, your low attack speed is preventing you from opening paralysis windows often. Second, you are using other abilities (lightning hydra especially) which will interrupt your MH damage coming from Static Discharge, which is your main source of MH damage. This a major issue I addressed in the original post.
I think I understand the relationship between attack speed and the paralysis window, and that paralysis is not triggered by auto-cast abilities from Etched Sigil. I added Lightning Hydra as a manual cast ability to trigger Paralysis more often, but apparently it is having the opposite affect. My lightning meteor is auto-cast only, and my main source of damage, so my only other lightning ability is Storm Armor, and I wasn’t aware that it could trigger paralysis.
So without Lightning Hydra and Storm Armor my Manald Heal damage would be more consistent, and more-so with (much) higher attack speed?
If you have an open Manald Heal proc window from Static Discharge and you get a Manald Heal proc from another source (e.g. manually cast Lightning Hydra) it immediately cancels your open proc window.
Ideally with a channelled Manald Heal build you don’t want any other skills present that can trigger Manald Heal procs, otherwise you end up gimping yourself because you keep cancelling your open proc windows.
Not sure about Storm Armor… it does look like it has a proc coefficient, which might mean it can trigger Paralysis + Manald Heal. Some skills are a bit wonky with Manald Heal procs though, Blizzard: Lightning Storm can trigger Manald Heal but it’s not consistent. Found this video where it seems that Storm Armor can trigger Paralysis and Manald Heal procs:
It’s infrequent enough I probably wouldn’t bother worrying about it cancelling your open windows though. It shouldn’t happen all that often I don’t think.
I ditched Lightning Hydra, and kept Storm Armor, and damage seems fairly consistent at GR90. I can go a bit higher, now that I can depend on the consistent damage.
Update: I’m now thinking that Manald should be de-coupled from the Paralysis passive, and simply give all wizard damage skills a percent chance to deal X% weapon damage depending on the skill proc coefficient.
This should resolve the issue with damage instances being interrupted, and make the power easier to balance as well.
The approach is better because as long as the damage comes from Manald Heal it will lack the support from a lot of bonuses. As such it won’t scale well.
If it’s changed to just increase lightning damage and the damage comes from an actual wizard skill then other bonuses can scale it better.
This is it, exactly. I think someone told me Manald would need to deal like 40,000% weapon damage to be comparable to CoE right now. that’s just ridiculous.
I see. So you both think that Manald won’t scale well if using weapon damage, despite how strong the weapon-damage based Chantodo is.
The problem is that you are ignoring other issues created by your proposal. So Venaliter, lets just take your earlier proposal of Paralysis causing enemies to take 200% more lightning damage. That is a x3 multiplier like Convention of Elements.
When using this in a Vyr Chantodo Lightning setup at 5 aps, you will have almost constant uptime on Paralysis. Lightning Chantodo would drop CoE for Manald, and do almost 2.5 times more damage than the current Cold setup. Manald becomes ANOTHER mandatory item in the build; Lightning becomes the only viable rune by a huge margin, and Vyr or Chantodo would have to be nerfed just to justify this version of Manald.
You made it worse
To try and prevent this, you could possibly make your proposed Manald debuff only work for damage from wizard skills to prevent Chantodo interaction/imbalance, but then a traditionally Vyr wizard item becomes useless for Vyr, and potentially overbuffs or becomes only useful for channeling Hydra or Meteor builds using DW+ES.
Removing the Paralysis requirement and retaining %weapon damage based on skill proc coefficient prevents us from being pigeon-holed this way, and a nerf/change to Deathwish (which is likely on the horizon) subsequently balances the item even further, allowing many wiz builds with high aps to make good use of it.
