Archmage - How Big Is The 0.2.0 Nerf?

Archmage was one of the strongest spirit gems during POE2's earliest days. It's getting nerfed on three separate significant axes, but was so overpowered it might well still be solid after the patch.

Archmage's key benefit is the text "Non-Channelling Spells Gain X% of Damage as extra Lightning damage for each 100 maximum Mana you have".

In patch 0.1.0, 'X' was typically 6-7 when you ran your first map, 9 after you obtained Gemcutter's Prisms to reach 20 quality, 10 at moderately high investment and 11 at very high investment (level 21 Archmage, +5 lightning skills wand, +2 skills focus, +3 skills amulet). Gemling Legionaires could exceed these numbers.

In patch 0.2.0, X will be 3 at all investment levels.

Magnitude of the nerf: 50% to 73% less bonus damage.

Sources of increased mana available to players sometimes add a fixed amount of mana such as the 10-20 mana provided by Lifesprig. Other sources provide a percentage increase to mana, such as the 20% in 0.1.0 (reduced to 10% in 0.2.0) on Dream Fragments.

The former bonuses are termed 'flat mana'.

Flat mana bonuses on rare items are being nerfed unevenly. Some slots such as boots and gloves are losing around a third of the available flat mana, others such as rings lose only around 10%.

Very significantly, the unique belt Ingenuity is being completely reworked and no longer (indirectly) provides nearly as much mana as it did in 0.1.0.

Flat mana available on items across a character is decreased by around 25% in 0.2.0. However, this does not tell the whole story, as players get a lot of flat mana from levelling up and from Intelligence. A level 90 character with 220 Intelligence will have 830 flat mana - 30 base, plus 4 per level, plus 2 per Intelligence.

Flat mana will thus decrease around 15% on characters with high gear levels, and 10-12% on characters that are less developed.

Magnitude of the nerf: 10% to 15% less mana, which means 10 to 15% less damage.

Sources of mana measured as percentages stack multiplicatively with flat mana. These are being nerfed more severely than flat mana sources, with many of them being converted from mana pool size boosts into mana recovery boosts.

Example: Mana Blessing is being reworked:

"The Mana Blessing Notable Passive Skill no longer has 5% increased maximum Mana, and now provides 20% increased Mana Regeneration Rate."

Some of the most notable changes include Dream Fragments going from 20% increased to 10%, Morior Invictus is losing its %mana bonus variants entirely and small nodes in the Stormweaver ascendancy are changing from 4% maximum mana to 12% mana regeneration rate.

Magnitude of the nerf: About 30% less mana, which means about 30% less damage (exact configurations will vary as players build and gear Archmages differently).

This is unlikely.

Archmage was such an extreme overperformer that even losing 70-83% of its bonus damage (a bigger loss at higher gear level) does not necessarily doom the playstyle to irrelevancy.

What has changed, however, is the ability to do difficulty 4 pinnacle boss fights on gear looted from the ground in Tier 1 maps. Fights will now take more time and so knowledge of the boss fights and gear will be more important.