Hey sorry for a noob question, first league for POE.

I’m looking to craft a mana ring like this one but the PoB didn’t explain how.

Or even a budget version that just has tons of mana and some resists or something, I’m not rich so not sure if leaving out the Crit helps or anything.

Appreciate any help in advance

Its kinda ironic that after all this effort to reduce flask spamming I end up spamming my flasks more than in POE1.

Mana costs are simply to high for spells. I have a bit under 900 mana, my essence drain costs 227, my dark effigy 524 and despair 744. You can't scale mana enough from tree and gear with reasonable investment to compensate for that.

So the best options is hitting your mana flask after every second cast. I seriously doubt that was intended.

This build is not perfected, but here's what I have so far

Hello everyone, I love this game and have found a rather interesting sword that I thought I'd make my own.
This build's main feature is the Spectral Sword, it's main effect is increasing physical damage by 1% per missing mana point; coupled with the druid's bane armor, I use the boots, to fully inhibit mana regeneration.
I put my stat points into the bare minimum to equip and wield all parts of the build, then dumped the rest into spirituality to increase max mana.
Equip whatever rings, amulet, gems, and back piece you want idk man.
Also I have a spell I use to just drain all my mana after a rest.

I have upgraded the sword and all the armor a bit and will include the + values in the rundown below:
Spectral Sword +10
Increases physical damage by 1% per missing mana point
2 Starborn Eggs attached for 20% weapon damage
Abandoned Helmet +5
Increases physical damage by 30%
2 Sapphire Weaves attached for 20% increased max mana
Duel Knight Gloves +8
Critical hits restore 10 stamina
Increases melee damage by 36%
Duel Knight Cape
Increases stamina regeneration by 25
Increases crit chance by 10%
Revenant's Ribcage
Weak spot damage 20%
Melee damage 20%
Gem of Dodge 10% dash cooldown reduction
Gem of Stamina x1.2 stamina recharge rate
Rogue's Step +7
Increases Dash speed by 30%
2 Gem of Dodge for 20% faster dash cooldown
Druid's Bane Boots THESE MAKE THE BUILD WORK
Receiving magical damage refills all dashes
THE IMPORTANT PART: Fully inhibits mana regeneration.

Reduced armor weight until I hit medium armor for a bit nicer quality of life and dashes.
In summary I use dashes and heavy attacks to do hit and run nonsense with a greatsword. Important note with greatsword heavy attacks: you can hold them as long as your stamina allows before swinging.
The total increased damage is this.
Including missing mana: Physical Damage 345%
Weapon Damage 20%
Melee Damage 56%
So in theory without resistances calculated a total of 421% increased damage done. This is without the two handed or any other skill trees calculated, no sneak damage calculated, no heavy attack damage calculated, and no other nonsense involved.

I hope you get the idea and are inspired to find unique items to make fun builds with!!

Haven't seen this yet so I thought I'd share it.

Divide your max FP by cost of your spells to get a rough estimate on how many times you can cast it without drinking from flask. Always round down.

Obviously this gets difficult if you use multiple spells but I still find it useful for keeping my eyes on the enemy without looking at mana bar.

Example: You have 93 FP and Glintstone pebble costs 7 FP to cast. 97÷7=13.28. You get 13 casts before needing to "reload". Rocksling costs 18, so you do 93÷18=5.16, giving you 5 casts.

Hope this helps, more useful for more expensive spells as its easier to keep track of smaller numbers.

Rise, Tarnished.

It's now impossible to build mana as a life source. With the change to eldritch battery occuring before ES % it makes trying to build mana incredibly frustrating, continuously so when several mana stacking nodes like + int% and +4% mana are locked into also being ES nodes. not to mention added mana costs and Regen issues from MoM and EB.

Mana is a prefix, so it fights for ES no matter what, it also fights with attacks and DMG % which most builds need. The mana affix isn't big enough to compete with ES except on boots and gloves and even then ES does outpace it. On chest and helm it's not even close. A morior with 5 2% mana gems will add half of what a 1000 ES chest would

Keep all the other changes, I'm fine with that. But please let EB add ES bonuses or give us back 4% gems and more ways to stack mana without needing ES nodes too.

Other game problems for mana builds that just decimate it

Mana remnants doesn't stay over capped, making this stay or at least drain much much slower would make this better. Pretty sure it drains relative to your Regen rate

Siphon affix appears to be % based of max mana, this includes odd affixes like the chilled ground frozen flume, fix this by making it a % of current mana instead.

Sapphires besides time lost have no way of adding mana without corrupting for intelligence

Please please revisit the quadruple nerfs that have happened to manastacking and consider reverting a change or two or finding a new solution.

Maybe I'm wrong, maybe someone will tell me how to do it right but to also get any build functional with any unique as well it seems practically impossible

As you can see from the pic I'm stuck at 2k mana but all my spells cost around 7k to max out, is there a way to get my max mana closer to being able to just activate all my spells without stalling or using perks?

Build planner link.

IMGUR album link for stats/look because I don't know how to do an image post with a massive wall of text attached.

This build is set up almost entirely to my preferences as an alternative to a DEX/FTH build . The goals were to:

• Simultaneously achieve good pure physical AR and high incantation scaling. A full explanation is down below, but a DEX/FTH build would need RL 182 to match both the physical AR on Keen infusion + incant scaling on Erdtree seal. and that is assuming said build has no ARC investment for spell requirements.
• Achieve at least 51 poise and decent negations with my preferred "lightweight" look and hat/hood headgear (which generally has 3 poise). Full explanation below
• Keeping the poise requirement in mind, achieve medium roll with the heaviest reasonable talisman loadout (no verdigris/bestowal/all crucibles) with 16 available weight for any combination of weapons
• Have two of those talisman slots be "flex" slots (In this case Millicent's + Dragoncrest Greatshield are perma-slotted for most weapon reqs and the generalist buffs they provide, the remaining two slots are flex) to adapt to fights as needed rather than center a build around 3-4 permanently-slotted talismans.
• Have a spell toolbox that works well in tandem with melee attacks, yet can still be relied on for pure damage in a pinch.

A few things people sleep often sleep on that are included in the build:

• Stone of Gurranq: an absolutely silly spell that often hits harder than both Black Flame(DoT included) and Lightning Spear on a lot of enemies (since a lot of enemies have far higher elemental resists than physical), is, unlike either, chaincastable until you are out of FP/Stam, costs less, has a solid AoE for clumped-up enemies without needing to be charged, and last, but not least, deals 14.4 poise/stance damage. That's as much as a one handed colossal sword swing and is what makes it insanely good for comboing with melee because you can deal some significant stance damage at range, especially if the boss lets you chaincast.
• Impaling Thrust: charged R2 poise damage and 2h charged R2 damage at only 9 FP while being much faster than a charged R2. This is cheaper and faster than Unsheathe and can be used on heavier weapons. Did I mention that it also ignores shields?
• Scouring Black Flame: A multi-purpose spell that is good at a ton of things: it can multihit large bosses with multiple separate hurtboxes, it consistently hits bosses and NPCs that input read dodge your spell attacks because they just dodge into another part of your massive black flame hitbox, it is very good at dealing with hordes of weak-to-fire trash mobs like dogs/footmen/scorpions/bugs if you are running away from them.
• Aspect of the Crucible - Horns: not in the screenie, but is really good at cheesing anything othewise annoying that can be launched into the air. Black knives, NPCs, Haligtree Knights. You can either chaincast this to keep a single enemy stunlocked (not the best use of your FP) or you can launch the enemy once and use the time you now have to set up a charged R2 + Ash of War on wakeup.

Weapons used with the build:

• Occult Flamberge/Banished Knight Greatsword/Knight Greatsword with Repeating Thrust(occasionally pulled on Flamberge for bleeds)Impaling Thrust/Giant Hunt (Piercing Fang is unfortunately not worth it vs Giant Hunt/Thrust because it deals less damage than Giant Hunt while costing the same amount of FP and is much slower than Impaling Thrust).
• Occult Cross-Naginata (two-handed) with Impaling Thrust/Spinning Strikes. Spinning strikes is mostly used for flavour/more moveset variety, Impaling Thrust turns a weapon that is otherwise pretty ass at stancebreaks into a weapon that is pretty decent at stancebreaks.
• Occult Longsword with Square Off.
• Sacred Mace with Sacred Blade (facerolls anything weak to holy), Occult Morningstar with Lion's Claw.
• Occult Zweihander with Royal Knight's Resolve - used primarily for charged R2s.
• Occult Misericorde with Royal Knight's Resolve (rarely enough time to use this unless I know the fight well) for crits since the crit damage of medium-sized weapons is otherwise fairly lackluster.
• Occult Crescent Moon Axe with Sword Dance.
• Bloody Helice
• Occult Greathorn Hammer with Cragblade. Occult Greatstars would be much a much better fit but it's ugly as sin.
• Formerly Eleanora's poleblade - respecced out of it (-1 DEX + 1 STR) because i'd rather 1hand Banished Knight's Greatsword (highest damage greatsword with the fancy moveset)/2hand Crescent Moon Axe without switching talismans rather than be able to use a spinny bleed stick.

Scaling stuff

This versus DEX/FTH and optimal Dragon Communion Seal scaling

DEX/FTH offers weapon buffs and good scaling for unique DEX/FTH weapons (such as Bolt of Gransax), but lags far behind for standard weapons and actual spellcasting. Dragon Communion Seal at these stats offers 340 incantation scaling, which is only matched by the Erdtree Seal at 77 FTH, a number that leaves barely any levels for DEX, especially if you want some ARC for spell requirements. Compared to an optimal Dragon Communion Seal (with 13 points moved from ARC to FTH), this only loses 8 (~2.3%) incant scaling while gaining ~4.3% more AR for ARC-scaling weapons. This makes this "distribution" (pumping arcane doesn't really require a ton of brainpower) insanely efficient for both melee damage and incantation scaling.

Poise/Weight

Poise in Elden Ring is absolute aids to get if you don't want to wear a heavy (and pronbably ugly) helm, a bulky chestplate (which kinda takes away from the agile vibes) or fuckugly greaves (scaled, bullgoat, prelate, the 6 variations of duckfeet sabatons on Veteran's/Banished Knight sets) because those are far more weight-efficient than most lighter variants. In the end Eccentric Chestplate + Blaidd Greaves + Fire Prelate Gauntlets (not super thrilled with the choice but it matches in most lighting conditions) does the trick with any 3 poise or higher headwear. However, just to paint a picture of how inefficient this is (and why this build has 27 END that could otherwise go to MND/ARC), switching to something like Banished Knight Chestplate (still really pretty, just not my style for this build) + some lightweight gaunts/legs could save 2 points of END while offering 1-1.5% higher physical negations, while completely abandoning any sense of style and going for poise efficient armour like Veteran's could likely save 3-4.

Shoutout to Blaidd for coming in clutch with decent poise greaves that don't look ugly. It wouldn't be possible without him. His chest (both altered and unaltered) also looks really good but I like Eccentric for the splash of colour.

Talisman/Weapon weight

16 units enables wielding a Fire Knight Greatsword/Zweihander. Alternatively, it can accomodate a set of lighter weapons. For most of the game I ran Flamberge + buckler + Composite Bow. By the end I had enough END to also throw a Misericorde in there. The difference between the heaviest talismans (that are actually usable) and lightest talismans (that are actually usable) leavs room for like 0.5-1 units of weight, which isn't worth optimizing for because of all the swapping it entails.

Bows?

Crossbows make more sense damage-wise on the build as it lacks physical stats. However, light bows have a much more fluid moveset that slots into the gameplay better. They are mostly used for status/pulling individual enemies/killing trash that's weak to elemental arrows without wasting FP.

Black Bow (in the base game) has the highest damage output with light bow jumping/rolling/sprinting attacks. However, something that isn't mentioned on the wiki is that Black Bow still retains the regular bow class draw speed when fired from a standstill. An actual Light Bow (like Composite) shoots faster outside of Barrage. Moreover, a light bow with Mighty Shot is versatile in that it can one shot weak mobs (for only 6 FP) while retaining the light bow moveset. Black Bow cannot do that and is also a whole 1 unit heavier than Composite and 1.5 units heavier than Red Branch.