Intelligence Is In A Weird Spot After 1.19

Since it's revealed that there will be spell-specific cost reduction (Raw and Percentage based).
It kinda puts Intelligence skill in a weird spot.

If the spell-specific cost reduction does not stack with Intelligence, this makes Intelligence almost useless.
If the spell-specific cost reduction does stack with Intelligence, this makes Intelligence/Spell cost reduction combination quite overpowered.

Do you think there is going to be a change to Intelligence? Like maybe does more spell damage instead of reducing mana cost. Although this will also partially conflict Strength which boosts damage in general. So maybe Strength will only boost melee and poison damage?

 

I have seen those stats only on Shaman, so maybe the inteligence is not broken?

 

I doubt it's going to stack with intelligence, if you'd even have 68 int spells could already only cost 1 mana if you get the right id rolls, not to mention a possibility of spell costs "going negative" and maybe staying 1 mana after multiple casts (think: technically -1 cost, 1 true cost -> -1 cost, 1 true cost -> 0 cost, true 1 cost -> 1 cost, true 1 cost -> 2 cost, true 2 cost) (Similarly, base cost of >o.5 could run into the same thing for percentual cost modifier). Unless Shaman depends on its totem to do all the damage, it sounds pretty broken to me.

And still, intelligence would not just get bad with the addition of those spell cost modifiers, whether they stack or not; you still need it for water builds, and intelligence will still reduce spell costs, and we all know just how useful that is. These new spell modifiers seem to me like they're offering another option than intelligence, probably to boost the usage of TFA (which is mostly spell-focused, but has always sucked massively due to it not having any spell cost reduction), which is a welcome change. And who knows, maybe high mana steal TFA or Brainwash builds will be incredible on Shaman. (At least more useful than they are now)

Oh, and another note:
I'm not a fan of how close the ids seem to be to -50% or other meaningful percentages. Take a look at this still slightly slanted Rusted Root.

That's -49% Uproot cost. Uproot is theorized to have an 8 mana base cost, so having exactly -49% would basically lose you one mana per cast of this spell. Similar for Aura, probably 6-8 base mana cost could make another difference of 1 mana cost per spell: those rolls would be more important than mana regen rolls, and far more diverse. Not sure if I'm a fan of that, in all honesty.

 

Also note that the mana reduction rolls are most likely only majorly present on weapons with specific “archetype” ideas in mind.

 

Also most likely on gimmicky weapons like lunar spine.