Guide An Alternative Approach To Lunar Spine

Introduction
Lunar Spine - a wand which needs almost no introduction. For those unfamiliar, this weapon induces a relatively unique playstyle. It provides all the mana sustain you need, at the cost of nullifying any mana regen.

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Generally, Lunar Spine is built as hybrid/spellsteal. Since the chance of triggering mana steal is 49% at Super Slow attack speed, it is not uncommon to be without mana for a few seconds simply due to bad luck. In this post, I’ll present an alternative approach to using Lunar, with the intention of gaining more control over your mana.

Weapon Switching
The proposed playstyle is all about managing the instances on which mana regen occurs. Every four seconds, the total mana regen stat is evaluated, then applied. By switching away from Lunar just before mana regen ticks, its stats won’t count towards the total mana regen, thus preventing all mana being lost. Even better is switching to a wand with positive mana regen (such as Bonder or King of Hearts). Once mana regen has ticked, Lunar can be switched back to for more spellcasting.

In essence, this results in spellspam Lunar (but switching to a different weapon every four seconds).

Implementation
For testing the playstyle a little, I used a relatively standard EWA spellspam build (https://wynndata.tk/s/lp1hza) with Bonder as a secondary. If played without error, this build has an effective mana regen of 12/4s.

To get a better idea of what using this build is like, below is a short video of me showing the weapon switching in a controlled environment:

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Using this build in combat is challenging; it’s still Lunar. As with spellsteal Lunar, good awareness of your mana is needed. However, unlike spellsteal Lunar, with enough skill, you can ensure you’re never out of mana. Plus, pulling off several consecutive cycles feels quite satisfying.

Concluding
I’ll close off this post with a short summary, and the main pros and cons of this playstyle compared to conventional Lunar builds (as I see them).

TL:DR - By briefly holding something other than Lunar Spine during mr ticks, its -mr penalty can be avoided, resulting in a semi-spellspam playstyle.

The good:
If played correctly, there will be no moments without mana
For some, it may be satisfying to use this playstyle
Coolant points for using Lunar

The bad:
“If played correctly” is quite a large caveat - it’s not an easy playstyle
Reacting to bad RNG can be considered skilful in its own right
Powder Special charge is lost when switching weapons, so there’s no real access to them

Thank you for reading! What do you think of this approach to Lunar? I’d love to hear.

Spoiler: But why?

In case you came all this way, and are still wondering why to bother when EWA Nepta exists -

 

I’ve been dabbling with lunar spine and bonder recently too lol. I found that the only real way to reliably switch on 4 is to use a metronome on my phone and time it to the server tick speed (usually 60bpm).

 

That’s pretty damn resourceful, lol

This reminds me that no matter how good I get at this game, there will always be metronome people and highbread

 

This is indeed a theoretical method to make Lunar Spine quite strong. The skill required is significant, but because mage in general is such a low skillcap class, it may be worthwhile.

 

I have one on me all the time cos I do a bit too much music.


If you want to go full gamer mode, play 5/4 at 75bpm with accented 5th beats to get full mana micromanagement. :)

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I must say though, lunar deserves to have the entropy major ID so spamming meteor is viable instead of 2 every melee hit.

 

MY PEOPLE

 

Truly a glorious day