Empires and Puzzles – Mana

Mana Generation: The basics

Mana fuels each hero’s Special Skill.  It is shown as the bar immediately under the health bar for your hero when looking at the battlefield. Titans and bosses also have mana bars for their own special skills. Mana bars begin each fight empty and fill as you make matches.

On offense, your heroes’ mana bar fills when you make matches of the same element as the hero. The mana gained is doubled when the tiles are ‘ghosted’ (when the tiles do not hit an enemy).

Bosses, titans, and enemy heroes in raids and wars gain mana when they are hit by tiles and at the end of their turn.

Mana Speeds

Number of Tiles required to charge special skill in offense and titan fights.

There are 5 levels of mana speed possible.  These levels correspond with how many matched tiles it takes to fill their mana bar.  Ghosted tiles (tiles that hit no monster) provide twice as much mana as those that hit (thus for Slow it would be 12 hits or 6 ghosted tiles).

• Very Slow:  13.5 tiles
• Slow:  12 tiles
• Average:  10 tiles
• Fast:  8 tiles
• Very Fast:  6.5 tiles

Mana Speed Modifiers

There are two types of modifiers to mana speeds.

1. Increase or decrease of mana generation per tile.
2. Direct addition of mana (at the end of turn, when certain effect triggers.)

Heroes that Decrease or Increase mana generation speeds

Conditional Mana Generation

There are certain effects in game that trigger mana generation when the conditions are met.

• End of turn – Alberich – 8% mana at the end of turn,
  Inari – 7% mana at the end of turn if minion is alive.
• On dodge – Margaret – 8% mana per dodge
• Misandra – 6% mana per hit on an enemy to all allies
• When damaged – Sumitomo – 8% mana when hit,
• Per minion removed – Grimble – 8% mana per minion removed.

Mana Generation Breakpoints

A minimum percentage increase is required to have any effect on the number of tiles required to fully charge the heroes special skill.

Do note that even if you fall short of 0.1% mana generation speed, it will not have any effect on reducing the number of tiles required.

Maximum rate of mana generation currently possible

4 Sakura/Pirate/Wonderland family bonus (12%)
Level 29/30 mana troop (15%)
Talent bonus (4%)
Ariel/Khagan (24%)
Inari (Sakura Family) (7% at the end of turn)

Therefore the fastest speed is 55% increased mana generation + 7%MU at the end of turn.

Mana Block / Reduction effects

There are 3 main categories of effects that can delay special skills from trigger.

1. Silence (Miki & Cabin Boy Peters)
2. Reduction in mana generation &
3. Effects that directly reduce mana

How effective is Mana reduction?

Lets break it down into the above few categories that were described above, Silence, reduced mana generation and direct mana reduction.

How effective is silence?

Silence is great because it guarantees that the enemy hero will not be able to trigger their special skills. This means that if you target the heroes with cleanse effects (rigard, vivica, zimthika etc) they will not be able to cleanse the silence debuff.

However, the downside is that mana generation can still occur. This means that once the silence debuff is over, the enemy hero will most likely be able to use their special skills immediately.

How effective is reduction in mana generation?

At 100% mana generation reduction (proteus and hel), they are considered one of the best heroes all round. This is because once you have stopped the enemy from generating mana for 3 turns, you have at least 4 turns to kill them.

This is because you can freely send tiles into the affected heroes without fear of any repercussions. Furthermore, once the effect is over, additional turns are required by your enemies to charge up their mana.

The only downside is that it does not have any effect on heroes that are already at full mana. They will still trigger their special skills regardless.

Whenever using these heroes, you should always take note of which heroes have a status cleanse effect, and how much mana they already have. After considering this information do you decide whether to wait a turn or two before you trigger your debuff.

For the rest of the percentage reduction (24% to 64%), based on the table above, you will notice that the effect is much more significant than a 64% longer time to trigger their special skills.

At a 64% mana generation reduction, it takes heroes 3 times as long to fully charge their special skills. [This is the reason why Little John is a MONSTER in rush attacks.]

Essentially, do not write off these heroes with mana generation reduction so quickly. They are able to buy your team a lot of time in both offense and defense.

How effective is direct mana reduction? (i.e reduce mana by x%)

These effects are much more effective when you are the defender (as opposed to you being the attacker).

This is because on attack, you first need to utilize your special skills and then match tiles. What this means is that the mana that you have reduced on your enemies will quickly be charged from the tiles that you have matched. And sometimes, your matched tiles will cascade into heroes that you did not want to hit.

On defense, the exact opposite happens. Mana is gained after the attacker matches their tiles, then the defender uses special skills then attacks. This means that should your mana reduction special skills take effect, the defender has to match tiles again, without being able to activate their special skills and its your turn again.

As such, when considering heroes that have a direct mana reduction, do give them greater considerations when placing them in defense.

Troops – What level do I need?

Mana Generation in a single image