Your gold and mana values are made of pure insanity. And did you mana blast some darklings? That's just wrong. I kinda wanted to hoard mana to see how ridiculous it could get, and your screenshot proves I was just scratching the surface.

I agree on mana shield. Maybe a 50/50 split.

It might be OP, but since you can never be sure you'll get it, does it matter that much?

Well, yes. The quest wasn't difficult, it's just a random chance, and I don't think any one spell / item simply should be THIS over-powered. Take the Scythe of the Void for example. You have to do some pretty tough fights in succession to get it, and even then it's not as big of an "I WIN" button, and even then there are drawbacks to using it. With mana blast :

1) ALL my heroes learned it once I finished the quest, even the Ascian.

2) Damage doesn't appear to cap out, or if it does it's probably not at any reasonable level.

3) It seems to be un-typed damage, as in even if I shot it at something with 100% resistance to fire, cold, and poison it would still do damage.

4) Costing 20-ish mana seems out of proportion considering all the above.

I would be ok with ONE of the above being the case, maybe two, but not all four. 

Agree, I rarely get it and I'm not going to search for it.    Its fun though.

I don't have anything like 700-900 damage, though.  Mine range from 50-80 in some battles to 120-150 damage per shot in others.  Haven't paid attention to why the damage values change - but with one hero I sometimes get 250 damage.

For the eyes of dragon quest... 50-70.  doh.

holy crap on the resource levels.

If getting 10,000 mana is at all possible then overall game balance is the problem, not mana blast.  Either you're playing with your food or the whole spell system needs to be overhauled.

with 10000 mana you can deathmagic enchant your champion for 1000 base damage or 250 initiative

or 700 damage and 150 initiative

this will provide ever higher dps then normal hero with 500 damage per turn, since such hero will act multiple times. 

I think that particular game I was testing with extra-slow tech progression, so there was a lot of waiting around and not a lot to spend mana on, so it ended up stockpiling a lot until I could research the "buff your heroes" spells and use up all that mana.

Mana blast damage scales with your mana pool, but I think it should scale on a curve rather than a straight line.

In a completely theoretical example, if you spend all your resources on mana but dont' cast any spells your gameplan should be gimped and the opponents would run you over. That happens in a super tight game like Starcraft.

Oliver, that already is in the game through the spell damage amplification by high level mages. They do even more damage than 10% of your manapool.

Maybe some cap by Hero level?

Damage = Min(Manapool , Herolevel*1000) / 10

That way e.g. a hero at level 10 could do a maximum of 1000 damage (which is still much), but only if the player has acces to >= 10000 Mana.

One could also replace the 1000 with 250/500/750 or something along those lines, you get the point.

A possible solution would be a limitation of the maximum mana. After all, the mana needs to be stored somewhere after all. So what if the maximum mana was:

100 * Hero Magic Level +

100 * Essence available in all Cities +

X from Buildings

mana blast shoud deal spell mastery of hero as damage at same mana cost (1:1 factor) and possibly include level factor and fraction of 10% of total pool.

This will make high level wizard with 200 spell mastery deadly and rookie with 30 spell mastery not stronger then soulspark. 

I can't believe no one can see that this is probably a bug. There is nothing unusual about having 2 or 3 thousand mana if you are playing on a rather large map. If you are a mage sovereign and a mage class and have the right picks, it is easy to do 400 - 500 damage. Late in the game I have done over 1000 damage. That isn't the point. I am quite sure that they meant to subtract the damage from your mana pool (OK, minus the bonuses a mage gets). It is so rare their beta testers (when was the last time we saw a game properly tested before release) probably didn't see it.

So, don't change anything, except after you use the spell 10% of you mana pool is removed. Simple fix. Another thing that might help to is to put a cool down timer. It does take a round to cast, but if you notice, there is a mage skill that lowers the time by 1 round. Talk about OP. Try going into a fight with 4000 mana, a mage with a initiative in the 20's, and can cast any spell in one round. grin The killer of summer? The maker of Dust? Those fights suddenly become pretty easy.