Which is better Recovery vs Cost Reduction?
In this article we are looking at Recovery vs Cost Reduction, and the reason for this is to help you understand which is better and under what circumstance you would potentially switch your build from one of these things to the other.
As a Tank one of the most common Jewellery enchants is Magicka Recovery and Recovery ticks every 2 seconds. You can regain Magicka via recovery while blocking aside from when using an Ice Staff combined with the Tri-Focus passive.
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Cost reduction is another popular choice, and you can use either Stamina Cost Reduction, Magicka Cost Reduction and Tri-Cost Reduction which reduces the cost of Magicka, Stamina and Health abilities.
One of the reasons why Magicka Recovery is so strong is because every 2 seconds, you’ll receive a tick of recovery. So as long as you don’t allow your Magicka bar to be full, you’ll always be gaining a benefit from having Magicka Recovery. It doesn’t require you to do very much to gain the benefit and Tanks will typically always use Magicka costing skills where possible because even while blocking you still have the recovery ticks.
With cost reduction, it’s only in use when you cast an ability. So, while you are stood still doing nothing, it’s also not doing anything. As soon as you cast something, that’s when it delivers it’s benefit with the lower cost. This can become particularly strong when you are casting skills every second or using Stamina skills while blocking because you cannot regenerate Stamina while blocking but you can reduce the cost of Stamina skills.
The simply way to look at Recovery vs Cost Reduction is the more you cast abilities, the more useful Cost Reduction is. The less you cast, the more benefit you’ll have from the Recovery instead. Someone who casts skills every second is going to benefit a great deal from Cost Reduction because they are maximising the amount of abilities, they are casting, if you only cast a skill once every 5 seconds then you’ll find the Recovery more useful.
One of the common problems people will encounter when going for a Cost Reduction setup is you cannot sustain using Cost Reduction if you don’t somehow substitute your Recovery in some way.
If you have a somewhat standard full Sturdy setup with 20k Max Magicka, you’re using 3x Infused Tri-Cost Reduction which bring your Magicka Recovery to around 1k then you’re trying to cast a skill every second – you’ll be out of Magicka within a few seconds. You cannot just switch from 3x Infused Magicka Recovery to 3 Prismatic Cost Reduction without finding alternative ways to increase your Recovery.
There is a real tipping point where Cost Reduction becomes more valuable than Recovery but as mentioned already, you need to boost Magicka Recovery in alternative ways, for me it’s using Divines gear and a food that includes Magicka Recovery, along with making sure I have Major and Minor Intellect as much as possible, if I didn’t do this then my cost reduction would essentially be useless because I can’t sustain using it.
There are other Niche situations where Cost Reduction has some value. If you are still using Magicka Recovery on a Dragonknight but want to begin maintaining Stone Giant’s Stagger debuff on the enemy, then using an Infused Stamina Cost Reduction pieces of Jewellery makes this much easier. In a similar fashion, playing a Necromancer Tank if you are using an Ultigen setup that spam casts skills to create corpses for Necrotic Potency then Magicka Cost Reduction is great as the Necro uses almost no Stamina skills.
So as you can see it’s not as simple as which is better Cost Reduction or Recovery – it’s linked to how often you cast skills, what skills you use and the class you are using. Just remember that you cannot replace Magicka Recovery for Cost Reduction, you need to find a way to add Cost Reduction additionally while still maintain the recovery needed to make it work. Consider which resource you are using, if Pierce Armor is your only Stamina costing skill its not worth using 3 Tri-Cost reduction for that one skill that already has a very low cost.
See more: Jewellery Enchants & Jewellery Traits