How does "Vaal Clarity" and "Mind over Matter" interact?

Messing around with Vaal Clarity on my Icenova Archmage build. Put on a lv21 Clarity for a bit of extra mana regen, with an arrogance. In the process of corrupting, I got a Vaal version. It makes it so skills do not cost mana.

I thought it would be a helpful defensive tool. If I was getting chunked, turn off mana for attacks. Allowing the full mana pool too be used as life while I leeched and regen.

When I use it though, my mana doesn't go down, even from hits. My health and ES spike still, but mana stays maxed. Is my Regen compensating the loss or does Vaal Clarity disable Mind over Matter. as a "skill"?

There shouldn't be any interaction that I'm aware of, other than they work well together.

Vaal clarity makes you skills cost no mana. So if your skills cost mana, there will be less drain on that resource for the duration. It should not prevent you from taking damage as mana through MoM. You should just have more mana in the hit pool, because you are not spending it on skill costs.

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I thought it would be a helpful defensive tool. If I was getting chunked, turn off mana for attacks. Allowing the full mana pool too be used as life while I leeched and regen.

Yes, that would be my understanding as well.

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When I use it though, my mana doesn't go down, even from hits. My health and ES spike still, but mana stays maxed. Is my Regen compensating the loss or does Vaal Clarity disable Mind over Matter. as a "skill"?

It could be that your mana is regenerating if you have a lot of mana regen. It also depends on your ratio of life to mana. I don't think vaal clarity makes the damage bypass MoM all onto life, both by description and testing. I appear to be still taking damage to mana during vaal clarity. Test with taking more damage, and pop life flask if life is running out quicker than seeing mana go down. Some of these mechanics like MoM, EB, energy shield, bypass damage, do have unusual interactions, but I don't think the damage is bypassing mana here.

Well, I realize that whole plan is a bust.

Using Vaal Clarity makes all my skills use 0 mana, because my skills use 0 mana "Kitava's Thirst" doesn't proc. Which means I do significantly less damage.

Since I do less damage, I leech less. Since I leech less, I am less tanky. The whole plan to use Vaal Clarity as a defensive measure in fact, makes me more vulnerable.

Found that out the hard way as a lv99.

The more you know.

Yeah I think what you where trying to do does work, but if you have other mechanics on your build that require mana cost it's going to break them.

Omen of amelioration might be useful if you on level 99 while altering the build.