A Guide to Mana Channel

Rejoice! You're a Sohei

If you're like me, the MANA CHANNEL spell became a thing when Soheis became a thing at the JediMUD around 2003. That's when some genius decided that the rather lackluster Sohei, created as a class mid-90s, shouldn't just be another Thief with the COLOR SPRAY spell, but should live up to their historical cool Chinese Magical Fighting Monk name. They should do some hard-core JediMUD pipe hitting. So MANA CHANNEL was devised and of course, the JediMUD exploit team found a way to break it hard in favor of the soulless, but crafty, player. At first, MANA CHANNEL and the new non-debugged STRIKE skill allowed some insane mob takedowns, with MC Sohei breaking the game with 10K+ meditates and endless blizzards of 1000+ damage hits.

After the class was tinkered with and boss mobs got STRIKE nerf padding (Count Cagliostro, Augustus, Ancient Fire Dragon, Jupiter, Beholder, among some others are !STRIKE) players settled down with the new class and still loved what they were able to do, especially when multi-duo arrived in 2008.

And of course, over the course of the next hundred or so Sohei remorts, the pure awesomeness that is the post-remort rewarding STRIKE skill became the pure awesomeness of the newly crowned post-remort Sohei class.

Soheis derive their STRIKE skill power from the shared contribution of hit points, mana and movement points at invocation time. Meditate allows the Sohei to distribute lopsided stats evenly across all health stat categories for a sustained STRIKE sequence. As a glowing Sohei, soon to be an entropied Sohei, you want to deliver your massive firepower quickly, in a series of three or four connected power strikes before your Cleric can safely summon you out.

To achieve this pure awesomeness, the quad multi-series strike, delivering at least 4000 raw damage (at the very minimum with a 0 remort Sohei), you must master the other purely awesome Sohei spell ability: MANA CHANNEL.

WTF is Mana Channel?

The first thing you should know, as an aspiring channeling Sohei, is that any stat category is capped at 1,000. So you can never channel more than 1,000 MANA at any given time.

Here's the in-game help file for MANA CHANNEL:

"MANA CHANNEL"
Level:     S27                           Cost:      75 mana
Target:    one monster                   When:      non-combat
Delay:     one combat round              Duration:  instantaneous
Effect:    The mana channel spell removes a number of hitpoints from the
           target monster, converts them to mana and grants them to the
           caster.
Usage:     cast 'mana channel' <victim>
See also:  Energy Drain

Mana Channel will transfer hitpoints from a target victim directly to the caster's mana pool, and after several successful mana channels, will build their mana total toward the 1,000 mana point cap. This requires a careful selection of target mobs, as not every mob provides more than the 75 mana required to cast the spell.

Some Soheis use the "Vampire Method" of channeling, where a mob of sufficient size is selected and channeled, while a Cleric partner will continually restore the target mob, effectively transferring mana from the Cleric to the Sohei in an effort to amass 1,000 mana.

Which ever method you choose, you'll start your process by channeling to 1,000 mana, then using the meditate skill to distribute your mana evenly for sustained striking. You may have to repeat this process a few times for top-tier boss mobs.

Here is a list of good channeling mobs by strikable boss mob zone:

Mob	Zone	Hitpoints	Channel Gain
panhandler	New Thalos	42	79
vulture	New Thalos	29	80-120
tourist	New Thalos	54	85
skinny kid	New Thalos	92	100
horse	New Thalos	154	80
musician	New Thalos		400-520
dockworker	New Thalos		80
rat	Weeden		20

Special thanks to Kia for his valuable input