Open Blood Rage Buff for mages too.

Make it useful to mages.

Change the physical life leech for damage life leech and include increase cast speed too.

Thanks in advance,

"

samfortal wrote:

Make it useful to mages.

Change the physical life leech for damage life leech and include increase cast speed too.

Thanks in advance,

Run low-life.

/thread.

no. one issue is that either CI or lowlife builds are practically unaffected by the drawback to blood rage (the chaos degen), due to either being immune, or having vastly more ES than life, coupled with Zealot's Oath and shavs/lorica.

another is that it was designed as a buff primarily for physical melee. granted, some others can benefit from it to a degree (any build can use the frenzy charges, any attacking build can use the physical life leech buff). but changing it to unrestricted damage leech, and/or cast speed, would make it far, far too powerful for casters.

it's already broken as hell for physical melee lowlife. honestly, I think that it should either be significantly reworked or removed as it's too easily abusable. any life-based physical melee character can easily run it with 1% life regen (which practically every life-based build will have already), and even without the lowlife bonus, it gives them free frenzy charges and frees up a link/gear slots by supplying life leech.

"

tsftd wrote:

no. one issue is that either CI or lowlife builds are practically unaffected by the drawback to blood rage (the chaos degen), due to either being immune, or having vastly more ES than life, coupled with Zealot's Oath and shavs/lorica.

another is that it was designed as a buff primarily for physical melee. granted, some others can benefit from it to a degree (any build can use the frenzy charges, any attacking build can use the attack speed buff). but changing it to unrestricted damage leech, and/or cast speed, would make it far, far too powerful for casters.

it's already broken as hell for physical melee lowlife. honestly, I think that it should either be significantly reworked or removed as it's too easily abusable. any life-based physical melee character can easily run it with 1% life regen (which practically every life-based build will have already), and even without the lowlife bonus, it gives them free frenzy charges and frees up a link/gear slots by supplying life leech.

Actually, no. To the bolded part.

Yes, any attack based build "can" make use of the attack speed, but the only ones that can count on it and reliably use it are low-life builds.

ah brain fart, really meant to put "physical life leech" instead of "attack speed", changed in my post.

also, CI can't under any circumstances use the attack speed buff since they can't hit low life ;p

"

tsftd wrote:

ah brain fart, really meant to put "physical life leech" instead of "attack speed", changed in my post.

also, CI can't under any circumstances use the attack speed buff since they can't hit low life ;p

But also totally negate the only "direct" penalty.

yep -- and even low life practically negate it since damage is based on life total, but regen would be based on their much larger es total (due to ZO)

"

tsftd wrote:

yep -- and even low life practically negate it since damage is based on life total, but regen would be based on their much larger es total (due to ZO)

I'm sure you know but I want to make sure that nobody mistakes what you said. Blood Rage says "you lose x% of your life as chaos damage".

It doesn't say "regen" anywhere.

It doesn't say "degen" anywhere.

It says nothing that can be affected by any gear or keystones we currently have, as far as I recall. There are other items that do apply a similar effect, however.

The only way to affect BR's chaos damage is by chaos resistance, Chaos Inoculation, and regeneration.

This is why CI builds can easily plug this in without any drawback.

Edit: For TL:DR folks, apart from explaining all the nuances of BR so that nobody gets confused, the reason not to extend it to cast speed and global damage leech is that a LL build can get 122-125% total IAS and 22.5% Physical Damage Leeched in 3 links, 0 mana reserved, and just a couple of passives taken (any Regen - can also get from gear, Inner Force passive ring, Zealot's Oath), many of which would be taken anyway by most LL builds.

Ok, I didn't really explain what I meant for people who aren't familiar and used a lot of shorthand. However, your description can (in some cases) lead to significant problems as well. In the interest of avoiding confusion:

The exact text for Blood Rage is: "Adds a buff that deals Chaos Damage over time, while increasing Attack Speed and Life Leech. Killing an enemy while this buff is active refreshes the buff duration, and grants a Frenzy Charge."

The exact mechanical descriptions are:
"Base duration is x seconds
x% Increased Attack Speed when on Low Life
x% of Physical Damage from Attacks Leeched as Life
You lose x% of your Maximum Life per second as Chaos Damage
Gain a Frenzy Charge on Kill"

Keywords on Blood Rage are "Chaos, Spell, Duration"

There is no official game mechanic term "Degen". Degen (or Degeneration or Degeneration Damage) is a shorthand term for Damage over Time (or DoT) effects. The term is used to emphasize its similarity and opposition to Regen (or Regeneration or Life/ES Regeneration), and as such is generally used for persistent DoT effects (such as Blood Rage or Righteous Fire) rather than dynamically applied DoT effects (such as Ignite or Puncture or Poison), though in reality it can (and sometimes is) used to apply to those too.

Now that we have the definitions out of the way, let's examine exactly what they mean and how they interact with various things.

First of all, you will notice that the text specifically calls Blood Rage a buff. This means that all buff mechanics apply to it -- most notably, the Increased Effect of Buffs on You mechanic. It applies uniformly to all parts of the buff (unconfirmed as to whether it would apply to Frenzy Charge gain, as it is currently not possible to reach +100% Increased Effect of Buffs on You to test it). This means that it increases the Attack Speed, Physical Damage Leech, and Chaos Damage applied to you (note that you may not see a change in some effects with extremely low increases due to the way that the game rounds).

While it can boost the beneficial effects, this can be troublesome, as it causes you to take more damage. It is also the only way that you can increase the damage taken (as it is a "lose" life effect, and not a "deal" damage effect, Spell Damage, DoT, and Chaos Damage increases do not affect it). However, you should be aware that the Vulnerability curse causes you to take more DoT, and will in fact increase the damage that you take from Blood Rage. Furthermore, Increased Effect of Buffs on You (IEoBoY) increases the life loss dealt, while Vulnerability increases the life loss taken, so they apply multiplicatively. Taking all of the IEoBoY nodes in the current tree gives you +26%, and Vuln adds 33% (at all levels), so 1.26*1.33 = a 67.58% increase maximum (technically more is possible in PvP).

Additionally, linking the Blood Magic support gem to Blood Rage unintuitively applies BM's quality bonus to BR (thereby making it a global effect); however, for some reason this only works when you are on Low Life, and BR's native IAS boost is triggered. It is unknown if this is a bug/exploit, or if IEoBoY would affect this BM quality effect when chained through BR.

That's it regarding increasing BR's effects; how about decreasing them? The DoT is Chaos Damage, so Chaos Resistance and Chaos Immunity (CR=100%) both reduce (or negate) it. Thus, CI makes you immune to the damage from BR, but also prevents you from benefiting from its lowlife effects. The only way currently to increase your max Chaos Resistance (natively 75%) other than by taking CI is with Saffell's Frame (+4%, or +5% on a Legacy). This conveniently brings higher-level Blood Rage gems' DoT taken below 1% of your life total (assuming no increased damage as mentioned above), as at level 17 and above, it only deals 3.8% of your life total as DoT. Note that as a DoT effect, this damage does not Hit, and thus Solaris Lorica's "−10 Chaos Damage taken" (or any similar effects added in the future) do not apply; however, if in the future they introduced something that Converted Chaos Damage taken to another Damage Type, it would apply.

While it is entirely possible to deal with the damage via Life Leech, Life Gain on Hit, flasks, or any other common method of life gain, by far the easiest, safest, and most common is via Regeneration (of Life or ES). For a life-based build, this would logically equate to getting 1% (or more) Life Regeneration from somewhere (tree or gear). Technically, for a maxed Chaos Res with Saffell's Frame and a level 17+ BR, you would need .76% Regen, for non-Saffels, .95%, for a level 5-16 BR and no Saffell's, .975%, and for a level 1-4 BR and no Saffell's, exactly 1%.

Also note that Chaos Damage will (normally) bypass ES, leaving it untouched, however it still counts as receiving damage, and as such, prevents your ES from recharging based on its delay (though not Regenning, Leeching, or Replenishing, should you have the applicable keystones/gear). Where it gets broken is when a non-CI build uses either Shavronne's Wrappings or Solaris Lorica, both of which have the effect "Chaos Damage does not bypass Energy Shield". This allows you to achieve Low Life (typically via reserving life using BM) but take the Chaos Damage to your ES. By taking the keystone Zealot's Oath, "Life Regeneration applies to Energy Shield instead of Life" -- however, the DoT damage from BR is still based on your life total. Thus, if you have, for instance, a 1,000 Life Total and 6,000 ES Total, (with a level 1 BR [4% of Life as DoT] and 75% Chaos Resistance) you would take 10 Chaos Damage per second, every second. However, with only 1% Life Regen (and Zealot's Oath), you would Regenerate 60 ES every second. Thus, in theory (and the above numbers), you could get by with only ~.17% Regeneration (compared to the .95% required for a Life build). This is what I was referring to earlier with

"

lowlife builds are practically unaffected by the drawback to blood rage (the chaos degen), due to [sic] having vastly more ES than life, coupled with Zealot's Oath and shavs/lorica

This also allows Low Life builds utilizing Shavs/Lorica, ZO, and BR to take the IEoBoY nodes to get 21% increased beneficial effects at a negligible increase to damage taken. This would give them 85-88% IAS with a 20/23 BR and a 20/23 BM linked (depending on if IEoBoY affects BM's quality). This is further boostable with a high-level Empower and/or an item that gives +1 to gems. Theoretically, with (I think?) ideal gear, you could have an item with +1 to the level of all gems, +1 to the level of support gems (from Catarina's mod), corrupted 20/23 BM and BR, and a 4/X Enhance. This yields an effective 21/63 BR and 22/23 BM, for 105% IAS from BR and 17-20% IAS from BM, or 122-125% total in 3 links, 0 mana reserved, and just a couple of passives taken (any Regen, Inner Force ring, Zealot's Oath), many of which would be taken anyway by most LL builds. Not to mention the 22.5% Physical Damage Leeched. Because with that sort of near-free IAS, life leech % doesn't really matter...

This, by the way, is why I was so opposed to extending it to include Cast Speed and all Damage Leech.

"

tsftd wrote:

Edit: For TL:DR folks, apart from explaining all the nuances of BR so that nobody gets confused, the reason not to extend it to cast speed and global damage leech is that a LL build can get 122-125% total IAS and 22.5% Physical Damage Leeched in 3 links, 0 mana reserved, and just a couple of passives taken (any Regen - can also get from gear, Inner Force passive ring, Zealot's Oath), many of which would be taken anyway by most LL builds.

Wait, what? How do you get that from just three supports?