Chaos Inoculation vs. Blood Magic (long)

Chaos Inoculation and Blood Magic:

These are two diametrically opposed keystones (both in form and in location) that effectively serve a similar function. Nuances notwithstanding, life and energy shield are interchangeable. Their sum constitutes your gross health pool. If you choose to build a character that maximizes health pool, you have two choices: Chaos Inoculation (CI) or Blood Magic (BM).

BM has remained largely unchanged. You would get, and still get, high life and life regeneration, and your skills are unrestricted by budgetary restraints. You also could, and can, regenerate your life (and your effective mana pool) with life leech. This last part was a significant, distinct advantage. Your opportunity cost was, and still is, limited use of auras and a relatively smaller gross health when compared to CI (approximately half).

In the past, if you chose the CI route to maximizing gross health pool, you gained complete immunity to chaos damage (a big deal) and a massive effective health pool, as well as the potential to add more auras than average and use blood rage with impunity. Your opportunity cost was a complete lack of regeneration under fire. You still had to manage your mana regeneration as do all characters without BM. There are other differences between CI and BM, of course, but they are relatively minor.

In past iterations of the passive tree, this choice was not clear cut. Was double the health pool, coupled with added offense through auras and buffs as well as complete immunity to chaos worth the lack of health pool regeneration under fire? It was a hard call to make. When something unexpected happens, it’s a real benefit to suck some potions and leech that life back. On the other hand, how often would you be in that position if your effective health pool is twice as large. That stuff is pretty meta game, build specific and certainly subjective.

Ghost Reaver (and to a lesser extent, Vaal Pact) altered that balance. One of, if not the, most significant opportunity costs to CI can be eliminated.

One reason the CI build is so effective is CI itself being multiplicative rather than additive (50% MORE energy shield as opposed to 50% increased maximum energy shield). But, the significant advantage to CI over BM is in the itemization. It requires many fewer passive nodes to achieve the high effective health pool than it does for BM. This is because there are multiple ES buff mods, and relatively few life buff mods. On rare equipment, the maximum ES buff is Incandescent (148 ES), Dauntless (170% ES), Djinn’s (50% ES), Savant (8% ES), not including all stat mods. A perfect ES chest can have over 1000 ES. On rare equipment, the maximum life buff is Fecund (99 life) and Leviathan (21 life), not including all stat mods. A perfect life chest provides 120 life.

A standard ES focused build requires about 45 passive points to achieve an additive ~123% to ES, a multiplicative 50% to ES, along with 95% increased ES regeneration, about 130 mana per second, and 2% mana leech and Ghost Reaver.

A standard life focused build requires over 70 passive points and achieves 221% to life with 7.4% life regeneration. You can, of course, forego some life regeneration if that seems excessive at a savings of 5 points or so.

With high end (but far from perfect) late game gear, under the two former scenarios, with the BM build you end up with around 4000 life, around 300 life regeneration, and the ability to regenerate through leech. With the ES build you end up with around 10,000 ES and, now, the ability to regenerate through life leech (and a unique shield if you want to get picky). But with the ES build, you also have a whopping 25 or 30 passive points to build offense. (As a side note related to itemization, under these circumstances, the perfect ES chest can amount to over 3500 ES! The perfect life chest amounts to less than 400 life.)

In conclusion, when comparing two builds of similar offensive style (be that ranged, melee or spell), one being BM and the other CI, the BM build just seems far inferior. I do understand and appreciate that there are more than a few factors involved including mana management and stuns and chills, among other things, these two functionally similar keystones just do not appear to be balanced.

To qualify my opinion, I have about 5 characters in their 70’s. I have thankfully had many opportunities to fully respec these toons. At every respec, I like to test new offensive builds using a CI focus, A BM focus, and a hybrid (life and mana regen). I have used this method with power siphon builds, elemental and physical bow builds, one and two handed GS/sweep builds, one and two handed flicker strike builds (pre-nerf) and dual wield and shielded caster builds. Prior to Ghost Reaver, the CI builds were typically more survivable as well as more offensively potent. The BM builds were a little less management intensive and more forgiving of mistakes, while offering less build options because of the passive point intensity. After Ghost Reaver, I find it difficult to recommend a BM build to serious minded (min/max) players.

To clarify, I am not advocating a nerf to anything nor do I have a solid solution. Perhaps raising increased life percentage nodes by 20% (from 8 to 10) would allow less passive points to be plowed into life nodes and allow for stronger offense/stronger options to bring BM up to par with CI. Perhaps having as many life mods as there currently are ES mods would help also.

TLDR: Blood Magic is a considerably weaker build than Chaos Inoculation even as the keystones have a similar function.

P.S. I have more observations I want to expound upon in the next few days as OB has been set. My apologies in advance.

I strongly agree with your assessment. Ghost Reaver is really the problem, imo. The BM build can focus moderate to high life with leech/regen increasing the effective health pool dramatically. But, as you pointed out, the health pool on an ES build could be about 2-4 times as much as a similarly spec'd BM build. What's the point of BM when you toss in Ghost Reaver with CI?

I think the solution is to really inspect the designed purpose of CI vs. BM. Right now their purposes strongly overlap with CI insanely superior to BM.

However! Further analysis would require looking at incorporating damage reduction from armor/evasion. BM builds are so far from any useful amount of ES passives that building armor/evasion is pretty much the only option.

I can say right now that an estimated 50% damage reduction effectively doubles your health pool and your life leech. Maybe armor is the balancing factor?

I agree as well, Ghost Reaver is the issue. That being said, I don't think it should go. I think it is fairly balanced, depending on weapon of choice, BM suits some builds better, while CI suits others better.

I think you're on the right track about ES mods and values on items. Before Ghost Reaver, I wouldn't have said anything about the +10K ES you could have with CI. You still had the downside that you had to disengage to regenerate it.

OP illustrates the difference and the ease which a CI user can gear up with in regards to item mods pretty well.

However I don't know any good solutions. Nerfing ES mods on items would in turn nerf non-CI casters (the few that there are). Nerfing CI itself will nerf non-GR casters. Nerfing GR may perhaps be the way to go, but it does give us an interesting option.

Maybe a rework of Ghost Reaver, not sure to what though.

Or perhaps looking at high life/regen builds. Currently these are the most gear dependent builds in the game. Perhaps add another build enabling unique like Kaoms Heart, maybe something a bit lower end though.

But you lose the huge offensive capabilities flab. In order to gain massive amounts of ES, one would have to spec into all life nodes + all ES nodes. That's building defensively, and you're being rewarded for doing so under that suggestion.

After getting my Ranger to lvl 65, I can safely say, that I do think far to many people think CI is OP (in regards to chaos dmg immunity, not the ES potential). Chaos immunity is only strong, really strong, for a melee build. Ranged builds are not really affected by chaos damage as much. Even as a Ranger, with 0 passive regen, I never once found Chaos damage to be strong. Ever.

I say this, because I think it is important to realize that a melee type, let's just say str for sake of discussion, get's hit by a TON of chaos dmg, therefore being immune to it sounds OP. But the fact of the matter is, to any ranged class, most chaos damage can be side-stepped, evaded, or killed before it becomes a problem.

So, if we have a BM life build, who is ranged, which some are, chaos damage shouldn't be a problem for them either. Only melee truly feels the full force of chaos.

The last note I will make in regards to "passive points available difference" is this. The highways for Witch area I tend to find rather long compared to what you get. This is coming from my vast experience with CI crit witch. I only hit little pockets for what I'm looking for, and usually have to spend MANY nodes in order to get there. In saying this, I believe that 25 passive points to a Witch =|= 25 passives points for a Mara, or even a Duelist. The amount that can be spent on those cramped areas with much higher node density is more than the density of good nodes in the Witch area.

This is just from my experience. I'm really not saying one keystone is better than other, just that there are other variables to take into account.

Cheers

I think it's obvious that there is a disparity between the skills, but the means to fix this issue is the far more important question.

Personally, I do not believe in nerfing the skills, as that usually leads to unintended consequences of destroying complete specs that the nerf is not even aimed at. The fix I would like to see is that BM is not cost prohibited from using percent based auras while CI keeps it's regen.

I fail to see the exact relevance of BM vs CI, I truely do. From what I can see, you are making a tenuous connection in the fact that they both allow the user to spec into more offensive options, then they would be able to without. However how do you compare the fact that in the end, CI is ultimately an eHP buffer, and BM is mana-management solution?

I guess it's how you play, where you play, and what you play. In my opinion, Blood magic is stupendously strong, as it eliminates an entire mana pool, meaning you get the ability to not use mana flasks, rely only on life leech, and other costs.

BM is much more an inverse of Eldritch Battery, then it is Chaos Innoculation.

EB requires more less passive investment, BM requires quite a bit. EB Is very item reliant, BM is not. EB forces you into a specific set of gear, BM does not. Both EB and BM make you spend the area's "Main defense" in different ways. BM, located in the str area, which is natively life based, spends life as they need it; EB spends ES up front.

While you ponder this issue, do realise that buffing BM is not an option in all reality, the node specifically, as EB is also strongly affected by the node, as they are the only two "Big" mana management keystones.

Also a sidenote: I find it hard to believe you have never had an issue with chaos, specifically poison arrow. Before I attained gear to the degree I did, around 3.5k life, I was being instagibbed continually by poison clouds. While you do play on a faster computer then me (As I am rather well known for playing on a computer with 4 fps) therefore I take more PA damage due to my delayed reaction time, I fail to see how you could not see the huge damage spikes at unexpected times, could indeed, screw someone over.

Seriously Epsi, I never once died from chaos or ever came to it.

This was with 3k life to boot. I actually stood in front of some chaos spell, whatchamacalits, to see what would happen, and could effectively take 2-3 volleys before I came close to dying. That's a LOT of time to react to move and take cover.

Chaos damage was not at all a problem for me. The only thing that scared me was flicker strike packs. That's it.

As a Witch against projectile mobs I never really had a big issue with them. Dodging arrows and casters and things proves fairly easy to do if you are half way paying attention. Regardless of element type.

As a CI witch the only thing that scared me, as Sl4y3r said, is flicker mobs where they close the gap instantly and being a ranged really has no advantage there, but more of a disadvantage.

Now for my noob side: Only been in the beta a week or so now, so my knowledge is still growing by leaps and bounds daily, but GR has no real place in a spell caster CI build, correct? I don't believe that life leach (or energy shield leach in this case) can work on spells, at least I haven't seen this before. Most gear I run into with leach on it specifies physical damage, so makes me wonder if this leach is global and works for spells. Thanks for the patience with the n00b.


More on topic of the thread, in my experience with CI I felt like early gearing was slightly rough (partially due to my noob nature and overall lack of knowledge/experience), but once I figured out what to aim for and how to gear it feels pretty damn strong. (using Sl4y3r's spec with frost pulse and only 4 link chest). Haven't used BM, but I think that going one or the other is a significant advantage over trying to balance both out, due to being able to stack one type and ignore the other.

If the original post holds true as to what you get for each spec, then I would have to agree spot on that there should be some balancing to be done. Some of the gear pieces I have seen are pretty insane for end game ES pieces. Keep in mind though that these pieces are fairly rare and only the top 1-2% of people will be likely to have them.

Doesn't a BM build also gain more armor from the gear pieces in which they go after which helps to mitigate some of the damage as well? ES is our only form of protection while BM specs rely on both life pool+max life, but also have armor on their sought after pieces which does help for mitigation, correct?

Thanks for reading!