was blood magic ever meant to be used by melee ?

Can't see that it works any better even with the new 60% less modifier.


The math is still a no-go, the hatred tax costs you 1/4 of your life if you go BM. And really, if you are melee you should be running herald of ash too.

looks like LL summoner is now the thing to do which is not really melee. Well the zombies are melee, but not really the same...

So I'm kind of curious if GGG thought that melee/life builds would actually use it.

I use it on a low life melee reave witch (without shavs do)

It's actually a very solid keystone atm if your building for an ES ehp base. (hybrid build)

Peace,

-Boem-

"

Boem wrote:

I use it on a low life melee reave witch (without shavs do)

It's actually a very solid keystone atm if your building for an ES ehp base. (hybrid build)

Peace,

-Boem-

interesting. CoE build ?
or are you using "low life" simply to stack a bunch of auras on a melee character instead of a spell damage buff ?

that would explain it's location. you have to stack a bunch of ES which is, for the most part in the witch area, although the templar area has some good ones.

so placing it where it is makes it "expensive".

but a duelist/marauder using it and taking advantage of regen nodes still seems like a no-go.

i wouldnt be able to maintain cyclone spaming without that node

She was actually going to be a low-life aura slut ek'er/support char, but i decided to try melee with her instead and go reave (which is pretty fun without a shavs, keep's the player on edge, which i enjoy a lot)

passive tree in spoiler below.


And you are correct it is a char simply stacking aura's and being melee and using blood rage to utilize the attack speed buff instead of needing another gem slot (making my 5-link a 6-link essentially)

However i see nothing wrong with that.

And really, there is a lot of "hybrid" potential for the blood magic keystone atm. I only regret that the "mortal conviction" node was not attached to the blood magic items in-game, because these items are totally bust now.

You can easily run ES atm with roughly 7/9 % regen (with vita aura) because of zealoths oath and utilise LL or Lgoh for life replenishment.
(or the other way around like i am doing to utilize blood rage, LL on ES and regen on HP)

It will be in a good spot once they rehaul HP again.(2-hand buff)

Peace,

-Boem-

I have used it in the past for iron will spell casters and for leveling melee chars. Auras op, mana leech everywhere.

back when auras reserved a fixed amount it was common place for blood magic users to reserve 1 or 2 auras on a massive pool of hp.


but this is back when things like hatred would only eat up 300 life and life regen notables were 1.5 - 2% with minors being 1%

and life nodes were ... almost double what they are now roughly


the many changes in mechanics have not been kind to blood magic.... to the point where ironically the only people who use the actual key stone are casters traveling from the otherside of the tree.


which to me is tragic since blood magic was originally advertized as the str/ dex alternative to EB and mana node . capable of solving mana issue for a reasonable price.


but now that ggg is determined to keep life pools small , and Regen prohibitively expensive to stack and the obvious str/ dex non caster auras % based ( looking at you hatred determination grace and fucking haste). you will hard pressed to fine blood magic characters that arent going there to run a low life shavs. lorica build with half a billion auras.


at this point might as well move it to the templar part of the tree seeing as no one from the mara/ ranger / duelist tree ( that isnt also going into the witch shadow scion areas) would use the damn thing in the main stream.


hell look at the hoops the build of week had to jump through to get blood magic too work . the build is as durable as a box of waffers in a rainstorm without its minions

Yeah they really need to rethink blood magic completely. Outright buffing mortal conviction is not the answer here, but they continue to just do it anyway... Bizarre.

ironically the more the they buff mortal conviction the larger the portion of blood magic users become casters and int based .

blood magic pretty much is nothing more than another energy sheild passive that is a happy middle ground between ci and eb.

they need to bring back fixed mana auras and call them something else . i was hoping the heralds would be fixed mana.... it was a huge opportunity wasted.

I hate that the keystone is only used in lowlife builds.
Not that I hate lowlife builds, but I think this is not what the keystone is meant to do.
And I don't think this is a "clever trick" (Ha! I reserve auras on life but don't need life! I am so smart!), it's just... wrong.

How about...

---

Blood Magic:
Use life instead of mana
10% more life
Your Energy shield and mana pool are zero
("50% less ES" if this sounds too harsh, but I'd actually make it "zero")

Mortal Conviction:
70% less aura reservation

---

You could then run one 60% aura with "reduced mana" gem basically for free.
60% *0.7 *0.3 = 12,6% reserved.

And even 120% in auras wouldn't be horrible.
120% *0.7 *0.3 = 25.2% reserved (so your playing with 15% less life than before, like 4250 instead of 5000 (yes, that hurts, but auras and a free gem slot could be worth it).

---

Another idea would be:

Blood Magic:
Use life instead of mana for melee attack skills
Your ES is zero (not your mana pool!)

So you can reserve your mana pool with auras like you want, but still need mana for stuff like curses, movement skills... I actually like that.