Blood Magic and Life Regen

Wait.. so.. GGG is adding more Life Regen in 95g? As if it wasn't already too OP.

My Blood Magic Mara is near invincible with only 2.5% Life Regen and with the already easily accessible 6.5% total Life Regen he stands to be immortal. Now he's got an easy 1% on top of that bringing the total to 7.5%? Even with Blood Rage running all the time, every skill/spell can be cast for free and health is recovered on top of it. The only way to die is to literally stand still and let monsters attack me without retaliation. Even then it takes forever!

The Regen passive added to the Templar area is good because it's hard to get to for other classes unless their build just happens to go there. But the 5% Life Regen around the Deulist is flat out ridiculous. First of all, it's way too overpowered. Second, why does a hybrid STR/DEX character get just as easy access to Life Regen than the pure STR character? Not that it's difficult for the Mara to branch over especially if you're going for a life regen build, but it's much easier for the Deulist to get 5% without sacrificing hardly anything for any build. All in all it's a bit harder for the Duelist to get the 7.5% but it only takes 4 extra levels.

Deulist 5% Life Regen - 15 nodes(~lvl 14)
Marauder 5% Life Regen - 20 nodes(~lvl 19)
Deulist 6.5% Life Regen - 31 nodes(~lvl 26-28)
Marauder 6.5% Life Regen - 24 nodes(~lvl 22)
Deulist 7.5% Life Regen - 35 nodes(~lvl 30-31)
Marauder 7.5% Life Regen - 31 nodes (possible on Cruel difficulty at level 26 with free passives if someone is good enough or if they have a friend to rush them as early as level 20)

5% Life Regen at level 14?! Are you serious?! That's more than enough to carry someone through nearly the entire game and 7.5% Life Regen is more than enough to keep you immortal(bar any stupid or careless mistakes) through Merciless+, especially with Blood Magic. Far too overpowered and that's not even considering adding any straight % Life passives, life mods, or life regen mods or life leech or life gain on hit/kill.

I think it would help if some of the nodes in the Duelist Life Regen cluster were changed to low value life gain on hit/kill mods. Perhaps change the 1st four nodes and make the 5th node 1-1.5% Life Regen.

Also, perhaps give Blood Magic a negative effect. Currently there is no negative effect. Losing the use of mana is hardly a drawback and pointless considering how powerful life flasks and any and all life passives/mods. Perhaps make Life Regen half as effective with Blood Magic or make skills cost twice as much. There needs to be a drawback of some sort.

As it stands now if you don't take Blood Magic as a melee character, with or without Life Regen, you're just plain stupid or you're looking for an actual challenge. There is no challenge with Blood Magic right now, it makes the game far too easy. Throw in the overpowered Life Regen and the game is a joke.

I am always amused by this argumentation: "I found an unbalanced build in beta and therefore reason that the whole game is "a joke"/"too easy"/etc"

Regarding your life reg issue: I agree, that the positioning of those quite high life reg nodes in immediate range to the duelist is peculiar. Comparing the templar and the duelist, I would rather think of the templar as more tanky than the duelist. I support your idea that it should be (partially) changed to some life gain/leech nodes.

Regarding Blood Magic: Non-AoF physical dmg builds or high-hp+life-reg builds really benefit alot from Blood Magic. I really enjoy my BM Ranger with Life Gain on Hit (equip) and split arrow. But caster have a hard time to get enough lifereg/lifeleech to compensate their needs (Life leech gem is quite a hard compromise). I'm not sure what kind of penalty/change to Blood Magic could lead to some caster using it and some physical dmg dealer not using it but at the same time being somehow logical.

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ArtificialMind wrote:

I am always amused by this argumentation: "I found an unbalanced build in beta and therefore reason that the whole game is "a joke"/"too easy"/etc"

You find it amusing for the wrong reason. Pay attention: I'm not saying the whole game is a joke because of one build. I'm saying the whole game is a joke while using these mechanics. Big difference.

Blood Magic is super powerful. Life Regen is super powerful. Both make the game easy. Put them together, and then the game is that much easier. That's where the joke is. It has nothing to do with the game as a whole.

Well ok you are right on this point. If one read very carefully and consider what your point in this post is than your formulation is ok, though easily misunderstood (imo). I just read this "I play an OP build. The whole game is easy as s**t." too often and was misguided by that, I apologize.

I just wondered something: You need a good deal of health and other damage mitigation to make your "nearly-invincible" 7.5% life reg point valid. With that amount of life reg you still need about 13 sec to regenerate fully (if my math is correct) and e.g. in Chaos there is a good amount of mobs that kill me in under 1 second. (~800 HP, >2k armor, ~50% resists, ranger)

Wtf people? Standard dualist is a melée character that does not have summons or best curses (or AoF) like Templar and does not have great defensive passives like marauder. Why then shouldn't he also have some life regen?

Hey, more fuel for the idea that we need a standardized life regeneration stopping effect.

Good for dealing with regeneration champions AND good for balancing out life regeneration on players.

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Torin wrote:

Wtf people? Standard dualist is a melée character that does not have summons or best curses (or AoF) like Templar and does not have great defensive passives like marauder. Why then shouldn't he also have some life regen?

I'm not saying the Duelist shouldn't have Life Regen. I'm saying that the Duelist as a hybrid character shouldn't be able to get more Life Regen faster than the Marauder who is pure STR. Life, Life Regen, Life Leech, etc is all attributed to STR and as such should be more easily available to the pure STR class. You wouldn't expect INT hybrids to be able to get more Mana than the Witch right out the gate would you? Hybrids should not be better in either attribute right from the start than a pure class. They should have to work ever so slightly to get the same effect. In the case with 7.5% Life Regen, the duelist does have to sacrifice a bit more of his build to get there. But with just 5%, The Deulist sacrifices next to nothing for a sizeable advantage.

Considering how powerful Life Regen is, there needs to be a way to limit it's potential. There needs to be a cap, or perhaps something like a curse that prevents Life Regen. If those don't sound appealing, then it just flat out needs to be nerfed either by limiting it's availability or reducing the values.

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ArtificialMind wrote:

I just wondered something: You need a good deal of health and other damage mitigation to make your "nearly-invincible" 7.5% life reg point valid. With that amount of life reg you still need about 13 sec to regenerate fully (if my math is correct) and e.g. in Chaos there is a good amount of mobs that kill me in under 1 second. (~800 HP, >2k armor, ~50% resists, ranger)

Indeed, and it's more of a build issue with combining both Blood Magic and Life Regen. By themselves, they are powerful, combined they are too powerful and it's too easy to combine them. It should be fairly obvious that if you're taking Blood Magic then you should also be stacking health related passives and mods. It's common sense.

Damage mitigation in the form of Armor/Resistances is easily available through equipment and does not need to be invested in at all. 60% Damage Reduction is very easy to obtain. Combine that with Endurance charges and the 75% cap is well within reach with little investment plus the added bonus of more Elemental Resistance. Warlord's Mark is perfect for this because it grants Life Leech and Endurance Charges. Blood Rage is also perfect, not for it's role in Damage Mitigation, but because not only is the 4% Chaos Degen completely negated, but it also grants a healthy amount of Life Leech and attack speed through Frenzy Charges. So even if your mitigation is poor, you can more than make up for it with various forms of health recovery. Survivability is through the roof with Blood Magic and Life Regen.

The way it stands now Blood Magic + Life Regen is the basis for an extremely powerful cookie cutter build. You can go several directions with this combination and no matter how you build your characters around it they will always be OP. There are too many aspects of the game that support this combination. It needs to be nerfed somehow.

I don't see the usefulness of the Life Regen, though. 7.5% heals you completely in 13 seconds. My piercing split arrow shoots 1-2 times to heal me completely and this means like 1-2 times per second complete heal (8% life leech, 12% with blood rage + ~15-20 per hit).

Regardless of blood magic, I would agree that a cluster of 5% life regen might be too strong.

That said, I have a different opinion on blood magic. Until I see good evidence otherwise, I will remain skeptical about blood magic being overpowered. I'm certainly not discounting the possibility entirely, but it seems like to have it be effective, one needs to spec a lot into defensive things (ie. health), and will hence deal less damage.