Blood Magic and Life Regen

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broodrooster wrote:

It's the damage output they can produce that makes it "save" to go out there more than anything else.

No your missing the point/s.

Life regen/steal allows you to forget about health management. Blood magic further removes mana management. Those are 2 of your main activities in any ARPG loot game. You dont have to focus on cool downs or combos or tactics, its about making sure you damage output is sustained while not letting your life drop below 1. Thats basically the crux of the game.

Life regen/steal in high quantities makes it almost impossible to die unless you go completely inactive OR get hit for massive alpha damage and killed before you can react, both of which are very rare. For example my badly built marauder with gimped passives all over the place got a support gem of +10 life per enemy hit, attached to ground slam this results in around 80 life per hit during heated battles + my 8% (ish) life leech which is about another 40 + my life regen of 20 (crap I know) + my on hit skills which total about 15. Even my badly built first time character is gaining roughly 155 life per second during combat, that means enemies have to do more than my total life + 155 in one second to kill me outright, if they dont kill me outright the odds just worsen for them as times continues as their numbers get smaller much faster than my health reduces.

Bear in mind this is using numbers from my poorly constructed beta character. I could probably nearly double that amount if I purpose built him to regen/life steal. That is a big issue imo.

Damage is not a problem, yeah im killing most things in 1 hit, but damage is nothing without survivability in ARPGs

Not that anybody would care, i guess - but here are my 2 cents.

I think blood magic is not OP, but mana costs in general are way too low. The drawbacks are already here: % reserved mana pool for example. Also, life regeneration and life leech methods are way off. It's ridiculous to regenerate 150 hp per second(!) and/or heal to full with one shot/hit. With or without blood magic.

Regeneration nodes should improve equipped items, nothing more. Something like "Regeneration items are 15% more efficient" for a cheap node. That way, you have to give up something in order to gain a benefit from it, and it does not scale by amount of hp anymore - which is the real problem here imho.

Life and Mana leech should be scaled down aswell somehow.

Also, i would consider *doubling* base mana costs and raising the cost modifier for augmentations. So that you would really benefit if you invest heavily in your mana pool.

Also, raising base costs radically would prompt more skill diversity. Builds without much skillpoints left for cost decreasing or pool increasing nodes may need some "backup" or "spammable" skills with alternative or no augmentation gems. In fact, even if you invest alot in your pool, there should be quite some combinations which even then you can not spam endlessly.