BM vs CI rant

Well Mana needs an investment. BM never was meant to be a node every player goes. Just look how many builds use Avatar of Fire.

It is basically meant for a high expense situation you cannot counter with leech. The most obvious one is Explosive Arrow, but also many spells work the same way. Bloodmagic is a clear and obvious decision and keystone is good not because it is an obvious increase in power like CI is, but because it isn't that.

The issue BM has, as life in general, is that CI basically got everything they have without much investment. I'm fairly certain that they will butcher CI in the near future or at least some of the core parts that focus on instant leech. Which means life will be the best you get, which makes BM look a lot different.

The good thing about BM is that it is not super powerful and not super obvious. That is like all Keystones should be, you should have to work around them to get the most power out of them. And BM can be used for that, there are a few builds showing that you can get a lot out of it.

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What? ES doesn't use Mana as a defensive bonus. Outside of Heirophant, which is unplayed, because ES builds don't need mana (Just like life builds don't need help with mana, ergo, BM is unplayed)

Well technically it is 2.0 because it is just better. 2.0 means an improvement, and CI provides the EHP of MoM without requiring an investment into two pools. His idea would be actually more similar to CI, because any mana he gets would be modified by his increased life, so he wouldn't even have to invest into mana to make use of it. He would just get much more Life by just scaling it. Which is basically what CI does. It would also be straight out better than MoM, because even if he would just get 30% of the mana, which would be the same as MoM basically, he would be able to sustain it with the same means as he does for his regular life pool, because it would effectively be life. Of course it will never happen due to Grand Spectrum and Hierophant, which would mean you could scale ES and Life (because you gain ES based on your mana, which should just like with attacks work even if you are not having mana anymore, because added fire works even if you are not dealing any physical damage anymore).

BM is actually pretty good as it is, for what it intends to do. It doesn't need to be treated as if it were CI in the sense of giving mana to your life pool. That only makes builds stronger that use BM already, but doesn't do anything for life builds as a whole. Builds that need auras will still not want to spec BM, and pathing out to BM is a lot more inconvenient for builds that would take CI anyway.

I'm not against adding something to BM to make it more flavorful or impactful than the low life aura reservation. The extra life nodes were a start in the right direction, but it again suffered from only making BM builds stronger without actually making BM more desirable.

I think, the best buff for BM would be some VERY powerful, but VERY mana-hungry spells. So, you will be able to use the actual benefit of having huge pool to cast (HP instead of mana). Things like mana converted to HP, Mortal Conviction, etc are just band-aids, that will never make BM good itself. Sure, they can help, but you shouldnt choose a keystone only for "band-aid" behind it. For example, players dont get CI only to get +15% more ES, chaos immunity is also important.
BM might get a band-aid like good life nodes behind it or reduced reservation (or cost of spells?), but BM itself should be useful too. Players should have incentive to give up their small 1k mana pool for 7k "life pool" to cast powerful, but expensive spells. Sadly, those spells dont exist in PoE, yet.
There are powerful spells in PoE, but they are cheap, and there are expensive spells but they're weak...

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MortalKombat3 wrote:

I think, the best buff for BM would be some VERY powerful, but VERY mana-hungry spells. So, you will be able to use the actual benefit of having huge pool to cast (HP instead of mana). Things like mana converted to HP, Mortal Conviction, etc are just band-aids, that will never make BM good itself. Sure, they can help, but you shouldnt choose a keystone only for "band-aid" behind it. For example, players dont get CI only to get +15% more ES, chaos immunity is also important.
BM might get a band-aid like good life nodes behind it or reduced reservation (or cost of spells?), but BM itself should be useful too. Players should have incentive to give up their small 1k mana pool for 7k "life pool" to cast powerful, but expensive spells. Sadly, those spells dont exist in PoE, yet.
There are powerful spells in PoE, but they are cheap, and there are expensive spells but they're weak...

Honestly? It wouldn't work as you want to, because if you have enough mana to cast one, maybe two times that spell you basically will outleech mana back with most of builds, which still, doesn't give any point to taking BM again.

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Painkiler1 wrote:

Honestly? It wouldn't work as you want to, because if you have enough mana to cast one, maybe two times that spell you basically will outleech mana back with most of builds, which still, doesn't give any point to taking BM again.

Even if spell costs 1000-2000 mana per second? You really think you'll be able to outleech that with 1k mana pool and 500 free mana? With Acuity, maybe, but it's one of the most powerful and expensive endgame uniques...

As berserker with cloaked in savager? As HoWA-like builds? As blade-flurry builds? Hell yeah, if mobs got enough healthpool, and u're able to cast stat spell. Because spell with 3k resource needed, is useless even as BM, because cutting half of your HP is a thing u doesn't want to do. To be honest, you can try it for now - get high mana, link spell totem with aura and then try to leech and you will see that's not a problem. Many builds outleech 10-20k ES with single hit with maybe 3-4% life leech, so 3k mana won't be issue.

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Painkiler1 wrote:

Many builds outleech 10-20k ES with single hit with maybe 3-4% life leech, so 3k mana won't be issue.

Well, the thing is, Vaal Pact only affect LIFE Leeching. Not Mana Leeching.

Meaning that these builds that instantly leech their 20k ES pools, would be stuck with only getting up to 20% of their max mana per second (Which they'd have to stack up to that point)

Meaning a 1k mana per second ability would need you to have 5k mana pool to sustain it, unless you invested into some increased leech per second nodes.

Though, the main issue with this kind of suggestion, is just how utterly broken a skill would have to be in order to justify having like 100-500 times the mana cost of regular skills that insta-clear packs and shred bosses in seconds.

The power level that would require would probably circumvent the need to actually build for mana sustain, since you'd likely one shot any boss with just a 2-3L leaving room for Blood Magic Support or other things (Such as Reduced Mana Support, Enlighten)

Or hell, it could just make Vaal Clarity a thing. Why go Blood Magic when you can take VC which is 9.9 seconds of 0 mana costs base (So ~16 seconds with just Increased Duration Support... Plenty of time to obliterate enough of a map to get another VC charge...)

Mana is such a complete joke that BM will never become useful for its alleviation of potential mana concerns.

Between Supports that alleviate mana concerns (Including the BM one, that doesn't need the keystone), Vaal Clarity, leech, bunches of regen nodes and even Flasks (Yeah, someone might swap one of their Utility flasks for a Mana one and sustain ridiculous mana costs by spamming that while they nuke down packs)

So we are here again - BM MUST BE counterpart of CI, as they are on opposite sides of passive tree, thus BM need to make life builds stronger - and we agreed that mana cost isn't an issue so here are few options:
1)nerf everything except life, especially nerf ES and CI
2)make BM as significant "must-have" for pure life builds, like CI is for ES builds, and we can do it by multiple ways:
2a) buff BM like i said, add % of mana as life to total life amount, so you will reach amout of life much higher than currently(just by taking mana nodes as life nodes, thus still inferior to ES), still worse than current ES, but much better option than current life
2b) make tons of life nodes behind BM to gather maybe 100-150% more life from these nodes, just to make life builds not that far behind to ES(10k life builds vs 22-25k es build with medicore gearing and passive)
3)? maybe an another useful idea?
4)Leave it as is, so this keystone is still useless

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Tarille wrote:

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Painkiler1 wrote:

Many builds outleech 10-20k ES with single hit with maybe 3-4% life leech, so 3k mana won't be issue.

Well, the thing is, Vaal Pact only affect LIFE Leeching. Not Mana Leeching.

Meaning that these builds that instantly leech their 20k ES pools, would be stuck with only getting up to 20% of their max mana per second (Which they'd have to stack up to that point)

Meaning a 1k mana per second ability would need you to have 5k mana pool to sustain it, unless you invested into some increased leech per second nodes.

Though, the main issue with this kind of suggestion, is just how utterly broken a skill would have to be in order to justify having like 100-500 times the mana cost of regular skills that insta-clear packs and shred bosses in seconds.

The power level that would require would probably circumvent the need to actually build for mana sustain, since you'd likely one shot any boss with just a 2-3L leaving room for Blood Magic Support or other things (Such as Reduced Mana Support, Enlighten)

Or hell, it could just make Vaal Clarity a thing. Why go Blood Magic when you can take VC which is 9.9 seconds of 0 mana costs base (So ~16 seconds with just Increased Duration Support... Plenty of time to obliterate enough of a map to get another VC charge...)

Mana is such a complete joke that BM will never become useful for its alleviation of potential mana concerns.

Between Supports that alleviate mana concerns (Including the BM one, that doesn't need the keystone), Vaal Clarity, leech, bunches of regen nodes and even Flasks (Yeah, someone might swap one of their Utility flasks for a Mana one and sustain ridiculous mana costs by spamming that while they nuke down packs)

I agree, many aspects of PoE should be revised and rebalanced, to make BM viable. All that power creep, where even dirt cheap skill oneshots screens, leaves no place for more powerful and more expensive skill...

As for using Vall Clarity and mana flasks - those are actually interesting, unique playstyles. If we see Vaal Fireball builds, why cant we see Vaal Clarity builds? If we see builds using life potions, why cant we see builds using mana potions?

If GGG increase (buff) base life and + increase (buff) life gain per level - it will fix a lot of problem and make life stronger without dramatic changes.