Blood Magic - make it good for blood mages

I don't think you are talking about what I said. Ofcourse 50% reduced is better than 50% less in this case, but there is no 50% reduced node on the tree, there is a 50% less node.

At any rate, aurabots are only loosely involved here.

I would love to hear some blood magic suggestions and criticisms.

If Blood Magic is to gain a buff then it must be based on having no life reserved or else % life not reserved. Going flat life unreserved ends up with bigger balance considerations and difficulties and will be more prone to power creep. The buffs must not be available to builds using reservation buffs, or maybe allow only one reservation buff.

I do agree the Blood Magic mechanic/node itself could use some love. Supposedly the reason it is kept as-is is because the tradeoff of not worrying about mana is significant enough to counter the gains from reserving mana for various benefits, but it seems pretty clear that's not the case. There still needs to be a way to regain life and that's more difficult for casters due to where spell nodes are placed in relation to BM.

One issue perhaps is it should still have less damage than builds that do have reservation buffs. Reservation buffs are a huge part of the game and if there's a superior build that entirely ignores them then that makes the game less interesting. There still needs to be a tradeoff.

The quickest and most straightforward damage addition might be "20% more damage while no life is reserved" since that ensures it's still lower than what reservation buffs can provide.

Sustaining life is potentially a more difficult thing since life leech and life regen can both be converted to affect ES instead. How much do we want to enable hybrid builds, especially ones like Shaper's Touch + Geofri's Sanctuary?

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Jackalope_Gaming wrote:

If Blood Magic is to gain a buff then it must be based on having no life reserved or else % life not reserved. Going flat life unreserved ends up with bigger balance considerations and difficulties and will be more prone to power creep. The buffs must not be available to builds using reservation buffs, or maybe allow only one reservation buff.

I do agree the Blood Magic mechanic/node itself could use some love. Supposedly the reason it is kept as-is is because the tradeoff of not worrying about mana is significant enough to counter the gains from reserving mana for various benefits, but it seems pretty clear that's not the case. There still needs to be a way to regain life and that's more difficult for casters due to where spell nodes are placed in relation to BM.

One issue perhaps is it should still have less damage than builds that do have reservation buffs. Reservation buffs are a huge part of the game and if there's a superior build that entirely ignores them then that makes the game less interesting. There still needs to be a tradeoff.

The quickest and most straightforward damage addition might be "20% more damage while no life is reserved" since that ensures it's still lower than what reservation buffs can provide.

Sustaining life is potentially a more difficult thing since life leech and life regen can both be converted to affect ES instead. How much do we want to enable hybrid builds, especially ones like Shaper's Touch + Geofri's Sanctuary?

I do like the idea of gateing the new benefit behind no life can be reserved. It then ensures that hybrid or low-life cannot abuse it.


Increased life leech and life regen both can be converted to effect ES builds. Increased life recovery rate cannot, which is why I like that as a solution.


Another thing to remember about buffing the BM nodes is that there is innately a trade off with hybrid builds, or all builds for that matter. The build has to take the BM node on the tree and the nodes behind it, which means it has to travel into the south-west most part of the skill tree. This is more of a burden for some builds than others, especially if you need certain damage/crit/defense/utility nodes.

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KiwiGivl wrote:

I do like the idea of gateing the new benefit behind no life can be reserved. It then ensures that hybrid or low-life cannot abuse it.


Increased life leech and life regen both can be converted to effect ES builds. Increased life recovery rate cannot, which is why I like that as a solution.


Another thing to remember about buffing the BM nodes is that there is innately a trade off with hybrid builds, or all builds for that matter. The build has to take the BM node on the tree and the nodes behind it, which means it has to travel into the south-west most part of the skill tree. This is more of a burden for some builds than others, especially if you need certain damage/crit/defense/utility nodes.

Recovery rate will exclude instant life gain though such as Life Gain on Hit, Seething flasks, or Bloodseeker. Maybe for the better, maybe not, but it's a consideration. Recovery rate is also multiplicative with regular increased life recovery, so a build (ab)using Soul of Arakaali would further be multiplied with rate. Arguably that pantheon power might need to be nerfed but in the absence of it I'd say a 10-20% life recovery rate boost would be the sweet spot.

I am more inclined to go with increased recovery or recovery rate though since that means it boosts other stuff rather than granting its own life recovery for the character to survive on.

Yes, its location is quite the tradeoff. It would be interesting to theorycraft various builds though and I have a feeling Righteous Fire would absolutely love the node if it had extra recovery since most are within spitting distance of it anyway.

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Jackalope_Gaming wrote:

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KiwiGivl wrote:

I do like the idea of gateing the new benefit behind no life can be reserved. It then ensures that hybrid or low-life cannot abuse it.


Increased life leech and life regen both can be converted to effect ES builds. Increased life recovery rate cannot, which is why I like that as a solution.


Another thing to remember about buffing the BM nodes is that there is innately a trade off with hybrid builds, or all builds for that matter. The build has to take the BM node on the tree and the nodes behind it, which means it has to travel into the south-west most part of the skill tree. This is more of a burden for some builds than others, especially if you need certain damage/crit/defense/utility nodes.

Recovery rate will exclude instant life gain though such as Life Gain on Hit, Seething flasks, or Bloodseeker. Maybe for the better, maybe not, but it's a consideration. Recovery rate is also multiplicative with regular increased life recovery, so a build (ab)using Soul of Arakaali would further be multiplied with rate. Arguably that pantheon power might need to be nerfed but in the absence of it I'd say a 10-20% life recovery rate boost would be the sweet spot.

I am more inclined to go with increased recovery or recovery rate though since that means it boosts other stuff rather than granting its own life recovery for the character to survive on.

Yes, its location is quite the tradeoff. It would be interesting to theorycraft various builds though and I have a feeling Righteous Fire would absolutely love the node if it had extra recovery since most are within spitting distance of it anyway.

I also thought about righteous fire, but I figured that the loss of vitality, with watcher's eye, or the purities would be a large enough trade off to make them even-ish, so RF builds wouldn't get too out of control. It certainly would be a balance concern though.


And this is ultimately what I'm saying, a buff to blood magic will allow builds to potentially choose an alternate build path / playstyle. In this case there would be BM righteous fire builds, normal righteous fire builds, and MoM righteous fire builds. They all act and feel sortof different, but still function in similar ways.


Now apply this to all other builds that might be able to take BM. It would create a whole new class of non-memey, real builds that didn't/couldn't exist before.


I should say though, I'm particularly interested in making blood magic good for caster marauders or templars. So, I would be partial to a generic or spell damage modifier being added.

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KiwiGivl wrote:

I also thought about righteous fire, but I figured that the loss of vitality, with watcher's eye, or the purities would be a large enough trade off to make them even-ish, so RF builds wouldn't get too out of control. It certainly would be a balance concern though.


And this is ultimately what I'm saying, a buff to blood magic will allow builds to potentially choose an alternate build path / playstyle. In this case there would be BM righteous fire builds, normal righteous fire builds, and MoM righteous fire builds. They all act and feel sortof different, but still function in similar ways.


Now apply this to all other builds that might be able to take BM. It would create a whole new class of non-memey, real builds that didn't/couldn't exist before.


I should say though, I'm particularly interested in making blood magic good for caster marauders or templars. So, I would be partial to a generic or spell damage modifier being added.

Yeah, another variety of RF and other builds would be more interesting. The simplicity of it would allow for some more specialization but it'd still probably end up less powerful than reserve buff builds.

Totally agreed for making it good for strength-based casters, and the 20% generic more damage I said earlier could allow for that. But I'm wondering what interesting ways it might otherwise boost spells and I'm not coming up with much unless it directly grants spell damage leech or some sort of boost after casting spells.

Mana regen and leech becomes life regen and leech somehow?

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Jackalope_Gaming wrote:

Yeah, another variety of RF and other builds would be more interesting. The simplicity of it would allow for some more specialization but it'd still probably end up less powerful than reserve buff builds.

Totally agreed for making it good for strength-based casters, and the 20% generic more damage I said earlier could allow for that. But I'm wondering what interesting ways it might otherwise boost spells and I'm not coming up with much unless it directly grants spell damage leech or some sort of boost after casting spells.

Mana regen and leech becomes life regen and leech somehow?

to be honest i always considered BM concept as some sort of sacrifice life and get a big buff out of it wich is why i rather have it giving a buff based on how much life you sacrifice. but if you want an alternative what about a pseudo dark pact mechanic for skills and spells?,

pulling the numbers out of the blue but what about something along this lines

10% of remaining life is sacrifice per spell or attack done (make it work on trigered spells / attacks)
% of the life that was sacrificed is added as fire damage to attacks and spells
cant leech life

do note its 10% of remaining life so this keystone will have diminishing returns in both self damage and damage boost the lower your health goes, cant leech is there to avoid making vaal pact a no brainer

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caboom wrote:

to be honest i always considered BM concept as some sort of sacrifice life and get a big buff out of it wich is why i rather have it giving a buff based on how much life you sacrifice. but if you want an alternative what about a pseudo dark pact mechanic for skills and spells?,

pulling the numbers out of the blue but what about something along this lines

10% of remaining life is sacrifice per spell or attack done (make it work on trigered spells / attacks)
% of the life that was sacrificed is added as fire damage to attacks and spells
cant leech life

do note its 10% of remaining life so this keystone will have diminishing returns in both self damage and damage boost the lower your health goes, cant leech is there to avoid making vaal pact a no brainer

Forgetting the numbers on that, I generally do not like the idea. It would restrict blood magic and force certain kinds of playstyle.


I think keeping it simple would be ideal. Of the things listed on the original list of buffs, pick any 2 of them and give them decent values (ex. 25% more damage, 15% life recovery rate ), or pick one and give it a large enough value to compensate for the loss of 2 auras (ex. 40% more damage). Something like that would open BM up to alot of different builds and playstyles without being oppressive to the meta.

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caboom wrote:

to be honest i always considered BM concept as some sort of sacrifice life and get a big buff out of it wich is why i rather have it giving a buff based on how much life you sacrifice. but if you want an alternative what about a pseudo dark pact mechanic for skills and spells?,

I'm hesitant on doing an entire style akin to Dark Pact because balancing gaining some sort of buff against sacrificing life has been shown to not work out so well in PoE if it's not tied to a specific skill.

Let's consider the Berserker. In the current Zerker's case he generates Rage which both gives a buff and also has the debuff in the form of the lost life per second. The problem right now is the vast majority of players find the buffs gained aren't worth the life lost, especially because other classes can get better damage returns without having to build your character around losing that life. In fact, a single Champion node (First to Strike, Last to Fall) pretty much entirely nullifies the core Rage mechanic of Berserker.

Let's compare Adrenaline to Rite of Ruin Rage:

Adrenaline:
100% increased damage (note this is global damage)
25% increased Attack, Cast, AND movement speed
10% additional physical damage mitigation
Lasts 20 seconds and triggers when reaching low life


Rage:
100% increased attack damage
50% increased attack speed
20% increased movement speed
Lose 10% of your life each second
Can't be stunned with 25 or more rage
Always on

Basically Champion trades 25% reduced attack speed and having a sometimes hard to trigger effect for 10% physical mitigation, global increased damage instead of just attack, and not needing to build around what's nearly RF levels of degen. Oh, and it's 1 node instead of 2.

I would much rather GGG give something more generic on the tree than to try fiddling with pros and cons like the above which turn out to be pretty screwy.

BM can still get 1 free aura.

I agree berzerker suck donkey dick right now, rage sucks because it s on kill and the bonuses of it compared to the degen is not worth it.