🩸Blood Magic and mortal conviction 💀

Lets compile some ideas how blood magic and mortal conviction could be balanced to be a competitive counterpart to CI

Blood magic makes it so all skills cost life and all auras reserve mana.
Downside is that it removes all mana. Thematically you spend blood (life) to gain power. In a sense it should be that the more life you sacrifice, the more power you gain.



Problems:
Mana cost of skills is easily mitigated with elreon mod / uniques

There is no real need to move cost to life and there is almost no benefit henceforth

Small nodes behind blood magic are not enough
You only gain a small amount of maximum life which is not enough to compensate for the loss of the mana pool. usually you have ~900 mana and 5000 life as strength based character in the maruader, templar and duelist starting area. 20% gives you around ~500-600 maximum life, it is close to the amount of mana you have but not exactly the same.

Auras are required to have enough damage and reservation is percentage based.
You gain a bit of life but you reserve life, effectively it is lowering your health pool while providing almost no benefit.



Mortal conviction is there to mitigate the downside of that by allowing you to have only one aura that reserves nothing, it is contrary to the idea of blood magic and sacrificing life at the cost of power

Mortal conviction also synergizes extremely well with supreme ego as the downside 50% more reservation is nullified by mortal conviction and you effectively just gain 50% more aura effect on yourself. That effectively locks both keystones into eachother making them both hard to balance.

Anyhow, even with the 50% more aura effect from supreme ego it doesn't make up for the loss of those other auras, if you were to buff supreme ego it would make it too powerful for non-blood magic builds that only need one aura.
Builds that spec into mortal conviction can just spec into supreme ego gaining all its benefits with no downside whatsoever on yourself.


I think the solution could be to completely rework what mortal conviction does. No need to touch supreme ego.

The following options present themselfes as replacement to what mortal conviction currently does:

a) Offensive bonuses from reserving life, like effects of buffs on you, increased damage or something alike
- less mana reservation efficiency but powerful buff effect nodes / damage nodes

b) Defensive Bonuses from spending life, like increased leech, armour or maximum resistances
- more life cost of skills / increased life leech nodes / increased armour or max res nodes

Those could be split into a small tree passives and notables.

It would be locked behind blood magic and be part of blood magic to allow you to diversify and make significant choices between powerful offence or powerful defences based on life cost and life reservation without overlapping with supreme ego.


what do you think ?

"

what do you think ?

It´s a stupid idea to willingly drop the most important resource a game offers.

"

Lachdanan wrote:

"

what do you think ?

It´s a stupid idea to willingly drop the most important resource a game offers.

Well, it wouldn't be if there was a meaningful tradeoff of some sort

Are there many builds that use BM/Mortal Conviction passives?

For the builds I played so far, I'd rather use "Essence Worm" ring and use the mana pool for something else (eg. MoM, The Agnostic, convert mana to armour or ES, etc)