Blood mage - balance pls?

Hi there,

I really wanna give some feedback on bloodmage and i really hope some dev will read this. I got 250 hours on it, and i believe im pretty qualified to give a honest, constructive feedback on it.

First of all it's a fun ideology class, with very nice idea behind it. The masochistic mage that suffers from self harm, going for drastic methods to achieve the pinnacle of his power. Cool!

Bloodmage has great strong points and some downsides, the problem is do we really have a choice here?
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Sanguimancy - mandatory acsendancy point which is in the only class that actually has that. You get this node by completing first trial. Kinda weird.. Because 1st point is ussually some boost that helps you out, but not this time. At those levels you actually dont have the abbility to mitigate the downside, so you better off just skiping it entirely and just wait till you are done with 2nd trial. Then just spec all 4 at once taking Vitality Siphon so u get a reliable source of getting your lost health back. Because if your doing just sanguimancy the only thing you have in mind is - uninstall, reinstall and wait till u get all 4.

Vitality Siphon - (problem solving skill for Sanguimancy). So by getting two trials we get a problem and we solve it, nice! Wont lie it feels good to get hp overcap and leech nonetheless for early gaming. Still a bit too much investment for 4 points total only half of those points left..

Gore spike + Sunder the flesh - Yes, you have to take both in order to get something useful. Gore spike is more like a filler to the Sunder of flesh. Why? You could say: "well if you overcap your hp, and get ~5k total, you would get 125% crit multi".(does this node even work? We dont know, we cant check it). Yes but. When you are endgame and you have lvl 30 gem, 1 use of skill eats up ~500 health and ~500 mana, this is nuts. Now remember that we dont even have a good way to scale our hp, so at best case you are ~3000 base hp max. You will never have an overcap of health, because you eat it up quite fast. Also the overcap works really just on maping, 0 use on bosses and thats only if your picking up those little damn orbs which is weird design on its own! (Didn't liked that mech on d4, and no one did).
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Note: If you took all 4 listed ascendancy points (which you should be doing), youre out, you spent 8 points, congratulations. In total we have: 1)problem 2) problem solver 3) kinda pathing node with no real value 4) Really good point (Sunder of the flesh).
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TLDR: We get sunder of flesh for 8 points.

Gasping Wounds and Crimson power - very good, but were out of points. The only real damage are left side of the sphere, taking acsendancy and have zero damage from it, that's out of the question.

Blood barbs + Open Sores - could be some build enabling nodes, but for now also fillers. No damage, no defence, doing some weird stuff with mechanics, which could lead to some interesting results. But if u wanna take any of those, you either loose on the only damage option again (remember sunder of the flesh), or life leech, that is already a problem solver for the 1st point. Mostly out of question also.

TLDR: Many nodes, no big choice to make. You either go damage, either defence thats about it. And you need damage, well not if your are playing some broken build but thats the matter of time i guess till you will be needing damage again.


In conclussion. Blood mage has a big potentiall to be a unique, interesting class but also it has very big hp/mana costs, you can even add even additional energy shield cost on top of that by taking Event Horizon the node that leads to spagettification, which is probably the best chaos node on the tree, but it's gated by the Event horizon. Why? Because that node bricks any es build right away, as it interrupts the energy shield recharge and hp stacking is really not viable also. Were again out of options. (that whole passive wheel has even 2 downsides, nuts!)
So we got loads of problems, but not really that BIG of and upside to compensate all of this.
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Suggestion:
1)Swap Vitality siphon with sanguimancy places. Make it an optional choice.
2) Buff sanguimancy - increase blood picking radius, so they stop spawning inside the boss or just make this as a passive buff but a bit weaker, and do a 50/50 hp/mana cost on skills not 100/100 its way too much.
3)Make gore spike give crit damage bonus on your max hp +max overcap potentiall (if you decide to go sanguimancy).
4)Swap crimson power with grasping wounds places. In that way you can actually buff your hp, on a hp stacking class.
5)Remove energy shield cost from Event Horizon.
6)Give the ability to bloodmage go CI, but by doing that your skills now cost es/mana 50/50, could be something there also.

I really hope this post will reach the right people. I did my best.
Thank you for a great game, and really appreciate your hard work, cheers!

Yeah, maining BM too.

Ascendancy obviously feels underpowered right now -- in my gaming circle I generally put most time/effort to build/equipment, and STILL much weaker then meta dps Ascendancy characters of other guys -- sometimes 10 levels lower.

Looks like I need to struggle x10 more to achieve same results.

Some serious buff/balancing/changes needed.

Sanguimancy should be Blood Magic + orbs. Just remove mana entirely from the equation.
Regarding Event Horizon I disagree that it has to be changed. The idea is to exactly punish ES and I think it is a good payoff for not using it.

+1

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arome1#6905 wrote:

Suggestion:
1)Swap Vitality siphon with sanguimancy places. Make it an optional choice.
2) Buff sanguimancy - increase blood picking radius, so they stop spawning inside the boss or just make this as a passive buff but a bit weaker, and do a 50/50 hp/mana cost on skills not 100/100 its way too much.
3)Make gore spike give crit damage bonus on your max hp +max overcap potentiall (if you decide to go sanguimancy).
4)Swap crimson power with grasping wounds places. In that way you can actually buff your hp, on a hp stacking class.
5)Remove energy shield cost from Event Horizon.
6)Give the ability to bloodmage go CI, but by doing that your skills now cost es/mana 50/50, could be something there also.

I really hope this post will reach the right people. I did my best.
Thank you for a great game, and really appreciate your hard work, cheers!

1) Nah, see that would lock you into casting spells where the ascendancy currently doesn't do that. Also, Vitality Siphon is just bad because it's not actually supposed to fix Sanguimancy. Sanguimancy is supposed to fix Sanguimancy and that should just be made to actually work. (The orbs are theoretically supposed to heal you and keep you overcapped in which case you can't actually benefit from leech.)
2) No notes. You're right. (Or it could just let you eschew mana entirely like the keystone passive in the normal tree.)
3) Does it not? Obviously, most of us are assuming it does, but I haven't tested it.
4) No strong feelings on this. One of my Blood Mages doesn't use ES and only takes Grasping Wounds, but I'd change that character to an Infernalist if I could, so...
5) No strong feelings on this either, but I'm inclined to agree with fwannmacher.
6) This seems unnecessary and not really thematic. You're a Blood Mage, you cast with your life force. CI reduces your life force in exchange for immunity to chaos damage. Nothing in there makes me think it should also mitigate your choice to case using your health.

I have over 300 hours on BM
My feelings are that you are stuck on crit and the life leech node/low cost skills that made detonate dead very viable while limit build option like just low options for anything that can do something , I get that is early access but Ascendancy should be more options.

I think the first node should also come with a hefty resource cost reduction or damage increase to make up for the trouble.
6-link skills just take a lot of mana and in this case also life so it feels very awful. The first node you take should not be a handicap!

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arome1#6905 wrote:

Gore spike + Sunder the flesh - Yes, you have to take both in order to get something useful. Gore spike is more like a filler to the Sunder of flesh. Why? You could say: "well if you overcap your hp, and get ~5k total, you would get 125% crit multi".(does this node even work? We dont know, we cant check it).

I disagree that Gore Spike is filler (it's more important than Sunder the Flesh if you're actually using the bone spells since they all already have 15% base crit) but holy shit why doesn't anything about Gore Spike apply to the sheet so I can at least be convinced it's working without having to wonder if I'm imagining bigger crits or hitting things with smaller health pools.