After Patch - Goodbye My Blood Magic, Duel Wielding, Flicker Strike Shadow

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jawsofhana wrote:

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allbusiness wrote:

Bloodmagic was moved because it was too easy to offset the costs for quite a few classes through fairly cheap items that had lifesteal/life on hit/etc.

Official statement was that new players chose it too early and died. Repeatedly.

I find this to be a sad fix for stupidity.

I never saw anyone in Global Chat saying anything to this effect. Of all the 'stupid' things newbies did, taking Blood Magic too early was not one that I saw anyone talking about.

And until very recently, I basically lived in normal Global Chat.

BUT now that the centre is like a friggin' gingerbread house, of course they had to move Blood Magic away...

Yeah, I was shocked when I patched today to find it has moved so far, it seems like a skill that could be viable with any class given you know what you are doing.

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ApocalypticTrick wrote:

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Hacks wrote:

idk, maybe it's just me but it looks like a swap of locations for iron grip and blood magic would not only be functional but appropriate as blood magic can effectively be used by all and iron grip would most benefit those heavily invested in the STR realm

YES! +1

That makes a TON of sense! Swap Blood Magic w/ Iron Grip....and I'll stop complaining about the new skill tree.

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this!

iron grip is pretty much made for bow marauders / high str duelists.

blood magic can benefit all classes.

switch places, big improvement.




EDIT:
and if someone takes it too early and dies a lot from it, he should just unspec it. easy.

I really cannot understand all the crying about the blood magic passive. Why are you guys so against using the gem? I used it last ladder on my Mara and it was great. No mana issues and I didn't have to sacrifice most of my life pool for all my auras. I don't get why anyone would want the passive bm. Maybe I'm just dumb but Im not able to think of a good reason to use it.

Because blood magic support makes skills cost 2x and that is at lvl 20 gem. Then when you add other supports total cost is a lot. Because you have to have more then one skill gem and because it uses up one slot.

Because you have to have the skill gem which is not a quest reward for any class while passive was always accessible.

I also think it's a kinda poor move that they did with blood magic as well (but personally forgot to comment about it in the alpha).

That said, I don't see why any other class would run blood magic, aside from the templar or duelist (not to say that they should be the only ones who have access to it). Even for the templar or duelist I feel it's too far away now though — at least for the templar.

One would think that it was maybe moved due to it being powerful or something, but personally I never found that blood magic was overpowered (although it dd need those extra nodes before it that they put in a while back on the old tree), since generally it just involved tanky characters that don't really do much aside from sit around with fat-ass life pools (most of which were marauders, in which case moving blood magic to marauder's corner doesn't fix the problem at all, in fact kinda makes it worse)


On a related topic: I find that the center of the skill tree is rather crap now in general. I haven't actually found a build where particularly it's efficient to go there. I've seen some situations where it's close (such as going for the critical nodes), but if you go for all the other critical nodes at the top right they end up being more efficient point-for-point than these ones (and spending too many points into critical just makes it less efficient due to [eventually] diminishing returns.

The elemental weapon damage nodes just cost way too much to get there, so it ends up not being worth it. Same sort of thing with pretty much everything else there.


I think a big re-vamp of the center area along with adding a center path for each class could maybe help things a bit (the current paths to the center would still have to remain though in order for other classes to get across the middle).

Many of the unviable nodes that some classes have in the extremities (or possibly other areas), such as the templar's 2-handed and 1-handed critical chance nodes could be moved adjacent to the new proposed rear passive path which leads to the center.

The change to Blood Magic has been explained to me. In a nutshell: use the gem.

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Charan wrote:

The change to Blood Magic has been explained to me. In a nutshell: use the gem.

I'm level 43 Shadow and have never seen a gem that would replace Blood Magic, but apparently I've also missed Whirling Blades.

It seems there are essential skill gems that are missing in my game. :-(

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ApocalypticTrick wrote:

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Charan wrote:

The change to Blood Magic has been explained to me. In a nutshell: use the gem.

I'm level 43 Shadow and have never seen a gem that would replace Blood Magic, but apparently I've also missed Whirling Blades.

It seems there are essential skill gems that are missing in my game. :-(

If I hadn't recently given my entire Beta stash away, I'd have thrown one of each your way. My apologies. I'll see what I can do, though. I have friends in merciless places.

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Charan wrote:

The change to Blood Magic has been explained to me. In a nutshell: use the gem.

uff, I hope that was not explained to you by GGG because that is then crap.
This is another topic that I plan to open but in a nutshell: we should not have create builds that depend on random drops of skill gems. Unless Blood magic gem becomes a quest reward for all classes this cannot work.