I feel that this is the most unblanaced skill in the game. Not Necronomiceconomics, not Promethean Magic, not Killer Vegan. Not sure where that last one came from. Why? Because, as I've said elsewhere, I feel that Dungeons of Dredmor is little more than one long battle of attrition. Either you can overcome all the barriers between you and Dredmor before you run out of resources and get killed or you can't. A lot of this involves skill. Choosing the right equipment. Tailoring your strategy to suit your random items found, skills and difficulty level. Rationing your consumables. For a warrior that primarily means tracking healing items. For rogues, its ammo and crafting components. For mages, it should be the MP to consistently cast the spells you need at hand. The problem is, Blood Magic totally removes the need for mages to ration MP. I recently completed a GRPD run with Blood Magic and Necronomiceconomics. On DL 1 I was harvesting 2 MP per kill. By DL 11 (the lowest I play to- I usually just skip to 15 after I clear 11) I was harvesting 7, and I never even put a point into the skill. Now, explain to me why I should ever worry about my MP when two out of three enemies is a Dr. Sanin wandering around waiting for me to pop it? Sure, I understand that you don't get MP back from everything. But you don't have to. Guess how much booze I found I actually drank? Maybe a dozen bottles, mostly the previously mentioned pilsner. Grog became Diggle Nog, and I drank that sometimes too, just to switch things up a bit. The rest of my booze became aqua vitae, which I then turned into well over 300 health potions. Suffice it to say that I was never low on health in-between encounters. Blood Mage lets wizards get way, way far ahead of the other two archetypes in the battle for resources simply by handing them several hundred (perhaps a thousand or more, depending on how much of the game you stop to see) shots of booze to keep their MP up. Plus, unlike booze, blood mana enters the reserve all at once and almost always comes when you need it- right after you cast a spell. I propose that Blood Mage should give 1 MP per kill. Period. This can perhaps go up to 2 MP when the skill is maxed out. Haematic Phylactery provides a panic MP source at a significant but balanced drawback (particularly when paired with Emomancy) and Sanguinista could change to some sort of skill that trades HP for MP. This would put resource management firmly back on the mage's radar and go a long way to alleviating the feeling that mages are OP compared to the other two archetypes. Why no Leyline Walker hate? Several reasons. For starters, Leyline Walker has a time cost built into its abilities. You have to wait around to use them, which means monsters can spawn to eat up all that MP later. Further, Leyline seems much more balanced against rogue and warrior resource management skills (Fungal Arts and Big Game Hunter/Killer Vegan) particularly with that Invisible Geometries bug fixed. Finally, I've seen Blood Mage in practically every mage build I've ever seen. The same is not true of Leyline Walker. That's telling. In conclusion: I think Blood Mage needs to be nerfed. Thank you.
I pretty much agree with this. ALTHOUGH I think it becomes very very weak later in the dungeon (DL 10-15), it is still way too strong for early game. So it's not exactly balanced. Phylacteries are also ridiculously strong...I usually collect 100-200 of them by DL 7 or 8, making everything super easy.
I support lower mana gains, maybe it should give some buffs to magic based stats more on kills instead? I don't think it would be good to only nerf it without changing its usefulness at all..
I'd be OK with that. Spirit/Soul Stealer always seemed like they were a little lame to me, and mage damage does descale vs monster HP very quickly at later levels. This is another reason why I usually skip DLs 12-14, the levels you get from playing them are actually more of a handicap by that point, unless you're playing Elvish. No one needs them to kill Dredmor and no equipment spawns there that you can't get earlier. Basically, unless you want to look for Chests of Evil for zanier weapons, there's no reason to stop on them. Even if the skill right now becomes weak in the late game it's still set you up to be fine in the late game because you'll have turned all your low level booze into high level booze and sat on it, so you still have no trouble spamming extra spells to eat through that higher HP. As I said before, DoD strikes me as a battle of attrition. A skill that lets you totally ignore attrition for two thirds of the game still leaves you in a ridiculously good position once it stops being as relevant. And honestly, in the build I mentioned in my original post, I could throw two Rifts into a room and typically still come out even on MP when it was all over and done with. I know things will be different for a tree like Mathemagics (my personal favorite magic skill) that doesn't have AOE damage, but still. And as you yourself have pointed out, it's very easy to make a stack of the phylacteries. Probably, the item should be nerfed or the drawback to creating one should be steeper somehow. Better yet, it could just turn HP into MP. Y'know, like Blood Magic is supposed to.
