Preliminary 0.9.4 Patch Notes

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Treffnix wrote:

Love the new skill tree! The highways are great, I can try out new passives much faster now.
Only problem I see with the new keystones is that the ranger has no way to the acrobatics one without spending points on int. That seems a pity.

iirc I only had to spend 1 point on int to go up to acrobatics from the nearest frenzy charge cluster... or maybe it was 2, not sure.
Would be much happier with +str there instead... didn't see many +str nodes around the ranger.

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Gwawr wrote:

Hello,

I have a question in regards to the "Blood Magic" keystone.

I'm not in beta yet, so I don't know how the game's specifics work, but I was wondering what the benefit of choosing it were? Other than the concept of using blood magic itself, that is.
Is that simply the reason for it? The concept. Or, like other keystones (such as, Eldritch Battery or Chaos Inoculation), is there some kind of positive bonus to choosing to give up your mana in exchange for using your health instead?

It seemed to me that, similar to Chaos Inoculation, you were putting your character in a great deal more danger, only without the bonuses Inoculation has.
No you won't stand at 1 hp, but presumably you're character will spend a great deal of their time at fairly low health. At the very least, you'll have a highly unstable health percentage most of the time. Which would make the Chaos damage a much higher risk to a blood mage as well. Only, as I mentioned, with no benefits to counter that risk (other than the "rush" of being on the brink of your character's death at any given point).

If that's the reason, that's fine. I just wanted to ask if it was intended, or if you had plans to alter it in the future.

Thanks,
Gwawr

Blood magic is not something you should take lightly.. actually none of the keystones should be taken lightly, you gotta plan for them a lot.
Blood magic has the potential to be very powerful. For starters, life flasks are much more potent, and as a blood mage you can use all 5 slots for life flasks, and even go for the mods which increase life gained substantially but spend mana (since you don't have mana, you lose nothing there afaik).
Also, life leech is available in much higher amounts than mana leech. And a maurader with blood magic can ignore +mana stats completely and just stack more hp instead, giving usually close to (possibly even more) the same hp as you would have had total hp + mana if you needed to get mana too.

So if I take bloodmagic in skill tree I cant undo it?

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Mark_GGG wrote:

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taekvideo wrote:

Blood magic is not something you should take lightly.. actually none of the keystones should be taken lightly, you gotta plan for them a lot.
Blood magic has the potential to be very powerful. For starters, life flasks are much more potent, and as a blood mage you can use all 5 slots for life flasks, and even go for the mods which increase life gained substantially but spend mana (since you don't have mana, you lose nothing there afaik).
Also, life leech is available in much higher amounts than mana leech. And a maurader with blood magic can ignore +mana stats completely and just stack more hp instead, giving usually close to (possibly even more) the same hp as you would have had total hp + mana if you needed to get mana too.

Pretty much this. Characters in general have significantly more life than mana. Life is easier to increase, flasks and other recovery methods restore more of it than for mana, and life leech is available in significantly higher quantities than mana leech.
Without the passive, a point of life is worth noticeably less than a point of mana, and thus a character can get far more of it for balance reasons. Blood Magic is allowing you to use the more plentiful resource in place of the more useful one, thus making it as valuable to your character as mana - except that you can get more of it more easily.

Thank you both for your responses, I have a better insight into how it works now. Sadly I've never been much of a powergamer, so I probably tend to take things at their basic "face value" in most cases. And, in this one, I simply saw "Lose mana for...?".

I'm naturally a caster, so I hadn't really considered the possibilities of Blood Magic for fighters, and for some reason life leech had never even crossed my mind. Which is pretty pathetic, since blood magic by it's very nature lends to the natural mindset of life usage, storage, and transference (to or from).
Passives and gems aren't something I could take into account too well. Since, as I mentioned, my knowledge of the game is only minimal right now.
Which is rather ironic, given that it was the customization of gem effects and the passive grid that first drew my interest here.

I really do appreciate the answers though. A blood mage is something that has always intrigued me, the various possibilities for it, but has so rarely ever been implemented in games.
The few that I have seen, add them in such a way as to have very little effect on the style of game play, and therefor there really isn't any particular difference from any other typical character (caster or otherwise) that you would see/play.

when will the 0.9.5 patch will come? gold is a lot nicer then the actual system.

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cryo23 wrote:

when will the 0.9.5 patch will come? gold is a lot nicer then the actual system.

Gold? They've stated pretty clearly that they don't ever plan to include gold.

The devs said they decided on the current barter system because gold was shunned in other games like Guild Wars and Diablo II. Their current reasoning is that people shunned it because it had no intrinsic value. The existence of fiat currency in real life casts doubt on this theory, and as such I think there were different reasons why people avoided gold in those games. People in Guild Wars traded ectoplasms to get around the limit on the amount of gold you could trade at once. People in Diablo II avoided gold because there was a maximum carrying capacity. The reason people avoided gold in those games was because of government price ceilings, not because the gold was a fiat currency.

A barter system does have advantages, at least in the limited context of a game like this, but it also has pretty severe disadvantages. The devs have set up a tier system among currency items, but I have my doubts that the economic value of the currency items will follow this tier system. Of course, that's even assuming that the economy will even take off at all. If there is no marketplace/auction house, then the game will have enormous transaction costs. Not only do you have to find another player with what you want, but you have to somehow appraise the value of all your currency items and somehow come to an agreement as to what the trade will be for. The transaction costs are simply staggering such that I would not be surprised if 80% of the population did not participate in the economy, and the remaining 20% only traded for the very upper echelons of items.

Thanks dear for share the information.......

Thanks dear for share the information.......

say i go for eldritch battery then take acrobatics, would i gain no mana or would i gain nothing?

btw imo there should b an incentive for a mage to get blood magic, like int gives health or a % of mana becomes health, maybe some health regen. stinks that the only health regen in the passive tree is on the bottom ><
maybe a lifesteal kind of thing from magic damage
i've never skilled blood magic as this is just my speculation