Blood Rage

I wasn't sure if this should go in bug reports or here, but I think maybe here, since it's mostly just a point of curiosity.

I've got a level 4 Blood Rage gem that I use regularly. When the skill is idle, it shows me "4% life leeched back" and "4% chaos damage done" in the skill description, but when I cast it the values effectively double to "8% life leeched back" and "7.9% chaos damage done".

Is this a bug, or some part of how the skill works that I don't understand?

I think it's a bug. I've heard of and seen several similar tooltip issues. The tooltips like to use your current character values when displaying, even to the point of doing silly things like taking into account your characters' current resistances when displaying how much monsters' resistances are reduced by for elemental weakness. Buffs like blood rage and phase run both have this problem as well.

As i've stated before I think the health degeneration isn't much of a draw back but more of an inconvenience. The attack speed increase on low health is also a bit pointless as if you're around that level of health and actively attacking you'll quickly leave the threshold before it makes much of a difference.

Taking extra damage or having a percentile reduction to defensive stats, like armour and evasion, in addition to a static health degeneration based on character level would warrant a more useful secondary effect instead of the low health attack speed boost.

It might also be an interesting option to incorporate the motif of "Take more damage, do more damage" with the draw back of the skill. For example total armour and evasion are reduced by 20% but you gain attack speed inversely proportional to your total health percentage. At <90% health you get 10% attack speed. At 80% you get another 10% for a total of 20% and so on.

The risk/gain trade off is still there but takes a more active role and encourages the player to think smart about using potions.


Another alternative could be converting the skill into a toggle skill. When activated drains health and gives frenzy charges on kills, when deactivated it drops your frenzy charges and stops draining health.

As someone who uses Blood Rage with a pure evade melee Ranger, both an evade decrease and a take more damage penalty would make my life a lot worse. Please don't do that ;_;

I think the life drain works for what it seems like it's supposed to do: keep you attacking to stay alive.

In situations where I run out of things to attack, or in the case of ranged enemies, the drain on life seems fast enough to count it as a risk, if not an overt drawback.

It's interesting how Frenzy charges are easy to keep up at the moment, while the other ones are not. It makes enduring cry seem like a pain to have to recast every 10 seconds while Blood Rage just keeps going on forever.

I think the attack speed on low life is fairly trivial as is the 4% health degen per second.

That leaves us with 4% life steal and all the frenzy charges. Either it's a little too good or Enduring Cry isn't good enough.

I feel like the Tooltip of this skill could use with some clarifying. Maybe I'm just being dumb but when I first read the tooltip this is what came into my mind:
1 - A buff that adds another poison-effect (I already had one so not too far fetched) to my attacks. And its damage is based off my HP!? As a Sword and Board Duelist focusing on being tanky this damn near made me jizz my pants.
2 - An attackspeed buff when at low Health? Useless I will never ever be at <35% hp for more than 1 attack. And if I am I'm not gonna spend the time standing still- I'd spend it running for the hills.
3 - Passive Life Leech? yes please!
4 - Recieve Frenzy charges on kills. I'd never had a character high enough to get charges so I wasn't aware how good they were. Seemed like a cool side effect at the time.

Instead what I got was a skill that drained my hp quite fast while giving Frenzy charges which turned out to be AWESOME and enough life leech to somewhat off-set the Health drain. Don't get me wrong my character got a HUGE power boost by this skill. It went from being basically a pure tank with very moderate damage output to a Killing machine. At least in single target. It wasn't what I expected but it was good.

I'm glad you've fixed the tooltip for 0.9.5 because I got pretty surprised when the level progression of the skill was.
Level 1 - 4%/sec - 4% life leech
Level 2 - 8%/sec - 8% life leech
Level 3 - 4%/sec - 4% life leech WTF????????

Now that I know it was just a visual bug I'm a bit more calm. I have to admit it did feel like my life leech went down between level 2 and 3 though.

As a previous poster mentioned the reduction to evasion/armor when using it would just kill my character as well. As I mentioned I play pretty darn tanky which means the 4% life drain is offset a lot by my built in hp regen and the fact enemies deal very low damage to me while the life leech ends up basically giving me more than the leech takes. it also makes you have to be a lot more active with using potions and having a good potion setup becomes a lot more important. As a general rule of thumb for me any skill that makes a Hack'n'Slash more active and more involved is a damn good skill. Anything that takes away from the repetition and makes for more dynamic battles is just a great skill and I have to say so far Path has a lot of these skills making it an awesome gaming experience.

Ryukira:

I actually got confused and thought it added chaos damage too at first. Then I noticed my life draining and figured it out, haha.

I would also like to agree with the general sentiment that the increased attack speed at low life is virtually useless. Because of the nature of the skill, you're life isn't going to stay at a low percentage for long. So you never really get the buff.