So, Bloodmages...

[Lujo]

[Waldo0]

[Waldo0]

[Grakor456]

[The Avatar]

@Grakor456/Waldo0: I'm with Grakor here. It is almost always more efficient to use mana potions before any blood pools, but that does not necessarily mean they should be used early. Honestly, on the topic of B2P, I usually don't convert it immediately, but unless I find a good use for it before finding all of my glyphs or exploring a meaningful potion of the map I convert it. Honestly, to all of the early potion users, I find my best bloodmages use nice early god boons to get through the early game and, as an elf, I have 3 fireballs from my 20 mana full tank, 10 more from my 2 fireball mana potions, 3 more from a prepped schadenfreude, and a bunch of 30% bloodpools. By itself that is 16 fireballs or 384/448/512 damage for levels 6/7/8 respectively. That is of course not even including the extra possible damage from mid-fight level ups, higher damage fireballs, or the dragon soul.

[Lujo]

It's the old "how much do I need for endgame" thing about hoarding resources or not hoarding resources with anything in general. It's really a playstyle and general intention thing, psych so to speak.

There's people who'll take great pains to reach the end fight with as much resources as possible and take into careful consideration not to use bloodpools in an inefficent manner and save potions until they get the biggest numbers out of them, and such, and evaluate, say, a class in the terms of the end numbers. These peole are the "optimal result folks".

Then there's guys who'll go out of their way to do the least possible ammount of work or worry while they play while still being challenged, prep binlor orc, blow both health and mana potions left and right, take a 35 piety boon just to break one wall, and judge a class upon how little they had to worry and if the experience hit the sweet spot between "too easy" and "too much work". These I'd call the "margin of error folks".

Weird as it is Bloodmage can work for both, except he seems to be dissapointing to the "optimal results" guys, while being a blast to the "margin of error" guys. I guess I figured out why I'm so worked up - if they "fixed" him in any way he'd be more interesting to the guys who "hoard the potions" so to speak, but would have a way larger margin of error rendering him sort of braindead for the other kind of people.

[dislekcia]

We spent so much time going through other variations on B2P that we know we can't do anything different with it than where it is now. More mana would mean unholy spiking power. Less health means ludicrous HALPMEH loops and the scumming that goes with that.

Bloodmages are designed to be a class that transitions from one playstyle to another through the course of a run. They start out being really great at bursting, everything they have is about storing up resources and picking choice targets, nothing nukes like they do. Then, because that would be far too powerful if it could continue into the lategame, we designed them to transition into a different sort of playstyle - turning their initial resource-using frenzy into less of a scary thing to do through Sanguine turning blood into another resource.

Once Bloodmages finally clicked, we knew we had something that would work for them... Transmuters took about as long to balance, maybe longer. In the end we couldn't make the walls-as-resource model work for Transmuters because walls were less granular than blackspace, so we had to make them give much larger amounts of resources, which meant less ability to limit resource hoarding. Transmuters in the alpha were pretty damn broken.

In the end, Transmuters and Bloodmages took different approaches to dealing with the alternate resource problem: Transmuters abandoned their resource, Bloodmages moved into using it in two opposing ways. Personally, I like the challenge of managing when to transition

[Grakor456]

[TheSchachter]

[The Avatar]

Grakor, if you mean late game spiking I'd very much like to see that math. I'd honestly be very surprised if the bloodmage has less than the wizard+sorcerer. Early game he struggles of course, but I don't believe either class will beat him late game (although obviously this will differ extremely based on scenario, so to be fair the math should probably vs a boss with no resists and 75 damage, with 27 bloodpools, approximately 70% of the monsters' blood pools).