Blood Magic needs an overhaul.

Blood Magic is a necromancer secondary attribute.

No inherent effect. Many Necromancer skills, especially spells that damage and steal health from your foes, become more effective with higher Blood Magic.


Very LITTLE direct damage.
To say the very very least.

Truthfully, It's a skill attribute set that seems to primarily attribute to life stealing, saccing, and energy management. (really, just saccing to do any of the aforementioned.)

Energy management? Yes, it's true. But why do we need more? We have Soul Reaping already. Which is apparently already borked. However through blood, we have the option of playing a battery for energy AND health for our entire party. This is cool if you like support, this doesn't need to be fixed or changed at all. It's very good.

Life Stealing? Yes, we have a little bit of this in Blood Magic. a LOT of skills pertain to life stealing, be that direct life stealing or via regen gained from degen of a target monster for a period of time. Are these useful? No.
Because they are life stealing skills, and ignore armor//protection prayers skills, the amount of life stolen is ALWAYS very very low. The recharge and cast time on these skills are also very very high. (Especially the better skills in the line. There must always be a drawback to the blood line.)

We have life stealing in the curses line too. Insidious parasite for example, in one casting, is more powerful than the elite spells from the Blood Magic Line; Life Transfer and Ravenous Gaze, and subsequently, because it's in the curses line of spells will stay that way.

By direct comparison; At lvl 16 curses and blood;

Insidious parasite at 16 curses, on a monster attacking once every 1.33 seconds, that monster receives 517 damage which you gain as life in its full duration. With a twelve Second Recharge, this skill can both be kept up indefinitely, AND be cast on multiple targets.

Life Transfer, the elite version of Life Siphon, at 16 blood magic this skill does 16 health degeneration per second, which you gain as regeneration. Nifty. Provided it's not removed prematurely, you can ideally drain 192 health from a target foe. However, with it's doubled cast time compared to insidious parasite, its easily interrupted (even by human players.)
It's 30 second recharge makes it near impossible to cast on multiple targets without a 20//20 wand and off hand AND Archane Echo. It's damage is also less than half of Insidious Parasite, left unchecked. An all but useless skill.

Ravenous Gaze at 16 blood magic steals 31 health, and an additional 95 if you yourself are below 50% health. This is a fair bit of life stealing. It down right HURTS. With a 5 second recharge you'd assume this skill could be semi-spammable for a grand total of 126 life stolen each cast, provided you stay *under* 50% health to do so. At best you could fire this off once or twice before a monk heals you or the skill itself heals you to full if not just to the 50% mark this skill needs in order to become useless.

Clip note for the lazy who dont want to read this 'novel;'

Insidious Parasite;

517 health stolen potentially on multiple targets in 12 seconds.

Life Transfer;

192 Life regenerated from 192 life degenerated from a single target foe every 32 seconds.

Ravenous Gaze;

31 health stolen from a single target every 5 seconds. Unless by some miracle you find yourself below 50% health and your monk does not heal you knowing you are going to use Ravenous Gaze, at which point you steal 31+95 health from a single target foe once every 5 seconds.

These are just two of many examples of Blood Magic Elites that are completely and utterly out classed, out dated, and have no practical use in either form of play.

C'mon, seriously? Offering of Blood? Jesus!

Orders are also non stackable. They still have potential to be good though.

Soul Leech and Spoil Victor have nothing wrong with them.

Cultists fervor and Vampiric Spirit are up to debate. I think Cultists can be very good in conjunction with Masochism, however, those 2 skills do not make up a full bar. And a build saccing that much should be using it's Elite for something better, like Orders, or BiP or better.

Discuss.

(Understand I have little experience in PVP. I HAVE pvped I've heard of the term bloodspike. This is a general over view and opinion please avoid flaming, 'mad libbing' and masturbating in this thread because you use a better build than so and so. This is meant to provoke thought and suggestions as to any changes that can or should or shouldn't be made to the Blood Magic line.)

I thought Dark Fury and Order of Pain were stabkable o.O

No necromancer enchantment stacks with Order of the Vampire.
That's the one I meant.

Offering of Blood?

Touch rangers...

And I wasn't quite sure if you got this, but insidious is curses.

Let's not get into touch rangers.
They probably contribute to half the Blood Magic hate in the game.

I did get that insidious parasite was curses.

Yeah, Order of Pain is stackable. The elite version, Order of Vampire, is not. It would make more sense for Order of Vampire to be stackable since it is elite. That's just my opinion. -___-'

Anyways, blood nukers are quite decent. Sure, not as powerful as ele nukers and others, but it has 3 advantages:

1. Defense is useless against them (save for shutdown tactics).
2. They heal themselves at the same time.
3. The same magic line also has support skills (one doesn't need to use a second attribute for heals and support).

Just don't expect to be able to do the same damage as a traditional nuker.

Mod edit: Please try to type in proper English (if you can). We have a policy on this. Please review our rules.

i don't think you'll have to worry dude, most people use different websites for that

Order of pain can be stacked with one of the other orders. The rest are elites, so a single character cannot bring them all. But they can be equiped by different characters to be able to bring them all.

Life stealing a dark spell damage are armor ignoring. So it's normal that most Blood magic skills are 'expensive'.

But they're not expensive, they just suck.

Shadow damage cannot be protected against by armor, However Spiteful Spirit, Mark of Pain, and a number of curses spells, deal this aswell, and are capable o DECIMATING mobs completely.

All spells that steal life in the Blood line have horrendous cast times and effect very limited targets.

All spells in the Blood line that deal shadow damage require touching, saccing, OR both, which places the squishy little necro into direct line of fire.
(Whereas a curses necro can do this from out of harms way with multiple skills, the only two that come to mind in blood are Shadow Strike, Lifebane Strike, and Dark Pact. All of which are highly conditional, sacrifice health, and deal minimal damage to a single target, provided the conditions for the Shadow//Lifebane Strikes aren't met. Need I also mention, even if they are met, they still have 2 second cast time and are easily interrupted by human players?)

1st please talk like you didnt just have a bolt rammed through your skull
2nd oov and oop together is not good and was nerfed because of it

Woops, shoulda read from the bottom up; sorry I broke one of the rules.

blood needs a buff. a big one. but the problem that comes with life stealing skills is that they can very quickly become overpowered. take a look at the old bloodspike, executed correctly there was simply no way to survive it. if life stealing skills become powerful they will easily take over PvP

Truth be told, that's what it comes down to in the end.
Any repair done to blood magic makes it 'cheap' in pvp.
Anything cheap in pvp gets nerfed. (Like the old Bloodspike.)
They literally nerfed blood magic yet again in the last week or so.
Angorodons was 'too powerful.'

The only necro skills in Blood Magic i see are bip/br, sv, and awaken the blood.

The rest are ranger skills.

Life Siphon and Life Transfer should affect adjacent foes as well. Perhaps Life Transfer should cause weakness or some sort of condition? If you truly think about it. Target foe is having the "life" taken from them, weakness.. crippled... bleeding, these should be conditions linked with many of the blood magic skills.

Blood magic is good for other professions... As support it helps casters and melee fighters (Bip/Orders), as a secondary (Touchers), but really blood magic doesn't really help support the Necromancer himself as much as you think it would. How about some resistance enchants?
Vampiric Weapon, and Vengeful Was Who ever (Rit skills), are more along the lines of what blood magic should've been like.

You can thank IWAY for that. Order of the Vampire was stackable at one time, but IWAY abused the hell out of it. Thats why Order is teh suck.

Your Life transfer argument isn't that strong either because you are comparing it with skills that you can't compare it too. You should try Corrupt Enchantment or Conjure Nightmare.

How do either of those cause regeneration of your own health equal to the degeneration of the target foe(s)?

As far as Corrupt Enchantment goes, it's GOOD, Life Transfer is not.
Fast recharge, same degeneration, removes an enchantment. Can be kept up nearly indefinitely too. You can cast this 3 times before Life Siphon Recharged once.

Conjure nightmare is always static -8 degeneration. The only thing that changes with more points in illusion magic is the duration. Which isn't really necessary due to the fact it only has 5 seconds recharge. It can almost always be kept up indefinitely after illusion magic 3 or higher. (And cast on multiple targets.) Conjure nightmare, by comparison is GOOD, Life Transfer is not. You can cast this 5 times before Life Transfer Recharged once.

Life Transfers purpose is to create degeneration while granting it's blood sucking user regeneration. It ranges from -3 to -8 for 6 to 13 seconds. It recharges in 30 seconds. Life transfer is a BAD skill. It's duration sucks compared to it's non elite counterpart. It's recharge compared to it's non elite form and pretty much EVERY degeneration based skill, sucks. the only thing it has on it's non elite form is cast time and energy cost. (A difference of 1 second and 5 energy. Given the recharge though, I could effectively cast Life Siphon on 6-7 more targets before life Transfer recharged once.)

Let's also look at Reapers Mark. This skill causes -5 degeneration for 30 seconds. (WOW!) and if the foe dies while suffering from this hex, you gain 16 energy. Recharge of 15 cast time of 1, you can fire this off 1.8 times in the time it takes Life Transfer to recharge once, it's linked to Soul Reaping which EVERY Necromancer has at a high to middle high value, and the energy cost more than pays for itself. Compared to Life Transfer, this is a great skill. Life Transfer again, is a bad skill.

If Blood Magic is buffed, I will become overpowered:

-IWAY
-BoonProts
-Touchers
-B-Spike
-B-spike 2.0
-B-Spike 3.0
-B-Spike 4.0
-IWAY 2.0 ( Zerg)
-Ranger-Spike

IWAY? Wrong. This build *NEVER* used Ravenous Gaze or Life Transfer. It relied on Orders, which, as I've already pointed out, are fine as they are.

BoonProts? What does this have to do with Necromancers, or much less, Blood Magic, aside form a variation that used Offering of Blood?


Touchers? Will ALWAYS exist. It will ALWAYS have counters too. That's the nature of the game. Adapt. Grow. (In this scenario the counters are also very very simple.)

B-Spike X.X? Will ALWAYS exist. It will ALWAYS have counters too. That's the nature of the game. Adapt. Grow.

IWAY 2.0 ( Zerg)? Wrong. *see IWAY.

Boonprots use offering of blood for E-management,but I agree with you, blood is the weakest link of all the necromancers atributes.

I never said Life Transfer was good, I was stating you would make a much stronger argument in showing how weak Life Transfer is compared to other high degen hexes in the environment.

What makes Life Transfer so bad though is the 30 second recharge...

Also, buffing Life Transfer would not buff IWAY or Blood Spike.

You say that blood direct damage spells are weaker than other direct damage skills, because they "must always have a drawback". Maybe you should have just stopped there, and realized that, without the drawbacks (ie, high cost, low lifestealing, etc) blood can easily be overpowered. Yes, curses can do lifestealing and direct damage too, but only in forms like Mark of Pain, SS, and Insidious, which all require the opponent to do something in order to actually deal damage. They're all expensive hexes too, which means that they can easily be removed; they could never dominate the metagame.

Compare those to blood spells, which you can SPIKE with; you simply can't look at the best-case scenario numbers and come to the conclusion that blood sucks. In PvE, yes, blood damage is horrible (barring of course SV), because you KNOW that mobs are going to be idiots and attack through your curses. In PvP however, how much damage is Insidious really going to do? Certainly not 500 or whatever you calculated.

I agree that Blood Magic needs huge changes, all it has done is attracted the Scum of GW with BloodSpike and Touch Ranger. OoB on Boon Prots and BiP are the only decent skills in the line.

Maybe you should have stopped right there.
All of those examples you just listed back up my arguement entirely, whereas you can steal 30-50 hp with one blood magic life stealing attack, ALL of those curse hexes remain in play for 15-20 seconds where they continue to do said armor ignoring damage once every 1.33 seconds or so. (Two of which even being *AoE* armor ignoring damage.) While A blood Magic Spell does it's thing once, for a very small ammount of damage to a single target, and then recharges for however long. In PVE and PVP Curses is by far better for offense.

You're absolutely right, insidious parasite isn't going to be your main killer in PVP. It does however serve as a nice cover hex, like parasitic bond, or any other, to keep your big killer//pressure intact.

As for the blood spike? Again, it's completely situational, has a 2 second cast time per spell, and even at best, only deals 220 damage to a single target. And once their health reaches under 50%, the damage is cut in half completely. Don't get me wrong, 110-220 damage health stolen is NOTHING to complain about.

My point is; these aren't even elite skills. There are a great deal of Elite skills in Blood Magic that are completely sub-par. They're sub-par to non-elite skills. (Sometimes even their own non-elite counterparts.) They can't even rate against other elites.

Even the attribute description of Blood Magic is off;

Blood Magic is a necromancer secondary attribute.

No inherent effect. Many Necromancer skills, especially spells that damage and steal health from your foes, become more effective with higher Blood Magic.



Where is this damage? Blood is currently a support role at best.

IMHO, Change lifesteals so that they deal Shadow Damage once you are at full health. This makes the Blood line Prot-able vs Blood Spike and that opens the door for lifesteals to get buffed hard.

80 point Vamp Gaze, 120 point conditionless Ravenous Gaze.

Nerfed about 2 yrs ago cause people cried & cried about Iway which had an orders necro that would stack OotV & OoP. Since people back then (& today) can't seem to read what skills could possible counter something like that, they cried for a nerf, & got it.

i agree with eveything you said, and anet if your reading this hows about you do an update that completely ignores all the pvp idiots whining about something being over powered instead of getting over it?

Please?

Blood is to necro as smiting is to monks, for the most part.

Please don't comment on people being "idiots" when they have more knowledge on that thing than you.
You might not see it as overpowered, but it's a degenerate spike build that deserves to be degenerated, and getting over it isn't the way, because things like that are boring as hell to play against.

That is a good suggestion, it will still ignore armor, but doesn't negate protection prayers.
*scratches chin.*

Perhaps, 'if you are below 50-90% health you steal X amount of life from target foe. Otherwise, target for takes X amount of shadow damage'?

A theoretical fix for Ravenous Gaze;

If your health is below 50-90% steal 30 health + 30 health for every recharging blood magic skill. (max 90.) Otherwise, deal 30 shadow damage + 30 for every recharging blood magic skill. (max 90.) (50% failure chance at blood magic 4 or less.)

Because a two second cast time is really hard to interrupt.
'nuff said.

Considering SV is a staple when going up against tough PvE foes, Orders are still popular in PvP post-nerf, and blood-spikers are a defense caster's worst nightmare in both PvE and PvP, I would say that Blood Magic is alive and well. Not every attribute can be HURF DURF IN-GAME TITAN, EVERY TWEAK SHAKES THE META TO ITS CORE!

41 blood magic spells, you've listed 4 that are useful.