Blood Sac Question.

Hi All,
Had a quick Question I recently captured a Elite Skill for my

Necro/Mesmer which has this 17% Blood Sac attached to it - I've
read the Wiki 3 times and just cannot wrap my head around what it is saying to me.

Is the 17% Sac,

Flat Out Permanent.

Permanent till the end of the Instance.

Till I heal normally.

I would much appreciate your thoughts as I dont want to permanently nerf a Toon because a misused the skill.

Sacrifice takes a percentage of your maximum health out of your current health. So lets say (for convenience) you've got 300 max health and a skill that has a 33% sacrifice cost. Using it would result in you losing 100 (33% of 300) current health (i.e, you'd be at 200/300). This can be healed like any other damage would*. You can't screw yourself over so go and play with it yourself if you still don't understand**.

*Technically speaking, the health drop from sacrificing is health loss, not damage. This matters for some skills.

**There are very few permanent non-reversible decisions in GW. The only ones I can think of are your primary profession, leaving pre-searing, and your continent of origin.

Yeah, pretty much what Marty said. I will just add that some sacrifice skills are spammable and sacrifice the same percentage every time you use them, so taking Marty's example, if you use it twice in a short period, you will drop 100 health each time (so 200 in total). It's easy to spam yourself to death if you're not watching your health and your healers are crap.

Also be careful when you use a health sac skill, the health loss is taken from you full health, ie 300, and not the 98 that you have left from the fight you were just in.

Except when your max health is 1 point, which is what I use when I BiP the warren, then there is no health loss.

Thankyou all very much, thats a good bit clearer now. BB.

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Edit:
Thanks Mark for making it clear about the 17% is 17% of baseline, not current; that might well have gotten me in trouble. And thanks to Cthon for taking tings a step further and making them more clear.

Honestly the Wiki had my head spinning, but this thread has helped me a whole lot. BB.

This has been covered, but just to say it one more time:
Health sac is basically plain old damage (except for the fact that it's not called "damage" and skills that care about "damage" happening won't react to it). You will take an amount of damage equal to the stated percentage of your max health.


This is not exactly correct. (At least, the way you phrased it is misleading.) It is not the case that you never lose health from saccing if your max hp is 1. It is the case that less than 50% of 1 rounds down to zero, and most sac spells sac less than 50%. If you manage to find a way to sac 50% or more in one spell (Blood of the Master is the only way to do it that I can think of at the moment), it will round up to 1 and you will sac out.

[edit: Thought about it some more. Scourge Sacrifice will make BiP and VSac fatal; Scourge Sacrifice and Awaken the Blood will make all of the 17% sac skills fatal.]

I've never been fully aware about how blood magic works, the cost always seemed higher than the reward unless BiP, maybe if I went pure Blood it would make more sense?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwHpLDgWonM