Elric Galad

Short casting time, it was the case in PoE1. And yeah, it was broken!

Right, I'm not dicarding your critic, but I won't make a change based on a single feedback. What I could be considering is reducing Blood Sacrifice recovery to 2s, but right now I don't plan to make a BPM upgrade anyway (no critical issue identified, although I keep a list of minor ones - mostly display). All things considered, it's probably a good thing that Blood Mage can't pretend to be a strict upgrade of Wizard anymore. Few observations : - Consider also DEX. Blood Mage is indeed meant to be uber versatile more than anything, and DEX helps this goal for a potentially unlimited ressource class (which other wizs are not). - Potion of Enlightenment and Blood Sacrifice aren't mutually exclusive. For the fights where you want to afford the Potion, Blodd Mage is really great. You could have Blood Sacrifice renew your low tier spells (which include great instant self buffs) while the Potion tick renew the high level one. With the Potion only, you will really have to use only 1 spell every 30s. - several possible multiclass had their self-healing enhanced, especially Fighters (Actual constant recovery) and Barbarian (Defiance). I had good feedback from a BPM Blood Mage / Corpse Eater user if I remember well. - 33% renew on Tier 7 is important to lower the convenience of infinite Walls of Draining.

OK, your request is perfectly clear. Based on the assumption that Blood Sacrifice always restores a spell in Vanilla, your request is that it should always restore a spell in BPM. I'm just dubious that Blood Sacrifice actually always restores a spell in Vanilla. This wasn't my understanding and the actual modification should not have caused this divergence between the Vanilla and BPM. But I don't pretend to fully understand and I possibly made a mistake. I did a lot of testing with BPM Brilliant which has similar properties, but I might have overlooked something. I will test it by spending a lvl 5+ spell slot and using Blood Sacrifice, and repeat it several time with vanilla just to be be sure. Either it should work 66% of time (my understanding) or 100% of time (your understanding and testing) (for spell lvl 8+, it should work only 33% of time) Any third party tester will be welcome for sure But I agree that if Blood Sacrifice always restores a spell in Vanilla, it should always restore a spell in BPM.

Note that this part only works with BPM. Other exceptions are : - Secondary skeletons from Chanter Skeletons invocation upgrade - Secondary drake from Chanter Drake invocation upgrade - Skeletons from Chanter skeleton phrase I didn't touch them. Touched Water Clone because the IA was broken and he wasn't able to use his spell. So I made it longer to compensate (I have no idea how to fix the IA). This is not a bug, it is an intended nerf. Minor is up to 3, Medium up to 6 and Major up to 9. When Noqn make the 3 blood sacrifice activable separately he remarked the displayed levels was 3, 6, 9 and this was most likely what the devs intended. But somehow it ended being 4,7,9 in vanilla. This change is a small nerf and a way to harmonize with BPM Brilliant Cycle, which is 3,6,9.

Yeah, but BPM isn't really made for such extreme gameplay. For standard gameplay, I think I'm pretty satisfied with Blood Mage having more significant drawback but being still enjoyable. And also... Indeed, it is fully hardcoded. So can't be fixed at my level. The only thing I can do would be to remove these spell from the game or giving them a completely different effect. Not fun at all. Basically yes. For withdraw and similar effects, one can't say whether high INT is a buff or an issue. That's why fixed duration was a better way to balance the spell. I get that in Vela's case it's a nerf. I had this on my radar once, but somehow I discarded. The reason why I discarded is that it is pretty simple to avoid by simply not doing this (given that it is significantly tedious to do it evey time one gets an affliction). The reason for some other nerfs was to make the nerfed ability usable without braking the game or running into an easy auto-win combo. Outworn buckler really has to be used in purpose to get the "problem"*. *Granted that Strand of Favor & Friends are in the same case, but you have to do it only once per run, making it way more tempting...

Great. Seems simple and consistent.

Yes, it's nice with the right party, but a simple Ciper, even Multiclass can help a buddy casting a Missile Salvo or Maelstorm every 6s thanks to Ancestor's Memory. In certain cases (SC chanter + 4 SC spellcaster party) the SC Chanter can do better, especially as an opener, but I would consider the Cipher to be in the same league. Granted that BPM uses this particular invocation as a base of SC Chanter design (it regenerates 2 ressources / 2 spells of the same tier except chanter's - but it is basically the same for Tier 9 since this Tier only has 1 cast) while it nerfs Brilliant.

Extremely powerful, yes, but has the unfortunate habit to bounce back on my party quite often. I don't know it it was due to Confusion (stronger against your party than vs foes) or Spell Reflection effects. IMHO Chanter is meh as Single Class, since a MC can do ~75% of what SC can do while doing some other stuff too (hence the BPM buff). But yeah Single Class Skald can cast 4 Tornadoes in a row by empowering the second with Sasha's full phrase back ability. If it is not bounced and you're not facing a Megaboss, you win.

Yup, it is developped and tested with it. Nice to hear !

Except, ahem, BPM nerfs package disables strand of favor exploit But sure if one only uses BPM buffs package, things are by definition better

I confirm the +10 ACC, a +50% DMG and a +2.5 PEN to Cape of the Falling Star is from BPM. It comes from scaling at character level 20. I confirm the +10 ACC, a +50% DMG and a +2.5 PEN to Apex Ward is from BPM and is 100% intentional and is supposed to be exactly the same bonus as Cape of the Falling Star. What happens exactly is listed as a warning about BPM scaling : Warnings : - If several items from the following lists are equipped simultanneously, the bonus above will appear as being applied by the first one. However, all the equipped items of the following lists will benefit from it, so this is only a change in the combat logs. You can unequip them and equip them in a different order, you will see Apex giving its bonus to the Cape this time. It works like this because implementing different scaling effects would have been horribly more tedious (and the scaling implementation was already quite tedious to implement and test...). All in all, you're legitimately happy about this. Hard Counter damages would be only 7 PEN without this change. There is a reason why I added scaling to all items passive attacks.

Note that pulsating spells duration isn't affected by PL, only by INT.

The area increase is so convenient at time (for any Crowd Control especially, sometimes for healing too in my experience) and +2 PL from a single ability point even situational would be too powerful. I still cling to the idea that the values are fine and that improving them would make it an almost "mandatory" talent, which I don't want it to be.

No, I never truly considered it, but I kind of remember speaking about it. Increased AoE is really convenient when needed, even for the cost, while increased PL is just icing on the cake to reward your character with optimum effect.

Whirling Strikes too. Do these Full Attacks receive a malus when dual wielding ? I would presume no, but I haven't checked.

Well, Rogue appears on bottom Tier on most class rankings I've seen. I don't think there is a huge debate about it. It could be said in an even more simple way : their Single Target damages are not distinctively better than other classes, they are squishy and none of their special tricks are great. Still it does its main job in an okay fashion so isn't unplayable. Deathblows + Scrolls is a decent backup feat. And I personnally like Sap+ Blunderbuss to super reliably control and damage a high priority target on every fight even with a melee Rogue. But that's it.

That's a bit the issue. The Player Character dispositions are somewhat controllable. You tend to get disposition point by RPing around the right attitude. Companion dispositions are a bit random for me. Even then, having to max dispotions and companions reaction feel too much constraint to manage. So usually I completely ignore hearth defender. But to be honnest, I even don't like dispositions having consequences on non-dialogue gameplay. I rarely even Deep Faith (yeah that's wrong). I like RPing a bit, but not being constraint into RPing in a specific fashion.

Note that you can get Martial Caster at some point that gives +100% (with BPM) casting speed for summoned weapon. Basically Quickswitch for Summoned Weapons.

Sure, but then it should be pointed that Brillant itself is less powerful since it regenerates spells up to Tier 3, 6, 9 cyclically. Yes, but another component of the mod is the potion of Enlightenment, which regenerates a ressource (no tier limit) every 30s. The potion is quite expensive (3000 base price) but helps for biggest fights. This reduces the gap between Blood Mage and others, but even for Blood Mage it helps by providing 2 sources of regen.

WoD is still pretty usable (+0.5s self buff, -2s foe buff, per Hit) but there should be more situations where it is much trickier to use consistently. And a couple of very powerful effects aren't extendable (Scordeo's Cascade, Prevent Death condition - Barring Death Door also works differently and is just a very big damage shield but for a longer duration). BPM isn't balanced around solo indeed. But the base game isn't balanced around solo to begin with.

It is my next planned character indeed. Granted that I play with my Balance Polishing Mod which nerfs Bloodmage and buffs Corpse Eater.

I don't add scaling rule to shield in general as answered a couple of weeks ago on this thread. Beetle Shell has 3 major advantages vs Withdraw : - It has triple the range, which is quite relevant when the job is to save some party member life - Less duration/breakable means more flexibility. The 20s(vanilla)/fixed 30s (BPM) out of combat of Withdraw is quite constraining for the team. - Doesn't cancel aggro, so your party member still "acts" as a sort of crowd crontrol effect. It has no built-in healing, but druid has plenty of regen spell, so there's a good chance that the target will have one active. Overall I find it not as good as Withdraw for its purpose, also because Tier 3 instead of Tier 2. BUT it has some advantages on its own, and life-saving isn't meant druid's specialty to begin with. Still I think it fullfills its purpose as it is (reducing casting time to 0.5s was absolutely paramount for it), for which druid has no real other option (apart consumables of course, but that has a money and slot cost).

Nope

Well maybe, but it is far from being obvious to say the least. I've discarded fixing the "ranged weapon paired with melee weapon + melee attack" issue, which applies to several abilities, most noticeably clear out. This one isn't big and gives support to "classic blunderbuss" (opposed to mortars) setting. So I guess it's ok.

The difference here is that Takedown Combo applies to all attacks to the target, not only to the one from the ability. So Takedown Combo would enable your whole party to get +100% damages on a single attack. This is quite a big buff. I think the dual claw aspect comes from the Drizzt Do Urden dual wielding ranger trope. They wanted to make an ability for dual wielding melee ranger specifically. Is this good ? Well I don't know, but the ability is still usable with two hander, I think it should even be optimal with WotEP specifically. Also with non dual wielding weapon, you still get a +10 Acc attack with damages scaling with PL, so this part of the effect is quite equivalent independantly from the choosen weapon. To be fair, I think it might be very tedious to change due to the number of subeffect coded separately for this one. So I think I will discard. Nothing prevent you from using it with DW weapons, then to swap to a good 2 handers. There's not ton of builds that favor style swapping.