Blood Ritual

**Coth** · 13-04-2012, 15:52

I think the idea of health as a resource is really cool and different gameplay but the current iteration of Blood Ritual looks broken to me. See if I'm missing anything here in the maths:

Blood Ritual

15% of Mana costs are paid with Life. In addition, you regenerate 1% of your maximum Life per second.

The most extreme mana rotation I can think of is spamming Locust Swarm (196 mana) with a 1.5 speed weapon under the effect of Big Bad Voodoo, which takes 353 mana/sec (give or take). 15% of this 53 life/second.

53 life is 1% of 5300 max life.

So for a WD with more than 5300 life it's impossible to lose life through blood ritual. From all the predictions of high level life numbers, most WDs will pass this threshold well before 60.

It's a bit disappointing that rather than new gameplay, Blood Ritual turns out to be just a flat mana cost reduction and a small HoT. I vaguely recall times back early in the Beta when life pools were much smaller, mana pools much bigger and Blood Ritual was 50%. That seemed like a cool skill, but like many others it's been nerfed to nothing.

**Horcsog** · 13-04-2012, 16:03

I like this better, 50% was waaay too much. Blood Ritual will be a must have with groups, u stay back, do some more damage as spells will cost a bit less mana and u won't have to worry about ur hp anyways.

**Coth** · 13-04-2012, 16:15

Yeah, sure, a 15% mana cost reduction is nice. I'm not saying it's underpowered, it's just not very interesting.

I was looking forward to builds that let me concentrate on leaching health from every source possible and then spamming Firebats or Locust Swarm using my health globe as a second mana pool. The longer I hold the high damage rotation the more risk I take.

Current version doesn't support that kind of play :(.

**z00t** · 13-04-2012, 22:56

Well, even though Blood Ritual does not have as much of a 'double edge' as it did before, it still has one :P.

Ironically, Blood Ritual seems to be much better lategame than in the early game, where that 15% would be much more noticeable with your smaller health pool, just because the mana-cost-scaling for skills isn't tooo hard (Firebats costs 65 mana at lvl 13 for example and only goes up to 122 mana at lvl 60).

**ElementEight** · 14-04-2012, 04:33

I think this passive could indeed be much more interesting. Right now, it's just an irrelevant cost reduction with an irrelevant health boost. If you could instead use 100% of health as mana, and have a % of your mana be transfered to your total health, now that'd be badass. Mana "management" would have to be done through healing skills by the player's choice, just as a regular WD will likely have to use mana management skills.

**z00t** · 14-04-2012, 05:06

I guess that unless Blood Ritual is the way it is, there wouldn't be enough mana-management passives for the WD.

Without Blood Ritual, the only other 'versatile' and reliable mana-saving passive is Spiritual Attunement. Rush of Essence, Gruesome Feast, and Vision Quest are all situational.

**Scorch Hellfire** · 14-04-2012, 08:09

Originally Posted by Coth

Yeah, sure, a 15% mana cost reduction is nice. I'm not saying it's underpowered, it's just not very interesting.

I was looking forward to builds that let me concentrate on leaching health from every source possible and then spamming Firebats or Locust Swarm using my health globe as a second mana pool. The longer I hold the high damage rotation the more risk I take.

Current version doesn't support that kind of play :(.

What about if you combine it with Pierce the Veil?

**ElementEight** · 14-04-2012, 14:13

Originally Posted by Scorch Hellfire

What about if you combine it with Pierce the Veil?

Might be useless. Perhaps mana management isn't dramatic-hard to do in the first place, so that the extra costs on Pierce the Veil is not a big issue. In all cases, you'd pretty much be using two passives for the effect of like, one and a half total.