so... about blood mages

[Sirrocco]

Just started trying out a blood mage. Thought I'd toss out the things I've noticed, and hope that others might chime in as well. Note that this is essentially first impressions for someone playing on normal.

- you can absolutely build these guys as a bump attacker. They have an entire generic tree that does nothign but buff their bump attack with the staff, and manages to do a pretty good job of it.
- They're pretty generic-hungry. At least from first and second glance, the bump attack tree will happily slurp up all fo the generics you care to give it, and their other unique generic tree also has some pretty solid stuff.
- We all know reavers, and we know how awesome bone shield can be. Unlocking the bone tree looks very shiny. It's kind of a trap at first though. Do *not* put your lvl 10 cat point there. You wont' get bone shield until level 12... but you wont' be able to *afford* it until much later. Your vim pool grows *slow* and a semi-defiler, and you simply won't have the 50 that you need to turn it on for quite some time.
- That's okay, though, because these guys are really pretty beefy. They have a number of things that make con a better buy for them, and wind up with a *lot* of con-based HP. Maxxing con is not a bad plan. Interestingly, this makes yeek (and to a lesser extent Shaloren) better picks. The low life rating just doesn't matter a whole lot when you're stacking up the con-based HP like this. Yeek likes the resistance to confusion and silence, and the extra base speed (see "bump attacker"). Shaloren likes the speed bump, the extra crit help (they have some crit boosts, especially spellcrit, but the cunning will probably be enough of a squeeze that the passive help is nice) and Timeless for the effect killer (they have a few duration effects too). First guess is that the Shaloren is better if you want to focus on the casting, while the yeek is better if you want to focus on the bumping, but that's more of a SWAG than anything else. Of course, this ties right back into the "kind of hungry for generics" thing.
- On the other side, you don't have a lot of vim to throw aroudn, but you gain it back pretty quickly. A point or three in the "bump attacks give me vim and deal damage" skill is quite effective at handling your resource needs, when added to the standard "killing things gives me vim and refunds the spell that did the killing" schtick. Worth rememberign that you have area effect spells - and if you can catch *anything* in the area that the spell will kill, it refunds the entire thing... especially nice as you can bloodcast - which means that you can run out of the vim that you need to sustain, but you can't run out of the vim you need to cast.

- side note: my weapon is based on 80% magic, 20% con. I have attack boosters based on spellpower... and it turns out that increasing my strength increases my damage. Apparently the +physpower effect on strength is quite real. Anyone know the numebrs on that enough to give me an idea of how much it matters? Is it enough to make investment in strength worthwhile for me? Blood Mage does have a racial generic passive that gives armor and hardiness, so a heavy armor Blood Mage is looking kind of tempting to me.

So... any thoughts, anyone?

[DuckAndCower]

Is the blood mage an addon class? I'm not seeing it in the list of unlockables.

[Sirrocco]

Huh. Looks like it's nullpack. I had honestly not realized that. I feel a little silly now, really.

If you have the nullpack, it unlocks alongside reaver.