Bloodmage Addendum

Also: Why couldn't people have complained about their bloodblades BEFORE I finished work on the class? It would have made this so much easier!

Bloodmage brainstorming

I've been listening to bloodmage complaints, and one is that you get ready for a big swing to take out a monster only to luck-whiff it and die a horrible death a bit later. My first thought was "Oh, just reduce luck misses on the bloodblade", but then you open it to potential abuse for people without training, and I also don't really see this being needed for high health focused bloodbladers. So I decided I'd decrease it when the blader was low health, which is great and solves the problem, but it isn't very noticeable and cool, and it leaves me wondering whether it should be an ability or just free. It is definitely useful, but the idea of paying a few ranks for something you can't show off and kind of feels like something you deserved all along is lame. It also generally only works if you're able to kill the monster with that hit, which led me to thinking "well what if we let you turn it on and off, and it let's you know if your next hit will kill the creature" (with some tweaks to damage variation). But removing variation COMPLETELY from the game is kind of silly, and besides it still doesn't allow for people to pull off damage over time attacks very well.

I'm currently considering an ability that, when the bloodmage is low health, they get reduced luck misses and luck hits (not that the reduced luck hits should matter), and when they hit the creature it is "stunned" for a short time, probably just enough for the savvy blader to pull back and try to avoid being hit (this would probably have to be accompanied with some timeout so multiple mages couldn't keep something stunned indefinitely). I imagine it as a passive ability that is active all the time, but I'm still not sure of the cost in ranks. It also seriously intrudes on a rework of their crippling abilities I had planned which would grant extreme speed reduction on hit. Maybe I can work around that by introducing some passive element of crippling blows into this ability in addition to potential reworks of crippling blows in general.

For other classes I'd have concerns about reducing variation like this, but by its nature the bloodmage is already an incredibly risky class, adding elements that a skillful player can use to avoid death generally doesn't run the risk of making the class less exciting and interesting to play.