Mortal Conviction - Another Look

Dear Grinding Gear Games,

I understand that auras are designed around the concept of risk vs viability/reward type scenarios, but I really think you should take another look at this notable.

Currently, by itself, it only reduces reservations of 60% auras by 18%. That leaves 42% of your total life reserved, which I and I'm sure many others believe is ridiculously high when using percent auras, and Blood Magic already has a built in risk vs reward mechanism which limits their usage innately.

I understand the desire to bring aura usage down and making the choices available more meaningful. The problem with auras was only related to mana users, not BM. No one can realistically run any 60% aura with BM without an absurd investment both monetarily through items and through passives. You simply give up too much in terms of utility by going Blood Magic that I'm struggling to find any desire to use it anymore, let alone Mortal Conviction. Even with Mortal Conviction and Reduced Mana, it still reserves 33% of total life for a single aura! Come on guys, you can do better than that.

I propose that you change how BM works with auras in general, simply by increasing the reduction on Mortal Conviction, allowing it to stack with Reduced Mana Cost, while changing all other reservation nodes to mana only. You can only pick up Mortal Conviction if you have Blood Magic anyway, preventing its usage from mana users by default. By making this change players won't have to be ungodly rich or level 50+ in order to use a single aura as a Blood Magic user.

Why don't you try increasing it to 75% (from 30%), and seeing how it goes?

60 * 0.25 = 15%

15% is a much more acceptable value for any level, and can further be reduced to 12% with Reduced Mana.

At the very least GGG, take a second look please.

Just something to add, have you considered the mortal conviction after including the reduced mana cost nodes (of which there are many)?

These factor into the decrease, and are no doubt what GGG was looking at when they considered this. Taking into effect the boost to life nodes aswell, I believe that getting the % down to about 20% should be viable

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Real_Wolf написал:

Just something to add, have you considered the mortal conviction after including the reduced mana cost nodes (of which there are many)?

These factor into the decrease, and are no doubt what GGG was looking at when they considered this. Taking into effect the boost to life nodes as well, I believe that getting the % down to about 20% should be viable

Even with 25% Reduced reservation, mortal conviction, and a level 20 reduced mana gem you're reserving 22% of your life per gem. In my opinion none of the auras are worth reserving nearly a quarter of your life for, and running more than one aura is completely out of the question. I don't see how people are still trying to defend the new auras interaction with BM, it's simply not viable to run auras if you're using BM.

I figured that passive would have been a giant reduction (more than it is now) as it's gated by BM. I never had the balls to run hatred on BM pre-nerfs which was 18% (IIRC) w/ lvl 20 reduced mana gem.

My problem with the aura change is mostly that auras didn't replace passives. You didn't decide between armor or determination, wrath or lighting damage passives, vitality or life regen. Either you got one but didn't consider the other (armor passives vs determination), the aura was much more valuable than the passives (wrath v lightning passives) or you got both, if you couldn't one or the other (vitality v regen). So this becomes a straight nerf, less auras and less passives.

I think the change to all % was ham handed way to force us into not using more auras when they could have just put a hard cap and been done with it. EB feels pretty weak now. If it's just for mind over matter just put it down there then.

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Moosifer написал:

I figured that passive would have been a giant reduction (more than it is now) as it's gated by BM. I never had the balls to run hatred on BM pre-nerfs which was 18% (IIRC) w/ lvl 20 reduced mana gem.

My problem with the aura change is mostly that auras didn't replace passives. You didn't decide between armor or determination, wrath or lighting damage passives, vitality or life regen. Either you got one but didn't consider the other (armor passives vs determination), the aura was much more valuable than the passives (wrath v lightning passives) or you got both, if you couldn't one or the other (vitality v regen). So this becomes a straight nerf, less auras and less passives.

I think the change to all % was ham handed way to force us into not using more auras when they could have just put a hard cap and been done with it. EB feels pretty weak now. If it's just for mind over matter just put it down there then.

I feel for some aura's its been done well and they feel powerful, but for others its done terribly and just hurts slightly.

Hatred is one that I am disappointed with. I feel it shouldn't be a full 60% for such a small damage increase. Infact anger/wrath I feel are similar. Those damage aura's should be about 50% (which would make them something to consider while not being something easy to take).

While other things like determination, and haste feel like they are very powerful specific options you would choose for a good reason

that's what feels so ham handed about this change. All auras becoming 60% with no basis on their strength. I feel they have enough info to decide which auras they want to limit (bump to 60-80%) and which they don't mind people stack (have as flat or 25-40%).

My biggest gripe with auras is it could have been done better.

.... nevermind, didn't read properly.

Agreed that Mortal Conviction feels pretty much useless right now.

I don't remember if I've made a post about this yet, but for the Average Joe Blood Magic user, running an aura while taking the Blood Magic Keystone is an absolute no-no. Not even a single aura. Losing that much health is just out of the question. Even with all the reduction from the tree and Reduced Mana, a single aura reserves 25% of your health. What? So if you had 2000 HP, you now have 1500. That's a massive reduction. So even if a poor player specializes COMPLETELY on auras, he probably won't even want to run ONE SINGLE aura on the Blood Magic keystone.

The only benefit I can see from Mortal Conviction is the ability to enable low life builds. That's about it, really. Is that worth it? I don't know.

I'm planning on speccing out of the BM keystone on my long-time 2-hand sword duelist so that I can run at least ONE aura. The current plan is to use three Blood Magic gems on my active skills so that I can run two auras and still feasibly, y'know, attack.

I thought GGG was against running multiple gems like that (Enduring Cry Immortal Call build, anyone?).

EDIT: For the Average Joe, the Blood Magic keystone is now going to mean "no auras." Is that good? Doesn't feel like it to me.

Okay, I did the math right this time. Here's pretty much how it breaks down:

30%: Too low.

33-38%: The conservative estimate for the amount the notable should provide. I can't think of any good reasons not to change it to a value within this range.

39-48%: This is still a very arguable amount for the notable to provide, but at this point it's starting to get a little dangerous.

Dangerous? Huh? Let me explain. This is the exact point (impossible at 49%) where it becomes possible to run every single aura on one character. No, seriously; Prism Guardian's Blood-Magic-only 25% reduction to three 60% auras, in combination with 46% reduction available from the passive tree and 8% from Alpha's Howl, means you can get 79% reduction on some and 54% reduction on the rest, PLUS 29% less from Reduced Mana, plus Mortal Conviction, means all 9 percentage auras on a single character at some amount of life left over; with enough left over, all 10 auras could be run. This could create a very powerful support build for group play which allows every other character to ignore auras completely; keep in mind that such a build would naturally also be taking every "Increased Effect of Auras you Cast" passive as well, so no other party member would be capable of a stronger Aura.

Now if you're thinking "but I've reserved all but 1 of my life, how am I going to survive?" the answer to that isn't that hard: Shavronne's, Soul Taker, and Spectral Throw. I never said this build would be cheap, just that it would be OP in party play.

You know the demand which Culling MF has in group play, especially in Beta where we had IIQ in every league? Think that, but in even more demand, and even less people being able to afford to run it, so the ones who can afford it get a bigger advantage.

49-50%: At this point things are getting even more dangerous, because it is now possible to do the above trick without Alpha's Howl, which means a proper ES helm could be used instead. However, at this point it's still unlikely that the support build would have enough life left over for Clarity, so I won't consider 50% completely off the table in terms of options. It is, however, extremely risky.

51+%: Too much reduction, and too guaranteed to allow specialized aura-stack builds to dominate group play.

Wow. Before writing that, I should have asked myself a simple question: what if you didn't take the Blood Magic keystone at all, and tried to do this currently?

54% reduction brings a 60% aura to 28% (rounded up), which then is cut to 20% by Reduced Mana support (again, rounded up). So you could fit exactly five 60% auras on your mana if you had some other means of paying for your skills. (This uses up one 4L and 3L weapon.)

The other three 60% auras you could put in Prism Guardian. They'd get 79% reduction but no Reduced Mana support, reserving 13% each (still rounding up) for a total of 39% life reservation.

Finally, a Blood Magic, Reduced Mana supported Purity would reserve another 39% life, for a total reservation of 78% before possibly attempting a Blood Magic Reduced Clarity (which could be put in the same 4L, leaving one 4L and a 6L chest for non-Aura business).

So this aura support build is currently buildable. There's no need to worry about whether it becomes possible or not, because it already is. If we need to nerf it, we would NOT nerf it through Mortal Conviction, so we're free to boost MC.

However, once we boost MC to the point that Alpha's Howl is no longer required for the build to work, then the build just goes Blood Magic and is even stronger as a result. We don't want that, because this kind of degenerate build stuff should have weaknesses, such as relying entirely on ES for survivability and being forced to wear Alpha's fucking Howl.

So I thoroughly endorse a boost to 40%, even up to 48%, but nothing 49% or higher (so no to 50%). Because we like numbers divisible by 5 for some odd reason, I believe 40% is the best choice, with 45% in a close second.