Blood magic in Dragon Age - Your opinions

Ed130 The Vanguard

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In gameplay terms for Origins it was pretty good and if the Mage wasn't so overpowered and Arcane Warrior so broken it would be the best specialization. Shapeshifter is crap even without Arcane Warrior available for those who wanted a magic knight and the Sprit Healer while good for support isn't exactly suited to a Nuker or Mezzer. Blood Wound in particular is worth it, combining DOT with a form of stunning (that doesn't end when the target gets attacked) and a short cast time.

The lack of healing could be counted by stacking CON and the absurd number of healing pots you could make/carry/use at once.

I didn't use it in DA2 as I had to turn both mages into healbitches due to the retarded spawn system dropping heavies behind my battleline and attempting to rape my fire-support characters combined with timers for healing pots.

In terms of story, it should be treated with extreme caution with heavy Templar supervision when any research is performed (one of the few times the Chantry's extreme view on magic is justified). There shouldn't be a total ban as Blood Magic has been used for good before (most notably the creation of the Grey Wardens) and drawing the line at using sacrifices/consorting with Demons is a good start.

Cybylt said:
The lack of demonic ROFLstomping the Warden party is part a part of gameplay/story segregation as the tower, heck most enimes scale to the player with certain exceptions like the Beefgates at the entrance to Orzammar. If you don't believe me then activate the Black Vial in the Mage Tower to summon Cale Viazagat, The First Corpse Walker (a corpse possessed by a Pride Demon known as a Reverent) at low level. You will be murdered.

Abominations are the most visible form of blood magic (or at least one possible result) and you shouldn't discount them, just ask Redcliffe village who suffered a zombie invasion due to Connor becoming possessed or the Circle which imploded due to blood magic opening holes to the Veil due to Uldred getting a little to close to a Pride Demon.

One of the biggest issues with Blood Magic is that you can use it to take control of others and is the biggest problem with the school of magic in the eyes of many.

Even even when not dealing with demons or mind control it is still rather iffy with unscrupulous mages sacrificing people to enhance their powers, most notably the slaver Caladrius from Origins offering to sacrifice all the slaves in the room to improve the Warden.

All those issues aside it can be used for good, with The Grey Warden Joining ritual for example is Blood Magic as well as rather ironically the Phylacteries the Templars use to hunt down fleeing Mages.
 

Chris Tian

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Anthony Corrigan said:
Blood magic was useless, your a mage and it HURTS you to use it, you don't have high constitution as it is and all it really did was draw magic from your health instead of your mana which is useless
No offense, but if you think Blood Magic is useless in either Dragon Age game you just couldn't use it right. Blood Magic is extremely powerfull in DA:O and DA2.
The ability to cast from health is totaly awesome in itself, it makes it viable to give your caster lots of health points, and thus making him much tougher than non-blood mages, and since blood gives you more mana you can cast non stop without any lyrium potions.
And Blood Wound is OP like f*ck, a spell that paralizes enemys and deals some serious pain for the duration. It is basically the AoE version of Crushing Prison and that spell was already overpowered like nobodys buisness. That spell alone would have been worth taking four different versions of a "The Warden/Hawke falls to his/her knees and beggs for mercy" skill, but luckily enough most BM skills are very usefull.


OT: What bugged me about Blood Magic was, that nobody noticed it. If you make such a big plot point about blood magic and make this ability availabe to the player character you should tie that together, such a big discrepancy between gameplay and story is just bad game design.
 

Kayevcee

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I've got no time for Blood Mages in Dragon Age: Origins (the only one I've played) for the same reason I've got no time for Batarians in Mass Effect and Ree-Yees in Knights of the Old Republic- because every one I've ever met has either immediately tried to kill me or has completely fucked up everything around them. Look at what that useless prick did to Redcliffe- he was hired to give the local prince a hand with his homework and managed to get the kid possessed and half the town devoured by zombies. It's like the meme picture of Homer Simpson standing with an apron and a chef's hat on in front of a bowl of corn flakes which he's somehow managed to set on fire- he fucked up in ways you wouldn't think it would be possible to fuck up given the task in hand.

All the other Blood Mages I encountered were bonk-eyed nutbags that wanted to either blow my face off or sacrifice me to their dark masters. If that's what blood magic does for you, you can stick it up your arse.

-Nick
 

Senare

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Eh... I thought it was a bit thematically boring. Boring spells, necessarily evil and such. In the way that I think about magic Blood Magic would be more closely associated to healing, since that would allow you to target blood (which is pretty important). Yet all healing is pretty mystical in fantasy settings. In the evil spells department I find it lacking when compared to Blood Boil: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZWAbkABMAg
But Blood Magic in Dragon Age is still not nearly as boring as the darkspawn themselves. And the combat system takes the cake all on its own.

Maybe that is just me and my idea of fantasy.
 

ItsNotRudy

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Doesn't seem like anyone played the game on a difficult setting. No appreciation for the OPness that is Blood Wound at all. At a small health cost you get to AoE Stun and damage without hitting party members. Also converting anyone temporarily outside bosses is insane. I'd gladly 'waste' 2 spell points to get those.
 

faranar

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Blood magic is broken. Sure you can be an OP immortal Arcane Blood Warrior, but blood magic is supposed to be ridiculously overpowered by itself. A blood mage shouldn't have other specializations and should be able to solo the game. The whole game talks about how evil and insanely powerful blood mages are, but if you become one no one really notices and at best you are a decent support.
 

Elfgore

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Gameplay: Very high risk high reward but requires a good skill with it to be useful, like Fiora.

Story: Really kinda thrown in the story to make you at least have a chance at siding with the templars.
 

breadsammich

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I think that it should have been more of a "moral choice" kind of thing. Like, you're confronted with a situation that's really difficult, and you have the option through the dialogue menu to either struggle through it or blow it up with blood magic. That way, they could weave it into the narrative.
 

Nemusus

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Anthony Corrigan said:
Doom972 said:
Blood Magic by itself isn't that much of a problem, but the fact that it makes a mage more vulnerable for demonic possession is the problem. However, I'm not sure if that is entirely true, since many mages of the Grey Wardens apparantly used it successfully without getting possessed (maybe being a warden has something to do with it?). I think that it might've been better if the circle allowed mages who have enough self-control and willpower to learn it and how to use it with relative safety instead of completely banning it.

Anthony Corrigan said:
Blood magic was useless, your a mage and it HURTS you to use it, you don't have high constitution as it is and all it really did was draw magic from your health instead of your mana which is useless
It's not useless because there's much more power in blood than in lyrium, which allows for very powerful spells. A health sacrifice could be worth it.
I'm sorry, your right the last 2 spells may actually be worth it but why would you bother going through a whole spell tree to get 2 good spells? the same goes for dragon age 2, except that the spell tree to GET to those 2 spells is much much larger and you have to be actively losing blood in order to use those last 2 spells if you have them

Compare the spells sucking health from an ally to say the mass heal spell, why would you pick killing an ally in battle for a spell which healed you BOTH? that's just STUPID
Blood Magic was incredibly useful in Origins. My nightmare PC was an arcane warrior/blood mage, and by the time he set up all his buffs he had almost zero mana for casting. Plus, with all the buffs, you're almost invincible, even on Nightmare, even if you're around 50% health (as long as you have a cleric). Blood control was a bit meh, but Blood Wound was amazing. And blood sacrifice came in handy now and then- I beat a couple of bosses by leeching enough health from my tank such that when he finally died, I was able to finish the fight. As for why Blood sacrifice over mass heal, well, Mass heal has less effect on you when Blood sacrifice is active.

Plotwise, Blood Magic was really neglected. The whole Grey Warden thing kinda explains it away, but the way they dealt with the PC being a blood mage in DAII was atrocious. It would have been central to the plot too; If you side with the Templars, your Hawke is turning his back on his own kind- he either lacks faith that others can control the magic the way he can or he's manipulating events in a bid for power, lending credence to the Chantry motto, "Magic exists to serve man, and never to rule over him." Of course, there is the third option, that Hawke is possessed, and is a secret abomination. And if you side with the mages, then it's a powerful statement that arguably the most powerful and influential person in Kirkwall (after the Chantry exploded), sided with the mages. In the end, though, there's no acknowledgement of your choice, and that, to me, was one of the worst things about DAII: The way they ignored almost every decision the player makes.
 

Anthony Corrigan

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The fact you can find a build to make use of it doesn't actually change my point, I could find a build to make use of the shapeshifter ability quite easily, the point is that there is a disconnect between game play and story, it SHOULD be massively over powered but with equally large story reasons NOT to use it, what it shouldn't be is ignored by the story and only useful for certain builds. If you look at it the way it's portrayed in the story it's a comstant temptation for every Mage, that its unlimited power but at a dreadful cost, where is that in the game play? Where is the temptation to give it to every Mage because it makes them an evil god? Not for certain builds where you have done this and that, for EVERY Mage, unlimited power
 

Terminal Blue

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Come on guys, Blood magic in Origins was completely overpowered, but like everything in Origins you had to play in a way which made absolutely no sense in order to get the most of it.

1) Put all the points you would put into willpower into constitution. Yes, you're roleplaying a mage who hits the gym every week in order to.. build up the amount of blood in their body, oh fuck it, it makes no sense but you should do it! Constitution is the essential skill of any blood mage.

2) Pick all your favourite sustained abilities. Rock armor (duh), miasma, flaming/frost/telekinetic weapons, haste.

3) Activate all your sustained abilities, and then activate blood magic.

Because the game never tells you this, but blood magic removes all fatigue effects. This means regardless of how many sustained abilities you have active, you will always spend the same ammount casting blood magic. Moreover, because you don't actually need your mana pool (like, at all) you can afford to spend all your mana on sustained abilities while still nuking and paralyzing away.

4) This also applies to armor, so go arcane warrior when you can and wear the biggest, bossest suit of plate armour you can find. It doesn't matter if you end up with 300% fatigue because it won't apply when using blood magic, and you always will be.

5) Get blood wound, and combine it with other control spells like mass paraylsis, paralysis explosion and so forth, and then if you still have the points get the spells needed to cast death cloud and storm of the century. Do I need to spell out how this works. ;)

6) Laugh at the hardest difficulty level.

Because of all your defensive sustained abilities, armour and crowd control (seriously, mages in Origins work best when investing significantly in crowd control) you will be insanely hard to kill, and in an emergency you can always pop blood magic for a second to down a potion. Cooldown is a whole 10 seconds and your party will still be a bunch of badasses even when you're not casting because you'll be buffing them so hard. You can even fight in melee because you'll have insanely high constitution and the arcane warrior melee damage boosting ability, so just juggle your sustained abilities around and wail on the enemy while you heal.

So yeah.. incredibly weak until level 7 thanks to low willpower. Absolutely Godlike from that point on.

In 2, yeah.. it wasn't so good, but mostly because you still needed willpower to wear high level mage armor and everything was a bit more balanced in 2. Building Merrill as a blood mage was still incredibly powerful though, and if you were playing an offensive mage you didn't really have that many options after getting the excellent Force Mage specialization so you may as well. Personally, I'd have gone spirit healer, put no points in it and just got more damage spells, but never mind.

Oh right, Origins had a story..

Honestly, I kind of like how it was handled. Most of the blood mages you meet are deranged maniacs, and yet there are a few guys out there who genuinely seem to believe they can control it or that it's justified in the pursuit of their goals, and often there's no real evidence they're not right. You can see why the chantry forbids it, because there are good reasons, and you can also see why some mages would legitimately turn to it for good reasons.

Of course, it gets a bit grating in Kirkwall where everyone is a blood mage and you spend half your life killing the deranged pasty suckers. But hey.
 

Terminal Blue

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Anthony Corrigan said:
The fact you can find a build to make use of it doesn't actually change my point, I could find a build to make use of the shapeshifter ability quite easily, the point is that there is a disconnect between game play and story, it SHOULD be massively over powered but with equally large story reasons NOT to use it, what it shouldn't be is ignored by the story and only useful for certain builds.
You do realize that pretty much describes everything about building your character in Origins.

For all its merits, and there are many, it's a completely batshit game from a mechanics and balance standpoint and in terms of story/gameplay integration.. well, there generally isn't any.

For some reason though, most people didn't notice this until Dragon Age 2 (which was actually much more balanced).
 

RJ 17

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wulfy42 said:
In DAO.....blood magic was I believe the weakest specialization....with the largest penalties as well. Why do blood mages suddenly lose all ability to cast spells normally? Shouldn't blood magic be in ADDITION to normal spell casting? That would make way more sense, and effectively double the ability of blood mages to cast spells...while also giving them some spells only they could cast.
Actually it was if you knew how to use it. Blood Magic is a "sustained" ability...you know, you CAN actually turn it off. If you're worried about bleeding yourself to death, then don't start a fight with it turned on. Burn through your mana and then switch over to it like a reserve tank. Or - seeing as how in DAO there were only 2 good spells for it - just cast your Mind Control and your obscenely overpowered AoE-DoT-Stun and turn it off, switching to normal spells. The blood magic AoE was ridiculous. By itself it knocks off half the life bar of anyone caught within it, add to it the fact that the rest of your party charges in and starts attacking and you can clear a room in no time at all. If you're lazy and don't want to micro-manage turning Blood Magic on and off, just use that Blood Sacrifice to give yourself a massive heal and have the person you drained it from chug a health potion. If used properly, there really are no drawbacks to Blood Magic.

In DA2...blood mages were a bit better, but still, you were better off with other specializations in my opinion. Blood magic was supposed to be so bad/evil....and the temptation to use it was there because it was supposed to be powerful....but it just never seemed to be more powerful in actual application.
It didn't really improve that much over what it could do in DAO, I'll give you that, but it was still obscenely overpowered if for nothing else but the AoE-DoT-Stun spell. The biggest improvement came in the new spell which allowed you to drain the life from all surrounding enemies. Getting low on health? Just use your blood vortex spell (forget what it's called, but that's basically what it looks like) and suck the life out of everyone around you. Considering that in DA2 the game felt like throwing endless swarms of baddies at you in waves, this spell came in handy a lot. Beyond that, it still requires the same balancing act as I mentioned above in order to use it effectively.

In real life (or a fantasy world with magic that is semi based on normal laws etc), blood magic should enable you to use anybodies blood to cast spells, so sacrificing a person could enable you to cast huge spells one spellcaster normally would not be able to cast, with no cost to yourself. I think blood magic would not HAVE to be evil though....if the spellcaster only sacrificed their own blood to cast spells. There have been many magic systems based around rules similar to that..with good mages only using their own life force (not blood but still the same) and bad mages using other peoples life force to s cast spells. A blood mage then, in theory, could be a good guy in DA....and I guess you can play your own characters that way if you want.
This actually brings up a pretty big plot-hole in the series. Like you said, all blood mages are seen as being evil, and with good reason. Blood Magic = Demon Magic, the only way to learn it is by reading a demonic spell book or having a demon teach it to you directly. And look at all the trouble that blood mages cause. Merrill needs blood magic to fix her cursed mirror of death, so she strikes a bargain with a demon to learn blood magic. End result: you have to kill her Keeper and - unless you play your cards right - slaughter her entire tribe. In Origins, a blood mage tries to teach a young prince about magic in secret and it ends up unleashing an army of horrors that ransack the castle's village every single night. While a normal mage just requires a bunch of lyrium to send someone into the Fade, a blood mage has to kill someone. Demons are attracted towards people using their magic, knowing that if they're greedy enough to want the power of blood magic, they'll likely be easy target to let the demon itself in and become an abomination.

Annnnnnnd yet no one seems to care at all when the heroic Grey Warden or Hawke starts slicing their wrists and impaling themselves on their staves in order to cast their spells. "Alright, this group of blood mages have been running amuck and now they've kidnapped a Templar, intending to force a demon into his body. Let's go get them!" "Sure thing, just let me get my blood magic ready." Granted it'd be a lot of effort and time spent on rewriting the story specifically on the off chance that the player plays a mage AND selects blood magic as a specialization, but still it's not like it's a big secret that while your party rushes in to start fighting, your standing back there slitting your wrists, controlling people's minds (a feat that can apparently only be done with blood magic in the DA universe), and causing people's blood to boil within their own bodies.

I only played DA2 through once though....on the PS3 even...so I don't remember that much about the classes/specializations etc. In DAO though....There was no reason to be a blood mage that I saw.
I hate to be one of those guys that says "You're doing it wrong" but...you really are doing it wrong. Blood Magic was easily the most overpowered specialization for the mage in both games if used properly.

OT: In quoting/responding to wulfy, I've pretty much summed up my thoughts on the matter in general. Blood Magic is very overpowered if you know how to use it and don't just turn it on and then bleed yourself to death. It requires more micromanaging than the other magic schools, but it really isn't that much trouble to balance it out properly. If you work it the right way, you can essentially have infinite "mana" for any given fight.

With regards to how it plays out in the story, it's obvious that both games try to instill the fact that it is pure evil and nothing good can come from it...which is why it's a giant plot-hole seeing as how the hero does nothing BUT good with it with no negative side-effects at all. You could say that that's evidence that not all blood mages are evil, but that's not what the rest of the story/the NPCs show us. Every blood mage you come across has done something terrible. In particular, in DA2 you slaughter countless blood mages all doing horrific things, while he run-away mage in DAO ends up causing an army of undead to relentlessly attack a town. Above all else, though, is the inescapable fact that blood magic comes from demons...that alone makes it a source of evil no matter what the player-character does with it.
 

Chris Tian

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Anthony Corrigan said:
The fact you can find a build to make use of it doesn't actually change my point, I could find a build to make use of the shapeshifter ability quite easily, the point is that there is a disconnect between game play and story, it SHOULD be massively over powered but with equally large story reasons NOT to use it, what it shouldn't be is ignored by the story and only useful for certain builds. If you look at it the way it's portrayed in the story it's a comstant temptation for every Mage, that its unlimited power but at a dreadful cost, where is that in the game play? Where is the temptation to give it to every Mage because it makes them an evil god? Not for certain builds where you have done this and that, for EVERY Mage, unlimited power
I agree that there should be a connection between gameplay and story.

However I heavily doubt there is any build to use the shapeshifter that even remotely compares to other builds. And BM is not usefull only in certain builds, maybe I did not make this clear but Blood Wound is by far the single most overpowered spell in the game. To get the most out of blood magic you have to build you character in a specific way of course, but thats true for every build.
 

ZippyDSMlee

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It had its uses and made more sense than the magic/skill layouts...

As for it being evil its not the trouble is it was abused and made a taboo.

I hope the next Dragon age is better than 1 since 2 blew chucks I want more RTS features so I can pause and give out commands and place characters where I want more like one than 2.
 

smokeyninjas

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evilthecat said:
Come on guys, Blood magic in Origins was completely overpowered
Totally agree my blood mage \ arcane warrior was so stupidly OP in DAO that he could solo nightmare which is crazy.

evilthecat said:
In 2, yeah.. it wasn't so good, but mostly because you still needed willpower to wear high level mage armor and everything was a bit more balanced in 2.
I still found it pretty powerful in DA2 as i always had him teamed with a ranger so i could use Grim Sacrifice on the rangers pet summon to get health back easily & Paralyzing Hemorrhage is awesome
 

kyuzo3567

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I should point out reading this thread, in DA:O to avoid killing or draining a party members HP to heal yourself, bring a Rogue along with the Ranger specialization. You can select the summoned animal of the Ranger as the party member to drain their health to heal yourself so you don't kill anyone else in your party... Yeah thats all I wanted to say if anyone will ever read this