Here are a few changes I would make:
- As warmachine stated bloodbond needs to be decreased. Simply because a boilblood can 'full heal' a party. I would say somewhere around 20% as he stated would be a fine fix.
- Another change I would say is to remove thickenblood and give bloodmage constrict again. Constrict was a better skill for them and was way better than thickenblood. The slowness wasn't incredibly overpowered considering it was what, slowness 1? But it allowed the bm/rest of the party to catch up to any class rather than only a select few (warriors and ninjas).
- In return for that I would say decrease the amount healed from SiphonBlood to 80-100% + 6% per blood union. Bloodmages can simply outheal a lot of damage using SiphonBlood every 4 seconds. Of course this is not really practical due to mana costs, though it is still a lot of healing.
- Change Bloodboil. Make it a warm up skill first of all and make it so that the damage is decreased to the other targets. So it would be 220 dmg to the initial target, then the targets within range of them would receive 110 damage as well. This would reduce the total amount healed to the party, but would still be a good AoE for group fights. Getting to 3 blood unions is fairly easy and good bloodmages should be able to get more than one off per fight. I'm not entirely sure on what the range of the AoE is, but if it is fairly large the damage could be changed even more.
Not sure if these would be perfect changes, of course they would need to be tweaked after more testing... But in my opinion Bloodmage should have been finely tuned before revamp #3, because it obviously was not.
I spend a lot of time developing for Herocraft. Whether it be balancing, bug fixing, or ability re-coding, I spend at
least 20 hours a week of my
free time devoted to the server. While I understand that I am not perfect, and am prone to make some mistakes at time, I believe that I am doing good for the server. I also think I'm a pretty understandable guy when it comes to these kinds of things. If I know a class of mine is imbalanced, I
will fix it. You won't even ever have to say anything--chances are I already know. I knew BoiBlood + BloodBond was broken as soon as Gabi threw his event in Forgelight. It was already going to be fixed.
When I win a fight in Herocraft, I want it to be because of my skill, not because of some outside source, such as hacks or imbalanced classes. I want to win because of -me-. However, I also want to have fun while I do it, which is why I have revamped a couple classes so far. Revamping something essentially puts you back at square 1, and I'm not perfect enough to get it right from the start. It's completely understandable if you or anyone else does not agree with my statements, but I'm sticking by them.
Balance is not as easy as people like to think, and it is very easy for certain things to go under the radar. Not everyone on the balance team has a large amount of time, or reason to actually be dedicated to their position. You're lucky that even
I am dedicated enough to put in the work I do.
You mentioned that Bloodmage should have been more finely tuned before revamp #3. I'd like to go out and say that a lot of time
was spent finely tuning Bloodmage before the update. Several hours of several days were devoted to completing the class. I personally tested over a hundred 1v1 and 2v2 situations, and also got in those few teamfights you partook in as well.
Those teamfights against your group on the test server that you all are so proud of, were done so that we could fine-tune certain numbers. And despite the fact that you say the class didn't have the numbers that it has now during that time--they honestly weren't very far off. Numbers are very deceiving things...
Running into issues like these are just part of playing on an ever-changing server. They can happen at any time, and affect any random number of people. It could be my fault, it could be Kainzo's fault, it could be
your fault. No matter what game, what server, or how many people are devoted to developing things, this kind of situation will
always pop up. It's just part of game design. I acknowledge that I screwed up in regards to the BloodBond+BoilBlood combo, but I do not believe that the class is "broken" in it's current state. The combo only strongly affects a very rare situation that you've yet to even witness first hand.
Despite the fact that I've been extremely overworked with my college Senior Project, I've taken very precious time out of my very few days remaining to ensure that Bloodmage was a working, complete, balanced class for the update.
Yes, I missed some things. But are these issues as big as you make them out to be? No. The only reason you are as upset as you are is because Umbra happened to have a couple of Bloodmages with them during a teamfight, and your group was forced to fight against them. But in addition to the
two bloodmages we had, we also had
two beguilers,
two paladins (with two layhands mind you.)
two samurais,
a wizard, and a ninja. If you had that kind of team comp, or perhaps if nona was with you last night, I think you would have had a much different opinion right now. But hey, maybe I'm wrong.
It's a real shame I didn't record that fight, because that way you could have seen the numbers in real time. It wasn't the Bloodmages that won that fight--it was the paladins, beguilers, samurais and wizard. The people you claim to have "bursted down" and that got "healed to full by bloodmage" were actually healed by our paladins--with layhands. An ability that
just got nerfed to crap and still won us the fight. But whatever, you're right, it was probably just the Bloodmages.
Honestly though, It doesn't even matter, we've already addressed the situation. The changes that are coming in the next update will prevent a Bloodmage from
ever being able to "full heal" off of BoilBlood. The healing in general from BloodBond has also been reduced. With the additional bug fix on BloodUnion, this will completely fix the issues you are concerned about.
Now, I need to get back to work on my senior project, so I'll have to opt out of addressing your suggestions directly, and for now just say this:
I disagree.