What is the deal with the Blood Mage?

[cANe]

Why are 90% of all the cards you are offered dead cards for him? All the sigils sucks due to no way to keep your summons alive and all the promotion cards are double edged swords.

What am I missing?

EDIT: Not to mention the skills are just as awful if not worse. Worst class I've played so far

EDIT 2: My point isn't as much that the blood mage sucks as my first run with him still worked out pretty well but more so that a lot of the cards feel straight up useless to him, same with the skills. I never skipped so many cards so early as I did with the Blood mage

[Omega AI]

Promotion cards are close to the equivalent of overcharge cards at 100%. E.g. in a really niche scenario if you need to activate+overcharge a minion ASAP and dont have enough ult or saving ult for something else than use a promotion card.
Overall removing them from the deck or skipping them can be more useful.

Overall yes the bloodmage kit is probably the worse when it comes to snowballing among summoners (maybe all classes? ). Many of the acquaried across run passives are not that amazing compared to other summoner passives. E.g. many are barely helpful and can backfire. Like with bloodmage there was actually a run whereby all offered passives among 3 were pretty much useless and kind of something that backfire (promotions. e.g. summon minion promotes him twice), so yes I skipped them. That has never happened on another class.

Overall i feel like non starter passives across most classesimprove or even completely change the way a class plays. However with bloodmage its minimal.

[Pokelot]

Blood Mage needs to be redesigned. It's basically just a bad Summoner with a blood theme.

[Omega AI]

if we exclude lich form is necromancer just a bad summoner with death theme? :)
obviously lich form is the caveat.

[Zoppy]

The Blood Mage is one of my favorite classes. I found him annoying the first few times I played that class. I tried my best to keep my minions alive for the sigils to work and other such nonsense. Lean in to the idea of explody bits and he becomes an absolute beast.

On my first few successful runs, I relied too much on getting the trait that makes the offerings heal instead of damage when you are at 25% health. It's a really good ability, but abusing his ability on the blood golems. Has you more than set on the health thing. Most of my fights with him on the higher difficulties has the enemies die in 1 or 2 turns.

My tips are prioritize getting a lot of armor. It helps a lot on the survival of your golems.
From what I see, the minions damage is linked to yours so don't neglect your own damage (Gar runes etc.)
Get 2-3 abominations and a preferably a mark (spell).
Some of the best spells are the ones that promote all of the creatures at once and those that activate them all. They are instant picks. The advanced promotion spell is, however, good at ending fights quickly with an abomination being summoned at lvl 4 (with trait) and then exploding killing the mobs the next turn.
Get rid of ALL of the barrier spells ASAP. Then get rid of the imp and the single promotion spells. The sigil that makes them activate their ability at the start of a turn is one of the few that works with this class, protection is good for the golem in the start, and the sigil of the rat "something" does provide a hefty damage boost. Ignore the rest.
The arcane barrier (or whatever it's called) where it adds barrier for each minion is a good safety net. Do try to limit yourself, to having a maximum of 2 of them.

Some of the best passives are the ones that summons them at higher levels. You WANT those explosions.

Amoung the 3 lvl 20 class specific traits. One of them have the minions not die, when they overcharge. They are not even killed and resurrected. They are instead just lvl'ed down to lvl 2, so the sigils keeps working on them.
The sigil that activates the minions on the start of a new turn stacks with itself.

I saw someone saying the broke the 1 billion barrier on the final boss in another thread, though I don't know the details or the legitimacy of that statement. My own current best is breaking the 1 million barrier (1.2M) with a Blood Mage.

[micdy]

it's funny because i think it's the most Overpower class , and so far it's the only one i have success with

[Juniper Seed]

You guys are crazy.

I got my first win with Summoner, and my second win with Blood Mage. While Summoner is super fun, assuming Blood Mage is worse was also my first impression. However, after giving it a go (won on my first try on Difficulty 2) I think it's just as good as Summoner, if not stronger, specifically towards the end of the run.

The reasons why Blood Mage is so powerful is because of the inherent mechanics of the class. Having the summons activate at end-of-turn (EoT) without your input is insanely powerful. In addition, passives which promote a unit upon summon become outlandishly powerful.

For my run I used the Golem as my starter summon. (Just for comparison, I used Wyrm for the Summoner). I opted for passives that promoted Wyrm, Fae, and Abomination upon summon. I also opted for passives that gave me flat armor, Energy upon Overcharge, Cost reduction on Overcharge, and Activation upon summon.

Cards that REALLY stood out were:

Synergy (Cost 1 - Invoke Fae and Wyrm), Invocation (Cost 3 - Activate all minions 2 times), Funeral Moon (Cost 1 - Reduce enemy's damage by 75% for 2 turns), Death Mask (Cost 1 - Mark an enemy for 5 turns and reduce its armor by 20 for each hit while marked), and Random Ritual (Cost 1 - Activate a random minion 2 times)

Those cards are simply broken on Blood Mage.

The backbone of Blood Mage is Promotion (Cost 1 - Offer 2% Max HP, promote a minion) and Ritual (Cost 1 - Activate a minion)

So how do we become OP?

The trick is playing around promotion levels 3/4 and your overcharge. Abom 4, Golem 4, Fae 2/3/4, and Wyrm 3/4 are absolutely BONKERS. In conjunction with Ritual activation comboing with EoT activation followed by Overcharge procs... talk about insta-gibbing!

With the Blood Mage, unlike with Summoner, Fae is sleeper OP!!! If you aren't playing Fae, sometimes twice, in your composition of four minions, you're not playing Blood Mage correctly. In addition, I found (later in the game) Abomination to completely outclass Wyrm in the majority of fights. Wyrm is still BiS against bosses and other big bois. Especially with Death Mask in the deck. (I got the -500 armor achievement on the final boss, reaching -640 armor)

Lastly, your Ultimate ability is dumb-strong. Need to heal but don't want to give up your level 3 Golem? Summon a level 1 Golem and Ult it for that sweet, sweet, blood juice. Need to wipe the board? Ult your level 4 Abomination after double Rituals and do upwards of 300 damage to all enemies! Not a fan of anxiety? Ult your Fae and watch your problems go away!

Seriously, as much fun as I had with the Summoner making a level 15 Wyrm motor-boat all the Wyrdspawn, Blood Mage is WAYYY more fun, more engaging, and has way more powerful combo turns. If you like playing combo, set down your Apostle and try out Blood Mage.

See my screenshot for a glimpse of the true power of Blood Mage.

[Zoppy]

A bit off-topic. But the most overpowered for the regular game is probably the sentinel. Selling and completely ignoring the quivers was something of a revalation for me on that class. Going down to 2 faints and selling the class ability, while getting the big buff maneuvers. the good arrows (returning shot can be abused HARD with this setup) and a few more multishot abilities has him 1-shotting every single fight. Every encounter and every boss. You do of course need to prioritize getting the draw traits. Calc, Gar, and Haegl are best in slot for the weapon runes for this build. Yr and the ones that adds more armor is best for the armor slot.

[Zoppy]

Regarding getting -640 in armor... it's hard capped at -500.

[Zoppy]

I've found the fae (imp) to only be usefull in the first area. I regard is a more of a waste of the spaces available and that its ability to be irrelevant, once you have an explosive build with abominations. Getting that on the draw instead of an abomination has you doing nothing on the first turn, should that be the only one, you got from a bad hand. Great you can sit back and the ultimate ability is charged slightly more. When instead you could have won the fight or at least almost won it with the other minions.

[JayXan]

its funny how people think the blood mage is weak

[Zoppy]

Looking at the thread, it appears to only be the first few people who shares this sentiment. So it's not so much "people" as it's "some people". They have their preferences and they were not met in this class it seems.

[Zoppy]

One thing to note, cards does not seem to unlock in a specific order. They could have been stuck with the worst ones for the class.
My first save slot was a blast with the wyrdhunter. Getting the big and powerful attacks with good synergies.
Later on in another run, I missclicked on the old archer, his abilites permanently became an inferiour version of what they could have been and I started a new save slot. Almost all the skills that were available were defensive and utilitarian in nature. Making him a punching bag with little to no punch on the first few runs, which was not fun.

[EsurientSophist]

Blood Mage became ridiculous once I used AOE sac skills for power and barrier and even better with the passive to make them activate on death. Every turn was basically sac everything, get full gauge, transform, do whatever was needed, and continue. The lv.20 skill makes it so they just turn back and forth from ethereal to normal if you keep aoe sacing so you have infinite minions just triggering every time they "die" while feeding you barrier and damage+.

[Draktok]

Originally posted by Zoppy:

I saw someone saying the broke the 1 billion barrier on the final boss in another thread, though I don't know the details or the legitimacy of that statement. My own current best is breaking the 1 million barrier (1.2M) with a Blood Mage.

he did it on apostate because with the right cards he can basically infinitely loop a turn, or at least take a VERY long one - when some cards draw cards, others flip cards, cards flipped reduce energy, flips charge ult, ult flips cards and reduce energy, others grant energy - you can literally rotate a deck 50 times if you don't mess it up - and every flip grants damage, hence his 1 billion claim.

but he literally took 7 hours for one turn at one point, so you know, he's crazy.

[Drimizi]

The summoner classes are all garbage. Just had a fight where for 10 turns nothing happened because my minions kept attacking the enemies invincible summons and ignoring the one enemy that could be damaged. Was so irritated I gave up and let myself die just so I could start a run with a real class.