Blood Magic Discussion [1.6]

[WayofTime]

So, as many of you may or may not know, I have been working on a mod lately that is entitled "Blood Magic." The main purpose of this thread is to have an area for members of the FTB community to discuss and give suggestions for the mechanics and general aesthetics of the mod. You probably want to know a bit about it before hand, so here is the MCF link for more information: http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/1899223-162-blood-magic-v030d-updated-aug-08-2013/

The purpose of this mod is to utilize the player's health in a way that will empower the player in a balanced, albeit arcane, way. By draining your health (which now costs food due to the 1.6 regeneration mechanics), you can transmute your own Life Essence into an energy that fuels several powerful rituals and items. Some of these mechanics include a crystal that can run a furnace off of your health, powerful Sigils to buff and protect you, and a Blood Altar that you build up throughout the mod to gain greater and greater power.

I can't really explain every single thing about this mod in a short post, so if you feel so inclined check out the link that was posted above. More is planned to be added as the mod progresses, so feel free to comment about it and give any form of critique that you so feel!

 

[draeath]

Aesthetic wise, this really screams "Diablo" to me - the classic and second, not the third.

I really like the idea, but my group's still on 1.5 so I couldn't do much more than offer that since it seems your asking for that kind of input too

 

[Omicron]

Well the one thing I can add is that if you want your mod to stay "balanced", as you say, then you need to be very careful. There are plenty of mods that add things that are horribly broken, regardless of how much resources, time and effort are required to get it. Soul Shards is an example. A tier 5 shard is really tedious to get, but no amount of tedium in the world could ever make this balanced. The moment you get one, all balance flies out the window, forever.

Therefore: don't try to balance by creation cost. It almost never works.

Balance things by not making them clearly superior to alternatives (the Energy Blaster should not outperform a Power V, Flaming, Infinity bow by more than a minor amount), by giving them clear downsides (the armor should require more blood to mitigate 1 heart of damage than you can get out of 1 heart of self-sacrifice even with efficiency runes), and by simply avoiding things that cannot ever be possibly balanced (see Soul Shards example).

 

[WayofTime]

Well the one thing I can add is that if you want your mod to stay "balanced", as you say, then you need to be very careful. There are plenty of mods that add things that are horribly broken, regardless of how much resources, time and effort are required to get it. Soul Shards is an example. A tier 5 shard is really tedious to get, but no amount of tedium in the world could ever make this balanced. The moment you get one, all balance flies out the window, forever.

Therefore: don't try to balance by creation cost. It almost never works.

Balance things by not making them clearly superior to alternatives (the Energy Blaster should not outperform a Power V, Flaming, Infinity bow by more than a minor amount), by giving them clear downsides (the armor should require more blood to mitigate 1 heart of damage than you can get out of 1 heart of self-sacrifice even with efficiency runes), and by simply avoiding things that cannot ever be possibly balanced (see Soul Shards example).

True, balance is always a difficult thing to achieve for sure. The problem with balance, though, is that you cannot only do it for vanilla. For instance, the Energy Blaster is stronger than a bow, yes, but it isn't stronger than other modded ranged weapons. Also, a point of balance for it is that it continually drains LP from the player, and siphons a large amount when fired. Is it stronger than a Power V, Flaming, Infinity bow? Perhaps. Would you want to use a bow over the Energy Blaster when you no longer have any LP stored? Not too likely. That is just with vanilla, though. If you add mods like TCon to the mix, who creates far superior bows (and much more customizable, cheaper, etc.), the blaster falls short in damage alone. Of course, it has other things going for it, but it isn't completely OP, especially if I were to, say, add other mobs...

The armour has vanilla to balance around, but also other alternatives which I doubt I'd ever want to breach. I do understand that it does need to cost proportionally to how much damage would have incurred, however the problem then appears to be "how much?" 1-to-1 would just be a pain for the user, because if they were to wear vanilla diamond armour that protects against 80% of the damage (without enchantments), why would they really start using the Bound Armour? I put it at around 80-90%, but with how the armour works to deliver the syphoning it will take a bit of tweaking to make it fit those numbers. Then, as always is the problem, mods come into play. When was the last time that you made a MPS when it became available? Very quickly? Yeah, it requires energy, but with most of the things you have set up it is basically a pittance. Also, I think it pretty much stops all damage at minimal cost. Where do you balance the cost then? Of course not mitigating all damage for no cost - this isn't Obsidian Tools, here - but you have to balance it for where it fits in relation to other mods.

I know I am not perfect, and in fact that is one of the reasons that I am enjoying this discussion. It just becomes a bit difficult when other mods come into play, because you pretty much have to look at them along with vanilla. Is my stuff better than vanilla? It's evil, arcane magic, so I better hope it is. By how much? Not too sure, but I do know that if you were to plug in X mod, after Y days you will completely outperform item Z.

 

[Omicron]

I haven't actually ever made a modular powersuit I think it crosses a few lines that I personally am not willing to... at least not without heavily tweaking the configs (usage cost times ten would be the bare minimum, I'd reckon, and even them I'm kinda meh about it). I'm well aware that my desired playstyle will always be on the more difficult end of the spectrum...

Now, the whole "balancing against vanilla or against other mods" is a very unfortunate topic that's never fun to discuss at length (and probably has been beaten to something that no longer resembles a dead horse somewhere). What happens if a popular mod is simply broken - do all other mods have to follow? Do mod authors feel obligated to make their macerator copy output another 10% more than the macerator copy before them that made 10% more than the macerator copy before them that...*snip*, in order for people to find their mod interesting? Would we be in a better place if all mods balanced around vanilla, or would it stifle creativity and give us less cool stuff? Do you balance against individual mods or against cross-mod exploits? Is mod X overpowered because it renders mod Y irrelevant, or is mod Y simply underpowered? And so on. I don't really want to beat on it even more here. All I wanted to do with what I wrote is draw attention to it, and it's good to see that you're aware of the complexity of the issue.

P.S.: Tinker's Conbstruct is way too easy!

 

[WayofTime]

Balance is a very fickle lady, this is true. Do you balance with the OP items, or do you act that they are not there? In fact, you can't even determine what is OP, since it is different from one mod interaction to another. I think balancing around vanilla, while being ... conscious of the other mods is probably the best stand-point. Convenience is also something that will need to be balanced, for instance - if I were to look at the armour again, I'd see that it protects against everything (barring void and drowning, though you can upgrade it so that it can help mitigate those). Though, because of the convenience of not needing to carry as much food with you to regen, or any other types of things to help you get back health, it should probably cost a bit more LP than diamond armour (enchanted, mind you) can protect you from. Also, what about UHC? You can't regen from that, so this armour may be considered OP from that stand-point.

The armour only becomes much more efficient, like everything else, when you fill a blood orb inside an upgraded altar. Otherwise, 1 heart = 200LP. Later on, that one heart will do a lot more. Should you penalize the player for not being at a high-upgrade level? Probably not. More like, you should reward the player for getting to that level. Upgrading the altar has a lot of variability, and I think I really like it for that - may need a balance for individual upgrades, but we'll see how that goes since that is another issue.

I suppose one heart = one heart might be a good baseline for the armour. The better your altar, the better the conversion rate should be. Though, you pay a lot for convenience when you just use the blood orb for portable filling, since it would only give you 200LP for that same heart that could, theoretically, get 760LP at an altar.

I need to learn not to ramble...

 

[Omicron]

You just need to be careful not to give the player a gigantic portable HP pool.

Vanilla diamond armor (without enchants) turns a player's 20 HP into 100 HP. If your armor ever ends up being able to buffer all HP loss from stored LP, then that will probably be a problem considering the magician's blood orb is able to store 1,500 HP worth of LP

 

[WayofTime]

You just need to be careful not to give the player a gigantic portable HP pool.

Vanilla diamond armor (without enchants) turns a player's 20 HP into 100 HP. If your armor ever ends up being able to buffer all HP loss from stored LP, then that will probably be a problem considering the magician's blood orb is able to store 1,500 HP worth of LP

The thing is, it isn't like you are using the LP just for armour. You'd need it for your tools, rituals, summons, any buffs that you have active ... Flying with the Air Sigil drains it like a beast, too.

 

[Pokefenn]

Random thing, but has anyone else tried playing with blood magic with the no health regeneration gamerule?
People should try it, its quite interesting :3

 

[WayofTime]

Random thing, but has anyone else tried playing with blood magic with the no health regeneration gamerule?
People should try it, its quite interesting :3

I do not condemn masochism! =3
(Nor condone, because without regen it may be ... difficult)

 

[Omicron]

You'll just have to pray... a whole lot.

 

[WayofTime]

Sure, you would probably need to pray ... but does prayer really fit with blood magic?

It would be impossible to make the Apprentice orb without health potions or other such things. Hell, even the weak blood orb would need a prayer!

 

[Omicron]

Sure, you would probably need to pray ... but does prayer really fit with blood magic?

Spoiler

 

[WayofTime]

Spoiler

I ... rest my case.

-Backs away slowly-

 

[BadKnightLv01]

The mod looks very good so far, I've actually been looking for some mods pertaining to the whole idea of "dark" or "blood" magic since existing magic mods are a little too tame for me.
One thing that comes to mind when I think of "blood magic" is powerful offensive spells/rituals. I think a cool addition would be more ways to turn this blood magic into an offensive weapon. I think what makes me think of this is playing as a mage in Dragon's Age: Origins, where the mage friend of the main character dabbles in blood magic and ends up using it in his defense when confronted by the castle guards.

 

[WayofTime]

Wondering if my mod is a little too gruesome for some people... I've tried to contact Dire about a spotlight, but his initial interest seems to have fallen so that he won't reply to my queries.

What do you think? I personally think that Minecraft is a world of fantasy, and the mod isn't condoning this type of violence. Is it just something a little too gruesome for people? Or is it just something that isn't suited to Minecraft? I know JadedCat has shown interest in adding this to her mudpack in 1.6.2, so it can't be simply because it is too gruesome. Guess I'll have to think how best to proceed.

 

[PeggleFrank]

Wondering if my mod is a little too gruesome for some people... I've tried to contact Dire about a spotlight, but his initial interest seems to have fallen so that he won't reply to my queries.

What do you think? I personally think that Minecraft is a world of fantasy, and the mod isn't condoning this type of violence. Is it just something a little too gruesome for people? Or is it just something that isn't suited to Minecraft? I know JadedCat has shown interest in adding this to her mudpack in 1.6.2, so it can't be simply because it is too gruesome. Guess I'll have to think how best to proceed.

It's either not big enough as a mod, or simply too gruesome. IIRC he didn't cover the gun in Xeno's Reliquary, but he covered everything else, so he might be trying to keep his mod spotlights less violent/gruesome/morgue/whatever. Although, that would be a bit silly to completely ignore a mod, just because of the theme, so he might be holding back until the mod gets bigger.

 

[WayofTime]

It's either not big enough as a mod, or simply too gruesome. IIRC he didn't cover the gun in Xeno's Reliquary, but he covered everything else, so he might be trying to keep his mod spotlights less violent/gruesome/morgue/whatever. Although, that would be a bit silly to completely ignore a mod, just because of the theme, so he might be holding back until the mod gets bigger.

This may be true, but what is the length of a spotlight that he does normally? About 30min, correct? With the content before 0.3.0, some mod spotlights (albeit shakily covered) reached to 20-25min. Dire tends to ... no offense, but he tends to dumb things down for the audience, so add another 5-10 min. Then the added content of the armour and weapons/tools, and it becomes a whole different ball game.

Also... He covered that Forge Multi Part in 9 min, and Thaumic Tinkerer in 25. Might me a mix of issues, for all I know.

 

[RedBoss]

Wondering if my mod is a little too gruesome for some people...

To be honest, I support you, but the mod is a bit too much for me. I'm not a fan of blood at all, especially in movies or games. I honestly wish you much success in modding but there's a line I blatantly enforce in my entertainment and that's the Gore level. Yeah zombies drop brains and flesh in game, but it's implied no explicit. I can't logically explain the difference, but I just can't deal with anything more than that.

I feel DW20 may see the blood feature as too mature for his main audience. He spends a portion of every smp episode just keeping the convo clean in TS. I can't see him doing a tutorial on blood and things related to it.

 

[cynric]

The mod sounds fine, but I can't even get it to work, or rather NEI blows up in my face when I try, and I'm to lazy to grind vanilla minecraft until I get all the stuff to try out the mod.