Blood Mage (Base Class)

[jiriku]

In my opinion, a class that is made better by cooperating with other classes is good, so I'm counting this as a win.

Point taken.

Wand of Cure Light Wounds between combats?

My concern is that the blood mage is in a truenamer-like position in which operating at his full potential becomes more difficult as he advances in level, rather than less. A quick review, assuming a character who starts with 18 Con and 18 Cha, then scales to 26 Con and 26 Cha by level 18

{table=head]Level|Avg hp|Hp to cast all spells|% of total
1st|8|4|50%
6th|49|32|65%
10th|89|89|100%
14th|151|175|116%
18th|171|276|161%[/table]

For this analysis I'm leaving out the SLAs that grant temp hp and the option to burn hp and/or Con when casting spells, but I think this demonstrates my concern. Also, you can see that at higher levels, a blood mage would need a wand factory to support him if he tried to use the wand of CLW trick to support his casting.

My spiel [about fast healing] is mainly that, if I'm going to create an innate feature that mitigates the drawbacks of Bloodletting, that feature itself has to have a drawback. You know my policy here: no free lunches.

I would propose that "must harm self to use class features" is a significant and overarching drawback, especially when the bulk of your spell list is intended to be cast while other people are trying to kill you.

Arcane Healing (Su): A Blood Mage develops the power to turn their arcane energy inward, channeling it through their blood to induce healing in the body. As a full-round action, a Blood Mage can spend an uncast spell to heal damage equal to the level of the spell expended.

This is reasonable. You might also consider an ability like the warlock's fiendish resilience, or an ability that grants fast healing but disables spellcasting while in use (thus, it's for out of combat healing only).

I'm not sure being able to apply Arcane Disciple or a Bloodline feat to Blood Mage breaks anything to Hell... But I might be sure of that only because I'm not intimately familiar with the Domain lists and the Bloodline feats, and the EXP/GP-heavy spells you can cast from those lists (I have never played out a divine caster, and still have to look up domain spell lists from time to time when I write characters for campaigns). If you can give me an example of what to look for, specifically, that would be great, but even just help on the wording would be nice (as I don't know how to go about excluding other spells from the spell list; I mean, really, it has no precedent with the Beguiler, Bard, Wizard, or anything else that I know of, and it's kinda hard to write something that DOESN'T have a workaround here, where everything's RAW only if the cheese isn't scraped off it, after which the jump is quickly made to RAI).

My suggested text would simply be "The blood mage may not benefit from any effect that would add additional spells to his class spell list or list of blood mage spells known."

Concerns would be (using "free" to describe an XP or GP cost paid with hp in an out-of-combat setting where the damage can be healed with no risk):

• Ultimate Magus to acquire free permanency in conjunction with access to the wizard spells compatible with permanency.
• Arcane Disciple to acquire free miracle.
• Arcane Disciple to acquire the Healing domain.
• Mother Cyst to acquire necrotic tumor (which provides dominated minions for use with blood pact) and necrotic empowerment (which provides 100 temp hp per casting).
• Sand Shaper to acquire free awaken sand (for unlimited minions).
• Rainbow Servant to acquire free raise dead/resurrection/restoration/greater restoration/mass restoration/stalwart pact/renewal pact/death pact.

Basically, bloodletting makes this a Tier 2 class, able to break the game in a variety of ways, depending on build. However, with a hard restriction on expanding the list, you could close that can of worms and restore this to the Tier 3 role you were envisioning.