Sanguine Blood Mage: Spend HP, deal damage, die anyway
To say Blood Mage is janky and rarely works in PvP would be an understatement.
Here is what I've discovered so far.
If you don't already know, Valanar's Vengeance (I'll refer to it as VV) is Sanguine Blood Mage's primary single target damage ability. The entire spec revolves around building Thirst stacks to reduce its cast time from roughly 4 seconds to ~1 second at 10 stacks.
The problem starts with its health cost.
At max rank, VV costs a flat 902 health. In full BiS PvP gear, that's roughly 1/6 of my entire health pool. Cast it a few times without healing and you're effectively killing yourself.
But that's fine... right?
The entire identity of Blood Mage is supposed to be spending health to cast powerful abilities and then leeching that health back through various means.
And in PvE, this actually works pretty well.
Blood Bolt heals you for roughly half your maximum health if you crit, while the Cardiac Arrest talent causes VV to deal additional damage based on the damage it deals and heals you for a portion of that damage over 2 seconds.
Considering I can crit for around 13k with a single VV, this can amount to a substantial amount of healing and makes Blood Mage extremely self sufficient in PvE.
In PvP, however, this falls apart completely.
Due to VV's PvP damage tuning, I'm hitting for roughly 1k to 2k damage.
That's still respectable damage for PvP, but because Cardiac Arrest's healing scales from the damage VV deals, reducing VV's damage also reduces our healing to basically negligible amounts.
Importantly the dot/hot of Cardiac Arrest does not stack on subsequent casts, which further nerfs its already weak output.
So we end up paying 902 health to deal roughly 900 to 2k damage, while receiving almost none of that health back.
You might be thinking:
"Yeah, but there are other ways to heal yourself."
And you'd be right. There are.
Are they effective?
Not really.
Outside of spamming Sanguine Mend directly in people's faces until you've burned through your Rage, our other sources of sustain aren't enough to compensate for the health we're constantly spending.
"But what about your big cooldowns? Transfusion and Fleshcraft?"
Yes. Transfusion (Lifeswap) is a huge heal, and Fleshcraft is a massive instant heal.
They're also on 3 minute and 5 minute cooldowns, respectively.
If your class effectively requires its biggest defensive cooldowns simply to continue doing meaningful damage, that is a pretty fundamental problem in PvP.
And then there's Apotheosis.
Apotheosis heals you for 100% of the damage you deal, which sounds like exactly what Blood Mage needs.
The problem is that it doesn't solve the underlying issue. We still need significant amounts of healing to offset VV's health cost, and our most reliable sources of that healing are tied to long defensive cooldowns.
So we're left with a class whose primary damage ability costs a significant portion of our health, while our main source of sustain is heavily dependent on damage that gets dramatically reduced in PvP. Our alternative healing options are either insufficient or tied to massive cooldowns, and our supposedly powerful 5 minute sustain cooldown is something we need just to keep ourselves alive while using our core ability.
This would become less of a problem later on with better gear, considering VV has a flat 902 health cost. As our health pools increase, that cost becomes proportionally smaller. But will the server last long enough to reach this level of gear before Blizzard takes it down? I hope so, but its not certain.
Would making the health cost of spells a percentage of our HP instead of a flat value ease this problem? Perhaps.
Would buffing the life leeching aspects of our kit in PvP ease this problem? Absolutely.
Blood Mage has an awesome identity.
Spending your own blood to cast powerful spells and then leeching that health back through your abilities is exactly the kind of class fantasy I want.
But right now, the PvP tuning creates a fundamental problem:
Our health costs remain unchanged in PvP, while our damage is reduced, leaving us to pay the full cost without enough sustain to compensate.
And that leaves Sanguine Blood Mage in a bizarre situation where its core gameplay loop works in PvE but falls apart the moment you take it into PvP.
TLDR;
Sanguine PvE: Do damage, leech HP back, be happy :D
Sanguine PvP: Do damage, leech nothing, fall over, be sad :(
Edited for clarity.