How much life and life regen before getting blood magic?

Question is in the title. I have my tree currently set up so I can get blood magic at any time, just not sure if I have enough stats to support it.

Playing a 2h axe mara.

When your life regen can sustain you constantly spamming any attack, while still gaining health. There is no exact "magic number", just whatever works best for you and your build.

I play hardcore only. Please realize that my opinion is heavily influenced by that choice. From my point of view, blood magic is never worth it.

Making mana work is a careful balance that requires a DPS sacrifice.
Making blood magic work is very easy. But it always makes your time to live shorter against an "oh, shit" situation. Every single time: you die faster for having blood magic linked, or picking up the blood magic passive.

Put yourself in the worst scenario imaginable. Now imagine every one of your 3 APS costs 50 life, that's 150 life per second that could be in your health globe instead. At what cost? A mana related link, a few passives spent on RMC, a few pieces of gear that carry +mana. Maybe a third of your DPS in trade for a third of your total healing. Blood magic gives up survivability in favor of DPS.

So how much regen are you willing to live without? that's the real question. I'm not willing to give up ANY. Most people obviously think differently, and I don't really blame them, this is just the way I personally approach it :) It all depends on your point of view.

As I've said elsewhere, I come from the totally opposite direction as the much-respected Zakaluka: I'm lazy and generally only play softcore. I still try very hard not to die, though.

For me, Blood Magic is perfect. Managing one resource instead of two is great. As a melee evader, will get BM the moment I can reach it, typically. I'll rely on +life gear and flask liberally. Maybe I'll grab a few life+% nodes if they're on the way, which they typically are. I find that the cost of skills for melee is typically well manageable in the absence of mana. Whereas with mana, I get frustrated at running out and temporarily losing my killing efficiency.

Did I mention I'm lazy?

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Charan wrote:

As I've said elsewhere, I come from the totally opposite direction as the much-respected Zakaluka: I'm lazy and generally only play softcore. I still try very hard not to die, though.

For me, Blood Magic is perfect. Managing one resource instead of two is great. As a melee evader, will get BM the moment I can reach it, typically. I'll rely on +life gear and flask liberally. Maybe I'll grab a few life+% nodes if they're on the way, which they typically are. I find that the cost of skills for melee is typically well manageable in the absence of mana. Whereas with mana, I get frustrated at running out and temporarily losing my killing efficiency.

Did I mention I'm lazy?

That's why I play a shadow with the Mana Leech passive. I might have two resources but I only have to manage one! My mana is infinite, even when I only have 30 maximum, =).

It's the best of laziness and survivability all at once, ^_^

Being a marauder, i guess u always hit never crit, then with 5 increased hp regen flasks, a good vitlity gem and (whatever the skill u use)+BM+life leech if it doesnt break ur build.

I would never take the node, why? easy because u are missing a full reservation of mana, with 100 mana u can have 2 aura that spend 40% or 2 aura with 30+ 1 with 40... etc. so picking bm node is a waste, if u dont want to break your build well get some mana leech (it will also break ur build if u get the gem but whatever, u can get it from nodes).

I come from yet another perspective: I only play HC, but I swear by Blood Magic.

The reason is, quite simply, it reduces the number of stats I need to keep up with to be effective. Yes, you are in a sense 'trading survivability for DPS' - but that means I can justify getting WAY MORE of those survivability mods than a non-BM build can. I can replace all that +mana and +mana regen/leech with +hp and +hp regen/leech.

To put it another way: it's only trading survivability for DPS if you choose to spend those extra passive points and gear mods that would have been used for mana on DPS stuff. You can spend it on survivability stuff instead.

It's more efficient to stack twice as much of one stat than half as much of two different ones, because you can stack multiplier bonuses on top of base stat bonuses and make each point you spend more efficient. Instead of having +100% hp and +100% mana, making each extra hp or mana twice as effective, I can have +200% hp and make each point three times as effective instead.

In an 'oh shit' situation, I have more hp and hp regen than your non-BM build has. I can either spend that extra hp on spamming skills, in which case we're even, or I can cast fewer skills and have a bigger hp pool than you could ever have access to.

The trade-off you're making with a BM build isn't "less survival, more skill spam." The most direct way to adapt a build to BM is to take all the points you spend on mana stuff, and spend them on hp stuff instead. That's *more* survivability. Whether you end up with more or less effective survivability in practice depends on a lot of other factors. If you think of it as turning your unspent mana (which is useless) into extra hp (which is very very useful), and balance the rest of your build and skill usage accordingly, it seems pretty clearly like a way to *enhance* survivability. It gives you options to play dangerously (in HC, you can read that as 'stupidly'), since you can effectively keep casting when you should be out of mana by depleting remaining HP, but it certainly doesn't force you to.

TL;DR: BM builds are only a risky playstyle if you use BM to spam way more skills than you otherwise could. That's not the only way to use it.

Short answer: don't worry about regen, get it as soon as possible.

I just hade to post my opionion on this matter since I think its relevant to some other keystone passives aswell.

Blood magic and Resolute technique and two kind of similar nodes and both of them share the fact that you trade complexity for a benefit that can be gained elsewhere.

By complexity I mean that you can get your attack rate just enough with some careful skill planning and equipment, same goes for blood magic if you manage your mana well.

I think all this can be done without reducing killing efficiency so thats why I never take these nodes anymore but I love the fact that they do exist, since they increase the build diversity.

This is my observation from playing hardcore.

I don't think the op cares about the pros and cons of blood magic vs mana, he obviously wants to take blood magic it's just a matter of when.

So, to get back on topic, the correct time is just as Aplier said, when your regeneration is enough to allow you to spam any of your skills while still regaining health. Personally, I like to take blood magic a little earlier. I like to take it just before I can sustain my attacks with regen but I have enough life gain on hit/kill to keep my health topped off. It's a little riskier, but in the early game its worth it. It's better to get your dps up early and sustainability later rather than the other way around, at least that's how I look at it.