The low health death magic damage increase feels odd.

@Chris - The playstyle, maintining half health and using soul tap to stay around there, causes a lot of downtime in your damage-dealing. If you're using global cooldowns to hurt yourself instead of throw out damage spells, your damage output takes a hit. Death Magic already has a large risk associated with it as it reduces your life magic attunement, thus (if I understand correctly) making you more difficult to heal with life spells? Perhaps this will be offset when we get bandage healing, but as it is right now trying to maintain half health goes against almost every instinct I have as a gamer.

I've been helping a friend of mine try to min/max a death/fire mage, ultimately he's decided to only use death ray in his build to combo it with flame arrow and is otherwise ignoring death magic. In his words, he doesn't feel like having to stay away from his group mates in case they're using aoe heals, or tell his group mates not to heal him because he'll lose damage. I'm playing a healer this time around and my first instinct as a healer, when I see a death mage at half health, is going to be to heal them.

Changing Death Ray to a channeled ability would be awesome. That with the fact that we've got heal creature and (according to the rumor mill) bandage healing coming soon, would push death magic more towards being a "main" school of magic, something you can really build a character around. But, if you're channeling a spell you'd have to stop the channel to drop your health again once you've healed above half or you'd lose half of your damage, or make sure you're nearly dead before starting the channel.

Question. Do the Death pets still decay over time? If so, what's the trade-off for that vs. summons from another school of magic? I'd love to try out a necromancer build release 29 for a while if the channeled death ray makes it in... possibly. I don't know if I look forward to trying to maintain half health or lower to put out the same (or possibly less) damage I could put out with fire and not have to worry about getting healed by another player.

 

Without having tried this at all, you've made a really strong argument for approaching death magic in a different way.

 

Currently the death pets still decay over time. I'd love to see them give a hp/focus gain or death themed sacrificial buff of some type to the caster on death to make them dying something to actually look forward to a bit.

 

I was thinking something similar the other day. My thought was that on death of the summoned skeleton/lich maybe instead of the corpse disappearing instantly, it could stick around for 30 secs or so to be used as fuel for the corpse explosion skill.

As to the OP I haven't really played around much with the new low health increased power to say how effective it is. In general I don't think the health gains/damage dealt from the death skills are quite good enough. It certainly hasn't kept me from having life heals as an crap buttons. But my skills are only in the 20s for the death skills so they could get much better at higher skill. I kind of think that the Death Field (the AOE life drain) should be more of a leech over time (channeled) skill instead of a one off leech.

 

now that i have made a death mage and leveled him up i'd have to say death magic is useless as is, i struggle to kill the same mob my other avatar has no problems with whom is 10 levels lower than my death mage, based on that i'm not even willing to test the build in pvp. the only skill i have found of any use in the death magic tree is tap soul and i don't need to be a death mage for that.

death magic is for fools lol.