My worry here is that there are now cases where, ICly, you can have blood that is not collectable or usable due to OOC reasons. To use your example blood from an injury during a battle is currently acceptable, but with the new changes you can have a battle where someone could easily be bleeding, could RP being injured, but a blood mage would not be able to use the blood. I can understand why the one class would get the short end of the stick instead of the many classes, but in this case it does feel like the short end is a bit too short.Maecius wrote:I think the thought process behind it is that a blood magus has to get the blood from another creature in order to bloodwalk to them.
This could either be done with consent or without consent in character, but (from our perspective) requires out of character consent and coordination for it to occur as legitimate PVP. You can't simply say you got blood from a character who hasn't bled.
You can cut them, or collect their blood after cleaning their wounds, or gather it from the site of a battle they fought in and took injuries from. But all of this requires some sort of out of character "OK" from the other player, as you are otherwise assuming that they bled, they left their blood behind, and you were able to collect their blood unnoticed -- and then are able to PVP them without offering an RP out (by essentially exploding out of their body). The RP out in this situation is coordinating with them the collection of their blood.
I don't think most people will deny it if there's a legitimate RP reason behind it. This just prevents people from being marked without even the character's player knowing it. Which is something that generated a number of complaints from the player base.
As Endelyon states, I also have no pony in this race, and don't mind if it's changed later on. But I am glad the devs are at least working on fixing it to the point where the class ability is actually operational. It may require some additional tweaking before it's operating fully as intended -- but if the fix generates a lot of outcry from the player base, we can of course consider alternatives to the current setup. Ideally, though, we'd like to keep the ability as in line with the PVP rules as possible (for an ability that allows you to damage people from maps away with very little warning).
Perhaps a description change can be made to specify the quality of the blood, or some other piece of writing can be added to the class to limit the IC form of blood needed to one that basically requires IC consent. That doesn't completely solve the problem, but it might at least push everything to be IC, instead of IC actions being guided by OOC reasons. That might be a start.