How to use blood magic effectively in battles?

[konming]

Blood magic has some great summons, but I could not find good battlefield magic. I wonder what good players use?

Blood Broil - Does not use blood slaves and AN, but has short range (20) and can be resisted by MR. Also single target and less than stellar precision.

Agony - 1 point of damage seems quite useless. Fear+0 attack would be useful, but I never saw it been effective.

Hellfire - Now we have a decent AOE attack. Still, falling fire would be much better IMO.

Harm - I do not see the point in this spell, can anyone point out a use for it?

Blood Rain - -4 Morale could be useful against elephants I think, other than that, what use is this spell?

Blood Letting - at 400 base fatigue, a B4 caster can at most decrease that to 80 fatigue. And doing 1 point of AN+MR damage, what's the point?

I admit life for a life and infernal prison are really great later against SCs, but before that, I cannot find a decent battlefield spell, or is there some secret I do not know?

[Micah]

Leech is fairly solid for low-level casters, since it's a life drain attack and will pay back most of the fatigue it costs to cast if you hit a square with 3 units in it. Rush of Strength is decent because it hits your whole army.

But yes, in general outside of L4L and the "go to hell" spells blood magic is *** in combat. So is most water magic, outside of quickness. Just the way things go.

[konming]

Yeah, I forgot about Leech. That's a decent one.

[The DarkOne]

Harm can actually be pretty useful if you cast it with a highlevel bloodmage since both area of attack and damage increses with the level of the bloodmage casting it.
Assuming that both AoE and damage increses by one for every level of bloodmagic above the 2 needed a level 9 bloodmage will have a AoE 11 dam 9 AN attack which isn't bad.

[Sombre]

Water magic does have frozen heart, which is pretty damn good. The equivalent blood spell is leech.

Hellfire can be ok as well.

[Lord_Bob]

If you have other paths.... or empower a mage in blood, the fatigue reducing spell would probably be worth something.

[Taqwus]

Hell Power, if you've got multiple other paths.

In general, while Blood got a combat boost over D2, it's still a summoning-heavy school -- especially if you're Lanka or Mictlan with all those tasty national summons.

Edit --
Oh, and certain tasty items, as well. Blood Thorn is the only 1HD non-unique life-draining weapon in the game, IIRC. Hell Sword is 2HD, but gives fire resistance, 'zerk, AND lifedrain. Armor of Souls is nice if you're facing lots of astral mages or mindblasters, for the heavy MR boost. Boots of Youth, for, well, youth. Contracts give devils...

[Warhammer]

Life for a Life looks like it would be good against SCs.

[Velusion]

Warhammer said:
Life for a Life looks like it would be good against SCs.

I've found B9 is excellent in that scenerio. The "send to inferno" spells and LfL can be very powerful against SCs.

Of course... you have to get to B9 and are only usable by above average blood mages...

[Micah]

L4L is B3, but only 1 slave, so a B2 mage could get a cast off...not exactly "above average" there. He'll be very much KO'd from it, but L4L is kind of a multiple-caster spell anyhow if you're trying to drop a 200HP SC.