I just had a thought, though I am not sure if it is possible. Ultimately it depends on how you feel regarding it, but if you prefer the RNG aspect to bloodrites and wouldn't want to give players the choice to choose, as that could potentially be powerful... Would it be possible to just inform players of which one has rolled?

The reason I am somewhat passionate about bloodrite RNG is that they're the only thing in the game that does not tell you what you're going to get, while also giving you a penalty associated with it. With every other random thing in the game, you can make a choice regarding if you want to use it or not, in addition to them all being purely beneficial.

So at least knowing what I'd rolled, rather than being able to choose what I want, feels better than just rolling the dice and potentially being kicked in the face for no benefit.

Oh, that's an interesting use case for the Barbarian's class title bonus.

But yeah, I was thinking something like each upgrade gives +0.5% or +1% or something. So it'd go from 10% to 9.9%, then 9.8, 9.7, 9.65, 9.6, etc... Or something along those lines.

And while this is a personal suggestion, I'd love to seen an option to enable something to let me choose which blood rite I get, rather than leaving it up to RNG. The only reason I'd really suggest it for blood rites is because of the penalty associated with them.

Due to the change above where blood altar rewards are determined at the start of a run, I could still see myself creating a duplicate profile, using the blood altar, and if it is something I do not want, I'd just reload to the original profile and ignore it. Which... isn't exactly fun.

I can understand some people loving that RNG, but for a player like me, it's basically torture. :P

That would certainly be possible. Right now, in my own play, I use the Barbarian mod class which gives bonus hp as a class title bonus to help defray some of the blood rite hp cost... but it is a good idea for an augment insofar as it does not duplicate the effect of a bonus you could get from somewhere else.

That is a good point. Though I did just have an idea that ties into another mod of yours:

Perhaps a bauble upgrade for your guild that reduces the bloodrite HP penalty by a certain percentage, so while it may still be a flat amount, you can actively invest into essentially giving yourself more HP. I'm not sure of how the exact numbers would work, but I imagine it could be done so that you never completely remove the HP penalty, but you can make it smaller as time goes on.

Problem with the scaling is that it quickly exceeds the armor and resistance penalties from NG+. So, your armor and res end up going *up* when you increase NG+. And without you ever needing to do anything else to increase them. The game gets easier the further you get and it makes items and class bonuses irrelevant.

One thing I was considering suggesting, but wasn't sure about, is putting more of the emphasis toward scaling. Instead of giving a flat 25, maybe give a flag 5 or 10 and retain the +2 per NG. So if you had 10 Immortal at NG+10, you'd normally have 250 + 200 for a total of 450.

Using 5 +2 as an example, you'd have 50 + 200, for a total of 250. Which is essentially what you'd have right now. (Well, for NG+10, at least.) But you'd continue to get a scaling bonus as you increased NGs further.

NG+50 would be: 250 + 1000 normally, or 50 + 1000 using the example above. If that feels too high, you could dabble with the initial value and the scaling to reach what you feel would be balanced. A spreadsheet could make it easy to test different initial values and different scaling methods.

I imagine that they're still useful, but the cost scaling while the benefit doesn't feels wrong to me.

Like add just a flat HP penalty rather than a percent? Maybe...

I do find the altars still very useful when I play. One or two armor or resistance rites can cover much of the penalty caused by advancing NGs

I feel as if there's one big oversight on this rebalance. You've placed a lot of limitations on bloodrites and stripped them of a lot of their power, but not really done anything to compensate for their detriments.

As it is, I'm skeptical that bloodrites will be anywhere near worth the cost of 10% of your HP without the ability to scale. That isn't to say that you should reintroduce scaling, but rather reevaluate the HP cost for bloodrites.

Seeing as the bonuses do not scale, but the penalties sure as heck scale, I feel that that's something that should warrant some attention. I'm not sure how to address the issue, though.

Really like the sound of this, one of the biggest frustrations I have is the blood rites save scumming being the way to progress. Which in multiplayer we don't have the patience for. Saw this got updated recently and tried, however I am getting a broken screen with clouds showing when I add the mod. I assume some compatibility issues with other mods sadly.

Nice I like the idea behind this