Talk:Blood Blade (3.5e Equipment)

TL;DR, reduce everything by one stage and change penalty to be con damage, reduce healing, add some cosmetics and flair I think the balance of this could be improved by changing the cost to be 4 points of Constitution instead of a flat health decrease. This would keep the cost going into the end of the game, and allow DMs to use this in higher-level campaigns without fear of (as many) balance issues. I think that the crit bonus should also either be decreased to 19/20 x3 or 18/20 x2, as that bonus is huge and would make several classes way too good. I think it also might be good to decrease the damage bonus a little to 1d8 for small, 2d6 for medium, 2d8 for large, 3d6 for huge etc, its still better than any weapon in the PHB. Finally, for the debuffs, I think that the healing should be reduced to 1d2 + con mod per hit, multiplied on a crit, as a source of free healing on tanks is quite good, even in small amounts, but 1d10 would scale too well with feats like whirlwind attack and in general with the higher amounts of attacks in the endgame. In terms of a gameplay niche, I think one bonus that could have really cool implications would be having the blade be bound to you, living in your bloodstream until summoned. It would stop you from just getting one of these from someone without paying the cost, it would also give it a cool aesthetic and give a really interesting tool for rogues, who the properties of the item are already great for, but with the cost of making them more susceptible to attacks with the decreased con. It could also be interesting to see the blade being able to take the form of any bladed melee weapon, but with the same damage etc, just as a customization option.

overall I think this could be a really cool tool with some balance tweaks, if you're watching the page, I would welcome any comments on the changes, I didn't want to make such sweeping changes without putting this here for the author of the page to comment but if there's no response I'll put them through in a while. If you don't like them then I'll just take the changed version for my campaign, but I think this could be really cool for other settings as well. --Teramin (talk) 07:10, 10 November 2021 (MST)

I personally can not comment about the balance of this item as I am not too familiar with 3.5e, but thank you regardless for your through breakdown of what changes you believe this item should have Teramin. Feel free to make changes to this item when you feel necessary as if you check the page's history tab at the top, it was created 5 years ago by an anonymous user and has since only had minor fixes to the page's formatting/other things.--Blobby383b (talk) 10:45, 10 November 2021 (MST)