There has been some internal discussion among both runners and moderators about rules surrounding The Blood Maiden. This is mostly relevant for "open world" categories, like the (obsolete) capstone categories, and several proposed categories, like level 1-60 or Tormented Lilith or Level 1 - Citadel runs.

As it stands, players competing in any category May not use/participate in The Blood Maiden. This is for a handful of reasons. Notably, there are concerns about an advantage while levelling (e.g. being likely to receive assistance from other players, removing the strategic planning + skilled execution required to be efficient at low levels). Relatedly, this would mean that there's a "time window" for runs to be likely to get off the ground -- notably, the beginning of new seasons, when lower world tiers are likely to be highly populated and the Blood Maiden will be well attended.

With the proposal of new endgame categories (1-Torment 4 Lilith, 1-Torment Citadel) in Season 6 and Beyond, there is some concern that prohibiting Blood Maiden may unduly restrict interesting strategies, especially those that rely on items from Zir, who is summoned using Blood.

There is a proposal that's been shopped somewhat, gathering opinion from runners and moderators, to change the way Blood Maiden is regulated, to allow participation under restricted circumstances.

Should Blood Maiden be allowed? Under what circumstances?

The two proposed restrictions are:

(a) Players may participate in Blood Maiden, if and only if they provide one or more of the baneful hearts for her summoning. Players may not use pre-farmed baneful hearts for this purpose, the baneful hearts used must be acquired during the run.

(b) Players may participate in Blood Maiden, but only after achieving level 60. This prevents any levelling advantage from being accumulated, while still allowing for target farming of blood for Zir.

Which of these restrictions should be imposed? Should Blood Maiden remain banned? Should both restrictions be imposed? Please keep in mind that finding a balance of opportunities for interesting strategies, skill expression, good decisionmaking from the runner, and ease of enforcement/moderation is the priorities that should be considered in any rule change.

Hi, Everyone.

As far as whether or not Blood Maiden should be allowed under restriction, I believe it should be allowed during the leveling process and there are a few reasons why.

1. It's worth 5 tree whispers. 5 tree whispers MASSIVELY benefit you in the early game/leveling. As you get a massive XP bonus from completing the whisper and get closer to turning in the full 10 at the tree. This helps for holding caches (to save for maybe getting glyphs at lvl 60) or using them to potentially get undercity tributes and other items to help you blast through the levels.

2. The XP you gain from killing the mobs before the maiden spawn are also nice for XP, but aren't the main reason for fighting her. After the Winter Event, enemies that spawn during the Blood Maiden waves also have a chance to count towards other tree whispers and can directly influence your leveling speed (via whisper completion and faster tree turn ins).

3. Once you hit 15 and have the capabilities to temper on a yellow item, putting elemental surge (legendary rarity) on a weapon (especially if it's a 2h Weapon), makes it so you can clear Penitent Difficulty Blood Maidens alone (and all other content in the game at that point). So, even if there are others there, you're doing a lot of the heavy lifting as far as damage goes (maybe in some situations, the only one doing damage, unless someone is doing what you're doing).

4. Also, if you pay for the summoning, by putting either 1-2 or 3 (only applies to Torment Difficulty) hearts in, you should be able to benefit from the summoning. As torment tiers go up, the Blood Maiden gets more challenging, but as far as farming blood from her, you would want to be as efficient with your time and grinding as possible, so you would probably fight her at T1/T2 (As the game currently is in Patch 2.0, most classes are just farming T1-T2 anyways due to needing GA items and glyph levels to do good damage (If you're a spiritborn in Patch 2.0, you don't count... Looking at you Kepeleke and Viscous Shield >.>).

5. This is the only issue I could see arising from something like this, but this is probably the only "negative" I can think of for a situation like this. If you approach a maiden that is already summoned (you can SEE the special indicator of the boss on your minimap when nearby, an HP bar at the top of your screen will show up or a blinking indicator will appear when someone has activated the altar), and you STAY for the kill, the run is DISQUALIFIED (at least, if you had ADAQUATE time to disengage and failed to remove yourself from the area ((5-10 sec))). Sometimes teleporting to town and coming back will put you in a different instance and allow you to fight the maiden alone/put hearts in to start fresh. But, if you walk into the radius of the area and "load into the server" and the maiden dies, you can't be held accountable for blizz server instability on not being able to load you into a region fast enough to get away. A good area to make a note of this would be the Maiden Altar below the "Ruins of Rakhat Keep". At least for me, whenever I run out of the waypoint there, it takes about 2 seconds to "load" my character into the area and sometimes the Blood Maiden could already be active or she could be close to dead.

6. I think this would be the best way to keep track of your hearts, so that way if you don't zero them out (I'd be rough to do that if you ever wanted to do anything outside of speedrunning), would be to take a mental note and know when you've collected a heart to allow you to accurately know when you are allowed to proc a Blood Maiden. I.E. boot up new character, go to helltide, see you have 23 hearts, and until you know you have 24-25 (depending on if you're doing solo or duo/trio/quad runs) then you'll be able to summon it when you've collected those. If you just so happen to get lucky and someone in the world pays a heart and you're still able to pay, you won't be penalized, because you still paid for it. Still just have to keep a mental note of what you started with in case you want to do multiple summons.

So, yeah. Long story short, I believe that if you take the time to get the resources to summon the blood maiden you should be allowed to reap the rewards.

As someone who's done the 1-T4 Lilith Speedrun MULTIPLE times in multiple different ways, Whispers from Blood Maiden are too valuable to leave out, but also when you're able to clear the content on your own, you should be able to benefit from it. Especially when it is a 0:01:30-0:02:30 time event for 5 whispers, that's just too good to have to pass up.