A group of friends and I will be beginning a 3.5 campaign in the near future. I have never played 3.5, but would like to use the Blood Mage Paragon Path in the 3.5 campaign. So, is there a prestige class or class that is similar to the 4e Blood Mage Paragon Path in 3.5e, and if not, is there a good homebrew that is similar in theme or mechanics?
[RPG] Bringing 4e Blood Mage into a 3.5 Campaign
blood-magednd-3.5ehomebrewparagon-path
Related Solutions
The magic item you're thinking of is probably the Potion of Regeneration. The level 9 version costs 160 GP a pop and gives you regeneration 5 while you're bloodied. It also costs a healing surge, which might be a problem for your wizard if you do a lot of encounters in a typical day.
Trollhide Bracers have a daily that also gives you regeneration 5, not just while you're bloodied, but those are a level 19 item so it'll be a while before you might have those.
Armor of Sudden Recovery is great for regeneration. You can, as a daily, convert any ongoing damage you're taking to regeneration -- so if you're taking ongoing 10, you can turn it into regeneration 10. I would strongly recommend a set. A slightly cheesy but amusing option: combine that with Dragonfire Tar, an alchemical consumable which does ongoing damage on the target. Use that on yourself. Check with your GM before using this one, though.
Back to non-cheese. For your neck slot, an Amulet of False Life has a daily that gives you temp hit points equal to your healing surge value. That's effectively an extra second wind once per day. I think that's better than the Amulet of Life, which allows you to spend an extra surge once per day when you spend a surge, since you have to wait for someone to heal you or use second wind with the Amulet of Life.
Diamond Cincture is another effective second wind, once per day. So that's pretty good. It fills your waist slot.
OK, let's see. Strategies -- don't forget about Shield. That's a very good defensive utility. With any luck it'll prevent one hit per encounter. For your level 10 utilities, you have a few interesting choices. Mass Resistance is a life saver if you're fighting anything at all elemental. It's party-oriented, which is nice. Blur is a great power to protect you -- you can't be seen by enemies more than five squares away, plus you get some defensive bonuses. If you have some way to fly, which you probably will eventually, this is a great way to stay safe in the air.
Being able to actually cast an unlimited number of spells is--barring excessive shenanigans via things like using plane shift to go to planes wherein time passes at a far faster rate so you can rest in the middle of an encounter--impossible. Having a character with a host of at-will spell-like abilities is possible with some effort.
Templates
If the character starts as a humanoid, he can take the templates half-fey (Fiend Folio 96) with at-will charm person for LA +2, half-rakshasa (Dragon #313 96) with at-will empathy (Dragon #313 94) for LA +3, and katane (Dragon #313 64) with at-will spider climb for LA +4, then top off with either half-celestial (MM 144) with at-will daylight for LA +4 or saint (BE 184) with at will bless, guidance, resistance, and virtue for LA +2. The character'll have 1 HD when he takes his 1st class level and count as a level 12 or level 14 character, but his ability scores will be amazing.
Also, this assumes reflavoring the names so the character isn't 3/2+ something.
Races
Play a monster. All of the following monsters get at least a few spell-like abilities at will: the ECL 20 astra deva (MM 11) and trumpet archon (MM 17); the ECL 19 hezrou (MM 44); the ECL 18 vrock (MM 48); the ECL 16 couatl (MM 37) and erinyes (MM 54); the ECL 11 hound archon (MM 16); the ECL 12 succubus (MM 47); the ECL 10 drider (MM 89). You can probably tell where I stopped going through the Monster Manual, but picking a monster is almost always suboptimal to picking an actual non-LA, non-ECL character.
Classes
The warlock from Complete Arcane's been suggested, but I also recommend Tome of Magic's binder, whose vestiges can grant spell-like abilities at will, like the Acererak vestige which grants at-will use of detect undead and speak with dead. The bound vestige persists for 24 hours after which it must be bound again, so it's not technically inherent-forever spell-like abilities. (Thus foiling your scheme to create a perpetual motion machine via an enslaved creature with an at-will spell-like ability.)
A 5th-level spellthief can steal another's at-will spell-like abilities all day long. The spellthief only gets one use of it before he must steal it again, but if the source is limitless so is the spellthief's ability to steal. Improved familiars make good targets.
Feats
Other than Complete Arcane's feat Innate Spell--which lets you trade mind blank or polymorph any object once per day for mage hand at will--getting at-will spell-like abilities via feats looks impossible.
However, like everything in D&D 3.X, being a caster and ruthlessly pushing the limits of the feat Craft Wondrous Item (PH 92-3) pretty much lets you make anything your DM allows. With the core rules setting a precedent with hand of the mage (DMG 258), convincing your DM to allow crafting other comparable at-will items should be trivial.
There's one feat, though, that I mention here because it's the Feats section: Fiendish Summoning Specialist (PlH 39). You needn't take it; just know it exists.
Spells
Depending on the errata the campaign uses the spell polymorph any object might be used to just become a creature with spell-like abilities, but neither magic jar nor shapechange grants access to a creature's spell-like abilities.
What does explicitly grant access to a creature's spell-like abilities is the 5th-level Sor/Wiz spell fiendform (SpC 90). It reads, "[Y]ou can take the form of any fiendish creature, demon, or devil that can be summoned by a summon monster I, II, III, IV spell..." (emphasis mine). So if the Fiendish Summoning Specialist feat exists in the campaign, by a strict reading, other folks have added to the summon monster lists, and those can be accessed by anyone who casts fiendform. The fiendform spell only lasts 1 minute per caster level and has as an unpriced but weird material component, and you've to convince your DM that other people totally put the demon, devil, or fiendish creature you want to change into on their summon monster list via the Fiendish Summoning Specialist feat, but if those obstacles are overcome--and you don't mind that sick feeling you get after having so much cheese--, have fun with your demonic and devilish at-will spell-like abilities. If being such a creature all day is required the fiendform spell is a valid target for the Persistent Spell feat (CAr 81) and multiple ways exist to reduce what would otherwise be an 11th-level spell to something that can be cast pre-epic.
There is not, to my knowledge, an identical opposite celestialform spell.
Best Answer
Blood Magic
I had a quick look for blood magic compatible with 3.5e, and I found, well, a lot of stuff. People seem to like this concept a lot. However, there isn't really a lot of it that seems any good, though. I'll summarize what i've been able to find, and then give some suggestions.
3.5e Material (Non-Homebrew)
Spell Thematics - From Player's Guide to Faerun, this changes your spells cosmetic effects to follow a theme - in this case, i'd say Blood. So instead of sending tiny magic missiles at your foes, you cut open your arm and shoot blood crystals - instead of shooting flame from your hands for Burning Hands, you heat your blood and spray it across your enemies like acid, etc. Just keep in mind it still does the same thing mechanically, it just looks and feels different.
Blood Magus - From Complete Arcane, it's a 10-level prestige class that you can only enter at high level. It has two main problems - 1. It's abilities are very lacklustre and boring. For 10 whole levels, it gives very very little. 2. It can only be entered at level 6, and loses 2 caster levels (i.e. it doesn't advance your spellcasting, meaning you'll be weaker than a wizard/sorc who just goes straight wizard/sorc). This means you can't be a blood mage from level 1 (or even from level 5) and so most of the game will pass with you just being a random wizard, and even as a Blood Magus, most of the time you'll be using spells rather than your crappy abilities.
Wizard or Sorcerer - There are a lot of spells in 3.5e. A lot of them are compiled in the Spell Compendium. A lot of them are bloodish already, or can be made more so with description/personalization/Spell Thematics. A careful spell selection using splatbooks and the Wizard class makes a decent Blood Mage straight out the gate.
Cleric - Only Divine Magic can heal in 3.5e, with some few exceptions. So if you want to be using the power of blood to heal people, you'll need to either multiclass into cleric, or look at an option like Mystic Theurge, gaining access to both cleric and wizard casting.
Tainted Sorcerer - From Unearth Arcana, it's an alternate Sorcerer who gets to use blood as a component in spellcasting. Perhaps go from this into a Blood Mage PrC?
Maho-Tsukai - From Oriental Adventures, the flavour is great, and the mechanics are very simple but work. Basically, you do metamagic, but instead of increasing the spell level, you pay constitution score. Potentially broken, as every way of avoiding metamagic costs are, but if you don't minmax it and just play it as it's intended, very thematic and very cool.
A list of every feat, spell, class, race, etc with the word 'blood' in the title in 3.5e.
Warlock - From Complete Arcane, refluff the Eldritch Blast as 'Blood Blast', and the rest of their abilities.. fit really well.
Hellfire Warlock - From Fiendish Codex II, it's a prestige class for Warlocks that lets them damage their constitution score to do a lot of extra damage when using an eldritch blast. It's seen as a way to make the generally-low damage of an eldritch blast competitive. Without a way to mitigate the constitution damage (typically a dip into Binder (Tome of Magic) for Naberius' Ability Fast Healing or either a class or feat from Magic of Incarnum to get the Strongheart Vest soulbind to reduce the ability damage to 0), you'll run out pretty fast though.
3.5e Homebrew Material
Blood Mage PrC - Homebrewed for Pathfinder, it appears to be based on the Blood Mage from Dragon Age (also the inspiration for the 4e Blood Mage and the Blood Magus). It seems.. surprisingly good. It gives decent abilities at each level, and doesn't have dead caster levels. The capstone ability seems powerful, but not more powerful than it should be at level 10 of a prestige class. Plus, the abilities are notable (other people will notice them as they have a pronounced effect) and thematic (in the theme of controlling your own and others' blood).
Bloodmage PrC - This is a less interesting blood mage PrC. It adds necromancy, death, and evil spells to player's class list, but player must use hp to cast spells. Can steal hp by sacrificing people, but only to use on blood magic. Can cast spells with expensive components without the components, by sacrificing con score, again can steal con score from people for this purpose by killing them. Boring, crappy, more for a NPC than a PC.
Sanguinist - Crappy clone of blood magus with a decent font. Maybe give it a read, but don't use it.
Blood Magus - Weird but potentially cool. Gives lots of different ways to spend HP to hurt people. Potentially very overpowered, but again, exercise restraint, etc.
Blood Mage - A base class, finally. A wizard, but can spend blood to use the weaker metamagic feats at high levels. I'd just use tainted sorcerer, and avoid this entirely.
Sanguine Master - Pretty cool. A base class that casts spells by using HP, but can't be healed by any kind of magic ever. So he can shoot off a heap of spells, but he'll be weak for days afterwards as he naturally heals up those hp. And getting hit by something is a disaster!
Cursed Blood Scion - This is a stupid thing I wrote to answer a question on this site. Take it for what it's worth.
Options
Overall, i'd be looking at either going Sanguine Master or Tainted Sorcerer or Maho-Tsukai as a base, then MAYBE prestiging into the interesting homebrewed Blood Magus PrC. All those base classes all work, largely due to having full casting. Alternatively, take my vampire knight wannabe class stub and turn it into a full class. Depends what 'kind' of Blood Magus you wanna be, really. All the 'castery' ones are different to what you'd think of as a 'blaster' in 4e, they are more utility problem solvers with nova capability. If you want a 'blaster', homebrewing something for yourself or using a Warlock are pretty much your options.