[POE2] Blood Mage Ascendancy is hopeless

I agree with the OP. Blood Mage feels and plays like crap.

I am level 40 and play pretty defensive and slow with frost spells & crit. And only because I have excellent gear for my level it feels bareable. But there were parts in the campaign that felt just horrible and frustrating.I know I am not even at maps, but according to reviews this is only getting worse down the line.

End of Act1 Boss was a nightmare. Beginning of Act2 as well. End of Act2 felt slow but okay.

Act3 beginning again a nightmare until I got extrmely good gear for my level. Now at the end of Act3 and feels okay again. At least I can clear thrash mobs and dont take too long for the elites.

I have the impression that the power of my Blood Mage currently depends 100 % on top gear. Passive Tree is just there to cover the flaws of the class and keep it in the game. Acendacy is a downright debuff.

I started a Warrior - and heck, what a difference! Feels like I am steamrolling where I was felt crippled on my Blood Mage.I am probably twice as fast in progressing the campaign.

Blood Mage might be viable in specific builds, but I have not seen them yet. Apparently in the top100 players there are only a hand full of BM.

I guess GGG have the data and I am hoping for some buffs.

Maybe buff spell power with over-heal. 100% overheal = +100% spell damage. That way I could maybe focus more on defense in passive skill tree.

Or reduce the overall casting cost (health & mana) so you do not constantly kill yourself.

Anyhow. I am going to play another class until this is properly balanced.

I'm currently playing a lvl 63 Blood Mage, I think a simple "-20% mana cost" Sanguimancy buff would go a really long way.

The other thing is that the physical caster kit feels incomplete. Unearth is trash, bone blast is trash, Bone Cage and Bone Storm are the only two spells that feel Good-ish.

When the Pride aura comes out that would be an obvious buff, but her kit makes me wish for two things:
1. Since the blood shards encourage close combat, I really want some kind of close range Bone Slash spell that hits the pinned enemies in front of me.
2. The physical support gems gave a bunch of effects like More damage on bleeding, More damage on Stunned, More damage on Armor broken. She needs some powerful charge up finisher like Hammer Of The Gods, but HotG is an ATTACK and all her buffs are for spells. She needs some kind of Bone Fist single hit charge up spell. All physical support gems seem to encourage one massive hit finisher and the physical casters just don't have it.


Bone Cage is an actually a great CC utility. If there was another close range physical DPS spell that would enable a really fun play stile. And man PLEASE make Hammer Of The Gods also a spell. I wish I could use it with weapon to flatten a stunned boss.

Please GGG, fix this ascendancy class, blood mage is TERRIBLE!!! The concept is cool, but this ascendancy has no identity in the game. Bone spells SUCKS and the are almost no bleed nodes in the skill tree. There is just a few physical damage with spells nodes if you compare with elemental damage, and they suck too.You are almost forced to use elemental damage but sorceress is infinitely better at this than the blood mage, so blood mage is useless at the moment. With this class, you are forced to pick 4 nodes, "sanguimancy" and "vitality syphon" and this both nodes sucks. Why are you forced to pick "vitality syphon"? Because "sanguimancy" literally kills you, and to become net 0 you need "vitality syphon", but the leech is terrible too.

This. Both of the ascendancies feel out of place. There's only 2 decent physical spells, and only one of them do any kind of damage but it's sooooooooooo sloooooooooow and makes you even slower. This is with the cast speed support and the movement speed while casting support gems and it still feels absolutely horrible, only positive is the multiple projectiles for crit purposes.

Meanwhile I can wipe the screen with my ice sorc by casting wall of frost with cascade, high crit/damage+damage after crit and cast hypothermia on freeze with the storm weaver blizzard on crit on a lucky cast of the spell. Unlucky cast everything is frozen or walled off anyway so spell echo ice bomb and comet for heavies and eye of winter for a bunch of crits and blizzards for swarms. Bosses just stand there and take it until they shatter, packs are obliterated immediately or good enough to move on because crit blizzards clean up.

I've tried five witches and I've come to the conclusion that I hate this class. No chaos support in ascendancies, reliance on other class spells after ascendency, build choice gets extremely narrow after ascendancies, ascendancies are either a detriment or mostly useless without trading specialized gear or getting lucky. Can't decide if I dislike infernalist or blood more, but I straight up fucking hate them both.

Can't wait to see shadow, hope it isn't shit.

Need to rework sanguinmancy. Maybe if damage recoup as life worked to offset it or it actually counted as an offering... Leech lucks too btw.

They should either move it to the str/int part of the tree or add a node which says "attacks are spells instead" because honestly BM makes a much better melee character. Not perfect mind you, i'd still rather pick warrior or mercenary for a melee character, but decent.

"

Dawaein#5688 schrieb:

Second ascendancy node Vitality Siphon is bricked

It says 10% spell leech, but i think it is less than 1%.
Single hit of my ability does 370DMG and I leech 3HP

Second trial didn't make it better.
I'am playing with 3% maximum life ascendancy... Lv 45

Thats because Leech is reduced by enemy resistances

Go to an Act 1 enemy and hit them. You'll leech the full amount.

Go hit a T15 map enemy. You'll hardly leech anything because their defenses are so high.

Leech is a pointless stat in my opinion in its current implementation

Level 92 Bloodmage here, I crush T18s (T16 waystones with corrupted & Irradiated), do about 2 mil DPS to bosses, and have 6000 ES (Grim Feast) and 5.8k HP (Sanguimancy capped)

The best way I've found to play Blood Mage, is to pretty much ignore the whole "Mage" part altogether. It's a little strange that that's the play, but, that's just how it is.

If you go for something like Corpsewades with Skeletal Brutes and Sacrifice, you get to do a variant of Pathfinder's PConc build enforced by Minion Max Life, Minion Level, and all of the Chaos% increase nodes along with Eldritch Battery and Mind Over Matter (We don't use Mana to cast, so the mana regen hit is just fine).

For general gear requirements:

- A big 750 ES chest piece with as much +Max Life on it as possible
- Atziri's Disdain helmet (Huge gains if you get a +1 Minion Level corrupt)
- Minion Level Amulet
- Chaos Damage, Max Life, Max Mana rings (Super easy to force a Chaos Damage+Chaos Res Breach ring with essence, as they're the only two modifiers in the pool. Get Ilvl 82 bases for 5-10 exalts, greater essence is around 15 exalts ea.)
- Corpsewade boots (This is what makes the build do the things)
- Scepter with some Spirit (Like 150-180 is fine), at least +4 minion skill, at least +45% maximum life to minions for Brutes
- A wand with some chaos damage, +4-5 to chaos spells (affects Decompose)
- Focuses with Chaos%, and resists to cap what you need
- Ingenuity if you want, standard +life +mana and resist belt if low on Divines

Even with some sloppy set up, you can do T15s right at level 65, avoid maps like Steppe and Waystones with Burning Ground though (Steppe's hills really mess with Decompose, as it doesn't follow terrain and elevated monsters will not take damage), BG will make your poison clouds go boom, and we do not want it to go boom

In a build like this, you only spend mana on Eye of Winter (we put Wither support, Unleash, and Pierce on this along with the Gain 11% chaos damage passive node to instantly get a 70% Wither on bosses on our Wand swap. Level 13 is good, lower mana cost and not used for damage), Despair, and Contagion

Keep your Brutes (Meat Shield, +minion level, +physical level) on Scepter swap along with Contagion, disable them for your Wand (Contagion swaps to scepter, Despair and Eye of Winter swap to Wand)

You can more or less play around with the rest, but there's the essential meat of the build. You use Contagion to drop your Brutes and that gets the ball rolling, then swap to Wand and just run around farting all over the place while playing "Collect the wisps and orbs" as a mini-game. Despair and Eye of Winter on bosses, watch em drop in a few seconds while just running in circles.

With this, you spend proooobably a total of 100-200 exalted orbs (to get a GOOD build going) and you have the cheapest build that turns the game into a "Difficulty optional" situation.

Yeah the OP is correct I was going to make a similar post.

When I took the ascendency I misread the first node, didn't realize it would cost both mana and life. The blood orbs I can replace with ES or MANA for 60 spirit with any class in the game.

You basically need every node on the ascendency tree as all ascendency nodes attempt to compensate the player for your first nodes debuff. Bone skills have sucky base damage but good base crit, they also suck mechanically.

this is how the ascendency plays out.

1) Nerfed with life costs = to BASE mana costs that cannot be scaled. Life blobs are a nerf in a game with one shot "explode on death" enemies.

2) 1% crit damage per 40 life. Ok if you replace all blood mage intel requirements with strength, otherwise garbage. 4k CURRENT life = 100% crit damage. Can get 400% CD with little effort on any class so this in a best case scenario is a first strike 20% hit damage boost.

3) Base spell crit 15%, very good if you are using non-bone skills and can ascend 7 times to compensate.

4) 10% damage as extra physical, elemental damage contributes to bleed. It doesn't work, bleed sucks and if you go elemental you need the 15% base crit to scale to endgame. That is 8 ascendency points without leech, damage mitigation or body armour to life.

5) 10% spell leech to basically exists to counter the first node. Yeah okay, it sucks plain and simple.

6) Curses have infinite duration. Don't care, maybe a small QoL in some cases or pretty good with hex blast but requires half you ascendency to even use. A case could be made this is the best use of the bloodmage ascendency but haven't tried it. Also VERY expensive mana/life costs.

7) 25% damage to your life converted to DoT is ok. But at this point all you're doing tanking your first node with NO OTHER BENEFITS.

8) ES from body armour as extra life. Yep amazing but requires at least 10 ascendency points to capitalize on the extra life. Taking this node requires 3 full ascendancies leaving you with.....Not much.


Yes with 3 mirrors I can make this class work at endgame. I could make a functional minion build without ascendency for 1 divine that can cruise run t15 maps. I can do the same with pyromancer, stormweaver, chronomancer.....

Hexblast I could make cheaper but it is clunky, slow and has very high mana/life costs.

In a nutshell the ascendency is awful.

"

MathiasSoul#7397 schrieb:

Level 92 Bloodmage here, .......

I made a similar build with the "original sin" ring on stormweaver or pyromancer IDR which was pretty good. Personally don't like the playstyle but I have the gear Ill give it a try. I am not one to poo poo before tasting the food.

You have to admit though this is pretty niche and the ascendency could be improved?