Can We Sentence Blood Mage To Death Now

blood mage is rulling POE2 for 1 years.

0.2: "Blood Hunt" One-Shot Kill Bosses
0.3: "Sacrifice Of Blood" Undying Hate Infinite Recovery
0.4: "COC + Doedre's Undoing"

It's hilarious how many bonuses the ascendancy provides for nearly 0 drawbacks.

wasnt deadeye ruling since launch?
what you want to kill next?

"

Johny_Snow#4778 schrieb:

It's hilarious how many bonuses the ascendancy provides for nearly 0 drawbacks.

Granted the drawbacks do become zero in late game builds.

But then, there's strong enough of a drawback as it is that especially on HC it's risky if not downright suicidal to go straight into Blood Mage.

Most players wait until the 3rd ascendancy and early maps before they switch to BM.

I'm a bit torn between BM being OP or not. Yeah, once a build is properly kitted out, BM is extremely strong. It's also very versatile, supporting many different kinds of builds.

But on the other hand, if you don't have top tier gear or the specific strongest builds for it and if you need survivability for HC, it's honestly very well balanced with Lich and Disciple in the top part of the tree, and pretty balanced with Invoker, Acolyte, Pathfinder and Amazon in the right part of the tree.

Balancing survivability vs damage is always gonna be problematic in SC, because players simply accept the risk that they are likely to die every 100 or so maps or every now and then on the hardest bosses. If you weaken BM - whether its damage or defenses - while leaving the other ascendancies I mentioned as they are, you're just gonna kill it off from HC.

I am biased of course since I play only HC, but in my opinion, HC is the better basis for balancing ascendancies, because a significant amount of SC players will just ignore defenses anyway so you can't meaningfully balance defense vs offense on SC.