Bleed Seems Fundamentally Flawed - Some thoughts on fixing it

Apologies if this has been talked about before, or if I'm getting anything wrong. New to PoE 2 as of this season but played a bloodmage spear bleed build for several weeks and did a lot of reading up on the mechanics before trying.

The primary issue is bleed being tied to physical damage and even scaling with crit damage. This led my build and I assume pretty much all others down the path that in trying to maximize bleed damage by balancing hit damage and bleed magnitude it was always better and more useful to keep stacking physical damage (or ele damage for blood mage) and crit chance / crit damage, and then getting to the point where the physical damage alone was enough to take out most mobs.

Every mob other than a boss is dead before they can even bleed. And if you want to kill bosses faster, just drop bleed related passives to add more instant damage till you're just another flat damage/crit focused build with whatever skill.

This even applies if you're using Crimson Assault to bring base bleed time to one second. Further it takes a lot of passives and item slots to bring bleed damage up (bleed chance, bleed duration, bleed magnitude). You can do better bleed damage by picking damage and crit passives, but again, everything will be dead before it bleeds.

You can make bleed work without blowing things up in one hit, you could do the long set up involved with blood hunt, but it effectively means heavier passive investment, pressing 4 times as many buttons, taking much longer in your set up and incurring way more risk of death, all to kill mobs magnitudes slower. It is not rational or fun to do so.

The specific bleed attack skill for spears Rake is clunky and has targeting and hit issues (at least on pc with controller).

Bleed needs a total rework imo. Suggestions.

1. Make bleed's base damage dependent on weapon damage and not scalable to physical or attack damage and not affected by critical hits.
2. Have bleed damage scale with int and or dex, and some newly added bleed or dot damage related mods. It's just a matter of math to figure out the numbers and how to make it do damage on par with other damage methods.
3. Limit bleed to specific weapons, like spears, claws, daggers, and swords. No one's bleeding to death from getting hit with a mace unless you've already hit them hard enough to kill them. Limiting it to specific weapons makes it easier to balance.
4. Enable bleed stacking, surpassing chance to apply bleed stacks (sorry last epoch does this better right now).
5. Get rid of incision, just as with everything being dead before it can bleed, attempting to stack incision is pointless.


Trying to keep this initial post short and have a lot more thoughts I can add later. Curious do other players think bleed is as in bad shape in this game as I do? It's early access, it shouldn't be too late to fix it, but I think it just needs a total conceptual and mechanical overhaul. It's pointless in its current form and frustrating... feel like I wasted a lot of time as a new player in figuring out just how bad it was.

Bump. Guess my post didn't get my message across like I thought it would. Or maybe people are ok with every build being simple and all funneling towards the inevitable plus damage + plus crit chance + crit damage.

Any fans of bleed builds in other games, where they're well designed and balanced, have any thoughts here?

Or are there actually bleed builds that work in this game that I'm missing?

I still think it needs a total rework and to be completely untethered from hit damage. At the very least it could add some severely needed variety to general build diversity.

Elden Ring has the best bleed mechanic imo. Bleed being just another DoT is kinda boring. We have so many DoTs in this game already. Also TLDR, sorry.

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Sakanabi#6664 schrieb:

Also TLDR, sorry.

No worries figured that was the problem.

In short, bleed being tethered to hit damage is what need changed. It just sends you down the path of plus damage + plus crit chance/damage, which then kills everything before it can even bleed. It's very poorly designed and needs an overhaul.

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Skutz123#5377 schrieb:

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Sakanabi#6664 schrieb:

Also TLDR, sorry.

No worries figured that was the problem.

In short, bleed being tethered to hit damage is what need changed. It just sends you down the path of plus damage + plus crit chance/damage, which then kills everything before it can even bleed. It's very poorly designed and needs an overhaul.

Well, in current environment is quite impossible to let trash mobs bleed to death as there is still too many of them and you need to kill them quickly. I never played any bleed build but I think its main strength are rares and bosses. There should be options to reduce mob density while increasing their effectiveness in endgame imo but right now killing most enemies before any type of DoT may happen is the only possible way to progress in reasonable speed. As I said before - the best bleed I ever tried is in Elden Ring where there is no DoT part but once you fill a bleed meter of an enemy that enemy loses a portion of its life instantly. It is especially great with daggers which have significantly lower dps than other weapon types but have high bleed build-up if used correctly making playing assassin a very unique experience. I would love to see different staus effects to behave differently and not just being another DoT of different color (although stacking a large amount of DoTs is quite a fun on its own).