Let's Talk Bloodlines

I've seen posts talking about how to re-design bloodlines to be more useful and powerful but I wanted to take a higher level look at them from the average player perspective.

To me PoE1 is about power fantasy, blasting, and "play your own way" yet I see a new feature tied to end game bosses that have a weird design philosophy of sacrifice your current build to ascend into them, while also most of them not really being useful or powerful.

The first idea is acquisition. Locking build defining passives to end game bosses is such a bad idea imo. The average player probably never sees some/most of these bosses and if there's a build they want to play that requires something tied behind these bosses, it's not accessible to them.
There's no way to acquire it via trade or via playing through the campaign/early maps.
Build defining passives should be accessible to the vast majority of poe1 players. These need to be tied to something else (side areas or side quests that people skip in campaign, bandits that people never choose so you have to pick the 15% resists vs 1 passive point vs unlocking a new ascendancy, completing all T1 white maps, unlocking the silver/gold chest or defeating the doggo in labs, etc...).
Put skills/uniques on these end game bosses that are build defining, but not passive trees!

The second idea is making them actually useful/powerful. I see 2 trees completely dedicated to minions, 1 to vaal skills, 1 to ward, and a few others that look maybe good/bad depending how people cook them. Overall though they don't seem very interesting/powerful to me. By the time you acquire them you already are level 80-90+ and have a build capable of end game. This whole upside/downside choice is just weird to me (get x% power increase but here's the downside) and I just hate that design philosophy. Please look at phrecia ascendancies as a guide for providing cool/unique/powerful ascendancy nodes.

That is all. I want it to be accessible to the majority of players and I want it to be powerful. PoE2 is a great place to put hardcore/challenging/non-powerful gameplay mechanics, but poe1 needs to stay the power fantasy that it's been.

Thanks

a) these build defining passives are SO NICHE that you wont even consider them if you are a new player. some of them look downright bad (and some actually are bad) without specific build in mind

b) you CAN trade for them. most bosses can be 'carried' and that service usually costs pennies in non-HC leagues

c) at the same time, i wholehartly agree that this method of unfolding build options is pretty demotivating (it is PER CHARACTER) and buying carries stinks as a concept

d) again - these are so niche, that if you play said build, youll handle it

e) in SSF - terrible. but SSF is a choice, if anyone hates idea of trading but hates the acquisition - do not trade?


There are few generally strong (profane ground? herald?) you can use. if your regular 4 ascendancies are better, cool, skip bloodline then.

it is optional, niche, sidegrade, not upgrade. i think GGG failed to communicate the sidegrade character of these ascendancies so far.


big applause for GGG for actually opening several niches (like ward, hybrid minion, serious herald) that were so far only possible in Phrecia or on VERY high budget (and even then didnt really make much sense)

most of my builds wont benefit but i am really tempted to re-do my Ward character from Phrecia, it was a great fun and these nodes are pretty damn strong for Ward characters