[POE2] Blood Mage Ascendancy is hopeless

Blood Mage seems to be a mistake at this point of the game.
It seeming has minimal synergy with its class skills, compared to other ascendancies.

Blood orbs are incredibly small to pick up with 0 magnetism and they spawn inside the hitbox of enemies. By the time enemies die and you get to pick them up, they despawn. Not to mention, you are beyond squishy with less mobility.

Late game, blood mages survive but it is due to the SHEER amount of items, points, and skills that are NOT complimented by the ascendancy. It is like if you chose a sorcerer without an ascendancy.

Please review this trash, with how difficult the game is for new players, players will get BRICKED AND QUIT if they don't know about how garbage it is.

PM: Is life leech broken? the damage I do with Spells doesn't seem to do jack squat for my health.

I agree. Seems to be no synergy with the playstyle most people are choosing Witch for; the minions.

The minions don't appear to be spawning orbs on their crits or causing any healing on their damage which they probably should. They should pick orbs up for us as well. If you must, just make an aura around the Witch that will cause these synergies with nearby minions.

On top of that, a lot of the minions feel woefully inadequate when compared to the Arcanists.

Really not seeing any value in bloodmage other than the one passive to make you take less damage.

The first ascendancy node is 99% all negative.

It needs to either be skills half mana costs are paid with life or be combined with the spell leech node.

Right now we have to spend 2 ascendancy nodes just to almost cancel out the first node's downsides.

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

I been trying the Bone spells and they are trash, at this point its like the whole idea of blood witch is to be some other speciality, so maybe recommend cold/fire spells rather than bone spells.
Can relocate all the random spell phys nodes at the top to somewhere else then aswell just add some more minion nodes since most of that top half of the entire atlas tree is minion stuff (or can we get a keystone like minion buffs apply to you instead that might be nice for non minion witches tho prolly op given just how many minion nodes there is).
The channel spell is fine against bosses i got a lot of crit nodes and damage nodes so i shred them but everything else is a grind, can i not just have a normal fast cast physical spell, like some aoe kind of exsanguinate or something, sprawling blood tentacles inflicting some bleed?

I can't see any flat adds x x phys damage to spells to scale off, sceptres are 90% minion mods, wands at best roll a x% phys spell damage the other bone spell on the wand is a 3 second cast or something so everything just moves out the way i dunno if it gets any better but i mean who cares at this point.
Guess i need to find dex or str with more respeccing and use a mace or quarterstaff for that.
Half the skills are stick a minion on a spike

This is from a reroll of trying the ed/contagion combo which cant even crit so most of that ascendancy is wasted on it.

I'm pigeon holed into es coz of int requirements, the block is miles away from everything spell related, is blood witch just literally build everything that actually isnt using any of the recommended skills? its super squishy, it gets boxed in easy (please let me phase) on corridor maps, bone circle is kind of no concern when you are surround because you aint dealing enough damage to ever escape.

It's sad because i really like the theme of the Blood Witch but i feel like this was a "Oh this sound cool" rushed idea and should've had a lot more cooking time and actual thought about how it synergises and works within its own area.
If i could handle the slow melee animations I'd at this point have just seriously considered pathing myself down a melee road or something because at least the right side (blood barbs/grasping wounds) of my ascendancy would make sense with that.
Necromancer should've definitely come out before Blood Witch.

Yeah i hit act 3 and am struggling after a relative easy time only the djinn and the final boss of 2 Gabe me any hassle (and the colossus but he's bugged AF)

I feel like I picked "wrong" and with the low amount of treasure drops respeccing is not exactly appealing

i'm trying blood mage as well, lvl 62 right now, act 6.

I am fan of chaos damage in poe1 so decided to do same here. i'm not able to 1 shot boss like some builds, but pretty manageable. Right now i'm using hexblast with 2 curses blasphemy (despair and temporal chains), not sure if it works properly, and i don't see any numbers on curse scalling)

my idea is to go full crit with some additional cast on crit. I plan to get that 15% base crit chance for all spells with 6th point. Yes, feels kind of week. Right now my hexblast deal just slightly above 3.5k according to tooltip.

Also i found Mana remnants buff from sorcerer quite good. But still blood magic is subpar to sorceress. I want an ascendancy that emphasize on chaos damage and not melee one (like monk). Maybe shadow will bring it to the table

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Pradagy#6864 wrote:

The first ascendancy node is 99% all negative.

It needs to either be skills half mana costs are paid with life or be combined with the spell leech node.

Right now we have to spend 2 ascendancy nodes just to almost cancel out the first node's downsides.

It's 100% negative because users reporting the game crashes when life orbs spawn.

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i'm trying blood mage as well, lvl 62 right now, act 6.

I am fan of chaos damage in poe1 so decided to do same here. i'm not able to 1 shot boss like some builds, but pretty manageable. Right now i'm using hexblast with 2 curses blasphemy (despair and temporal chains), not sure if it works properly, and i don't see any numbers on curse scalling)

my idea is to go full crit with some additional cast on crit. I plan to get that 15% base crit chance for all spells with 6th point. Yes, feels kind of week. Right now my hexblast deal just slightly above 3.5k according to tooltip.

Also i found Mana remnants buff from sorcerer quite good. But still blood magic is subpar to sorceress. I want an ascendancy that emphasize on chaos damage and not melee one (like monk). Maybe shadow will bring it to the table

The issue is that its very likely that your success (and mine too, im ED contagion with hexblast) has little to no influence from blood mage ascendancies.

The blood orbs are worthless on boss fights, the health cost had to be compensated with recoup and regen, the only thing you can realistically get are the 25% delayed damage taken which is indeed very nice. 15 base crit sure, some skills are way lower than that so it helps. But i wouldn't say that this ascendancy is powerful enough to be called that.

Agree Sanguimancy is just bad, and you are better off not taking it. Maybe at some point later in levelling your crit and larger total health pool will turn this around but when you first take it you get substantially weaker. There's literally no upside.