[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.