Bloodmage - "The Needler" Arbiter of Ash DOWN & T16+ (Bonestorm + Detonate Dead) Lategame Guide!

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HeliosRaa#6075 wrote:

I guess to me, unless I build MoM and stacked mana, Arcane intensity would be rather poor. It takes 7 points to path to it. Sure its scalable, but given that I could improve the stats such as cast speed, crit damage, and crit chance instead.

I saw a guy in another build guide take the Adverse growth and Lucidity nodes to make a mini MoM version taking ~%20 damage to mana without fully committing to MoM. I kind of like the idea since Sanguimancy is a pain to deal with. It kind of makes Arcane Intensity more worth investing in, too.

I also recommend trying Atziri's disdain. It makes life worth going for in equipment

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Semifact#6246 wrote:

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HeliosRaa#6075 wrote:

I guess to me, unless I build MoM and stacked mana, Arcane intensity would be rather poor. It takes 7 points to path to it. Sure its scalable, but given that I could improve the stats such as cast speed, crit damage, and crit chance instead.

I saw a guy in another build guide take the Adverse growth and Lucidity nodes to make a mini MoM version taking ~%20 damage to mana without fully committing to MoM. I kind of like the idea since Sanguimancy is a pain to deal with. It kind of makes Arcane Intensity more worth investing in, too.

I also recommend trying Atziri's disdain. It makes life worth going for in equipment

I actually use Atziri's disdain. Its 1 unique but the benefit is massive. Since I will prio life anyway for the +crit damage it makes perfect sense to use this unique alongside just for the added ES. For a blood mage its like having a single item grant 2000-3000 extra ES as even with such low life (1500) it grants me 2000 ES alone with no downside.
The damage bypass is actually perfect for bloodmage because if you use bonestorm you are always crit, your DD nearly always crit (so that 1 orb per monster) plus an orb on death so another 1 orb per monster. The 20-30% damage thru is actually a boon, like mitigation, when used with grim-feast.

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HeliosRaa#6075 wrote:

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Semifact#6246 wrote:

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HeliosRaa#6075 wrote:

I guess to me, unless I build MoM and stacked mana, Arcane intensity would be rather poor. It takes 7 points to path to it. Sure its scalable, but given that I could improve the stats such as cast speed, crit damage, and crit chance instead.

I saw a guy in another build guide take the Adverse growth and Lucidity nodes to make a mini MoM version taking ~%20 damage to mana without fully committing to MoM. I kind of like the idea since Sanguimancy is a pain to deal with. It kind of makes Arcane Intensity more worth investing in, too.

I also recommend trying Atziri's disdain. It makes life worth going for in equipment

I actually use Atziri's disdain. Its 1 unique but the benefit is massive. Since I will prio life anyway for the +crit damage it makes perfect sense to use this unique alongside just for the added ES. For a blood mage its like having a single item grant 2000-3000 extra ES as even with such low life (1500) it grants me 2000 ES alone with no downside.
The damage bypass is actually perfect for bloodmage because if you use bonestorm you are always crit, your DD nearly always crit (so that 1 orb per monster) plus an orb on death so another 1 orb per monster. The 20-30% damage thru is actually a boon, like mitigation, when used with grim-feast.

Holy heck I just tested that helmet. Ridiculous amount of ES granted

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HeliosRaa#6075 wrote:

Let me preface this with that, although I have played PoE for years, I am rather inexperienced when it comes to understanding the mechanics behind skill scaling.
I read over your build and I have quite a few questions.
First, why do you get so many ES recharge nodes?
Why do you get arcane intensity?
What is the purpose of pathing so far on the left just for some ES recharge rate and crit?
Why spell cascade instead of spell echo?

Perhaps it has to do with bossing, giving you quicker recharge and thus survivability on bosses?

I guess to me, unless I build MoM and stacked mana, Arcane intensity would be rather poor. It takes 7 points to path to it. Sure its scalable, but given that I could improve the stats such as cast speed, crit damage, and crit chance instead. As long as you satisfy your res needs. Even at 2500 mana you are getting 75% spell power for 7 points ~ 10% per point. Shy of scaling this to huge numbers (which I cannot imagine how) its almost more efficient to get Ruin, Potent incantation, or path into any number of other damage areas.
As for spell cascade, it seems to target other corpses so unless you have a plethora of extra corpses lying around that can quickly run them dry which leaves you with nothing to scale your clear off. For me the smaller AOE compared to spell echo causes it to clear less. Maybe I would swap into it for breach but even then Echo has the effect of firing off a second time in a similar location and given its increased AOE of the echo, leads to more pushback / more of the map cleared giving me a springboard for my next DD.

Anyways, let me know what you think.
Honestly not trying to critique it, just having trouble understanding why "this instead of that" mentality.

Bring on the criticism my guy I don't mind one bit. Power Per Point is something that isn't brought up too much so it's cool to see someone else talk about it. I desperately want Path of Building 2 to be released so it makes this entire process much easier. I'll address each main point you made 1 by 1 and try my best to break down my thought process.

Addressing the ES Nodes: Recharge Rate and Faster start are incredibly important when having 5k+ ES. Without those stats a large ES pool won't operate the way you want it to, and that is to buffer your health pool so you can take a large 5k+ hit every 2~ seconds without dying. On later bosses like +4 Breach Boss you'll really appreciate having all the recharge rate and faster start that I allocate. So yeah you correct to assume it was for bossing. I really don't like making builds that are glass cannon so survivability is pretty important to me.

Addressing the mana: Yeah I could rethink all the mana I get on gear and simultaneously all the regen we still get on the tree (the 7 points heading to the node that gives 54% spell power for me) isn't all that great when I don't really need all that mana regen. Those points could possibly be reallocated elsewhere for more damage probably. With the addition of scattershot the mana cost of my level 31 Bonestorm is like 500~ per second which isn't bad at all. I really like this criticism and I'll work on addressing it soon.

As for why I path all the way to the left to grab the crit damage nodes, keep in mind there's also a jewel socket on the way there thus making the hike over there much less painful and the Crit Damage nodes are incredibly powerful making the damage increase per point used pretty efficient. Jewel sockets also represent +2 Max Res so going out of your way for jewel sockets is likely the right move. There's another one I'm contemplating getting that's near ruin, but I'd need to shift around a few points. With my Gem included, that comes out to roughly 5% spell power per point, and 10% crit damage per point along with crit damage reduction from mobs and +2 to max fire res. I think that's pretty powerful but maybe there's a better way to spend 7 points? In comparison Potent Incantation is 12% spell power per point which is weaker than the 7 point path I take from ES nodes. If you had a weaker gem obviously it becomes much less worth it to path there.

I have my Detonate Dead 5 socketed, so while sure it has Spell Cascade it's also paired with corpse conservation, so it's not as bad as you might think. The extra "cast speed" from Spell Cascade allows it to quickly clear through breaches which was the content I chose to juice for. Without spell cascade I'd be doing twice the cast animations and thus slowing down my clear considerably.

Ruin and Potent Incantation are pretty decent nodes to path too and definitely something I'd consider when dropping Ether Flow and Arcane Intensity. Ruin less so because of its reduction on AoE. I really don't want the AoE of detonate dead to be reduced when I'm spamming breach maps :/

Yeah I am no fan of ruin myself, I was simply doing the math between the cost to path to Arcane intensity + the added effort vs the cost to path to Ruin. My mind was that the cost to benefit ratio would be better served elsewhere and it puts you closer to a jewel socket.
I agree with the jewel socket logic btw, I am pathing around that myself.
I understand the ES recharge being good in boss fights. As I am not there yet I have no real idea what to expect but that was my guess.
Currently still mapping. This is my current idea of passives, Give it a look at tell me what you think.

https://tinyurl.com/4kw6wnvu

I think like this I have +2 sockets on the passive tree. It does focus more heavily on damage but also max ES.
I path to the right for greater corpse conservation and take the extra 46% AOE size with the Roil node.

As for spell cascade, I used it in map clear and its possibly because of my packs being somewhat more spread out that It becomes a hindrance. Normal map clear I certainly get more bang for my buck using echo even on the singular location as the secondary explosion gains a 20% gain to its AoE size which can be the difference between if I get a follow up pack body or not.
I will certainly have to do more testing. I feel the pain of having my BS drain my mana as is and really wish the life cost wasn't as steep as well. 500hp/s would probably nearly kill me, granted the shot would probably fully heal me.
TBH bloodmage (imo) needs a buff. Given the sanguimancy, it should go without saying that life leech should contribute to over-cap even if only 50%~
Heck even 20% effective return at overcap.

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HeliosRaa#6075 wrote:

Yeah I am no fan of ruin myself, I was simply doing the math between the cost to path to Arcane intensity + the added effort vs the cost to path to Ruin. My mind was that the cost to benefit ratio would be better served elsewhere and it puts you closer to a jewel socket.
I agree with the jewel socket logic btw, I am pathing around that myself.
I understand the ES recharge being good in boss fights. As I am not there yet I have no real idea what to expect but that was my guess.
Currently still mapping. This is my current idea of passives, Give it a look at tell me what you think.

https://tinyurl.com/4kw6wnvu

I think like this I have +2 sockets on the passive tree. It does focus more heavily on damage but also max ES.
I path to the right for greater corpse conservation and take the extra 46% AOE size with the Roil node.

As for spell cascade, I used it in map clear and its possibly because of my packs being somewhat more spread out that It becomes a hindrance. Normal map clear I certainly get more bang for my buck using echo even on the singular location as the secondary explosion gains a 20% gain to its AoE size which can be the difference between if I get a follow up pack body or not.
I will certainly have to do more testing. I feel the pain of having my BS drain my mana as is and really wish the life cost wasn't as steep as well. 500hp/s would probably nearly kill me, granted the shot would probably fully heal me.
TBH bloodmage (imo) needs a buff. Given the sanguimancy, it should go without saying that life leech should contribute to over-cap even if only 50%~
Heck even 20% effective return at overcap.

Bloodmage 100% needs a buff. I like many of the ideas you have going on here.

How much you invest in Recharge and Faster Start of ES largely depends on the content you're doing. For instance say we wanted to focus on Killing the pinnacle boss, then you'd be highly incentivised to drop all ES recharge and faster start for more damage, as skipping his intermission gives you a much higher chance at killing the boss. If you were running high t15/16 maps with +4 to bosses w/ breaches than you'd probably want to have all the recharge and faster start of es.

I rearranged the tree a bit taking your criticisms into consideration and honestly it feels better. I'll make sure to update the tree to match the changes here this afternoon. I'm going to also make another tree that's better at bossing. The intermission on Arbiter of Ash is brutal, skipping that is my next goal.

I took some input from you and revamped my initial passive tree to include some regen.

https://tinyurl.com/3n6mke2d

I wanted to get ES recovery to roughly 100% time until recharge and 100% recharge rate.
PoE2 says you get about 12.5% of max ES per second once it starts to recharge. 100% recharge rate is effectively 25% or 4s to full as opposited to 8s. Anything beyond 100% is more but diminishing returns, 200% = 37.5 = 8s/4s/3s ect.
Same for time until recharge 0% = 4s, 100% = 2s, 200% = 1.5s~.
I still haven't faced pinnacle bosses as IDK how to even do that, and though it may be worth reduced time for them, in maps I find the 100%/100% to be fare more then enough to keep my resources at max / overcharge.

I pathed away from arcane intensity and instead took the nodes to the left taking warding fetish as that comes with 3 amazing benefits.
1. it provides -30% effectiveness of curses and if you do maps you know how annoying curses are so 30% reduced effect is amazing. If you feel like adding more you can get the other 2 small nodes nearby for a total 60% reduced effect of curses which will help you in later maps immensely.
2. It provides you a whopping 30% spell damage PER curse so effectively you can have 2 curses up and still dps as if only affected by 1, but not only that you gain 30-60-90% extra damage for doing those maps? Nice!
3. It provides slightly more ES from your Foci which can get pretty high with a good base and nice rolls (140% extra in total.

Did some testing on Soul Bloom node and I do not trust it. It says 15% recovery rate of ES but that seems to only apply to ES recharge rate, leech, and recoup which I have none. It does not affect time until recharge per the tooltip on your character sheet thus I ignored it as 4 nodes of recharge rate are effectively just 4 minor nodes and I can get that elsewhere if I wanted.

I would love to make it more efficient but I cannot fathom how to improve damage without severely hampering recovery or vice versa.
This version does feel much more stable in maps keeping me near max / overcharge.

I’ve been playing a build very similar to this, currently in mid 70s. really cool discovery about scattershot. I didn’t try it bc I assumed it’d be useless to add 2 projectiles to 20.

One question about your detonate dead supports- I tried spell echo and swear it didn’t work. It seemed like the first cast consumed the corpse and the second did nothing. Am I mistaken? Do there need to be 2 corpses in the same spot for it to work?

In lieu of echo, I run unleash which might be an improvement on your support setup. I feel I don’t need to hold down DD, usually DD —> roll —> DD which gives time for unleash to stack and for more mobs to come onscreen. Unleash automatically targets multiple different corpses which usually gives near fullscreen aoe, and anything caught in overlapping explosions gets evaporated. If echo does actually work then I’ll run both.

A janky idea I’ve been messing with is CoC astral projection bone cage. The single target damage can be insane as you can cast multiple bone cages with one bonestorm, but the hitbox on the bone cage seems inconsistent? Like it doesn’t deal damage on spawning the cage on an enemy, it only deals damage when they try to move through it. I need to do more testing with it on stationary/teleporting bosses but if anyone has ideas to improve consistency of astral projection bone cage hitting I’d love to hear.

Have you tried incorporating CoC? With so many projectiles it will be triggered from every cast of Bonestorm without any investment in meta energy. Comet with Spell Echo and similar supports would yield the highest dps, and you can incorporate some Cold Pen or pre-cast Frostbomb to boost this damage further.

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desu#2172 wrote:

Have you tried incorporating CoC? With so many projectiles it will be triggered from every cast of Bonestorm without any investment in meta energy. Comet with Spell Echo and similar supports would yield the highest dps, and you can incorporate some Cold Pen or pre-cast Frostbomb to boost this damage further.

I would say that the mana expenditure already is intensive, adding in CoC would yield some more dps but other then for clear reasons I would see it as a wasteful use of spirit.
Yea you could likely get it to cast but since each cast isn't free you will dip further into your own HP/MP pools then you already do and bonestorm is by far a insane hog of mana as-is without any added CoC mechanics. If GGG were to fix bloodmage and make them either A: Leech add to overcap, or B: set the cost to 50/50 like it SHOULD be, then I could see CoC being more viable. Without such changes however I am nearly empty with 1 or 2 casts of my bonestorm and I can only see it getting worse at higher levels. Currently I run a lvl 27 bonestorm and that isn't even fully buffed a I have no amulet, don't have 5 link, and its base is 19/21 (no vaal)