Blood Mage Rework Ideas

I think blood mage as a class is a super cool concept, and i've been having a lot of fun with it, but as i progressed through the story and through the endgame and especially now as i'm approaching pinnacle bosses, i can really feel the clunkiness of this ascendancy. i wouldnt say its critically weak, but its definitely not strong and feels counterintuitive and unrewarding to play for the amount of risk you take on. below are some ideas on buffing/reworking the class ->

1.) sanquimancy 50% mana 50% life cost. ive heard this being suggested quite a bit, and while i think this is a solid buff, i dont think it will fix how clunky and counterintuitive the ascendancy feels as a whole.

2.) sanguimancy heal amount scaling with max life. two skills in the ascendancy either support or reward stacking life, so having the only required notable skill only scaling off level doesn't make much sense.

3.) allow vitality siphon to overheal. the only reason top tier players are using it is for sbossing. having an ascendancy skill be completely obsolete for 90% of gameplay feels pretty bad, and with the leech being over 1 second it doesnt feel like a powerful node either. it doesnt save you when you get swarmed, it doesnt sustain overheal, its only purpose is to allow you to dps bosses for more than 10 spells.

4.) sanguimancy : no longer drops orbs, but instead automatically either leeches base life on kill/crit (again, scaling with % max life) or leeches some % of dmg, paired with a new vitality siphon : loses leech, but allows you to 2x overheal. this is a more aggressive rework, but i think it would be the best feeling change out of the 4 thus far.

5.) allow blood barbs to scale with chaos damage. chaos is one of the two damage types witch is meant to be played with, thus i feel there no point in not adding chaos damage support.

6.) remove open sores lmao

some core problems with blood witch (or more generally) that i dont think were relevant to the skills are ->

- you cant really stack physical damage resistance in the same way that you can elemental, which feels very bad when you get one tapped by an offscreen vaal axeman running up a corridor, or when you fail to dodge a slam attack, get stunned and you just get deleted in 3 hits from 2x life and es overheal.

recoup effects feel very weak, especially when you get phys-d. ive run heavy recoup for a couple days now and not once have i been like yes im so glad i had recoup there.

running labs without being *way* overleveled is extremely difficult, and feels terrible as before you get sunder the flesh the ascendancy is critically weak, especially against bosses.

tldr: blood mage is weak and feels bad to play, though i feel the concept is excellent. i think the class would benefit greatly from some subtle, but meaningful changes.

People have found out that they can pick a skill which doesn't rely on gem level. They use low level gem to keep life (and mana) costs low. Detonate Dead. That allowed them to stack remnant effects faster than they consume their life to use their skills.

For other gems, keeping their level low amounts to about 25% DPS loss for attack skills and 50% DPS loss for spell skills. Take Ice Strike for example: https://poe2db.tw/Ice_Strike. In exchange, we get to potentially stack from, assuming 2k life, to let's say double that to 4k life. That translates to 100% increased crit bonus.

Crit builds typically have 200% increased crit bonus. If we were to make a comparison:

Other ascendancies
100 x (100 + 200)% = 300 crit damage

Blood mage
100 x (100-25)% x (100 + 200 + 100)% = 300 crit damage

Spending 4 ascendancy passives to go back to square one in terms of DPS, she gets to double her life. She has to stop DPS-ing to collect remnants in the middle of a dangerous mob pack, can't leave instance so as not to reset remnant effects, etc. We haven't take into account non-crit damage.

If they solve this clunkiness issue and make the crit bonus higher, I believe then more players will play this class for something other than Detonate Dead.

update: as i continue to anticipate the bandaid 50/50 sanguimancy buff, and as i level an infernalist, ive come to realize that blood mage as an ascendancy doesn't really have an identity. gemling stacks gems, stormweaver stacks mana and does lightning damage, infernalist turns into a demon, pathfinder poisons, and blood mage can crit but also life stack but also curse (for some reason) but also deal elemental damage (for some reason) but also bleed but also lifegain ? and there isnt any support for stacking a ton of life, and the bonus you get from stacking a bunch of life is more of a nice side effect than a build defining vector. even if you were to somehow stack an absolutely ludicrous amount of life (lets say 6000), you are rewarded with 150% crit damage bonus, and still get tapped because you cant build any physical damage res.

at this stage of denial i fear the class is just not as well thought through as the others, and i think it would be more work than its worth to give it the love it needs to feel good to play.

I believe feedback, at this stage, is better given in the form of thoughts and concepts than concrete change ideas with numbers. So the purposeful vagueness is a nice touch.
Though everyone seems to agree that the effect of sanquimancy is a bit much, early on without much of the payoff that comes later.

Especially considering Infernalist might just actually be better at crits, too.
It really comes down to how they envisioned it would play out. We don't know, but it could be that the game ended up subtly different and thus the benefits of the health orbs don't slot as neatly into player's skill rotations as they expected.

I wonder if it's be possible to have the base passive with a lower penalty, and increase that penalty on most (not all) of the following nodes, so players could end up with 75 - 125% of mana cost as life cost.

As for things it could stand to have: We don't honestly know what the third ascendancy class will be, but it could be something chaos-focussed, so I can see how it focuses on physical (sadly, it's not great at it).

cyborg i think a chaos ascendancy would be absolutely cash money, though i would put my money on necromancer next. as for physical blood mage builds i think they have a ton of potential if ggg adds more physical spells (bonestorm is mid deluxe). though getting value out of gore spike with crimson power (as opposed to going sunder) is strictly not worth it at the moment i fear, just because gore spike's ratio is relatively weak and you cant stack life very well atm.

speaking of not being able to stack life though, if ggg added a *chase* unique (not a drop unique with shit stats or outrageous downsides) that converts energy shield to life (or mana to life + a blood magic effect) i think that would singlehandedly make blood mage viable in endgame with a small gore spike buff.

buff gore spike, adjust sanguimancy to scale with max health, add es->life chase unique and blood mage is fix thumbs up

Hi, (sorry im not native ENG speaker)
I think Blood mage just also lack of Maximum Life nodes in Passive skill tree (compare to ES stacking and Grim Feast), and GGG sad they dont wanna put Max L node in Tree (Even literally our clas is around Life) my sugestion is to add one line in our Ascendancy (on some second major Ascendancy (for Example - Vitality Siphon))....
Like ***20% from "minion have #% increased maximum Life" is "Siphon" to Us***.

It forbiden to Other class stack Life from Tree Like GGG wanna to be, also this will be NOT major influnce on our Life but still good, top passive tree give 306% increased maximum Life to Minions 20% from that is 61,2% (there is also 3 node on bottom but they are really far away and give 45% increased maximum Life to minion and to Us will be like 9 % i doubt somone will take 20 passive point to inc 9 %)

I Know that 61% for our class is not BIG but also not small we are around 2-3k Max life average (with our passive we can double that Life pool but we pay in life for spels soo its waste, our firends who stacking ES usualy have like 10k-12k ES (i dont talk about extrime 18k) and they dont pay for spels in ES).
Personaly i will be raaaally happy if that be 25% (then 306% increased maximum Life to Minions 25% from that is 76,5%)
Sorry for my mistakes in the ENG language :)

Make bleed better for a start.

Add some leech related stuff to the top of the tree, some more bleed nodes, there's like 2 phys/bleed clusters at the top all the rest seems to be down in merc mostly for some reason there's also no leech up there either.

There's nothing to really punch a big bleed out either trying to crit a decent bonestorm which i guess is a lot of smaller hits or an unearth is meh it's really begging for some bigger punch physical spell (I guess like Exsanguinate or something)

For a whole blood themed ascendancy i feel like i am on the complete wrong side of the passive tree and pretty far from anything blood like, that base crit shouldn't be just spell only, same for the leech as well I think it would make the ascendancy a fair bit more attractive if it was just a 15% base crit or 10% leech to all (though i get it might get out of hand without care with some melee stuff and some of the clusters around) since you still got to travel to get anywhere that's not spell or elements.

Maybe one of them ascendancy nodes (like the curse one or something) should've been something like corrupting blood working in a similar way to poison where you could stack multiple bleeds on a target and sort of vampire leech from the bleed or spread aggravated bleeds when that target dies.

That recoup one may as well have just been a spruced up petrified blood too which would open a bit more of the low life stuff again.
Guess we just got to see what gems are still cooking for the most part at the mo