Blood Mage?

So, where's the payoff for the bloodmage ascendancy? I pay life to get .... what??

1) Leech/Orbs - I pay life to cast spells so I can regen that life back. Fair trade, but no upside.
2) Crit multi - like 50-75% crit multi. That's abysmal for having to manage 2 resources.
3) 25% staggered incoming damage - So I stagger off incoming damage so I can regen it along with the life cost of my spells.

I literally see no upside to taking bloodmage. I currently get 3% increased HP for my ascendancy because taking any other node requires me gimping myself for no power power payoff.

Good times

Blood mage felt really bad almost the entire game for me, especially when you first pick it up and your character instantly gets far worst. Had to respec out of it to be able to play.

After I got the second and third ascendancy it got better but still felt underpowered.

Finally at lv 90 i got the 4th one so I can run both leech and base crit 15% and at this point I can say it is a pretty strong ascendancy. Feels much much better, it was a huge change for me from the 3th to the 4th.

But think about it. I needed 90 level to feel good about blood mage. This is ridiculous. It should feel strong from the 1st 2 points you take. They really need to change/buff Sanguimancy or maybe reorder the nodes.

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Juggla1570#0315 wrote:

So, where's the payoff for the bloodmage ascendancy? I pay life to get .... what??

1) Leech/Orbs - I pay life to cast spells so I can regen that life back. Fair trade, but no upside.
2) Crit multi - like 50-75% crit multi. That's abysmal for having to manage 2 resources.
3) 25% staggered incoming damage - So I stagger off incoming damage so I can regen it along with the life cost of my spells.

I literally see no upside to taking bloodmage. I currently get 3% increased HP for my ascendancy because taking any other node requires me gimping myself for no power power payoff.

Good times

The BM does take time to come online, its one of these odd ones that getting the 1st ascenency and using your 2 points immediatly puts your life at risk - for me them 2 points shoudl be the 2nd set and the 1st set is your survivability

But, im level 76 and rocking it, the BM was my 5th character above 75 and this is without doubt the most fun - only the Monk can rival it i have died the least amount of times on BM the blood you gain later on also increases your max life pool so it acts like a EA shield but then when you can get around to gettin eldritch battery etc.. it gets really online

Just one of htem classes that until say 60-65 it can feel hardwork, but it 100% pays off at end game and catn wait to take into the end game bosses, but im not quite there yet about 5-10 levels to go

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Juggla1570#0315 wrote:

1) Leech/Orbs - I pay life to cast spells so I can regen that life back. Fair trade, but no upside.

This is the only way to achieve "overcharging" your health pool. It's basically the Grim Feast of life. If you strength stack and have a base large health pool, this is a very strong ascendancy node. (Also this ascendancy BY FAR has the highest max HP pool available in game).

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Juggla1570#0315 wrote:

2) Crit multi - like 50-75% crit multi. That's abysmal for having to manage 2 resources.

Again, very strong for strength stacking. It's almost like you're meant to use it with a skill that benefits from high crit damage and guaranteed crits on strength based builds like sunder.

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Juggla1570#0315 wrote:

3) 25% staggered incoming damage - So I stagger off incoming damage so I can regen it along with the life cost of my spells.

Again, for strength stacking builds who use armour, anything to lower the inbound hit and / or delaying damage is huge, because armour is worse the higher the base hit damage is. So this is actually ludicrously strong for a strength stacking melee build.

If you'd like to go even further, you can get a strength / int chestpiece that gives armour and ES, then get the ancient aegis node along with the +80% body armour node, now you're at +60% ES and +140% body armour from just chest piece, and then any ES scaling you have turns that ES into raw HP ON TOP OF THE ENERGY SHIELD IT GRANTS.

If you stack things right, this node grants you like 1.5 - 2k max hp AND 1.5k - 2k ES. It's fucking disgusting. Oh yeah AND, you get both the life overcharge on it, so its 4k max hp, AND you can run grim feast on the ES portion, so its 4k ES. From a chestpiece. DISGUSTING.

Think outside the box mate.

I'm a lvl 95 Blood Mage. It needs a major buff.

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NiceGuy69#1759 wrote:

If you strength stack

strength stacking.

strength stacking builds

strength stacking melee build.

Think outside the box mate.

I'm sorry but basing an entire build around stacking a single core stat to have a gigantic health pool doesn't exactly sound like "Thinking outside the box". Sounds like the same old same old to me.

Sounds to me like going to back to old school PoE1 where the only way to advance in the game was to ignore everything on the tree except +life nodes.

Don't get me wrong, it sounds like a reasonable build. Just not what I'm looking for. Guess I'll re-roll my witch and go with infernal.

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Juggla1570#0315 wrote:

So, where's the payoff for the bloodmage ascendancy? I pay life to get .... what??

1) Leech/Orbs - I pay life to cast spells so I can regen that life back. Fair trade, but no upside.
2) Crit multi - like 50-75% crit multi. That's abysmal for having to manage 2 resources.
3) 25% staggered incoming damage - So I stagger off incoming damage so I can regen it along with the life cost of my spells.

1) With Orbs you can overflow your health up to double the value.

This is a very good defensive layer, if you can keep it full.

Spell leech is just good, nothing too fancy but it is a unique and good upgrade.

2) I agree completely.

I was interested in the crit nodes but then I noticed I can easily get a lot more crit multi from regular tree nodes + gear.

Not sure if picking life to crit multi would even be a 10% damage increase.
Perhaps it should be "your critical hits deal x% more damage per y points of life"?

And the 15% base crit feels sad when you notice all the spells you want to scale with crit already have that value, or very close to it.
Maybe there will be more interesting options here when we get more spells.
With current spell options, I think it would feel much better if the node was something like +5% base crit chance for all spells instead.

3) Damage stagger has been one of the most powerful defensive options in PoE 1.
I suspect it will feel like that in PoE 2 too once you invest in other defensive layers.
Especially if they steer the endgame more towards the slower playstyle, where all forms life recovery are more valuable.

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Begano#4789 wrote:

Blood mage felt really bad almost the entire game for me, especially when you first pick it up and your character instantly gets far worst. Had to respec out of it to be able to play.

This is interesting, I had the exact opposite experience.

After that first ascendancy I felt SUPER tanky for picking up the blood orbs.

I was suprised to survive a lot of big hits/bursts that killed my other characters... with a full health bar.

~

I was also using grim feast to keep the energy shield up while I stack health, maybe that's why you guys felt differently?


Not sure how it will feel when I finish cruel though, the ascendancy seems to have pretty bad offensive options (opposite of witchhunter actually).

They need to move around the nodes in the tree as its not really worth investing into until the 3rd.

As the Crit IS amazing if you build around It, Mine has a nearly 100% Crit chance and still not as strong as my Minion Witch, but really a lot more fun to play if I am honest.

My advice for Blood Mage players, Put your first point to get the 3% HP and then save the rest until you can easily sustain the HP loss, ( For me that wasn't until endgame)

Blood Mage really wants Atziris Disdain helmet.
It can add up to 30% of max life as flat ES.

So if you had 2k life and overflow that all the way to 4k life, that helmet is going to add 1200 flat ES before scaling and you can overflow that with Grim Feast up to 2x its value.
Again, thats before any %ES scaling and that does apply!


On top of that the helmet splits dmg taken between life and ES, allowing you to "double" your sustain from blood orbs plus grim feast.
This on its own makes Blood Mages very very tanky in the current state of the game. All you have to do from here is figuring out how to deal solid dmg and you are good to go.

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Juggla1570#0315 wrote:

I'm sorry but basing an entire build around stacking a single core stat to have a gigantic health pool doesn't exactly sound like "Thinking outside the box". Sounds like the same old same old to me.

Sounds to me like going to back to old school PoE1 where the only way to advance in the game was to ignore everything on the tree except +life nodes.

Don't get me wrong, it sounds like a reasonable build. Just not what I'm looking for. Guess I'll re-roll my witch and go with infernal.

Well no you're not strength stacking for health, you're strength stacking for giant's blood. The health is just a natural synergy bi-product of strength stacking.

If you're going to roll an infernalist witch, I mean, what you gonna do? Play minions, take all the minion nodes and then complain because you're ignoring everything in the tree except +minion nodes?

Your arguments make zero sense.

Why wouldn't you build your character to the strengths of your respective ascendancy?