why aren't more witches blood mages?

i can't see a down side.
Life nodes and Regen nodes are amazing for any style of gameplay, so going down towards templar and marauder land is a good idea. From there it is far more efficient to cast from hp than to bulk up your mana and mana regen to a suitable level. Plus iron will for a nice dps buff.

Most witch builds i see here don't even spam life nodes.. Why not?

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fadeawayyx wrote:

i can't see a down side.
Life nodes and Regen nodes are amazing for any style of gameplay, so going down towards templar and marauder land is a good idea. From there it is far more efficient to cast from hp than to bulk up your mana and mana regen to a suitable level. Plus iron will for a nice dps buff.

Most witch builds i see here don't even spam life nodes.. Why not?

For my build am stacking 5-7 auras. I would have no life left. Mans regen is easy come mid late game. Mostvof a these builds srecsoftcora hence the lack of esrly defense

Blood magic is far too good of a skill and lets you brainlessly link 5-6 skills with no consequence since you regen 200+ hp passively just taking the marauder path there.

Unfortunately not everyone knew this from the start and ended up making gimp awful builds that rely on mana.

Most build you see flying through this forum are people who don't understand some game concepts and they are asking questions. Blood magic is a very useful concept for a witch; however, there are very few builds that start at the witch tree and pass by blood magic. What you'll see some people do is completely forget about the blood magic passive, and instead use the blood magic support gem. For example. Hybrids, or Eldritch Battery characters will use reduced mana and blood magic on one or more auras that have numeric mana costs. This will reserve a small portion of a large health pool. Some will blood magic a skill along with life leech so that they don't spend mana and theoretically don't spend life.
The blood magic passive to me is more of a leveling/end-game option for melee. End game use of this mechanic for a witch will almost always be through a support gem.

iron will (almost +100% dmg if you are in the bm zone of passives), lmp, faster casting, faster projectiles for freezing pulse, chain/arc for other spells, penetration, leech hp etc and the blood magic passive is a better option than wasting a support slot on a blood magic gem imo.

The plethora of life and life regen nodes to the lower left of the board are almost mandatory for hc imo if you want a badass hp pool, in which case you are right next to blood magic.

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fadeawayyx wrote:

iron will (almost +100% dmg if you are in the bm zone of passives), lmp, faster casting, faster projectiles for freezing pulse, chain/arc for other spells, penetration, leech hp etc and the blood magic passive is a better option than wasting a support slot on a blood magic gem imo.

The plethora of life and life regen nodes to the lower left of the board are almost mandatory for hc imo if you want a badass hp pool, in which case you are right next to blood magic.

IMO you didn't think this through. Becuase you won't be running any auras. If you think you are playing hardcore while reserving half of your what...5k?....life pool with 2 maybe 3 auras then you'll be in default.

On the other hand, player b is eldritch battery, has the same if not MORE life than you, is running 7 auras and linking FP with lmp/gmp - added chaos - life leech - blood magic. He is also linking clraity, grace, disc with blood magic while also running haste-determ-purity. This character did not get blood magic and IMO is raping your char.

Faster casting blood magic with no life leech is suicide btw, especially on reflect. If player b above wants Iron Will, then he needs to spec into more STR and swap added chaos or get a 6 link.

I'll link you your build, and then link the build im talking about in comparison when I get home from work so you'll see what I mean.

Sorry if I sound aggressive I'm not trying to attack you I'm just trying to point things out for the OP.

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Lachis wrote:

*IMO you didn't think this through. Becuase you won't be running any auras.
Anger, hatred and wrath only affect physical attacks.

Clarity is not needed on a BM (or an EB mage for that matter)
Disc almost costs more in life than you gain in ES even assuming you have a decent +ES % global. Why would I run this?
Grace would be run on the BM easily.
Haste/Purity/Determ are the big ones. Vitality not so much.

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Lachis wrote:

*On the other hand, player b is eldritch battery, has the same if not MORE life than you

No, they do not have more life. Why on earth would they? Marauder zone has way more life nodes, and strength. Even if you went into 5 of the shadow's life clusters you still don't get as much as the south-west portion of the board, plus you gain another 100 or so life per second regen, 30% more flask regen if you want it.

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Lachis wrote:

*linking FP with lmp/gmp - added chaos - life leech - blood magic.

swap blood magic for +100% dmg iron will

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Lachis wrote:

*He is also linking clraity, grace, disc with blood magic

Don't need clarity as bloodmage. Disc costs more hp with blood magic skill gem than it gives you in energy shield. Grace is good at ~150 cost off a 6k life pool I'll take it happily.

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Lachis wrote:

*while also running haste-determ-purity.

This one I concede.

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Lachis wrote:

Sorry if I sound aggressive I'm not trying to attack you I'm just trying to point things out for the OP.

Not at all. It's a great help to me, I am still figuring out how to plan various builds. Thanks.


Essentially with the BM passive and lower-west side of the passive board you get more hp, more hp/sec regen, more energy shield, more damage on FP through iron will and a lower cost on it.

With the EB approach you lose your ES, your FP does less damage and costs more. You gain a dozen % of cast speed which is nice, determination won't be a huge benefit since you have no armour anyway, and purity which I admit I would like to have.

I'm really not seeing much competition there.

Finally if you're going to use your mana bar to exclusively cast auras and stick blood magic gems on your main attack, why bother taking EB at all? Stick with the energy shield. A decent mana cost support linked with your auras will let you pitiful mana bar keep purity/determ/haste up.

PS - This is my vanilla build.
http://s17.postimage.org/t3f6fe9db/34567.jpg

I believe it to be very powerful due to the massive +life and +regen spam.
If you notice it's actually extremely similar to Nug's ranger build (#1 hc), the only real difference being I take curses and spend more time around the 9 +life nodes in the center of the map rather than taking the shortcut near lava lash because I don't have to travel all the way from the ranger area. Rough pic of nug's build

You can either:

Tag on blood magic and lose purity/haste/determination but keep your energy shield and iron will support gem for ~+75% damage.

or

Tag on eldritch battery and gain purity/haste/determination but lose your energy shield. You have to swap iron will for blood magic support gem. You now run grace from mana pool instead of hp pool.

or

Leave it alone. Gain purity/haste/determination. You'll need a bit more mana if you want to run grace as well, or a higher level mana cost gem. You have to swap iron will for blood magic support gem.


Personally I like #1. I haven't been convinced otherwise yet.

So I am not hardcore or even high level yet. What I do know though is that I currently have 8 zombies, and 2 specters. I also have a totem that pops up about 11 skeletons. This is my army. My army work better with auras. I don't have great gears yet and mana pool isn't huge. But I have found with clarity and with picking up a few passive regen nodes I am regenerating mana in my small pool faster than I can cast my curses and my arc lightning or my firestorms. Basically I am rocking the current content with not much troubles at all. My energy shield absorbs a few hits until my minions grab agro. The whole screen is usually filled with them so I don't feel in danger all the time. I have died when being clumsy or not dialed in or letting my guard down. Obviously a death in hardcore is a big deal so I can't speak on that. But basically I regen crazy fast mana just with the few areas I picked up that were on the way to my other passives. So life and life regen has not shown me alot of need yet. Also I didn't really see a way to get a huge regen to life as you were talking about. Life leeching maybe, but not life regen.

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Karble wrote:

I regen crazy fast mana just with the few areas I picked up that were on the way to my other passives. So life and life regen has not shown me alot of need yet.

Just to give you an idea of how that'll scale:

Mana regen is just over 100% of your max mana per 60 seconds.
Or 1.66% of your mana every second.

Your level 5 arc costs you 24 mana, or 30 mana per second.
Level 15 arc with chain, added chaos damage and lesser multiple projectiles costs 167 mana, or just under 210 mana per second. You'll need to regen 210 mana per second, or 170 if you picked up inner focus, have +100% mana regen and have clarity aura.

With +100% mana regen you'll be regenning 3.33% of your mana a second. If 3.33% of your mana = the remaining 170 you need to break even then you'll need a total mana pool of over 5000. That's a lot of gear, or a lot of ES lost to eldritch battery.


The hp regen I speak of comes from troll blood, golem blood and life regeneration in the marauder/duelist/templar starting areas. With a very reachable 6k life that's over 250 a second on top of all the survivability you have from the hp. All that without spending a point of passives or gear mod slots on mana and you can see why casting from hp is tempting.