Blood Magic Keystone Advice

So I'm planning on a life-based caster when I get back into the game in the next few days. I'm going Chieftain and grabbing Hinekora, Death's Fury (My primary damage will be fire). My question is, at what rate of regen and leech would it probably be wise to grab Blood Magic (feels a bit like deciding when to go full CI, to be honest.)? I've never grabbed this keystone before, and I won't have internet until Tuesday, so I can't test with one of my standard toons who have a reset (Not sure if I even have a marauder with a reset at this point, been without internet since the end of November).

Seems like the life behind this keystone, and Mortal Conviction are really a juicy steak in front of a hungry predator.

Depends on your spell, support links, life regen and life pool.
i.E. with a tabula rasa, the spell could be a bit too expensive for your health regen.

But generally, BM is just "free mana" at the cost of "no auras".

take bm keystone for skills that use a lot of mana. dominating blow, fire nova mine, cyclone, shockwave totems, fireball and so on.

you can run auras with essence worm unique ring.

I was considering a CwC build using Incinerate (I want to use flame surge as the casted spell, but I do have lots of wiggle room to work around with). Probably going to use a cwdt setup with a few fire skills just to help add into my leech from Hinekora, Death's Fury as well.

Honestly, I could use an essence worm, but I have a tendency to not even reserve mana anyway (probably going to opt for Clear Mind for spell damage). I usually focus more on curses than auras. Probably not the greatest move in the game, but I've still gotten characters close to 90, so good enough for me XD

If I have enough gear freedom, might still put an Essence Worm in though.

Not exactly the same build or skills, but I had a RF Juggernaut that I respecced to use BM. My life went from ~7.5k to 8k. The extra life % from BM is mostly offset by a less efficient pathing to other life nodes, and the need to use Essence Worm for my Purity of Fire aura, so losing out on that ring slot. I also missed out on a few regen nodes, so I occasionally end up in a situation where I can't quite cover the RF degen.

All in all, not quite a 10% boost in life and damage, but feels much less tanky than before. I'll revert to the non-BM version next reset.

Speaking of life nodes and whatnot, would any of you say that grabbing those +30 strength nodes is worthwhile for the purpose of life? I've never really grabbed them just for life, just because 30 strength = 15 life, with increase life % seems like the best one of those nodes would add is around 35 life or so, but I'm not an expert on life builds :P

30 STR as a source of life for 1 point is very poor. You easily get more than 100 life from an 5% life node, when you have good life + STR on your gear (you should).

The BM keystone itself is extremely situational, the upsides are not that great in most cases and losing aura space is very costly.

use this instead.

BM is a strange one.

Mostly because it's essentially just a way to get more efficient "Mana" usage for costly attacks. At the cost of using auras (Since even with Mortal Conviction, reserving your Life pool is still going to be a bad plan. Especially since the 35% increased life from the nodes behind BM won't outweigh even a 17% reservation aura)

Which, to be honest, can often be achieved by simply using a BM Support gem for the 1 skill that's mana hungry, while still letting you reserve mana with auras.

The other situation for BM to be useful, is by going for a LL build and just relying on massive ES for your health pool, then you use Mortal Conviction to let you put up a ton of auras using a bunch of less reservation passives with it.

Really, at the end of the day, it just comes down to MC looks tasty. But really the life nodes aren't worth too much and even with MC, aura's just aren't worth running for a Life build (Due to how lacklustre those life nodes are). Especially when BM Support exists, to allow you access to your mana pool, in addition to spending your life.

Now, if MC had 15% MORE instead of 15% INCREASED life, then we might be talking, since then it'd have a good chance of at least counteracting a single aura worth of life reservation, if not let 0 aura/essence worm users just get more life

Iirc, there's some totem builds that use it, but are they even good?.
Also: Are these niche LL BM builds still around these days?

Imho it would need one of those 2 changes to be of any real use:

1. A little drawback: "Auras reserve ES, not mana."
2. Just a buff: "Spend life instead of mana. Mana can still be reserved."

For both, remove the "50% less reservation", of course.