Does Warlock seem..... weak to you?

The Problem with the Warlock I see is entirely with Sanguimancy which is so bad I struggle to think of any build that could use it.

Costing life instead of mana is fine, but you lose all your mana, having a 50% increased in efficiency is not enough to make up for it because you are totally limited by just using life. I could just use mana instead and reserve %90+ of it or just take Eldritch Battery

You could still go energy shield, but you can't do Chaos Innoculation (Life cost will kill you instantly). Then one of the branches removes Energy Shield entirely for more life on armour, which doesn't give you as massive a boost as you'd think because this seems to indicate that the %Increased Energy Shield from the tree won't affect this.

It wouldn't be so bad except that Mana Flasks exist, which completely circumvents all benefits of this part of the tree.

And if someone hates Mana Flasks for taking up a slot on their Flask belt... then they are probably wanted to min/max their belt... which means going Warden.

The only way this will be good is if Dark Effigy is something totally crazy. But we have no information on it (yet)

There seems to be every incentive to not take Sanguimancy except for one really niche build that doesn't want Tinctures.

Couldn't agree more Whiteout.

I've been thinking more about this tree in terms of Opportunity cost.

Sanguimancy is literally "You lose 25% resource reservation capacity"
Flat out, before any extra maths. It's made worse by how much harder Life Reservation is to get than Mana (Ashes nerfed and they still went ahead LOL).

Yah, you get Access to the other two nodes, but are they THAT good?
I mean, Crimson Power already comes with it's own down sides! Most builds don't even find the downsides on it ALONE worth it, much less having to "deal" with the downsides Sanguimancy presents.

You basically give up TWO auras, and not shit auras, likely 30-40%'s worth of mana, in order to get access to Canibilised Faith and Crimson Power. Is that REALLY worth it??

I guess you also get the benefit of saving 6-8 passive skill points on a couple mana wheels you don't need to take...

Again, just wishing these were split up, or the downsides turned into "upsides" with further investment into the tree (in this case, something like the less health you have, the more damage, or lost mana is converted into something useful?), very much like Warden does


BTW the 25% thing....
If having 100% Life & Mana available to reserve is 100% reservation capacity...
Losing Mana means you lose 50%. Getting 50% LRE gets you half of that back.
So you net lose 25%