Witch Ascendancy's are Trash Tier

So after spending 10+ hours to get to the ascendancy (and beating it first try luckily) I get to do the age old tradition of ascendancy, the Build Defining thing. Only to find out... They SUCK.

Infernalist ascendancies are as follows:
"Take more damage, take more damage, take more damage, take more damage, or get a dog that takes damage for you."

Blood Mage is a bit different:
1) Penalize you for ascension as now all skills require life and mana.
2) Infinite curses is dope
3) Nothing else in the Ascension tree feels build defining, and they barely feel useful or impactful on gameplay.

What happened to the POE1 Ascensions that actually CHANGED how you played, or defined the entire build?

Extremely disappointed.

Yea thy are pretty crap. While leveling almost all are useless, or can't even take them, cause you need highly specialized setup/gear to use them. I was so happy finally getting ascended to find out only one skill is cool and usefull.

Its almost that no thought went into them, and thy feel rushed.
Its real crap putting so many hours into a character to find out, your class ascendancy's are almost compleet useless for the 65 levels of the game.

How can thy the devs, with so much experience in POE 1 make such boring and for the most part useless acendancy's for the witch boggles the mind......

And for an inexperienced POE player, most nodes read as if you need a alot of ingame mechanical knowledge to see any potential in it, nothing seems straightforward like other ascendancy's. And almost nothing as a newer players seems cool or fun to get.... Its early acces for sure....

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Triobian#0481 wrote:

Infernalist ascendancies are as follows:
"Take more damage, take more damage, take more damage, take more damage, or get a dog that takes damage for you."

Blood Mage is a bit different:
1) Penalize you for ascension as now all skills require life and mana.
2) Infinite curses is dope
3) Nothing else in the Ascension tree feels build defining, and they barely feel useful or impactful on gameplay.



Extremely disappointed.

This is why I stopped playing Witch. I'm not trying to literally kill my character just to use skills. It's a horrible concept to me, seems a lot like it and that's great some people like tofu I can't account for their bad taste.

This also felt off to me as well. I always though the point of an ascension was to provide a unique power buff to your character. The first ascension for the Blood Mage is 3% increased life, and all skills cost life as well as mana. It's a nerf.

It just feels bad to ascend and your character is weaker for it. Especially given you don't get a choice in the nodes you get to pick. It's better to ascend and not allocate the nodes until you complete more ascensions.

"

ZaitaNZ#1567 wrote:

This also felt off to me as well. I always though the point of an ascension was to provide a unique power buff to your character. The first ascension for the Blood Mage is 3% increased life, and all skills cost life as well as mana. It's a nerf.

It just feels bad to ascend and your character is weaker for it. Especially given you don't get a choice in the nodes you get to pick. It's better to ascend and not allocate the nodes until you complete more ascensions.

Blood mage probably needs 6pts before its worth spending them.

i dont see how even 6 points gonna save blood mage.. hopefuly they will change this later on in development - curent stage of blood mage is 3% of hp is all you get

Yeah, it's pretty crap and as a hardcore player, I will no see myself play that ever. The ascendancy for the witch needs to change BIG TIME and both, the Infernalist and the Blood Mage need to be scrapped entirely.

Agreed, there shouldn't ever be an ascendancy where you deliberately have to stall it until you get more points to get another thing that "solves" it. I'm not sure what the solution would be with Sanguimancy. Some people suggest to combine leech with it, but that would make it very strong just from one point, but then again, no other class has an ascendancy where it has to be delayed until 20+ levels until you maybe kind of feel like you can start doing what the class is meant to do. There are just so many instances with this ascendancy where you feel your progress stagnate and its a pretty unenjoyable experience to go through.

Not only that, but nodes like Gore Spike do not show in the tooltip, so we have no idea if it actually works or not. Also, when it says "per 40 life" we do not know if it's referring to the max health of the character, or how much life you currently have. If it's based on the latter, then it would just be a very inconsistent passive, given how difficult it already is trying to sustain the hp on this ascendancy.

Make the leech node the first one

Allow leech to go to life 'overflow'

PROFIT. There is no ???? step.

Yeah really hate the infernalist so far... No idea why they shipped it like this.

Dog is fine is suppose, but not gamechanging... I mean it's cool to have a free pet that's slightly more tanky than the skeleons and takes 20% damage for you I suppose.

Then I went and tried the demon form, and I hated it.... It unsummons all my minions and blocks usage of most of my skills, constantly drains my hp and I didn't find the DPS increase on the few spells I can now use to be worth the transformation... Maybe for non-summoner builds it could be an okay choice... But losing my army and taking constant damage for a small burts of DPS isn'T worth it for me in like any circumstances.

So I switch to Infernal Flame and it's somehow even worse... I just don't get it... It replaces your mana with a crappy bar that fills up super fast and give you a huge damage hit when you fill it up... It takes like 8 seconds of not attacking to get it back down when it's almost full.... And you can't use Mana potions anymore... And they don't even have the decency to allow you to equip two health potions, meaning your mana pot is now useless and your HP flask now has pull in twice as much work....

Then you have a branch that makes it so you take big ignite damage every time you crit... Again I don't really get it. It's not even a big crit damage bonus, just 30%...

Finally , the last branch has you taking way more fire damage and chaos damage , which unless you have a build that absorbs fire and negates chaos is probably a terrible idea.

Worse part, I already wasted like 24K gold respeccing out of those skills.... And I'm now contemplating picking non notable ascendency passive like the 12% Spell Damage and 12% More Minion Life nodes, which are barely better than regular skill tree nodes... Guess for now i'll just keep those points unspent.