Blood Mage DoT build feedback

I think I chose the wrong ascendency, and I'll get to that in a moment.

Contagion and Essence drain felt pretty good up till about the end of Act 2. It was at this point dot damage just wasn't enough and found myself struggling hard. Both contagion and essence are level 12 and Essence Drain is currently doing 375 chaos dps...with over 200% chaos damage from the nodes.

I'm at the passive skill quantity point now where it will cost a small fortune to dump the chaos damage nodes. I got pretty lucky at around level 20 and found a wand with some spell damage and +2 chaos spell skills. I haven't replaced it since, and I just hit 42.

At around 26 I got my first ascendency and picked Blood Mage. This was a termendious mistake. Sanquimancy is a trap. A trap in the sense where you feel like it should give you a big return for making your skills now cost life AND manage, but it doesn't. But it's a mandatory node if you want to take vitality siphon which appears very underwhelming.

Should I be stacking spell damage instead of chaos damage? Seems like chaos damage raises the base damage instead of the modifier.

I had a very similar experience. First two acts ed+contagion, hard but enjoyable, overall very good time. In act 3 damage started to fall off, even with all Spell and Chaos damage nodes. Had to unspec Sanguimancy to be able to kill bosses and get second trial. After that couldn't find any way to scale Chaos DoT further, so spent all my gold to respec into Hexblast + Crit to be able to proc life remnants on bosses, but on big bosses those spawn underneath and not reachable, so now I'm kinda hardstuck on the last boss of Act 3.

Same experience here.

I bought a +1skill amulet and a +2wand on the market for 1 exa each and skilled exclusive Chaos% Nodes in the tree. Ill plan to run to the +1Chaos Node in the near future.

I play with every possible dot and dual curse and the totem and the damage is so low, i couldn't even kill the Gold-Golem half until fight ended in death for me :D
I had to respec the ascendancy note, because i killed myself in bossfights.
Im currently in CruelAct1. It feels really bad what effort i had to kill some bosses, while my mates in discord chill on semi afk SRS build destroying the content.

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AuroraAlpha#0611 wrote:

Same experience here.

I bought a +1skill amulet and a +2wand on the market for 1 exa each and skilled exclusive Chaos% Nodes in the tree. Ill plan to run to the +1Chaos Node in the near future.

I play with every possible dot and dual curse and the totem and the damage is so low, i couldn't even kill the Gold-Golem half until fight ended in death for me :D
I had to respec the ascendancy note, because i killed myself in bossfights.
Im currently in CruelAct1. It feels really bad what effort i had to kill some bosses, while my mates in discord chill on semi afk SRS build destroying the content.

the + 2 wand and amulet completely made it feel much better on bosses thanks for the heads up i literally forgot trading was in game.

I wanted to go minions but I'm de-speccing away from their damage to just let them tank with some skeleton reavers + warriors from my sceptre, otherwise goign flame spirit and inferno/fireball so far. But yes not enough life drain type magic to make the them worth it considering the massive fragility

I'm a moron so I'm probably wrong but Blood Mage seems suited for a crit build and DoTs don't crit

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Rafkin4#7914 wrote:

I'm a moron so I'm probably wrong but Blood Mage seems suited for a crit build and DoTs don't crit

It does seem to more support crit builds. Thankfully we get Hexblast which is amazing so far.