Blood mage issues early ascendancy

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YukiyaKitsuNebi#6596 wrote:

First off, I love the game.
Just to be clear, I'm giving feedback because I hope it improves certain lesser parts of the game.

There are two main issues I have with Blood Mage early ascendancy in particular:
1. There are absolutely no merits in taking Sanguimancy before you have 4 ascendancy points, in fact there are only demerits.
2. There is no real synergy between 90% of Occult skills for a good portion of the ascendancy line.

I will try to explain as thoroughly as I can what I mean by these points:
1.
- Instead of halving or replacing the mana cost with half life or full life, it now costs BOTH life AND mana at full cost.
- Instead of giving 100% chance to get life shards on killing, it's a mere 25% chance (+10% from quality).
- Having spell crits give life shards once every 2 seconds is harsh, and crit works poorly on the class for multiple reasons.
- Crit chance modifiers from gear/passives are not additive, meaning 50% on a pre-existing 7% only gives 10.5% rather than 57%, and the nodes are far apart and the stat is rare on gear to begin with.
- There is not enough healing from the life orbs to begin with, on average you need 200+ mana and health to kill something, to maybe get 85 health back.
- There is not a single life leech passive what so ever on any of the upper part of the skill nodes which make up (assumedly) 750-ish nodes, the closes one is like 30 nodes away.

2.
- Most skills in the Occult category have low crit chance (7~15) or none at all.
- Most skills like minions or damage over time don't proc spell crits (this makes up the majority of the Occult class), for damage over time only initial hit damage if applicable which is just one spell.
- Certain skills like curses are extremely mana costly (and thus life costly), even more so with certain support gems.
- There are no life leech skills.
- The only gem with a life leech support passive doesn't work on damage over time skills.

TLDR

You get nerfed taking this before you get 4 ascendancy points as there is nothing to support it, and it does not provide anything that is beneficial to begin with.
I know you can convert damage taken to drain mana instead with a major passive node a bit later down the line, but that basically doubles the mana cost while reducing recovery by 50% which again begs the question, why would anyone pick this early on if it only brings demerits?

On a side note, I think Trial of Ultimatum (Chaos one) is absolute RNGfest garbage (no offense) so I'm basically locked out of the entire ascendancy as I can't do Trial of Sekhemas again to get my next set of points.
I pretty much gave up on ascending for these reasons.