Feed back on Occult tree and witch

First of all I love the game. The sound it great and crunchy, the music is phenomenal. The bosses are the best I have seen in any arpg. I love that the story is a little more in focus and seeing the lore come to life is so neat.

I have almost 4000 hours in poe one and have been playing since 2014. I say this to highlight that I can navigate the skill tree and know what does and does not effect the skill or skills I'm using.

I have not gotten far, I am level 40 blood mage and I decided to stick to a flavor path and not get ANY other class of gems but occult. I speced Minion, chaos and a tiny bit of Physical damage on the tree.

The main issue with it is the skills feel bad. I have seen post on minions, I love how interactive it is "Having to use dark ritual and hold charges to use zombies when needed or possibly use the charges on bone storm. The main issue is bosses, there are no bodies to use minions, the skellys don't seem to do much to hold their weight so I end up just using a curse energy drain, contagion while channeling the bone storm (the only real damage).

The chaos skills in Poe 1 where hard to balance, going from broken to bad to ok. By themselves they don't feel good here. Even with a wand with 66% more chaos damage additional damage added as 2 elements and ok gear. When you need to invest into minions and you cant use them for the most part in bosses it feels bad.

I am now stuck on two bosses in act 3 to avoid spoilers on is the molten one with a dps check. No matter what I cant hit the dps check and that is being multiple levels over the zone. I can come back so that's not as big an issue.

The other is the historical figure through a portal. (Being vague to avoid spoilers) I am hard locked on that. The fight is great but not having direct damage the DOT does not work with the attrition of the longer boss fights. You can only dodge so much and the slow keel damage and no bust from minions make it a loosing feel. I also know that there is better gear always and uniques that can assist I am speaking as how a new player trying a predetermined spec line would feel, even one with a substantial game knowledge base can feel.

All that said excellent game! Im proud to have supported it so long and I cant wait to see what else you all bring to the table! I rolled a monk and cant wait for the Druid!!

cba about spoilers, people who havent even finished normal shouldnt be in feedback forum.

Viper Napuatzi is dps check boss and ur build does zdps. Viper was the point where i finally dropped chaos build. Btw bloodmage is bad with any build, its just bad ascendancy that didnt had even 15minutes of dev playtesting. GGG should just remove it alltogether. Early access is not excuse for such failure.

It wont get better later, bloodmage will keep holding you back. GGG only quick at fixing "brokenly good" builds and wont give a flying fuck about bloodmage for weeks, so enjoy your bricked char or just quit, aint noway anyone will restart 20 hours of super "fun" campaign on new char, just because of developers mistake.